>>Hello and welcome today's cube presentation of eight of us startup showcase. I'm john for your host highlighting the hottest companies and devops data analytics and cloud management lisa martin and David want are here to kick it off. We've got a great program for you again. This is our, our new community event model where we're doing every quarter, we have every new episode, this is quarter three this year or episode three, season one of the hottest cloud startups and we're gonna be featured. Then we're gonna do a keynote package and then 15 countries will present their story, Go check them out and then have a closing keynote with a practitioner and we've got some great lineups, lisa Dave, great to see you. Thanks for joining me. >>Hey guys, >>great to be here. So David got to ask you, you know, back in events last night we're at the 14 it's event where they had the golf PGA championship with the cube Now we got the hybrid model, This is the new normal. We're in, we got these great companies were showcasing them. What's your take? >>Well, you're right. I mean, I think there's a combination of things. We're seeing some live shows. We saw what we did with at mobile world Congress. We did the show with AWS storage day where it was, we were at the spheres, there was no, there was a live audience, but they weren't there physically. It was just virtual and yeah, so, and I just got pained about reinvent. Hey Dave, you gotta make your flights. So I'm making my flights >>were gonna be at the amazon web services, public sector summit next week. At least a lot, a lot of cloud convergence going on here. We got many companies being featured here that we spoke with the Ceo and their top people cloud management, devops data, nelson security. Really cutting edge companies, >>yes, cutting edge companies who are all focused on acceleration. We've talked about the acceleration of digital transformation the last 18 months and we've seen a tremendous amount of acceleration in innovation with what these startups are doing. We've talked to like you said, there's, there's C suite, we've also talked to their customers about how they are innovating so quickly with this hybrid environment, this remote work and we've talked a lot about security in the last week or so. You mentioned that we were at Fortinet cybersecurity skills gap. What some of these companies are doing with automation for example, to help shorten that gap, which is a big opportunity >>for the job market. Great stuff. Dave so the format of this event, you're going to have a fireside chat with the practitioner, we'd like to end these programs with a great experienced practitioner cutting edge in data february. The beginning lisa are gonna be kicking off with of course Jeff bar to give us the update on what's going on AWS and then a special presentation from Emily Freeman who is the author of devops for dummies, she's introducing new content. The revolution in devops devops two point oh and of course jerry Chen from Greylock cube alumni is going to come on and talk about his new thesis castles in the cloud creating moats at cloud scale. We've got a great lineup of people and so the front ends can be great. Dave give us a little preview of what people can expect at the end of the fireside chat. >>Well at the highest level john I've always said we're entering that sort of third great wave of cloud. First wave was experimentation. The second big wave was migration. The third wave of integration, Deep business integration and what you're >>going to hear from >>Hello Fresh today is how they like many companies that started early last decade. They started with an on prem Hadoop system and then of course we all know what happened is S three essentially took the knees out from, from the on prem Hadoop market lowered costs, brought things into the cloud and what Hello Fresh is doing is they're transforming from that legacy Hadoop system into its running on AWS but into a data mess, you know, it's a passionate topic of mine. Hello Fresh was scaling they realized that they couldn't keep up so they had to rethink their entire data architecture and they built it around data mesh Clements key and christoph Soewandi gonna explain how they actually did that are on a journey or decentralized data >>measure it and your posts have been awesome on data measure. We get a lot of traction. Certainly you're breaking analysis for the folks watching check out David Landes, Breaking analysis every week, highlighting the cutting edge trends in tech Dave. We're gonna see you later, lisa and I are gonna be here in the morning talking about with Emily. We got Jeff Barr teed up. Dave. Thanks for coming on. Looking forward to fireside chat lisa. We'll see you when Emily comes back on. But we're gonna go to Jeff bar right now for Dave and I are gonna interview Jeff. Mm >>Hey Jeff, >>here he is. Hey, how are you? How's it going really well. So I gotta ask you, the reinvent is on, everyone wants to know that's happening right. We're good with Reinvent. >>Reinvent is happening. I've got my hotel and actually listening today, if I just remembered, I still need to actually book my flights. I've got my to do list on my desk and I do need to get my >>flights. Uh, >>really looking forward >>to it. I can't wait to see the all the announcements and blog posts. We're gonna, we're gonna hear from jerry Chen later. I love the after on our next event. Get your reaction to this castle and castles in the cloud where competitive advantages can be built in the cloud. We're seeing examples of that. But first I gotta ask you give us an update of what's going on. The ap and ecosystem has been an incredible uh, celebration these past couple weeks, >>so, so a lot of different things happening and the interesting thing to me is that as part of my job, I often think that I'm effectively living in the future because I get to see all this really cool stuff that we're building just a little bit before our customers get to, and so I'm always thinking okay, here I am now, and what's the world going to be like in a couple of weeks to a month or two when these launches? I'm working on actually get out the door and that, that's always really, really fun, just kind of getting that, that little edge into where we're going, but this year was a little interesting because we had to really significant birthdays, we had the 15 year anniversary of both EC two and S three and we're so focused on innovating and moving forward, that it's actually pretty rare for us at Aws to look back and say, wow, we've actually done all these amazing things in in the last 15 years, >>you know, it's kind of cool Jeff, if I may is is, you know, of course in the early days everybody said, well, a place for startup is a W. S and now the great thing about the startup showcases, we're seeing the startups that >>are >>very near, or some of them have even reached escape velocity, so they're not, they're not tiny little companies anymore, they're in their transforming their respective industries, >>they really are and I think that as they start ups grow, they really start to lean into the power of the cloud. They as they start to think, okay, we've we've got our basic infrastructure in place, we've got, we were serving data, we're serving up a few customers, everything is actually working pretty well for us. We've got our fundamental model proven out now, we can invest in publicity and marketing and scaling and but they don't have to think about what's happening behind the scenes. They just if they've got their auto scaling or if they're survivalists, the infrastructure simply grows to meet their demand and it's it's just a lot less things that they have to worry about. They can focus on the fun part of their business which is actually listening to customers and building up an awesome business >>Jeff as you guys are putting together all the big pre reinvented, knows a lot of stuff that goes on prior as well and they say all the big good stuff to reinvent. But you start to see some themes emerged this year. One of them is modernization of applications, the speed of application development in the cloud with the cloud scale devops personas, whatever persona you want to talk about but basically speed the speed of of the app developers where other departments have been slowing things down, I won't say name names, but security group and I t I mean I shouldn't have said that but only kidding but no but seriously people want in minutes and seconds now not days or weeks. You know whether it's policy. What are some of the trends that you're seeing around this this year as we get into some of the new stuff coming out >>So Dave customers really do want speed and for we've actually encapsulate this for a long time in amazon in what we call the bias for action leadership principle >>where >>we just need to jump in and move forward and and make things happen. A lot of customers look at that and they say yes this is great. We need to have the same bias fraction. Some do. Some are still trying to figure out exactly how to put it into play. And they absolutely for sure need to pay attention to security. They need to respect the past and make sure that whatever they're doing is in line with I. T. But they do want to move forward. And the interesting thing that I see time and time again is it's not simply about let's adopt a new technology. It's how do we >>how do we keep our workforce >>engaged? How do we make sure that they've got the right training? How do we bring our our I. T. Team along for this. Hopefully new and fun and exciting journey where they get to learn some interesting new technologies they've got all this very much accumulated business knowledge they still want to put to use, maybe they're a little bit apprehensive about something brand new and they hear about the cloud, but there by and large, they really want to move forward. They just need a little bit of >>help to make it happen >>real good guys. One of the things you're gonna hear today, we're talking about speed traditionally going fast. Oftentimes you meant you have to sacrifice some things on quality and what you're going to hear from some of the startups today is how they're addressing that to automation and modern devoPS technologies and sort of rethinking that whole application development approach. That's something I'm really excited to see organization is beginning to adopt so they don't have to make that tradeoff anymore. >>Yeah, I would >>never want to see someone >>sacrifice quality, >>but I do think that iterating very quickly and using the best of devoPS principles to be able to iterate incredibly quickly and get that first launch out there and then listen with both ears just >>as much >>as you can, Everything. You hear iterate really quickly to meet those needs in, in hours and days, not months, quarters or years. >>Great stuff. Chef and a lot of the companies were featuring here in the startup showcase represent that new kind of thinking, um, systems thinking as well as you know, the cloud scale and again and it's finally here, the revolution of deVOps is going to the next generation and uh, we're excited to have Emily Freeman who's going to come on and give a little preview for her new talk on this revolution. So Jeff, thank you for coming on, appreciate you sharing the update here on the cube. Happy >>to be. I'm actually really looking forward to hearing from Emily. >>Yeah, it's great. Great. Looking forward to the talk. Brand new Premier, Okay, uh, lisa martin, Emily Freeman is here. She's ready to come in and we're going to preview her lightning talk Emily. Um, thanks for coming on, we really appreciate you coming on really, this is about to talk around deVOPS next gen and I think lisa this is one of those things we've been, we've been discussing with all the companies. It's a new kind of thinking it's a revolution, it's a systems mindset, you're starting to see the connections there she is. Emily, Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. So your teaser video >>was amazing. Um, you know, that little secret radical idea, something completely different. Um, you gotta talk coming up, what's the premise behind this revolution, you know, these tying together architecture, development, automation deployment, operating altogether. >>Yes, well, we have traditionally always used the sclc, which is the software delivery life cycle. Um, and it is a straight linear process that has actually been around since the sixties, which is wild to me um, and really originated in manufacturing. Um, and as much as I love the Toyota production system and how much it has shown up in devops as a sort of inspiration on how to run things better. We are not making cars, we are making software and I think we have to use different approaches and create a sort of model that better reflects our modern software development process. >>It's a bold idea and looking forward to the talk and as motivation. I went into my basement and dusted off all my books from college in the 80s and the sea estimates it was waterfall. It was software development life cycle. They trained us to think this way and it came from the mainframe people. It was like, it's old school, like really, really old and it really hasn't been updated. Where's the motivation? I actually cloud is kind of converging everything together. We see that, but you kind of hit on this persona thing. Where did that come from this persona? Because you know, people want to put people in buckets release engineer. I mean, where's that motivation coming from? >>Yes, you're absolutely right that it came from the mainframes. I think, you know, waterfall is necessary when you're using a punch card or mag tape to load things onto a mainframe, but we don't exist in that world anymore. Thank goodness. And um, yes, so we, we use personas all the time in tech, you know, even to register, well not actually to register for this event, but a lot events. A lot of events, you have to click that drop down. Right. Are you a developer? Are you a manager, whatever? And the thing is personas are immutable in my opinion. I was a developer. I will always identify as a developer despite playing a lot of different roles and doing a lot of different jobs. Uh, and this can vary throughout the day. Right. You might have someone who has a title of software architect who ends up helping someone pair program or develop or test or deploy. Um, and so we wear a lot of hats day to day and I think our discussions around roles would be a better, um, certainly a better approach than personas >>lease. And I've been discussing with many of these companies around the roles and we're hearing from them directly and they're finding out that people have, they're mixing and matching on teams. So you're, you're an S R E on one team and you're doing something on another team where the workflows and the workloads defined the team formation. So this is a cultural discussion. >>It absolutely is. Yes. I think it is a cultural discussion and it really comes to the heart of devops, right? It's people process. And then tools deVOps has always been about culture and making sure that developers have all the tools they need to be productive and honestly happy. What good is all of this? If developing software isn't a joyful experience. Well, >>I got to ask you, I got you here obviously with server list and functions just starting to see this kind of this next gen. And we're gonna hear from jerry Chen, who's a Greylock VC who's going to talk about castles in the clouds, where he's discussing the moats that could be created with a competitive advantage in cloud scale. And I think he points to the snowflakes of the world. You're starting to see this new thing happening. This is devops 2.0, this is the revolution. Is this kind of where you see the same vision of your talk? >>Yes, so DeVOps created 2000 and 8, 2000 and nine, totally different ecosystem in the world we were living in, you know, we didn't have things like surveillance and containers, we didn't have this sort of default distributed nature, certainly not the cloud. Uh and so I'm very excited for jerry's talk. I'm curious to hear more about these moz. I think it's fascinating. Um but yeah, you're seeing different companies use different tools and processes to accelerate their delivery and that is the competitive advantage. How can we figure out how to utilize these tools in the most efficient way possible. >>Thank you for coming and giving us a preview. Let's now go to your lightning keynote talk. Fresh content. Premier of this revolution in Devops and the Freemans Talk, we'll go there now. >>Hi, I'm Emily Freeman, I'm the author of devops for dummies and the curator of 97 things every cloud engineer should know. I am thrilled to be here with you all today. I am really excited to share with you a kind of a wild idea, a complete re imagining of the S DLC and I want to be clear, I need your feedback. I want to know what you think of this. You can always find me on twitter at editing. Emily, most of my work centers around deVOps and I really can't overstate what an impact the concept of deVOPS has had on this industry in many ways it built on the foundation of Agile to become a default a standard we all reach for in our everyday work. When devops surfaced as an idea in 2008, the tech industry was in a vastly different space. AWS was an infancy offering only a handful of services. Azure and G C P didn't exist yet. The majority's majority of companies maintained their own infrastructure. Developers wrote code and relied on sys admins to deploy new code at scheduled intervals. Sometimes months apart, container technology hadn't been invented applications adhered to a monolithic architecture, databases were almost exclusively relational and serverless wasn't even a concept. Everything from the application to the engineers was centralized. Our current ecosystem couldn't be more different. Software is still hard, don't get me wrong, but we continue to find novel solutions to consistently difficult, persistent problems. Now, some of these end up being a sort of rebranding of old ideas, but others are a unique and clever take to abstracting complexity or automating toil or perhaps most important, rethinking challenging the very premises we have accepted as Cannon for years, if not decades. In the years since deVOps attempted to answer the critical conflict between developers and operations, engineers, deVOps has become a catch all term and there have been a number of derivative works. Devops has come to mean 5000 different things to 5000 different people. For some, it can be distilled to continuous integration and continuous delivery or C I C D. For others, it's simply deploying code more frequently, perhaps adding a smattering of tests for others. Still, its organizational, they've added a platform team, perhaps even a questionably named DEVOPS team or have created an engineering structure that focuses on a separation of concerns. Leaving feature teams to manage the development, deployment, security and maintenance of their siloed services, say, whatever the interpretation, what's important is that there isn't a universally accepted standard. Well, what deVOPS is or what it looks like an execution, it's a philosophy more than anything else. A framework people can utilize to configure and customize their specific circumstances to modern development practices. The characteristic of deVOPS that I think we can all agree on though, is that an attempted to capture the challenges of the entire software development process. It's that broad umbrella, that holistic view that I think we need to breathe life into again, The challenge we face is that DeVOps isn't increasingly outmoded solution to a previous problem developers now face. Cultural and technical challenge is far greater than how to more quickly deploy a monolithic application. Cloud native is the future the next collection of default development decisions and one the deVOPS story can't absorb in its current form. I believe the era of deVOPS is waning and in this moment as the sun sets on deVOPS, we have a unique opportunity to rethink rebuild free platform. Even now, I don't have a crystal ball. That would be very handy. I'm not completely certain with the next decade of tech looks like and I can't write this story alone. I need you but I have some ideas that can get the conversation started, I believe to build on what was we have to throw away assumptions that we've taken for granted all this time in order to move forward. We must first step back. Mhm. The software or systems development life cycle, what we call the S. D. L. C. has been in use since the 1960s and it's remained more or less the same since before color television and the touch tone phone. Over the last 60 or so odd years we've made tweaks, slight adjustments, massaged it. The stages or steps are always a little different with agile and deVOps we sort of looped it into a circle and then an infinity loop we've added pretty colors. But the sclc is more or less the same and it has become an assumption. We don't even think about it anymore, universally adopted constructs like the sclc have an unspoken permanence. They feel as if they have always been and always will be. I think the impact of that is even more potent. If you were born after a construct was popularized. Nearly everything around us is a construct, a model, an artifact of a human idea. The chair you're sitting in the desk, you work at the mug from which you drink coffee or sometimes wine, buildings, toilets, plumbing, roads, cars, art, computers, everything. The sclc is a remnant an artifact of a previous era and I think we should throw it away or perhaps more accurately replace it, replace it with something that better reflects the actual nature of our work. A linear, single threaded model designed for the manufacturer of material goods cannot possibly capture the distributed complexity of modern socio technical systems. It just can't. Mhm. And these two ideas aren't mutually exclusive that the sclc was industry changing, valuable and extraordinarily impactful and that it's time for something new. I believe we are strong enough to hold these two ideas at the same time, showing respect for the past while envisioning the future. Now, I don't know about you, I've never had a software project goes smoothly in one go. No matter how small. Even if I'm the only person working on it and committing directly to master software development is chaos. It's a study and entropy and it is not getting any more simple. The model with which we think and talk about software development must capture the multithreaded, non sequential nature of our work. It should embody the roles engineers take on and the considerations they make along the way. It should build on the foundations of agile and devops and represent the iterative nature of continuous innovation. Now, when I was thinking about this, I was inspired by ideas like extreme programming and the spiral model. I I wanted something that would have layers, threads, even a way of visually representing multiple processes happening in parallel. And what I settled on is the revolution model. I believe the visualization of revolution is capable of capturing the pivotal moments of any software scenario. And I'm going to dive into all the discrete elements. But I want to give you a moment to have a first impression, to absorb my idea. I call it revolution because well for one it revolves, it's circular shape reflects the continuous and iterative nature of our work, but also because it is revolutionary. I am challenging a 60 year old model that is embedded into our daily language. I don't expect Gartner to build a magic quadrant around this tomorrow, but that would be super cool. And you should call me my mission with. This is to challenge the status quo to create a model that I think more accurately reflects the complexity of modern cloud native software development. The revolution model is constructed of five concentric circles describing the critical roles of software development architect. Ng development, automating, deploying and operating intersecting each loop are six spokes that describe the production considerations every engineer has to consider throughout any engineering work and that's test, ability, secure ability, reliability, observe ability, flexibility and scalability. The considerations listed are not all encompassing. There are of course things not explicitly included. I figured if I put 20 spokes, some of us, including myself, might feel a little overwhelmed. So let's dive into each element in this model. We have long used personas as the default way to do divide audiences and tailor messages to group people. Every company in the world right now is repeating the mantra of developers, developers, developers but personas have always bugged me a bit because this approach typically either oversimplifies someone's career are needlessly complicated. Few people fit cleanly and completely into persona based buckets like developers and operations anymore. The lines have gotten fuzzy on the other hand, I don't think we need to specifically tailor messages as to call out the difference between a devops engineer and a release engineer or a security administrator versus a security engineer but perhaps most critically, I believe personas are immutable. A persona is wholly dependent on how someone identifies themselves. It's intrinsic not extrinsic. Their titles may change their jobs may differ, but they're probably still selecting the same persona on that ubiquitous drop down. We all have to choose from when registering for an event. Probably this one too. I I was a developer and I will always identify as a developer despite doing a ton of work in areas like devops and Ai Ops and Deverell in my heart. I'm a developer I think about problems from that perspective. First it influences my thinking and my approach roles are very different. Roles are temporary, inconsistent, constantly fluctuating. If I were an actress, the parts I would play would be lengthy and varied, but the persona I would identify as would remain an actress and artist lesbian. Your work isn't confined to a single set of skills. It may have been a decade ago, but it is not today in any given week or sprint, you may play the role of an architect. Thinking about how to design a feature or service, developer building out code or fixing a bug and on automation engineer, looking at how to improve manual processes. We often refer to as soil release engineer, deploying code to different environments or releasing it to customers or in operations. Engineer ensuring an application functions inconsistent expected ways and no matter what role we play. We have to consider a number of issues. The first is test ability. All software systems require testing to assure architects that designs work developers, the code works operators, that infrastructure is running as expected and engineers of all disciplines that code changes won't bring down the whole system testing in its many forms is what enables systems to be durable and have longevity. It's what reassures engineers that changes won't impact current functionality. A system without tests is a disaster waiting to happen, which is why test ability is first among equals at this particular roundtable. Security is everyone's responsibility. But if you understand how to design and execute secure systems, I struggle with this security incidents for the most part are high impact, low probability events. The really big disasters, the one that the ones that end up on the news and get us all free credit reporting for a year. They don't happen super frequently and then goodness because you know that there are endless small vulnerabilities lurking in our systems. Security is something we all know we should dedicate time to but often don't make time for. And let's be honest, it's hard and complicated and a little scary def sec apps. The first derivative of deVOPS asked engineers to move security left this approach. Mint security was a consideration early in the process, not something that would block release at the last moment. This is also the consideration under which I'm putting compliance and governance well not perfectly aligned. I figure all the things you have to call lawyers for should just live together. I'm kidding. But in all seriousness, these three concepts are really about risk management, identity, data, authorization. It doesn't really matter what specific issue you're speaking about, the question is who has access to what win and how and that is everyone's responsibility at every stage site reliability engineering or sorry, is a discipline job and approach for good reason. It is absolutely critical that applications and services work as expected. Most of the time. That said, availability is often mistakenly treated as a synonym for reliability. Instead, it's a single aspect of the concept if a system is available but customer data is inaccurate or out of sync. The system is not reliable, reliability has five key components, availability, latency, throughput. Fidelity and durability, reliability is the end result. But resiliency for me is the journey the action engineers can take to improve reliability, observe ability is the ability to have insight into an application or system. It's the combination of telemetry and monitoring and alerting available to engineers and leadership. There's an aspect of observe ability that overlaps with reliability, but the purpose of observe ability isn't just to maintain a reliable system though, that is of course important. It is the capacity for engineers working on a system to have visibility into the inner workings of that system. The concept of observe ability actually originates and linear dynamic systems. It's defined as how well internal states of a system can be understood based on information about its external outputs. If it is critical when companies move systems to the cloud or utilize managed services that they don't lose visibility and confidence in their systems. The shared responsibility model of cloud storage compute and managed services require that engineering teams be able to quickly be alerted to identify and remediate issues as they arise. Flexible systems are capable of adapting to meet the ever changing needs of the customer and the market segment, flexible code bases absorb new code smoothly. Embody a clean separation of concerns. Are partitioned into small components or classes and architected to enable the now as well as the next inflexible systems. Change dependencies are reduced or eliminated. Database schemas accommodate change well components, communicate via a standardized and well documented A. P. I. The only thing constant in our industry is change and every role we play, creating flexibility and solutions that can be flexible that will grow as the applications grow is absolutely critical. Finally, scalability scalability refers to more than a system's ability to scale for additional load. It implies growth scalability and the revolution model carries the continuous innovation of a team and the byproducts of that growth within a system. For me, scalability is the most human of the considerations. It requires each of us in our various roles to consider everyone around us, our customers who use the system or rely on its services, our colleagues current and future with whom we collaborate and even our future selves. Mhm. Software development isn't a straight line, nor is it a perfect loop. It is an ever changing complex dance. There are twirls and pivots and difficult spins forward and backward. Engineers move in parallel, creating truly magnificent pieces of art. We need a modern model for this modern era and I believe this is just the revolution to get us started. Thank you so much for having me. >>Hey, we're back here. Live in the keynote studio. I'm john for your host here with lisa martin. David lot is getting ready for the fireside chat ending keynote with the practitioner. Hello! Fresh without data mesh lisa Emily is amazing. The funky artwork there. She's amazing with the talk. I was mesmerized. It was impressive. >>The revolution of devops and the creative element was a really nice surprise there. But I love what she's doing. She's challenging the status quo. If we've learned nothing in the last year and a half, We need to challenge the status quo. A model from the 1960s that is no longer linear. What she's doing is revolutionary. >>And we hear this all the time. All the cube interviews we do is that you're seeing the leaders, the SVP's of engineering or these departments where there's new new people coming in that are engineering or developers, they're playing multiple roles. It's almost a multidisciplinary aspect where you know, it's like going into in and out burger in the fryer later and then you're doing the grill, you're doing the cashier, people are changing roles or an architect, their test release all in one no longer departmental, slow siloed groups. >>She brought up a great point about persona is that we no longer fit into these buckets. That the changing roles. It's really the driver of how we should be looking at this. >>I think I'm really impressed, really bold idea, no brainer as far as I'm concerned, I think one of the things and then the comments were off the charts in a lot of young people come from discord servers. We had a good traction over there but they're all like learning. Then you have the experience, people saying this is definitely has happened and happening. The dominoes are falling and they're falling in the direction of modernization. That's the key trend speed. >>Absolutely with speed. But the way that Emily is presenting it is not in a brash bold, but it's in a way that makes great sense. The way that she creatively visually lined out what she was talking about Is amenable to the folks that have been doing this for since the 60s and the new folks now to really look at this from a different >>lens and I think she's a great setup on that lightning top of the 15 companies we got because you think about sis dig harness. I white sourced flamingo hacker one send out, I oh, okay. Thought spot rock set Sarah Ops ramp and Ops Monte cloud apps, sani all are doing modern stuff and we talked to them and they're all on this new wave, this monster wave coming. What's your observation when you talk to these companies? >>They are, it was great. I got to talk with eight of the 15 and the amount of acceleration of innovation that they've done in the last 18 months is phenomenal obviously with the power and the fuel and the brand reputation of aws but really what they're all facilitating cultural shift when we think of devoPS and the security folks. Um, there's a lot of work going on with ai to an automation to really kind of enabled to develop the develops folks to be in control of the process and not have to be security experts but ensuring that the security is baked in shifting >>left. We saw that the chat room was really active on the security side and one of the things I noticed was not just shift left but the other groups, the security groups and the theme of cultural, I won't say war but collision cultural shift that's happening between the groups is interesting because you have this new devops persona has been around Emily put it out for a while. But now it's going to the next level. There's new revolutions about a mindset, a systems mindset. It's a thinking and you start to see the new young companies coming out being funded by the gray locks of the world who are now like not going to be given the we lost the top three clouds one, everything. there's new business models and new technical architecture in the cloud and that's gonna be jerry Chen talk coming up next is going to be castles in the clouds because jerry chant always talked about moats, competitive advantage and how moats are key to success to guard the castle. And then we always joke, there's no more moz because the cloud has killed all the boats. But now the motor in the cloud, the castles are in the cloud, not on the ground. So very interesting thought provoking. But he's got data and if you look at the successful companies like the snowflakes of the world, you're starting to see these new formations of this new layer of innovation where companies are growing rapidly, 98 unicorns now in the cloud. Unbelievable, >>wow, that's a lot. One of the things you mentioned, there's competitive advantage and these startups are all fueled by that they know that there are other companies in the rear view mirror right behind them. If they're not able to work as quickly and as flexibly as a competitor, they have to have that speed that time to market that time to value. It was absolutely critical. And that's one of the things I think thematically that I saw along the eighth sort of that I talked to is that time to value is absolutely table stakes. >>Well, I'm looking forward to talking to jerry chan because we've talked on the queue before about this whole idea of What happens when winner takes most would mean the top 3, 4 cloud players. What happens? And we were talking about that and saying, if you have a model where an ecosystem can develop, what does that look like and back in 2013, 2014, 2015, no one really had an answer. Jerry was the only BC. He really nailed it with this castles in the cloud. He nailed the idea that this is going to happen. And so I think, you know, we'll look back at the tape or the videos from the cube, we'll find those cuts. But we were talking about this then we were pontificating and riffing on the fact that there's going to be new winners and they're gonna look different as Andy Jassy always says in the cube you have to be misunderstood if you're really going to make something happen. Most of the most successful companies are misunderstood. Not anymore. The cloud scales there. And that's what's exciting about all this. >>It is exciting that the scale is there, the appetite is there the appetite to challenge the status quo, which is right now in this economic and dynamic market that we're living in is there's nothing better. >>One of the things that's come up and and that's just real quick before we bring jerry in is automation has been insecurity, absolutely security's been in every conversation, but automation is now so hot in the sense of it's real and it's becoming part of all the design decisions. How can we automate can we automate faster where the keys to automation? Is that having the right data, What data is available? So I think the idea of automation and Ai are driving all the change and that's to me is what these new companies represent this modern error where AI is built into the outcome and the apps and all that infrastructure. So it's super exciting. Um, let's check in, we got jerry Chen line at least a great. We're gonna come back after jerry and then kick off the day. Let's bring in jerry Chen from Greylock is he here? Let's bring him in there. He is. >>Hey john good to see you. >>Hey, congratulations on an amazing talk and thesis on the castles on the cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>All right, Well thanks for reading it. Um, always were being put a piece of workout out either. Not sure what the responses, but it seemed to resonate with a bunch of developers, founders, investors and folks like yourself. So smart people seem to gravitate to us. So thank you very much. >>Well, one of the benefits of doing the Cube for 11 years, Jerry's we have videotape of many, many people talking about what the future will hold. You kind of are on this early, it wasn't called castles in the cloud, but you were all I was, we had many conversations were kind of connecting the dots in real time. But you've been on this for a while. It's great to see the work. I really think you nailed this. I think you're absolutely on point here. So let's get into it. What is castles in the cloud? New research to come out from Greylock that you spearheaded? It's collaborative effort, but you've got data behind it. Give a quick overview of what is castle the cloud, the new modes of competitive advantage for companies. >>Yeah, it's as a group project that our team put together but basically john the question is, how do you win in the cloud? Remember the conversation we had eight years ago when amazon re event was holy cow, Like can you compete with them? Like is it a winner? Take all? Winner take most And if it is winner take most, where are the white spaces for Some starts to to emerge and clearly the past eight years in the cloud this journey, we've seen big companies, data breaks, snowflakes, elastic Mongo data robot. And so um they spotted the question is, you know, why are the castles in the cloud? The big three cloud providers, Amazon google and Azure winning. You know, what advantage do they have? And then given their modes of scale network effects, how can you as a startup win? And so look, there are 500 plus services between all three cloud vendors, but there are like 500 plus um startups competing gets a cloud vendors and there's like almost 100 unicorn of private companies competing successfully against the cloud vendors, including public companies. So like Alaska, Mongo Snowflake. No data breaks. Not public yet. Hashtag or not public yet. These are some examples of the names that I think are winning and watch this space because you see more of these guys storm the castle if you will. >>Yeah. And you know one of the things that's a funny metaphor because it has many different implications. One, as we talk about security, the perimeter of the gates, the moats being on land. But now you're in the cloud, you have also different security paradigm. You have a different um, new kinds of services that are coming on board faster than ever before. Not just from the cloud players but From companies contributing into the ecosystem. So the combination of the big three making the market the main markets you, I think you call 31 markets that we know of that probably maybe more. And then you have this notion of a sub market, which means that there's like we used to call it white space back in the day, remember how many whites? Where's the white space? I mean if you're in the cloud, there's like a zillion white spaces. So talk about this sub market dynamic between markets and that are being enabled by the cloud players and how these sub markets play into it. >>Sure. So first, the first problem was what we did. We downloaded all the services for the big three clowns. Right? And you know what as recalls a database or database service like a document DB and amazon is like Cosmo dB and Azure. So first thing first is we had to like look at all three cloud providers and you? Re categorize all the services almost 500 Apples, Apples, Apples # one number two is you look at all these markets or sub markets and said, okay, how can we cluster these services into things that you know you and I can rock right. That's what amazon Azure and google think about. It is very different and the beauty of the cloud is this kind of fat long tail of services for developers. So instead of like oracle is a single database for all your needs. They're like 20 or 30 different databases from time series um analytics, databases. We're talking rocks at later today. Right. Um uh, document databases like Mongo search database like elastic. And so what happens is there's not one giant market like databases, there's a database market And 30, 40 sub markets that serve the needs developers. So the Great News is cloud has reduced the cost and create something that new for developers. Um also the good news is for a start up you can find plenty of white speeds solving a pain point, very specific to a different type of problem >>and you can sequence up to power law to this. I love the power of a metaphor, you know, used to be a very thin neck note no torso and then a long tail. But now as you're pointing out this expansion of the fat tail of services, but also there's big tam's and markets available at the top of the power law where you see coming like snowflake essentially take on the data warehousing market by basically sitting on amazon re factoring with new services and then getting a flywheel completely changing the economic unit economics completely changing the consumption model completely changing the value proposition >>literally you >>get Snowflake has created like a storm, create a hole, that mode or that castle wall against red shift. Then companies like rock set do your real time analytics is Russian right behind snowflakes saying, hey snowflake is great for data warehouse but it's not fast enough for real time analytics. Let me give you something new to your, to your parallel argument. Even the big optic snowflake have created kind of a wake behind them that created even more white space for Gaza rock set. So that's exciting for guys like me and >>you. And then also as we were talking about our last episode two or quarter two of our showcase. Um, from a VC came on, it's like the old shelf where you didn't know if a company's successful until they had to return the inventory now with cloud you if you're not successful, you know it right away. It's like there's no debate. Like, I mean you're either winning or not. This is like that's so instrumented so a company can have a good better mousetrap and win and fill the white space and then move up. >>It goes both ways. The cloud vendor, the big three amazon google and Azure for sure. They instrument their own class. They know john which ecosystem partners doing well in which ecosystems doing poorly and they hear from the customers exactly what they want. So it goes both ways they can weaponize that. And just as well as you started to weaponize that info >>and that's the big argument of do that snowflake still pays the amazon bills. They're still there. So again, repatriation comes back, That's a big conversation that's come up. What's your quick take on that? Because if you're gonna have a castle in the cloud, then you're gonna bring it back to land. I mean, what's that dynamic? Where do you see that compete? Because on one hand is innovation. The other ones maybe cost efficiency. Is that a growth indicator slow down? What's your view on the movement from and to the cloud? >>I think there's probably three forces you're finding here. One is the cost advantage in the scale advantage of cloud so that I think has been going for the past eight years, there's a repatriation movement for a certain subset of customers, I think for cost purposes makes sense. I think that's a tiny handful that believe they can actually run things better than a cloud. The third thing we're seeing around repatriation is not necessary against cloud, but you're gonna see more decentralized clouds and things pushed to the edge. Right? So you look at companies like Cloudflare Fastly or a company that we're investing in Cato networks. All ideas focus on secure access at the edge. And so I think that's not the repatriation of my own data center, which is kind of a disaggregated of cloud from one giant monolithic cloud, like AWS east or like a google region in europe to multiple smaller clouds for governance purposes, security purposes or legacy purposes. >>So I'm looking at my notes here, looking down on the screen here for this to read this because it's uh to cut and paste from your thesis on the cloud. The excellent cloud. The of the $38 billion invested this quarter. Um Ai and ml number one, um analytics. Number two, security number three. Actually, security number one. But you can see the bubbles here. So all those are data problems I need to ask you. I see data is hot data as intellectual property. How do you look at that? Because we've been reporting on this and we just started the cube conversation around workflows as intellectual property. If you have scale and your motives in the cloud. You could argue that data and the workflows around those data streams is intellectual property. It's a protocol >>I believe both are. And they just kind of go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. Right? So data for sure. I. P. So if you know people talk about days in the oil, the new resource. That's largely true because of powers a bunch. But the workflow to your point john is sticky because every company is a unique snowflake right? Like the process used to run the cube and your business different how we run our business. So if you can build a workflow that leverages the data, that's super sticky. So in terms of switching costs, if my work is very bespoke to your business, then I think that's competitive advantage. >>Well certainly your workflow is a lot different than the cube. You guys just a lot of billions of dollars in capital. We're talking to all the people out here jerry. Great to have you on final thought on your thesis. Where does it go from here? What's been the reaction? Uh No, you put it out there. Great love the restart. Think you're on point on this one. Where did we go from here? >>We have to follow pieces um in the near term one around, you know, deep diver on open source. So look out for that pretty soon and how that's been a powerful strategy a second. Is this kind of just aggregation of the cloud be a Blockchain and you know, decentralized apps, be edge applications. So that's in the near term two more pieces of, of deep dive we're doing. And then the goal here is to update this on a quarterly and annual basis. So we're getting submissions from founders that wanted to say, hey, you missed us or he screwed up here. We got the big cloud vendors saying, Hey jerry, we just lost his new things. So our goal here is to update this every single year and then probably do look back saying, okay, uh, where were we wrong? We're right. And then let's say the castle clouds 2022. We'll see the difference were the more unicorns were there more services were the IPO's happening. So look for some short term work from us on analytics, like around open source and clouds. And then next year we hope that all of this forward saying, Hey, you have two year, what's happening? What's changing? >>Great stuff and, and congratulations on the southern news. You guys put another half a billion dollars into early, early stage, which is your roots. Are you still doing a lot of great investments in a lot of unicorns. Congratulations that. Great luck on the team. Thanks for coming on and congratulations you nailed this one. I think I'm gonna look back and say that this is a pretty seminal piece of work here. Thanks for sharing. >>Thanks john thanks for having us. >>Okay. Okay. This is the cube here and 81 startup showcase. We're about to get going in on all the hot companies closing out the kino lisa uh, see jerry Chen cube alumni. He was right from day one. We've been riffing on this, but he nails it here. I think Greylock is lucky to have him as a general partner. He's done great deals, but I think he's hitting the next wave big. This is, this is huge. >>I was listening to you guys talking thinking if if you had a crystal ball back in 2013, some of the things Jerry saying now his narrative now, what did he have a crystal >>ball? He did. I mean he could be a cuBA host and I could be a venture capital. We were both right. I think so. We could have been, you know, doing that together now and all serious now. He was right. I mean, we talked off camera about who's the next amazon who's going to challenge amazon and Andy Jassy was quoted many times in the queue by saying, you know, he was surprised that it took so long for people to figure out what they were doing. Okay, jerry was that VM where he had visibility into the cloud. He saw amazon right away like we did like this is a winning formula and so he was really out front on this one. >>Well in the investments that they're making in these unicorns is exciting. They have this, this lens that they're able to see the opportunities there almost before anybody else can. And finding more white space where we didn't even know there was any. >>Yeah. And what's interesting about the report I'm gonna dig into and I want to get to him while he's on camera because it's a great report, but He says it's like 500 services I think Amazon has 5000. So how you define services as an interesting thing and a lot of amazon services that they have as your doesn't have and vice versa, they do call that out. So I find the report interesting. It's gonna be a feature game in the future between clouds the big three. They're gonna say we do this, you're starting to see the formation, Google's much more developer oriented. Amazon is much more stronger in the governance area with data obviously as he pointed out, they have such experience Microsoft, not so much their developer cloud and more office, not so much on the government's side. So that that's an indicator of my, my opinion of kind of where they rank. So including the number one is still amazon web services as your long second place, way behind google, right behind Azure. So we'll see how the horses come in, >>right. And it's also kind of speaks to the hybrid world in which we're living the hybrid multi cloud world in which many companies are living as companies to not just survive in the last year and a half, but to thrive and really have to become data companies and leverage that data as a competitive advantage to be able to unlock the value of it. And a lot of these startups that we talked to in the showcase are talking about how they're helping organizations unlock that data value. As jerry said, it is the new oil, it's the new gold. Not unless you can unlock that value faster than your competition. >>Yeah, well, I'm just super excited. We got a great day ahead of us with with all the cots startups. And then at the end day, Volonte is gonna interview, hello, fresh practitioners, We're gonna close it out every episode now, we're going to do with the closing practitioner. We try to get jpmorgan chase data measures. The hottest area right now in the enterprise data is new competitive advantage. We know that data workflows are now intellectual property. You're starting to see data really factoring into these applications now as a key aspect of the competitive advantage and the value creation. So companies that are smart are investing heavily in that and the ones that are kind of slow on the uptake are lagging the market and just trying to figure it out. So you start to see that transition and you're starting to see people fall away now from the fact that they're not gonna make it right, You're starting to, you know, you can look at look at any happens saying how much ai is really in there. Real ai what's their data strategy and you almost squint through that and go, okay, that's gonna be losing application. >>Well the winners are making it a board level conversation >>And security isn't built in. Great to have you on this morning kicking it off. Thanks John Okay, we're going to go into the next set of the program at 10:00 we're going to move into the breakouts. Check out the companies is three tracks in there. We have an awesome track on devops pure devops. We've got the data and analytics and we got the cloud management and just to run down real quick check out the sis dig harness. Io system is doing great, securing devops harness. IO modern software delivery platform, White Source. They're preventing and remediating the rest of the internet for them for the company's that's a really interesting and lumbago, effortless acres land and monitoring functions, server list super hot. And of course hacker one is always great doing a lot of great missions and and bounties you see those success continue to send i O there in Palo alto changing the game on data engineering and data pipe lining. Okay. Data driven another new platform, horizontally scalable and of course thought spot ai driven kind of a search paradigm and of course rock set jerry Chen's companies here and press are all doing great in the analytics and then the cloud management cost side 80 operations day to operate. Ops ramps and ops multi cloud are all there and sunny, all all going to present. So check them out. This is the Cubes Adria's startup showcase episode three.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 the digital edition. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies world on the Cube without our next guest. Tim Crawford, CEO, Strategic Advisor from a boa. Tim, welcome back to the Cube. It's great to talk to you. >>Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me on the Cube today. >>A lot has changed since we last got to sit down with you in person. We think of the last Dell Technologies world is a year and a half ago. But we've seen dramatic changes in the enterprise the last 67 months. Talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing. >>Yeah. You know, Lisa, you couldn't put, um, or sustained way around what we've seen over the last 10 months or less. Even theater prices change for Monster Blue. You know, we've gone from having a pretty clear strategy of how we're going to move forward in the technology is we're gonna use to setting all that aside the strategies and plans that we had in the end of 2019 no longer apply the way we engage with customers, the way we run our business, the way who our customers are. The markets we go after all of that is now up for grabs. All of that has changed. And so, therefore, technology and the underpinnings of how we use data has to change accordingly. And so I think we'll talk a little more about that, too. >>I'd like to get your perspective on this acceleration of digital transformation that happened this year. We've seen that we've seen the companies that weren't ready. We've seen the companies that were pretty decently able to pivot quickly. What's your advice for those who are still struggling? Because here we are seven months in. One thing we know for sure is this uncertainty is going to continue for a while. >>Yeah, you're absolutely right. The uncertainty is going to continue for a while. We don't know what the new normal is gonna look like. We don't know how our customers are going to engage with us in the future. And so all the more reason why we need to be thinking very differently about how we operate our companies and how we remain flexible, how we stay in touch with our customers and how that translates into the choices we make in terms of the partners and technologies data that we use. You know, one of the great things about the coronavirus that has come out. If you can say that there is a great thing that's come out of it is it's really accelerated the need to transform companies. And I'm talking about business transformation, not digital transformation. Digital transformation is a downstream component of business transformation. And so a lot of the hurdles that companies were having that I T organizations were having to move to the cloud toe leverage, data toe leverage, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ah, lot of those hurdles have since dropped by the wayside because companies are realizing if they don't start to adopt some of this new technology, it's available and has been available for some time. They will die, and it it really is that dramatic for companies. And so the Kobe 19 virus has really kind of thrown everything into into the muck, and we've had toe kind of sort things out, but at the same time, it's really given companies an opportunity to say we have. We have a single opportunity here to do something that we will probably never see again. What I mean by that is now we have the lowest level of risk that our company will will observe, probably over our career lifetimes. And what I mean by that is just imagine if you're a commercial airline, you have the lowest passenger loads right now, If >>you need >>to change core operational systems, now is the time to do it. Not when you're operating at Peak, and this is playing out right now across all of the different industries, and that's a huge opportunity. >>That's a great point. And you're right. There are opportunities. There are pluses that are coming out of this. If you think of the I love the opportunity that you just described it, there's the lowest risk right now for, say, an airline to be able to rapidly pivot. Of course, one of the things that you know what happened during that is the customers that consumers would. We react in many different ways. The customer experience is almost under on even higher resolution microscope. The last seven months talk to me about what some of the things you're seeing, how companies need to react to preserve customer relationships because brand is at stake. >>Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, Brand is at stake. The livelihood of your company is at stake, and at the core of that is technology and data. So all we have to do to answer that question is really look in the mirror. Look at how we have changed. Look at how our buying habits have changed. Now that's more of a B two C relationship. But even in the B two b space, those relationships have changed demonstrably. And so we have to think about how our customers air needing to change and how their business is changing, and then how we can accommodate that. And so what that means is we have to tap into data whether it's on the customer experience side or the business operation side of it. We have to tap into that data and use it in a more meaningful way than we ever have in the past. We have to remain more flexible. We have toe leverage it in ways that that we can do things and change on a moments notice. And that's something that we generally haven't architected our organizations or or our technology architectures for, for that matter. But now is the time to do it, and we have to be in touch with our customers in order to do it so again comes back to data, comes back to technology and architectures. Flexibility is the key here. >>I think consumers are far more demanding in the last seven months just because we have this expectation set for the last few years that we could go on Amazon to get anything we want. Anytime we could go on Netflix and watch any movie from any number of years ago anytime we want. And so when this happened and people were so used thio that speed of delivery and things were delayed, I just started seeing much more uproar from the consumer. I thought, Man, we've been conditioned for so long, but one of things I'm curious about when you're talking to the C suite is budget shifting. I mean, we know companies, some of them those enterprises that are in good shape have d our plans. They have business continuity plans. Probably. Nobody had a pandemic plan. So how do you help advise these enterprises to shift budget rapidly enough to be able thio implement the technologies that can harness insights from that data to drive a stupid earlier differentiated customer experience? >>Yeah, so let's kind of break that a part of it and unpack it. So on the pandemic, planning companies did have pandemic planning. I mean, 15 years ago, when I was leading I t. At Stanford University, we had a pandemic response plan that went with R D. R and B C plans. I think that most folks, though, they they struggled through that D R and B C process, and they never get to the pandemic end of that spectrum. And that's a really hard problem to solve for but kind of getting back to how that customer has changed and how we can accommodate that. Changed your right. Budgets have changed, technology has changed, and so we have to think about how we do things differently. I think from a budgetary standpoint, one of the first things we saw is just extreme spending and productivity tools, right? More laptops, more screens, more webcams, Mawr lights. Who would have thought that I would have needed Ah, lighting system for my home, right? Maybe a laptop was enough. We have to think about how our processes air different. How do we push patches out to people's computers out at their home? You know, that may sound somewhat trivial, but the reality is it's really hard to do because you're dealing with all kinds of different bandwidth requirements. Andi. It's not just me in the house. I have my wife, who is an executive on on video all day. I've got two teenage kids when in high school, when a middle school there on video all day. So we're taxing these networks within people's homes as well, in ways that we never have. And so all of these pieces kind of come together and cause us to rethink how we allocate our budgets within the I T organization. So the first thing is there was a lot of productivity tools that were being purchased. There was a lot of preservation of cash that companies kind of went into. How do we start to control, spend and kind of pull back on the reins? But the smart ones started to look at the opportunities to accelerate their innovation programs. And those are the folks that are really doing well right now. How do I start to use this opportunity again, not trying to suggest that the code 19 or the coronavirus is a great thing for us. But how do we start toe leverage that in the best way possible, and take advantage of it in such a way that it could benefit us on the long run? And this is where innovation and accelerating some of those changes really comes into play. And as I mentioned things like cloud artificial intelligence machine learning, leveraging data to understand your customers more intimately, being flexible to change your company's your business operations, how you engage with your customers, you know, instead of just a website, maybe you need thio move Mawr to a focus on a mobile device or mobile application, or vice versa. All of those start to come into play, but at the heart of it is data and data is what ultimately will drive the decisions down the path. >>So you talked about the work from home thing, and I kept thinking of the proliferation of endpoint devices at the edge you're right. How many of us tried to get a webcam months ago and couldn't? Because suddenly that became a tool that was essential for folks to continue their operations and and maintain their productivity. How are enterprises, in your opinion this year addressing the edge and understanding how they need to be able to take advantage of that? But also understand where all those devices are, to your point, pushing out patches, ensuring that there's a secure environment? What's their view of the edge? >>Yeah, the the edges incredibly complicated, and it's important to differentiate a couple of pieces here. So when you talk about the productivity devices, whether it's the laptops, the Webcams, the lighting, all of those I p connected components that we interface with, that's one aspect. And you're right. I mean, I can remember I t leaders that were telling their staff. Goto every office supply store, every big box store by every laptop keyboard, mouse, webcam you can get your hands on. I don't care what brand it is. I don't care what specs are. Just do it because they didn't have access to those. Resource is for their entire employee base. And so That's one aspect. And that's a whole another, um, consideration as we start to think about cybersecurity, and now we're talking about non non traditional, um, platforms that are in the environment in the enterprise environment, versus your standard kind of image and standard product. But aside from that, we also have data coming from the edge, whether it's from sensors and video cameras and other types of devices that we have to bring into the mix, too. Right understanding that Tim Crawford has now entered into a store and that Tim Crawford has now left the store but hasn't purchased. But we know that Tim Crawford is a loyal customer based on his loyalty at how do we start to gauge that? Or how do we start to gauge the number of folks that are moving through a given area and especially in light of coronavirus? I mean, there there's some aspect that air coming up where companies are starting to look at. How do we measure the number of people that are in a given room and do that in an automated way, and maybe alert people to say, Hey, you know, is there a way you can stand out or reminds people gently, Um, you know, keep your distance, make sure you're wearing your mask, etcetera. There are a lot of ways that edge comes into play, but at the core of this is data. And so that's where it becomes really important to understand that the amount of data, not just the sources of data but the amount of data that we're gonna have to deal with and we're dealing with today at the edge is just incredible. And it's on Lee going to grow exponentially. And so it's important to understand that your customer engagement pieces are going to be a source of data as well as a consumer of data. Let's not forget that people with the edge they need to be able to consume data and not in a batch way, they need to be able to do it in real time, which then gets back to flexibility and speed and algorithms at the edge. But understanding all of that data at the edge, being able to analyze it, whether it's for business operations or customer engagement and then providing that through the continuum from edge to cloud is really, really critical. It's a very complicated problem to solve for, but every single enterprise across the industries is already heading down this path. >>You're right. It is an incredibly complex problem to solve. So here we are, virtually at Dell Technologies World 2020. Talk to me about Dell Technologies Landscape. How do you think it fits into addressing some of these challenges in the complexities that you just talked >>about? Yeah, you know, Dell has been on this path for a while. I mean, through the partnerships through the ecosystem that Don't has is well as their portfolio of hardware and software. I think Della's position really well to be able to address both the customer experience as well as the business operations. The key here is you have to think about edge to Klag. You have to think about data. You have to think about analytics and then, from a nightie perspective, how do you start toe layer in the management and the algorithms on top of that to be able to manage that landscape? Because that landscape is getting increasingly more complicated on I think Dell starting to come up with the software pieces that actually make the connection between back those points on the continuum, and that's a really important piece here for I t. Organizations to understand. I think, you know, with the new announcements around Apex, I think that will will shine really well for dealt. I think if you look at the partnerships and the ecosystem and the connections that they're making both with public cloud providers as well as with other partners in the ecosystem, I think that's, ah, positive place. But the place that I would actually watch most closely with Dell is what is that? Software Later, They already have a really good hardware platform to build on top of them that portfolio. What is that software layer that connects or create that connective tissue for them? And I think that's the big piece, and I think we're going to hear more of that. Here is Dell Technologies World. >>I'm also curious. I read your posts and and listen to podcasts on the difference between a traditional CEO and a transformational CEO. If I think is such an important thing to discuss because part of that is cultural right, it's it's got, too. It's not just about a company being able to transform It's got to be the person with the right mindset with that flexible, agile mindset. But your advice to businesses who are still pivoting or pivoting multiple times and trying to become not just a survivor but a winner of tomorrow. From a cultural perspective, >>you know, culture is the hardest thing to change. It really is. You know, the technology is easy. Relatively speaking. We can swap out one technology for another. It's relatively straightforward to dio, and it always has been, Um, the real challenge here is how do you create the underpinnings and the foundation for that culture? What I mean by that is changing, like within the I T organization, and it starts with the CEO, but then also kind of branches out into the rest of the I T organization to the most junior levels of the I T staff. What I mean by that is you have to look at how you become less text centric and more business centric. And so my post about the change in the differentiation from the traditional CEO to transformational CEO is just about that. It's about how do you start to make that shift where you start focusing on business first and that ultimately becomes our context regardless of what organization you're in. I t marketing HR engineering product support. It doesn't matter. You start with the business context and then you flow down from that. And so part of that move to being the transformational CEO or the transformational organization is really shifting to be more business focused. And using that is your North Star and then from it, you start to understand how the different technology pieces fit into place. And so, for example, a traditional CEO would typically focus on business operations. More of the back end pieces, right? The underlying technology, the back end systems. But the transformational CEO is going to be incredibly more customer focused. They're actually gonna be out with the customer they're going to be doing right alongs will probably not right now in the absence of Corona virus, but they're going to be engaging firsthand with customers, understanding firsthand what they're dealing with, understanding what the business challenges are that they're having and then being able to translate that into where does technology fit in? And where does technology not fit in kind of going back to what I was saying earlier around the importance of customer experience. And so that's really where this transformational bent comes from. Is shifting from just being back office focused to moving toward understanding that front office or that customer focus. And that's the rial differentiator for companies. Here is when you can start to think about how tech enology plays. That's central role in changing your business. That's gold. That's absolute gold. >>Gold, but hard, hard Thio Dig for that gold. One last question, Tim, You talked about a number of the opportunities that Cove in 19 is bringing. And I completely agree with you. Not that any of us loves being stuck at home and isolated in the same walls, but there are opportunities that are going to come. We're gonna learn things from that if we're open minded and and flexible and agile in our thinking. But other things that that you think we haven't heard about yet that you see as a kind of maybe some north stars to come. >>Yeah, there there are a couple things that I think we generally are missing, and I kind of touched on one of from earlier, which is how do you start, Thio, accelerate some of that innovation now. And so you know, I used the airplane example of you know you've got the lowest passenger loads. Now is the time to implement that innovative technology. Because if something does go wrong, if something does go wrong, the impact to your customers is relatively low. And quite frankly, a lot of folks Aer giving out hall passes to say, You know what we understand Coronaviruses. Hard for all of us. Something went sideways here. Fine, go fix it, go fix it and then come back to us. And so I think customers are definitely more apt to hand out that whole past now versus when, where it full capacity. And that kind of leads me to. The second piece that I think people are missing is that companies are organized and built around operating efficiently at 80% utilization or 100% utilization. What I mean by that is they tend not to make money until they get to that level of utilization. But yet in the coronavirus era, what if we had a company that was organized in such a way that it could be profitable at 25% utilization that would cause us to think very differently about how we use technology, how we're able to scale technology, how we leverage data were thinking in more meaningful ways about the customer. And so what that means is that it gives us the ability to scale our business up and down. God forbid, if we ever run into another situation like this ever again in our lifetimes. But if we ever hit another patch of negativity around economic growth, it allows a company to be able to scale down and back up as needed for their customers. And that's another piece. I don't think people are thinking about their thinking about the big picture they're thinking about. How do we build for growth? But what they're not thinking about is what if we need to scale this back, and I think a great example of where this touches in we're here. A Dell Technologies world is Look at the way that companies are starting to shift towards this as a service model, right? We're able to scale technology up use it is, we need it, give it back when we don't need it. And so when you start to move into that more flexible mode. I talked about flexibility in other ways earlier, but as you start to get into a different consumption boat, it gives you a lot of opportunity to do a lot of different things in a lot of different ways. And that's ultimately what companies need to be thinking about today. >>Sounds like it's going to be some of the big differentiators between the winners and the losers of tomorrow. Will Tim, Thank you for joining us on the Cube virtually from your home. It's not a Dell Technologies world on the Cube without talking to you, Tim. And I appreciate we all appreciate your time and the insight that you shared today. >>Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me on the Cube. >>Our pleasure for Tim Crawford. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We've been following a company called Actifio for quite some time. Now they've really popularized the concept of copy data management. Really innovative Boston based Waltham based company. And with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and Paul Forte who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of Actifio. Guys great to see you. I wish we were face to face at your June event but this will have to do. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks Dave. >> You bet Dave. >> Yeah, so Brian you've been on theCUBE a bunch. I'm going to start with Paul if that's okay. Paul, let's talk a little bit about your background. You've done a number of stints at a variety of companies. Big companies like IBM and others as well. What attracted you to Actifio? >> Yes Dave I would say in all honesty, I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years. And so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for on and onwards there. And so Actifio was just smack dab in the middle of that. And so when I was looking for my next adventure I had an opportunity to meet with Ash our CEO and founder and describe and discuss kind of what Actifio was all about. And candidly, the number of connections that we had that were the same. There are a lot of OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for some that work for me historically. So it was almost this perfect world. And I'm a Boston guy so it is in my old backyard. And yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for. Which was really a small growth company that was trying to get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and could understand and articulate the value proposition. >> Well as we say in Boston, Paulie we got to get you back here. (laughs) >> I know (mumbles) so I'll pack my car. >> (laughs) Yeah. So Brian... >> For 25 years, I still got it. >> let's talk about the climate right now. I mean nobody expected this of course. And it's funny I saw Ash at an event in Boston last fall. We were talking like "Hey, what are you expecting for next year?" "Yeah a little bit of softening" but nobody expected this sort of black swan. But you guys I just got your press release. You put it out. You had a good quarter. You had a record first quarter. What's going on in the marketplace. How are you guys doing? >> Yeah, well I think that today more than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis. And that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers, how they manage through their supply chain and frankly how they take care of their employees, is all very data centric. And so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data. On premises, in the cloud and hybrid configuration. Those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIO's mind. I think RQ1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets and they are confident in Actifio as an important part of their data supply chain. >> Paul I want to come back to you. First of all I want to let people know you're an Ex-Army Ranger. So thank you for your service, that's awesome. >> You're welcome (mumbles). >> I was talking to Frank Slootman, I interviewed in the other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and he says "Yeah I manage by a playbook". He's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military. Well it's weird. This is a situation. (Paul laughs) And that really is kind of how you're trained. And of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before. So how you seeing organizations generally, Actifio specifically kind of manage through this crisis. What are some of the moves that you'are advising, recommending? Give us some insight there. >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. It's funny that you mentioned my military background. So I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day. That one of the things that they trained for in the military, is the eventuality of chaos. So when you do an exercise we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you are now dead. And without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the (mumbles) unit has to go on. And so what happens is you learn by muscle memory like how to react in times of crisis and you know this is a classic example of leadership in crisis. And so it's just interesting. So to me you have a playbook. I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with the plan. I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of my famous quotes was "Plan is good until somebody punches you in the face". (Dave laughs) >> That's the reality of what just happened to business across the globe. This is just a punch in the face. And so you've got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic. And from a leadership perspective, I think you can't lose your confidence. Right, so I've watched some of my friends and I've watched some other businesses cripple in the midst of this pandemic because they're afraid instead of looking at this. In my first commentary in our first staff meeting Brian, if I remember it was this, okay so what makes Actifio great in this environment? Not why is it not great? And so we didn't get scared. We jumped right into it. We adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter. And we took down deals. Honestly Dave we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy. It was insane, it was really fun. >> Okay, so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record quarter. It was really a broad based demand. >> Yeah, so if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter. We had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever. We had the largest contribution from our nano partners and our OEM partners ever. And we had the highest number ever. And so it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries. >> Interesting, you used the term opportunistic and I get right on. You obviously don't want to be chasing ambulances. At the same time, we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian. You're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer. You're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic. And I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency. You talked about digital initiatives, data center, transformations etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, Brian. Did you do those things, how did you do those things? What kind of pace were you guys at? How did you do it remotely with everybody working from home? Give us some color on that. >> Sure, and if Ash, if he were here he would probably remind us that Actifio was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. So we have essentially been book ended by two black swans over the last decade. The lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit is as relevant today. Everything starts with cost containment and cost reduction. Hence in protection of the business and so CIOs in the midst of this shock to the system. I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital and critical initiatives and what is a "nice to have" and I'm going to hit pause on nice to have and invest entirely in the critical initiative. And the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working remotely. Getting people safe access to their systems and their applications and their data. And then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals in the state actors. Unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike, particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to really ensure the resiliency in their applications. So we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs, helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructural light manner. But also really emphasized the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when, instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is something that is incredibly valuable. >> So let's dig into cyber resiliency. So specifically what is Actifio doing for its customers from a product standpoint, capabilities, maybe it's part of the 10C announcement as well but can you give us some specifics on where you fit in. Let's take that use case, cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a stack of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency. At the lowest level, you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're infected. And so the ability to go back in time, test the recoverability of data, test the validity of the data is step one. Step two is once you found the clean point, being able to resume operations, being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase. And that's something that Actifio was founded on this notion of instant access to data. And then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk. You want to go back and clean that system. You want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it. And that's where our partnership with IBM for example, resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solutions which takes the Actifio platform and then wrappers in a complete manage services around it. So they can help the customer not only get their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable ground. >> Okay, so that's interesting. So Paul was it kind of new adoptions? Was it increases from existing customers combination? Can you talk to that? >> Yeah, totally. So ironically to really come clean the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar to do with the metrics that we see historically. So the mix with mean our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by. We anticipated that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base. But candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that our value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerate it or just continue down the path of adoption during the timeframe of COVID-19. Across industries I would say that again there were some industries I would say that pushed pause. And so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during this past period were the ones you would think of, right? So financial institutions primarily as well as some of the medical. So some of those transactions, healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions. And then I would say that we did have some industries that pushed pause. You can probably guess what some of those are. Among the majority of those were the ones that were dealing with the small and midsize businesses or consumer-facing businesses, things like retail and stuff like that. Well we typically do have a pretty nice resonance and a really nice value proposition but there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause. Like we're going to come back. But overall yeah the feedback was just in general. It felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal. As strange as that sounds. 'Cause I know speaking to a lot of my friends in peer companies, peer software companies, they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well. >> That's interesting, you're right. Certain industries, airlines, I'm interviewing a CIO of a major resort next week. Really interested to hear how they're dealing with this but those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down. But we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot, it didn't, it didn't buffer the decline in IT spending that were expected to be down maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it. What about Cloud? We're seeing elevated levels in Cloud demand. Guys have offerings there. What are you seeing in Cloud guys? >> Do you want to take it Brian? >> Yeah, I'll start and then Paul please weigh in. I think that the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the move to cloud that we've been we've been witnessing over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months. The projects that might have been on the 18 to 24 month roadmap have of all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year of our roadmap. But in terms of the wholesale everything moves to Cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate. I don't think we've seen that quite yet. I think that the world is still hybrid when it comes to Cloud. Although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the non-number one and number two Cloud providers but the rest of the hyper-scalers who are fighting for market shares because now they have an opportunity to perhaps, Google for example, a strategic partner of ours has a huge offering when it comes to enabling work from home and the remote work. So leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings, I think it gives them a wedge that the Amazon might not have for example. So it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend that we've been seeing for years. >> Yeah, and I would add a little bit Dave. The IBM held their Think Conferences past week. I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate. They're one of our OEM partners and... >> Dave: Oh Yeah, we covered it. >> When our CEO presented his opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really put it down to two things and said any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid Clouds or they're talking about AI and machine learning. And that's kind of it, right? And so every digital business is talking in one of those categories. And when I look to Q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as Brian talked about all of the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration. But outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity did so and those that did not just peeled back a little bit. But overall I would agree with IBM's assessment of the market that those are kind of the two hotspots and hybrid Cloud is hot and the good news is, we've got a nice value prop right in the middle of it. >> Yeah, Alvin Chris has talked about, and he has it, maybe not a thing but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in public statements that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle, the hybrid Cloud. And also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially, which is to mean those two things are great news for you guys, obviously Red Hat is the linchpin of that. I want to ask you guys about your conference, Data-Driven. So we were there last year it was a really great intimate event. Of course you can't have the physical events anymore. So you've pushed to September or you're going all digital? Give us the update on that Brian. >> We're eager to have theCube participate in our September event. So I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks, but also >> Dave: Awesome, love it. (Brian laughs) >> Exactly, so you can tell Frank to put that in there. So we've been participating in some of the other conferences most notably last week learning a lot and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics we're putting on the digital event. I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint. Our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed. The digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they might want. So I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content for the users of our technology. And then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in years past, our customers tell the story of how they're using data. And this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible crisis and hopefully renewal from the crisis. >> Well one of my favorite interviews last year at your show was the guy from DraftKings. So hopefully they'll be back on and we'll have some football to talk about, well let's hope. >> Amen. >> I Want to end with just sort of this notion of we've been so tactical the last eight weeks. Right? You guys too I'm sure. Just making sure you're there for customers, making sure your employees are okay. But as we start to think about coming out of this into a Post-COVID Era and it looks like it's going to be with us for a while but we getting back to Quaseye opening. So I'm hearing hybrid is here to stay. We agree for sure. Cyber resiliency is very interesting. I think one of the things we've said is that companies may sub-optimize near term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and business resiliency in place. That's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home. How do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the Post-COVID Era? >> Yeah, this is a really interesting topic for me. In fact I've had many discussions over the last couple of weeks with some of our investors as well as with our executive staff. And so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occured, for IT specifically at the enterprise level, it's about to go through a transformation, no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replaced a cold calling sales person with an inside and inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and BDR. Because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or physical building to go through. And so that whole thing has been removed from the sales process. So it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on, they happen to be online. However, way higher than what we can (mumbles), you coupled that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices. And I really think that those companies that embrace this new model, are going to find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way. And I do believe that the professional sales enterprise sales person of tomorrow is going to look different than it looks today. And so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and watching us learn together how we're going to buy, sell and market to each other in this post-COVID way. 'Cause the only thing I really do know it's just not going to be the way it used to be. What is it going to look like? I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet. But it's going to look different for sure. >> They're very, very thoughtful comments. And so Brian, you know our thinking is the differentiation in the war. Gets one in digital. How is that affecting your marketing and your things around that? >> We fortunately decided coming into 2020, our fiscal 21, that we were actually going to overweigh digital anyway. We felt that, it was far more effective, we were seeing far better conversion rates. We saw way better ROI in terms of very targeted additive digital campaigns or general purpose ABM type of efforts. So our strategy had essentially been set and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds into digital. So we have essentially a two pronged marketing attack, right now, which is digital creating inbounds and BDRs that are calling on those inbounds that are created digitally. And so it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually back and spawn, how much we decide to actually go back into that. To some extent we've talked about this in the past Dave. The physical events and the sheer spectacle and the sheer audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model. (laughs) And so I think this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling customers what they need to know to help and assist their buying journey and their investigation journey into new technology. >> There in the IT world is hybrid. And I think the events world is also going to be hybrid. Intimate, they're going to live on but they're also going to have a major digital component to them. I'm very excited that there's a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September, a lot of the bugs are going to be worked out. You know we've been going, feels like 24/7, but really excited to have you guys on. Thanks so much, really looking forward to working with you in September at Data-Driven. So guys thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE. >> Oh my gosh, thank you Dave. So nice to be here, Thank you. >> All right, stay safe. >> Thanks Dave, always a pleasure. You too. >> Thank you everybody, thank you. And thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>Live from Las Vegas, you covering splunk.com 19 brought to you by Splunk.. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. That's the cubes live coverage in Las Vegas for Splunk's dot com user conference 10 years is their anniversary. It's cubes seventh year. I'm John Farah, your host with a great guest here. Joe Partlow, CTO of rely AQuESTT recently on the heels of vying thread care and Marcus, Carrie and team. Congratulations. They'd come on. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a been a fun month. So obviously security. We love it. Let's take a minute to talk about what you guys do. Talk about what your company does that I've got some questions for you. Yeah. So you know, obviously with the increasing cyber threats, uh, you know, uh, security companies had a lot or customers had a lot of tools. Uh, it's easy to get overwhelmed, um, really causes a lot of confusion. So really what we're trying to do is we have a platform called gray matter that is really kind of how we deliver security model management, which what that means is that's bringing together people, process technology in a way that's easy to kind of make sense of all the noise. >>Um, yeah, there's, there a, a lot of features in there that would help monitor the health, uh, the incident response, the hunt, um, any kind of features that you would need from a security. So you guys are a managed service, you said four? >> Yeah. Yeah, a different, a little different than a traditional MSSP. We um, you'll work very close with, uh, the customers. Uh, we work in their environment, we're working side by side with them, uh, in their tools and we're really maturing and getting better visibility in their environment to get that MSSP for newer. >> Right. That's where you guys are. M S S VP >> on steroids. A little bit different. >> Alright. Well you guys got some things going on. You got a partnership with Splunk for the dotcom sock. Oh yeah. Talk about that with set up out here. And what's it showing? Yeah, that's been a great experience. >>Uh, we, we work very close with the Splunk, uh, team. Uh, we monitored Splunk corporate, uh, from a work with skirt team monitoring them. Uh, so when.call came around, it was kind of a natural progression of Hey, uh, you know, Joel and team on their side said, Hey, how do we kind of build up the team and do a little bit extra and I'll see any way that we can help secure.com. Uh, it was really cool. I give credit to the team, both teams, uh, standing up a, uh, new Splunk install, getting everything stood up really in the last few weeks, uh, making sure that every, uh, everybody at the pavilion and the conference in general is protected and we're watching for any kind of threat. >> So it's, it's been great working with the Splunk team. So is that normal procedure that the bad guys want to target? >>The security congresses? This is gonna make a state visit more of graffiti kind of mentality. It's an act kind of lift, fun, malicious endpoints that they want to get out of here. Oh yeah. There's, there's a little bit of a, you know, let's do it for fun and mess with the conference a little bit. So we'll want to make sure that, that that's what happened. So is my end point protected here? My end points, my phone and my laptop. Uh, not the user specific but any of the conference provided demo stations. Okay. So or structure for the equipment, not me personally. You are not monitoring your personal okay. I give up my privacy years ago. Yes. This is a interesting thing to talk about working with spunk because you know, I hear all the time and again we're looking at this from an industry wide perspective. >>I hear we've got a sock, they got a slot. So these socks are popping up yesterday. Operation centers. What is, what is the state of the art for that now? Is it best practice to have a mega Monster's sock or is it distributed, is it decentralized? What's the current thinking around how to deploy Sox surgery operations center or centers? Yeah, we certainly grow with a decentralized model. We need to follow the sun. So we've got operations centers here in Vegas, Tampa and Dublin. Uh, really making sure that we've got the full coverage. Uh, but it is working very close with the Splunk socks. So they've got a phenomenal team and we work with them side by side. Uh, obviously we are providing a lot of the, uh, the tier one, tier two heavy lift, and then we escalate to Splunk team. They're obviously gonna know Splunk corporate better than we will. >>So, uh, we work very close hand in hand. So you guys acquired threat care and Marcus carries now in the office of CTO, which you're running. Yes. How is that going to shape rely a quest and the Europe business? >> Yeah, the acquisition has been extremely, uh, you know, uh, exciting for us. Uh, you know, after meeting Marcus, uh, I've known of Marcus, he's a very positive influence in the community, uh, but having worked with him, the vision for threat care and the vision for Lioncrest really closely aligned. So where we want to take, uh, the future of security testing, testing controls, making sure upstream controls are working, uh, where threats they're wanting to go for. That was very much with what we aligned more so it made sense to partner up. So, uh, very excited about that and I think we will roll that into our gray matter platform has another capability. >>Uh, gray matter, love the name by the way. I mean, first of all, the security companies have the best names or mission control gray matter, you know, red Canary, Canary in the coal mine. All good stuff. All fun. But you know, you guys work hard so I know the price gotta be good. I gotta ask you around the product vision around the customers and how they're looking at security because you know, it's all fun games. They'll, someone's hacking their business trash or this ransomware going on. Data protection has become a big part of it. What are customers telling you right now in terms of their, their fears and aspirations? What do they need? What's on the agenda? Guests for customers right now? Yeah. I think kind of the two biggest fears, um, and then the problems that we're trying to address is one, just a lack of visibility. >>Uh, customers have so many things on their network, a lot of mergers and acquisitions. So, uh, unfortunately with a lot of times the security team is the last one to know when something pops up. Uh, so anything that we can do to increase visibility and that and that, a lot of times we work very closely with Splunk or send that they have out to make sure that it happens. And then the other thing I think is, you know, most people want to get more proactive. Uh, you know, salmon logging by nature is very reactive. So when he tried to get out in front of those threats a little bit more, so anything that we can do to try to get more proactive, uh, may certainly going to be on their, their top of mind. Well, the machine learning toolkits, getting a lot of buzz here at the show, that's a really big deal. >>I think the other thing that I'm seeing I to get your reaction to is this concept of diverse data. That's my word, not Splunk's, but the idea of bringing in more data sets actually helps machine learning that's pretty much known by data geeks, but in making data addressable because data seems to be the one thing that is all doing a lot of the automation that's takes that headway heavy lift and also provides heavy lifting capabilities to set data up to look at stuff. So data is pretty critical. Data addressability data diversity, you got to have the data and it's gotta be addressable in real time and through tools like fabric search and other things. What's your reaction to that and thoughts around that? No, I agree 100%. Uh, you know, obviously most enterprise customers have a diverse set of data. So trying to search across those data sets, normalize that data, it's, it's a huge task. >>Um, but to get the visibility that we need, we really need to be able to search these multiple data sets and bring those into make sense. Whether you're doing threat hunting or responding to alerts. Um, or you need it from a compliance standpoint, being able to deal with those diverse data sets, uh, is is a key key issue. You know, the other thing I wanna get your thoughts on this one that we've been kind of commenting, I've kind of said a ticket position on this gonna from an opinion standpoint, but it's kind of obvious but it's not necessarily true. But my point is with the data volume going up so massive, that puts the tips, the scales and the advantage for the adversaries. Ransomware's a great example of it and you know, as little ransomware now is towns and cities, these ransomware attacks just one little vector, but with the data volume data is the surface area, not just devices. >>Oh yeah. So how is the data piece of it and the adversarial advantage, you think that that makes them stronger, more surface area? Yeah, definitely. And that's something that where we're leaning on machine learning for a lot is if you really kind of make sense of that data, a lot of times you want to baseline that environment and just find it what's normal in the environment, what's not normal. And once you to find that out, then we can start saying, all right, is this malicious or not? Uh, you know, some things that uh, yeah, maybe PowerShell or something and one environment is a huge red flag that Hey, we've been compromised in another one. Hey, that's just a good administrator automating his job. So making sense of that. Um, and then also just the sheer volume of data that we, that we see customers dealing with. >>Very easy to hide in if you're doing an attack, uh, from an adversary standpoint. So being able to see across that and make sure that you can at scale SyFy that data and find actionable event. You guys, I was just talking with a friend that I've known from the cloud, world, cloud native world. We're talking about dev ops versus the security operations and those worlds are coming together. There are more operational things than developer things, but yet CSOs that we talked to are fully investing in developer teams. So it's not so much dev ops dogma, if you will. But we gotta do dev ops, right? You know, see the CIC D pipeline. Okay, I get that. But developers play a critical role in this feature security architecture, but at the end of the day, it's still operations. So this is the new dev ops or sec ops or whatever it's called these days. >>What's your, how, how do customers solve this problem? Because it is operational, whether it's industrial IOT or IOT or cloud native microservices to on premise security practices with end points. I mean, I, the thing we see that, that kind of gets those teams the most success is making sure they're working with those teams. So having security siloed off by itself. Um, I think we've kind of proven in the past that doesn't work right? So get them involved with their development teams, get them involved with their net ops or, or, you know, sec ops teams, making sure they're working together so that security teams can be an enabler. Uh, they don't want to be the, uh, the team that says no to everything. Um, but at the end of the day, you know, most companies are not in the business of security. They're in the business of making widgets or selling widgets or whatever it is. >>So making sure that the security, yeah, yeah, that's an app issue. Exactly. Making sure that they're kind of involved in that life cycle so that, not that they can, you know, define what that needs to be, but at least be aware of, Hey, this is something we need to watch out for or get visibility into and, and keep the process moving. All right. Let's talk about Splunk. Let's set up their role in the enterprise. I'll see enterprise suite 6.0 is a shipping general availability. How are you guys deploying and optimizing Splunk for customers? What are some of the killer use cases that's there and new ones emerging? Yeah, we've, we provide, you know, really kind of three core areas. First one customers, you're one is obviously making sure that the platform is healthy. So a lot of times we'll go into a, a customer that, uh, you know, maybe they, they, there's one team has turned over or they rapidly expanded and, and in a quickly, you kind of overwhelming the system that's there. >>So making sure that the, the architecture is correct, maintained, patched, upgraded, and they're, they're really taking advantage of the power of Splunk. Uh, from an engineering standpoint. Uh, also another key area is building content. So as we were discussing earlier, making sure that we've got the visibility and all that data coming in, we've got to make sure that, okay, are we pursuing that data correctly? Are we creating the appropriate alerts and dashboards and reports and we can see what's going on. Um, and then the last piece is actually taking, you know, see you taking action on that. So, uh, from an incident response standpoint, watching those alerts and watching that content flyer and making sure that we're escalating and working with the customer security team, they'd love to get your thoughts. Final question on the, um, first of all, great, great insight. They'll, I love that. >>As customers who have personal Splunk, we buy our data is number one third party app for blogs work an app, work app workloads, and in cloud as well as more clients than you have rely more on cloud. AWS for instance, they have security hub, they're deploying some of this to lean on cloud providers, hyperscale cloud providers for security, but that doesn't diminish the roles flung place. So there's a lot of people that are debating, well, the cloud is going to eat Splunk's lunch. And so I don't think that's the case. I want to get your thoughts of it because they're symbionic. Oh yeah. So what's your thoughts on the relationship to the cloud providers, to the Splunk customer who's also going to potentially moves to the cloud and have a hybrid cloud environment? Yeah, and now I would agree there's, you know, there are going to exist side by side for a long time. >>Uh, most environments that we see are hybrid environments. While most organizations do have a cloud first initiative, there's still a lot of on premise stuff. So Splunk is still going to be a, a key cornerstone of just getting that data. Where I do see is maybe a, you know, in those platforms, um, kind of stretching the reach of Splunk of, Hey, let's, let's filter and parse this stuff maybe closer to the source and make sure that we're getting the actionable things into our Splunk ES dashboards and things like that so that we can really make sure that we're getting the good stuff. And maybe, you know, the stuff that's not actionable, we're, we've up in our AWS environment. Um, and that's, that's a lot of the technology that Splunk's coming out with. It's able to search those other environments is going to be really key I think for that where you don't have to kind of use up all your licensing and bring that non-actionable data in, but you still able to search across. >>But that doesn't sound like core Splunk services more. That's more of an operational choice there. Less of a core thing. You mentioned that you think splints to sit side by side for the clouds. What, what gives you that insight? What's, what's, uh, what's telling you that that's gonna happen? What's the, yeah, you still need the core functionality of Splunk running with spark provides is a, you know, it's a great way to bring data and it parses it, uh, extremely well. Um, having those, uh, you know, correlate in correlation engines and searches. Um, that's, that's very nice to have that prepackaged doing that from scratch. Uh, you can certainly, there's other tools that can bring data in, but that's a heavy riff to try to recreate the wheel so to speak. We're here with Joe Parlo, CTO, really a quest, a pardon with Splunk setting up this dotcom SOC for the exhibits and all the infrastructure. >>Um, final question, what's the coolest thing going on at dotcom this year? What's, what should customers or geeks look at that's cool and relevant that you think should be top line? Top couple of things. Yeah, I, I, uh, one of the things I like the most out of the keynote was, uh, the whole, uh, Porsche use case with that. The AR augmentation on my pet bear was really, really cool. Um, and then obviously the new features are coming out with, with VFS and some of another pricing model. So definitely exciting time to be a partner of Splunk. Alright, Joe, thanks for them. John furrier here with the cube live in Las Vegas day two of three days of coverage.com. Their 10th year anniversary, our seventh year covering the Silicon angle, the cube. I'm Sean furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019. Lisa Martin with John Furrier, in San Francisco. This is an internal R&D innovation off site that VMware does, lots of innovation going on here from engineers from all over the globe. We're pleased to welcome Joe Baguley, the CTO from EMEA, from VMware. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> So we've been having some great conversations this morning about this tremendous amount of innovation, I mean the potential is massive. Not just from Radio, but from all the other innovation programs that VMware has, really speaks very strongly to the culture of innovation that VMware has had. But of course all this innovation has to be able to be harnessed to deliver what customers need. Talk to us about that, you're in the field, field CTO. What is that connection with the innovation that happens within VMware? How do customers help influence that and vice versa? >> Yeah, I think we're very unique in the structure that we've put around that to drive that innovation over the years. So my job as field CTO is, I call it sort of 50, 50. So 50% is Chief Technology Officer, which is this kind of stuff for Radio and 50% is Chief Talking Officer, which is out with our customers and presenting at conferences, et cetera. But the general remit is connecting R&D in the field. And so for eight years now I've been connecting R&D in the field at VMware, I actually did at my previous company as well. And what we've done is, we've built a series of programs over the years to do that, and one of the biggest ones is the CTO Ambassadors. And so that was, you know, you get to a point, you get to a growth size, I've been here eight years, and suddenly you need someone else to help you because I can't be everywhere. And the original role was, back in the day I was hired to scale Steve Herrod, because Steve Herrod couldn't be in Europe all the time, I was like mini Steve Herrod that could be there when needed. But then eventually I can't be in every European country and our major regions as we get bigger and bigger, and we've grown dramatically. So the CTO Ambassadors is to support that. And that's really, we've got 140 of our top customer facing techies from around the globe in this program called the Ambassadors. And they have to be customer facing, and they have to be individual contributors, so like a pre-sales manager or something doesn't count. They're a massively active community, there's a whole bunch of them here at Radio as well. And their job is really that conduit, that source of information, and also a sounding board, a much shorter range sounding board for R&D. So if R&D want to get a feel of what's going on, they don't have to ask everyone they can bounce off the Ambassadors, which is part of what we do, and that makes it easier. >> So like a filter too, they're also also filtering input from the field, packaging it up for R&D. >> Totally. Yeah, and when you're at an organization of our scale, filtering is really important. Because obviously, you can't have every customer directly talking to every engineer, it's never going to work. (laughs) >> I mean another radio project stay right there, a machine learning based champion CTO to go through all the feedback. >> Yeah, so I started my career, with my previous company doing that, I was the filter. So I'd get a hundred questions a day from various people in the field, and 99 of those I'd bounce right back because I knew the answer. But there was the one that I was like, uh. Then I'd turn around to R&D and ask them. But the great thing was that R&D knew that if I was asking then it was a real question, it wasn't the 99. So the CTO Ambassadors, and what we do in Octo Global field is really a method of scaling that. >> I want to ask you about that because that's a great example of here reputation comes in. Because your reputation is on the line if you go back and pull the fire alarm, if you will, send too many lame requests back, you're going to be lame. So you've got to kind of check, balance there. So that begs the question, how do you do the filtering for the champions that work for you? Is there a high bar? Is there a certain line? Like being a kid, you've got to be this tall to ride the roller coaster. Is there criteria? Is there certification? Take us through the filtering there. >> The Ambassador program is a rotating nomination system. So essentially there's a two year tenure. So what happens is, if you're in the field and you want to be an ambassador, which is a really prestigious thing, then you nominate yourself or get nominated and then people vote on you and you put forward your case, et cetera. Essentially it's a democratic process based on your peers and other people in the company. And then after you're allowed a maximum of two years. Sorry, two tenures so you get four years, if that makes sense, I'm not confusing you. >> John: So term limits? >> Yeah there's term limits, right, we have term limits. And after two terms you have to go out for a year to give someone else a chance because otherwise it will just glub- >> It'll turn into the US government. (laughs) >> But no, it's important to maintain freshness, maintain diversity and all those kind of things. And so it comes back to that filter piece we were talking about before. The reputation is massive, of the CTO Ambassadors. I mean when we started this six years ago as a program, most of R&D were like, who are these Ambassador guys? What value are they going to add? Now, if you're in R&D, one of the best things you can say, if you want to get something done, is what the CTO Ambassador said. I mean, literally it is, you can go and we have- >> John: The routine approach to that. Talk about how you guys add in a new category. So, for instance kubernetes, we saw this years ago when KubeCon was started, theCUBE was there present at the creation of that trend we kind of got it right away. Now Gelsinger and the team sees this as a massive traction layer. So that would be an example, where we need an Ambassador. So do you like just create one or how does that work? >> They create themselves, that's the best thing. So we have an annual conference which is in February, held in Paolo Alto where we all get together along with all the chief technologists, which is the level below me. And the principles, which the most senior field people. So literally the best of the best get together. It's about 200 plus get together for a week. And we are an hour and a half on on one with Pat for example, so Pat's there with all of us in a room. But one of the sessions we do is the shark tank, and there's two of them. One of them is, come up with your really cool, crazy, wacky ideas, and the other one is the acquisition shark tank. So there we get the MNA team, include our E-staff sit in, and the Ambassadors, as teams, will come in and present. We think we should acquire, uh because that's making a big difference. The great thing is, not nine times out of 10 but probably seven times out of 10, the E-staff are going, yeah we know about that, when actually we can't really tell you what's going on but yeah we know about them. But there's the two or three times out of 10 that people are like, oh yeah, so tell me more about them. And it might be a company that's just coming up, it might be 2013 and there's this company called Docker that no one's heard of, but the Ambassadors are shouting about Docker, and saying it's a big, you know. So there's that- >> So white space is too emerging you can see it's a telemetry, literally feedback from the field to direct management on business strategy. >> And our customers are pushing our field in directions faster than maybe R&D get pushed if you know what I mean. >> You guys deserve a lot of credit because Pat Gelsinger was just on this morning with Lisa and me, and we were talking about that. He just came back from the Sales President's club cruise, and one of the comments he said was the sales executive said, hey, who does strategy? Because everything's fitting together beautifully. Which kind of highlights how radiance this all progresses, not like magic, there's a process here, and this kind of points to your job is to fit that pieces in, is that correct? >> Yeah. People always say, as a CTO do you all sit down once a week and talk about strategy? And that's not what you do. There's a hive mind, there's a continual interaction, there's conference calls, there's phone calls, there's meetings, there's get togethers of various different types, groups, and levels. And what happens is there's themes that emerge over that. And so my role specifically, as the EMEA CTO is to represent Europe, Middle East, and Africa's voice in those conversations. And maybe the nuances that we might have around particular product requirements or whatever, to remind people that maybe sit in a bubble in Silicon Valley. >> John: I'm sure you raised your hand on privacy and GDPR? (laughs) >> Just a couple of times, yeah. Yeah, now and again. >> The canary in the coal mine is a really big point that helps companies, if they're not listening to the signals coming in. >> Well you do, and you see a lot. There's a lot of the tech companies that I see, it's often defined as the three bubbles, or your Massimo Re Ferrè, who's now at Amazon. When he was here, did this fantastic blog post talking about the first bubble is Silicon Valley, and the second bubble is North America, and the third bubble is everywhere else. And so you kind of watch these things emerge. And my job is to jump over that pop into the Silicon Valley bubble before something happens and say, no you should be thinking about X, you should think about Y. At an event like Radio I've got a force multiplier because I've got 40 plus Ambassadors with me all popping up at all these little booths you see behind you, and the shows, and the talks. >> And the goal here is not to be a bubble, but to be completely one hive mind. >> And the diversity at VMware just blows my mind, it really does. I think a lot of people comment on it quite often, and in fact I've been asked to be a non-exec director of other companies, to help them advise on their culture. Which is not in tech, in culture, which is quite interesting. And so the diversity that we have here is really infusing people to innovate in a way that they've not done before. It's that diverse set of opinions really helps. >> Well it does. And this, from what we've heard, Radio is a very, there's a lot of internal competition, it's like a badge of honor to be able to respond to the call for papers, let alone get selected. Touch on the synergies, the symbiosis that I feel like I'm hearing between the things that are presented here, the CTO Ambassadors and the customers. Like maybe a favorite example of a product or service that came from, maybe a CTO Ambassador, to Radio, to market. >> Yeah, I'm just trying to think of any one specific one. There are always bits and pieces, and things here and there. I think I should have thought of that before I came on really. I think what you're looking at here is, it's much more about an informed conversation and so it's those ideas around the fact. And also, quite often someone will have a cool idea, and they'll go to the Ambassadors, can you find me five customers that want to try this? Bang, we've got it. So if you're out there on a customer, and someone comes to you as an ambassador and says, I've got a really cool thing I'd like you to try. It might be before, we have a thing called Fling, so it might even be before it's made a fling. You probably heard from Morney how that process goes. Then engage fast, because you're probably getting that conduit direct into the core of R&D. So a lot of the features that people see and functions and products et cetera, that people see. A lot of the work you see, we're doing with the next version if you realized our management platform, a lot of that has been driven by work that's been done by Ambassadors in the field, and what we're doing there. All the stuff you'll see, I've got my jacket over there with NANO EDGE written on it. A lot of the EDGE stuff that you see, a lot of the stuff around ESXi on Arm, a lot of the stuff around that is driven specifically around a particular product range. So a really good example is, a few years ago, probably around four, myself and Ray sat down and had a meeting in VMware Barcelona, with a retail customer, and the retail customer was talking about could we get them an STDC, but small enough to fit in every store. They didn't say that at the time, but that's how we kind of got to it. So that started off a whole process in our minds, and then I went back and we, the easiest actual way for me to do it was to then get a bunch of the Ambassadors to present that as one of their innovation ideas, which became NANO EDGE. I originally called it VX Nook, because we were going to do it on intel Nooks. (laughs) Unfortunately the naming committee wouldn't allow VX Nook, so it became NANO EDGE. And that drove a whole change within the company, I think within R&D. So if you think up until that point, four years ago, most of what we were doing was, how do we run things bigger and faster? It was all like Monster VM, remember that? All those kinds of things, right? How do we get these SAP HANA 12 terabyte VMs running? And really NANO EDGE was not necessarily a product, per se but it was more of a movement driven by a particular individual, Simon Richardson, who had got promoted to Principle as a result, through the Ambassador program. That was driven through our R&D to get them to think small as well as big, you know. So next time you're building that thing, how small can you run your SX, how small can we get an SX? >> John: Small, at scale. Which is EDGE, right? >> And, you know, so get small, at scale, which was EDGE. And so suddenly everyone starts talking about EDGE, and I'm like, hang on I've been talking about this for a while now, but we just didn't really call it that. And then along comes technology like Kubernetes, which is how do you manage thousands of small things. And it's kind of, these things come together. But yes, totally, you can almost say our EDGE strategy, and a lot of the early EDGE work was done and driven out of stuff that was done from CTO Ambassadors. It's just one of the examples. >> What are some of the Kubernetes service mesh? Because one of the things we heard from Pat, and we've heard this before, but most recently at Dell Technologies World, in the last couple of weeks, was don't look down, look up. Which basically means we're automating the infrastructure. I get that, I've covered ad nauseam. But looking up the stack means you're talking about kubernetes app developers, you've got cloud native, you've got services meshes, microservices, new kinds of challenges around instrumentation. How are you guys inside Radio looking at that trend? Because there's some commercial impact, You've got Heptio, you've got Craig and the team, some of the original guys. >> Yeah, yeah. >> As well as you have a future state coming out, with state, pun intended, data, stateless. (laughs) These are new dynamics. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What's the R&D take on this? >> So there's two ways that I really talk to people about this. The first one is, I've got a concept that I talk about called application chromatography. Which sounds mental, but you remember from high school probably, chromatography was where you had that really special paper and you put the dot of liquid on and it spread it to all it's constituent parts. That's actually what's happening with our applications right now. So, we've gone through a history of re-platform. You know, mainframe, blah blah blah blah blah. So then when we got to x86, everything's on x86, along comes cloud, and as you know John, for the last 10 years it's been everything's going to cloud because we think that's the next platform. It's not, but then everything's not going to SAS, it's not all going to paths, it's not all going to Functions, it's not all going to containers. What you're seeing is those applications are coming off that one big server, and they're spreading themselves out to the right places. So I talk to customers now and they say, okay, well actually I need a management plan, and a strategy and an architecture for infrastructure as a service, containers as a service, functions as a service platform as a service and SAS, and I need a structure for that on premises and off premises. So that's truly driving R&D thinking is not how do we help our customers get from one of those to the other? They're going to all of them. >> It sounds like a green screen for media. >> It is, and then the other side of that is I've just had a conversation with some of the best, you know, what these events are like? Some of the best conversations in the water cooler, in the- >> In the hallway, yup exactly. >> I've just had a fascinating conversation with one of our guys has been talking about, oh it's really cool if we got kubernetes cause I could use it right down at the edge. I could use it to manage thousands as a tiny EDGE things. And as I'm talking to him and sort of saying, you know what he's doing, I suddenly went, hang on a second, how does a developer talk to that? He's like, well I've not really thought about that. I said, well that's your problem. We need to stop thinking about things from how can that framework help me? But how can I extend that framework? And so a lot of that- >> Moving beyond just standing up kubernetes, for what purpose? Or is that what you know, the why, what? >> So if the developers there, it shouldn't be all. I'm going to use this new framework to solve my problem or the EDGE if an R&D person would, but people like myself are there to drive them to think of the bigger picture. So ultimately at some point a developer in the future is going to want to sit there and through an API, push out software SQL server, a bit of Mongo over here, some stuff on AWS, go and use the service on our Azure at the same time pushing stuff into their own data center and maybe push a container to every store if they're a retailer and they want to do that through one place. That's what we're building. And you know, driving that, all these bits and pieces you see behind you pulling those all together into this sort of consistent operations model. As I'm sure you've heard many of- >> And it's dynamics not static, so it's not like provisioning the old way. You got to track what's being turned on and off because how do you log off? What goes turns on? What services get turned on? Turned off, turned on. >> If you don't get a theme of really, I suppose not only Radio, but our industry of the last few years, people have always said if that cliche change is constant, right? Oh, change is constant. Yet still architects build systems that are static, right? You guys that just, I'm designing an architect in this new system for the next three years. I'm like, that's stupid. What you need to do is design a system that you know is going to change before you've even finished starting it. More or less started going half way through it. So actually, as I see, I was in a fantastic session yesterday with the Architects around ESXi and VCenter, which might be boring to most, but where we architecting that for scale at a huge way. >> Well, I think that's the key thing I mean this is, first of all, we'd love this conversation because, if you can make it programmable with API and have data available, that's the architecture because it's programmable, it's not static. So you let it morph into however the application, because I think I mentioned green screen, you know chroma keys as we have those concepts here, but that's what you're saying. The apps are going to have this notion of, I need an app right now and then it goes away. Services are going to be provisioning and turning on and off. >> There is a transience, there's a transience to infrastructure, there's a transience to applications, there's a transience to components that traditional mechanisms aren't built to do. So if you look at actually, what are we building here? And what's that sort of hive mind message? It's how do we provide that platform going forward that supports transience? that allows customers to come, I mean people used to use the term agile, but it's been over years and it's not right. It's the fact that literally it's a situation of constant change. And what your deploying onto, it's constantly changing and what you're deploying is constantly changing. So we're trying to work out how do we put that piece in the middle, that is also changing but allows you some kind of constancy in what you're doing, right? So we can plug new things in the bottom, a new cloud here, a new piece of software there, a new piece of hardware there or whatever. And at the same time, there's new ways of doing architecture coming on top. That's the challenge of this, the software defined data centers, almost like an operating system for clouds or the future operating system for all apps on all clouds and all of- >> It's a systems thinking for sure, absolutely. >> Let's put your Chief Talking Officer hat on for a second as we look- >> I thought I've been doing that for the last fifteen minutes. (laughs) >> At VMWorld 2019, which is just around the corner. Any cool ANEA customers that are going to be on stage that we should be excited to hear about it? >> Actually, I was having a meeting yesterday morning about that, so I can't really say, but there's some exciting stuff we're lining up right now. We're obviously now is the time we start thinking about the keynotes, now at the time you start thinking about who's on stage. Myself and a few others are responsible for what those demos are, you know the cool demos you see on stage every year. So we literally had the meeting yesterday morning at Radio to discuss what's going to be the wow at VMWorld this year. So I'm not going to give anything away to you. I'll just say make sure you're there to watch it because it's going to be good. And we're also making sure there's a big difference between what we're doing in Moscone now and what we're going to be doing it in Barcelona when we- >> And when expand theCUBE outside of the United States certainly, we'd love to have you guys plug in and localize some of these unique challenges. Like you said, I agree bubble now the west of the world has different challenges content different. >> Definitely, I think to that end, multicloud is probably more of a thing in Europe than it was necessarily in, in North America for a longer time because those privacy laws you talked about before, people have always been looking at the fact that maybe they had to use a local cloud for some things. You know, a German cloud run by German people in a German data center and they could use another cloud like Amazon for other things. And you know, we have UK cloud who provide a specific government based cloud, et cetera. Whereas in America there was, you could use an American cloud and that was fine. So I think actually in Europe we've already been at the forefront of that multicloud thinking for a while. So it's worth watching. >> It is worth watching, I wish we had more time to, so you're just going to have to come back. >> Definitely, anytime tell me when. >> We look forward to seeing you at VMWorld. We thank you for sharing some insights with John and me on theCUBE today. >> Cool, thank you. >> For John Ferrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for CUBE's special coverage, exclusive coverage, of Cisco Systems DevNet Create. It's an inaugural event for DevNet, a new extension to their developer program. DevNet, which is their classic developer program for the Cisco ecosystem, network guys, so on and so forth, moving packets around, hardware guys. DevNet Create is about developers and dev ops and cloud-native, all the goodness of application developers. Where apps meets infrastructure, certainly with the Cisco acquisition of AppDynamics, a new world order is coming down the pipe. Cisco's moving up the stack. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris is my co-host, our next guest is Val Bercovici, CUBE alumni and also guest analyst in our studio in Palo Alto, also the cofounder of Peritus.ai, and now you can talk about it. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. We get to talk about it, finally. >> So before we get into your company, and I want to drill into it because the first public CUBE interview, drilling down on what you're working on. What's your take on Cisco's event here, because, I've known Cisco since I moved to Silicon Valley, 18 years, and even before then, and they scaled all the internet connecting networks. There's always been a discussion internally inside Cisco about moving up the stack. And it's always been kind of like a Civil War. Half the company wants to move up the stack, half doesn't, and now, you've been in NetApp, you know this world and its infrastructure, its hardware, its gear, its boxes, network packets. This is a seminal moment for Cisco. They've tried some open source before, but this seems like an all-in bet. Your thoughts? >> It is, and I was just telling Yodi Rahm, before we went live on stage that I think this is like Goldilocks event, right? It's my first. Apparently, it's the first one of its kind here at Cisco, and for me it's not too big. It's not too small. I find it really just the right size, and I find it very well-targeted, in terms of the fellow speakers, panelists that I was on with today in terms of, I see the right amount of laptops, the right amount of code, basically, amongst the attendees on the floor here. So my first impression, 'cause that's all I have so far, is it's a very well-targeted show, and it's not unique anymore. You'll notice Intel kind of pulled back from having one large event, one large annual event, and smaller more targeted events for developers, for operators, for other ISVs, and so forth. >> You're talking about the IDF Intel Developer Forum. >> The IDF, yeah, it's no longer a big, monolithic event. They split it up into more- >> And IBM has also collapsed their shows into one monster show. So little micro-events seem to be the norm. >> Yeah, I wouldn't even call it quite even a micro-event. It's a bit bigger than that, but it's not a VMworld . >> It's not a Dreamforce. >> It's not a COMDEX to VR sales. >> Interesting, I like they did their homework on the panels. So in terms of subject matter, the agenda looks great, but I do agree with you. I like how principals are here. It's not just staff here. It's both people in the trenches at Cisco, and the execs are here. Susie Wee and some other folks, they run Cisco a lot. They're all here. >> And their CTO, this morning, I caught the opening keynote livestream on the way over here. She did a fantastic job describing the role of the infrastructure developer, which is something that is a bit nebulous to nail down, at least it has been in the past, and I'm really glad that Cisco is echoing that, because I think it helps their entire ecosystem, their partner ecosystem, particularly former employers like NetApp of mine. >> I'm usually critical of big companies trying to put their toe in the water with some event that looks like a little cloud washing or you know, here or there, but I think Cisco's got a legit opportunity with programmable infrastructure. And I think, just in general, straight up, they do, because their infrastructure, and Peter and I talked about that. But I think IoT is really the big driver. They could really, that's a network connection. It's at the edge. It requires intelligence. That's a good angle for them. >> It's a great angle. The only beef I have, the gripe I have, is they still call it IoE, I think. If it's going to be Internet of Everything, and it's Internet of nothing, right? I really wish they'd kind of stick to the agreed term, and what they are doing of course is giving- >> But they were first with IoE. They were, you got to give Cisco, when they ran those commercials, what 10 years ago? >> Yeah. >> You know. >> It's a personal in for me. The commercials are fantastic. It's just the term bothers me. >> They got dogma with IoE, come on, get rid of it. Okay, tell me about your company? >> So Peritus.ai, we've realized now there's a chance to go beyond traditional digital disruption of existing industries to cognitive disruption. Let me explain what I mean by that. We're seeing a lot of increasing pace of change in data centers. The conference here, and all the technologies spoken about here, are very foreign to more traditional data center operators, and so the new environments, microservice architectures, or cloud-native apps or so forth. It's a pace of change that we haven't seen before. Agile business and agile software developer models can push code out realistically on a daily basis, whereas the waterfall model and the iCode models in most IT service practitioners practice, that's a manual or quarterly update cycle, with formal change managed practices. >> John: A more settled, structured. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Slow. >> Familiar. >> John: Reliable. >> You know, but it's the past, and the pace of change now is creating stress within IT organizations and stress within the product support organizations of the vendors that they choose to deploy. You couple that with increasing complexity of the environments we have here. We have a lot going on, the ethos of CNCF, which is container packaged, dynamically orchestrated, and micro services architected apps, cloud-native apps. The abstraction layers are masking a lot of complexity there, but the complexity is still there. And you have very good availability if you're able to write to cloud-native principles as a developer, but nevertheless, you still got that .001% of your outages so forth. And the last line of defense towards business continuity is still a human. You still got escalation engineers and support organizations that go through pretty contrived and complicated workflows to triage and diagnose problems, perhaps a case manager to assign a case or subject manager expert, get that back and forth information with the customer and finally resolve the case, and this is what we term cognitive disruption. The maturity of the AI platforms now have reached a point where you can take these complicated workflows that require nuance and inference, and actually apply true machine learning and deep learning to them. And if not entirely automate the resolution of these complex cases, better prepare a scarce resource, an escalation engineer with lots of experience, with more context up front when they encounter the case, so they can close it more quickly, and this has- >> So you're targeting, so if I understand this correctly, you're targeting the personnel in the data center. >> Val: The supportability space. >> Escalation engineers, the human labor, the last mile, if you will, or whatever, first mile, how you look at it. >> Correct. We see APM vendors in this space, we see ITSM vendors in the space. They're partners and even platforms for us. No one really is focused on supportability and automating those workflows using cognitive techniques. >> John: Give an example, give an example. >> The best example I can give actually is firsthand. I'll try and be as generic as I can to protect the innocent, but if you take a look- >> John: NetApp. >> (laughs) It's not even specifically a NetApp case. >> John: Okay, all right. >> If you look at the supply chain upstream, let's talk about electronic supply chain. If a particular manufacturer defect occurs upstream, that defect gets shipped in bundles, purchased by an equipment supplier vendor in bundles, and deployed by customers in bundles. So it's not like one of these one node outage situations is the best case scenario, traditional triple replication, you know. >> John: It's a bad batch basically. >> A bad batch. >> A lot of bad product. >> That can take out not just a node, it can take out a rack. It can take out multiple racks of storage gear, switching gear, server hosts, and so forth. In that case, again, your last line of defense is a human. You basically got to triage and diagnose the problem, could be hardware problem, could be a driver-software problem, could be an upstream OS or database problem. And it's a very stressful environment, a very stressful situation. You can take a look at prior case notes. You can take a look at machine logs and data. You can take a look at product documentation and bill of materials from suppliers, and you can pre-analyze a lot of that, and factor that into your diagnosis, effectively having it almost ready before the case is even opened, so that when the escalation engineer is assigned the case, they don't start from ground zero. They start from third base and almost they're rounding their way to home, and they're able to apply all the prior knowledge, algorithms never sleep. All the prior knowledge in terms of all the cases that have actually been dealt with that match that to a degree. They're never perfect matches, because that's just business process automation. There's a degree of inference required, and using AI techniques, we're able to guess that you know what? I've seen this before. It's very obscure, but it's actually going to be this resolution. >> So AI's technology that you're using in machine learning and data, what problem are you solving specifically? Saving them time, getting them faster resolutions? >> So we're improving the efficiency of support operations. There's always margin pressures within customer support operations. We're fundamentally solving complex system problems. We've reached a point now where business process automation can solve trivial support cases. >> John: Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on. Expert system's supposed to do this. >> And they did in the past, and now we're evolving beyond the expert. >> Not really. Remember those expert system stays? >> Yeah, I remember LISP and all those early days, so yeah. >> So this kind of sounds like a modern version of an expert system to aid the support engineers to either have a predetermined understanding of options and time to solution. >> So we're able to do so much more than that, right? We're able to create what we call otologies. We're able to categorize all the cases that you've seen in the past, find out whether this new one fits an existing category, if so, if it matches other criteria, if not, defining a category. We're able to orchestrate. Resolution is not just a one-shot deal. Resolution is diagnose the problem, find out if you have some subject matter experts available to resolve the issue, assign it to them, track their progress, close the case, follow up on customer satisfaction. All those things are pretty elaborate workflows that can be highly automated today with cognitive approach-- >> Congratulations on launching. Thanks for spending the time to lay that out. What's next? You've got some seed funding? >> Val: We've got some seed funding. >> You got some in an incubator at the Hive in Palo Alto, which we know quite well. Rob is great, Rob is a great friend. He's done great, he's done great. How many people do have, what are you guys looking to do? What are some of the priorities? >> We are hiring. We're definitely looking to get more data scientists on staff, more full-stack engineers particularly with log experience. We're still looking for a CTO and leadership team. So there's a lot of hiring coming in place. >> John: How many in there now? >> We have about, less than 10 people working right now. >> It's a great opportunity for a classic early-stage opportunity. >> Yeah, early stage opportunity. We're addressing a hot space, and what I love is I personally shifted from being a provider of cloud-native solutions in this market to being a consumer. So I'm seeing exactly how a perfect storm is coming together of machine and deep learning algorithms, running on, orchestrated-- >> John: Both sides of the table. You should talk to Mark Sister. >> Yeah. He's been on both sides. What's it like to be on the other side now? >> It's everything I actually thought it would be, because at the end of the day, I always say, developers are the ultimate pragmatists. So it's not so much about brand loyalty at any particular vendors. What solution, whether it's an open source library, whether it's a commercial library, whether it's a propietary cloud service or something in between. What solution can solve my task, this next task? And composite applications are a very real thing right now. >> So we had a question I posted into the crowd chat, from this social net. I'm going to ask you the same questions. So Burt's watching and maybe you'll find that thread, and I'll add to it later. Here's the question. What challenges still remain as part of implementing DevOps, in your opinion? How did you see the landscape, and how are people addressing them? In your expert opinion, what's the answer to that question? What's your opinion? >> It's a two-faceted answer, at least. The first one, it's not a cliche. It's still a cultural challenge. If you want to actually want to map, it's not even a cultural challenge specifically, it's Conway's Law. Any product output, software output, is a function of your organizational structure that created it. So I find that whether you want to call it culture, whether you want to call it org structure, the org structure's rarely in place to incentivize entire teams to collaborate together throughout a full CICD pipeline process. You've still got incentive structures and org structures in place for people to develop code, unit test it, perhaps even integration test it, but I see more often than I'd like to, isolated or fenced off operations teams that take that and try to make it something real. They might call themselves SREs, and outside recovery engineers, but they're not integrated enough into the development process, in my mind. >> So you're saying the organization structures are also foreclosing their ability be agile, even though they're trying hard, that the incentives are too grounded in there. >> So I still see a lot of skunkworks projects as DevOps projects, and it shouldn't be that way anymore, right? There should be, where there's a legitimate business reason for more agile businesses, there should be a much more formal DevOps structure, as opposed to skunkworks DevOps structure. So that's one challenge, and it's not new, but it's also not resolved. And the other one really is this blind spot for the autonomous data center vision, this blind spot for operations being 100% automated and really just never having to deal with the problem. The blind spot is everything breaks. New technology just happens to break in new ways, but it does fundamentally break, and if your last line of defense is a human or a group of humans, you can expect a very, very different sort of responsiveness and agility as opposed to having something automated. >> Peter and I have been talking all morning the Ford firing of Mark Fields, which was announced yesterday. He quote retired by the Twitter handle of Ford, which is just code words for he got pushed aside. One, we're big fans of Mark Fields, before we covered Ford there in Palo Alto, doing some innovative centers over there, and also a Cloud Foundry customer. So I was actually, took notice of that. We were commenting on not so much the tech, but the guy got fired in less than three years into his journey as chief executive. >> Val: Yeah. >> Now the stock's down 39% so the hammer's coming down from either the family, Ford family, or Wall Street, Peter thinks Wall Street. But this brings up the question, how are you going to be a transformational leader, if you don't have the runway? Back to your org structure. This is, this is-- >> I'm like a broken record. I was thinking that yesterday as I was watching CNBC, and just thinking in my mind, processing what they were announcing. I'm realizing in my head, I bet why, because I don't know, but I bet why, I speculate why he got fired, because he wasn't able to put the org structure and incentives in place to run faster, and that's what the board asked his successor is run faster, and if his successor doesn't put the org structure and the incentives in place to be an agile business. That's the definition of insanity. It's banging your head against the wall. >> If I had to add one more thing to that comment, which by the way I agree with you. If you could configure an asset in a company besides the organizational structure, so you did that, what would your next asset be? More cloud, more data-centric, what would be? >> It might be cliche, but it's totally true, I would have a cloud-first approach to everything. So we don't remember this guy called Obama anymore, but really he did a pretty revolutionary thing, when he brought in a CIO eight, nine years ago, and he made every federal government department defend a capital purchase. And they basically have to go through a multi-hundred page document to defend a capital IT acquisition, but to actually go cloud first or cloud native, didn't require almost any pre-approval at all to get funding. >> So we made it easier incentives to go cloud. >> Created incentives, and I'm a big believer that cloud is not a panacea. >> That helped Amazon, not IBM, as the CIA case now. >> I'm a big believer in life cycles, so it's not like cloud is the rubber stamp solution for every problem, but the beginning innovation phase of every new product line or revenue stream really should be in the cloud right now. The amazing services, forget about IS and all that. Look at the machine language and APIs, IoT APIs, the entire CICD pipelines that are automated and simplistic, the innovation phase for everyone should be in the crowd. Then you got to take a step back, look at that bill, get over your sticker shock, and figure out whether you can afford to stay in a cloud using maybe some of those higher-level proprietary high-margin services and whether you want to re-factor. And that's where professional services kick in, and I think that might be the next great disruption for AI, is re-factoring apps. >> I think one of the things, final question I want to get your thoughts on. Pretend that we're at Cisco and we go back to the ranch, and someone says, "Hey, what's that DevNet Create?" What's our advice to our peers, if we had an opinion that people valued inside Cisco, doubled down on DevNet Create, continue, merge it DevNet? What would your advice be? >> I'm a long time James Governor fan. Developers are the new kingmakers. Actually I think we're in this situation that's not very well understood by business leaders right now, where developers are influencing all the technology infrastructure decisions we're making, but they don't necessarily write the checks. But if you want to run an agile business, a digital business today, you can't do it without happy developers and a good developer experience, so you have to cater to their needs and their biases and so forth, and at shows like this I think, bring Cisco's large ecosystem to bear, where we can figure out how Cisco can maximize the developer experience, how partners, and I'm soon to be a Cisco partner myself at Peritus.ai can maximize their developer experience and just drive more modern business. >> Bring the developer community in with the networking, get those margins connected. Val Bercovici, cofounder of Peritus.ai, this is theCUBE with exclusive coverage of the inaugural event of Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, returning after this short break. (electric music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director.

>> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube at Catalyst Contracts. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. It's funny, seems something about Phoenix that this is where all the great women in tech conferences are. We were here two years ago for our first Grace Hopper and it's really fun to return now to this one, the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, which, a little bit smaller, about 400 people, their fourth year, but again it's all about empowering girls, empowering women to think differently, to take charge and to be more successful so really excited for our next guest, Jim McCarthy, brought in to motivate the troops. >> That's right. >> So first off, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So-- >> Thanks Jeff. >> Your keynote was all about a career without regret, have a great impact on what you care about. That is so topical right now, and especially these people that talk about, you know, the millennials and you know, kind of the younger generation coming up, they want to do things that they care about >> Yeah, I think all the research indicates millennials, more than maybe prior generations, really are looking for work that has impact and has meaning. >> Is it because they can? You know, that things are a little bit easier, they know they're not necessarily y'know, suffering to get by? Why do you think there's the change and then once you've made that decision, how do you implement that in kind of your day to day life? >> Well I'm not sure I could explain how the millennials are perhaps different, maybe they just see some of the challenges in our world like climate change for example and realize wow, there's some very serious challenges we face. That might be why they're looking for more of an impact, but in terms of what to do to find more meaning in life I always encourage people to do work that they really love, that they're passionate about, and in this conference a lot of the women have talked about passion and what you're good at and really doing that 'cause that's what you're going to be most successful at. >> Right, but that's a really common theme >> Yeah. >> We've heard that forever, to close your parachute, y'know, if you could find something that you get paid well and you're passionate about, but often times there's a conflict, right? Sometimes it's just harder, people get stuck in something that they're not happy with, but they're not really willing to make the change, not really willing to make the investment or take the chance so what are some of the things you tell people that are specific actionable, that will help them y'know, make those changes to get some place where they're y'know, feeling better about what they're working on? >> Well, so for me part of my talk was I talk about how I had a career in Silicone Valley, early employee at Yahoo! and different internet companies and then about three and a half years ago I was diagnosed with cancer and that was a big wake up call for me. And even though my health seems to be okay right now, it really sort of helped me realize that wow, I'm not going to live forever and by embracing my mortality I've started living much more fully and I decided okay, if I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I always wanted to, never had the courage to do it, I thought okay, I'm not going to live forever, I might as well dive into it, have the courage to try even if I fail. But at least I'll be happy and I'm not living a life with regrets. >> Right. >> So that was part of my workshop yesterday. >> So that's really interesting and a powerful story I mean, we often hear when there's these, y'know, kind of life changing events, these big moments, y'know that is the catalyst. Does it take that to make the change? Can people do it without the change? I mean, we can't hardly get anyone to lift up their face out of email. (laughing) I mean, how do we do it without that or does it really take that? I mean, is that really what happens, whether it's yourself or a loved one or someone you care about, it's interesting 'cause that's powerful catalyst >> Yeah so, I think for some people it does take getting, y'know, hit with a ton of bricks like that in order to really realize what they need to do and have the courage to do it and just realize y'know, this may not work out but I'm just going to go for it. In part of my workshops I try to help people think about their mortality, think about if you were to die today, how would you feel about your relationships. If you were to die today, how would you feel about the work that you've done. And then I always have them write out action plans for okay, based on what I wrote, based on what we discussed, what do you want to change in your life and what's the deadline to do it? So that's kind of the process that I use in my workshops so it's not just nice story and inspiration but it's really okay, how can we bring this back to what am I going to do with my career, what am I going to do with my relationships and there's also very practical things that people can do that I think will help them a lot, one is mindfulness to reduce their stress, one is affirmation in which you can actually train your brain to be much more positive thinking and there's a lot of neuroscience behind that today which shows that you can actually sculpt your brain to have a much more positive attitude. So those are some and then the goal setting is important too. So -- and then gratitude, I'm sorry, there's another practice. So these are very, this is not just nice ideas but actually daily practices you can do, mindfulness and meditation, gratitude and affirmations, these are all things that can really have a daily impact in a very positive way. >> Right, and I'm sure people say, "Jim, that sounds great, I printed it out, it's on my fridge, but jeez, I wake up, I have 472 unread emails, the boss is calling me," how do I really actually do it? I want to do it but I'm drowning in email, whoever invented email is problematic, I'm glad that young kids don't use it 'cause it's going to die soon. (laughing) But y'know, practically, what do you tell folks? >> What I tell people is if you meditated 10 minutes a day, that's about 1% of your waking hours and that 1% would improve the other 99% of your waking hours and meditation used to be very weird and funky and new-agey and now you see more and more people saying, "No actually, 10 minutes of mindfulness or meditation or breathing or whatever can make a huge positive impact on your health both physically and mentally". There's all sorts of very serious scientific research, neuroscience, which underscores that. So if you invest 10 minutes of your day in being at peace, reducing stress, focusing on your breathing, then the other 99% of your day is going to be calmer, you're not going to be freaking out so much, you get an email in your inbox that you may not like but you can say, "okay, let me breath, okay let me think about this, okay", don't have to do an immediate flame mail response and then you're doing a lot less damage control in your life and you're being much more focused on how do I want to spend my day. And so that is one way to reduce your stress and yet still get stuff done, the most important stuff done. >> It's interesting, I have an unwritten book that I always wanted to write, kind of on some of the things you said before about y'know, don't forget your death bed, 'cause at some point you're going to be laying on your death bed-- >> That would be the title of your book? >> And you're going to have those questions. >> Yeah >> Yeah Y'know, did I do what I want to do? Did I spend too much time at the office, or too much time at the beach or too much time with the kids or not? >> Well if I can say, there's a woman who wrote a book named "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying" and regret number two was "I wish I had worked less". And every single man in her survey that she talked to said "I wish I had worked less". And these are men on their deathbeds. But it applies to a lot of women as well. >> So I want to shift gears a little bit, back to your tech days, >> Yeah (laughing) >> Just looking at your background, obviously some of our homework and you y'know, you did a summer at McKenzie, you're kind of at the leading edge of business and smart people and you -- >> You're too kind Jeff, okay? (laughing) >> No, and then you decide I haven't finished the story, and then you go to San Jose Mercury News to work in classifieds. >> Actually to do marketing. >> To do marketing >> Yeah >> But you were involved in classifieds and I only bring up the classifieds 'cause it's interesting because then you left and went to Yahoo!, right at the main, I mean really at a pivotal time in the transformation of classifieds moving from the newspaper to online. >> Yes >> So you lived kind of this digital transformation long before Uber and some of the other examples that are so often cited. >> Yeah. >> So I'd just love to get kind of your perspective on, y'know, kind of digital transformation, it happened, this was 97 so what 20 years ago, I can't believe it's 20 years ago, to now and then in the context of what you're doing now. >> So I graduated from business school in 1996, and went to the San Jose Mercury News and was doing marketing things. But right when I was graduating I was like, "Oh jeez, y'know this internet thing is going to be huge!", and after a few months at the Mercury News, I said, "Look, I really want to do something with internet", and they said, "Sorry, can't do that, keep helping us sell papers." And I said, "Well screw this!", and so I went to Yahoo! In July 1997, I was employee number 258 and I was hired to be a product manager for Yahoo! classifieds, so realizing, 'cause I remember sitting in the Mercury News at my computer and looking at, wow, Yahoo! has some like, online classifieds for autos? And careers? And this is way better than the newspaper! I can have long descriptions here and you can even see pictures of things, so I went to Yahoo! classifieds and out of that we created Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Careers Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! Real Estate. And yes, this absolutely-- And then later there was the category killers where there was Match.com, where there was Monster or Monster Board, and on down the line-- >> Monster Park, remember Monster Park, one of the first sponsored stadiums back in the day. >> Yeah, yeah. >> After 3Com. Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt. >> No it's okay. So it was an amazing transformation and it was one of these things where the internet just does things so much better and you could say it also sort of helped destroy an industry, right? I mean, I'm certainly a big believer in the power of local newspapers and investigative journalism, and that's really been damaged a lot from the last 20 years, but sometimes it's like this technological imperative where the web is so much better, people have to figure out different business models, different ways to fund their journalism, different revenue models that work. But I mean it's just amazing to see what's gone on with how classifieds has developed, e-commerce has developed. I worked later on Yahoo! Auctions and Shopping, you can talk about that more if you want. >> Yeah, a friend of mine works at the Yellow Pages, I was like dude, you probably need to get a new job. >> Really? Still? >> It's YP.com now. Well turns out they have a huge online business which is good for them. No still, I was like c'mon, (laughing) You need to get out of that. >> Gosh (laughing). >> So, anyway. It's just interesting, the digital transformation that we're under now y'know, has happened over and over again, we just happen to be kind of in the current iteration, sometimes people forget-- >> Yes, yeah. >> That there was a time before Google, it was called AltaVista (laughing) or WebCrawler if you want to go back even further. Anyway, we regress. So Jim, what're you working on now, what're you looking forward to in the next six months, any special projects? You just traveling the country and spreading good word? >> I travel the country and I travel internationally doing my workshop. So basically the workshop's where I teach companies how to build happy, high performance teams. >> Awesome. >> And in the workshop, some of them are a little bit more, much more sort of inspirational and about mortality and about what you want to do for life purpose, I have a workshop called, "Happiness Workshop: Keep Calm and Get Stuff Done" and then so there's ones which are much more goal setting, there's more which are inspirational and yeah, I travel and teach companies how to -- whether it's an hour workshop or a six hour workshop, that's what I do. >> Jim, thanks for stopping by, it's a great story and I think it's just so important, y'know there's a lot of great inspirational stories out there but really y'know, how you do you help people, give them actionable things that they can put on the fridge, put on their calender and-- >> And have in their daily routine. >> Right and do it right, and do change behavior 'cause it's hard to change attitude, really hard, and the way you do it is you change behavior, that you can actually change. Thanks for-- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Thanks for sharing a few minutes with us. >> Thank you Jeff, very kind of you. >> Absolutely >> Thank you >> Jim McCarthy, I'm Jeff Frick, we're in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, you're watching The Cube. Thanks for watching.