>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's the Cube, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017, brought to you by Samsung. (electronic music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome back, live here in San Franscisco, Moscone West. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage of Samsung's Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, cohost here in the Cube. My next guest is Paris Rain, recording artist, innovator, working with Stan Lee, music projects. What's exciting about this event is that you have such exciting new lifestyle trends happening and this one here's a great story. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's nice being here with everybody. >> You look fabulous, you're a superhero. Tell us the story, because one of the things that's super compelling about your projects you're working on, and your innovation, is the convergence of culture. You've got Comic Con kind of culture integrated with music, online services, digital communities, and now new products are being developed, new experiences, AR, VR, the new vibe is out there. Tell your story. >> Well, we just thought, why not? So what happened was, my manager had a really close relationship to Stan and he basically showed Stan my music and said, "Hey, this girl's talented," and then we got to talking and we were like, "Why don't we integrate Stan into the music business?" He took over the movie industry, why doesn't he take over the music industry as well? >> And so Marvel obviously absolutely hits a home run, the comics, but this is now also a digital life, and so people look at all the successes, certainly the movies. >> Absolutely, yeah, that would be the biggest. >> I was a comic kid when I was growing up. But the movies have just been spectacular. One sequel after the other. Gaming now is part of the movie scene, so gaming culture is huge, and you're doing a game with Samsung, that's something you've got going on, what's that about? >> I can't say too much about it, to be honest with you, but we're in preparation with Samsung on this new, innovative, high tech, app that's coming out, and it's going to be integrated to, I mean, everything's going to come together, it's going to have my music in it, it's going to have, Stan's going to make a cameo, in that, in the game, and in my music video as well, and yeah it's all coming together. >> So that's coming out. You can't really talk, it's under wraps, but it's an integrated project. You've been successfully into viral videos, a couple years ago that went viral on YouTube. What's that like, do you just like wake up one day and say, "Oh my God, this is going crazy?" >> It kind of happened like that with YouTube. Because you do it all yourself. I worked with Afflux Studios, it's in Wellington. They're a really awesome studio, super high tech and I got kind of an in, they're kind of family to me, and so it was kind of ... It was really easy to get with them anyway so we were like, "Hey, I did the blue hair thing." And I was like, "You know what? "I'm set on going viral, this is what I want to do." And the first video I put out, bitch better have-- B better have my money. (John laughs) By Rihanna. >> We're the internet. You can say whatever you want. >> Oh, fuck it. Bitch better have my money. Oh shit, really, I can swear? Oh I feel so much more comfortable now. On stage, I felt so ... So yeah, "Bitch Better Have My Money" came out and it got like 1.5 million, or 1.3 million views, and then I did another video and it got another 1.3 million. >> All right, so what happens after, because everyone wants to know. 'Cause everyone tries to engineer viral, and you can't really engineer viral, 'cause viral is one of those things where-- >> Dye your hair blue, sell your soul. >> (laughs) Okay, you sold your soul. Who bought it? The Devil? (laughs) >> The Devil, yeah, the Devil bought it. No. >> Well, you got to tell. >> No, for real, like honest talk right now. What you have to do is go on the top charts and pick one of your favorites, something that is completely not you, or you, but you have to do it a different way, so what we did, was I work with a producer who's super awesome, his name's Arcaeus, and we remixed it. And you know how remixes are huge? So we were like, "Why don't we do a remix cover?" and then it blew up and that's what happened. >> So now that you're on Stan's radar, he's got the whole, you know, he's been around the block, he's a legend in the community. His success is off the charts. What's his creative mind like right now? How are you guys looking at the mark offs? You're integrating music with comics. >> With comics and with gaming, that's, I mean, you just nailed it. >> So what's the creative scene like, do you guys sit back, do you kick back? What do you talk about? >> Stan's really big on making the powers unique, and he always has been really great on making sure that the powers are unique, so that's right now, we're still in the preparation stage of everything, but we're, we want to, we're prepping with Marvel right now. I have to say all the right words in order to not get in trouble. >> PR handled. (they laugh) >> We're prepping with Marvel to go into one of their storylines that I can't say. I can't say too much. >> Yeah. All these licensing things are going on. I've always been fascinated with how it's about time that the comics and Marvel really start expanding and start franchising the gaming because we were talking yesterday with one of the guests influencers about how the gaming culture really is a precursor to how life is evolving. You got multiplayer, it is virtual, you got virtual currencies, you have things happen on gaming, so it's a natural extension to move into gaming. How does the music piece, I mean, do you guys have licensing stuff? You must have to get authorizations. Is it indie, what's ... >> Well, it would be my music that's on the game. >> So you're doing your own music for the game. >> So I'd just be paying myself, essentially. >> You're licensing your movie? >> Yeah. >> All right. So here's another question for you. What's the weirdest thing that's happened to you in the past year? >> This interview right here. No, I'm just joking. >> (laughs) It's great for me too. >> No, it's Stan calling me up and saying, "Hey, I want to make you a superhero." That's the weirdest thing I've ever gone through. >> What's it like in the L.A. scene for you? >> I don't go to L.A. too much. I don't, but I am moving out there next month, so I will be in the L.A. scene. The L.A. scene's crazy, from what I've seen, from what I've seen about the scene. Yeah, it's crazy. >> So what's the plans for you and Stan the next couple months? What are you guys going to be working on, heading down, doing the tour, creative-- >> I think we're going to a couple Comic Cons. Potentially getting inducted into the music industry by a big player in the hiphop culture who, I can't say his name. There's a lot of big things, but it's mainly just preparation right now, we're just talking about everything, what we all want to do, and making sure that the gaming app with Samsung, which is why we're here today, it's like that's a huge thing, Jackie, Jacqueline Chow whose mobile game, it's a mobile game, so the game, the music, and hopefully eventually movies, but and the comic books, oh! You know what I think is really cool? I think that we're going to do a comic book on like a tablet version or a mobile version of the comic books, and I don't know if you've seen, I forget what it's called, but it's like a tilt screen comic book that's really, it's really innovative? I'll have to show you the app after, but it's, I think we're going to do something like that, 'cause people don't buy comic books, people don't buy books, they don't go to the store, they don't go to the library, I mean, I do, but they don't, you know? They go on their phone and they pay for it. >> Phone is where the action is, for the kids. All right, so what's exciting you these days? Obviously, you must be pretty pumped. Things are rocking. >> Yeah. >> What's on your mind these days? >> What's on my mind these days? >> Yeah, what are you excited about? >> Sitting beside Stan and just talking about this stuff. Honestly, performing, I'm super excited about the show, 'cause I want the show to be, I mean, if I'm a superhero, it's got to be heroic. >> Can you share your superpowers? What's the ... >> I can't! I can't, but I am a singer so I think obviously we're going to roll with the singing 'cause I think, I mean, naturally singing, performing, I think is almost like a human superpower that we have. >> So what's the event? Give us your take on the event here. Obviously Samsung is a big part, and congratulations, nice gig to have there. Congratulations, so you've got the app coming on, we'll dig into that, we'll look forward to the news when it comes out. But the vibe here, this developer community. We see high school kids here, I saw some eight year olds here. I mean, this is like an awesome developer conference. >> It is! When I was on stage with Stan, it was like, we had five minutes left, and I was kind of, you know, we had gone through all of the questions that we'd prepared, and I was like, "Hey, guys, if anyone "has any questions, please raise your hand," or whatever, and just kids, it was all, it was like mostly kids at first and then the adults are like, oh well we can do too, but the kids were like, "Stan, what do you think about DC?" and he was like, "DC who?" It was hilarious. >> So next year, "Rain, what do you think about ..." So you're going to be popular, congratulations. Thank you for coming on and chatting with me. This was great, with Rain Paris, here at the Cube live, from San Francisco for SDC, you got games coming out, music converging with comics, this is the culture. More after this short break. (electronic music)

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

>> Narrator: TheCUBE presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Good afternoon guys and gals. We're so glad you're here with us. Welcome back to the MGM Grand, Las Vegas. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, as I mentioned, our second day of coverage. We've learned a lot about cybersecurity, the complexity, the challenges, but also the opportunities. We've had some great conversations, really dissecting some recent survey data. We know that every industry, no industry is immune from this but healthcare is one of the ones that's quite vulnerable. We're going to be talking about that next, in part. >> Yeah. Cause we always talk about the super cloud and connecting hybrid across clouds and you know, on-prem, but also now out to the edge. >> Yes. >> You know, and nobody wants a separate stove pipe, but we saw this during the pandemic. We saw the pivot, work from home, to end point and cloud security rearchitecting the network, identity and you know, more stove pipes. Right? So, but that's not what the industry wants or needs, so. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Well I never would think about, you know you go to the doctor's office, you go to a hospital, X-ray machines, CT scanners, all these proliferation of medical IoT devices. Great for the patient, great for the providers, but a lot of opportunities for the attackers, as well. We're going to be talking about that, in part, in our next conversation with an alumni that's coming back to the program. Anand Oswal is here. The SVP and GM of network security at Palo Alto Networks. Great to have you back. >> Great to have me. Thank you. >> It's been a few years. >> Oswal: Yeah. It's been a time. >> So, I was looking at some of the unit 42 research: medical devices are the weakest link on the hospital network. >> Oswal: Yeah. >> But, so great for patient care, for doctors, providers, et cetera. But, a challenge and an opportunity for the adversaries. >> Oswal: Yeah. >> What are some of the things that you guys are seeing? I know you have some news on the medical IoT front. >> Yeah. Thanks for having me by the way. So, if you look at every industry has benefited from connected devices. Changes the outcome and the experiences, both for the end users, as well as the businesses. And healthcare is no different. If you look at the experience that we had as patients over the last decade has changed dramatically. And in the pandemic, even more changes happened, right? This is really ushering in a new era of patient care. It's connected devices. You know, I have a family member of mine who has diabetes. And, as you know, you got to check the blood glucose level periodically. It's usually pricking, it's cumbersome, it can hurt you. But now, with this new IoT based glucose margin systems, you can monitor these levels in real time, constantly. If it drops, can inject the right amount of insulins. So, changing the experience and the outcome for patients. Taking data from this devices to ensure that you have different outcomes. So, really, changing how you experience as patient. But, like you said, along with all of this is adding increased cybersecurity. Right? And we've seen over the last, I don't know, year or so, a 200% increase in cyber attacks on healthcare organizations. And, in the next couple of years, you're going to see 1.3 billion, yes, the "B," billion, new connected devices come to healthcare. So, that's including the attack surface. So, we've got to stay vigilant. There's a lot of great things you get from connected devices. It has cyber risk, just plan it properly. >> But, it's hard just to secure a medical IoT devices. Why is it so challenging? And how do you help? >> Yeah. Look, you can only secure what you see, first of all, right? So, it's very important to understand what devices you have on your network. And these can't be done statically, right? Because you're, they're made by different manufacturers and you're adding so many every day. So, you need to use machine learning to identify what these devices are. But just not what are devices, who's the manufacturer? What's the make, what's the model? What's the unpatched vulnerabilities? That's one part. I tell people that having visibility is good, but just that's not enough. It's like me telling you, you have a leak in your house. I don't give you any information on where the leak is. How do I call the plumber? What's the home warranty? Home insurance coverage? So you got visibility. Then you need to do segmentation. Segmentation all about who can talk to whom. Should your CT scan machine or MRI machine be talking to a server in the corporate environment? Should be talking to your point of sale terminal in the hospital? Maybe not. Right? So you need to define those policies. Again, those can be manual. They have to be automated because you're adding new devices every day. After you do that, it's around the data that is transporting on those devices. Do they have threats? Are they command controlled connections? Because threats can move laterally and need to inspect this in real time every day, constantly. Not just one time. Right? That's the whole notion of zero trust, which is no notion of implied trust. You want to have least privilege access. And the most important is that, look, we talked about this before. Majority of healthcare organizations have legacy security architectures. You can't have it solved better, the point product a new sensor, a partial solution. You need to get fully integrated because you need to reduce their operational cost. You need to ensure that they have better security. Right? I tell people what do organization want? Make more money, save money, and steer out trouble. Right? In simple ways. >> Valante: Yeah. >> I need to ensure that they're able to get this done securely. That's very important. >> So, a lot of the devices, so you think about oT, a lot of the devices been naturally air gaped. That was sort of the safety. What's it like in healthcare? Is the MRI machine, was it historically net-, you know, fenced off from the network and how is that changing? >> Yeah. I'll give an example. I talked to a customer, this is a few months ago. And this happened before the pandemic, luckily. They were doing, a doctor was doing a surgery on a patient at roughly two in the morning, on a, and using a ventilator. And guess what happened? The ventilator rebooted and said: firmware upgrading. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Wow. >> And luckily when I doctor, their customer, they said they had another ventilator that they could quickly do. This ventilator was connected to an ethernet cable, in this case. And somebody decided that two AM is the right time to upgrade things. Like, you know, you have windows of when you upgrade things. But, you need to be able to manage a lifecycle of these devices more intelligently. When is it being used? When it's upgraded? There's a life of a device, and then there's a cyber life. Now we have too many devices with end of life operating systems. We all remember the 2017 WannaCry attack. That was an end of life operating system. So, you have a shelf life and you have a cyber life. Need to be able to manage the life cycle of these devices and easily onboard new devices, but also have, be able to sunset devices as needed. >> Okay. So the business generally stays ahead, you know, of cyber, but are those worlds coming together? I mean, I feel like with digital transformation we're beginning to see that everybody talks about, you know, cyber can't just be a bolt on. >> Oswal: Yes. >> But it oftentimes is. So what's the state of play in healthcare? >> I think it's changing. If you think about the healthcare organizations or generally even oT environments, the decision maker is not just the CIO and CISO, it's also your plant manager, the hospital owner, or manager of the operations of the hospital. They have to be taken into account. The other, the other stakeholders: the clinical and biomed engineer who operates these devices, right? I was talking to a healthcare customer that said that asset utilization or devices important. Many times you find nurses or doctors will keep an infusion pump with them in their room because they want easy to use. And then they say, I want five more or 10 more, right? We all living in an environment where budget will be more and more important. So how do you get a full inventory of what's using what, how often are they used? For example, MRI machines are many times preset for scanning certain parts of the body. Now you can change it, but it takes time. It's effort. So if you know the actual utilization of what you're doing, you can be more efficient and have a much more efficient organization. >> And so how do they do that? Is that some kind of predictive analytics that they're using? Is it... >> Yes. It's the whole lifecycle of a zero trust architecture. It is the whole lifecycle of managing these devices effectively and then simplifying your operations. The three things that we have to do. >> How can zero trust be really tailored to healthcare specifically? >> Yeah. Let me tell you, first of all, when I talk of zero trust, I have a simple way of talking about it. Which is no notion of implied trust, right? Just because I'm in an environment doesn't mean have access to a device and application, et cetera. And when we think of medical device, it's like, who's the user who's accessing it? How do you authenticate that user? And that can be the things the organization has: password, an MFA, et cetera. That's, that's good. That's not enough. If you're accessing some, if I authentic authenticated you from this device, but what if this device itself is infected with malware? So, I need to know that it's the state of your device. Then what are you trying to access? Medical records, healthcare records, you'd like permission sets to access it. Are they read only, write only? Do you have confidential information about it? And when you're exchanging this information, is there malware in that data? You need to do this on a continuous basis. So, user, endpoint, access, and transaction. These four constructs have to be done continuously. That's the whole notion of zero trust. >> So, okay. Cause you had, we were talking off camera, you said, you know, get, say ask somebody what zero trust is, you get 10 different answers. 10 people, 10 different answers. So, I always would used to think unless a device or a person has been explicitly authorized and authenticated, they don't get access. But, you just added something more. It also has to be clean essentially. >> Yes. >> Right? And you've got the technology to do that? >> Absolutely. And we can, if you think about it, we can do this across all facets, all use cases. If you think of traditional network security, right? It doesn't secure the network. Like I said, it secures everything on the network. The users, the IoT devices, and the applications they access. Now I can be in the office, I can be on the road, or I can be home. I may use different notions of stacks. I may use a hardware-centric firewall for accessing data center based applications in my private data center. I may use a software firewall application for accessing things in the public cloud. I may use a cloud deliver SASE architecture from home or for remote branches. I wanted consistent security. The way I do threat, the way I do phishing protection, ransomware protection, IoT security. It should be consistent no matter where the user is, no matter where the data is, no matter where the applications is. And that's really what we can do with a consistent platform approach. >> So on-prem. In... >> The cloud, yes. >> In all the clouds, at the edge. >> Yes. >> Not only healthcare, but operational technologies? The factory? >> You want to make sure that it's not only the best in class security, it's also consistent security and consistent manageability. Right? Which means that the experience I have as an admin, from day minus one to day n. And it can be for any use case I have, it could be for securing my applications in my private data center, my application is the public cloud, or remote access from home or remote branch. I want that consistent security. I want that consistent policy. So, what is the treatment for you, the user, when you are in the office, on the go, or somewhere else? You don't want different experience. >> Valante: Yeah. >> You want same experience. >> Right? That goes... >> It should be optimal. It can be slow, it can be like, it takes you a long time to access your application either. Cause all of us are, we spoiled, we want it right away. >> Yeah. It can't be a blocker to productivity. >> Exactly. >> I was looking at some of the unit 42 data about, just the, all the vulnerabilities in different machines. We talk about cyber resilience a lot. How and, as I mentioned, and I think even the survey that Palo Alto Networks released yesterday, "What's Next in Cyber", was even demonstrating healthcare being one of the most vulnerable. >> Yes. >> And we talk about, you know, it being one of the weakest links. How can Palo Alto Networks work with healthcare organizations, large and small, across the globe to help them really dial up cyber resilience. >> Oswal: Yeah. >> And start reducing the vulnerabilities that are there as device proliferation is just going to happen. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think you hit a very good point. We have data which says that 83% of imaging systems run end of life operating system stacks, right? And you remember in 2017, the WannaCry attack started with an end of life operating system device. Right? It affected 150 countries in the UK alone. 70,000 devices, 30,000 patient cancellations. We know that, if you think about infusion pumps, three out of four have unpatched vulnerabilities. Which means that you can patch it. But it's very hard for the biomed or clinical engineer to understand what to do and what not to do. Healthcare organization have lot of compliance requirements. Right? They have HIPAA compliance, they have other regulations. So, you need to make them audit ready: inventory of the devices, status of each device, make it audit ready, compliance ready. So, they're able to do what they do best in serving patients versus worrying about other things that they, that we can automate for themselves. Lastly, I'll say is that, you also want to simplify the operations of the health environment, right? Having more point products, more point solutions, that's solving only a certain aspect of what you do. Like only visibility, telling you have a leak, but not putting the end solution. Adds more and more complexity to organizations. >> So it's a different dynamic in this world, healthcare world, because you got to all these devices and they're not, you know, I think about Patch Tuesday, Right? I mean Microsoft's always putting out patches. And so, that tells the hackers, Hey, you know, go in on Wednesday. >> Yeah. >> And hack away. It's probably different in healthcare. They're probably not as frequent patches published or maybe there are, I don't know. I'll be curious as to whether they are. But I mean the, the device manufacturers, they're not, you know, the biggest software company in the world. >> Yeah. >> You know, so they're probably not as on top of it. >> Yeah. >> So I'm not saying it's better or worse, it's just a different environment. >> The patches to the end devices may not be as frequent, but patches that you can apply on from a security perspective on a security stack are like happening continuously in real time. The second things that you also want to ensure that the capabilities of your security product itself are able to stop attacks inline, in real time. For example, 95% of all malware in the world is MORF malware, which means it's variations of existing malware. You can stop this inline real time, right? Attackers are using more and more sophisticated techniques today, to evade traditional sand boxing techniques. So, you have to out-innovate them. And that's what we've done by all our cloud services. We move them very early on to the cloud to get the agility and scale that we get. But we invested a lot in machine learning and deep learning to stop these day-zero threats in line, real time. Attackers are using that window of opportunity, like you mentioned, between the time when a breach is announced or detected, and patched. And that breach could, that time window could be a minute. They're going to exploit that time. You want to reduce that to almost zero, which means that you need to stop it in line, in real time, continuously. >> So, take the sandbox example. >> Yeah. >> So, what do you say? So, if I'm doing a sandbox on-prem, one of the vulnerabilities is if my capacity is out of 10,000 files, they're just going to overwhelm me with a hundred thousand and then I'm going to be trying to figure out what's going on. And while I'm doing that, they're going to be sneaking in. And is that an example of... >> No. >> Valante: That you address because you're in the cloud, or...? >> Yeah, that's one. But, think about examples where attackers are devising malware, are creating malware that will basically evade traditional sand boxing techniques. So, if I do a memory lookup on the register, that malware will diffuse. It only detonates on an end user on a device or a database. So, now you need to do intelligent techniques. So, we built this, lot of infrastructure for intelligent realtime memory analysis to ensure that we are able to stay ahead of the competition. And we did that for phishing, we did that for command control connections, we did for software exploits, we did data for malware, for DNS. We're able to stop about 11 to 12 million additional phishing sites than anybody else. We're able to have our sand boxing more effective than anybody else. We're able to stop 26% more malicious sessions than others in the industry. >> Valante: Why? Architecture? >> Architecture. Couple of things. First, architecture. Second is that, through a lot of innovation that we've done in both machine learning and deep learning, to be able to look at unstructured data and be able to stop the attacks inline, real time. Think about it, the traditional way of doing URL filtering has always been to build a database of URLs in the world. And you categorize as URLs into groups of categories: news, adult. And then you say, what's my risk profile for each of these? And you put a score and you say, I want to have this tolerance. That doesn't work anymore. The reason is because attackers are sophisticated. Websites come in, up and down, in seconds. Before I build a database, it's gone. I can't do this old way of doing things, signature and databases. I've got to use the power of machine learning. I've got to use the power of deep learning and data. >> And it's, are healthcare leaders, do they have an appetite for that? >> I think healthcare data looking for outcomes. They're looking, when I talk to healthcare professionals, they want to basically do what they do best. Serve patients, right? Give them optimal care. They want someone to take care of all these things holistically, end to end. Simplify all the things that they have to do from a compliance perspective, architectural perspective, reduce their cost, give them a better outcome. That's what they want. >> It's all about outcomes. >> Oswal: It's all about outcomes. >> And we know you cover much more than healthcare, but we obviously used most of our time on that. It's such an interesting, fascinating industry. Obviously, a lot of opportunities there for organizations to work with companies like Palo Alto to really dial up their cyber resilience. >> Absolutely. >> And ultimately, to your point, deliver the outcomes that they are there to do. >> Absolutely, yes. >> We'll have to have you back cause we just, I feel like we just scratched the surface. Right? >> Oswal: Happy to come back. >> Valante: Thank you. >> Oswal: Thank you. >> Awesome. >> Oswal: Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure to have you on the program. For Anand Oswald and Dave Valante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. [Pedantic Music Fades]

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and Alkira. I looked at many a company and Alkira seemed the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and now Alkira. I looked at many of companies and I'm curious in the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

>> Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online, where the theme of the event is, is modernize now. Yes, let's talk about that. And with me is Ravi mayor him, who's the senior vice president of engineering and the CTO at Couchbase Ravi. Welcome. Great to see you. >> Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here with you. >> I want to ask you what the new requirements are around modern applications. I've seen some of your comments, you got to be flexible, distributed, multimodal, mobile, edge. Those are all the very cool sort of buzz words, smart applications. What does that all mean? And how do you put that into a product and make it real? >> Yeah, I think what has basically happened is that so far it's been a transition of sorts. And now we are come to a point where that tipping point and that tipping point has been more because of COVID and there are COVID has pushed us to a world where we are living in a in a sort of occasionally connected manner where our digital interactions precede, our physical interactions in one sense. So it's a world where we do a lot more stuff that's less than in a digital manner, as opposed to sort of making a more specific human contact. That does really been the sort of accelerant to this modernize Now, as a team. In this process, what has happened is that so far all the databases and all the data infrastructure that we have built historically, are all very centralized. They're all sitting behind. They used to be in mainframes from where they came to like your own data centers, where we used to run hundreds of servers to where they're going now, which is the computing marvelous change to consumption-based computing, which is all cloud oriented now. And so, but they are all centralized still, but where our engagement happens with the data is at the edge at your point of convenience, at your point of consumption, not where the data is actually sitting. So this has led to, you know, all those buzzwords, as you said, which is like, oh, well we need a distributed data infrastructure, where is the edge? But it just basically comes down to the fact that the data needs to be there, if you are engaging with it. And that means if you are doing it on your mobile phone, or if you're sitting, but doing something in your while you're traveling, or whether you're in a subway, whether you're in a plane or a ship, wherever the data needs to come to you and be available, as opposed to every time you going to the data, which is centrally sitting in some place. And that is the fundamental shift in terms of how the modern architecture needs to think when they, when it comes to digital transformation and, transitioning their old applications to the, the modern infrastructure, because that's, what's going to define your customer experiences and your personalized experiences. Otherwise, people are basically waiting for that circle of death that we all know, and blaming the networks and other pieces. The problem was actually, the data is not where you are engaging with it. It's got to be fetched, you know, seven sea's away. And that is the problem that we are basically solving in this modern modernization of that data, data infrastructure. >> I love this conversation and I love the fact that there's a technical person that can kind of educate us on, on this because date data by its very nature is distributed. It's always been distributed, but with the distributed database has always been incredibly challenging, whether it was a global SIS Plex or an eventual consistency of getting recovery for a distributed architecture has been extremely difficult. You know, I hate that this is a terrible term, lots of ways to skin a cat, but, but you've been the visionary behind this notion of optionality, how to solve technical problems in different ways. So how do you solve that, that problem of, of, of, of, of a super rock solid database that can handle, you know, distributed data? >> Yes. So there are two issues that you alluded little too over there. The first is the optionality piece of it, which is that same data that you have that requires different types of processing on it. It's almost like fractional distillation. It is like your crude flowing through the system. You start all over from petrol and you can end up with Vaseline and rayon on the other end, but the raw material, that's our data. In one sense. So far, we never treated the data that way. That's part of the problem. It has always been very purpose built and cast first problem. And so you just basically have to recast it every time we want to look at the data. The first thing that we have done is make data that fluid. So when you're actually, when you have the data, you can first look at it to perform. Let's say a simple operation that we call as a key value store operation. Given my ID, give him a password kind of scenarios, which is like, you know, there are customers of ours who have billions of user IDs in their management. So things get slower. How do you make it fast and easily available? Log-in should not take more than five milliseconds, this is, this is a class of problem that we solve that same data. Now, eventually, without you ever having to sort of do a casting it to a different database, you can now do solid queries. Our classic SQL queries, which is our next magic. We are a no SQL database, but we have a full functional SQL. The SQL has been the language that has talked to data for 40 odd years successfully. Every other database has come and tried to implement their own QL query language, but they've all failed only SQL has stood the test of time of 40 odd years. Why? Because there's a solid mathematics behind it. It's called a relational calculus. And what that helps you is, is basically a look at the data and any common editorial, any, any which way you look at the data, all it will come, the data in a format that you can consume. That's the guarantee sort of gives you in one sense. And because of that, you can now do some really complex in the database signs, what we call us, predicate logic on top of that. And that gives you the ability to do the classic relational type queries select star from where, kind of stuff, because it's at an English level becomes easy to so the same day that you didn't have to go move it to another database, do your sort of transformation of the data and all the stuff, same day that you do this. Now that's where the optionality comes in. Now you can do another piece of logic on top of this, which we call search. This is built on this concept of inverted index and TF IDF, the classic Google in a very simple terms, what Google tokenized search, you can do that in the same data without you ever having to move the data to a different format. And then on top of it, they can do what is known as a eventing or your own custom logic, which we all which we do on a, on programming language called Java script. And finally analytics and analytics is the, your ability to query the operational data in a different way. And talk querying, what was my sales of this widget year over year on December 1st week, that's a very complex question to ask, and it takes a lot of different types of processing. So these are different types of that's optionality with different types of processing on the same data without you having to go to five different systems without you having to recast the data in five different ways and apply different application logic. So you put them in one place. Now is your second question. Now this has got to be distributed and made available in multiple cloud in your data center, all the way to the edge, which is the operational side of the, the database management system. And that's where the distributed platform that we have built enables us to get it to where you need the data to be, you know, in the classic way we call it CDN'ing the data as in like content delivery networks. So far do static, sort of moving of static content to the edges. Now we can actually dynamically move the data. Now imagine the richness of applications you can develop. >> And on the first part of, of the, the, the answer to my question, are you saying you could do this without scheme with a no schema on, right? And then you can apply those techniques. >> Fantastic question. Yes. That's the brilliance of this database is that so far classically databases have always demanded that you first define a schema before you can write a single byte of data. Couchbase is one of the rare databases. I, for one don't know any other one, but there could be, let's give the benefit of doubt. It's a database which writes data first and then late binds to schema as we call it. It's a schema on read thing. So, because there is no schema, it is just a Json document that is sitting inside. And Json is the lingua franca of the web, as you very well know by now. So it just Json that we manage, you can do key value look ups of the Json. You can do full credit capability, like a classic relational database. We even have cost-based optimizers and other sophisticated pieces of technology behind it. You can do searching on it, using the, the full textual analysis pipeline. You can do ad hoc webbing on the analytics side, and you can write your own custom logic on it using or inventing capabilities. So that's, that's what it allows because we keep the data in the native form of Json. It's not a data structure or a data schema imposed by a database. It is how the data is produced. And on top of it, bring, we bring different types of logic, five different types of it's like the philosophy is bringing logic to data as opposed to moving data to logic. This is what we have been doing in the last 40 years, because we developed various database systems and data processing systems at various points in time in our history, we had key value stores. We had relational systems, we had search systems, we had analytical systems. We had queuing systems, all these systems, if you want to use any one of them are answered. It always been, just move the data to that system. Versus we are saying that do not move the data as we get bigger and bigger and data just moving this data is going to be a humongous problem. If you're going to be moving petabytes of data for this, it's not going to fly instead, bring the logic to the data, right? So you can now apply different types of logic to the data. I think that's what, in one sense, the optionality piece of this. >> But as you know, there's plenty of schema-less data stores. They're just, they're called data swamps. I mean, that's what they, that's what they became, right? I mean, so this is some, some interesting magic that you're applying here. >> Yes. I mean, the one problem with the data swamps as you call them is that that was a little too open-ended because the data format itself could change. And then you do your, then everything became like a game data recasting because it required you to have it in seven schema in one sense at, at the end of the day, for certain types of processing. So in that where a lot of gaps it's probably related, but it not really, how do you say keep to the promise that it actually meant to be? So that's why it was a swamp I mean, because it was fundamentally not managing the data. The data was sitting in some file system, and then you are doing something, this is a classic database where the data is managed and you create indexes to manage it. And you create different types of indexes to manage it. You distribute the index, you distribute the data you have, like we were discussing, you have ACID semantics on top of, and when you, when you put all these things together, it's, it's, it's a tough proposition, but we have solved some really tough problems, which are good computer science stuff, computer science problems that we have to solve to bring this, to bring this, to bear, to bring this to the market. >> So you predicted the trend around multimodal and converged databases. You kind of led Couchbase through that. I, I want, I always ask this question because it's clearly a trend in the industry and it, and it definitely makes sense from a simplification standpoint. And, and, and so that I don't have to keep switching databases or the flip side of that though, Ravi. And I wonder if you could give me your opinion on this is kind of the right tool for the right job. So I often say isn't that the Swiss army knife approach, where you have have a little teeny scissors and a knife, that's not that sharp. How, how do you respond to that? >> A great one. My answer is always, I use another analogy to tackle that, and is that, have you ever accused a smartphone of being a Swiss army knife? - No. No. >> Nobody does. That because it actually 40 functions in one is what a smartphone becomes. You never call your iPhone or your Android phone, a Swiss army knife, because here's the reason is that you can use that same device in the full capacity. That's what optionality is. It's not, I'm not, it's not like your good old one where there's a keyboard hiding half the screen, and you can do everything only through the keyboard without touching and stuff like that. That's not the whole devices available to you to do one type of processing when you want it. When you're done with that, it can do another completely different types of processing. Right? As in a moment, it could be a TomTom, telling you all the directions, the next one, it's your PDA. Third one. It's a fantastic phone. Four. It's a beautiful camera which can do your f-stop management and give you a nice SLR quality picture. Right? So next moment, it's the video camera. People are shooting movies with this thing in Hollywood, these days for God's sake. So it gives you the full power of what you want to do when you want it. And now, if you just thought that iPhone is a great device or any smartphone is a great device, because you can do five things in one or 50 things in one, and at a certain level, he missed the point because what that device really enabled is not just these five things in one place. It becomes easy to consume and easy to operate. It actually started the app based economy. That's the brilliance of bringing so many things in one place, because in the morning, you know, I get an alert saying that today you got to leave home at >> 8: 15 for your nine o'clock meeting. And the next day it might actually say 8 45 is good enough because it knows where the phone is sitting. The geo position of it. It knows from my calendar where the meeting is actually happening. It can do a traffic calculation because it's got my map and all of the routes. And then it's got this notification system, which eventually pops up on my phone to say, Hey, you got to leave at this time. Now five different systems have to come together and they can because the data is in one place. Without that, you couldn't even do this simple function in a, in a sort of predictable manner in a, in a, in a manner that's useful to you. So I believe a database which gives you this optionality of doing multiple data processing on the same set of data allows you will allow you to build a class of products, which you are so far been able to struggling to build. Because half the time you're running sideline to sideline, just, you know, integrating data from one system to the other. >> So I love the analogy with the smartphone. I want to, I want to continue it and double click on it. So I use this camera. I used to, you know, my kid had a game. I would bring the, the, the big camera, the 35 millimeter. So I don't use that anymore no way, but my wife does, she still uses the DSLR. So is, is there a similar analogy here? That those, and by the way, the camera, the camera shop in my town went out of business, you know? So, so, but, but is there, is that a fair and where, in other words, those specialized databases, they say there still is a place for them, but they're getting. >> Absolutely, absolutely great analogy and a great extension to the question. That's like, that's the contrarian side of it in one sense is that, Hey, if everything can just be done in one, do you have a need for the other things? I mean, you gave a camera example where it is sort of, it's a, it's a slippery slope. Let me give you another one, which is actually less straight to the point better. I've been just because my, I, I listened to half of my music on the iPhone. Doesn't stop me from having my full digital receiver. And, you know, my Harman Kardon speakers at home because they, I mean, they produce a kind of sounded immersive experience. This teeny little speaker has never in its lifetime intended to produce, right? It's the convenience. Yes. It's the convenience of convergence that I can put my earphones on and listen to all the great music. Yes, it's 90% there or 80% there. It depends on your audio file-ness of your, I mean, your experience super specialized ones do not go away. You know, there are, there are places where the specialized use cases will demand a separate system to exist. But even there that has got to be very closed. How do you say close, binding or late binding? I should be able to stream that song from my phone to that receiver so I can get it from those speakers. You can say that all, there's a digital divide between these two things done, and I can only play CDs on that one. That's not how it's going to work going forward. It's going to be, this is the connected world, right? As in, if I'm listening to the song in my car and then step off the car, walk into my living room, that same songs should continue and play in my living room speakers. Then it's a connected world because it knows my preference and what I'm doing that all happened only because of this data flowing between all these systems. >> I love, I love that example too. When I was a kid, we used to go to Tweeter, et cetera. And we used to play around with three, take home, big four foot speakers. Those stores are out of business too. Absolutely. And now we just plug into Sonos. So that is the debate between relational and non-relational databases over Ravi? >> I believe so, because I think what had happened was relational systems. I've mean where the norm, they rule the roost, if you will, for the last 40 odd years and then gain this no SQL movement, which was almost as though a rebellion from the relational world, we all inhabited because we, it was very restrictive. It, it had the schema definition and the schema evolution as we call it, all those things, they were like, they required a committee. They required your DBA and your data architect. And you had to call them just to add one column and stuff like that. And the world had moved on. This was a world of blogs and tweets and, you know, mashups and a different generation of digital behavior, There are digital, native people now who are operating in these and the, the applications, the, the consumer facing applications. We are living in this world. And yet the enterprise ones were still living in the, in the other, the other side of the divide. So out came this solution to say that we don't need SQL. Actually the problem was never SQL. No SQL was, you know, best approximation, good marketing name, but from a technologist perspective, the problem was never the query language, no SQL was not the problem, the schema limitations and the inability for these, the system to scale, the relational systems were built like airplanes, which is that if a San Francisco, Boston, there is a flight route, it's so popular that if you want to add 50 more seats to it, the only way you can do that is to go back to Boeing and ask them to get you a set from 7 3 7 2 7 7 7, or whatever it is. And they'll stick you with a billion dollar bill on the allowance that you'll somehow pay that by, you know, either flying more people or raising the rates or whatever you have to do. These are all vertically scaling systems. So relational systems are vertically scaling. They are expensive. Versus what we have done in this modern world is make the system horizontally scaling, which is more like the same thing. If it's a train that is going from San Francisco to Boston, you need 50 more people be my guest. I'll add one more coach to it, one more car to it. And the better part of the way we have done this here is that, and we are super specialized on that. This route actually requires three, three dining cars and only 10 sort of sleeper cars or whatever. Then just pick those and attach the next route. You can choose to have, I need only one dining car. That's good enough. So the way you scale the plane is also can be customized based on the route along the route, more, more dining capabilities, shorter route, not an abandoned capability. You can attach the kind of coaches we call this multidimensional scaling. Not only do we scale horizontally, we can scale to different types of workloads by adding different types of coaches to it, right? So that's the beauty of this architecture. Now, why is that architecture important? Is that where we land eventually is the ability to do operational and analytical in the same place. This is another thing which doesn't happen in the past, because, you would say that I cannot run this analytical query because then my operational workload will suffer. Then my front end, then we'll slow down millions of customers that impacted that problem. They'll solve the same data once again, do analytical query, an operational query because they're separated by these cars, right? As in like we, we, we fence the, the, the resources so that one doesn't impede the other. So you can, at the same time, have a microsecond 10 million ops per second, happening of a key value or a query. And then yet you can run this analytical query, which will take a couple of minutes to them. One, not impeding the other. So that's in one sense, sort of the part of the problems that we have solved it here is that relational versus the no SQL portion of it. These are the kinds of problems we have to solve. We solve those. And then we yet put back the same query language on top. Why? It's like Tesla in one sense, right underneath the surface is where all the stuff that had to be changed had to change, which is like the gasoline, the internal combustion engine the gas, you says, these were the issues we really wanted to solve. So solve that, change the engine out, you don't need to change the steering wheel or the gas pedal or the, you know, the battle shifters or whatever else you need, over there your gear shifters. Those need to remain in the same place. Otherwise people won't buy it. Otherwise it does not even look like a car to people. So even when you feed people, the most advanced technology, it's got to be accessible to them in the manner that people can consume. Only in software, we forget this first design principle, and we go and say that, well, I got a car here, you got the blow harder to go fast. And they lean back for, for it to, you know, to apply a break that's, that's how we seem to define design software. Instead, we shouldn't be designing them in a manner that it is easiest for our audience, which is developers to consume. And they've been using SQL for 40 years or 30 years. And so we give them the steering wheel on the, and the gas pedal and the, and the gear shifters by putting SQL back on underneath the surface, we have completely solved the relational limitations of schema, as well as scalability. So in, in, in that way, and by bringing back the classic ACID capabilities, which is what relational systems we accounted on, and being able to do that with the SQL programming language, we call it like multi-statement SQL transaction. So to say, which is what a classic way all the enterprise software was built by putting that back. Now, I can say that that debate between relational and non-relational is over because this has truly extended the database to solve the problems that the relational systems had to grow up to solve in the modern times, rather than get sort of pedantic about whether it's we have no SQL or SQL or new SQL, or, you know, any of that sort of jargon oriented debate. This is, these are the debates of computer science that they are actually, and they were the solve, and they have solved them with the latest release of 7.0, which we released a few months ago. >> Right, right. Last July, Ravi, we got got to leave it there. I love the examples and the analogies. I can't wait to be face-to-face with you. I want to hang with you at the cocktail party because I've learned so much and really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming to the cube. >> Fantastic. Thanks for the time. And the opportunity I was, I mean, very insightful questions really appreciate it. - Thank you. >> Okay. This is Dave Volante. We're covering Couchbase connect online, keep it right there for more great content on the cube.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation welcome to the cube lisa martin here i'm having the opportunity to speak with one of dell technologies customers joining me from all the way down under in melbourne australia is kevin pritchard the head of it and business systems from janna investment advisors hi kevin nice to have you on the program thanks lisa a pleasure to be here so tell us about jonah investments who you guys are what you do all the types of data that you're dealing with jana is uh an asset consultant uh we consult to what we call in australia the superannuation industry which is the equivalent of your 401 k our clients are the actual funds themselves the pension funds we advise on both the accumulation and then the pension stage of those to those funds we have under advice across all our clients approximately 500 billion aud so that's a significant responsibility our decisions our research our recommendations probably affects between two to three out of five australians retirement outcomes all right so business critical data kevin i imagine there's compliance requirements not just in australia but if you're doing business with any clients in the americas or in uh europe primarily our markets australia but the regulatory overlays that we and our clients face into are significant and growing the superannuation sector in australia is now at around three trillion dollars it's a significant amount of money i think it's the second or third largest in the world um don't quote me on that but it's a significant amount of money so let's talk about data as a business critical asset and also from a brand reputation perspective talk to me about your it environment how you were managing data before and what some of the challenges were that you wanted to resolve i've been with jana for 14 years and in that time the demands and the complexity of our environment have increased we have to address a growing accumulation of business critical data our data forms our ip it's the core of our advice and it's not just what we're doing today it's what we've done five years ago 10 years ago it has to be there for ready reference it's a critical business asset i like how you said it's really your data is really your ip so talk to me about your it environment before on-prem cloud virtualize what does that landscape look like so we run a a data center we have a it's it's a more economical footprint but nevertheless it's the core of what we do as a business on a day-to-day some data we can't put in the cloud the regulatory overlays really don't permit it and privacy and you know we can better protect in a data center uh we we occupy a space in a dedicated space in a tier 4 data center in australia but that said we are increasingly moving into cloud now the cloud is super important to us it's but it's not easy to migrate into people just say oh let's just go to the cloud you really do have to think about things you have to think about how it's implemented you have to think about data security uh they're very good the cloud providers but it's all care no responsibility it ultimately comes back to you but the the nexus between cloud and on-prem is something that you have to think about and if i'm thinking about backup and dr and i can think of it from a number of perspectives you know it's not just backing up in case we've got failure of hardware but it's about cyber security it's about protection from things like air gapping ensuring um you know that your backups are actually aware of the malware for example uh we've we've had incidents uh and i'm sure the u.s had as well in australia where organizations have found six months down the track that their backups have been compromised we can't afford to do that our regulators our clients i myself have to give assurances to our clients that we're resilient that we're meeting the increasingly stringent benchmarks in your case study i was reading about uh really jonah was on a quest to become more data driven and also it sounded to me like the board was heavily invested and had a vested interest in data protection talk to me about how dell technologies is helping you meet some of those goals becoming more data driven and enabling you to ensure to your cfo et cetera the board that our data is secure yeah as i was saying [Music] at the beginning of this journey i would have thought back up how hard can it be right you you take a backup it's a tape it's a disc you put it into a secure repository something somewhere offside you have a problem you phone someone up they bring it take back and you restore those days have gone and when you really look into it it's a very specialist area how do you back up data especially the size of the data that we have how do you restore it in a timely manner how do you protect it against as i'm saying compromise you need to test it you need easy ways to test it it's complex now when i looked at this problem three years ago i think well okay we're no longer part of a big bank um we've got to stand on our own feet what's the best solution do you research the market um i i've worked with dell for a long time and they're in the mix in the end dell offered the best solution and they showed that they had the understanding of my environment and more broadly where industry is going so that data protection mix of products between the the visibility the dashboards and what happens in the cloud in terms of testing your workloads that are up there because testing is something that my board really really insists upon we have a an annual testing program it runs the full 12 months where we're testing various aspects of uh recovery so talk to me about you're talking about the complexity of a person in the beginning i thought back up in recovery how how difficult can that be you talked about the complexity though and as we talked about with with probably i would say increasing scrutiny from a regulations perspective aboard the cfo how did dell technologies how did power protect actually help you simplify because i actually saw a quote from you in your case study about it being easy help us understand how that was possible yeah you've always got to be careful using the word easy but let's take that perspective from what it would be if it wasn't easy so our prior solution was essentially relying on the dis backup multi-volume disk backup that was stored by a suitable company now i was looking at the dell uh the power protect data protect dashboard the other day and i was surprised we have 27 terabytes of data stored in the cloud which is sent up there daily i get a report card each day it's all green thankfully i can see that on average you know the change the delta of what the data we store on particular servers is on average around seven to ten percent a day those statistics are really important and uh and the deduplication compression ratios you know 97 98 are outstanding um that is really helpful so the point i was trying to make in my previous comments is that visibility is very important that's where it gets easy because i don't have to rely on an expert who's sitting over there he may be in or out telling me what's the status of where we are in day-to-day backup it's it's a critical part of bau it's a pretty critical part of data protection and our clients are greatly comforted by it absolutely when you were describing your previous environment i thought wow one of the things you probably you couldn't have had is complete visibility let alone maybe even good visibility so now with the dell uh power protect series can you look through like a single pane of glass management and see all the backups on file servers virtual machines all of that iep that you talked about that's core to the business uh the short answer is yes now there was another part of our previous setup where we used you what would be classical we had a warm site and we would replicate data one of the problems with that is i didn't know if replication was occurring i didn't know if you know if i if i had had a and we haven't but if we had a ransomware attack then it infects the server and it actually it replicates to your secondary side there was no air gap air gap your backup protected these old solutions of running a you know for an organization outside the the expanding the maintenance required to run a secondary side are just too much one of the things that sounds like you now have is confidence that what you're protecting with dell is in fact protected it's secure and you talked about ransomware a second ago and now in the age of kobe i read the other day that there's a ransomware attack happens every 11 seconds phishing is getting more personal and more sophisticated so that's a big challenge now that sounds like you've got a pretty resilient infrastructure that i i'm going to speak for you gives you the confidence that you're in a pretty good situation with respect to ensuring that that data is indeed safe i have a great deal more confidence and i'm being cautious and cynical i'm you'd never want to say 100. all right because the backup gods will frown upon you but i'm now more confident i can provide my c-suite i can provide the board with a ready snapshot view of where we stand are there any issues um not just cost effectiveness but the visibility of what's going on and look i i was absolutely surprised that an organization outside had 27 terabytes of data that's a lot of data for someone outside and that's important because really at the end of the day this boils down to brand reputation the ability to guarantee to the regulators your clients that all of the data that you talked about it's a lot for a company of your size is indeed secure and protected and that you can as you said you have pretty strong confidence i agree with you saying 100 is always one of those challenging kind of areas to be in but but i think from from a business outcomes perspective this isn't just about protecting the data that's sitting on file servers and virtual machines this is protecting and helping to reinforce the reputation of the brand of janna yes reputation our reputation is so important and we need to ensure to to guarantee to our clients that we stand head and shoulders above i've had funds come to me we we do our uh audits they've come in they've looked at our processes procedures you are miles ahead of us you put us to shame what's your advice to those folks who are coming in saying what you're doing kevin is putting us to shame you say here's how i would advise you to modernize your environment what's your advice well backup is no longer in d i's just look at the bcp and the dr thing it's no longer just about anticipating a hardware failure hub is very reliable but it can still fail network failure malware and malware is increasingly something we have to protect again that your your database is must be insured so you've got to think about it what's the best strategy and that and so you start with those primary objectives standing vms up in the cloud is you know you've got to understand cloud environments so seek good advice really research and and go for the solution that really offers hide the complexity if you can because at least if you guys make sure you can have someone over there that does all the the cloud stuff someone over there that knows all the hardware and then they can all get into a room and we can but most companies now are looking for that single pane of glass and you if you plan right and size your requirements then you you'll be okay in that respect and and it is an endorsement to dell [Music] um implementation phase well they're very good through the through the investigation phase their proposals were very very sound the um the costings the financial benefits were all laid out for me i was able to take a very firm recommendation to my board and we were able to secure that funding and then the implementation kevin that's great advice do do your due diligence and i'm sure now in this very dynamic different world that you're in you're in a much better position than you would have been had this not been able to be moved forward under your leadership we thank you so much for joining us on thecube today and sharing the successes that you're having at janna pleasure for kevin pritchard i'm lisa martin you're watching the cube

>> Hi, and welcome to data cloud catalyst women in tech round table panel discussion. I am so excited to have three fantastic female executives with me today who have been driving transformation through data throughout their entire career. With me today is Lisa Davis SVP and CIO of Blue Shield of California. We also have Nishita Henry who is the chief innovation officer at Deloitte and Teresa Briggs, who is on a variety of board of directors, including our very own Snowflake. Welcome, ladies. >> Thank you. So I'm just going to dive right in. You all have really amazing careers and resumes behind you. I'm really curious, throughout your career, how have you seen the use of data evolve throughout your career? And Lisa, I'm going to start with you. >> Thank you. Having been in technology my entire career, technology and data has really evolved from being the province of a few in an organization to frankly being critical to everyone's business outcomes. But now every business leader really needs to embrace data analytics and technology. We've been talking about digital transformation probably the last five, seven years. We've all talked about disrupt or be disrupted. At the core of that digital transformation is the use of data, data, and analytics that we derive insights from and actually improve our decision-making by driving a differentiated experience and capability into market. So data has involved as being, I would say, almost tactical in some sense over my technology career to really being a strategic asset of what we leveraged personally in our own careers, but also what we must leverage as companies to drive a differentiated capability to experience and remain relative in the market today. >> Nishita curious your take on, how you've seen data evolve? >> Yeah, I agree with Lisa, it has definitely become the lifeblood of every business, right? It used to be that there were a few companies in the business of technology. Every business is now a technology business. Every business is a data business. It is the way that they go to market, shape the market and serve their clients. Whether you're in construction, whether you're in retail, whether you're in healthcare doesn't matter, right? Data is necessary for every business to survive and thrive. And I remember at the beginning of my career, data was always important, but it was about storing data. It was about giving people individual reports. It was about supplying that data to one person or one business unit in silos. And it then evolved right over the course of time and to integrating data and to saying, all right, how does one piece of data correlate to the other? And how can I get insights out of that data? Now let's go on to the point of how do I use that data to predict the future? How do I use that data to automate the future? How do I use that data not just for humans to make decisions but for other machines to make decisions, right? Which is a big leap and a big change in how we use data, how we analyze data and how we use it for insights and evolving our businesses. >> Yeah. It's really changed so tremendously, just in the past five years, it's amazing. So Teresa, we've talked a lot about the data cloud, where do you think we're heading with that? And also how can future leaders really guide their careers in data, especially in those jobs where we don't traditionally think of them in the data science space, curious your thoughts on that. >> Yeah. Well, since I'm on the Snowflake board, I'll talk a little bit about the Snowflake data cloud that we're getting your company's data out of the silos that exist all over your organization. We're bringing third party data in to combine with your own data and we're wrapping a governance structure around it and feeding it out to your employees so that they can get their jobs done. And it's as simple as that, I think we've all seen the pandemic accelerated the digitization of our work. And if you ever doubted that the future of work is here, it is here. And companies are scrambling to catch up by providing the right amount of data, collaboration tools, workflow tools for their workers to get their jobs done. Now it used to be, as prior, people have mentioned that in order to work with data, you had to be a data scientist. But I was an auditor back in the day and we used to work on 16 columns spreadsheet. And now if you're an accounting major coming out of college, joining an auditing firm, you have to be tech and data savvy because you're going to be extracting, manipulating, analyzing, and auditing data. That massive amounts of data that sit in your client's IT systems. I'm on the board of Warby Parker. And you might think that their most valuable asset is their amazing frame collection but it's actually their data. There are 360 degree view of the customer. And so if you're a merchant or you're in strategy or marketing or talent or the co-CEO, you're using data every day in your work. And so I think it's going to become a ubiquitous skill that any anyone who's a knowledge worker has to be able to work with data. >> Now, I think it's just going to be organic to every role going forward in the industry. >> So Lisa curious about your thoughts about data cloud, the future of it, and how people can really leverage it in their jobs from future leaders. >> Yeah, absolutely. Most enterprises today are, I would say, hybrid multi-cloud enterprises. What does that mean? That means that we have data sitting on prem. We have data sitting in public clouds through software, as a service applications. We have a data everywhere. Most enterprises have data everywhere. Certainly those that have owned infrastructure or weren't born on the web. One of the areas that I'd love that data cloud is addressing is the area around data portability and mobility. Because I have data sitting in various locations through my enterprise, how do I aggregate that data to really drive meaningful insights out of that data to drive better business outcomes. And at Blue Shield of California, one of our key initiatives is what we call an experience cube. What does that mean? It means how do I drive transparency of data between providers and members and payers so that not only do I reduce overhead on providers and provide them a better experience or hospital systems or doctors, but ultimately how do we have the member have at their power of their fingertips the value of their data holistically so that we're making better decisions about their healthcare? One of the things Teresa was talking about was the use of this data. And I would drive to data democratization. We got to put the power of data into the hands of everyone, not just data scientists. Yes, we need those data scientists to help us build AI models to really drive and tackle these tougher challenges and business problems that we may have in our environments. But everybody in the company, both on the IT side, both on the business side, really need to understand of how do we become a data insights driven enterprise, put the power of the data into everyone's hands so that we can accelerate capabilities, right? And leverage that data to ultimately drive better business results. So as a leader, as a technology leader, part of our responsibility, our leadership is to help our companies do that. And that's really one of the exciting things that I'm doing in my role now at Blue Shield of California. >> Yeah. It's really, really exciting time. I want to shift gears a little bit and focus on women in tech. So I think in the past 5 to 10 years there has been a lot of headway in this space but the truth is women are still underrepresented in the tech space. So what can we do to attract more women into technology? Quite honestly. So Nishita curious what your thoughts are on that? >> Great question. And I am so passionate about this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is I have two daughters of my own and I know how important it is for women and young girls to actually start early in their love for technology and data and all things digital, right? So I think it's one very important to start early, starting early education, building confidence of young girls that they can do this, showing them role models. We at Deloitte just partnered with LOV engineer to actually make comic books centered around young girls and boys in the early elementary age to talk about how heroes in techs solve everyday problems. And so really helping to get people's minds around tech is not just in the back office, coding on a computer, tech is about solving problems together that help us as citizens as customers, right? And as humanity. So I think that's important. I also think we have to expand that definition of tech as we just said, it's not just about database design. It's not just about Java and Python coding. It's about design, it's about the human machine interfaces. It's about how do you use it to solve real problems and getting people to think in that kind of mindset makes it more attractive and exciting. And lastly, I'd say, look we have a absolute imperative to get a diverse population of people, not just women but minorities, those with other types of backgrounds, disabilities, et cetera, involved because this data is being used to drive decision-making, and if we're all involved and how that data makes decisions, it can lead to unnatural biases that no one intended but can happen just 'cause we haven't involved a diverse enough group of people around it. >> Absolutely. Lisa, I'm curious about your thoughts on this. >> Oh, I agree with everything Nishita said. I've been passionate about this area. I think it starts with first, we need more role models. We need more role models as women in these leadership roles throughout various sectors. And it really is, it starts with us and helping to pull other women forward. So I think it certainly it's part of my responsibility. I think all of us as female executives that if you have a seat at the table to leverage that seat at the table to drive change to bring more women forward, more diversity forward into the boardroom and into our executive suites. I also want to touch on a point Nishita made about women. We're the largest consumer group in the company yet we're consumers, but we're not builders. This is why it's so important that we start changing that perception of what tech is. And I agree that it starts with our young girls. We know the data shows that we lose our young girls by middle school, very heavy peer pressure. It's not so cool to be smart or do robotics or be good at math and science. We start losing our girls in middle school. So they're not prepared when they go to high school and they're not taking those classes in order to major in these STEM fields in college. So we have to start the pipeline early with our girls. And then I also think it's a measure of what your boards are doing. What is the executive leadership and your goals around diversity and inclusion? How do we invite more diverse population to the decision-making table? So it's really a combination of efforts. One of the things that certainly is concerning to me is during this pandemic, I think we're losing one in four women in the workforce now because of all the demands that our families are having to navigate through this pandemic. The last statistic I saw in the last four months is we've lost 850,000 women in the workforce. This pipeline is critical to making that change in these leadership positions. >> Yeah, it's really a critical time. And now we're coming to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you Teresa, what would be a call to action to everyone listening, both men and women since it needs to be solved by everyone to address the gender gap in the industry. >> I'd encourage to you to become an active sponsor. Research shows that women and minorities are less likely to be sponsored than white men. Sponsorship is a much more active form than mentorship. Sponsorship involves helping someone identify career opportunities and actively advocating for them in those roles, opening your network, giving very candid feedback. And we need men to participate too. There are not enough women in tech to pull forward and sponsor the high potential women that are in our pipelines. And so we need you to be part of the solution. >> Nishita, real quickly, what would be your call to action to everyone? >> I'd say, look around your teams, see who's on them and make deliberate decisions about diversifying those teams, as positions open up, make sure that you have a diverse set of candidates. Make sure that there are women that are part of that team and make sure that you are actually hiring and putting people into positions based on potential, not just experience. >> And real quickly, Lisa, we'll close it out with you. What would your call to action be? >> Well, it's hard to, but Nishita and what Teresa shared, I think were very powerful actions. I think it starts with us taking action at our own table, making sure you're driving diverse panels and hiring, setting goals for the company, having your board engaged and holding us accountable and driving to those goals will help us all see a better outcome with more women at the executive table and diverse populations. >> So I want to talk to you all about a pivotal moment in your career. It could have been a mentorship. It could have been maybe a setback in your career or maybe a time that you really took a risk and it paid off big, something that really helped define your career going forward. Curious what those moments were for you all in your career. Teresa, we'll start with you. >> Sure. I had a great sponsor and he was a white male by the way. He identified some potential in me when I was early in my career about five years in and he really helped pave the way for a number of decisions I made along the way to take different roles in the firm. I was at Deloitte, he's still in my life today. We get together a couple of times a year. And even though we're both retired from Deloitte, we still have that relationship and what that tell me was how to be a great sponsor. And so one of the most satisfying things I did in my career was when I finally got to the place where I was no longer reaching for the next rank of the ladder for myself, I got to turn around and pull through all of these amazing future leaders into roles that were going to help them accelerate their careers. >> What about you, Lisa? >> I think there's been many of those moments. One I'll speak about is having spin 20, 25 years in technology, I had spent my first career in department of defense, moved over to academia and then went to a high-tech firm on their IT side, really in hopes of getting the CIO role having been a CIO, I did not get the CIO role, and really had a decision to make. One of the opportunities that was presented to me was to move to the business side to run a $9 billion P&L on one of the core business units within the company. And of course, I was terrified. It was a very risky decision having never run a P&L before and not starting small going right to the billion dollar mark in terms of (laughs) what that would look like. And frankly decided to seize that opportunity and I've certainly learned in my career that those opportunities that really push you out of your comfort zone that take you down a really completely different path or where the greatest opportunities for growth and learning occur. So I did that role for three and a half years before coming into my current role back to a CIO role at Blue Shield of California in healthcare, and just a tremendous amount of learning, having been on the business side and managing a P&L that I now apply to how I engage with my partners at Blue Shield. >> I couldn't agree more. I think forcing yourself out of that comfort zone is so critical for learning and driving your career for sure. Nishita, what about you? >> Yeah, I agree. Lots of pivotal moments, but I'll talk about one very early in my career, actually was an intern and one of my responsibilities was to help research back then facial recognition technology. And I had to go out there and evaluate vendors and take meetings with vendors and figure out, all right, which ones do we want to actually test? And I remember I was leading a meeting, two of my kind of supervisors were with us. And I know I went through the list of questions and then the meeting kind of ended. And I didn't speak up at that point in time to kind of say here are the next steps or here's what I recommend. I kind of looked at my supervisors to do that. Just assuming they should be wrapping it up and they should be the ones to make a final decision or choice. And after that meeting, he came to me and he's like you know Nishita you did a really nice job in bringing these technologies forward but I wish you would have spoken up because you're the one who've done the most research. And you're the one who has the most background on what we should do next. Next time don't stand by and let someone else be your voice. And it was so powerful for me and I realized, wow, I should have more confidence in myself to be able to actually use my voice and do what I was asked to do versus leave it to someone else because I assumed that I was too junior or I assumed I didn't have enough experience. So that was really pivotal for me early in my career to learn how to use my voice. >> I'm really curious for you, Nishita. What drew you to the industry of data? What was something when you were young that drew you into that space? >> Yeah. So my background is actually in engineering and it's actually funny. It's an electrical engineering and I probably couldn't do another thermal dynamics equation to save my life anymore (laughs). But what drew me to technology was problem solving, right? It was all about how do I take a bunch of data and information and create a new solution, right? Whether it was, how do I create a device? I remember in college, right? Creating a device to go down stadium steps and clean, right? How do I take data for how this machine will interact with the environment in order to create it? So I always viewed it as problem solving and that's what has always attracted me into the field. >> That's great. So, Teresa, I'm curious, at what point did you feel that you really found your voice in your career, in yourself as a part of your professional life? >> Yeah. About 12 years into my career I started working as an M&A partner and I was working with a private equity firm along with their lawyers and other advisors, bankers and so forth. And what I realized in that situation was that I was the expert in what I did. And so, I mean, I found my voice before that in many other ways but that was sort of a moment where I felt like, "I'm here to deliver an expertise to this group of people. And none of them have the expertise that I have. And so I need to just stand firm in my shoes and deliver that expertise with confidence." So that was my example. >> That's great. Well, Lisa, what about you? What was that moment that you felt that you just found your voice kind of in your groove and that confidence kicked in? >> No, I don't know if it was exactly a moment but it was certainly a realization. Right out of college, I was working for the federal government in department of defense and certainly male dominated. And through that realized that to be heard, I had to become very good at what I do. So I built that confidence, frankly, by delivering results and capability and becoming an expert in the work, essentially the services that I provide. And when you become very good at what you do, regardless of what you look like, then people will start to listen. So I think it starts with delivering results. I think you have to build your confidence and through that you find to use your voice so that you are being heard, having worked in department of defense and academia and high tech, I've had to leverage that throughout my entire career ultimately for my voice to be heard, and to be represented within the roles that I was playing. >> That's great. I know one of the things that we've also talked about is just the value, the business value, the importance of having a diverse workforce and a diverse team and the value that that brings to the outcomes. What are some of your strategies to create those types of teams? What, as leaders in your company, you manage a team and what is your advice to them, your strategies to get a diverse pool of candidates and a diverse team. Nishita, what about you? >> I think it's looking beyond what the individual role is, right? So a lot of times we have a role description and you want these certain skills and so (indistinct), or you get a certain set of candidates. I think it's taking a step back and saying, "What are the objectives of my team? What am I trying to accomplish? What types of business acumen do I need on that team? What types of tech acumen, what types of personalities? Do I want people who know how to work with others and therefore bring them together? Do I need people who are also drivers and know how to get things done, right?" It's finding the right chemistry. We have a business chemistry, talk track around. We don't need all different kinds to make a really good team. So I think it's taking a step back and understanding what you need the makeup of your team to be, understanding the hard skills and the soft skills. And then thinking about what are all the sources you could really go to for them and being a little bit non-traditional and saying, "Do I need a full-time person all the time to do this job that's sitting here? Can I be more diverse in finding people from the crowd? Can I have part-time resources? Can I use different pieces and parts of the ecosystem to actually bring together the full team that represents the diversity?" It's just expanding our mind and stop thinking about a role to person, start thinking about it as the makeup of a team, to the outcome you desire. >> It's really about being creative and just thinking in new ways. Teresa, I'm super curious, since you sit on a bunch of different boards, what kind of strategies do you see companies taking to attract different talent? >> So I can address that from the board lens, for sure. And boards are probably one of the least diverse bodies in business right now, but that is changing, and for the better, obviously they were traditionally kind of white male dominated. And then we've had this wave of women joining boards. And now we're starting to see a wave of diverse individuals join boards. And with each person who's diverse that joins a board that I'm on, the dynamic of the discussion changes because they bring a different perspective. They bring a different way of thinking. They came from a different background or a different functional skillset or a different geography or you name, whatever element of diversity you want to see. We just added the head of Apple music to the service in our board. And so you might scratch your head and say, "Wow, the head of Apple music and an enterprise software company that is a B2B software company." But he thinks deeply about how the end user consumes in his case content and in our case software. And so he's able to bring just a completely different perspective to the discussion we have at the board table. And I think at the end of the day, that's what diversity is all about, is improving the outcome of whatever it is. If you're producing something or making important decisions like we do in board rooms. >> That's amazing. Lisa, real quickly, what are some of your strategies? >> Yeah. Well, we know diverse teams actually produce better business results. So there's no reason, there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't think in that lens. I think it starts with our hiring and the makeup of our teams. I think it requires more than creativity though. You have to be very purposeful. I'm in the process of hiring four leadership positions on my team. And it's really to me, almost like a puzzle piece of diverse perspectives and knowledge and capabilities that come together that ultimately create a high performing team. But I can't tell you how many times I got to go back to HR and say, "I need to see more diverse talent. Are there any more women in the pool?" One of the things we've struggled, we have to get more women into the roles is, and we heard this from Sheryl Sandberg, as women, we feel we need to meet every qualification on an application. Whereas men, "I got a couple I'm good to go." And they throw their name in the hat. They take much more risk than we do as women. So we need to encourage our women to get out of your comfort zone. You don't need to meet every qualification. What Nishita was saying of thinking more broadly about what this role requires and the type of individual that we're looking for, but be purposeful in terms of driving to diversity as our end result. >> That is so true. What you just said. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. It's really interesting to hear all your strategies and thanks for sharing. >> And you're clear.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (techno music) Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. One of the biggest topics we've been digging into as we head through 2020, has really been multi-cloud and as the customers as they're really going through their own transformations understanding what they're doing in their data center to modernize what's happening between all of the public clouds they use, and all the services that fit amongst them. Happy to bring back one of our CUBE alumni to dig into a specific topic. Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU. Of course data protection, a big piece. A big buzz in the industry for a number of years, in one of those areas, in multi-cloud, that's definitely of big importance. Simon, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me back on, it's exciting to be here. >> All right, so, Simon, first, give us the update. >> Sure. >> It's 2020. We've seen you at many of the conferences we go to. You're based in Boston, so not to far for you to come out to our Boston area studio here. You know a 40 minute drive without traffic so, >> Not bad at all. >> give us the latest on HYCU. >> Certainly well and Stu, thanks again for having me into your studio, it's gorgeous, everything looks great. It's a lot easier than traveling over to Europe to see you. So this is very very convenient actually. But since we last spoke, which I think was about six months ago now, HYCU has been growing fast and furiously, you know we started out with the world's first purpose built backup and recovery product for Nutanix Of course, we added VMware we added Google Cloud, we wrapped all the data together into multi-cloud data protection as a service, and we called that HYCU Protege. Well I am so thrilled to announce that in just the three months since we've launched Protege, we have seen hundreds of customers flocking to it. And what we're finding is that customers are calling us and they're saying things like, "let me get this straight, "I'm already backing up my data on-prem with you, "I can now migrate to the cloud, "bring it back again for disaster recovery as a service, "and it's all part of HYCU?" and we say yes, you know, and they say, "and this is all offered as a service?" Yes, "and it's natively integrated "into all the platforms that I'm using?" Yes. And I think so customers today, are more and more in need of the kind of expertise that HYCUs providing because they're looking now much more strategically than ever before, at what workloads to leave on-prem and which workloads to migrate to the cloud, and they want to make sure that, that entire data pathway is protected from beginning to end. >> Yeah, it's really interesting stuff, I think back to early in my career that you know that data protection layer was like, "well, this is what I'm running "and don't change it." Think about like when you've rolled out like virtual tape as a technology it was, you know, "I don't want to have to change my backup "because that is just something that runs "and I don't do it." For last five years or so it feels like customers. There's so much change in their environment that they are looking for things that are more flexible, you talked about some of the flexible adoption models for payment and the like that they're looking for. So, you know, what do you think customers are just more embracing of that change, is it just that changes their daily business and therefore data protection needs to come along with that. Well it's funny you asked because just a few years ago I was on theCUBE with you and you said to me, "you guys have a perpetual license model, "what are you doing about that?" and I said, "don't worry, it is shifting to as a service it's going subscription," which was super important for the market is, I've had conversations with folks who are selling cooking gear and they're trying to sell that as a service, I saw yesterday, somebody, I think Panera Bread, is offering a coffee as a service. You know, I think what we've started to realize is that the convenience of the as a service model, the flexibility, which I would argue was probably driven by cloud technology and cloud technology adoption, is something the market has truly embraced and I think anybody who's not moved in that direction at this point is probably very much being left behind. >> Okay, another technology that often goes hand in hand in discussion with data protection is security. Of course ransomware is a hot topic conversation the last few years, how does that fit into your conversations with customers, what are you saying? >> That's a great question. So you know one of our advisory board members, his name is Kevin Powers, and he runs the Boston College cyber security program. I had the privilege and the honor of attending the FBI Boston College cyber program recently at a large scale event at Boston College, and FBI Director Ray was actually on hand to talk about this problem, and it was incredible you know he said, "cyber crime as a service "is becoming a major issue," you're talking about the commoditization of hard to build malware, that's now just skyrocketing off the charts, the amount of cyber exploitation that's going on across the world. This is creating massive massive issues for the FBI because they've got so many thousands of cases, they've got to deal with. And while they're doing a fantastic job. We believe prevention is certainly the key. So one of the things that has been really really wonderful as a CEO to watch has been the way that some of our customers have actually been able to crack the code in terms of not having to give in to these bad actors. We've had actual customers who have had ransomware attacks had millions of dollars in data, literally stolen from them, and they've been told, "you've got to deposit, "$5 million on this Bitcoin account by midnight, "or we're deleting the data." Right? Because HYCU is Linux based because HYCU is not Windows Server based because HYCU is natively integrated into all the platforms that we support. We were able to help those customers get their data back without paying a penny. So I think that that's one of those moments where you really sort of say to yourself, "God I'm glad I'm in this business here," we've built a product that doesn't just do what we say it's going to do, it does a heck of a lot more. And I think it's it's absolutely a massive problem and data protection is really a key part of the answer, >> You know it's great to hear their success stories there, you know I think back to earlier days where it'd be like well you know what if I set up for disasters and data protection and things like that, well maybe I haven't thought about it or maybe I kind of implemented it but I've never really tested it, but there's more and more reasons why I might actually need to leverage these technologies that I've deployed, and it's nice to know that they're there. You know it's not just an insurance thing that I've never used. >> Oh absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right. So I started off our discussion time in talking about multi-cloud So you talked about earlier we first first met it was at the Nutanix shows in their environments, and some of that you've gone along with Nutanix as they've gone through hybrid and multi-cloud what they call enterprise Cloud Messaging. >> Sure. >> And play with those environments so bring us up to speed. What have your big customers doing with cloud where does HYCU fit in and what are the updates on your product. >> Yeah, sure. And I'll start off by saying that at this point about a third of all AHV customers are using a HYCU for backup AND recovery. >> And just for our audience that doesn't know, AHV of course is Nutanix's >> Yes. >> Acropolis Hypervisor >> Absolutely. >> That comes baked into their solution as an alternative to people like VMware. >> Perfectly said as always sir, yes very much, and you know we've been thrilled as the rise of AHV and Nutanix has sort of taken the market by storm. And when we started out, you know we use to came on the show with zero customers and a new product and said, "we believe in AHV and we think it's going to be great "and we're going to back it up." And that's really paid off in spades for us, which was wonderful, but we also recognize that customers needed that VMware backups. We built a VADP integration and then we started going after the public cloud. So we started with Google Cloud, and we said we're going to build the world's first purpose built backup and recovery as a service for GCP. We launched that last year and it was tremendous you know some of the world's largest companies and organizations and governments are actually now running HYCU specifically for Google Cloud. So we've been thrilled about that. I think the management team at GCP has done a terrific job of making sure that Google can be really competitive in the cloud wars, and we're thrilled to support them. >> Yeah, and I'm glad you've got some customer stories on Google because you know the industry watchers out there it's like, "well you know Google they're number three," and you know we know that Google has some really strong data products Where they're very well known but I'm curious when you're talking to your customers. Is there anything that's kind of commonalities to why customers are using Google and you know what feedback you're hearing from your customers out there. >> Sure I mean I'll start off by saying this, we've polled our customers and we've now got over 1,300 customers in 56 countries. So we polled all of them and we just said, "how many data silos do you have, "how many platforms, how many clouds?" The average was five. Right, so the first thing to say is that I think almost all of these large enterprise customers in public sector and private sector are really using all of them, the extent to which they may be using AWS versus Azure versus GCP, versus Nutanix versus VMware on-prem. we can argue and debate but I think all customers at this point of any size and scale are trying them all out. I think what Google's done really well is they've started to build a really strong partner program. I think where they were a little bit sort of late to the party in terms of AWS and Azure being there sort of first. But I think what Thomas Kurian did when he came in is he sort of tripled down on sort of building out that ecosystem and saying, "what's really important "to make cloud customers comfortable "that their data is going to be as safe on Google Cloud, "as it was on-prem," and I'm thrilled that they've elected to make data protection sort of one of the key pillars of that strategy, not just because we're a data protection company, but because I do think that that was one of the encumbrances in terms of that evolution to cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely, seen a huge growth in the ecosystem around Google. The other big cloud provider that has a very strong partner ecosystem is the one when I went to the show last year, their CEO Satya Nadella talked about trust, so of course talking about Microsoft and Azure, very large ecosystem there, trying to emphasize, maybe against others and by the way you saw this as much of a shot against Google >> Sure. >> you know, how do I trust Google with my data and information from the consumer side as AWS is I might be concerned that they might be competing against them. So, how about the Microsoft relationship? >> It's a great question. So again, so when we started on-prem, with our initial purpose built backup recovery products. We added Google Cloud. You know I'm now thrilled to announce that we're also going to be launching Azure backup and recovery. It's also native, it is purpose built into the Azure Marketplace. All the things you've come to expect from HYCU backup. The simplicity, the fact that it's SLO based. The fact that you can actually go in and decide how many times a day you want a different recovery point et cetera. All of those levels of configuration are now baked in to HYCUs own purpose built backup and recovery as a service for Azure. But I think the important thing to remember about this wonderful wonderful new addition to our portfolio. Is that, it is a critical component of HYCU Protege. So getting back to your question from before about multi-cloud data protection and what we're seeing, we call this the year of migration, because for all of these cloud platforms, what are they really trying to do they need to move massive amounts of data in a safe and resilient manner, to the cloud. So remember after we built out these purpose built backup recovery services, Azure is now one of those. We then pulled all that data together under a single pane of glass we called it HYCU Protege. We then said to customers, we're going to enable you to automatically migrate with the touch of a button an entire workload to the cloud, and then bring it back again for disaster recovery, and we will protect the data on-prem in the cloud and back again. >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause when we kind of look at what's happening in the marketplace, for many years it was a discussion of what's moving from the data center to the public cloud, some things are moving back from the environment edge, of course, pulls things even further. Often it's, I say it's not even migration anymore it's just mobility, because we are going to be moving things and spinning things up and building things in many more places, and it's going to change. As we started out that conversation, there's so much change going on that so you're giving customers some optionality there, so that this isn't just a one way, you know, let's stick it on a truck put it on this thing and get it to that environment but I need to be able to enable some of that optionality and know what I'm doing today but also knowing that you know six months a year from now, we know things are going to be different >> Yes, yes! >> And in each of these some of those environments. >> Absolutely. We call it the three Ds data assurance, data mobility, and disaster recovery. So I think the ability to not only protect your data, whether it's on-prem as it journeys to the cloud or whether it's in the cloud, the ability to actually assist the customer in the migration. And what I hear time and time again is, "oh but Azure has a tool," or "Google has a tool for migration." Of course they have tools for migration, but I think the challenge for customers is, how do I affect that data resiliency, how do I ensure that I can move the data as a complete workload. Moving an entire SAP HANA instance, for example, to the cloud. And it protected the entire time as it journeys up there, and then bring it back for the disaster recovery without professional services. Because again, you know HYCU it's about simplicity, we want to make sure that these customers can get the same level of readiness, the same ease of deployment that they get from their cloud vendor, when they're thinking about the data protection and the migration. >> All right, I want to click down one layer >> Please. >> in here. We're talking about multi-cloud, you talk about simplicity. >> Sure. >> Well, Kubernetes might not be the simplest thing out there but it absolutely is a fundamental piece of the infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment so you know your partners, Google with GKE, Azure with AKS and >> And Carbon. >> Carbon with a K from Nutanix everyone now, I say it's not about distributions it's really every platform that you're going to use is going to have Kubernetes built into it so what does that mean from a data protection standpoint? Do you just plug into all of these environments you've tested it got customers using it? >> It's a great question it comes up, as you can imagine, all the time. I think it's something that is becoming more and more ready for prime time. A lot of the major vendors are moving to it, making heavy investments in Kubernetes, we ourselves have over 100 customers that are actively using Kubernetes in one form or another and backing the data up using HYCU so there's no question in my mind that HYCU is Kubernetes ready. I think what's really exciting for us is some of the native integrations we're working on with Google and with Nutanix so whether it's Carbon whether it's GKE, we want to make sure that when we work with these platforms that we mimic, how the platform is supporting Kubernetes, so that our customers can get the same experience from HYCU that they're getting from the platform provider itself. >> All right, Simon want to give you the final word. Bring us inside your customers what they're doing with multi-cloud and where HYCU fits there, here in 2020. Sure, we talked about prime time. Cloud for many years has been something that I think large enterprises have talked a big game about, but have been really dipping their toe in the water with. What we've seen the last two years, is a massive massive at scale migration to the largest three public clouds, whether that's GCP, whether that's Azure or the other one. (laughing) We're thrilled to support GCP and Azure because GCP and Azure, we believe do provide the most value to our customers. But I think the name of the game here is not just supporting a customer in the cloud, it's understanding that every customer today is to is on a journey, whether they're on-prem, whether their journeying to cloud or they're in cloud those three Ds, data assurance, which is our backup, data mobility, which is the automated migration, or disaster recovery readiness. That's the name of the game and that's how HYCU wants to help. >> All right, Simon Taylor. Always a pleasure to catch up with you thank you so much for the HYCU updates, >> Stu thanks so much for having us on. >> All right, be sure to check out www.thecube.net for all of our inventory of the shows that we've been at the videos we've done, you can even search on keywords in companies, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (Techno Music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at Oracle Park in San Francisco for a really special event. It's called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day, really bringing together a bunch of innovative companies in the sports tech space, really with a focus on not only sports but beyond sports. And we're happy to have really one of the key players here that made this all happen from Dentsu. He's Fumihiko Nakajima, the Senior Director of Business Development from Dentsu. Welcome. >> Hi, nice to meet you. >> Yeah absolutely. So for people that aren't familiar with Dentsu, give us a little overview of Dentsu as a company and then we'll get into the specific event. >> Yeah, Dentsu has a long history focusing on broadcasting rights and sponsorship for event globally. But combining such kind of global asset and new technology to create a new business in sports tech industry and beyond sports industry. >> Right. So pretty interesting way to do that, so you didn't just go find some interesting companies, you guys have created this event to bring a lot of companies together, demonstrate their technology. What was kind of the thinking and how did you guys get involved? >> Yeah. Combining the new asset and technologies and global asset, there are lot of the Japanese company global brand, SoftBank, ITOCHU, Sony Music, Microsoft, and CBC. Such kind of companies very interested in, create new business with innovative staff all over the world. So that's a basis of this event. >> Right, right. So, you got the Tokyo Olympics coming up in a year, so that's kind of a catalyst to make all this happen. Is there anything special that you see between, you know, kind of sports technology and managing teams, sports technology applied to the athletes, and then sports technology applied to the fan experience that you're most excited about? >> Yeah, that's correct. This is a beginning. Next month world Rugby World Cup, the next year, Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic we have. That's a beginning, so, you know the, the sports and live entertainment beyond live entertainment, health cares, biometrics, bio mechanics, from the point of sports. But we enter into the new field and explore the new business field. >> Jeff: Right. >> With the great start-ups and industry leaders on the basis, that who joining these communities. >> Right, right. No, it's pretty interesting because you know the, companies spend so much money now on the players and really look at them as investments. A lot of players get hundred million dollar contracts now. So it's pretty interesting on kind of the health care and the like we talked earlier, sleep and nutrition-- >> Yeah. >> And all these things to keep that athlete performing, are really applicable to everyday people like you and me. >> Yeah. You know that Dentsu has more than one century history in marketing and branding all over the world. And our assets, such kind, properties and, global network, will really help the new technologies and new start up, the new business field. >> Jeff: Right. >> Grow rapidly. >> Jeff: Right. >> All over the world. >> Right. It's interesting, too, that so much of the stuff around the sports, you talked about sponsorship and rights beyond just the score, you know, is so important these days. To feed the 24/7 news cycle, to do fantasy sports, the changes in the gambling law, so there's so much stuff around sports that's beyond the sport that's watched in this industry grow and grow and grow. >> Yeah it's a very interesting point. We know new, legal we will need, a new legal and a new set-up structure for the new business. >> Jeff: Right. >> In specific Tokyo, a lot of specialist joined to help such kind of structures for the futures. >> Right. So before I let you go, it's a busy day, have you been to this park before, home of the Giants, and what do you think? >> Yeah very, very, very special day. It will be very memorable day that one of the best historic venue in America, the San Francisco Giants stadium, Oracle Park. We really excited to share our progress, concrete progress, and want to expand our trial to all over the world. >> Great, well thanks for inviting us and we're, we're excited to watch the story unfold. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright. He's Fumihiko, I'm Jeff, you're watchin' theCUBE. We're at Oracle Park in San Francisco, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's the Cube. Covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Comvault. >> Welcome back to the Music City. This is the Cube at Commvault GO. I'm Stu Miniman with my Co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program one of the users of the show, actually, going to get to see her on stage at the keynote tomorrow. Ah, Michele Buschman who's the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Thanks so much for jointing us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, ah, give us a little bit about your company and your roles of responsibility there. >> Sure, so, um, as you mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Um, I pretty much am responsible, you know, in the acting role or CIO, CTO, and CISO. So, I manage all technology for the company reporting to the COO. Um, our company is a top 15 independent mortgage bank. Um, we do about 10 billion dollars in mortgages a year, and have about a 25 hundred employee user base. >> Alright, so you've just got a couple of roles there, and luckily your in an industry, not much regulation to worry about, things aren't changing, things are kind of static. You just kind of put in a couple hours at the office and go, go take a nap, right? >> Ya, right (laughing). >> Um, why don't you tell us, what are some of those dynamics that are driving your up level business that are impacting, uh, the technology side. >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, you know, the mortgage industry is somewhat cyclical, and we are in that range where interest rates are going up, um, margin pressures are high. So, you know it's all about doing more with less and saving money. Um, in traditionally in the mortgage banking world, um, you know, IT resources, you're always a little bit short? Um, and so, that, you know, drives me to look for strategies that allow me to leverage my technical resources more for business value operations, than managing infrastructure, keeping lights on, um, which has really motivated us to move to the Cloud, and adopt platform type solutions similar to Commvault to be able to be more efficient with our few resources that we do have in our technology team. >> Alright, can you speak a little bit about Cloud. What is that driver, what does Cloud mean to your organization? And ah, yeah, what is the strategy as it sits today? >> Absolutely, so, um, we're kind of unique, I guess, to an extent in that, you know, when I walked into the organization four and a half years ago. The bulk of our critical business applications were already Sass hosted applications. Um, that grew out of the need because they had such a small technical team, um, you know, for the investments to manage the infrastructure to host applications is very high. So, um, luckily enough, I already had a head start, ah, in that the bulk of our critical business applications were CSS Sass hosted, so, um, what I've done since then is to look for those solutions that are more commodities. So, you know, why manage email on Prem when, you know, Microsoft can do a way better job than we could with the small staff we have. So, you know, it's slowly been, you know, taking each application, pulling it out, putting it into the Cloud, so that my team can be better leveraged to actually work on security initiatives, and um, business value, and transformation type of solutions. So, it is part of it is a, you know accessibility as well. Um, you know, we're in a changing environment where we want to be able to deliver our, um, employee workforce to be able to work anywhere, anytime, on any device, and in order to do that, we have to have solutions that are sitting out there, and accessible to them, um, and not always just sitting behind the firewall in the data center. >> So, let's talk a little bit about data management, data protection as it pertains to the business. What are some of the drivers, especially if you are in the Sass world that make you look at data protection suites as opposed to consuming native solutions within those services? >> Oh, absolutely. So, I very much have a strategy around platform services. Uh, when I walked into the organization, there's probably 30 different applications that were out in the environment, and none of them talked to each other. Um, when you're trying to manage, you know, bringing data across the organization to compile it and aggregate it to actually have something useful to the business. You have to have connected systems, but when you have a small team, it's very difficult to do that development working, connect all those systems, and manage them. So, what I like to look for is a platform solution, um, that will allow me to grow, um, as my budget allows, to add on the different modules that that platform solution, um, offers to me. So, you know, for example, you know, today's budget, I might have a certain limited amount that I can invest, but if I pick a solution that ultimately might give me 70, maybe 80 percent of the needs, um, then I'm only having to add in maybe a couple of other solutions and that cost to integrate and manage, and so overall it reduces the overall cost and complexity of the environment. >> So, you're in a mismatch of ten billion dollars a year in mortgages issued, yet, small IT staff, Sass solutions. When you think of Commvault 20 years, enterprise less solution, you don't think necessarily simple, easy to use, initially, so, why Commvault? >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, again within the first year I was there we went through a huge market share grab and so we grew 75 percent market share, and when I walked in the door, we needed to do investment in infrastructure. So, um, the original forecasts were totally blown out of the water, so the investment we made in small to midsize business type of solutions, we out grew before our contracts were due. So, when I went into this, um, we took about an 18 months, um, to take out time to find the right solution. Uh, we looked at about 6 different vendors, um, you know, we did a little bit of POC work, uh, we did references, um, and ah, basically at the end of the day I was looking for something that had a really good vision, um, that was platform driven, so I could continue to add additional products as budget allowed. Um, that had the ability to have more of a single pane of glass and very little man power to manage, um, and then, reliability was huge. Um, you know, we had some challenges with our previous solution of feeling comfortable that our backups would work in the event we had an incident. So, you know, when we looked at Commvault, um, you know, it may have been, um, you know, it's an enterprise solution which is what I wanted. I could scale without rip and replace. Um, great reputation, great vision, good, technology, you know, bones. Um, and so, you know, when I would go to the board for that, I said, you know, the investment may be a little bit more than a lower end solution, but it's going to give us the capability to grow with the business. >> You know Michele, it's interesting, if you dialed back and said you were looking at this five years ago, I wonder if the pricing strategy that Commvault had in place would fit what you're looking for. I'm sure you've seen as a customer, um, when I hear, you know, I kind of want to be able to reach that vision, but do it incrementally. Sounds like something you might get more from a startup? Maybe give us a little bit of insight what you've seen, how you look at this relationship, and what are some of those things that you are looking to add on in the future. >> Oh, absolutely, so, you know, absolutely, financials always come into place, right? You've got to be able to afford what you're putting into place. Um, you know, I will say that, um, their pricing model did change, you know, cause we had looked at that previously, and it was a pretty high price point to get in with the licensing under the perpetual licensing models. Um, so, with the change of how Commvault kind of moved with the times, more subscription style, made it a little more affordable for some of the smaller businesses to take advantage of. Um, and so, you know, that's how I kind of looked at it for, plus at the end of the day, if you're looking for a quality product around security, and recovery, and backup, it's worth the money to invest in something you feel comfortable that's going to meet that need. Um, and grow with you without, again, having you know, who wants to go through a migration every three years when your contracts up, right? Um, and then, as far as the other products, I'm looking, you know, at some of the new products that they've officially announced. It was really exciting to hear the CEO and COO talk today about the automation that they are building cause that plays absolutely into what we're trying to do in our organization. As we need stuff, you know, again, acception processing is what I always talk about. I only want to have to touch things when it's not working, and, you know, when there's some sort of exception. Um, and, so, I'm really excited about the way Commvault's headed down that path with the automation. Um, and then, also the data piece. Being able to really categorized the data, know if it's outdated or not. I mean, this is a very well known industry issue that we have, we are data hogs in the mortgage business. Um, and our users are as well. Uh, and so being able to identify the data that I have, I mean, you know, I walked into a situation where there's been no purge of data. You know, being able to really identify what is valuable date to not purge vs. the data we want to purge to reduce that footprint to reduce the risk for any kind of potential breech, or security incident. You know, the more you have out there, the more the chance you are going to get hit. >> So, you wear a bunch of hats that seem kind of in conflict especially, seeing that you report up to the COO. Security being the most interesting one. >> (Michele) Uh huh. >> How does your role as the CISO and your selection of the data protection suite, data management, impact your decision to go with a Commvault. >> Oh absolutely, that's huge as well, right? Um, you know, in our industry, we obviously are responsible for um, being custodians to a lot of personal information to consumers, so we have NPI, PI all over, and it's not even just with my critical business system vendor, you know, caus I rely on them heavily, they're much larger, they have, um, larger security teams, and larger budgets to typically protect our data. But, we also have that data internally into our own data warehouse. So, um, data protection is key. Um, so looking at products that will allow us to simplify that, have visibility into it, you know, that's another area I'm really looking forward to expanding my Commvalt use into as we start to actually, Um, you know, one of the other projects we're going to be working on potentially is moving our data warehouse to Microsoft Azure. So, um, you know, really having that, um, security plan figure out before the data is up in the cloud. >> Michele, I wonder what your experience has been with recovery. Is that something you test? Have you had to actually do a recovery? What is your experience been? >> Yeah, so, you know, knock on wood, I'm not sure if there's wood under here, but, you know, knock on wood. We haven't had a major incident, um, however, what we do, have done, now that we've actually deployed Commvault fully, um, is in, you know, it's too bad it's not a couple weeks from now because we're actually going to do a full DR exercise with our new backups now that are fully deployed with Commvault. >> So, you'll take a vacation the week after (laughing). >> So, we're going to actually test that out. That's one of the things that I task my team with is once my backups and everything was in place that we're going to, you know, do a tabletop exercise, but actually try to do a full recovery of some systems with the new backups to make sure we are all in good shape. Uh, but with that being said, I can already tell you just from a, um, you know, our old system to our new system, you know, with the features sets that we have available in Commvault compared to what we had in our other solution. The time to recover individual files is exponential. You know, our other solution, we had to recover an entire folder, not just individual files. And then, we're really excited also of being able to eventually being able to push out some self service file restoration capabilities that Commvalt allows us to do as well. >> So, as a natural consumer of, as a service, offering a mission critical businesses. How important is Commvalut role map to, as a service, for enterprise class solutions. >> Oh, I think that's great. I actually can't wait to see what they have to offer around that. Again, you know, um, I might be a unique use case, I don't know, because that's really how we manage our business from the IT side because of limited budget, limited resources is leveraging vendors. Um, so, I'm really excited to see how that evolves actually. Um, you know, from a service perspective. >> Okay, Michele, it's your second time coming to this event. For audiences that didn't come, what did you get out of it, what excites you the most coming to an event like this? >> I think there's two key things that I really enjoy going to conferences about. Um, one of course, is always the networking opportunities. I always, meet other people who have the same challenges that I do, and you know, they're looking at the same products, and being able to exchange ideas, um, and how you solve problems, and, you know talking to other people about real life issues, um, is so valuable. Uh, the other piece is always getting myself out of the office and getting more education. So, you know, really seeing what's evolving, what's changing, um, you know, what are the partners doing that work with Commvault, what's Commvault, you know, doing? Really, getting out of the office to have a chance to really get educated around that and what's really unique to about Commvalt GO to, is that a lot of it is customer based. Uh, you have customers up talking about their use cases and how they've implemented the product, so it's real life, ah, education, and not just, you know, um, a vendor up there talking about their product and selling it, right? >> Absolutely, we appreciate you sharing your story, Ah, with our audience here, and uh, congratulations on all the progress, ah, American Pacific Mortgage. And ah, boy, you know, tired of thinking of all the hats you've been wearing for those of us that wear a few hats, ah, we can definitely, ah, you know, appreciate that, alright. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more programming here at Commvault GO. Thanks for watching The Cube. >> Michele: Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018, brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville. You're watching theCUBE at Commvault GO. Our first year at this show, the third year of the show. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program Chris Powell, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Commvault. Thanks so much. >> Thanks, Stu. >> For inviting us to the Music City, and your party. >> We're glad to have you guys, thanks for being here. >> All right, so Chris, Commvault... I really like what I've seen at the show, so far. You made a statement that really resonated with me yesterday. You said, look, this is a 20 year old company, but it's very different than it was. We know cloud and AI and all these things are kind of changing. >> Yeah. >> Things like ransomware and GDPR are hot in the data world. When we look at our research, data is at the center of everything. So, you know, what's the brand of Commvault? If we think of a company that has lots of customers, but going through its own transformation, how should we be thinking of the company? >> I think what we're trying to do with Commvault is make sure that we, there's some times in marketing, where you end up in a place where it's either, it's perception is driving reality or reality is driving perception, and Commvault's in that transitional period where it's more about reality that we need to use to drive that perception, because there's some old perceptions. And as you said, in any company, especially in the tech space, that's 20 years old, you end up in a place where there's a lot of different perceptions of you from days gone by. Those can be about pricing. They can be about the usability of the products. The different technology innovations that you've had because you have such a long history, so we, sort of, need to continue to shift that and shape that as we go forward. For us, the Commvault brand has really evolved into Commvault is about being data experts and helping our customers be data experts. As you said, data is the new oil. Data, as we said at the show this morning, the new water, and it's definitely, sort of, this space where everybody's recognizing what's happening, but it's such early days in this world of data that's changing everything around us. >> Well, we have a friend of the program, Alan Cohen, that said, here's the challenge in IT, used to be that IT was the, always the no, and then you go to the procurement people and they're really slow. And, Chris, do you know what we need everybody to do? We need them to go. (laughs) I really like the branding of the show. Probably not where you came up with the term, but you've got 2,000 people here. The show floor, I've been to five or six thousand person shows that have a smaller expo hall here. You've got customers, with booths. You've got partners with booth. You know, Nashville's got a great energy. So, for people who haven't come here in person, give us a little bit about, why Nashville, what you hope to accomplish with the expo, the flow and then the show? >> Well, the why Nashville, and a lot of what we were trying to get with is, we've all been to probably one or two too many conferences in other cities, that we won't name here because I love those other cities too, but what we've done in our partnership with the Gaylord Hotels, which is a great customer of Commvault's as well, is trying to find just venues that are a little bit more interesting, and unexpected and different. That it was all part of the plan, as we were coming up with this, is to really project Commvault in a way that we believe, really, was more about our image. Towns like Nashville, last year we were in Washington, D.C., it's, they're great representations of what we're trying to do in the market. I was with people last night and they said so many people said they'd never been to Nashville, and this is a great town, and it really represents our brand well. >> So Chris, 20 years, 20 years of data. There's companies that are just waking up, realizing that they have this asset locked away in their, whether it's on tape, on media that's sitting aside in some random storage facility, but they have this asset that they can now unlock. What's the central message you want these customers to know about Commvault and your ability to help them to unlock that data. >> Keith, the... it's so true in that when you talk to people who are more on the data scientist side of things, it's this, it's this understanding that the... usually, the very well-paid data scientists struggle with just a couple of very basic things that they don't want to struggle with and it's not even what you pay them for. It's, can I get access to the data? Is the data all brought together in a form that I can really now serve it up, use it, get value from it? And as Commvault's been, sort of, developing and expanding our overall portfolio, it's really trying to address both of the issues of, if you're someone who's responsible for data in your organization, you have a bit of a challenge on an ongoing basis. You need to make sure the data is protected so it's secure. It's available when you need it. But it's also that you can serve it up and you can get value from it. The portfolio that Commvault's really been refining and introduced this past July, and continued to introduce things just this week, is made up of products that both enable the protection of that data but also serving that data up. The Commvault Activate product line and the portfolio that we're starting to introduce now is all meant to try to drive value out of the data. You're so right, in that, I was talking to some of our... we have a great expert in AI that's going to be with us tomorrow, Y.Y. Lee, who's also one of our board of director members, and she was just talking about how so many companies, as you've said, have locked that data away. It's not... it's not available to them and now they're bringing in these data scientists and their job is to try to find value in that data but they can't get access to that data. So this is a, this is a very straight-forward challenge that we're trying to help our customers with. >> Chris, I'd like you to take us inside your customers because when I think about five or ten years ago, backup, there was usually a storage person. It's like, okay, how do I have it? Do I have a backup window? Got to worry about recovery, something we would look at, but when you talk about data, you talk about data scientists. We're going up the stack. How do I use analytics and everything? Is this... >> Yeah. >> Is there a C.D.O. in my organization, worries about that? Governance and compliance are board-level discussions. So, bring us through where are you talking to the customers? Is there, kind of, the traditional customer, and the new customer? How'd that impact your whole field? It's a, it's a big, broad question. We don't have a ton of time but, yeah. >> Chris: Well, the way that I usually look at it is you can almost come at this from two different directions but you end up telling a very similar story. It's just almost the order of operation that you tell it. What I mean by that is, in the world of the folks who were really responsible for their virtual environment, their physical environment, and backing it up, you can talk to them about what they need and their desires in terms of the strongest backup and recovery, but then eventually you pretty quickly find yourself talking about a better understanding of what that data is so that you can apply your policies against it, so that you can show your compliance, and then eventually, to be able to serve that data up for more higher-value needs of your organization. And if you end up speaking to someone often, it's a more senior IT person in an organization or even all the way into the CEO's office. It's sort of just almost a different direction you go. It's you want to talk about how you can get value out of your data, and in order to get that value out of your data, you need to be able to understand truly what it is, where it is, who created it, who has access to it, and then eventually, you find yourself to: Is it protected? So it's a very similar story but if you go to a CEO and you start with backup, they don't really want to talk to you. And, if you go to a backup administrator and start talking about the value of data, they don't really want to talk to you. So, but what we've come to realize is that it's the same story, just told in a different direction. >> So talk... talk to us about bridging that gap. We're at Commvault GO, two thousand people, over 150 sessions, guys have been pretty clear this is an educational event. How did you help bridge the gap with such a large... difference of users? You have over five hundred partners attended the, the Partners Session. You have customers from the backup, admin, all the way up to the data scientists, and even executives that have to make these decisions. How does Commvault GO help bridge that gap? >> So, in a lot of ways, we use data so we're... we're as the old saying goes, eating your own dog food, kind of thing. We're using data from the previous conferences and always refining this. It's a... there's 182 Break-Out Sessions that occur over two days. There's, what we call, 30 and 30. It's 30 structured labs and 30 hands-on labs that you can, sort of, experience while you're here at the show. There's a lot of mini sessions, so there's the theaters that hold 120 people and then there's the theaters that hold 15 people. And through a lot of the technology of the shows now, the mobile apps, you can really refine what you want to experience at the show. The Meet the Experts Sessions, we have our developers here. The first year we did this, I wasn't sure how this would work, but we brought about, I think we brought about 10 developers for a Meet the Experts Sessions. The next year, we ended up bringing 20, and this year, we brought 40. 40 developers and engineers are here to have whiteboard sessions and just sit and talk to people. So, it's a... we've really divined, defined, sorry, this show in a way that looks at the audience first and, from a marketing perspective, I can tell you that when we came into this, nobody wants to be marketed to in this, in this industry. They, they want real information and what Commvault GO has been about is real information. It's, you talk about the reality driving the perception. Commvault is strong in reality. You know, it's, that's our reality. We just need to be able to communicate that and we use this show to make sure we're doing it, and not selling to people. We're here to provide real information. >> Chris, one of the things that actually surprised me, the portfolio is actually broader than I expected and part of that, you had quite a bit of hard news. What I mean by that, you announced quite a lot of products, everything from the ASA service through the Commvault Activate. >> Yeah... extended appliances. >> There's a whole lot of things there. We're going to have a lot of your, your team on to go through that, but give us what, when you, people walk away from the show, what you want them to know about Commvault, announcements. >> Yeah, so I think the big... there's so many different pieces, you're right, that have come from the show, very tangible, specific things, new product line around Commvault Activate, what you can utilize that... solution for, in terms of, understanding your data, things like, for sensitive data governance, then you get into the Commvault appliance and the extended appliance offering. We've taken the start of the appliance that was just in its initial forms last year at this time, at the last GO Conference, and then extended that this year with a larger appliance offering, as well as a smaller. And that's just a testament to how these things are being adopted in the market and the amount of customer uptake we're beginning to see on it. And then, when you look within our product portfolio, we've tried to make sure that some of our foundational products, like Commvault Complete Backup Recovery, that's been a big change for us recently. In terms of offering what we consider to be, and in terms of the name, the most complete backup and recovery solution, and what that was, is an answer to the market. Over the last 20 years, and it's not just Commvault, the whole market started to disperse their backup and recovery products. If you wanted backup and recovery, you had to go out and buy 10, 15 different products. You had to piece all these different things together, and what we realized is that what customers were really... longing for was something that really brought this together, so that they stopped spending all their time trying to figure out how to piece together a backup and recovery solution, and started spending more of their time about how to get value out of that data. >> As your CEO and COO said on the stage this morning, there's the difference between simple and smart, >> Chris: Yeah. >> And often, smart will end up being easier than, than doing this in part. >> Yep. >> Chris, I really appreciate you helping us to get a flavor for the show at the beginning. We've got lots more interviews to dig through all the product announcements, talk to the customers, talk to the partners. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome to the Music City. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. This is Commvault GO. 20-year-old company, Commvault, the third year of their show, and the first time we have theCUBE here, and the first time we've been in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Stu Miniman, your host for one day of coverage and joining me to help unlock the Commvault is the CTO advisor, Keith Townsend. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Keith, so you've actually been to this show before. It's my first time. I've known Commvault for a long time, but, you know, we talk about companies, they're all going through some kind of digital transformation and Commvault is no exception. I love the energy that I'm seeing at this show. They've got great puns around data. Data is at the center of everything, and really comes to what we see. You know, we know that data is so important. All the tropes out there. It's the new oil, it's the new currency, it is one of the most important things, not only in IT, but in business. So what's your experience been, so far? >> So far great. You know, they did a great job, second go for me. Last year, they had Captain Sully, great inspirational talk. This year they had a comedian, Connell on it, did a fabulous job of fast-paced multimedia sessions, talking about the connection of data, our everyday lives, lives as a technologist. Really high-powered show, a lot of great conversation around data and its applicability. >> Yeah, I did love that. Steve Connell, he is a poet, and some humor, and a lot of geeky things in there, talking about, right, how data fits into all of our lives, and what we do. And then that's one of the reason's why we're here, why the customers are here, and that's what it's about. You look at a company like Commvault. They've got 10s of thousands of customers, and as the big wave's coming in, what is Cloud Mead? I like some of the messages. I know we're going to dig in, both in our analysis, as well as with the guests, how cloud is impacting this, as well as things like the wave of AI. How is that changing the product? How can I access the information? I hear things like ransomware and GDPR, and hacking. It's a dangerous time in technology, whether you're talking social media, or talking in business. So give us a little bit of background, what you're hearing. Keith, you're talking to customers in your day job all the time. How important is data? And things like backup and data recovery, where do they fit in their world? >> Well, you know what? Customers are still learning this journey. I've talked to plenty of customers that have used Commvault, competing products, and a lot of, at the low level, a lot of these guys are still thinking about it as backup, but great, great testimony from one of the larger customers, out there, Merck, who talked about using backup or data protection, as part of their data management strategy, moving workloads from worker mobility, moving workloads from cloud to cloud, location to location. Every customer is dealing with multi-cloud challenges. Stu, we've talked about multi-cloud and the keys to multi-cloud data is absolutely the most important part of getting your multi-cloud strategy, or even cloud strategy, straight. So, I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation I've had out in the field, which is customers challenged with how do I simply identify a data management strategy? To hearing Commvault's message today and throughout the guests that we'll have on, customers, partners, the entire ecosystem, about how Commvault enables multi-cloud through data management. >> Yeah, I was curious what I would see coming in. Would this be, kind of, a hard core, let's get in to the product and understand things like backup and recovery. As you know, backup's important, but recovery is everything. We heard some of the customer stories about how fast they can recover. Those are great stories. How does cloud fit into it? You had the CEO and the COO on stage talking about do you go, when you go to the cloud, do you go simple or do you go smart? And there's some nuance there that you'll want to unpack as to understanding. You know, as we look at cloud, it's not just take the way we were doing things and throw them up there. I mean Keith, they talked about tape and virtual tape. You know, I remember back when, like, the VTLs were first being a thing, I was working at a storage company back then. You know, it was a huge move. Backup, those processes, are really hardened into an environment. What do the admins have to do? What do they have to change in the way they're doing things? Let's look at the news a little bit. So, you know, there was the, Commvault did a good job, I think, of checking all the check boxes. While there was nothing that jumped out at me as, like, wow this is the first time I've heard it, it's what I'm hearing from customers. So, moving to, and as a service portfolio, they've got a full line of appliances, but it's not only hardware. If you'd like to buy the software from them, of course you could do that. Got a number of big partners. We're going to HPE on the program. We're going to have Cisco on the program. NetUP is another big, big partner here. As well as, I think that the product that they're most excited to talk about is Commvault Activate, which is really looking a lot of the governance, which, when you talk in a cloud world, is one of the biggest challenges. By the way, if people in the background hear these cheering, the Commvault employees are really excited, everybody's starting to walk on the show floor. We're in the center of it all, Keith. So, we got a preview yesterday, they actually announced it to the tech field day crew, which you and I sat in with. So, give me your thoughts as to what you saw in the product line. How does that line up with what you're hearing from customers in a competitive nature? >> So, I think I tweeted out yesterday, doing the tech field day session, Commvault does not sleep at the wheel. As you said, Stu, there's nothing amazingly new about what they announced, but a 20-year-old technology company is definitely keeping pace with the innovation that we've seen in the field. Customers want options when it comes to consuming backup and recovery. From a storage layer, they want the storage bricks, they want a hardware solution, they want to consume it via subscription, or perpetual license. They want this cloud-type capability. More importantly, they want, and they talked about it on stage today, this analytics capability. The ability to extract intelligence out of your data. Commvault calls is 4-D indexing. Other vendors just call it, simply, meta-data. But taking advantage of 15, 20 year-old data, to drive innovation in today's society, while keeping compliant with GDPR and other regulations that are coming up, sprouting up as it seems, every other week. >> I did like that terminology that you used. The 4-D innovation, because of course the fourth dimension is time and we're using intelligence. The challenge we have, as we know, is we have so much data and what do we the analytics for? They said we can use the analytics, first of all, compliance. I need to understand that I take care of that. Secondly, what if I want to cull data? What data don't I need anymore? What can I get rid of? There's huge cost savings that I can have there. And lastly, what can I get from analytics? How can I get value out of that information? And more. So, the use of analytics is something I was looking for, obviously want to talk to some of the product people, some of the customers, about what I've heard so far and talking to people. People were excited. I was actually talking to one of the partners of Commvault, they said one of the reasons they partnered deeper and are looking to work with Commvault, is they've got good tech. There's a reason they've been around for 20 years. They're a publicly traded stock. They've been doing well. They have been growing. Revenue wise, I looked, the last three years, I think they're at 700 million, they've been growing in the kind of eight to 9% year over year for the last couple years. Which, as a software company, it's not taking the world by storm, but for, in the infrastructure space, that is good growth. I do have to mention, there was some activist investor activity that came on. We actually we're going to have the CMO, we're going to have the COO on the program. We won't have the CEO, they are in the midst of going through a change there. And, you know, look, say what you will about activist investors. The reason they're getting involved is because they believe that there is more value that can be unlocked in Commvault with some changes and with product line and the things happening that's what we're starting to see here. That's why were excited to dig in and kind of understand. >> Yeah, we can see that even in some of the tech customer's testimonials. The state of Colorado net new customer. This is amazing in an area that we've seen 90 million, 250 million, easily a half a million dollars of investment in the data protection space. Commvault, 20-year-old company, still gaining traction with net new use cases and if I was an activist investor, I'd look at that. I'd look at the overall industry and thinking what can we do to unlock some of the potential of a fairly large customer base? Pretty stable company, but a very, very exciting part of the industry. >> Yeah, and Keith, you brought up meta-data. Meta-data's something that, you know, in the industry we've been talking about for a long time. It's really that intelligence that's going to allow the systems to gather everything. I know, when I get my brand new phone now, I can search my 4,000 photos by location, by date, everything like that. It's auto-recognizing information. The same thing we're getting on the business side. It used be oh okay, let's make sure when you put your photo, your file, in there that you tag it. Come on. Nobody can do this. Nobody's thinking when I'm doing my job, well I really need to think about the meta data 'cause five years from now, I might want to do it. Oh, I can search by person or project or things like that. But it's the intelligence in the system to be able to learn and grow and the more data we have, actually the more that the intelligence can get there. >> And that's critically important for even compliance. Again, culling data. You know, Bill Nye got up on stage and talked about being able to use data, or I'm sorry, AstraZeneca got up on stage and talked about using data that was 15-years-old to rerun through today's algorithms and trials. If you were to cull the wrong data, then they could not have the innovation that they've created by having 15-year-old data. So, the meta data, the ability to go back again, search your repository for key words, content, surface up that data and leverage that data. This is why we say data is the new currency, it's the new oil, it's the most critical. I even heard on stage today, data's the new water. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, you know I like my old-fashioned glass of water, but this is why we hear these terms because companies are reinventing themselves with the data. >> Alright, so Keith, what Dave Allante would point out is water is a limited resource. Data, we can reuse it. We can take a drink of data, we can share it. Data helps complete us. It's the shirts that they have at the show. We've got AstraZeneca, we've got the state of Colorado, we've got other users. The key partners, key executives. We're going to bring you the key data to help you extract the signal from the noise here at Commvault GO. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for joining theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE covering theCUBE New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. (techy music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live in New York City for CUBENYC, formerly Big Data NYC. Now it's turned from big data into a much broader conversation. CUBENYC is exploring all these around data, data intelligence, cloud computing, devops, application developers, data centers, the whole range, all things data. I'm John Furrier here with Peter Burris, cohost and analyst here on the session. Our next guest is Byron Banks, who's the vice president of product marketing at SAP Analytics. No stranger to enterprise analytics. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, SAP is, you know, a brand that's been doing business analytics for a long, long time, certainly powering-- >> Mm-hm, sure. >> The software for larger enterprises. Supply chain, you name it-- >> Sure. >> ERP, everyone kind of knows the history of SAP, but you guys really have been involved in analytics. HANA's been tailor-made for some speed. We've been covering that, but now as the world turns into a cloud native-- >> Mm-hm. >> SAP has a global cloud platform that is multi-cloud driven you guys kind of see this picture of a horizontally scalable computing environment. Analytics is a big, big piece of that, so what's going on with machine learning and AI, and as analytical software and infrastructure need to be provisioned dynamically. >> Sure, sure. >> This is an opportunity for people who love to get into the data. >> Absolutely. >> This is a great opportunity. What's the uptake? >> Great opportunity for us. We firmly believe that the era of optimization and digitization is over. It's not enough, it's certainly important. It has given a lot of benefits, but just overwhelming every user, every customer with more data, more optimization, faster data, better data, it's not enough. So, we believe that the concept to switch to intelligence, so how do you make customers, how do you serve customers exactly what they need in the moment? How do you give them an offer that is relevant? Not spam them, give them a great offer. How do you motivate your employees to be the best at what they do, whether it's in HR or whether it's in sales, and we think technology's key to that, but at the end of the day, the customer, the organization is the driver. They are the driver, they know their business best, so what we want to do is be the pit crew, if you will, to use a racing analogy, if they're the driver of the race car we want to bring the technology to them with some best practices and advice, because again, we're SAP, we've been in the business for 45 years, so we have a very good perspective of what works based on the companies we see, and serve over 300,000 of them, but it's really enabling them to be their best, and the customers that are doing the best, we call those intelligent enterprises, and that means three components. It needs intelligent applications, what we call the intelligent suite. So, how do we make an HR application that is great at retaining the best employees and also attracting great ones? How do we enable a sales system to give the best offers and do the best forecasts? So, all of that is the intelligent applications. The middle layer for that is called intelligent technologies. So, how do we use these great technologies that we've been developing as an industry over the last three to five years? Things like big data, IoT, sensors, machine learning, and analytics. That intelligent technology layer, how do we make that available, and then finally, it's the digital core, the digital platform for that. So, how do we have this scalable platform, ideally in the cloud, that can pull data from both cloud sources, SAP sources, non-SAP sources, and give the right data to those applications-- >> Yeah. >> And technologies in realtime. >> I love the pit crew example of the race car on the track, because you want to get as much data in the system as possible because more data is, you know, more opportunities to understand and get insights, but at the end of the day, you want to make sure that the car not only runs well on the track, (chuckles) and is cost effective, but it's performing. It actually wins the race or stays in the race. So, customers want revenue, I mean, the big thing we're hearing is, "Okay, let's get some top line benefit, not just "good cost effectiveness." >> Right, right. >> So, the objective of the customer, and whatever, that can be applications, it could be, you know, insight into operational efficiency. The revenue piece of growth is a big part of the growth strategy-- >> Right. >> For companies to have a data-centric system. >> Absolutely. >> This is part of the intelligence. >> But it's not just presenting the data. We introduced a product a couple of years ago, and I promise this isn't going to be a marketing pitch, (chuckles) but I think it's very relevant to what you just said. So, the SAP Analytics Cloud, that's one of those technologies I talked about, intelligent technologies. So, it is modern, built from the ground for SAS applications, cloud-based, built on the SAP cloud platform, and it has three major components. It has planning, so what are my KPIs? If I'm in HR am I recruiting talent or am I retraining talent? What are my KPIs if I'm in sales? Am I trying to drive profitability or am I trying to track new customers? And if I'm in, you know, again, in marketing how effective are we on campaigns? Tied to that is all the data visualization we can do so that we can mix and match data to discover new insights about our business, make it very, very easy, again, to connect with both SAP and non-SAP sources, and then provide the machine learning capabilities. All of that predictive capability, so not just looking at what happened in the past, I'm also looking at what's likely to happen in the next week, and the key point to all of that is when you open the application and start, the first thing it asks you is, "What are you trying to do? "What is the business problem you're trying to solve?" It's a story, so it's designed from the get-go to be very business outcome focused, not just show you 50 different data sources or 100 different data sources and then leave it to you to figure out what you should be doing. >> Yeah. >> So, it is designed to be very much a business outcome driven environment, so that, again, people like me, a marketer, can logon to that product and immediately start to work in campaigns-- >> Yeah. >> And in the language that I want to work in, not in IT speak or geek speak. Nothing wrong with geek speak, but again-- >> Yeah, I want to get into a conversation, because one of the things, we're very data driven as a media company because we have data that's out there, consumption data, but some platforms don't have measurement capability, like LinkedIn doesn't finance any analytics. >> Sure. >> So, this data that's out there that I need, I want, that might be available down the road, but not today, so I want to get to that conversation around, okay, you can measure what you're looking at, so everything that's measurable you've got dashboards for, but-- >> Sure. >> There's some elusive gaps between what's available that could help the data model. These are future data sets, or things that aren't yet instrumented properly. >> Correct. >> As new technology comes in with cloud native the need for instrumentation's critical. How do you guys think about that from a product standpoint, because you know, customers aren't going to say, "Well, create a magic linkage between something "that doesn't exist yet," but soon data will be existing. You know, for instance, network effect or other things that might be important for people that aren't yet measurable but might be in the future. >> Sure. >> They want to be set up for that, they don't want to foreclose that. >> Sure, well and I think one of the balances we have as SAP, because we're a technology company and we built a lot of great tools, but we also work a lot with our customers around business processes, so as I said, when we introduce our products we don't want to give them just a black box, which is a bunch of feeds and speeds technologies-- >> Yeah. >> That they need to figure it out. As we see patterns in our customers, we build an end-to-end process that is analytics driven and we provide that back to our customers to give them a headstart, but we have to have all of the capabilities in our solutions that allow them to build and extend in any way possible, because again, at the end of the day, they have a very unique business, but we want to give them a jumping off point so that they're not just staring at a blank screen. It's kind of like writing a speech. You don't want to start with just a blank screen. If you're in sales and marketing and you want to do a sales forecast, we will provide out-of-the-box, what we call embedded analytics, a fully complete dashboard that will take them through a guided workflow that says, "Hey, you want to do a sales forecast. "Here's the data we think you want to pull, "do you want to pull that? "Here's some additional inference we've seen "from some of our machine learning algorithms "based on what has happened in the last six weeks "of selling and make a projection as to what "we expect will happen between now and next quarter." >> You get people started quickly, that's the whole goal. Get people started quickly. >> Exactly, but we don't lock them into only doing it the one way, the right way. We're not preaching >> Yeah. >> We want to give them the flexibility. >> But this is an important point, because every, almost every decision at some point in time comes back to finance. >> Sure. >> And so, being able to extend your ability to learn something about data and act on data as measurements improve, you still want to be able to bring it back to what it means from a return standpoint, and that requires some agreement, not just some, a lot of agreement-- >> Sure. >> With a core financial system, and I think that this could be one of the big opportunities that you guys have, is because knowing a lot about how the data works, where it is, sustaining that so that the transactional integrity remains the same but you can review it through a lot of different analytics systems-- >> Right. >> Is a crucial element of this, would you agree? >> I fully agree, and I think if you look at the analytics cloud that I talked about, the very first solution capability we built into it was planning. What are my KPIs that I'm trying to measure? Now, yes, of course if you're in a business it all turns into dollars or euros at the end of the end of the day, but customer satisfaction, employee engagement, all of those things are incredibly important, so I do believe there is a way to put measurements, not always at a dollar value, that are important for what you're trying to do, because it will ultimately translate into dollars down the road. >> Right, and I want to get the news. You guys have some hard news here in New York this week on your analytics and the stuff you're working on. What's the hard news? >> Absolutely. Absolutely, so today we announced a bunch of updates to our analytics cloud platform. We've had it around for three or four years, thousands of customers, a lot of great innovation, and what we were doing today, what we announced today, is the update since our SAPPHIRE, our big, annual conference in June this year, so we have built a number of machine learning capabilities that, again, speak in the language of the business user, give them the tools that allow them to quickly benefit from things like correlations, things like regressions, patterns we've seen in the data to guide them through a process where they can do forecasting, retainment, recruiting, maybe even looking for bias, and unintended bias, in things like campaigns or marketing campaigns. Give them a guided approach to that, speaking in their terms, using very natural language processing, so for example, we have things like Smart Insights where you can ask questions about, "Give me the sales forecast for Japan," and you can say it, just type it that way and the analytic platform will start to construct and guide you through it, and it will build all the queries, it will give you, again, you're still in control, but it's a very guided process-- >> Yep. >> That says, "Do you want to run a forecast? "Here's how we recommend a forecast. "Here are some variables we find very, very interesting." That says, "Oh, in Japan this product sold "really well two quarters ago, "but it's not selling well this quarter." Maybe there's been a competitive action, maybe we need to look at pricing, maybe we need to retrain the sales organization. So, it's giving them information, again, in a very guided business focus, and I think that's the key thing. Like data scientists, we love them. We want to use them in a lot of places, but can't have data scientists involved in every single analytic that you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> There are just not enough in the world. >> I mean, I love the conversation, because this exact conversation goes down the road of devops-like conversation. >> Right. >> Automation, agility, these are themes that we're talking about in cloud platforms, (chuckles) say data analytics. >> Absolutely. >> So, now you're bringing data down. Hey, we're automating things, so it could look like a Siri or voice activated construct for interaction. >> Yeah, absolutely, and in their language, again, in the language that the end user wants to speak, and it doesn't take the human out of it. It's actually making them better, right? We want to automate things and give recommendations so that you can automate things. >> Yeah. >> A great example is like invoice matching. We have customers that use, you know, spent hundreds of people, thousands of hours doing invoice matching because the address wouldn't line up or the purchase order had a transposed number in it, but using machine learning-- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Or using algorithms, we can automate all of that or go, "Hey, here's a pattern we see." >> Yeah. >> "Do you want us to automate "this matching process for you?" And customers that have-- >> Yeah. >> Implemented, they've found 70% of the transactions could be automated. >> I think you're right on, I personally believe that humans are more valuable, certainly in the media business that people think is, you know, sliding down, but humans, huge role. Now, data and automation can surface and create value that humans can curate on top of, so same with data. The human role is pretty critical in this because the synthesis is being helped by the computers, but the job's not going away, it's just shortcutting to the truth. >> And I think if you do it right machine learning can actually train the users on the job. >> Yeah. >> I think about myself and I think about unintended bias, right, and you look at a resume that you put out or a job posting, if you use the term I want somebody to lead a team, you will get a demographic profile of the people that apply to that job. If you use the term build a team, you'll get a different demographic profile, so I'm not saying one's better or the other, but me as a hiring manager, I'm not aware of that. I'm not totally on top of that, but if the tool is providing me information saying, "Hey, we've seen these keywords "in your marketing campaign," or in your recruiting, or even in your customer support and the way you speak with your customers, and it's starting to see patterns, just saying, "Hey, by the way, "we know that if you use these kinds of terms "it's more likely to get this kind of a response." That helps me become a better marketer. >> Yeah. >> Or be more appropriate in the way I engage with my customers. >> So, it assists you, it's your pit crew example, it's efficiency, all kind of betterment. >> Absolutely. >> Byron, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate the time, coming to share and the insights on SAP's news and your vision on analytics. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. It's theCUBE live in New York City for CUBENYC. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us, day one continues. We're here for two days, all things data here in New York City. Stay with us, we'll be right back. (techy music)

(techy music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018, brought to you by theCUBE. (techy music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back. This is the live CUBE coverage here in Toronto, Ontario here in Canada for the Untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference. This is day two of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage. We've got great presentations going on, live content here on theCUBE as well as in the sessions, great networking, but more important all the thought leaders in the industry around the world are coming together to try to set the standards and set up a great future for cryptocurrency and blockchain in general. Our next two guests are very special guests for theCUBE and we're excited to have them on, the Honorable Wayne Caines, Minister of National Security for the government of Bermuda, and Kevin Richards, concierge on the Fintech business development manager, part of the Bermuda Business Development Agency. Thank you guys for coming on, really appreciate the time. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Why this is so important is that we heard your presentation onstage, for the folks, they can catch it online when they film it and record it, but the Bermuda opportunity has really emerged as a shining light around the world, specifically in the United States. In California, where I live, Silicon Valley, you guys are now having great progress in hosting companies and being crypto-friendly. Take a minute to explain what's happening, what's the current situation, why Bermuda, why now, what's developing? >> This has all happened over the last eight months. We were looking in November of 2017 to go in the space. In January we went to the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland. When we went to Davos in Switzerland something very interesting happened. People kept coming up to us, I was like the Hound of the Baskerville, or the Pied Piper if you please, and so, so many people were coming up to us finding out more information about Bermuda. We realized that our plan that we thought we could phase in over 18 months, that it had to be accelerated. So, whilst we were at the World Economic Forum in Davos we said to people, "Listen, if you want to change the world, "if you want to help Bermuda to grow, if you're serious," this is a Thursday, "Meet us in Bermuda on the Monday morning." On the Monday morning there are 14 different people in the room. We sat in the room, we talked about what we wanted the world to be, how could Bermuda be in place, what are the needs in this industry, and by the Wednesday we had a complete and total framework, and so we split up into industries. Number one was ICOs, we wanted to look at how to regulate the ICO market. Number two, we wanted to look at digital asset exchanges or cryptocurrencies or how do we regulate security tokens and utility tokens and what do exchanges look like, how do we do exchanges in Bermuda, and then we wanted to talk about education and setting up incubators. And so, come fast forward to July, August, we have an ICO bill in place that allows us to look at setting up ICOs in Bermuda. We wanted to focus on the legal and the regulatory framework, so this is a nascent space. A number of people are concerned about the dark actors, and so we wanted to set up a jurisdiction that traded on our international reputation. Now, remember for the last 60 years reinsurance, finance, captives, hedge funds, people in the financial services market have been coming to Bermuda because that's what we do well. We were trading on the reputation of our country, and so we couldn't do anything to jeopardize that. And so, when we put in place the ICO legislation we had consultants from all over the world, people that were bastions and beasts in industry, in the ICO industry and in the crypto world came to Bermuda and helped us to develop the legislation around setting up an ICO. So, we passed the ICO legislation. The next phase was regulating cryptocurrencies, regulating digital assets, and we set up a piece of legislation called the Digital Asset Business Act, and that just regulates the digital asset space exchanges, and the last piece we wanted to do was a banking piece, and this is the last and we believe the most significant piece. We were talking to people and they were not able to open up bank accounts and they were not able to do, so we said, "Listen, "the Bermuda banking environment is very strong." Our banking partners were like, "Listen, "we love what you guys are doing, "but based on our corresponding banking relationships "we don't want to do anything to jeopardize that space," but how could we tell people to come to Bermuda, set up your company, and they can't open bank accounts? And so, we looked at, we just recently passed creating a new banking license that allows people to set up their business in Bermuda and set up banking relationships and set up bank accounts. That simply has to receive the governor's Royal Assent. As you know, Bermuda's still a British pan-territory, and financial matters have to get the okay of the Queen, and so that is in the final stages, but we're excited, we're seeing an influx, excuse me, a deluge of people coming to Bermuda to set up their companies in Bermuda. >> So, the first two pieces are in place, you have the legislation... >> Mm-hm. >> Mm-hm. >> You have the crypto piece, and now the banking's not yet, almost approved, right? >> It's there, it simply has to get the final sign-off, and we believe that it should take place within the next two weeks. So, by the time this goes to air and people see it we believe that piece will be in place. >> So, this is great news, so the historical perspective is you guys had a good reputation, you have things going on, now you added on a new piece not to compromise your existing relationships and build it on. What have you guys learned in the process, what did you discover, was it easy, was it hard, what are some of the learnings? >> What we've learnt is that KYC, know your customers, and the AML, anti-money laundering, and terrorist financing pieces, those are the critical pieces. People are looking in this space now for regulatory certainty, so when you're talking about people that are in the space that are doing ICOs of $500 million or exchanges that are becoming unicorns, a billion dollar entity in three months, they want a jurisdiction that has regulatory certainty. Not only do they want a jurisdiction with regulatory certainty, they want to open up the kimono. What has this country done in the past, what do they have to trade on? We're saying you can go to a number of countries in the world, but look at our reputation, what we're trading on, and so we wanted to create a space with regulatory certainty, and so we have a regulatory body in Bermuda called the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and they are an independent regulator that they penned the Digital Asset Business Act, and so the opportunity simply for people around the world saying, "Listen, we want to do an ICO, "we want to set up an exchange. "Where's a country that we can go to that has a solid reputation? Hold on, how many countries have law surrounding"-- >> Yeah. >> "The Digital Asset Business Act, how many ICO countries have laws. Guess what, Bermuda becomes a standout jurisdiction in that regard. >> Having a regulation signaling is really important, stability or comfort is one, but the one concern that we hear from entrepreneurs, including, you know, ourselves when we look at the market is service providers. You want to have enough service providers around the table so when I come in and domicile, say, in Bermuda you want to have the banking relationships, you want to have the fiduciary-- >> Yes. >> You want to have service providers, law firms and other people. >> Yes. >> How are you guys talking about that, is that already in place? How does that fit into the overall roadmap for your vision? >> I don't want to beat a horse (laughs) or beat a drum too much, that is what we do as a country. So, we have set up, whether it's a group of law firms and the Bermuda, excuse me, the Bermuda Monetary Authority, the Bermuda that's the register of companies that sets up the companies. We have Kevin, and Kevin will tell you about it, he leads our concierge team. So, it's one throat to choke, one person that needs, so when you come to really understand that the ease of business, a county that's business-friendly with a small country and with a small government it's about ease of reference. Kevin, tell us a little about the concierge team. >> It's like the Delaware of the glove, right? >> Absolutely. >> Come in, domicile, go and tell us how it works. >> I'll give you a little bit of background on what we do on the concierge side. So, one thing that we identified is that we want to make sure that we've got a structure and a very clearly defined roadmap for companies to follow so that process from when they first connect with the BDA in Bermuda to when they're incorporated and set up and moved to Bermuda to start running their business is a seamless process that has very clearly identifiable road marks of different criteria to get through. So, what I do as a concierge manager is I will identify who that company needs to connect with when they're on the ground in Bermuda, get those meetings set up for when they come down so that they have a very clearly mapped out day for their trip to Bermuda. So, they meet with the regulator, they meet with the government leaders, they meet with the folks who've put together legislation that, obviously you mentioned the service providers, so identifying who's the right law firm, corporate service provider, advisory firm on the ground in Bermuda, compliance company, and then making sure that depending on what that company wants to achieve out of their operation in Bermuda they've got an opportunity to connect with those partners on their first trip so that they can put that road map together for-- >> So, making it easy... >> Making it very easy to set up in Bermuda. >> So, walk me through, I want to come down, I want to do business-- >> Yeah. >> Like what I hear, what do I do? >> So, you send me an email and you say, "Listen, Wayne, we're looking at "doing an ICO launch in Bermuda. "I would like to meet with the regulator. "Can you put a couple law firms in place," in an email. I zip that over to Kevin or you go on our Fintech.bm website-- >> Yeah, I was going to say... >> Fintech.bm website, and Kevin literally organizes a meeting. So, when you come to Bermuda for your meeting you have a boardroom and all the key players will be in the boardroom. >> Got it. >> If you need somebody to pick you up at the airport, if you need a hotel, whatever you need from soup to nuts our team actually makes that available to you, so you're not running around trying to find different people to meet, everyone's there in the room. >> And the beauty of Bermuda is that, you know, the city of Hamilton's two square kilometers, so your ability to get a lot done in one day is, I think, second to nowhere else on the planet, and working with the BDA concierge team you're, you know, we connect with the client before they come down and make sure we identify what their needs are. >> The number one question I have to ask, and this is probably the most important for everyone, is do they have to wear Bermuda shorts? (laughs) >> When you come you tell us your size, you tell us what size and what color you want and we'll make sure, so the... I tell this story about the Bermuda shorts. The Bermuda shorts, Bermuda's always had to adapt and overcome. Bermuda, we have something called the Bermuda sloop and it's a sailing rig, and so we... The closest port to Bermuda is Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and we wanted to cut down the time of their voyage, so we created a sailing rig called the Bermuda rig or the Bermuda sloop. Over the years that has become the number one adopted rig on sailing boats. We've always had to adapt and become innovative. The Bermuda shorts were a way to adapt and to get through our very hot climate, and so if you look at just keep that in mind, the innovation of the Bermuda sloop and the Bermuda shorts. Now, this Fintech evolution is another step in that innovation and a way that we take what's going on in the world and adapt it to make it palatable for everyone. >> What's the brand promise for you guys when you look at when entrepreneurs out there and other major institutions, especially in the United States, again, Silicon Valley's one of the hottest issues around-- >> Yes. >> Startups for expansion, right now people are stalled, they don't know what to do, they hear Malta, they hear other things going on. What's the promise that you guys are making to the law firms and the people, entrepreneurs out there trying to establish and grow? >> The business proposition is this, you want a jurisdiction that is trading on years of solid regulation, a country and a government that understands business, how to be efficacious in business. When you come to Bermuda you are trading on a country that this is what we've done for a living. So, you don't have to worry about ethical government, is your money going to be safe. We have strong banking relationships, strong law firms, top tier law firms in Bermuda, but more importantly, we have legislation that is in place that allow you to have a secure environment with a clear regulatory framework. >> What should people look for as potentially might be gimmicks for other countries to promote that, you know, being the Delaware for the globe and domiciling, and what are some of the requirements? I mean, some have you've got to live there, you know, what are some of the things that are false promises that you hear from other potential areas that you guys see and don't have to require and put the pressure on someone? >> When you hear the people say, "We can turn your company around in the next day." That we don't require significant KYC and AML. Red flags immediately go up with the global regulatory bodies. We want when a person comes to Bermuda to know that we have set what we believe is called the Bermuda Standard. When you come to Bermuda you're going to have to jump through some legal and regulatory hoops. You can see regulation, the ICO regulation and the Digital Asset Business Act on BermudaLaws.bm. BermudaLaws.bm, and you can go through the legislation clause by clause to see if this meets your needs, how it will affect your business. It sets up clearly what the requirements are to be in Bermuda. >> What's the feedback from business, because you know, when you hear about certain things, that's why Delaware's so easy, easy to set up, source price all know how to do in a corporation, let's say in the United States-- >> We don't have the SEC handicaps that they have in America, going from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. You're dealing with a colony that allows you to be in a domicile that all of the key players finances... We have a number of the key elements that are Bermuda. We're creating a biosphere that allows a person to be in a key space, and this is, you have first move as advantage in Bermuda. We have a number of things that we're working on, like the Estonia model of e-residency, which we will call EID, that creates a space that you are in Bermuda in a space that is, it's protected, it's governed. We believe that when companies set up in Bermuda they are getting the most secure, the strongest business reputation that a country could have. >> The other thing I would add, I'll just say, you know, quality, certainty, and community is what that brand represents. So, you know, you've got that historical quality of what Bermuda brings as a business jurisdiction, you have the certainty of the regulation and that pathway to setting your company up and incorporating in Bermuda, and then the community piece is something that we've been working on to make sure that any of the players that are coming to Bermuda and connecting with Bermuda and setting up there, they feel like they're really integrated into that whole community in Bermuda, whether it be from the government side, the private sector side. You can see it with the companies that have set up that are here today, you know, they really have embraced that Bermuda culture, the Bermuda shorts, and what we're really trying to do as a jurisdiction in the tech space. >> What can I expect if I domicile in Bermuda from a company perspective, what do I have to forecast? What's the budget, what do I got to do, what's my expectation? Allocate resources, what's going to be reporting, can you just give us some color commentary? >> So, with reference, it depends what you're trying to do, and so there will be different requirements for the ICO legislation. For the ICO legislation a key piece of the document actually is the whitepaper. Within the whitepaper you will settle what your scope of business is, what do you want to do, what you know, everything, everything that you require will be settled in your whitepaper. After the whitepaper is approved and if it is indeed successful, you go to the Bermuda Monetary Authority and they will outline what they require of you, and very shortly thereafter you will able to set up and do business in Bermuda. With reference to the digital asset exchanges, the Digital Asset Business Act, such a clear guideline, so you're going to need to have a key man in Bermuda, a key woman in Bermuda. >> Yeah. >> You're going to need to have a place of presence in Bermuda, so there are normal requirements-- >> There's levels of requirements based upon the scope. >> Absolutely. >> So, if you run an exchange it has to be like ghosting there. >> Yeah, yeah, you need boots on the ground. >> And that's why the AML and the KYC piece is so important. >> Yeah. Well, I'm super excited, I think this is a great progress and this has been a big uncertainty, you know, what does this signal. People have, you know, cognitive dissonance around some-- >> Yes. >> Of the decisions they're making, and I've seen entrepreneurs flip flop between Liechtenstein, Malta, Caymans. >> Right. >> You know, so this is a real concern and you guys want to be that place. >> Not only, we will say this, Bermuda is open for business, but remember, when you see the requirements that we have some companies won't meet the standard. We're not going to alter the standard to accommodate a business that might not be what we believe is best for Bermuda, and we believe that once people see the standard, the Bermuda Standard, it'll cascade down and we believe that high tides raises all boats. >> Yeah. >> We have a global standard, and if a company meets it we will be happy for them to set up and do business in Bermuda. >> Well, I got to say, it's looking certainly that leaders like Grant Fondo in Silicon Valley and others have heard good things. >> Yeah. >> How's been the reaction for some of the folks on the East Coast, in New York and around the United States and around the world? What has been some of the commentary, what's been the anecdotal feedback that you've heard? >> We're meeting three and four companies every day of the week. Our runway is full of Fintech companies coming to Bermuda, from... We have insurtech companies that are coming in Bermuda, people are coming to Bermuda for think tanks, to set up incubators and to do exploratory meetings, and so we're seeing a huge interest in Bermuda the likes have not been seen in the last 20 years in Bermuda. >> Well, it's been a pleasure chatting with you and thanks for sharing the update and congratulations. We'll keep in touch, we're following your progress from California, we'll follow up again. The Honorable Wayne Caines, the Minister of National Security of the government of Bermuda, and Kevin Richards, concierge taking care of business, making it easy for people. >> Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. >> We'll see, I'm going to come down, give me the demo. >> We're open for business and we're looking forward to seeing everybody. (laughs) >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Major developments happening in the blockchain, crypto space. We're starting to see formation clarity around, standards around traditional structures but not so traditional. It's not your grandfather's traditional model. This is what's great about blockchain and crypto. CUBE coverage here, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching, stay with us. More day two coverage after this short break. (techy music)

(techy music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018, brought to you by theCUBE. (techy music) >> Well, welcome back to theCUBE, we're live here in Toronto for the Untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference for two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, who had to take a step away and our next guest is David Johnston, who's the chairman of the board at Factom, industry legend, he's done a lot of great work from startups, he funds it in early days, really was involved in the original decentralized application framework and part of that community. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for spending the time with us. >> It's good to be here. >> So, first of all we are believers, theCUBE, our team, we're pretty biased. We think that decentralized applications is going to be the next really renaissance in software and startups because it's not your grandfather's venture capital or app SAS model, there's a real change going on. Capital formation, entrepreneurial activity-- >> Yep. >> So, congratulations for putting that together. What's going on, what's the status of this? I mean, obviously put all the price crashes on the side, there's real building going on. >> Well, it's really actually an exciting time. A lot of of good projects have started the last few years and I think what we're going to see is those projects come to fruition later this year, early next. I think about what's happening with groups like PolyMath and what they're doing on tokenizing securities. It really started that wave last year, and now we've got Bank to the Future, and what's going on in Malta with the legislation. A lot of jurisdictions are looking to basically embrace that model of okay, if you have a company, now we can turn that equity into a record on the blockchain and really give people global ledger where we can then trade it on multiple exchanges. It gets you global access, global liquidity, and all of these advantages, so I see a stampede of projects headed towards that model, but thinking about decentralized applications, what I want to preserve is still the permission-less nature of this ecosystem. I mean, I wasn't a rich investor when I got into bitcoin in 2012, all right. I was lucky to be an economics nerd and already wanted to get rid of my Fiat and opt into non-government currency, and so, you know, the timing was great for me but there weren't any barriers. I could download a node-- >> Yeah. >> I could access the ecosystem, I could jump right in and get involved, and so as we see the ecosystem mature what I hope we see is preserving that permission-less nature and recently I proposed Smartdrops as a means of distributing tokens and utilities or currencies-- >> Yeah. >> As a way of bootstrapping the network. So, that's what I really see coming next. >> Love the Smartdrop concept because you know, with Smart contracts and Airdrops kind of being wishy-washy, you know what goes on there, I think one of the things I want to get your thoughts on, because we were at the cloud blockchain event yesterday. Cloud computing and cloud-native chain, SAS applications, you start to see operators now be involved in cloud as that matures, what decentralized applications bring kind of changes the game a bit. How do you see software development changing, because what cloud did was create devops culture, it certainly leverages opensource. >> Right. >> And there's a big community around that. Now with decentralized application you've got community as an active part of it, so is opensource, how is it going to change the software development frameworks? >> Well, I think you can cut out a lot of the middle steps and go directly to developers that you want to work with. I mean, I think Ethereum really still set the gold standard when they set aside a chunk of ether for developers that contributed code to their GitHub before launch, and people will forget now it was a heavy lift to get Ethereum launched. It took a good year and a half, two years, to go from a whitepaper to production net deployments and in that time they needed to align people, the smartest people in the world to try to build that platform, and so I think people can still draw from that lesson and say, "Okay, I'm going to enroll developers directly, "I'm going to reward the people that download "the alpha, download the beta," right. Bootstrap this community to my first 1,000, first 10,000 users. I think PolyMath did that really well recently with their Airdrop where they got 50,000 people into a telegram channel and fill out a survey and do the KYC because they didn't make it a rounding error, they made it a meaningful Airdrop of hundreds of dollars worth of Poly at the time, and that really motivated people to get involved, so-- >> Yeah, and I like the slogan, "Let the stampede begin." (laughs) Actually, we covered PolyMath at their PolyCon event-- >> Sure. >> That Tracy and Untraceable did, and this is, again, the new dynamic. So, I want to get your thoughts on economics, right. So, you've got crypto, which is token economics, which is a business concept when you think about a new way. Blockchain's certainly becoming an infrastructure. >> Right. >> Token economics is changing the business landscape, so you saw it as an economics nerd and now people are realizing, "Holy shit, "I can actually do things with it differently. "I can change the equation"-- >> Right. >> "And still get the outcomes I want "faster, cheaper, smarter, of something "that's not efficient," this is a new dynamic. How do you see the token economics evolving, you know, aside all the liquidity nonsense we're seeing in the market, certainly fluctuations are happening. >> Sure. >> But from a build-out standpoint, from a business model innovation, where is the action on token economics? >> Well, I loved when the Vitala coined the term token economics, and you know, crypto-economics, and basically what he was describing is we're using math to screw the past and we're aligning people's economic incentives to secure the future. So, that idea that we can rely on encryption to give us a stable, immutable, transparent ledger is really powerful because it takes away, in a cloud context, the need to create a bunch of infrastructure. Right, before the cloud people had their own servers. >> Yeah, provision them. >> Dot com days, right, they spent millions of dollars provisioning their own hardware-- >> Before they could roll out their app. >> Right, and so we take it for granted today. >> Yeah. >> You can jump on AWS or Rockspace-- >> Yeah. >> And get going in a few minutes. So, I think blockchain is going to do something similar for all the features of Smart contracts, financial integrations around transfer of money, all of these things are now a toolkit that as soon as I hook into Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash or one of these protocols I have this large, established infrastructure, thousands of people running nodes that I don't have to pay for-- >> Yeah. >> As a user, and that's amazing for innovation because it just lowers the barrier-- >> Yeah. >> For the average guy to get involved. >> And accelerates time to value big time. >> Yeah. >> All right, so what was your talk here at the show, what were you speaking about, you had a discussion, what was the speech about? >> Really focused on this idea of Smartdrops because I think, you know, this can be a primer-- >> Explain Smartdrops real quick. >> Sure, sure, so most people are probably familiar with Airdrops. >> Yep. >> Been around for years, hey, you want to give 100,000 users of bitcoin some of your new token. We're going to send it out to all their addresses. It's sort of like a spray and pray strategy, very broad, right? >> Yeah. >> And so what I think we need to move to now that we have 50 million people with cryptowallets is we can much more intelligently target who we're dropping to, hence Smartdrop. Right, really focus in on the people that the app needs. If you're at the development stage you want to develop, you want to Airdrop to 1,000 Ethereum developers-- >> Yeah. >> To test out your app, if you're going into your alpha you need those early adopters to try it out, give you feedback. So, it's a thing that I think we could leverage but people have treated it as sort of an afterthought. Right, oh, I'll take one percent of my tokens and do one of these Airdrops. I think we could actually be distributing 20%, 40%, 60% of tokens via Smartdrops if you're properly targeting them and traunching it out based on the maturity of the projects. >> Yeah, and I think Smart contracts, Smartdrops really add value because it brings intelligence-- >> Right. >> To and targeting and more value you can distribute. It's like policy-based distribution. >> Right. >> All right, final question for you, state of the union, obviously people seeing these fluctuations, Ethereum lost its one-year value, it's back down to where it was a year ago. Largest developer community, people get nervous when you have these short term fluctuations that really aren't based on anything from a build-out standpoint. >> Sure. >> It's really more of market dynamics, Asia, wherever, whatever-- >> Right. >> But this real build is in the developer community going on that are building long term, trying to build long term ventures. >> Right. >> What do you say to that community at Ethereum and others, stay the course, don't waver, don't check the price, head down, grind it, what do you say? >> What I say is think long term. We've been through this like four times already. I remember when bitcoin went from almost nothing to $30 and crashed to $2, right, and it took almost a year-- >> Yeah. >> To recover, 2012, get back to 10 bucks, and then it made it's big run 2013 to $250, and proceeded to crash to $50. >> Yeah. >> Right, and then make a big run thereafter to the thousands-- >> Yeah. >> And crash to $200, and here we've made enormous runs and $19,000, you know, on the bitcoin price and it's crashed to $6,000 or $5,000, whatever it is today, and so you got to keep in mind the long term perspective. We have come so far. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Like when I got into bitcoin in 2012 it was $10 a bitcoin, there were 10 million bitcoins in circulation, meaning $100 million was the entire digital currency universe, and now today there are hundreds of billions of dollars-- >> Yeah. >> Of assets in this space, and it's only been five or six years. Like it's orders of magnitude, so I keep my eye on usage, on real utility. You look at Ethereum, I mean, they're doing seven, eight, 900,000 transactions a day. People are using-- >> Yeah. >> The platform and I think at this point they've got more usage than all of their blockchains combined. >> Yeah. >> And so, you know, that's really exciting and I think keep your head down, keep building, these are the times when sort of like the fluff falls away-- >> Yep. >> And the projects that didn't make sense, all that gets flushed out of the ecosystem and the real projects come to the forefront. >> Well, David you're having a great career so far. Congratulations on getting in early when it was 10 bucks, and we had our first website developer was so good but he wanted to be paid in bitcoin in 2011, it was 22 cents-- >> Wow. >> At the time, I remember buying it, it was like, "What's bitcoin, what is this craziness?" (laughs) We started covering it then, just started doing videos, so we're going to do more interviews. We'll hopefully get you on again. Real quick, final plug for you, what are you working on right now? Share with the community some of the projects and your interests right now and what's going on. >> Well, Factom is a big focus for me because this solves data on the blockchain and lets you do recordkeeping, documentation, all that sort of stuff, and so that's really hit a chord with enterprise, so we need to get the mainstream into the ecosystem and that's really what Factom is focused on. >> Yeah. >> So, really excited, they've delivered their third version of their software, which is now fully decentralized recently. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge milestone for them. >> So, harden it, make it reliable, stable, and make it easy to consume and use. >> That's right, that's the key. >> That's the goal. >> And let people put millions, billions, or trillions of records on, and what Factom does with Merkle trees, basically you only need one transaction every 10 minutes to anchor all of that data. So, what we've created is scalability, and that's what we need for this to go mainstream. >> All right, David Johnston, chairman of the board at Factom here on theCUBE, industry insider, pioneer, also leader, inspiration. theCUBE bringing you all the live action, all the data here not yet on the blockchain, soon to be. I'm John Furrier, live coverage here in Untraceable's event Futurist event here in Toronto, be back with more. Stay with us, be right back with more content after this short break. (techy music)