(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to present our special guests for today's program and they are Kyle Hines, VP Strategic Accounts at Presidio as well as chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., chief of the Cherokee Nation. Welcome to the program, gentlemen >> Thank you. >> Terrific, well, delighted to have you here, we're going to discuss the key award of best partner transformation, most impactful nonprofit partner, of course now highlighting some of the technologies now being technology now being leveraged to help preserve the Cherokee language as well as its culture. Now, Chuck, I'd like to start with you and if you could describe some of the challenges that the Cherokee nation is now faced with in terms of preserving the language and its culture and how you see technology being able to really help preserve it. >> Well, thank you, Natalie. It was really good to be with you all today. The Cherokee language and culture is what makes us unique as a people. It's the link that links us back to time and immemorial through generations. And over those generations, there've been many threats to our language and culture. There's been disease after European contact, there's been dispossession, there's been our forced removal on the trail of tears. Other pressures in more modern times have continued to erode our language and culture, including, boarding schools, the public school system through most of the 20th century as Cherokee Nation has gotten back on its feet, that is to say when the govern the United States has allowed Cherokee Nation to do what we've always done well which is to govern ourselves, chart our own destiny, and preserve our life ways, we've been able to make preservation efforts but those generations of eroding our language and culture had coming to steep costs. We're the largest tribe in the country, 392,000 citizens and by the way we're mostly in Northeast, Oklahoma but we have Cherokees living all over the country even all over the world. And we only have 2000 fluent speakers left. So it's a great challenge to save a language that's truly endangered. And if we don't save it generations from now we may do a number of things exceedingly well as we do today, business, providing education and housing, creating a great healthcare system, but we will have lost that thing that makes us a unique people, that thing that links us back to our past. And so what we're doing today, working with great partners like Presidio is just indispensable to what's really our most important mission. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, thank you so much for those insights. I'd like to switch it over to Kyle and hear about the technologies now being utilized to preserve the Cherokee language and culture. >> Sure, happy to Natalie and thanks for having us this morning. So yeah, when we started to work with the Cherokee Nation, it was very clear to us that, there's obviously a higher power or a higher mission here. And so it's really been an honor to work with the chief and the nation and what we've been able to do is is take what the Cherokee Nation is trying to do in terms of language and cultural preservation and build solutions in really a very modern way. So between Inage’i, the 3D mobile open-world game and the virtual classroom platform, it's entirely a cloud native serverless solution in AWS, using a lot of the most modern tools and technologies in the marketplace. For example, in the mobile game, it's built around unity and the virtual classroom platform is built around the Amazon chime SDK, which allows us to really build something that is very clean and light and focused on what the nation is trying to achieve and really cut out a lot of the baggage and the other sort of plumbing and various other technologies that this would have, this type of solution would have taken just a few short years ago. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, Kyle, staying with you, what do you think were some of the factors behind the development of this solution? >> Yeah, so I think flexibility was key. Was maybe the biggest design goal in building these solutions because you learn a lot when you originally set out to build something and it starts to impact real users, and in this case, speakers of the Cherokee Nation, you learn a tremendous amount about the language and how it's used and how people communicate with each other. And so the main design goal of the solutions was to allow a sort of flexibility that lets us adapt. And every time we learn something and every time we find something that works or perhaps doesn't work quite as well as was imagined, we have the flexibility to change that and kind of stay nimble and on our toes. >> Terrific, well, Chuck, now switching over to you, why do you think that some of these, platforms like the virtual classroom are so effective with Cherokee speakers? >> Well, a couple of reasons, one pandemic related, during COVID the worst public health crisis the world seen in living memory, we have had to adapt quickly to continue on our mission to save this language. We couldn't afford a year off in terms of pairing speakers, by the way, most of our fluent speakers are over the age of 70, with young people who need to learn the language and be the new generation of speakers. So it's been really important that during those difficult times we could connect virtually and the technology we've been using has worked so effectively, but the other is really irrespective of what's going on in terms of having to isolate, and social distance and things of that nature during COVID, and that is just making sure we can make this language accessible, particularly to young people in a manner in which they are becoming accustomed to learning things throughout the rest of the world. And so using platforms that they're familiar with is very important but it also has to be something that an older generation of these fluent speakers, as I say most of them are over 70, can use. And that's what really has been so effective about this platform. It's so usable. Once you introduce it to people whether it's a young person who can adapt pretty quickly 'cause they're growing up immersed in it, or it's someone who has not been familiar with that technology, with just a little bit of showing them how to use it, suddenly this classroom becomes just like you're in person. And that makes all the difference in the world in terms of connecting these young people with their elders. As the other thing is Cherokees are by nature very much part of a big extended family. And so that personal connection that you can maintain through this platform is really important. I think it's going to be the key to how we save this language, because as I say we have Cherokees all over the country, even all over the world and we're going to harness our numbers, the large population we have and find those with the interest and aptitude to learn the language, we must use this technology and so far it's worked well. >> Yeah, terrific, and now switching over to Kyle, we'd love to hear from you how your team developed this technology. How they really thought out, what kinds of methods are really going to drive the interaction and the immersion and engagement among these disparate demographics of, elderly Cherokees and also the young generation. So, how did your team go about developing that? >> Yeah, it's a very good question because in a situation like this, there is no shortage of different ways that you could have built a solution like this. There are a lot of different ways that it could have been done. So the tax that we took was a rigorous focus on the user experience and on the experience of the speaker. And that allowed us to detach ourselves to a large degree from what were the exact technology choices that were implemented in terms of AWS services, other open source packages that run on AWS, it's being able to focus completely on what the nation was trying to achieve with their speakers, both through the game and the virtual classroom platform. It let us take a lot of other design decisions and technology choices sort of into the background and behind a level of abstraction. And so there's always quite a bit of rigorous testing and really making sure you understand how something's going to perform in the wild, but the reality of the situation was, the whole reason for doing it was the experience of the speakers, both in the game and in the classroom platform. So we stayed very focused on that and made technology decisions sort of second fiddle or lower priority. >> Terrific, well, Chuck, how do you think that these kinds of innovations could be applied to other areas of the Cherokee school system? >> Well, our greatest challenge is preserving language and culture, but we also have as part of our mission to educate this new generation of Cherokees coming up. For years and years, really generations, Cherokees who were able to get a good education many of them left our tribal lands for new opportunities. And so we lost a great deal because of the economic pressures here in Northeast, Oklahoma, particularly on our Cherokee lands. So the task now is to generate opportunity for a new generation coming up. Education is key to that and so if we want to create a pipeline of young Cherokees who want to get into the healthcare fields, want to get into aerospace, want to get into other professions, we've got to create an education system that is steadier and modern. We have a school that is K through 12th grade, K through the senior year, and so we have an opportunity really to do that. And I think for the first time in our history, in this era, I'm talking elect the last few decades, we are able to really craft education in a way that works for us and using technology and making choices about what that technology is, is important to us. It's a bygone era in which the federal government or the state is sort of imposing on us what choices we make. Now we can reach out with great partners all over the world like Presidio and say what solution can work for our classroom? When we can identify what the great demands are on the reservation in terms of jobs. And one of the great demands we have is healthcare. So how can we use technology to inspire little Cherokee boys and girls to grow up and be doctors and nurses here in just a few decades when we're building this great health system? Well, we're going to use technology to do it. So the possibilities are really unlimited and they need to be because we think our potential here in Cherokee Nation is unlimited. >> Yeah, I mean that's terrific to hear how technology is really encouraging younger generations to study, learn and really push themselves further. Kyle, I'd like to switch over to you and hear a little bit about the benefits of launching this kind of platform on AWS. >> Yeah, there are a lot of benefits to building this on AWS. And I think that it spans a couple of categories, even. I mean, from a technological perspective there was every tool and every service that we needed to build both of the solutions that we built right there in AWS. And when there was a, when there was a time where we needed to jump out and use a project outside of AWS, running on AWS such as the unity engine, AWS makes that very easy. So I would say that the choice was easy because there are technological realities and the breadth and the depth of the technological portfolio in AWS combined with the partnership that we get from them, It's really, you know, there's a lot of support when it comes to, Hey we're working with the Cherokee nation on something that's extremely important. We need your help. We need you to help us figure this out. It's never been hard to get that partnership. >> Terrific, and also following up on that, love to hear how AWS really helped with flexibility and also the cost effective effectiveness of this kind of platform. >> Yeah I would take those questions backwards or in reverse order because the cost-effectiveness of the solution is really, it's really something to make note of because when we build something in the way that we built these platforms they're serverless and event driven. Meaning that the Cherokee Nation is not paying for a solution constantly as we would in lives past running things in data centers and such. It really, the services in AWS allow us to say, Hey, let's spin up certain pieces of functionality when they're needed as they're being used. And the meter is running during that time, and the cost is occurred during the time it's being used and not all of the time. So that really has a dramatic impact on cost effectiveness. And then from a flexibility standpoint, as we learn new things, as we evolve the platform as we grow this out to more and more speakers and to more and more impact to the Cherokee Nation, we have all kinds of different technology choices that we can make and it's all contained within AWS. >> Yeah, and I'd like to open this now to both of you, starting with Chuck, how do you think this kind of technology could be applied to other cultures or languages that re seeking to preserve themselves? There's so many languages in the world that are now dying out because most of us are only speaking, just a few like English, Spanish, just a few others, what steps can be taken so that humanity can preserve these important languages? >> Well, you're right. There are so many endangered languages around the world and indigenous languages are unfortunately dying all over the world all the time, even as we speak, they're slipping away. The United nations is dedicated the next decade to the preservation of indigenous languages. That's gotten many leaders around the world thinking about how we can save languages here in this era. And I would encourage any tribal leader in particular in the United States, but I think it certainly applies around the world to seek out this technology. I mean, Cherokee Nation's in a position now where we can seek out the best in the world in terms of partnerships. And we've found that in Presidio. And of course they're using AWS which means they're using the best in the world and so the technology exists, and the willingness to work together exist. And I think generations ago that would have been not something we could have connected well on in terms of partnering with companies that were doing cutting edge things. So if you're looking to connect generations in terms of learning and sharing the language, which is just I cannot stress enough how indispensable that is to language preservation, this type of technology will do it. There are some, I think that may think, and I don't have a technology background, that if you're using this cutting edge technology, I mean this is the best in the world that you're going to speak only to this young generation coming up, and maybe it's inaccessible to an older generation. It's just not the case. This is so user-friendly that we we've been able to connect elders with young people. And if anyone in the world interested in preserving languages could see this in action, could see a young person sitting next to an elder talking about the technology or connecting virtually, it would change their whole perspective on what technology means for language reservations because I promise you all over the world the great challenges you have this group of older generations of people who know the language. They have it in their hearts, they have it in their minds and they're slipping away just from the passage of time. Connecting them with the generation coming up is just what we need to do. This technology allows us to do it. >> Yeah, Chuck following up on that when I hear about elderly people being able to connect with the younger generations in this way and share their history and their culture I'm sure that also, It must have a positive mental effect for them. Right, so elderly are often isolated. Do you have any insight on that? Any quality of insight what you've heard from people using this? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think the last year has proven how valuable it is. I mean, we lost over 50 fluent Cherokee speakers and I mentioned earlier in the program, that we only have 2000 left. 50 to COVID and more to just the passage of time and old age. But we have many that are active and engaged in language preservation and they have said to me how valuable it's been to be able to be at home and yet still feel like they're part of this great mission that we have at the Cherokee Nation. Understand that this mission that we have is on par with what any nation in history has set as a goal to shoot for whether it's the United States wanting to land a man on the moon, we're trying to save the language. This is that level of importance. And so for an elder to feel like they're connected and still contributing during this past year difficult times, that makes all the difference in the world. And even as I say, as the pandemic recedes and we hope it continues to recede, there is still a need for elders to stay connected. And in many cases they cannot due to poor health, due to the lack of transportation, this knocks down those barriers and so there's a great deal of joy that has been gained from using this technology. And honestly, just talking to elders about young people getting the opportunity to play this video game even some elders that were voice actors in this game, that Presidio helped us develop. I mean, I can't tell you how important that is for somebody to use their language, to make a living. And that's part of how you preserve a language. Presidio has showed us a way that we can do just that. So we're not only training new speakers, we're giving this opportunity many cases to elders to do something that is very productive with the wonderful gift they have, which is the Cherokee language. >> Terrific, well that is really inspiring because potentially this technology could be utilized by generations to come. The current young people that are using this will one day be the elderly. So, Kyle, how do you see this technology potentially on this platform being evolved? What's the next step to keep it really up to date for future generations as it's evolving. >> Yeah, there's a lot of plans on where to take this I can tell you, honestly. From the perspective of the mobile game, you're building on a platform of an open world game means that the imagination is the limit quite honestly. So there are a lot of new characters and new levels and new adventures that are plans to further immerse the speakers in the platform. And I think that will, that will help with reach and it will help with the amount of connection that's built to the chief's point about bridging the older generations into the younger generations over that common bond of the language and the culture that keeps those connections alive. And so we want to expand the mobile game Engage, the navigate to be as accessible and as wide reaching and immersive as it possibly can, and there are a lot of plans in the works for that. And then with the virtual classroom platform, we started with a various focused constituency within the nation of the language immersion school. And there are many other educational services and even healthcare to the chief's earlier point again where I think there's a lot of potential for that one as well. >> All right, well, terrific gentlemen. Thank you so much for your insights, really fantastic hearing how this platform is really a difference in the lives of people in the Cherokee Nation. Of course, that were our guests, Kyle Hines, VP Strategic Accounts at Presidio as well as chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., the chief of the Cherokee Nation. And that's all for today's session at the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, I'm your host for "theCUBE", Natalie Erlich. Thanks so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE. Presenting: Big Data Silicon Valley. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, we're here live at San Jose for Big Data SV, Big Data Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE. We're here with two great guests, Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Druva, and Jake Burns, VP of Cloud Services of Live Nation Entertainment. Welcome to theCUBE, so what's going on with Cloud? Apps are out there, backup, recovery, what's going on? >> So, we went all in with AWS, and late 2015 and through 2016 we moved all of our corporate infrastructure into AWS, and I think we're a little bit unique in that situation, so in terms of our posture, we're 100% Cloud. >> John: Jaspreet, what's going on with you guys in the Cloud, because we've talked about this before, with a lot of the apps in the cloud, backup is really important. What's the key thing that you guys are doing together with Live Nation? >> Sure, so I think the notion of data is now pretty much everywhere. The data is captured, controlled in data center, now it's getting decentralized into getting into apps and ecosystems, and softwares and services deployed either at the edge or in the Cloud. As the data gets more and more decentralized, the notion of data management, bead backup, BD discovery. Anything has to get more and more centralized. And we strongly believe the epicenter of this whole data management has to move to Cloud. So, Druva is a size based provider for data management. And we work with Live Nation to predict the apps not just in the data center. But, also at the edge and also the Cloud data center. The applications deployed in the Cloud, be it Live Nation or Ticketmaster. >> And what are some of the workloads you guys are backing up? That's with Druva. >> Yeah so, it's pretty much all corporate, IT applications. You know, typical things you'd find in any IT shop really. So, you know, we have our financial systems and we have some of our smaller ticketing systems and you know, corporate websites. Things of that nature. So, it's like we have 120 applications that are running and it's just really kind of one of everything. >> We were talking before we came on camera about the history of computing and the Cloud has obviously changed the game. How would you compare the Cloud as a trend relative to operationalizing the role of data and obviously GDPR, Ransomware. These are things that now with the perimeter gone. There's worries. So now, how do you guys look at the Cloud? So Jake, I will start with you. If you can compare and contrast, where we have come from and where we are going. Role of the Cloud. Significant primary, expanding. How would you compare that? And how would you talk to someone who says Hey I'm still in the data center world? What's going on with Cloud? >> Well, yeah, it's significant and it's expanding, both. And you know, it's really transforming the way we do business. So you know just from a high level, things like shortening the time to market for applications, going from three to six months just to get a proof of concept started to today, you know, in the Cloud. Being able to innovate really by trying things trying to... we try 20 different things, decide what works, what doesn't work. And at very low cost. So, it allows us to really do things that just weren't possible before. So, also, we we move more quickly because, you know, we're not afraid of making mistakes. If we provision infrastructure and we don't get it right the first time, we just change it. You know, that's something that we would just never be able to do previously in the data center. So to answer your question, everything is different. >> And as a service model's been kind of key. Is the consumption on your end different like I mean radically different? Like give an example of like how much time would be saved or taken to use other the traditional approaches. >> Oh for sure. You know, in the role of IT has completely changed because you know, instead of worrying about nuts and bolts and servers and storage arrays and data centers. You know, we could really focus on the things that are important to the business. You know, those things delivering results for the business. So, bringing value, bringing applications online and trying things that are going to help you know, us do business rather than focusing on all the minutiae. All that stuff's now been outsourced to Cloud providers. So, really, we kind of have a similar head count and staff. But, we are focused on things that bring value rather than things that are just kind of frivolous. >> Jaspreet, you guys have been very successful startup growing rapidly. The Cloud been a good friend that trend is your friend with the Cloud. >> What's different operationally that you guys are tapping into? What's that tail wind for Druva that's making you guys successful? And is it the ease of use? Is it the ease of consumption? Is it the tech? What's the secret to success with Druva? >> Sure, so, we believe cloud is a very big business transformation trend more than a technology trend. It's how you consumer service with a fixed SLA, with a fixed service agreement across the globe. So, it's ease of consumption. It's simplicity of views. It's orchestration. It's cost control. All those things. So, our promise to our customers is the complexity of data management, backups, archives, data production, which is a risk mitigation project. You know, can be completely abstracted by a simple service. For example, you know, Live Nation consumers, consumer drove a service through Amazon Marketplace. So, think about consuming a critical service like data management through simplicity of marketplace, pay as you go, as you consume the service. Across the globe. In the US, in Australia, and Europe. And also, helps the vendors like us to innovate better. Because we have a control environment to understand how different customers are using the service and be able to orchestrate better security pusher, better threat prevention, better cost control. DevOps. So, it improves the pusher of the service being offered and helps the customer consumer. >> You both are industry veterans by today's standards unless you're like 24 doing some of the cryptocurrency stuff that, you know, doesn't know the old IT baggage. How would you guys view the multi-Cloud conversation? Because we hear that all the time. Multi-Cloud has come up so many times. What does it mean? Jake, what does multi-Cloud actually mean? Is it the same workload across multiple Clouds? Is it the fact that there is multiple Clouds? Certainly, there will be multiple Clouds? But, so, help us digest what that even means these days. >> Yeah, that's a great question and it's a really interesting topic. Multi-Cloud is one of those things where, you know, there's so many benefits to using more than one Cloud provider. But, there are also a lot of pitfalls. So, people really underestimate the difference in the technology and the complexity of managing the technology when you change Cloud providers. I'm talking primarily about infrastructure service providers like Amazon web services. So, you know, I think there's a lot of good reasons to be multi-Cloud to get the best features out of different providers, to not have, you know, the risk of having all your data in one place with one vendor. But, you know, it needs to be done in such a way where you don't take that hit in overhead and complexity and you know, I think that's kind of a prohibitive barrier for most enterprises. >> And what are the big pitfalls that you see? Is it mainly underestimating the stack complexity between them or is it more of just operational questions? I mean what is the pitfalls that you've observed? >> Yeah, so, moving from like a typical IT data center environment to public Cloud provider like AWS. You're essentially asking all your technical staff to start speaking in a new language. Now if you were to introduce a second Cloud provider to that environment, now you're asking them to learn a third language as well. And that's a lot to ask. So, you really have two scenarios where you can make that work today without using a third party. And that's ask all of your staff to know both and that's just not feasible. Or have two tech teams. One for each Cloud platform. That's really not something businesses want to do. So, I think the real answer is to rely on a third party that can come in and abstract one of those Cloud complexities Well, one of those Cloud providers out. So, you don't have to directly manage it. And in that way, you can get the benefit of being multi-Cloud, that data protection of being multi-Cloud. But, not have to introduce that complexity to your environment. >> To provide some abstraction layer. Some sort of software approach. >> Yeah, like for example, if you have your primary systems in AWS, and you use a software like Druva Phoenix to backup your data and you put that data into a second Cloud provider. You don't have to an account with that second Cloud provider. You don't have to have the risk of associating without a complexity associated without that is I think is a very >> And that's where you're looking for differentiation. We look at venues, say hey don't make me work harder. >> Right. >> And add new staff. Solve the problem. >> Yeah, it's all about solving problems right? And that's why we're doing this. >> So, Druva talk about this thing. Because we talked about it earlier about To me we could be oh we're on Azure. Well, they have Office 365 of course they're going to have Microsoft. A lot of people have a lot going on and AWS. So, maybe we're not there at the world where you can actually use provision across Clouds, the same workload, It would be nice to have that someday if it was seamless. But, I think that's might be the nirvana. But at the end of the day, an enterprise might have Office 365 and some Azure. But, I got some mostly Amazon over here I'm doing a lot of development on and doing a DevOps, and I'm on-prim. How do you talk to that? Because that's like you got to backup Office 365, you got to do the on-prim thing, you got to do the Amazon thing. How do you guys solve that problem? What's the conversation? >> Absolutely. I think over time we believe best of breed will win. So, people will deploy different type of cloud for different workloads. Pete's has hosted IaaS or platform like PaaS. When they do that, when they host multiple services, softwares to deploy services. I think its hard to control where the data will go. What we can orchestrate or anybody can orchestrate is the centralizing the data management part of it. So, Druva has the best pusher, has the best coverage across multiple heterogeneous Cloud breed. You know. Services like Office 365, Box, or Saleforce or B platforms like S3 or Dynono DB through our product called Apollo or hosted platforms like what Live Nation is using through our Phoenix product line. So getting the breadth of coverage, consistency of policies on a single platform is what will make enterprises adopt what's best out there without worrying about how you build abstraction for data management. >> Jake, what's the biggest thing you see people who are moving to the Cloud for the first time? What are they struggling with? Is it the idea that there's no perimeter? Is it staff training? I mean what are some of the as people move from Test Dev and or start to put in production the Cloud? What are some of the critical things they should think about? >> Yeah, there are so many of them. But first, really, its just getting buy in, you know, from your technical staff because, you know, in an enterprise environment you bring in a Cloud provider it's very easily framed to hold as if we're just being outsourced right? So, I think getting past that barrier first and really getting through to folks and letting them know that really this is good for you. This is not bad for you. You're going to be learning a new skill, very valuable skill, and you're going to be more effective at your job. So, I think that's the first thing. After that, once you start moving to the Cloud, then, the thing that becomes apparent very quickly is cost control. So, you know, the thing with public Cloud is you know, before you had this really kind of narrow range of what IT could cost. Now with the traditional data center, now we have this huge range. And yes, it can be cheaper than it was before. But, it can also be far more expensive than it was before. >> So, service is sprawled or just not paying attention? Both? >> Well, you essentially you're giving your engineers a blank check. So, you need to have some governance and, you know, you really need to think about things that you didn't have to think about before. You're paying for consumption. So, you really have to watch your consumption. >> So, take me thorough the mental model of D duplication in the Cloud. Because I'm trying to like visualize it or grok it a little bit. Okay, so, the Cloud is out there, data's everywhere. And do I move the compute to the data? How does the backup and recovery and data management work? And does D Doup change with Cloud? Because some people think I got my D Doup already and I'm on premise. I've been doing these old solutions. How does D Doup specifically change in the Cloud or does it? >> I know scale changes. You're looking at, you know, the best D Doup systems, if you look historically, you know, were 100 terabyte, 200 terabyte, Dedup indexes, data domain. The scale changes, you know, customers expect massive scale in Cloud. Our largest customer had 10 perabyte in a single Dedup index. It's 100x scale difference compared to what traditional systems could do. Number two, you could create a quality of service which is not really bound by a fixed, you know, algorithm like variable lent or whatever. So, you can optimize a Dedup very clearly for the right workload. The right Dedup for the right workload. So, you may Dedup off of 365 differently than your VMware instances, compared to your Oracle databases or your Endpoint workload. So, it helps you that as a service business model helps you create a custom, tailored solution for the right data. And bring the scale. We don't have the complexity of scale. But, to get the benefit of scale. All, you know, simply managing the cloud. >> Jake, what's it like working with Druve? What's the benefit that they bring to you guys? >> Yeah, so, specifically around backups for our enterprise systems, you know, that's a difficult challenge to solve natively in the Cloud. Especially if you're going to be limited to using Cloud native tools. So, it's really it's a really perfect use case for a third party provider. You know, people don't think about this much but in the old days, in the data center, you know, our backups went offsite into a vault. They were on tapes. It was very difficult for us to lose those or for them to be erased accidentally or even intentionally. Once you go into the Cloud, especially if you're all in with the Cloud, like we are. Everything is easier. And so, accidents are easier also. You know, deleting your data is easier. So, you know, what we really want and what a lot of enterprises want. >> And security too is a potential >> Absolutely, yeah. And so, what we want is we want to get some of that benefit, you know, back that we had from that inefficiency that we had beforehand. We love all the benefits of the Cloud. But, we want to have our data protected also. So, this is a great role for a company like Druva to come in and offer a product like Phoenix and say, you know, we're going to handle we're going to handle your backups for you essentially. So, you're going to put it in a safe place. We're going to secure it for you. And we're going to make sure it's secure for you. And doing it software is a service like Druva does with Phoenix. I think is the absolute right way to go. It's exactly what you need. >> Well, congratulations Jake Burns, Vice President in Cloud services. >> Thank you. >> At Live Nation entertainment. Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva, great to have you on. Congratulations on your success. >> Thank you. >> Inside the tornado called Cloud computing. A lot more stuff coming. More CUBE coverage coming up after this short break. Be right back. (electronic music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier host here in Palo Alto, California. theCUBE's second year covering International Women's Day. It's been a great celebration of all the smart leaders in the world who are making a difference from all kinds of backgrounds, from technology to business and everything in between. Today we've got a great guest, Dominique Bastos, who's the senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent Systems, formerly with AWS. That's where we first met at re:Invent. Dominique, great to have you on the program here for International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you John, for having me back on theCUBE. This is an honor, especially given the theme. >> Well, I'm excited to have you on, I consider you one of those typecast personas where you've kind of done a lot of things. You're powerful, you've got great business acumen you're technical, and we're in a world where, you know the world's coming completely digital and 50% of the world is women, 51%, some say. So you got mostly male dominated industry and you have a dual engineering background and that's super impressive as well. Again, technical world, male dominated you're in there in the mix. What inspires you to get these engineering degrees? >> I think even it was more so shifted towards males. When I had the inspiration to go to engineering school I was accused as a young girl of being a tomboy and fiddling around with all my brother's toys versus focusing on my dolls and other kind of stereotypical toys that you would give a girl. I really had a curiosity for building, a curiosity for just breaking things apart and putting them back together. I was very lucky in that my I guess you call it primary school, maybe middle school, had a program for, it was like electronics, that was the class electronics. So building circuit boards and things like that. And I really enjoyed that aspect of building. I think it was more actually going into engineering school. Picking that as a discipline was a little bit, my mom's reaction to when I announced that I wanted to do engineering which was, "No, that's for boys." >> Really. >> And that really, you know, I think she, it came from a good place in trying to protect me from what she has experienced herself in terms of how women are received in those spaces. So I kind of shrugged it off and thought "Okay, well I'm definitely now going to do this." >> (laughs) If I was told not to, you're going to do it. >> I was told not to, that's all I needed to hear. And also, I think my passion was to design cars and I figured if I enroll in an industrial engineering program I could focus on ergonomic design and ultimately, you know have a career doing something that I'm passionate about. So yeah, so my inspiration was kind of a little bit of don't do this, a lot of curiosity. I'm also a very analytical person. I've been, and I don't know what the science is around left right brain to be honest, but been told that I'm a very much a logical person versus a feeler. So I don't know if that's good or bad. >> Straight shooter. What were your engineering degrees if you don't mind sharing? >> So I did industrial engineering and so I did a dual degree, industrial engineering and robotics. At the time it was like a manufacturing robotics program. It was very, very cool because we got to, I mean now looking back, the evolution of robotics is just insane. But you, you know, programmed a robotic arm to pick things up. I actually crashed the Civil Engineering School's Concrete Canoe Building Competition where you literally have to design a concrete canoe and do all the load testing and the strength testing of the materials and basically then, you know you go against other universities to race the canoe in a body of water. We did that at, in Alabama and in Georgia. So I was lucky to experience that two times. It was a lot of fun. >> But you knew, so you knew, deep down, you were technical you had a nerd vibe you were geeking out on math, tech, robotics. What happened next? I mean, what were some of the challenges you faced? How did you progress forward? Did you have any blockers and roadblocks in front of you and how did you handle those? >> Yeah, I mean I had, I had a very eye-opening experience with, in my freshman year of engineering school. I kind of went in gung-ho with zero hesitation, all the confidence in the world, 'cause I was always a very big nerd academically, I hate admitting this but myself and somebody else got most intellectual, voted by the students in high school. It's like, you don't want to be voted most intellectual when you're in high school. >> Now it's a big deal. (laughs) >> Yeah, you want to be voted like popular or anything like that? No, I was a nerd, but in engineering school, it's a, it was very humbling. That whole confidence that I had. I experienced prof, ooh, I don't want to name the school. Everybody can google it though, but, so anyway so I had experience with some professors that actually looked at me and said, "You're in the wrong program. This is difficult." I, and I think I've shared this before in other forums where, you know, my thermodynamic teacher basically told me "Cheerleading's down the hall," and it it was a very shocking thing to hear because it really made me wonder like, what am I up against here? Is this what it's going to be like going forward? And I decided not to pay attention to that. I think at the moment when you hear something like that you just, you absorb it and you also don't know how to react. And I decided immediately to just walk right past him and sit down front center in the class. In my head I was cursing him, of course, 'cause I mean, let's be real. And I was like, I'm going to show this bleep bleep. And proceeded to basically set the curve class crushed it and was back to be the teacher's assistant. So I think that was one. >> But you became his teacher assistant after, or another one? >> Yeah, I gave him a mini speech. I said, do not do this. You, you could, you could have broken me and if you would've done this to somebody who wasn't as steadfast in her goals or whatever, I was really focused like I'm doing this, I would've backed out potentially and said, you know this isn't something I want to experience on the daily. So I think that was actually a good experience because it gave me an opportunity to understand what I was up against but also double down in how I was going to deal with it. >> Nice to slay the misogynistic teachers who typecast people. Now you had a very technical career but also you had a great career at AWS on the business side you've handled 'em all of the big accounts, I won't say the names, but like we're talking about monster accounts, sales and now basically it's not really selling, you're managing a big account, it's like a big business. It's a business development thing. Technical to business transition, how do you handle that? Was that something you were natural for? Obviously you, you stared down the naysayers out of the gate in college and then in business, did that continue and how did you drive through that? >> So I think even when I was coming out of university I knew that I wanted to have a balance between the engineering program and business. A lot of my colleagues went on to do their PEs so continue to get their masters basically in engineering or their PhDs in engineering. I didn't really have an interest for that. I did international business and finance as my MBA because I wanted to explore the ability of taking what I had learned in engineering school and applying it to building businesses. I mean, at the time I didn't have it in my head that I would want to do startups but I definitely knew that I wanted to get a feel for what are they learning in business school that I missed out in engineering school. So I think that helped me when I transitioned, well when I applied, I was asked to come apply at AWS and I kind of went, no I'm going to, the DNA is going to be rejected. >> You thought, you thought you'd be rejected from AWS. >> I thought I'd be, yeah, because I have very much a startup founder kind of disruptive personality. And to me, when I first saw AWS at the stage early 2016 I saw it as a corporation. Even though from a techie standpoint, I was like, these people are insane. This is amazing what they're building. But I didn't know what the cultural vibe would feel like. I had been with GE at the beginning of my career for almost three years. So I kind of equated AWS Amazon to GE given the size because in between, I had done startups. So when I went to AWS I think initially, and I do have to kind of shout out, you know Todd Weatherby basically was the worldwide leader for ProServe and it was being built, he built it and I went into ProServe to help from that standpoint. >> John: ProServe, Professional services >> Professional services, right. To help these big enterprise customers. And specifically my first customer was an amazing experience in taking, basically the company revolves around strategic selling, right? It's not like you take a salesperson with a conventional schooling that salespeople would have and plug them into AWS in 2016. It was very much a consultative strategic approach. And for me, having a technical background and loving to solve problems for customers, working with the team, I would say, it was a dream team that I joined. And also the ability to come to the table with a technical background, knowing how to interact with senior executives to help them envision where they want to go, and then to bring a team along with you to make that happen. I mean, that was like magical for me. I loved that experience. >> So you like the culture, I mean, Andy Jassy, I've interviewed many times, always talked about builders and been a builder mentality. You mentioned that earlier at the top of this interview you've always building things, curious and you mentioned potentially your confidence might have been shaken. So you, you had the confidence. So being a builder, you know, being curious and having confidence seems to be what your superpower is. A lot of people talk about the confidence angle. How important is that and how important is that for encouraging more women to get into tech? Because I still hear that all the time. Not that they don't have confidence, but there's so many signals that potentially could shake confidence in industry >> Yeah, that's actually a really good point that you're making. A lot of signals that women get could shake their confidence and that needs to be, I mean, it's easy to say that it should be innate. I mean that's kind of like textbook, "Oh it has to come from within." Of course it does. But also, you know, we need to understand that in a population where 50% of the population is women but only 7% of the positions in tech, and I don't know the most current number in tech leadership, is women, and probably a smaller percentage in the C-suite. When you're looking at a woman who's wanting to go up the trajectory in a tech company and then there's a subconscious understanding that there's a limit to how far you'll go, your confidence, you know, in even subconsciously gets shaken a little bit because despite your best efforts, you're already seeing the cap. I would say that we need to coach girls to speak confidently to navigate conflict versus running away from it, to own your own success and be secure in what you bring to the table. And then I think a very important thing is to celebrate each other and the wins that we see for women in tech, in the industry. >> That's awesome. What's, the, in your opinion, the, you look at that, the challenges for this next generation women, and women in general, what are some of the challenges for them and that they need to overcome today? I mean, obviously the world's changed for the better. Still not there. I mean the numbers one in four women, Rachel Thornton came on, former CMO of AWS, she's at MessageBird now. They had a study where only one in four women go to the executive board level. And so there's still, still numbers are bad and then the numbers still got to get up, up big time. That's, and the industry's working on that, but it's changed. But today, what are some of the challenges for this current generation and the next generation of women and how can we and the industry meet, we being us, women in the industry, be strong role models for them? >> Well, I think the challenge is one of how many women are there in the pipeline and what are we doing to retain them and how are we offering up the opportunities to fill. As you know, as Rachel said and I haven't had an opportunity to see her, in how are we giving them this opportunity to take up those seats in the C-suite right, in these leadership roles. And I think this is a little bit exacerbated with the pandemic in that, you know when everything shut down when people were going back to deal with family and work at the same time, for better or for worse the brunt of it fell on probably, you know the maternal type caregiver within the family unit. You know, I've been, I raised my daughter alone and for me, even without the pandemic it was a struggle constantly to balance the risk that I was willing to take to show up for those positions versus investing even more of that time raising a child, right? Nevermind the unconscious bias or cultural kind of expectations that you get from the male counterparts where there's zero understanding of what a mom might go through at home to then show up to a meeting, you know fully fresh and ready to kind of spit out some wisdom. It's like, you know, your kid just freaking lost their whatever and you know, they, so you have to sort a bunch of things out. I think the challenge that women are still facing and will we have to keep working at it is making sure that there's a good pipeline. A good amount of young ladies of people taking interest in tech. And then as they're, you know, going through the funnel at stages in their career, we're providing the mentoring we're, there's representation, right? To what they're aspiring to. We're celebrating their interest in the field, right? And, and I think also we're doing things to retain them, because again, the pandemic affected everybody. I think women specifically and I don't know the statistics but I was reading something about this were the ones to tend to kind of pull it back and say well now I need to be home with, you know you name how many kids and pets and the aging parents, people that got sick to take on that position. In addition to the career aspirations that they might have. We need to make it easier basically. >> I think that's a great call out and I appreciate you bringing that up about family and being a single mom. And by the way, you're savage warrior to doing that. It's amazing. You got to, I know you have a daughter in computer science at Stanford, I want to get to that in a second. But that empathy and I mentioned Rachel Thornton, who's the CMO MessageBird and former CMO of AWS. Her thing right now to your point is mentoring and sponsorship is very key. And her company and the video that's on the site here people should look at that and reference that. They talk a lot about that empathy of people's situation whether it's a single mom, family life, men and women but mainly women because they're the ones who people aren't having a lot of empathy for in that situation, as you called it out. This is huge. And I think remote work has opened up this whole aperture of everyone has to have a view into how people are coming to the table at work. So, you know, props are bringing that up, and I recommend everyone look at check out Rachel Thornton. So how do you balance that, that home life and talk about your daughter's journey because sounds like she's nerding out at Stanford 'cause you know Stanford's called Nerd Nation, that's their motto, so you must be proud. >> I am so proud, I'm so proud. And I will say, I have to admit, because I did encounter so many obstacles and so many hurdles in my journey, it's almost like I forgot that I should set that aside and not worry about my daughter. My hope for her was for her to kind of be artistic and a painter or go into something more lighthearted and fun because I just wanted to think, I guess my mom had the same idea, right? She, always been very driven. She, I want to say that I got very lucky that she picked me to be her mom. Biologically I'm her mom, but I told her she was like a little star that fell from the sky and I, and ended up with me. I think for me, balancing being a single mom and a career where I'm leading and mentoring and making big decisions that affect people's lives as well. You have to take the best of everything you get from each of those roles. And I think that the best way is play to your strengths, right? So having been kind of a nerd and very organized person and all about, you know, systems for effectiveness, I mean, industrial engineering, parenting for me was, I'm going to make it sound super annoying and horrible, but (laughs) >> It's funny, you know, Dave Vellante and I when we started SiliconANGLE and theCUBE years ago, one of the things we were all like sports lovers. So we liked sports and we are like we looked at the people in tech as tech athletes and except there's no men and women teams, it's one team. It's all one thing. So, you know, I consider you a tech athlete you're hard charging strong and professional and smart and beautiful and brilliant, all those good things. >> Thank you. >> Now this game is changing and okay, and you've done startups, and you've done corporate jobs, now you're in a new role. What's the current tech landscape from a, you know I won't say athletic per standpoint but as people who are smart. You have all kinds of different skill sets. You have the startup warriors, you have the folks who like to be in the middle of the corporate world grow up through corporate, climb the corporate ladder. You have investors, you have, you know, creatives. What have you enjoyed most and where do you see all the action? >> I mean, I think what I've enjoyed the most has been being able to bring all of the things that I feel I'm strong at and bring it together to apply that to whatever the problem is at hand, right? So kind of like, you know if you look at a renaissance man who can kind of pop in anywhere and, oh, he's good at, you know sports and he's good at reading and, or she's good at this or, take all of those strengths and somehow bring them together to deal with the issue at hand, versus breaking up your mindset into this is textbook what I learned and this is how business should be done and I'm going to draw these hard lines between personal life and work life, or between how you do selling and how you do engineering. So I think my, the thing that I loved, really loved about AWS was a lot of leaders saw something in me that I potentially didn't see, which was, yeah you might be great at running that big account but we need help over here doing go to market for a new product launch and boom, there you go. Now I'm in a different org helping solve that problem and getting something launched. And I think if you don't box yourself in to I'm only good at this, or, you know put a label on yourself as being the rockstar in that. It leaves room for opportunities to present themselves but also it leaves room within your own mind to see yourself as somebody capable of doing anything. Right, I don't know if I answered the question accurately. >> No, that's good, no, that's awesome. I love the sharing, Yeah, great, great share there. Question is, what do you see, what do you currently during now you're building a business of Persistent for the cloud, obviously AWS and Persistent's a leader global system integrator around the world, thousands and thousands of customers from what we know and been reporting on theCUBE, what's next for you? Where do you see yourself going? Obviously you're going to knock this out of the park. Where do you see yourself as you kind of look at the continuing journey of your mission, personal, professional what's on your mind? Where do you see yourself going next? >> Well, I think, you know, again, going back to not boxing yourself in. This role is an amazing one where I have an opportunity to take all the pieces of my career in tech and apply them to building a business within a business. And that involves all the goodness of coaching and mentoring and strategizing. And I'm loving it. I'm loving the opportunity to work with such great leaders. Persistent itself is very, very good at providing opportunities, very diverse opportunities. We just had a huge Semicolon; Hackathon. Some of the winners were females. The turnout was amazing in the CTO's office. We have very strong women leading the charge for innovation. I think to answer your question about the future and where I may see myself going next, I think now that my job, well they say the job is never done. But now that Chloe's kind of settled into Stanford and kind of doing her own thing, I have always had a passion to continue leading in a way that brings me to, into the fold a lot more. So maybe, you know, maybe in a VC firm partner mode or another, you know CEO role in a startup, or my own startup. I mean, I never, I don't know right now I'm super happy but you never know, you know where your drive might go. And I also want to be able to very deliberately be in a role where I can continue to mentor and support up and coming women in tech. >> Well, you got the smarts but you got really the building mentality, the curiosity and the confidence really sets you up nicely. Dominique great story, great inspiration. You're a role model for many women, young girls out there and women in tech and in celebration. It's a great day and thank you for sharing that story and all the good nuggets there. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE, and it's been my pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having me. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto getting all the content, check out the other interviews some amazing stories, lessons learned, and some, you know some funny stories and some serious stories. So have some fun and enjoy the rest of the videos here for International Women's Days, thanks for watching. (gentle inspirational music)

>>Welcome back to the aria in Las Vegas, Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Falcon 22, the Cube's continuous coverage. Sean Henry is here. He's the president of the services division and he's the chief security officer at CrowdStrike. And he's joined by Kevin mania, CEO of Mandy. Now part of Google Jens. Welcome to the cube. Thank you. Congrats on closing the Google deal. Thank you. That's great. New chapter, >>New >>Chapter coming fresh off the keynote, you and George. I really en enjoyed that. Let's start there. One of the things you talked about was the changes you've been, you've been in this business for a while. I think you were talking about, you know, doing some of these early stuff in the nineties. Wow. Things have changed a lot the queen, right? Right. You used to put the perimeter around the queen. Yeah. Build the Mo the Queen's left or castle new ballgame. But you were talking about the board level knowledge of security in the organization. Talk about that change. That's occurred in the last >>Decade. You know, boards are all about governance, right? Making sure everybody's doing the right things. And they've kind of had a haul pass on cybersecurity for a long time. Like we expect them to be great at financial diligence, they understand the financials of an organization. You're gonna see a maturity, I think in cybersecurity where I think board members all know, Hey, there's risk out there. And we're on our own to kind of defend ourselves from it, but they don't know how to quantify it. And they don't know how to express it. So bottom line boards are interested in cyber and we just have to mature as an industry to give them the tools they need to measure it appropriately. >>Sean, one of the things I wanted to ask you. So Steven Schmidt, I noticed changed his title from CISOs chief inf information security officer, the chief security officer. Your title is chief security officer. Is that a nuance that has meaning to you or is it just less acronym? >>It depends on the organization that you're in, in our organization, the chief security officer owns all risks. So I have a CISO that comes underneath me. Yep. And I've got a security folks that are handling our facilities, our personnel, those sorts of things, all, all of our offices around the globe. So it's all things security. One of the things that we've found and Kevin and I were actually talking about this earlier is this intersection between the physical world and the virtual world. And if you've got adversaries that want gain access to your organization, they might do it remotely by trying to hack into your network. But they also might try to get one of your employees to take an action on their behalf, or they might try to get somebody hired into your company to take some nefarious acts. So from a security perspective, it's about building an envelope around all things valuable and then working it in a collaborative way. So there's a lot of interface, a lot of interaction and a lot of value in putting those things together. And, >>And you're also president of the services division. Is that a P and L role or >>It is, we have a it's P P O P and L. And we have an entire organization that's doing incident response and it's a lot of the work that we're doing with, with Kevin's folks now. So I've got both of those hats today. >>Okay. So self-funded so in a way, okay. Where are companies most at risk today? >>Huh? You wanna go on that one first? Sean, you talk fast than me. So it's bigger bang for the buck. If >>You >>Talk, you know, when I, when I think about, about companies in terms of, of their risk, it's a lot of it has to do with the expansion of the network. Companies are adding new applications, new devices, they're expanding into new areas. There are new technologies that are being developed every day and that are being embraced every day. And all of those technologies, all of those applications, all of that hardware is susceptible to attack. Adversaries are looking for the vulnerabilities they can exploit. And I think just kind of that sprawl is something that is, is disconcerting to me from a security perspective, we need to know where our assets are, where the vulnerabilities lie, how do we plug the holes? And having that visibility is really critical to ensure that you're you're in, involved in mitigating that, that new architecture, >>Anything you >>Did. Yeah. I would like when I, so I can just tell you what I'm hearing from CISOs out there. They're worried about identity, the lateral movement. That's been kind of part of every impactful breach. So in identity's kind of top three of mind, I would say zero trust, whatever that means. And we all have our own definitions of migration to zero trust and supply chain risk. You know, whether they're the supplier, they wanna make sure they can prove to their customers, they have great security practices. Or if they're a consumer of a supply chain, you need to understand who's in their supply chain. What are their dependencies? How secure are they? Those are just three topics that come up all the time. >>As we extend, you know, talking about XDR the X being extend. Do you see physical security as something that's being extended into? Or is it, or is it already kind of readily accepted that physical security goes hand in hand with information security? >>I, I don't think a lot of people think that way there certainly are some and Dave mentions Amazon and Steve Schmidt as a CSO, right? There's a CSO that works for him as well. CJ's clear integration. There's an intelligence component to that. And I think that there are certain organizations that are starting to recognize and understand that when we say there's no real perimeter, it, it expands the network expands into the physical space. And if you're not protecting that, you know, if you don't protect the, the server room and somebody can actually walk in the doors unlocked, you've got a vulnerability that might be exploited. So I think to, to recognize the value of that integration from a security perspective, to be holistic and for organizations to adopt a security first philosophy that all the employees recognize they're, they're the, the first line of defense. Oftentimes not just from a fish, but by somebody catching up with them and handing 'em a thumb drive, Hey, can you take a look at this document? For me, that's a potential vulnerability as well. So those things need to be integrated. >>I thought the most interesting part of the keynote this morning is when George asked you about election security and you immediately went to the election infrastructure. I was like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. But then I was so happy to hear you. You went to the disinformation, I learned something there about your monitoring, the network effects. Sure. And, and actually there's a career stream around that. Right. The reason I had so years ago I interviewed was like, this was 2016, Robert Gates. Okay. Former defense. And I, I said, yeah, but don't we have the best cyber can't we go on the offense. He said, wait a minute, we have the most to lose. Right. But, but you gave an example where you can identify the bots. Like let's say there's disinformation out there. You could actually use bots in a positive way to disseminate the, the truth in theory. Good. Is, is that something that's actually happening >>Out there? Well, I think we're all still learning. You know, you can have deep fakes, both audible files or visual files, right. And images. And there's no question. The next generation, you do have to professionalize the news that you consume. And we're probably gonna have to professionalize the other side critical thinking because we are a marketplace of ideas in an open society. And it's hard to tell where's the line between someone's opinion and intentional deception, you know, and sometimes it could be the source, a foreign threat, trying to influence the hearts and minds of citizens, but there's gonna be an internal threat or domestic threat as well to people that have certain ideas and concepts that they're zealots about. >>Is it enough to, is it enough to simply expose where the information is coming from? Because, you know, look, I, I could make the case that the red Sox, right. Or a horrible baseball team, and you should never go to Fenway >>And your Yankees Jersey. >>Right. Right. So is that disinformation, is that misinformation? He'd say yes. Someone else would say no, but it would be good to know that a thousand bots from some troll farm, right. Are behind us. >>There's, it's helpful to know if something can be tied to identity or is totally anonymous. Start just there. Yeah. Yeah. You can still protect the identity over time. I think all of us, if you're gonna trust the source, you actually know the source. Right. So I do believe, and, and by the way, much longer conversation about anonymity versus privacy and then trust, right. And all three, you could spend this whole interview on, but we have to have a trustworthy internet as well. And that's not just in the tech and the security of it, but over time it could very well be how we're being manipulated as citizens and people. >>When you guys talk to customers and, and peers, when somebody gets breached, what's the number one thing that you hear that they wished they'd done that they didn't. >>I think we talked about this earlier, and I think identity is something that we're talking about here. How are you, how are you protecting your assets? How do you know who's authorized to have access? How do you contain the, the access that they have? And the, the area we see with, with these malware free attacks, where adversaries are using the existing capabilities, the operating system to move laterally through the network. I mean, Kevin's folks, my folks, when we respond to an incident, it's about looking at that lateral movement to try and get a full understanding of where the adversary's been, where they're going, what they're doing, and to try to, to find a root cause analysis. And it really is a, a critical part. >>So part of the reason I was asking you about, was it a P and L cuz you, you wear two hats, right? You've got revenue generation on one side and then you've got you protect, you know, the company and you've got peer relationships. So the reason I bring this up is I felt like when stucks net occurred, there was a lot of lip service around, Hey, we, as an industry are gonna work together. And then what you saw was a lot of attempts to monetize, you know, private data, sell private reports and things of that nature you were referencing today, Kevin, that you think the industry's doing a much better job of, of collaboration. Is it, can you talk about that and maybe give some examples? >>Absolutely. I mean, you know, I lived through it as a victim of a breach couple years ago. If you see something new and novel, I, I just can't imagine you getting away with keeping it a secret. I mean, I would even go, what are you doing? Harboring that if you have it, that doesn't mean you tell the whole world, you don't come on your show and say, Hey, we got something new novel, everybody panic, you start contacting the people that are most germane to fixing the problem before you tell the world. So if I see something that's new in novel, certainly con Sean and the team at CrowdStrike saying, Hey, there's because they protect so many endpoints and they defend nations and you gotta get to Microsoft. You have to talk to pan. You have to get to the companies that have a large capability to do shields up. And I think you do that immediately. You can't sit on new and novel. You get to the vendor where the vulnerability is, all these things have to happen at a great rate to speak. >>So you guys probably won't comment, but I'm betting dollars to donuts. This Uber lapses hack you guys knew about. >>I turned to you. >>No comment. I'm guessing. I'm guessing that the, that wasn't novel. My point being, let me, let me ask it in a more generic fashion that you can maybe comment you you're. I think you're my, my inference is we're com the industry is compressing the time between a zero day and a fix. Absolutely. Absolutely. Like dramatically. >>Yes. Oh, awareness of it and AIX. Yes. Yeah. >>Okay. Yeah. And a lot of the hacks that we see as lay people in the media you've known about for quite some time, is that fair or no, not necessarily. >>It's, you know, it's harder to handle an intrusion quietly and discreetly these days, especially with what you're up against and, and most CEOs, by the way, their intent isn't, let's handle it quietly and discreetly it's what do we do about it? And what's the right way to handle it. And they wanna inform their customers and they wanna inform people that might be impacted. I wouldn't say we know it all that far ahead of time >>And, and depends. And, and I, I think companies don't know it. Yeah. Companies don't know they've been breached for weeks or months or years in some cases. Right. Which talks about a couple things, first of all, some of the sophistication of the adversaries, but it also talks about the inability of companies to often detect this type of activity when we're brought in. It's typically very quickly after the company finds out because they recognize they've gotta take action. They've got liability, they've got brand protection. There, whole sorts of, of things they need to take care of. And we're brought in it may or may not be, become public, but >>CrowdStrike was founded on the premise that the unstoppable breach is a myth. Now that's a, that's a bold sort of vision. We're not there yet, obviously. And a and a, and a, a CSO can't, you know, accept that. Right. You've gotta always be vigilant, but is that something that is, that we're gonna actually see manifest, you know, in any, any time in the near term? I mean, thinking about the Falcon platform, you guys are users of that. I don't know if that is part of the answer, but part of it's technology, but without the cultural aspects, the people side of things, you're never gonna get there. >>I can tell you, I started Maning in 2004 at the premise security breaches are inevitable, far less marketable. Yeah. You know, stop breaches. >>So >>Yeah. I, I think you have to learn how to manage this, right? It's like healthcare, you're not gonna stop every disease, but there's a lot of things that you can do to mitigate the consequences of those things. The same thing with network security, there's a lot of actions that organizations can take to help protect them in a way that allows them to live and, and operate in a, in a, a strong position. If companies are lackadaisical that irresponsible, they don't care. Those are companies that are gonna suffer. But I think you can manage this if you're using the right technology, the right people, you've got the right philosophy security first >>In, in the culture. >>Well, I can tell you very quickly, three reasons why people think, why is there an intrusion? It should just go away. Well, wherever money goes, crime follows. We still have crime. So you're still gonna have intrusions, whether it has to be someone on the inside or faulty software and people being paid the right faulty software, you're gonna have war. That's gonna create war in the cyber domain. So information warriors are gonna try to have intrusions to get to command and control. So wherever you have command and control, you'll have a war fighter. And then wherever you have information, you have ESP Espino. So you're gonna have people trying to break in at all times. >>And, and to tie that up because everything Kevin said is absolutely right. And what he just said at the very end was people, there are human beings that are on the other side of every single attack. And think about this until you physically get physically get to the people that are doing it and stop them. Yes, this will go on forever because you can block them, but they're gonna move and you can block them again. They're gonna move their objectives. Don't change because the information you have, whether it's financial information, intellectual property, strategic military information, that's still there. They will always come at it, which is where that physical component comes in. If you're able to block well enough and they can't get you remotely, they might send somebody in. Well, >>I, in the keynote, I, I'm not kidding. I'm looking around the room and I'm thinking there's at least one person here that is here primarily to gather intelligence, to help them defeat. What's being talked about here. >>Well, you said it's, >>It's kind >>Of creepy. You said the adversary is, is very well equipped and motivated. Why do you Rob banks? Well, that's where the money is, but it's more than that. Now with state sponsored terrorism and, you know, exfiltration of state secrets, I mean, there's, it's high stake's games. You got, this >>Has become a tool of nation states in terms from a political perspective, from a military perspective, if you look at what happened with Ukraine and Russia, all the work that was done in advanced by the Russians to soften up the Ukrainians, not just collection of intelligence, not just denial of services, but then disruptive attacks to change the entire complexity of the battlefield. This, this is a, an area that's never going away. It's becoming ingrained in our lives. And it's gonna be utilized for nefarious acts for many, many decades to come. >>I mean, you're right, Sean, we're seeing the future of war right before us is, is there's. There is going to be, there is a cyber component now in war, >>I think it signals the cyber component signals the silent intention of nations period, the silent projection of power probably before you see kinetics. >>And this is where gates says we have a lot more to lose as a country. So it's hard for us to go on the offense. We have to be very careful about our offensive capabilities because >>Of one of the things that, that we do need to, to do though, is we need to define what the red lines are to adversaries. Because when you talk about human beings, you've gotta put a deterrent in place so that if the adversaries know that if you cross this line, this is what the response is going to be. It's the way things were done during nuclear proliferation, right? Right. During the cold war, here's what the actions are gonna be. It's gonna be, it's gonna be mutual destruction and you can't do it. And we didn't have a nuclear war. We're at a point now where adversaries are pushing the envelope constantly, where they're turning off the lights in certain countries where they're taking actions that are, are quite detrimental to the host governments and those red lines have to be very clear, very clearly defined and acted upon if they're >>Crossed as security experts. Can you always tie that signature back to say a particular country or a particular group? >>Absolutely. 100% every >>Time I know. Yeah. No, it it's. It's a great question. You, you need to get attribution right. To get to deterrence, right. And without attribution, where do you proportionate respond to whatever act you're responding to? So attribution's critical. Both our companies work hard at doing it and it, and that's why I think you're not gonna see too many false flag operations in cyberspace, but when you do and they're well crafted or one nation masquerades is another, it, it, it's one of the last rules of the playground I haven't seen broken yet. And that that'll be an unfortunate day. >>Yeah. Because that mutually assure destruction, a death spot like Putin can say, well, it wasn't wasn't me. Right. So, and ironically, >>It's human intelligence, right. That ultimately is gonna be the only way to uncover >>That human intelligence is a big component. >>For sure. Right. And, and David, like when you go back to, you were referring to Robert Gates, it's the asymmetry of cyberspace, right? One person in one nation. That's not a control by asset could still do an act. And it, it just adds to the complexity of, we have attribution it's from that nation, but was it in order? Was it done on behalf of that nation? Very complicated. >>So this is an industry of superheroes. Thank you guys for all you do and appreciate you coming on the cube. Wow. >>I love your Cape. >>Thank all right. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave ante be right back from Falcon 22 from the area you watching the cue.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante >> In its early days, robotic process automation emerged from rudimentary screen scraping, macros and workflow automation software. Once a script heavy and limited tool that largely was used to eliminate mundane tasks for individual users, and by the way still is, RPA's evolved into an enterprise-wide mega trend that puts automation at the center of digital business initiatives. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we present our quarterly update of the trends in RPA and automation and share the latest survey data from enterprise technology research. RPA has grown quite rapidly and the acronym is becoming a convenient misnomer in a way. I mean the real action in RPA has evolved into enterprise-wide automation initiatives. Once exclusively focused really on back office automation and areas such as finance, RPA has now become an enterprise initiative as many larger organizations especially, move well beyond cost savings and outside of the CFO's purview. We predicted in early "Breaking Analysis" episodes that productivity declines in the US and Europe especially, would require automation to solve some of the world's most pressing problems. And that's what's happening. Automation today is attacking not only the labor shortage but it's supporting optimizations in ESG, supply chain, helping with inflation challenges, improving capital allocation. For example, the supply chain issues today, think about what they require. Somebody's got to do research, they got to figure out inventory management, they got to go into different systems, do prioritizations, do price matching, and perform a number of other complex tasks. These are time consuming processes. Now the combination of RPA and machine intelligence is helping managers compress the time to value and optimize decision making. Organizations are realizing that a digital business goes beyond cloud and SaaS, and puts data, AI and automation at the core leveraging cloud and SaaS but reimagining entire workflows and customer experiences. Moreover, low code solutions are taking off and dramatically expanding the ability of organizations to make changes to their processes. We're also seeing adjacencies to RPA becoming folded into enterprise automation initiatives. And that trend will continue for example Legacy software testing tools. This is especially important as companies SaaSify their business and look for modern testing tools that can keep pace with their transformations. So the bottom line is, RPA or intelligent automation has become a strategic priority for many companies. And that means you got to get the CIO involved to ensure that the governance and compliance edicts of the organization are appropriately met. And that alignment occurs across the technology and business lines. A couple of years ago, when we saw that RPA could be much much more than what it was at the time, we revisited our total available market or TAM analysis. And in doing so, we felt there would be a confluence of automation, AI, and data and that the front and back office schism would converge. That is shown here. This is our updated TAM chart, which we shared a while back with a dramatically larger scope. We were interested that, just a few days ago by the way Forrester put out a new report, picked up by Digital Nation, that the RPA market would reach 22 billion by 2025. Now, as we said at the time our TAM includes the entire ecosystem including professional services as does Forrester's recent report and the projections they're in. So see that little dotted red line there, that's about at the 22 billion mark. We're a few years away but we definitely feel as though this is taking shape the way we had previously envisioned. That is to say a progression from back office blending with customer facing processes becoming a core element of digital transformations and eventually entering the realm of automated systems of agency where automations are reliable enough and trusted enough to make realtime decisions at scale for a much, much wider scope of enterprise activities. So we see this evolving over the 2020s or the balance of this decade and becoming a massive multi hundred billion dollar market. Now, unfortunately for later investors, this enthusiasm that I'm sharing around automation has not translated into price momentum for the stocks in this sector. Here are the charts, the stock charts for four RPA related players with market values inserted in each graphic. We've set the cross hairs approximately at the timing of UiPath's IPO. And that's where we'll start. UiPath IPOed last April and you can see the steady decline in its price. UiPath's Series F investors got in at $30 billion valuation, so that's been halved, more than half. But UiPath is the leader in this sector as we'll see in a moment. So investors are just going to have to be patient. Now, you know the problem with these hot tech companies is the cat gets let out of the bag before the IPO because they raise so much private money, it hits the headlines and then, at the time you had zero interest rates, you had the tech stock boom during the pandemic, so you're just going to have to wait it out to get a nice return if you got in sort of post IPO. You know, which... I think this business will deliver over the long term. Now, Blue Prism is interesting because it's being bought by SS&C Technologies after a bidding war with Vista. So that's why their stock has held up pretty reasonably. Vista's PE firm, which owns TIBCO and was going to mash it, Blue Prism that is, together with TIBCO. That was a play I always liked because RPA is going to be integrated across the board. And TIBCO is an integration company, and I felt it was in a good position to do that. But SS&C obvious said, "Hey, we can do that too." And look, they're getting a proven RPA tech stack for 10% of the value of UiPath. Might be a sharp move, we'll see. Or maybe they'll jack prices and squeeze the cashflow, I honestly have no idea. And we shelled the other two players here who really aren't RPA specialists. Appian is a low code business process development platform and Pegasystems of course, we've reported on them extensively. They're a longtime business process player that has done pretty well. But both stocks have suffered pretty dramatically since last April. So let's take a look at the customer survey data and see what it tells us. The ETR survey data shows a pretty robust picture frankly. This chart depicts the net score or customer spending momentum on that vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness relative to other companies and technologies in the ETR dataset, that's on the horizontal. That red dotted line at the 40% mark, that indicates an elevated spending level for the company within this technology. The chart insert you see there shows how the company positions are plotted using net score and market share or Ns. And ETR's tool has a couple of cool features. We can click on the dot and it allows you to track the progression over time, in this case going back to January, 2020 that's the lines that we've inserted here. So we'll start with Microsoft and we'll get that over with. Microsoft acquired a company called Softomotive for a reported a hundred million dollars thereabout, it's a little more than that. So pretty much a lunch money for Mr. Softy. So Microsoft bought the company in May and look at the gray line where it started showing up in the October ETR surveys at a very highly elevated level, typical Microsoft, right? I mean, a lot of spending momentum and they're pretty much ubiquitous. And it just stayed there and it's gone up and to the right, just really a dominant picture. But Microsoft Power Automate is really kind of a personal productivity tool not super feature rich like some of the others that we're going to talk about, it's just part of the giant Microsoft software estate. And there's a substantial amount of overlap between, for example, UiPath's and Automation Anywhere's customer bases and Power Automate users. And it's speaking with the number of customers. They'll say, "Yeah, we use Power Automate," but they see enterprise automation platforms as much more feature rich and capable and they see a role for both. But it's something to watch out for because Microsoft can obviously take a bite out of virtually any platform and moderate the enthusiasm for it. But nonetheless, these other firms that we're mentioning here, the two leaders, they really stand out, UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Both are elevated well above that 40% line with a meaningful presence in the data set. And you can see the path that they took to get to where they are today. Now we had predicted in 2021 in our predictions post that Automation Anywhere would IPO in 2021. So we predicted that in December of 2020 but it hasn't happened yet. The company obviously wasn't ready, and it brought in new management. We reported on that, Chris Riley as the Chief Revenue Officer, and it made other moves to show up their business. Now let me say this about Riley. I've known him him for years, he's a world class sales leader, one of the best in the tech business. And he knows how to build a world class go to market team, I guarantee that's what he's doing. I have no doubt he's completely reinventing his sales team, the alliances, he's got a lot of experience of that when he was at EMC and Dell and HPE, and he knows the channel really well. So I have a great deal of confidence that if Automation Anywhere's product is any good, which the ETR data clearly shows that it is, then the company is going to do very well. Now, as for the timing of an IPO, look, with the market choppiness, who knows? Automation Anywhere, they raised a ton of dough and it was last valued around... In 2019, it was just north of 7 billion. And so if UiPath is valued at 15 billion, you could speculate that Automation Anywhere can't be valued at much more than 10 billion, maybe a little under, maybe a little over. And so they might wait for the market volatility to chill out a little bit before they do the IPO or maybe they've got some further cleanup to do and they want to get their metrics better, but we'll see. Now to the point earlier about Blue Prism, look at its position on the vertical axis, very respectable. Just a finer point on Pega. We've always said that they're not an RPA specialist but they have an RPA offering and a presence in the ETR data set in this sector. And they got a sizeable market cap so we'd like to include them. Now here's another look at the net score data. The way net score works is ETR asks customers, are you adopting a platform for the first time? That's that lime green there. Are you accelerating spending on the platform by 6% or more relative to last year, or sometimes relative to some other point in time, this is relative to last year. That's the forest green. Is your spending flat or is it, that's the gray, or is it decreasing by 6% or worse? Or are you churning? That's that bright red. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score which is shown for each company on the right along with the Ns in the survey. So other than Pega, every company shown here has new adoptions in the double digits, not a lot of churn. UiPath and and Automation Anywhere have net scores well over that 40% mark. Now, some other data points on those two, ETR did a little peeling of the onion in their data set and I found a couple of interesting nuggets. UiPath in the Fortune 500 has a 91% net score and a 77% net score in the Global 2000. So significantly higher than its overall average. This speaks to the company's strong presence in larger companies and the adoption and how larger companies are leaning in. Although UiPath's actually still solid in smaller firms as well by the way but... Now the other piece of information is, when asked why they buy UiPath over alternatives customers said a robust feature set, technical lead and compatibility with their existing environment. Now to Automation Anywhere. They have a 72% net score in the Fortune 500, well above its average across the survey, but 46% only in the Global 2000 below its overall average shown here of 54. So we'd like to see a wider aperture in the Global 2000. Again, this is a survey set, who knows, but oftentimes these surveys are indicative. So maybe Automation Anywhere just working that out, more time, figuring out the go to market in the Global 2000 beyond those larger customers. Now, when asked why they buy from Automation Anywhere versus the competition customers cited a robust feature set, just like UiPath, technological lead, just like UiPath, and fast ROI. Now I really believe that both for Automation Anywhere and UiPath, the time to value is much compressed relative to most technology projects. So I would highlight that as well. And I think that's a fundamental reason, one of the reasons why RPA has taken off. All right let's wrap up. The bottom line is this space is moving and it's evolving quickly, and will keep on a fast pace given the customer poll, the funding levels that have been poured into the space, and, of course, the competitive climate. We're seeing a new transformation agenda emerge. Pre COVID, the catalyst was back office efficiency. During the pandemic, we saw an acceleration and organizations are taking the lessons learned from that forced March experience, the digital I sometimes call it, and they're realizing a couple things. One, they can attack much more complex problems than previously envisioned. And two, in order to cloudify and SaaSify their businesses, they need to put automation along with data and AI at the core to completely transform into a digital entity. Now we're moving well beyond automating bespoke tasks and paving the cow path as I sometimes like to say. And we're seeing much more integration across systems like ERP and HR and finance and logistics et cetera, collaboration, customer experience, and importantly, this has to extend into broader ecosystems. We're also seeing a rise in semantic workflows to tackle more complex problems. We're talking here about going beyond a linear process of automation. Like for instance, read this, click on that, copy that, put it here, join it with that, drag and drop it over here and send it over there. It's evolving into a much more interpreter of actions using machine intelligence to watch, to learn, to infer, and then ultimately act as well as discover other process automation opportunities. So think about the way work is done today. Going into various applications, you grab data, you trombone back out, you do it again, in and out, in and out, in and out of these systems, et cetera, NASM, and replacing that sequence with a much more intelligent process. We're also seeing a lot more involvement from C-level executives, especially the CIO, but also the chief digital officer, the chief data officer, with low code solutions enabling lines of business to be much more involved in the game. So look, it's still early here. This sector, in my view, hasn't even hit that steep part of the S-curve yet, it's still building momentum with larger firms leading the innovation, investing in things like centers of excellence and training, digging in to find new ways of doing things. It's a huge priority because the efficiencies that large companies get, they drop right to the bottom line and the big ER the more money that drops. We see that in the adoption data and we think it's just getting started. So keep an eye on this space. It's not a fad, it's here to stay. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan who helped research this week's topics and Alex Myerson on the production team who also manages the Breaking Analysis Podcast, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, helped get the word out on social. Thanks guys. Your great teamwork, really appreciate that. Now remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR's website at etr.ai. And we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me directly, david.vellante@siliconangle.com is my email. You can DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm here with the leader of the partner program, Sandy Carter, Vice President, AWS, Amazon Web Services @Sandy_Carter on Twitter, prolific on social and great leader. Sandy, great to see you again. And congratulations on this great program we're having here. In fact, thanks for coming out for this keynote. Well, thank you, John, for having me. You guys always talk about the coolest thing. So we had to be part of it. >> Well, one of the things that I've been really loving about this success of public sector we talked to us before is that as we start coming out of the pandemic, is becoming very clear that the cloud has helped a lot of people and your team has done amazing work, just want to give you props for that and say, congratulations, and what a great time to talk about the winners. Because everyone's been working really hard in public sector, because of the pandemic. The internet didn't break. And everyone stepped up with cloud scale and solve some problems. So take us through the award winners and talk about them. Give us an overview of what it is. The criteria and all the specifics. >> Yeah, you got it. So we've been doing this annually, and it's for our public sector partners overall, to really recognize the very best of the best. Now, we love all of our partners, John, as you know, but every year we'd like to really hone in on a couple who really leverage their skills and their ability to deliver a great customer solution. They demonstrate those Amazon leadership principles like working backwards from the customer, having a bias for action, they've engaged with AWS and very unique ways. And as well, they've contributed to our customer success, which is so very important to us and to our customers as well. >> That's awesome. Hey, can we put up a slide, I know we have slide on the winners, I want to look at them, with the tiles here. So here's a list of some of the winners. I see a nice little stars on there. Look at the gold star. I knows IronNet, CrowdStrike. That's General Keith Alexander's company, I mean, super relevant. Presidio, we've interviewed them before many times, got Palantir in there. And is there another one, I want to take a look at some of the other names here. >> In overall we had 21 categories. You know, we have over 1900 public sector partners today. So you'll notice that the awards we did, a big focus on mission. So things like government, education, health care, we spotlighted some of the brand new technologies like Containers, Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Connect. And we also this year added in awards for innovative use of our programs, like think big for small business and PTP as well. >> Yeah, well, great roundup, they're looking forward to hearing more about those companies. I have to ask you, because this always comes up, we're seeing more and more ecosystem discussions when we talk about the future of cloud. And obviously, we're going to, you know, be at Mobile World Congress, theCUBE, back in physical form, again, (indistinct) will continue to go on. The notion of ecosystem is becoming a key competitive advantage for companies and missions. So I have to ask you, why are partners so important to your public sector team? Talk about the importance of partners in context to your mission? >> Yeah, you know, our partners are critical. We drive most of our business and public sector through partners. They have great relationships, they've got great skills, and they have, you know, that really unique ability to meet the customer needs. If I just highlighted a couple of things, even using some of our partners who won awards, the first is, you know, migrations are so critical. Andy talked at Reinvent about still 96% of applications still sitting on premises. So anybody who can help us with the velocity of migrations is really critical. And I don't know if you knew John, but 80% of our migrations are led by partners. So for example, we gave awards to Collibra and Databricks as best lead migration for data as well as Datacom for best data lead migration as well. And that's because they increase the velocity of migrations, which increases customer satisfaction. They also bring great subject matter expertise, in particular around that mission that you're talking about. So for instance, GDIT won best Mission Solution For Federal, and they had just an amazing solution that was a secure virtual desktop that reduced a federal agencies deployment process, from months to days. And then finally, you know, our partners drive new opportunities and innovate on behalf of our customers. So we did award this year for P to P, Partnering to Partner which is a really big element of ecosystems, but it was won by four points and in quizon, and they were able to work together to implement a data, implement a data lake and an AI, ML solution, and then you just did the startup showcase, we have a best startup delivering innovation too, and that was EduTech (indistinct) Central America. And they won for implementing an amazing student registration and early warning system to alert and risks that may impact a student's educational achievement. So those are just some of the reasons why partners are important. I could go on and on. As you know, I'm so passionate about my partners, >> I know you're going to talk for an hour, we have to cut you off a little there. (indistinct) love your partners so much. You have to focus on this mission thing. It was a strong mission focus in the awards this year. Why are customers requiring much more of a mission focused? Is it because, is it a part of the criteria? I mean, we're seeing a mission being big. Why is that the case? >> Well, you know, IDC, said that IT spend for a mission or something with a purpose or line of business was five times greater than IT. We also recently did our CTO study where we surveyed thousands of CTOs. And the biggest and most changing elements today is really not around the technology. But it's around the industry, healthcare, space that we talked about earlier, or government. So those are really important. So for instance, New Reburial, they won Best Emission for Healthcare. And they did that because of their new smart diagnostic system. And then we had a partner when PA consulting for Best Amazon Connect solution around a mission for providing support for those most at risk, the elderly population, those who already had pre existing conditions, and really making sure they were doing what they called risk shielding during COVID. Really exciting and big, strong focus on mission. >> Yeah, and it's also, you know, we've been covering a lot on this, people want to work for a company that has purpose, and that has missions. I think that's going to be part of the table stakes going forward. I got to ask you on the secrets of success when this came up, I love asking this question, because, you know, we're starting to see the playbooks of what I call post COVID and cloud scale 2.0, whatever you want to call it, as you're starting to see this new modern era of success formulas, obviously, large scale value creation mission. These are points we're hearing and keep conversations across the board. What do you see as the secret of success for these parties? I mean, obviously, it's indirect for Amazon, I get that, but they're also have their customers, they're your customers, customers. That's been around for a while. But there's a new model emerging. What are the secrets from your standpoint of success? you know, it's so interesting, John, that you asked me this, because this is the number one question that I get from partners too. I would say the first secret is being able to work backwards from your customer, not just technology. So take one of our award winners Cognizant. They won for their digital tolling solution. And they work backwards from the customer and how to modernize that, or Pariveda, who is one of our best energy solution winners. And again, they looked at some of these major capital projects that oil companies were doing, working backwards from what the customer needed. I think that's number one, working backwards from the customer. Two, is having that mission expertise. So given that you have to have technology, but you also got to have that expertise in the area. We see that as a big secret of our public sector partners. So education cloud, (indistinct) one for education, effectual one for government and not for profit, Accenture won, really leveraging and showcasing their global expansion around public safety and disaster response. Very important as well. And then I would say the last secret of success is building repeatable solutions using those strong skills. So Deloitte, they have a great solution for migration, including mainframes. And then you mentioned early on, CloudStrike and IronNet, just think about the skill sets that they have there for repeatable solutions around security. So I think it's really around working backwards from the customer, having that mission expertise, and then building a repeatable solution, leveraging your skill sets. >> That's a great formula for success. I got you mentioned IronNet, and cybersecurity. One of things that's coming up is, in addition to having those best practices, there's also like real problems to solve, like, ransomware is now becoming a government and commercial problem, right. So (indistinct) seeing that happen a lot in DC, that's a front burner. That's a societal impact issue. That's like a cybersecurity kind of national security defense issue, but also, it's a technical one. And also public sector, through my interviews, I can tell you the past year and a half, there's been a lot of creativity of new solutions, new problems or new opportunities that are not yet identified as problems and I'd love to get your thoughts on my concern is with Jeff Bar yesterday from AWS, who's been blogging all the the news and he is a leader in the community. He was saying that he sees like 5G in the edge as new opportunities where it's creative. It's like he compared to the going to the home improvement store where he just goes to buy one thing. He does other things. And so there's a builder culture. And I think this is something that's coming out of your group more, because the pandemic forced these problems, and they forced new opportunities to be creative, and to build. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so I see that too. So if you think about builders, you know, we had a partner, Executive Council yesterday, we had 900, executives sign up from all of our partners. And we asked some survey questions like, what are you building with today? And the number one thing was artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I think that's such a new builders tool today, John, and, you know, one of our partners who won an award for the most innovative AI&ML was Kablamo And what they did was they use AI&ML to do a risk assessment on bushfires or wildfires in Australia. But I think it goes beyond that. I think it's building for that need. And this goes back to, we always talk about #techforgood. Presidio, I love this award that they won for best nonprofit, the Cherokee Nation, which is one of our, you know, Native American heritage, they were worried about their language going out, like completely out like no one being able to speak yet. And so they came to Presidio, and they asked how could we have a virtual classroom platform for the Cherokee Nation? And they created this game that's available on your phone, so innovative, so much of a builder's culture to capture that young generation, so they don't you lose their language. So I do agree. I mean, we're seeing builders everywhere, we're seeing them use artificial intelligence, Container, security. And we're even starting with quantum, so it is pretty powerful of what you can do as a public sector partner. >> I think the partner equation is just so wide open, because it's always been based on value, adding value, right? So adding value is just what they do. And by the way, you make money doing it if you do a good job of adding value. And, again, I just love riffing on this, because Dave and I talked about this on theCUBE all the time, and it comes up all the time in cloud conversations. The lock in isn't proprietary technology anymore, its value, and scale. So you starting to see builders thrive in that environment. So really good points. Great best practice. And I think I'm very bullish on the partner ecosystems in general, and people do it right, flat upside. I got to ask you, though, going forward, because this is the big post COVID kind of conversation. And last time we talked on theCUBE about this, you know, people want to have a growth strategy coming out of COVID. They want to be, they want to have a tail win, they want to be on the right side of history. No one wants to be in the losing end of all this. So last year in 2021 your goals were very clear, mission, migrations, modernization. What's the focus for the partners beyond 2021? What are you guys thinking to enable them, 21 is going to be a nice on ramp to this post COVID growth strategy? What's the focus beyond 2021 for you and your partners? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, we're going to actually continue to focus on those three M's mission, migration and modernization. But we'll bring in different elements of it. So for example, on mission, we see a couple of new areas that are really rising to the top, Smart Cities now that everybody's going back to work and (indistinct) down, operations and maintenance and global defense and using gaming and simulation. I mean, think about that digital twin strategy and how you're doing that. For migration, one of the big ones we see emerging today is data-lead migration. You know, we have been focused on applications and mainframes, but data has gravity. And so we are seeing so many partners and our customers demanding to get their data from on premises to the cloud so that now they can make real time business decisions. And then on modernization. You know, we talked a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Containers are wicked hot right now, provides you portability and performance. I was with a startup last night that just moved everything they're doing to ECS our Container strategy. And then we're also seeing, you know, crippin, quantum blockchain, no code, low code. So the same big focus, mission migration, modernization, but the underpinnings are going to shift a little bit beyond 2021. >> That's great stuff. And you know, you have first of all people don't might not know that your group partners and Amazon Web Services public sector, has a big surface area. You talking about government, health care, space. So I have to ask you, you guys announced in March the space accelerator and you recently announced that you selected 10 companies to participate in the accelerated program. So, I mean, this is this is a space centric, you know, targeting, you know, low earth orbiting satellites to exploring the surface of the Moon and Mars, which people love. And because the space is cool, let's say the tech and space, they kind of go together, right? So take us through, what's this all about? How's that going? What's the selection, give us a quick update, while you're here on this space accelerated selection, because (indistinct) will have had a big blog post that went out (indistinct). >> Yeah, I would be thrilled to do that. So I don't know if you know this. But when I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. We just helped through (indistinct), one of our partners reach Mars. So Clint, who is a retired general and myself got together, and we decided we needed to do something to help startups accelerate in their space mission. And so we decided to announce a competition for 10 startups to get extra help both from us, as well as a partner Sarafem on space. And so we announced it, everybody expected the companies to come from the US, John, they came from 44 different countries. We had hundreds of startups enter, and we took them through this six week, classroom education. So we had our General Clint, you know, helping and teaching them in space, which he's done his whole life, we provided them with AWS credits, they had mentoring by our partner, Sarafem. And we just down selected to 10 startups, that was what Vernors blog post was. If you haven't read it, you should look at some of the amazing things that they're going to do, from, you know, farming asteroids to, you know, helping with some of the, you know, using small vehicles to connect to larger vehicles, when we all get to space. It's very exciting. Very exciting, indeed, >> You have so much good content areas and partners, exploring, it's a very wide vertical or sector that you're managing. Is there any pattern? Well, I want to get your thoughts on post COVID success again, is there any patterns that you're seeing in terms of the partner ecosystem? You know, whether its business model, or team makeup, or more mindset, or just how they're organizing that that's been successful? Is there like a, do you see a trend? Is there a certain thing, then I've got the working backwards thing, I get that. But like, is there any other observations? Because I think people really want to know, am I doing it right? Am I being a good manager, when you know, people are going to be working remotely more? We're seeing more of that. And there's going to be now virtual events, hybrid events, physical events, the world's coming back to normal, but it's never going to be the same. Do you see any patterns? >> Yeah, you know, we're seeing a lot of small partners that are making an entrance and solving some really difficult problems. And because they're so focused on a niche, it's really having an impact. So I really believe that that's going to be one of the things that we see, I focus on individual creators and companies who are really tightly aligned and not trying to do everything, if you will. I think that's one of the big trends. I think the second we talked about it a little bit, John, I think you're going to see a lot of focus on mission. Because of that purpose. You know, we've talked about #techforgood, with everything going on in the world. As people have been working from home, they've been reevaluating who they are, and what do they stand for, and people want to work for a company that cares about people. I just posted my human footer on LinkedIn. And I got my first over a million hits on LinkedIn, just by posting this human footer, saying, you know what, reply to me at a time that's convenient for you, not necessarily for me. So I think we're going to see a lot of this purpose driven mission, that's going to come out as well. >> Yeah, and I also noticed that, and I was on LinkedIn, I got a similar reaction when I started trying to create more of a community model, not so much have people attend our events, and we need butts in the seats. It was much more personal, like we wanted you to join us, not attend and be like a number. You know, people want to be part of something. This seem to be the new mission. >> Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that, you know, people do want to be part of something and they want, they want to be part of the meaning of something too, right. Not just be part of something overall, but to have an impact themselves, personally and individually, not just as a company. And I think, you know, one of the other trends that we saw coming up too, was the focus on technology. And I think low code, no code is giving a lot of people entry into doing things I never thought they could do. So I do think that technology, artificial intelligence Containers, low code, no code blockchain, those are going to enable us to even do greater mission-based solutions. >> Low code, no code reduces the friction to create more value, again, back to the value proposition. Adding value is the key to success, your partners are doing it. And of course, being part of something great, like the Global Public Sector Partner Awards list is a good one. And that's what we're talking about here. Sandy, great to see you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights and an update and talking more about the 2021, Global Public Sector partner Awards. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Okay, the Global Leaders here presented on theCUBE, again, award winners doing great work in mission, modernization, again, adding value. That's what it's all about. That's the new competitive advantage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hey there, thank you for joining me. My name is Heather Pick and I head up strategy and portfolio for point next technology services. Um I really appreciate you guys joining me today. So I want to take you through some of the experiential changes that we are launching today in accordance with their compute space that we believe are going to drive the success of our compute platform without our customer environment. I always like to start these presentations with a provocative yet somewhat simple question and today um I want to start with what would you do if you had an hours, more time and every day. Now to be clear, I'm not looking to extend the day to 25 hours so you can cram more stuff into it. I'm really looking at if I gave you an hour's worth of time of stuff that you did today and tomorrow, you don't have to do it anymore. What would you do with that time? Would you take a lunch hour? Would you leave at a reasonable hour on a daily basis from work? Would you spend that hour really thinking about that strategic project that your boss needs you to go do some R. And D on and really forgot where it is. You need to take the company. What would you do with that precious time? And I ask you because here within point, next technology services, we believe that the element of time is one of the most valuable resources that we can give back to our customers, right? And we see that in two spaces, right? So both in time saved and then time well spent. And let me tell you what it is. I mean about this. So when we talk about giving time back to our customers, that's in terms of a rich digital experience that provides automation and Ai and ultimately access to the things that matter to our customers so that they can do the day to day job of managing their technology ecosystem. Yeah. We don't want to undermine the fact that that same digital platform is also leveraged in order to enhance conversations with our customers that we consider time well spent. So answering questions about what would happen if I turn to this feature on what can I expect um if I make this architectural changes and we're seeing both of those questions come our way hard and fast from our customer base. And these two elements are the underpinning of the entire portfolio experience change that we're bringing to market. Yeah. So what do I mean specifically when we talk about time well saved our time safe. So how how are you going to realize this within your day to day? So number one, it's it's knowing our customers, right? We are working with a lot of different personas within our customer base, right? So we might have a purchasing agent, we might have an I. T. Line manager and the ability and the requirement within that digital ecosystem to know that person the moment they walk through the front door, whatever their front door is, whether it's a digital front door, whether it's a phone call, whether it's an email, whether it's reaching out to an HP person that's on site that we have that digital footprint on them to know who they are and what information matters to them second, taking our technology capabilities and all the information and the richness that's within that digital environment and providing them access to the information about their products that's meaningful to them. Sometimes they don't want to talk to us. Sometimes they just want to know how to do a simple field replacement of something or, or when they get into those more complex. Hey, I need more expertise. I really do need to do some scenario planning. How do I get access to those technologists that can help me? And then how do those technologists bring other people to that conversation so that I leave that conversation knowing that have the right answer and the decision that I've made is the right one for my company. So let me take you through an example of what it is I'm talking about. So as you enter into the new digital customer experience or HP Support center, as you've known it, you're going to notice a dearth of information that's available to you. And one of the cornerstones are foundational elements in developing this new experience is really that it's tolerable. Not every customer and not every persona within every customer wants access to all this information. So, customization on this entry point is critical for you. So, whether you are a line manager who wants to understand all of the things that are going on within your environment, whether you're a technologist that wants to understand what is the technical risk within my environment right now, whether that's their product alerts or critical downloads, or again back into that broader view of what's happening with my contracts, what's expiring, how much money am I going to have to spend this year to keep the keep these contracts going? That's all available to you within this digital experience, and again, heavily customizable based on what you want to see. So in terms of asset management, let's get down to the technical aspects associated with it. So, our technologists need access into their environment on a per product or per technology basis. When we talk about compute it gets even more critical for me to know what kind of compute assets I have and again, what are the features and functionality or potential risks within those environments? This allows a rich ecosystem with access to all of that technical knowledge, very prescriptive information about the different products that's that you have running within your environment, access to both a digital ecosystem as well as peers doing similar things. And then finally, a roll up to give you proactive insights to again your entire environment from a technical view so that you can identify and manage risks in aggregate as opposed to on a per asset basis. We believe that these are the two foundational elements of success in giving customers time back and then also providing the foundation for meaningful experiences. So I've taken you through the detail on what we mean by saving you time. I've taken you through a demo of our new digital customer experience. Now let me talk a little bit in depth about what we mean by time, well spent more and more coming from our customers, they're expecting us to deal with the technology issues, you know, of our technology, but more and more. They also want information on the broader implications of technology changes within their environments so things around performance. How do I get more performance from this from this compute platform that I look at? How do I find tune it so that it can be more workload addressable? Um what happens when I toggle this feature to the network impact? So more and more often we're having to have much broader conversations, again, more meaningful conversations with our customer base on the outcomes that they're trying to drive. So as a result, our offerings are changing in order to pivot towards your more workload mindset and that more aggregate view as you'll see reflected in some of our technology tools. I'm going to take you through an interview with one of our technologists um to show you what it is I'm talking about. So joining me is Nation George. He is one of our senior technologists. Within point. Next Technology services Nation, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today? >>Be good, >>awesome. So you see a lot you've been with us, You're dealing with a lot of customers. Tell us what you're seeing on a day to day basis. What questions are you getting for their customers? How are you seeing these interactions change? >>Absolutely. Before I go into the examples, I've haven't seen your technologist in plain X. Global Remote Services. What I do late today is actually solving complex problems. I can give you a few examples. For example, like a couple of days back I was actually on a customer call um they were looking for understanding the benefits of tag versus tunnel network in more in hb synergy when inter operating with one view Cisco ASA and B M R V center and this is in the interoperability space. Another example would be a customer coming in and asking like this is a telecommunication customer who want to know how to integrate their centralist monitoring tool um to retrieve physical encounters from H. B. Products so that they can have their proactive monitoring in place, right. And some of the other common questions what we see from customers are around maintenance which means like they are doing an infrastructure former update and or infrastructure update. They would like to understand how the version compatibility, the known issues specific to their environment or the best practices what they can follow so that the updates complete successfully. You know, these are the type of request, what we are seeing mostly now from the customers. >>Okay, so really diverse, Pretty complex. A lot of moving parts. Um, how do you know, what kind of methodology or how are we doing to ensure consistency across all these interactions in the different customers? >>Absolutely. We have developed a method and a mindset to provide a frictionless experience to the customer. When they come with these questions, you know what it means is actually that when they come with the question, we try to understand their technical problem technical problem from a technology standpoint. Then we try to see how the technical problem impacts the workload and application and how does it impact their business. We get into an understanding of the technical problem. Then we try to understand that. What are the components involved in the solution for example like compute storage, fabric and software. And then try to understand the into anthropology and data flow with the understanding of the technical problem and the solution into interview. Now we are able to understand what the customer is trying to achieve and what the expected outcome of the interaction need to be and now that we know the expertise needed and most of the time we have the expertise needed to take care of the request. In some cases we need to bring additional experts but we will bring the additional experts but all the time we will keep the solution level ownership until the expected outcome is achieved. Once we are able to collaborate, the experts were able to explain to the customer that the actionable steps which they can perform to actually resolve the problem or achieve the expected outcome. You know? This is the type method what we use whenever the customer comes for advice and guidance. >>So what do you think the ultimate benefits are to the customer? And kind of simplified terms? >>Yeah, these are some of the benefits. What I can see, you know one. They can call us to the support line for any help. For example, like they have a question, they need an answer, they need an advice and guidance or they have support issues that one stop shop like they come to our call, they call us and get them the assistant second, it is a solution level ownership. The person who picks up the call and assist will stay on with the solution level ownership until the customers expected outcome is achieved third. Once we follow the method, what I explained earlier, we will always get to foster resolution and always achieves the customers outcomes. Actually see at the end of it. The central focus here is to reach customers outcome and with solution level ownership. >>Great, thank you so much for joining me. This has been really, really insightful. It's always good to be able to talk with our technologists. >>Thank you heather. >>Okay, so you can never come to one of these without some sort of a call to action. So what am I? What am I asks of you? Check out, check care, right, explore the digital customer experience, use those tools and resources that are available into the air. Use it and give us feedback. This is not a capability that we're rolling out, that we're not going to touch. You're going to see iterative value added to it and that's going to be driven primarily by customer feedback and then telemetry that we're getting on how it is. They're using it, so use it and give us that feedback. Get your time back, really, get your time back, take your lunch, um, spend time on the strategic projects. That's what we're here for. This is we think one of our most compelling assets that we can do for our customer base. Thank you for your time.

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stu minimun and it's our seventh year doing the cube this year of course it is a digital event which means we are reaching all the community members where they are around the globe really excited to bring program first time guests and a first time to redhead summit Vachon Vora he's the chief technology officer of Vodafone idea joining me from Mumbai India bhishan nice to see you take so much for joining us it's a pleasure to be here as >> I'm looking forward to this interaction all right so as I said I've been at Red Hat show for many years the the telecommunications space you know service providers are some of the you know more interesting in the technology space you talk about scale you talk about change you talk about you know software eating the world all of those discussions are ones I've had for many years but you know I think many people know Vodafone may be a vote a fun idea escape for us you know the organisation and of course you've got the CTO at so you know what that means inside your organization sure so what a fun idea is a company that came came to acclaim as a result of a merger about 18 months ago so the number two and number three operators in India which was Vodafone an idea came together to create a telco serving over 300 million subscribers and we've been integrating the the networks over the last 18 months and consolidating and doing one of the largest integration in the world of two networks comprising over 200 thousand sites and carrying you know more than 50 billion MB of traffic per hour per day serving more than 40 million voltaic customers and we have been duplicating the network very very busy with her and we taken down so far almost a hundred thousand base stations which is equivalent to the size of a large operator in us so that's about the carnahan that is about the scale of the the operator that word of an idea is and what we've been busy with for the last day yeah well well Besant of course the reason we're doing this event online is because right now with the global pandemic the vast majority of the population they're at home so you know healthcare of course you know one of the major concerns I actually have done interviews with some of the power and energy companies critically important at this time but you know telecommunications you know what one of the top of the list you know in normal times for what people need but today it's the the only way that we can all connect it so tell us a little bit about do you know what the current situation you know the impact and importance this really highlights of your business yeah so just as the rest of the world India is also in a lockdown and India actually has one of the largest the largest lockdown in the world putting all 1.3 billion people in a lockdown yeah across the entire country so within that context the telecom network is crucial to make sure that the life goes on the essential services are delivered the industry continues to still operate as the best it can and all of that is made possible because of a stable and reliable network that we offer so a huge huge impact on the society always has been but in in this current context it is even more more critical and crucial so what we do is we make sure that we are the invisible layer you talked about health healthcare workers and emergency services well we are the invisible essential service that probably many people don't see but we are the ones who are really helping this country survive this this crisis and so far we have seen 25 30% increase in traffic in a single day in one week we experienced the same amount of traffic growth we would have experienced in the entire year so we we scalability is very very critical in our network and we've been able to keep up with that kind of a growth and continue to serve the communities and in this crucial juncture and all this dude large extent has been made possible because of a large-scale deployment of cloud technologies that we have done over the last 18 months which has really helped us scale up a large lot of our capabilities in the back yeah I'd love if you could explain a little bit more on that it you know challenging times you know I'm curious the amount of people that are using your services probably haven't changed but the demand and how much they're using it as change a lot so cloud obviously gives you scalability but you know are there concerns about what this does the profitability how you maintain things how much of this is a temporary change and how much will this be you know I know in the United States there's a lot of talk about how much work from home will become more of a standard than it had been before this pandemic so you know short term what's the impact on your business and what are you and other telecommunication companies thinking about what long-term impact this will have >> I think that's a very very interesting question I think even for me and my organization what we have been able to do working from home is amazing I never would have thought that it was possible to do as much as we've been able to do just staying young with most of the work for staying at home and that has really I think happened across industries across the entire country I think many organizations have now realized that work from home or work from anywhere which is the other term he's gonna become quite possible and prevalent going forward because people have realized that you can just get you can get just as much productivity out you can get so many things done working from home and it gives so much more personal flexibility to the individuals so I see when I look back at our organizational experience I see our productivity has been actually quite good actually better then haha where probably even in the office days so I think that is definitely one thing that is gonna come out as a global change across all industries I think the second thing that is gonna happen is data analytics I think there is going to be far more analysis of data to understand patterns and understand trends and how to take advantage of that I think of course the immediate application is in the healthcare and the spread of the pandemic but I think this will spur a lot of other analytics I think the third thing is going to do is the adoption of digital as the primary mode digital was already something that most companies are working on as is a top priority but I think going outward is gonna become very evident to people that it is actually essential just talking about my business I can tell you today you know all the stores all the shops every place that we used to check our cell or recharge vouchers are closed so the only place we are able to get any revenue from is our digital channel and on end only place where customers have been able to recharge their prepaid subscriptions etc has all been through digital I think digital we will also become a massive massive requirement so in that context I think telecom will be seen as a critical critical backbone I think to a large extent it has been seen by many in the past is more of an essential commodity but I think many organizations will realise that this is actually a value creator so I think it's a great exciting opportunity for us to take advantage of those new business opportunities that will come and at the same time be a very very important player in the digital economy that every nation around the world is gonna press you know for Sean said it really appreciates some really good commentary there you know we've been talking for years about customers going through their digital transformation it's really about the data and how they leverage that and if you're data-driven then you really have gone through that transformation and you kind of described what we call the new innovation cocktail you're leveraging cloud that there's data you put those all together as to how you drive your company and you can drive innovation oftentimes when we think about what results we're going to get from deploying cloud and using these types of new technologies we think we know what we're gonna get but the reality of how your company is dealing with things today of course you know proves what you were hoping that build for here help us understand you know what we're talking here is part of red hat summit this week you know what's red hats role in this piece and you know how did the reality of rolling this out and then how it has helped you in the current global situation impacted your business sure oh so I would say actually the three words that I used digital cloud and analytics to me they're actually inseparable cuz I do not believe that you can have a digital business that is not based on cloud or that is not good at data analytics I think if you want to really have a successful cloud offering it implies that automatically that you are a digital business and you're gonna do extensive modern data and analytics and build those capabilities I think those are three inseparable terms now speaking specifically about a red head I would say that red head has been a very very critical partner for us right from the beginning 18 months ago when the two companies too came together to create this network we knew that we had to do several things number one was actually to have a completely rationalized structure which was around extracting the synergies from the from the merger but beyond that we needed to build a telco of the future technology company of the future which will let us transform the business and create capabilities that will give us a step ahead a leapfrog ahead of our competition and cloud was a very very essential part of the journey and we knew we needed to build a cloud based on open systems because we did not want to get into a proprietary logins with anybody and we are a very large business we have suffered a sufficiently large scale to really be able to build a very large cloud so we started working with Red Hat about two years ago and it in the last two years we have deployed 80 plus cloud locations distributed cloud locations across the country and these all of these clouds our vision is to orchestrate them as a single cloud our vision is to build a cloud there is a universal cloud actually that is the word there is a word we use when we talk about cloud it's a universal cloud what does that mean that means that cloud will carry not only the traditional telco workloads but it will also carry IT workloads it will also carry lot of the enterprise offerings we have so - for the end-user for our enterprise clients and all of those capabilities out to be accommodated with a platform that is versatile that is scalable and that is gonna give me in enormous amount of flexibility and control as a organization so Red Hat has been a very important part of the journey and on the red head OpenStack cloud today I have a Daffy's working from any major supplier you can think of I have any enemies working from Nokia Ericsson Huawei ziti even some smaller players like Marvin here so we have demonstrated that this is possible we've been able to break the lock in that the traditional naps have had on their cloud offerings which were really more of a virtualized offerings rather than a cloud computer is a truly universal cloud on the back of the technology provided by a red well that's that's fantastic congratulations on that I love the the result of what you're calling Universal Cloud is the promise that we talked about for a number of years you know is that nitty gritty networking piece it was like you know network functions virtualization and if be sitting an open stack and everybody's like well OpenStack am I trying to build a cloud to compete against the public cloud providers it was like no what you said exactly there's services that you want to be able to deliver and it's not just about oh we're getting away from hardware appliances it's you know just like most people today they're used to whatever smart device they're doing I want to be able to turn on channels and access new things that's your now you know reducing that barrier to Vodafone idea to deliver that to your users have I captured that properly that is correct as a matter of fact I'll just give you one proof point my water phone app is the app that we we have for our consumers and that app is currently running on my telco clock what used to be called the telco cloud so on that platform we are running my packet or actually there are about 40 and FB is for virtualized traditional calculations running alongside with an IT application a digital application okay so one of the things I you know I would like to understand there that what you've deployed there over the last couple of years sounds like a significant shift so you know you're talking about apps you're talking more of a developer type of environment bring us inside a little organizationally you know what new skills have new people had to learn has there been new people added to the organization have there been in a restructures what what is this this this whole initiative to get to universal cloud meant for your organization sure so I look after both the network and IT pieces of the part of parts of the company and you know we traditionally were in the past legacy we have had a IT cloud and we have heard indigo cloud what we are now creating is a single universal cloud what either of the two workloads are gonna be facilitated so for that actually the two organization the two parts of the organization need to come together and start to really work as one now it is very important that the telco guys understand the scale and the 99-year the five nines required in a running a network but at the same time IT guys also understand very much what all of the the flexibility that the business requires and the responsiveness required for the for the enterprise so bringing those two talents together I think in infusing that to create a single organization is one of the biggest challenges I think any telco has we also face it that is one aspect of it the second aspect of it is that there just aren't too many cloud experts in the world and we have been struggling with that I think skill shortage is a clear challenge for us now we try to address it using variety of means we of course try to upscale rescale lot of the traditional network core engineers that we have had we also try to use talent available or from consultants and then we also try to use our vendors so one of the concepts we've been working with our vendors is a concept of a resident engineer so we try to actually get them to second some of their engineers to work with us and at the same time we've been now working with both IBM and redhead to create a program to really go out and create a community around us of developers who can really work with this cloud and therefore we will have enough of skills available to leverage all of the potential benefits there are then the platform but can only be unleashed if I have the right skills and right people you touched on a very important issue it is a challenge but we are working our way through it and so far we've been a bit we make good all right well if it's shot I can't let a CTO go without looking a little bit into the future so want to help understand we talked about some of the technologies talked about transformation of what's happening your business what's happening your organization and there's some big waves coming week you know cloud is still in early days 5g of course you know is expected to have massive impact on on everyone's environment for this so what is the winning formula for the the telecoms going forward well I think Phi G is an exciting world we are a 4G network today the Phi G spectrum hasn't been auctioned in India but what we are building today is what I call a 4G plus network which means the lot of the architectural principles of PI G we have already applied in my core networks today and in my transport network in that world I think IOT is gonna play a very very big role and if you want to do things like IOT and if you want to do things like blockchain now I think telco cloud has a huge role to play because we are the telcos are traditionally the only ones in a country anywhere in the world who have experiences experience in operating in very far front powerful places dealing with lot of the infrastructure challenges especially if you're in a developing country you know that you have to work with a poor power availability poor transport etc I do not see any of the big guys the the big cloud players really having those capabilities today I think telcos are gonna play a very big role in enabling that pi g io t work and it is going to be an exciting journey for telcos I think telcos will very soon be called tech companies that is one thing that I strongly believe in I think also many of the things that depend on blockchain will require the kind of cloud that telcos will create because a telco cloud is far more demanding than a traditional IT application in many ways for example latency or for example throughputs now all those things aren't very important in blockchain apple type of applications I think that's another exciting opportunity for telcos really is to get into that and of course there are discussions about smart cities smart government government and because of Kovach kharkova crisis I think many governments are gonna explore new ways of organizing Society's new ways of governing economic activities and the backbone for a lot of those things is gonna be our telecom networks and the cloud distributed clouds to the edge that we create so I think it'll create many many exciting business opportunities as a consequence of some of those technological innovation yeah Shanta I can't remember who said it as they said don't waste a crisis but Vasant Bora CTO of Vodafone idea pleasure talking with you thank you so much for joining us hope you enjoy the Red Hat event as it is distributed this year and definitely look to be able to meet you sometime at a future physical event back when we have those in the future Thank You Stu it's been a pleasure meeting you virtually and look forward to these all right lots more coverage from the cubes Red Hat summit at 20/20 activity I'm Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching [Music]

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio today, the COVID thing is continuing to go, and one of the huge impacts, right, is obviously in the conference business, our world. Those things have all been canceled or made virtual, and everyone's still trying to figure out, what does a virtual event look like, what are the characteristics of it, and we're really excited to have one of our favorite CUBE alumni, guest host extraordinaire, Keith Townsend. You know him as the CTO advisor joining us, Keith jumped in with both feet, right when this thing went down, and said "I'm going to have my own CTO Advisor "virtual conference," so first off, Keith, I miss you, great to see you, we haven't run into each other at the Sands in an awfully long time, so great to see you, how are you doing? >> Good to see you, if it's only virtual, good to see you too, Jeff. >> So tell us about your decision to jump in with both feet, and go ahead and test the waters on this virtual conference concept. >> So I talked about this a little bit on a random, just a YouTube update, but roughly 30, 35% of my revenue comes from in-person events. And plus my brand, The CTO Advisor, is tied to people seeing me on theCUBE, seeing me at the shows, creating the content, kind of on the ground, guerrilla style, kind of like how John started out early on. So we needed a practical solution for most things, one, we feed off the energy of the community, so we need to be on the ground as much as possible, so that we can create content and get you guys the stories and the data that you need to make purchasing decisions, and two, we needed the practical problem of solving our own revenue problems, so we jumped in, head in, to say "Let's do a virtual event." I don't know if I would've done it if I wasn't as naive as I was back then, but we jumped in. >> So before we jump into the processes, make sure, give us a full-on plug, when is it, where should people go, registration I assume is still open, want to just get that out there for the folks. >> So even if you see this after registration closes, quote unquote closes, it's April 21st, >> 10: 30 AM central to 3:30 PM central, that's US time. You can register at CTOAdvisorVirtualConference.com. >> Excellent, so let's talk about some of the interesting things about virtual. One of the things as you said in a physical event, you've got people, you've got time and space and geography that we all come together in that space, and there's a lot of advantages to everybody being at the same place at the same time. A virtual event, almost by definition, is now you've broken up the segments of content capture, if you will, and creation, which can or cannot be on that date. The actual display, or the publishing of that content, if you will, and then the consumption of that content, which may or may not happen on the 21st. How have you worked with this expanded palette, if you will, to be able to work in an asynchronous world, and how are you finding it in terms of actually day to day execution? >> So you guys have done plenty of remote content at this point. When you're in theCUBE studio, you have commercial internet, it's fairly reliable when you're on premises, maybe a little bit less reliable from the sense that it's conference-centered, but it's still enterprise class internet access, so you can do real-time video on theCUBE fine. We can go to Cube.tv, Cube.net, and see what you guys are doing real-time, and it's pretty much without blip. In the virtual conference world, what we're dealing with where I'm coming in, remote to you, while my video and audio looks fine now, it may blip. So we embrace two things. We embrace the fact that this is a virtual event, so in a background, you'll see that we're in Keith Townsend's basement, the other thing that you'll see is that we won't produce live content, because there's not much value in it being live, if I can't interact with you. One of the great things about theCUBE, is that it's live, but there's this element that people are on the ground, they're watching it live, they're interacting with it live, we're tweeting about it, so how do you reproduce, if not that exact feeling of it being live and you're being part of it, but the conversation around the content, and that's what we focused on, creating high quality video content, that you can consume, kind of as a watch party, so on Twitter, in the platform that we're using, we're having conversations real-time, so that you can enjoy the community, and the speakers who are presenting, you can interact with them because they're not presenting real-time, they're in the chat room, they're on Twitter, they're running as their session is running, and they're able to interact with you, so we've embraced the medium, and then after the fact of course we can do all kinds of things to run asynchronous content after the fact, 'cause the majority of people will watch it after the video's done. >> All right, and I'm just curious, how many sessions are you going to have, approximately? >> So we have I think 21 sessions, in a five hour period, so we're running three separate tracks, two super techy, geeky tracks, then a sponsored track is kind of by itself, and we're not expecting everyone to consume it all at one time. >> Right, you know it's just so interesting to me, talking about your tracks. If you were to go rent a venue, that had the capacity to run 21 tracks over five hours, it'd be a pretty decent-sized venue, it'd be expensive, and then you would have to pick your sessions and your tracks based on the limitations of the budget that you had and the window that you had of rooms that you could put these people in, and who could do it now, when, there, the other thing, and so it's really interesting that now this opens up the amount of sessions, is really a function of what you can manage, or what the community can kind of self-organize, you're not really limited by how many rooms are in the Sands Convention Center, and the other thing that you brought up, which I think people completely miss is that if the content is recorded in advance and puts in the can, to your point, the presenter can actually participate in the conversation while the session is happening, which they can't do in a physical event, because they're actually presenting, so, we had a guy in the other day, Ben Nelson, he talked about a car is not a mechanical horse, it's not the same, digital's not the same as physical, and there are some things that aren't as cool, but there's a whole lot of things that you can do in the digital space that you can't do in the physical space. >> Yeah, a lot of my presenters were kind of put off by the idea of, "Wait, hold on, I'm not going to present live? "How will I interact with webinars now?" And I think this is the other end of the spectrum, Jeff, I think you guys have probably found this too, it's not a in-person event, and it's also not a webinar, so don't treat it as a webinar. You don't have to have these canned, phony questions that some people have behind the scenes, it is a real, authentic thing. Oddly enough, I discovered this as part of helping my church put on their worship service. I was watching the service, I'll look off the screen a little bit to the left, I was watching the service, and the minister's delivering his sermon, and in the Zoom meeting, there he is, playing with his little two year old daughter, while he's giving the talk, and I just opened chat at him, and next thing I know there's an explosion of conversation around just life and the topic at hand, so it is a really unique experience. >> Yeah, I think that's a really important point, it's not only what is a digital event, but what is it not, and it can't be a webinar, and when we were first going through this kind of shake-up, and we were really trying to identify some of those things, and we specifically did not want a digital event to be a webinar, 'cause what's a webinar, it's generally a one way communication of information for the vast majority of the session that you're sitting there, and they only open it up to Q&A at the very end, and it's only a moderated Q&A that very few people get a chance to get their question in, and you don't know how they're picking, and it only goes to the hosts, so, really having an open, live engagement around an engaged group of people, with a piece of content as kind of the coalescing of those people, really, it's not a webinar, it's a very different kind of experience, and sounds like you're really embracing that. >> Yeah, it'll never replace a live event, live has, again we talked about the energy, the, people are like "Do you really "want to smell the Sands, Keith?" You know what, it's all part of the energy, it's instant reminders to "Oh, I remember when I interviewed Pat Gelsinger here," and you have these instant cues that we as humans love, we don't get that, but I think it is something that's going to be with us to stay and it'll augment, I'd love to hear how you guys are thinking about how being able to have this capability will augment theCUBE once we return to physical events. >> Yeah, I mean I think this behavior that we're now been forced to engage in, in terms of increased working from home, and kind of increased use of videoconferencing, and that is a different communication mode, I think those behaviors are going to stick quite a bit, actually, I think if you look at what a conference is, there's a couple different tracks, as you said, there's the expression going around, kind of the rally moment, right, the keynote, we want, we have a strong message, the CEO wants to get something out, and I think that's of tremendous value, but then you look at all the breakout sessions and the information flow and the community engagement, those quite frankly can be done online much more efficiently and with much less cost, so will the new conference be kind of this, the celebration and basically a customer appreciation event, they want to have a party, but really that, I don't think it will be quite the information flow, 'cause why should product group A wait until the conference date, if they're ready to release their information, and wait for product group B or C or D, so this kind of forced aggregation of the communication into this very small window of three days in Vegas, I don't think it makes any sense, you know, it's Waterfall versus DevOps, and if this group's got stuff and they're ready to go, again, why hold the information back, it really doesn't make sense, and decouple the customer celebration, the rally moment, if you will, and the education, they don't necessarily have to be this contiguous big unit for three days in Vegas. >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to first quarter 2021, usually January, February, first half of March, really slow news channel product teams release stuff and they really want some big stage to release it, I think this will really make the dissemination of information coming from product teams super interesting as folks like theCUBE, The CTO Advisor, we're able to put on independent events virtually that have a sense of gravitas to it, that our partners will come and embrace. >> Yeah, the other thing, Keith, and I wonder, as you've been collecting your content for your show next week is that, the pressure on the quality of the content has escalated dramatically, right? If you're stuck in a huge conference hall, surrounded by 10,000 people, in the middle of a keynote that's not that exciting, it's kind of hard to get up and walk out. But if you're sitting at your desk with the entire world an alt-tab away, not to mention pesky things like email and Slack and everything else that we have as a distraction, it's really going to come in on the content provider and the engaged community to deliver, or else you're going to lose the audience, and I think it's going to be really interesting, people that overly have relied on the 100 foot video screen and the electronic violin music in the morning, and some of these tips and tricks, aren't going to carry the weight, because if it's just you sitting in front of a screen and you got to deliver the message, it's got to be crisp, it's got to be powerful, and it's got to be engaging, or people are just going to step away. >> And more importantly, how do you bring people back? So, you know how, when I take a break at a conference, I'm kind of captured. Eventually I'm going to walk back to the conference center, I might go back out to take a call, et cetera, but getting people to come back, even if the content has been awesome and engaging and great, how do you get 'em to come back, they don't have to come back that day, or even real time, but they have to come back to the portal, so we're working on kind of the next 30 days after the event, this is the thing that's really funny about putting on a virtual event, there's kind of the exhale after the day of the event, a virtual event, you know what, you've got a third of your audience that first day, a third of the audience the next week, and then the rest of the audience creeps in over the next three or four weeks, and how do you engage them, how do you get them to come back, and ultimately consume your content and your message? It's something that I haven't, I don't know if I've cracked the formula for it yet, but it is going to be a very interesting challenge. >> Yeah, but I think we have, right, in the way, how do you consume video today, how do you find information, right, you go to YouTube or to Google and you search, right, and right now the biggest phenom in pop media is the Tiger King, right, so when do people watch the Tiger King, how do they hear about the Tiger King, when do they actually sit down and watch it, has nothing to do with when you watch it unless we decide to trade messages, I say "Hey, Keith, have you seen the new episode?" So when you look at consumption patterns, to me it's really interesting, it's kind of bifurcated, you either binge watch, and just really get into something that you're into, and you just go go go for hours and hours and hours, or you're getting snippets, you're getting little quick hits, quick hits, quick hits, and I think it's this kind of ugly middle, where you don't have enough content or richness or engagement to have people hang, but you're a little bit longer than a quick hit just to get your message out, and I think it's really going to kind of bifurcate, and the beauty of digital is you can consume it in lots of different ways, and piece parts, and you don't have to necessarily kind of sit through kind of a straight row consumption as a captive audience, I think the opportunity's really really good, if the content is up to snuff, properly tagged, search terms, all those types of things of course as well. >> So yeah, John talks about the value of community a lot, and one of our co-hosts on theCUBE, and also a CUBE alum is Corey Quinn, and he does a really great job of this with curating content after it's been consumed live. He'll to his audience say "You know what, I'm going to live tweet this session "from three months ago," and that refreshes the conversation, it's not about when the content was created, it's about the conversation, as long as it's relevant, and finding mediums to help amplify that message. >> Yeah, I think it's just a great opportunity, you know, we used to do some work with Live Nation in another lifetime, right, and Live Nation around concerts, they had that particular event when you go to the show, and a lot of their efforts on the marketing side were what they call extending the glow, right, extending the glow after, and also kind of building the excitement before, and moving that window of that event to more than just the night that the show played, and I think we've got the same opportunity here, that's why again if you get good quality content, it's not speeds and feeds, but it's evergreen themes that have legs, you can go back to that well and you can stir that thing up, and you can get it back out there again, and then again hopefully people stumble upon it, whether it's via community or whatever. The other thing I think that's really interesting is you talked about community, and you talked about QuinnyPig, @QuinnyPig I think is his Twitter handle, is this whole idea of collaboration, and I think that's another thing that we can take from the internet, I know you do a lot of that, so working with other influencers if you will, or other people in the communities, and introducing each other's community to one another, I think it's a really big part of what makes a lot of the big YouTubers famous is that they do things together and they kind of cross-pollinate their communities, and if there's some overlap there then they both have kind of a win-win, and again I think in digital, where you don't have destruction, you don't have single use, you can use stuff more than once, it really opens up this opportunity for much more win-win, let's work together, and build community together, cross leverage, versus it's either yours or mine, and it's really more of a competitive thing. >> And I've been collaborating a lot with some of my European peers, and you bring up a really interesting concept. Our friends at VMware's going to be putting on VMworld in the next few months, and they usually had a US conference and a European conference, were both pretty sizable conferences. It's basically going to run concurrently as one conference. So if it's going to run as one conference, why do I have to limit the live experience to the US timezone? Why can't I cater this, and why is it just a fixed hour, I don't know if it will be, but it shouldn't just be a fixed hour event, it's going to be a all-out hour event that's going to happen across Asia, Europe, and the US, and tailoring the content to each continent and time zone, and cross-pollinating, so that content that I would not have typically have gotten at the US event, or in the Europe event, I can now get that experience and cross-cultural flavor as a natural part of digital, so there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot to miss about in-person events, but I think there's opportunities that are just massively untapped. >> Yeah, yeah, and I'm just going to get one more concept, which I don't think is getting enough action, get your take on it, but if you think of the value to the company, let's just stick with VMware for a minute, we're great fans of Pat and Sanjay, there is a information transfer when Pat gets up and does his keynote as from one to many tens of thousands, and there's value there, and again we talked about this rallying moment, but think of turning that on its head, which is really what digital provides, now there's an opportunity for Pat and Sanjay and the entire VMware senior team and junior team and product managers to now flip that information flow. So if you think of the user experience from the attendees' point of view, is it better for Sanjay to talk to 10,000 people in an audience, or would Sanjay rather hear from 10,000 people, and have that flow of information going back in? So if you think of it as a community event versus a one way communication of here's our exciting news, I think the value to the sponsor goes up dramatically, 'cause there's so much institutional knowledge and tribal knowledge and experience within all those people that are just sitting passively listening to that keynote. If this is a way to better suck that information back into the company, I don't think they'll ever go back to the other way it was. >> Yeah, two points, two data points on that. One, again, from the worship side of the house, at our Easter service, our church enabled every member who cared to to kind of do a five, eight second "Hey, this is the Townsend family, "happy Easter," and then 15 minutes before the live church service started, they just ran a video of family after family after family that I recognize, saying "Hi, happy Easter," so you have that moment, and how do you capture that online? VMware's social media team already does this well, they amplify end user content, there was a guy that did a video on how to install VMware Cloud Foundation in three hours, went viral. You have these opportunities, again, to hear from sources and have conversations that's really not practical from a typical conference perspective. I think I heard it best the other day, one of my attendees and presenters said "You know what, Keith, the virtual conference "is such a democratizing event because "it enables me, whether I could not afford "to go to a conference before, "or I couldn't travel, or whatever reasons "I could not attend a conference before," the virtual conference gives opportunities for collaborations that could not have taken place otherwise. >> Yeah, it's great, so again, Keith, thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your thoughts, and again, for everybody, April 21st 2020, next week, >> 10: 30 AM central time, join the CTO virtual conference. Keith, always great to catch up, man. >> You too, Jeff, thanks a lot. >> All right, take care. He's Keith, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching, I'll see you next time. (calm music)

>>live from Miami, Florida It's the Q covering IBM is data in a I forum brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to Miami, Florida Everybody watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we're covering the IBM data and a I Forum Scott Hefner series The CMO on uh, sorry VP and CMO IBM Data. Yeah, right, I know. Here's the CMO of late again. So welcome. Welcome to the >>cake was great. Great >>event. Yeah, I've never attended one of these before. The sort of analytics University 1700 people that everybody's like. Sponges trying to learn more and more and more. >>60% higher attendance last year. Awesome. A lot of interest. >>So if we go back a couple of years ago, talks about digital transformation, people roll their eyes. They think it's a buzz word. When you talk to customers, it's really they're trying to transform their business, and data is at the center of that. So if you go back to like 2016 there's a lot of experimentation going on. Kind of throw everything against the wall, see what sticks. It seems Scott, based on the data that I see, that people are now narrowing their their bets on things like Ai ai automation machine learning containers. What are you seeing from customers? >>I think you framed it Well, I mean, if you kind of think about it, this digital transformations been going on for almost 20 years. With the advent of the Internet back around 2000 late 19 nineties, every started on the Internet doing business transactions, and slowly but surely, digital transformation was taken effect, right? And I think clients are now shifting to what we can call digital transformation two point. Oh, what's the next 20 years look like? And our view, our viewpoint from overlay from our clients is, if you think about it, it's data that fuels digital transformation. Right? Without data, there is no digital transformation is no digital. It's all data driven, evidence based decision making, using data to do things more efficiently and more effectively for your clients and your employees, and so on, so forth. But if you think about it, we've been using data as a way of looking to what has happened in the past or what is happening now in clients with digital transformation. To point out what a shift to a word of predictive data. How do you How do you predict in shape? Future outcomes, right? And if you think about it's a I that's gonna unlock predictive data. That's why we see such an intense focus on a I as a really the linchpin of digital transformation. Two point. Oh, and of course, all that data needs to be virtualized. It has to sit in a hybrid cloud environment. 94% of clients have multiple clouds. So if that unlocks the value or if a Iot of Mark's value the data and predictive ways the cloud in a multi cloud environment is that platform that has built upon, it's. That's why you see this enormous shift today. I in terms of investment priority along with hybrid multi cloud. >>So I like this this point of view, this digital transformation 2.0, because what's in their senior business in a digital business? That's how they used data. Yeah, and IBM is mission. Using your group is to help people better take advantage of data to five business outcomes. I mean, that's pretty clearly. What you guys are doing this to Dato To me. Three innovation cocktails, data plus machine intelligence or a I, and then you scale it with cloud. And so you talk about cloud to two point. Oh, really? Involves this predictive sort of a component of the equation that you're bringing into it, doesn't it? >>Yeah. When I think of this next phase, there's several things our clients trying to achieve. One is to predict and shape future outcomes, whether it be inventory, whether it be patient care, whatever it may be. Ah, customer service call. You want Toby to predict what the call's gonna be about what the client or what the customers has gone through before with the issue may be right. So this notion of predicted in shaping the outcome the second is empowering. People do higher value work. How do you make them better at what they're doing? The superpowers of being aided by a machine all right, or some kind of software, it's gonna help you be better what you do. And of course, this whole notion of automating task that people don't want to do automated experiences and intelligent ways. This all adds up to like new business models, right? And that's where a I comes in. That's what I does, and I do think it's a linchpin. What clients are looking to invest in is this notion that you need one unified platform to build upon for the future. That is, cloud service is data service is an aye aye. Service is all is one thing. One cloud native platform that runs on any cloud and completely opens up where all your data is. You run your APS wherever you want to run them secure to the core, and that's what they're looking to invest in. And >>so you guys use is the sort of tag line you can't have a I without. Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, being information architecture. So for years on the q b been talking about bringing the cloud model to your data? Could you don't move data around? Now you're talking about bringing machine intelligence to your data wherever your data lives, to talk about why that's important and what IBM is doing both conceptually in from a product standpoint, to enable that. >>So the number one issue with the eye and actually a number one issue that sometimes results in failure with a I is didn't understand the data. Some 81% of clients do not understand the data that they're gonna need for the aye aye models. And if they do understand the doubt that they don't know how to make it simple, inaccessible, especially when its ever changing and then they have all the issues of compliance and quality. And is it a trusted set of data that you're using? And that's what you mentioned about? There is no way I without an aye aye, which is information architecture. So it starts there than two. To your point is, Dad is everywhere. There's thousands of sources of data, if not more than that. So how do you normalize all that? Virtual eyes it right. And that's where you get into one platform, any cloud, so that you can access the data wherever it sits. Don't spend the money moving things around the complexity of all that. And then, finally, the third thing we're looking to do is use a I to build. I use a I to actually manage the life cycle of how do you incorporate this into your business and That's what this one platform is gonna d'oh! Versus enabling customers to piece together all this stuff. It's just it's too much. >>So this is what cloudpack for data? Yeah, it is and does. Yes. So you say Aye, aye. Free. Are you talking about picking the functions and automating components? Prioritizing? Yeah. How you apply those those algorithms. Is that right? >>Yeah. So I think Way talk about data with three big things to really focus on his data. And that is the whole nursing. You need that information architecture that's that's ready for an aye aye multicolored world. It's all about the dad in the end, right? Two is about talent, right? Talent being skills. Are you able to acquire the skills you need? So we're trying to help our customers apply. I actually generate and build a I optimize eh? So they don't need is, you know, as much skill to do it. In other words, democratize the ability to build a I models for your business. And then finally, the dad is everywhere. You need to have completely open environment. That's the run on any cloud notion. And that's why the Red had open shift is such a big component of this. So think of clients are looking to climb the ladder >>today. I >>modernize their data states, make the data simple, inaccessible, create a trusted data foundation building scale new models and infuse it throughout their business. Cloudpack for data is essentially the foundational platform that gives you the latter >>day I >>that is in earnestly extensible with things that may be important to you or certain areas of additional capabilities. So Compaq for Dad essentially is the platform that I'm referring to hear when you say you know any cloud, right? >>So I feel like we're on the cusp of this enormous productivity boom. If you look at the data, productivity in the first quarter went up now and if you believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but over the long term productivity numbers right, you probably can't believe in them. I think for Q one was like 3% which is a huge uptick. And I feel like it's much, much higher than the anemic whatever it was one and 1/2 1.7%. All this ay, ay, all this automation is gonna drive productivity. It's gonna have an impact on organizations. So what's your perspective? Point of view on on the depending productivity boom boom? Do you believe that premise, How our job's going to be affected, What a client seeing in terms of how their retraining people, What should we expect? >>Yeah, I think a I's gonna give people superpowers. It's gonna make them better. What they do, it's gonna make you as a consumer better at how you choose what to buy. It's gonna make the automobile drive more efficiently and more more information that's relevant to you in the dashboard. It's gonna allow you call for service on your cable company. For them to already know your history, maybe already died. Knows what why you're calling and make it a more efficient call. It's gonna make everyone more productive. It's gonna result in higher quality output because you're able to predict things right. You automate things and intelligent ways, so I don't see it as anything that replaces jobs. It's just gonna make people better at what they do. Allow them to focus on higher value work and be more efficient when you are making decisions right in that will that will result in higher productivity per per worker, right? >>I mean, we've certainly heard examples today of customers that are doing that basically, and it's not like they're firing people. They're basically taking away mundane tasks or things that maybe humans would take so long to do and then re pointing that talent somewhere else. >>Toe higher value. >>So you're seeing that in your client base? Yeah, it's starting to hit today. It's gonna be interesting to see whether or not that affects jobs. I mean, we like to say That's not I ultimately think it's gonna create more jobs. There may be some kind of dip where we've got to retrain people, maybe have to change the way in which we do. Reading right bet Smith and I were talking, reading, writing arithmetic in coding, You know, maybe one of the skills that we have to bring in, but ultimately I think it is a positive, and I'm sanguine and I'm an optimist. Um, but you're seeing examples today of people refocusing their talent. What are they focusing that talent on more strategic things? Like what? >>Well, again, I think it's just getting people to be better at what they do by giving them that predictive power of super powers to be a to do their job better. It's gonna make people better not replace >>them. So it's consumers. We're probably gonna buy more. You're >>gonna buy more, you're gonna buy the right things more. And the right things are gonna be there for you to buy the right sales because everything is gonna be able to better understand patterns of what happens and predict right. And that's why you're seeing this enormous investment shift among among technologists companies. What was that? M. I. T. Sloane in the Boston Consulting Group just came out with a study. I think couple weeks ago, 92% of companies are looking to expand their investments in a I gardener came out with the study of C i ose and there in top investment areas, artificial intelligence was number one. Data and analytics was number two, which is the information architecture, right? One into as the first time it's been like that. So and I think it's for this reason of digital transformation, the predictive notion predictive enterprise, if you will, and just helping everyone be more efficient, more productive or what they do. That's really what it's about. It's not so much replacing people. They're thinking of robots and things like that. That's a small part of what we're talking about. >>Well, even when you talk to people about software robots, they love them because they don't have to do these Monday tests and dramatically impact the quality of what they're doing it again. It frees them up to do other things. >>Good, Good example. Legal Legal Nation is one of our clients that we've been working with, and they do case law for business clients. And sometimes it can take weeks, if not a month, to prepare case law documents. They're able to do that ours now because they have artificial intelligence. The background has done a lot of the case law, intelligence and finding the right dad in the right case law and helping to populate those documents where they don't have to do all the research themselves. So what does that do for the lawyer? Right? It makes them better what they do. They can shift a higher value work than just preparing the document. They could work on more cases that could spend more time on the subtleties of the case. Actually, that's a good example of what we mean here. He's not replacing the lawyer. >>Well, I'm seeing a lot of examples like this in legal fields. Also, auditing. I've talked enough. I've asked you think I'd be able to cut the auditing bill? And the answer is actually, No, because to the point you just made is they're shifting their activities to higher value. They might be charging Maur for activities that take less time. >>Customer service is is another great example. There's so many some examples of that. But it used to be. If you called, everyone treated equal right and you get onto a call. And then sometimes it's very rudimentary things. Sometimes there's gotta be a way to prioritize What are the most critical calls knowing that there's something already wrong and you know why they're calling? And if you can shift your human agents to focus on those and let let a I help with the more rudimentary ones you're making, the client's happier. But those people doing higher value work, we go on forever and ever on just different examples across different industries in different businesses, of how this is really helping people, and it all comes down to it. The three big words, which is prediction, automation and optimization. And that's what I was gonna do. And with digital transformation in just shift the whole the whole notion of using data for evidence based decision making what's happened in the past? What's happening now, too? I'm gonna I'm gonna understand its shape, the future. You could do so many things with that. >>It's amazing when you think about it. We've been at this computer industry 50 60 plus years, and you think everything's automated. It's not even close. All this technology has actually created so much more data so much on structured data. Actually, so many Maur inefficient processes in a lot of ways that now machine intelligence is beginning to attack in a big >>way. You won't find a survey because, ah, a survey of businesses where a eyes not a top aspiration trick, is how do you turn the aspirations of the outcomes? And that's what this latter day eyes all about. It's a very prescriptive approach that we've learned from our clients on howto take that journey to a I and a lot of things we talk about on this on this conversation or the real key linchpins, right? You gotta get the data right. You have to trust in the data that you're going to be used and you gotta get the talent and be able to simple find democratize how you build his models and deploy them. And then ultimately you got to get trust across your organization. And that means the models have to have explained ability, Understand? You have to help you understand how it is recommending these things, and then they're gonna buy into it. It's just gonna make them better. It's the whole notion of superpowers. >>Get that down and then you could scale. And that's really where the business and >>they all want to get there. Now the hard part is now we got to start doing it right. It's kind of like the Internet was 20 years ago. They know they want to do business transactions over the Internet and do commerce. But it didn't happen like overnight. It wasn't magic. It took. It was a journey. I think we're seeing that movie. We playing here? >>Yeah. And in fact, I think in some ways it could even happen faster now because you have the Internet because you have clouds. That's not predicting a very steep Pogue. I've s curve here. We'll have to leave it there. Scott, great to see you. Thanks >>for coming >>on. >>Any time. >>All right. Keep it right, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the Cube from the IBM data and a I form in Miami. We'll be right back.

(energetic music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley; Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Power Panel recorded here in Palo Alto, California. We've got remote guests from around the Internet. We have Evan Anderson, Mark Anderson, Phil Lohaus. Thanks for comin' on. Evan is with INVNT/IP, an organization with companies and individuals that fight nation-sponsored intellectual property theft and also author of the huge report Theft Nation Almost a 100 pages of really comprehensive analysis on it. Mark Anderson with the Future in Review CEO of Pattern, Computer and Strategic New Service Chairman of Future in Review Conference, and author of the book "The Pattern Future: "Find the World's Greatest Secrets "and Predicting the Future Using Discovery Patterns" and Phil Lohaus, American Enterprise Institute. Former intelligent analyst, researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, studying competitive strategy and emerging technologies. Guys, thanks for coming on. This topic is, is industrial IoT the new battleground? Mark, you cover the Future Review. Security is the battleground. It's not just a silo'd space. It's horizontally scalable across every single touch point of the Internet, individuals, national security, companies, global, what's your perspective on this new battleground? >> Well, thank you, I took some time and watched your last presentation on this, which I thought was excellent. And maybe I'll try to pick up from there. There's a lot of discussion there about the technical aspects of IoT, or IIoT, and some of the weaknesses, you know firewalls failing, assuming that someone's in your network. But I think that there's a deeper aspect to this. And the problem I think, John, is that yes, they are in your network already, but the deeper problem here is, who is it? Is it an individual? Is it a state? And whoever it is, I'm going to put something out that I think is going to be worth talking more deeply about, and that is, if people who can do the most damage are already in there, and are ready to do it, the question isn't "Can they?" It's "Why have they not?" And so literally, I think if you ask world leaders today, are they in the electric grid? Yes. Is Russia in ours, are we in theirs? Yes. If you said, is China in our most important areas of enterprise? Absolutely. Is Iran in our banks and so forth? They are. And you actually see states of war going on, that are nuisances, but are not what you might call Cybergeddon. And I really believe that the world leaders are truly afraid. Perhaps more afraid of that than of nuclear war. So the amount of death and destruction that could happen if everybody cut loose at the same time, is so horrifying, my guess is that there's a human restraint involved in this, but that technically, it's already game over. >> Phil, Cybergeddon, I love that term, because that's a part of our theme here, is apocalypse now or later? Industrial IoT, or IIoT, or the Internet, all these touch points are creating a surface area that for penetration's purposes, any packet can get in. Nation-states, malware, you name it. It's all problem. But this is the new war battleground. This is now digital Cybergeddon. Forget the wall on the southern border, physical wall. We're talking about a digital wall. We have major threats going on to our society in the United States, and global. This is new, rules of engagement, or no rules of engagement on how to compete in a digital war. This is something that the government's supposed to protect us for. I mean, if someone drops troops in California, physical people, the government's supposed to stop that. But if it's a digital war, it's packets. And the companies are responsible for all this. This doesn't make any sense to me. Break it down, what's the problem? And how do we solve this? >> Sure, well the problem is is that we're actually facing different kinds of threats than we were typically used to facing in the past. So in the past when we go to war, we may have a problem with a foreign country, or a conflict is coming up. We tend to, and by we I mean the United States, we tend to think of these things as we're going to send troops in, or we're going to actually have a physical fight, or we're going to have some other kind of decisive culmination of events, end of a conflict. What we're dealing with now is very different. And it's actually something that isn't entirely new. But the adversaries that we're facing now, so let's say China, Russia, and Iran, just to kind of throw them into some buckets, they think about war very differently. They think about the information space more broadly, and partially because they've been so used to having to kind of be catching up to America in terms of technology, they found other ways to compete with America, and ways that we really haven't been focusing on. And that really, I would argue, extends most prominently to the information space. And by the information space I'm speaking very broadly. I'm talking about, not just information in terms of social media, and emails, and things like that, but also things like what we're talking about today, like IIoT. And these are new threat landscapes, and ones where our competitors have a integrated way of approaching the conflict, one in which the state and private sectors kind of are molded or fused or at least are compelled to work together and we have a very different space here in the United States. And I'm happy to unpack that as we talk about that today, but what we're now facing, is not just about technical capabilities, it's about differences in governing systems, differences in governing paradigms. And so it's much bigger than just talking about the technical specifics. >> Evan, I want you to weigh in on this because one of the things that I feel strongly about, and this is pretty obvious from the commentary, and experts I talk to is, the United States has always been good at defending itself physically, you know war, in being places. Digitally, we've been really good at offense, but terrible on defense, has been the metaphor. I spoke with former four-star General Keith Alexander, who ran the NSA and was first commander of the cyber command, who is now the CEO of IronNet. He and I were talking on-camera and privately and he's saying, "Look it. "we suck at defense digitally. "We're great at offense, we can take someone out "on the offense." But we're talking about IoT, about monitoring. These are technical challenges. This is network nerds, and software engineers have to solve this problem with the prism of defense. This is a new paradigm. This is what we're kind of getting to. And Mark, you kind of addressed it. But this is the challenge. IoT is going to create more points that we have to defend that we suck now at defending, how are we going to get better. This is the paradox. >> Yeah, I think that's certainly accurate. And one of our problems here is that as a society we've always been open. And that was how the Internet was born. And so we have a real paradigm shift now from a world in which the U.S. was leading an open world, that was using the Internet for, I mean there have been problems with security since day one, but originally the Internet was an information-sharing exercise. And we reached a point in human history now where there are enough malicious hackers that have the capabilities we didn't want them to have, but we need to change that outlook. So, looking at things like Industrial IoT, what you're seeing is not so much that this is the battlefield in specific, it's that everything like it is now the battlefield. So in my work specifically we're focused more on economic problems. Economic conflicts and strategies. And if you look at the doctrines that have come out of our adversaries in the last decade, or really 20 years, they very much did what Phil said, and they looked at our weaknesses, and one of those biggest weaknesses that we've always had is that an open society is also unable necessarily to completely defend itself from those who would seek to exploit that openness. And so we have to figure out as a society, and I believe we are. We're running a fine line, we're negotiating this tightrope right now that involves defending the values and the foundational critical aspects of our society that require openness, while also making sure that all the doors aren't open for adversaries. And so we'll continue to deal with that as a society. Everything is now a battlefield and a much grayer area, and IoT certainly isn't helping. And that's why we have to work so hard on it. >> I want to talk about the economic piece on the next talk track of rounds. Theft, and intellectual property that you cover deeply. But Mark and Phil, this notion of Cybergeddon meets the fact that we have to be more defensive. Again, principles of openness are out there. I mean, we have open source. There is a potential path here. Open source software has been, I think, depending on who you talk to, fourth generation, or fifth, depending on how old you are, but it's now mainstream enough now. Are we ever going to get to a formula where we can actually be strong in defense as well as just offense with respect to protecting digitally? >> Phil, do you want that? >> Well, yeah, I would just say that I'm glad to hear that General Alexander is confident about our offensive capabilities. But one of the... To NSA that is conducting these offensive capabilities. When we talk about Russia, Iran, China, or even a smaller group, like let's say an extremist group or something like that, there's an integration between command and control, that we simply don't have here in the States. For example, the Panasonic and Sony examples always come to mind, as ones where there are attacks that can happen against American companies that then have larger implications that go beyond just those companies. So and this may not be a case where the NSA is even tracking the threat. There's been some legislation that's come out, rather controversial legislation about so-called hacking back initiatives and things like that. But I think everybody knows that this is already kind of happening. The real question is going to be, how does the public sector, and how does the private sector work together to create this environment where they're working in synergy, rather than at cross purposes? >> Yeah, and this brings up, I've heard this before. I've heard people talk about the fact that open source nation states can actually empower by releasing tools in open source via the Dark Web or other vehicles, to not actually have, quote, their finger prints, on any attacks. This seems to be a tactic. >> Or go through criminals, right? Use proxies, things like that. It's getting even more complicated and Alexander's talked about that as well, right? He's talked about the convergence of crime and nation-state actions. So whereas with nation-states it's already hard-attributed enough, if that's being outsourced to either whether it's patriotic hackers or criminal groups, it's even more difficult. >> I think you know, Keith is a good friend of all of ours, obviously, good guy. His point is a good one. I'd like to take it a little more extreme state and say, defense is worth doing and probably hopeless. (everyone laughs) So, as they always say, all it takes is one failure. So, we always talk about defense, but really, he's right. Offense is easy. You want to go after somebody? We can get them. But if you want to play defense against a trillion potential points of failure, there's no chance. One way to say this is, if we ignore individuals for a moment and just look at nation-states, it's pretty clear that any nation-state of size, that wants to get into a certain network, will get in. And then the question will be, Well, once they're in, can they actually do damage? And the answer is probably yeah, they probably can. Well, why don't they? Why don't they do more damage? We're kind of back to the original premise here, that there's some restraint going on. And I suspect that Keith's absolutely right because in general, they don't want to get attacked. They don't want to have to come back at them what they're about to do to your banks or your grid, and we could do that. We all could do that. So my guess is, there's a little bit of failure on our part to have deep discussions about how great our defenses either are, or are not, when frankly the idea of defense is a good idea, worthwhile idea, but not really achievable. >> Yeah, that's a great point. That comes up a lot where it's like, people don't want retaliation, so it's a big, critical event that happens, that's noticeable as a counterstrike or equivalent. But there's been discussion of the, I call it "the slow bleed" where they push the line of where that is, like slowly infiltrate, and just cause disruption and inconvenience, as a tactic. This has become something we're seeing a lot of. Whether it's misinformation campaigns on fake news, to just disrupting operations slowly over time, and just kind of, 1,000 paper cuts, if you will. Your guys' thoughts on that? Is that something you guys see out there that's happening? >> Well, you saw Iran go after our banks. And we were pushing Iran pretty hard on the sanctions. Everybody knows they did that. It wasn't very much fun for anybody. But what they didn't do is take down the entire banking system. Not sure they could, but they didn't. >> Yeah, I would just add there that you see this on multiple fronts. You see this is by design. I'm sure that Mark is talking about this in his report but... they talk about this incremental approach that over time, this is part of the problem, right? Is that we have a very kind of black or white conception of warfare in this country. And a lot of times, even companies are going to think, well you know, we're at peace, so why would I do something that may actually be construed as something that's warlike or offensive or things like that? But in reality, even though we aren't technically at war, all of these other actors view this as a real conflict. And so we have to get creative about how we think about this within the paradigm that we have and the legal strictures that we have here in this country. >> Well there's no doubt at least in my non-expert military opinion, but as someone who is a techie, been on the Internet from day one, all my life, and all those tools, you guys as well, I personally think we're at war. 100%, there's no debate on that. And I think that we have to get better policy around this and understand it better. Because it's happening. And one of the obvious areas that we see in the news everyday, it's Huawei and intellectual property theft. This is an economic impact. I mean just look at what's happening in Brexit in the U.K. If that was essentially manipulated, that's the ultimate smart bomb, is to just destroy their financial system, which ended up happening through that misinformation. So there are economic realizations here, Evan,that not only come from the misinformation campaigns and other attacks, but there's real value with intellectual property. This is the report you put out. Your thoughts? >> There's very much an active conflict going on in the economic sphere, and that's certainly an excellent point. I think one of the most important things that most of the world doesn't quite understand yet, but our adversaries certainly understand, is that wars are fought for usually, just a few reasons. And there's a lot of different justification that goes on. But often it's for economic benefit. And if you look at human history, and you look at modern history, a lot of wars are fought for some form of economic benefit, often in the form of territory, et cetera, but in the modern age, information can directly and very quite obviously translate into economic benefit. And so when you're bleeding information, you're really bleeding money. And when I say information, again, it's a broad word, but intellectual property, which our definition, here at INVNT/IP is quite broad too, is incredibly valuable. And so if you have an adversary that's consistently removing intellectual property from what I would call our information ecosystem, and our business ecosystem, we're losing a lot of economic value there, and that's what wars are fought over. And so to pretend that this conflict is inactive, and to pretend that the underlying economy and economic strength that is bolstered or created by intellectual property isn't critical would be silly. And so I think we need to look at those kinds of dynamics and the kind of Gerasimov Doctrine, and the essential doctrine of unrestricted warfare that came out of the People's Republic of China are focused on avoiding kinetic conflict while succeeding at the kinds of conflict that are more preferable, particularly in an asymmetric environment. So that's what we're dealing with. >> Mark and Phil, people waking up to this reality are certainly. People in the know are that I talk to, but generally speaking across the board, is this a woke moment for tech? This Armageddon now or later? >> Woke moment for politicians not for tech, I think. I'm sure Phil would agree with this, but the old guard, go back to when Keith was running the NSA. But at that time, there was a very clear distinction between military and economic security. And so when you said security, that meant military. And now all the rules have changed. All the ways CFIUS works in the United States have changed. The legislation is changing, and now if you want to talk about security, most major nations equate economic security with national security. And that wasn't true 10 years ago. >> That's a great point. That's really profound, I totally agree. Phil. >> I think you're seeing a change in realization in Washington about this. I mean, if you look at the cybersecurity strategy of 2018, it specifically says that we're going to be moving from a posture of active defense to one of defending forward. And we can get into the discussion about what those words mean, but the way I usually boil down is it means, going from defending, but maybe a little bit forward, to actually going out and making sure that our interests are protected. And the reason why that's important, and we're talking about offense versus defense here, obviously the reason why, from what Mark was saying, if they're already in the networks, and they haven't actually done anything, it's because they're afraid of what that offensive response could be. So it's important that we selectively demonstrate what costs we could impose on different actors for different kinds of actions, especially knowing that they're already operating inside of our network. >> That's a great point. I mean, I think that's again another profound statement because it's almost like the pin in the grenade. Once they pull it, the damage is done. Again, back to our theme, Armageddon, now or later? What's the answer to this, guys? Is it the push to policy conversation and the potential consequences higher? Get that narrative going. Is it more technical protection in the networks? What's some of the things that people are talking about and thinking about around this? >> And it's really all of the above. So the tough part about this for any society and for our society is that it's expensive to live in a world with this much insecurity. And so when these kind of low-level conflicts are going on, it costs money and it costs resources. And companies had to deal with that. They spent a long time trying to dodge security costs, and now particularly with the advent of new law like the GDPR in Europe, it's becoming untenable not to spend that defensive money, even as a company, right? But we also are looking at a deepening to change policy. And I think there's been a lot of progress made. Mark mentioned the CFIUS reforms. There are a lot of different essentially games of Whack-A-Mole being played all around the world right now figuring out how to chase these security problems that we let go too long, but there's many, many, many fronts that we need to-- >> Whack-A-Mole's a great example. The visualization of that is just horrendous. You know, not the ideal scenario. But I got to get your point on this, because one of the things that comes up all the time in our conversations in theCUBE is, the government's job is to protect our securities. So again, if someone came in, and invaded my town in Palo Alto, it's not my responsibility to fight for the town. Maybe defend my own house. But if I'm a company being attacked by Russia, or China or Iran, isn't it the government's responsibility to protect me as a citizen and the company doing business there? So again, this is kind of the confusion that people have. If somebody's going to defend their hack, I certainly got to put security practices in place. This is new ground for the government, digitally speaking. >> When we started this INVNT/IP project, it was about seven years ago. And I was told by a very smart guy in D.C. that our greatest challenge was going to be American corporations, global corporations. And he was absolutely right. Literally in this fight to protect intellectual property, and to protect the welfare even of corporations, our greatest enemies so far have been American corporations. And they lobby hard for China, while China is busy stealing from them, and stealing from their company, and stealing from their country. All that stuff's going on, on a daily basis and they're in D.C. lobbying in favor of China. Don't do anything to make them mad. >> They're getting their pockets picked at the same time. And they're trying to do business in China. They're getting their pockets picked. That's what you're saying. >> They're going for the quarterly earnings report and that's all. >> So the problem is-- >> Yeah so-- >> The companies themselves are kind of self-inflicted wounds here for them. >> Yes. >> Yeah, just to add to that, on this note, there have been some... Business to settle interest. And this is something you're seeing a little bit more of. There's been legislation through CFIUS and things like that. There have been reforms that discourage the flow of Chinese money in the Silicon Valley. And there's actually a measurable difference in that. Because people just don't want to deal with the paperwork. They don't want to deal with the reputational risk, et cetera, et cetera. And this is really going to be the key challenge, is having policy makers not only that are interested in addressing this issue, because not all of them are even convinced it's a problem, if you can believe it or not, but having them interested and then having them understand the issue in a way that the legislation can actually be helpful and not get in the way of things that we value, such as innovation and entrepreneurialism and things like that. So it's going to take sophisticated policy-making and providing incentives so that companies actually want to participate and helping to make America safer. >> You're so right about the politicians. Capitol Hill's really not educated. I mean I tell my kids, and they ask the same questions, just look at Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai present to the government. They don't even know what an Android phone versus an iPhone is, nevermind what the Internet, and how this global economy works. This has become a makeup problem of the personnel in Capitol Hill. You guys see any movement? I'm seeing some change with a new guard, a new generation of younger people coming in. Certainly from the military, that's an easy when you see people get this. But a new generation of young millennials who are saying, "Hey, why are we doing this the old way?" and actually becoming more informed. Not being the lawyer at law-making. It's actually more technically savvy. Is there any movement, any bright hope there? >> I think there's a little hope in the sense that at a time when Congress has trouble keeping the lights on, they seem to have bipartisan agreement on this set of issues that we're talking about. So, that's hopeful. You know, we've seen a number of strongly bipartisan issues supported in Congress, with the Senate, with the House, all agreeing that this is an issue for us all, that they need to protect the country. They need to protect IP. They need to extend the definition of security. There's no argument there. And that's a very strange thing in today's D.C. to have no argument between the parties. There's no error between the GOP and the Democrats as far as I can tell. They seem to all agree on this, and so it is hopeful. >> Freedom has its costs and I think this is a new era of modern freedom and warfare and protection and all these dynamics are changing, just like Cloud 2.0 is changing application developers. Guys, this is a really important topic. Thank you so much for coming on, appreciate it. Love to do a follow-up on this again with you guys. Thanks for sharing your insight. Some great, profound statements there, appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> It's been a CUBE Power Panel here from Palo Alto, California with Evan Anderson, Mark Anderson, and Phil Lohaus. Thank you guys for coming on. Power Panel: The Next Battleground in Industrial IoT. Security is a big part of it. Thanks for watching, this has been theCUBE. (energetic music)

>> And one topic. I want to get onto that. You mentioned it up and you opened the can of worms on this. So I blame you. His blood flow restriction training you called B F R. And Freeman listening chases the well, the most well versed individuals in this area. I was, I learned from him probably weekly on it, and I get studies from him. I used to be daily. Probably. It will lessen consistent now, because he's probably realizing that I can't read that fast. But I'm gonna chase to talk a little bit about some of protocols that you used be a far and harder you can use it for. Not yet. That's like development for individuals who might just be seeking an alternative way to work out whether the older adults, people who travel on the road and what it does physiologically for not only muscle growth, but the tendon thickness, like you said, and some of the other other >> protocols. Such a cellular swelling protocols. >> Yeah, yeah, I think you know, the one thing I would say about our previous of conversation with incense Thing is, I'm not telling people not to take him out like running around saying that that's the devil and all that. So I make sure that I'm not like one of those zealots about that stuff. It's it's just Hey, do you need it? You know, like this, that thought process is critical. Is this necessary? Not let me just problem cause I'm sore today, right? I think that's the caveat I want people to walk away with is that everything is necessary if it's necessary. And if it's not, is there a better alternative, or is it just part of life? Is that part of being a division one athlete or, you know, somebody who's recreational? E fit is you're going to feel a little sore and tired. Is it necessary to take that pill that made negatively? Thank you. So I think that's one thing I want to say, but kind of moving on to the >> You are not a dealer. I will vouch for it. Yeah. Interesting topic to talk about. And I give you credit for being open minded on both ends. Yes, everyone was concerned. >> Yeah, Yeah, I want to throw that out there. But I think with the Bee Afar stuff, it's I'm so ill. I've learned a lot from the man. Dr Headless Sarah. Hey, Works is Smart tools company, which they're just absolutely revolutionising how available and the education that's associative willful restrictions. So I you know, I I'm gonna kind of pass on that credit and say that, uh, they're really pushing the field forward, and I'm not affiliated with the company. I just think what they're doing is is fantastic work, because local restriction obviously has been around for a long time. It's not new, you know, we're not pretending it's new, but you know, it's really the availability of cuffs for sort of affordable prices has made it seem no refreshed and kind of a new life to it started in the late nineties in Japan, really doing a lot of the early research on it. Ah, lot of people started with tine off with different straps and and, ah, bands that they're just wrapping around their arms and looking for, you know, in a partial occlusion and some cases probably dangerously a full ischemia. But I think you saw it. And most recent years, with some of the owns recovery and the Delphi's, which come in a pretty high price tag and as I mentioned, smart tools has come out. They have much more affordable. I think it's, you know, a tenth of the price. And so now you're able tto. But these types of you know it's tool and everybody's hands. And I think it's is changing the landscape as faras, a modality that has multiple uses. And that's one thing when we talk sports science, we talked technology. You know, everything has a time in place. But when I look and evaluate and vet out technology, or whatever we're going to bring on is as a new resource. I always looked forward to have multiple uses, doesn't have a bang for your buck, and I think the blood flow restriction does. It's versatile. It can be used in rehab. You can be used to build muscle confused for strength. It can be used as, ah, activity potentially ater so you can use it. Potentially increase your subsequent performance with an acute time window. You can use it as a recovery tool, so I think the the utilization of it is still we're learning about it. There's still no definitive. Here's how this happens in this sequence but I think that's what Everything right? The human body. We're learning so much about it. But the science that's there has proven that low load with local restriction, where we're including one hundred percent venous return, but partially including arterial inflow. So there is blood flow going into the muscles and the periphery, but there is no blood flow returning, and so it creates a cooling effect. We're essentially you're gonna limit the availability of oxygen. You're going to decrease the pH and more acidic. You're goingto deplete foster creating stores. You're essentially going to run through the size of principle and use up small of slow twitch fibers and skip essentially rights of fast switch fivers with a low load or even a non loaded exercise. So I think when you talk about somebody who's got limitations, maybe they just had surgery. They can't run. They can't have the impulse of the impact that you would need or you would want to see toe. I kind of developed the most cultures. They come back. Little restriction is a great way because takes a low load exercise and you realise, is that restricted bowling and you get a subsequent fast, which adaptation? So you're you're simulating the big boys, the ones that move us, the ones that make us jump and run faster. Ah, and I think you're seeing time Windows of adaptation that air a sixth of the time Faster, you're getting strength. And I purchased three Adaptation in two weeks, whereas in traditional resistance training it was taking eight to twelve. Um, so And when you talk about, I had an athlete rolled her ankle and I want to make sure that they're not having atrophy is they walk around in a boot. I need to make sure that the muscles around the knees and the hamstrings, the name of the elders, critical drivers and sport aren't just wasting away. So we would have athletes obviously in the rehab sitting, doing protocols to develop muscle but also just sitting the act of just sitting with occlusion passively not doing anything has been shown to cut atrophy by fifty percent. So it's fantastic because it's not invasive. You're not doing anything into him. They're just sitting. So, uh, we don't you know, promote them to play on their phones constantly, but they can sit there and have their phone out and, you know, twenty minutes goes by and they just hopefully of, you know, benefited their return to play and a, you know, a faster, more efficient way than just sitting around. So lots of lots of utility for it. >> Interesting. So for those not familiar bloodflow restriction training the way it works, you gotta cuss. Arms hopefully cast. Not just, uh, elastic band, you tying on. But that's how I started originally from Kat to training out in Japan. So it's a cuff. The attach is approximately on the whim, typically by the shoulder or up along the thigh, and it includes the amount of blood so reduces the amount of blood. Don't go into the muscle, which then allows these Siri's of physiological effects that chase alluded to. That is a difference between Venus and arterial occlusion and chase in. Regards to that were Some of the specifics are for people who aren't as familiar with blood flow. You rattle off a bunch of stuff regarding blood flow and from the adaptations of it. But people who aren't familiar with it you measure the occlusion through Doppler. I believe Smart tools uses a remote Doppler. They're attached to you on the distal limb and everyone using this, what percentages do use? How do you know what you too much occlusion that to type that not tight enough. And we're the protocols that you use once you have the right conclusion for that limb to increase some of these hypertrophy, some muscle growing activities or, you know, just sitting there play on your phone activities that reduces hypertrophy for your athletes. >> Yeah. So what you're doing is you're actually going to take an external Doppler or something that's gonna allow you to magnify the sound of the pulse, right? So if you take radio pulse, you know, right here you would replace the Doppler on it. You would actually be able to hear the heartbeat as it from service, >> due stew, stew, sh >> and up top. They're wearing the cuff. You're going to slowly start to inflate it. It gets tighter, tighter, tighter. And you will eventually get to a point where that, uh, false will start to fade of >> this dish dish. >> And it comes to a point where it's non existent. And so that's when you know that there's been full arterial occlusion that's there one hundred percent. There is no blood flow into that arm. There's no blood flow out. It is included. And so research has shown that basically anywhere from thirty percent in ninety percent, you're gonna have the same amount of occlusion. So if I was explained that, ah, a little bit more detail is so I'm going to take that one hundred percent occlusion number. So if you've ever done your blood pressure and the typical one of perfect blood pressure's one twenty of Brady and that's the same device we're going to use I mean its's stigmata. I'm anemometer the tough one to say, um and you're going to get a number up there like, let's just say two fifty. Alright, so that's your hundred percent occlusion. What again research has shown is that in thirty percent of two. Fifty all the way up to ninety percent of two. Fifty, that's the sweet spot or including arterial, that actually doesn't improve occlusion as the higher you go. So we stick to fifty percent. So, you know, fifty per cent of two fifty is one twenty five. And, ah, you're goingto have Justus. Much of you did it at ninety percent. And really, the differences is pain perception. Because if you start getting up one hundred percent inclusion and telling somebody to exercise, they're not going to like it. It's not going to feel good. So it's a nice sweet spot of saying, Hey, we have included Arterial but not fully restricted, but we have researched it, Venus. But we can still move and be act on DSO with that what you're really looking to do. There's a thirty fifteen fifteen fifteen protocol that's seen pretty commonly, but ultimately you just need to fatigue the muscles. Ito have a low load exercise that's done for high volume, typically fifteen plus wraps for multiple sets with a minimal respirations. So what we're trying to do is we're trying Teo, allow for blood to be flung, pumped into the muscle. You're goingto actively, you know, contract. Over time, it's going to stimulate fast twitch fibers. You're going to rest for a very short period. More blood flow is going to go to the area. It's gonna keep getting more acidic. It's going to keep activating Mohr fast twitch, and you're going to just repeat that. And so I mean it really, really magnifies the response of typically a weight or resistance that would be almost no impact on you at all. You would have no performance benefit from using a weight that light. So you can really use it as you know, when I was in a rehab setting with an athlete who has very little capability to handle load. Or you could use it as a finisher in your body builder. And you wantto stimulate ah, muscle group that's lagging, and you really want to build it up. Ah, it's the fantastic thing I think about It is it's a minimally damaging activity. And what I mean by that is that you're gonna have a dramatic reduction and creating stores of CK levels. Lt's myoglobin. You're not going to get the same mechanical breakdown that you see what too difficult resistance training when we start talking about internal load and H R V. If you were to substitute and in season lift with the Afar, you're still going to get strengthened and have virtually adaptation without the potential systemic load. That may be a typical resistance training session. Does the now you start talking about minimizing, uh, internal responses? Bye. Still getting annotation, so it's it's pretty, pretty amazing. >> Yeah, that's that's something. So I've seen personally as well. I use smart tools, smart tools. I'm not feeling it with a big fan of whom, because they made it affordable for individuals like you, of myself actually use them. So we're talking about occlusion. We're talking about reducing amount of arterial occlusion, but not with the amount of Venus inclusions here allowing blood to pool. It's an extent you get large amounts of violation. You increase the amount of capital area is in that area, but you're also not breaking down the muscle in the same way that you would otherwise. So we're lifting a heavy load. You have the fibers himself begin to essentially tear apart. Your body has to rebuild these, but now we're increasing hypertrophy, so growing them also, without having to have this break down response in the muscle itself. But that being said, the loads that you're using are also twenty percent of your one rat max. So a very, very light load you're using to fatigue. How does that affect the tendon itself? Because one thing I've noticed personally, this is I'm not I'm not saying you should do this, Okay, this is what I did and maybe stupid or whatever you wanna call it. I had a really bad Tanaka, the issue of my knee where I couldn't play basket. I couldn't go upstairs well, and I didn't be afar. Traditional trailer at tempo work. But when I started doing be fr low level plyometrics when I started inducing some of the shearing forces on the tendon to increase adaptation that area that otherwise might not be there with a >> low load, >> I started Teo see much better results in my knee compared to some of the tempo work. Do you do anything specifically with B a far that might target attendant outside of the traditional thirty wraps, fifteen wraps, fifteen reps. Fifteen reps with >> a low load. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think you know some of the ice of measures that we talked about when you were working in Stanford and having that Anil Jessica effect. So having the ability to have the mitigation on acute windows of what, fifteen, forty five minutes, but also the college and proliferation. So you're getting an increase in human growth hormone that there's like one hundred seventy percent times greater after ah workout, which we know. H gh doesn't necessarily build bigger muscles, but it does stimulate collagen growth. So when you're having somebody who is maybe coming back from a ruptured Achilles or another, you know IDA cirrhosis issue, You know, it's a great way to help promote and environment and maybe in a vascular area and the kind of forces, nutrients and a hormonal shift that may promote a more appealing environment. I think you know, we talked about it briefly. The training piece, I think you know, the more that you can start to get people into. I'm not overly dramatic, sport specific person, but I think the more you can get people into activities that are going to be replicated on the field, know whether it's sled pushes and walks or whether it's, you know, having some type of, um, you know, activity. If your picture where you're getting your arm through these range of emotions that are going to be necessary while using the inclusion is actually gonna promote a lot of ongoing benefit. I think toe rehabilitate the area on a functional manner and develop not only the musculature, but also remote the properties around that specific tissue that needs to be healed. So I think there's some really cool things that are just now kind of being played with Just because we can actually die. Elin, the proper collusions. We can actually die. Elin. What we want to see happen with you whether it's, uh, some of the cells, whole protocols that we're doing are these giving preconditions. Bread falls. Where were haven't athletes sit for extended period time passively with their occlusion of set? And then they're gonna reap, refuse. We're in, Allow blood flow back, and we're going to do that repeated intervals prior to activity and see a potential for increased power output. Oxygen. Connectix. The research is pretty amazing with some of the human reconditioning and that they're saying, um, increase time to exhaustion, decrease time trial performances. But they don't really know why. You know, there isn't like a clear mechanisms for performance gains that's been totally identified just yet. There has been stuff where it's shown to attenuate lacked eight levels. So you're obviously no cellular. Respiration is enhanced because you're not getting that amount of hydrogen present in the blood. So you may be potentially more efficient energy user using more, more fat and oxygen, so that's great there. But I think you know, as the research are sketching out, that piece is that's one thing that I'm looking at doing for my research focus for school. Is that potentially a shin piece? If I'm already going to be sitting around before a game, or I'm gonna have time between events like a track and field event are, you know, Cool event. And I know I can sit here passively, not use energy, provide a stimulus to the body that's gonna potentially open up neural pathways or physiological mechanisms to increase contract ability of the muscles. I'm going to, then maybe get that extra tenth of a second. I'm going to throw an extra, you know, a couple feet on the javelin. I'm going to do whatever I need to dio potentially at a higher level. I think that's really as we're pushing towards performance. Why do you take, you know, choose during the game like you want increase performance, you want to run longer, and I think this is going to add one more a little layer to it. That from an investment piece is minimally invasive is minimally changing to their to their schedule. They're not. They don't have to do anything crazy. They feel good. And that's the biggest thing. Is the anecdotal feedback on it is man, I feel great. I feel like I have to I don't have to do a full warm up. I feel like I can just kind of get out there, move around. We still have him do stuff, but they just feel like they've warmed up faster. And I think of that piece is gonna be really cool to see if we can demonstrate some of empirical evidence on it. >> Yeah, that I'm excited to see the research, >> and I know you're working hard on it. >> It's kind of a great stop. Making Brava kind really brings us full circle because you look at be fr it, increases their sit in the area and lacked a production and increases economic nervous system arousal, which has been shown both to increase cognitive abilities. Um, neural plasticity and ability to enhance memory. And so why you're doing this? It's also the only prime main the body for the coming activity. We also prime ing the body is a hole in regards to it's mental capacity and not just the muscular area. And so when you start looking at that, you know, full system, the human body and how we can talk about a little bit here, some dynamical systems where you know the body is really complex. What happens in one area affects another. You can't differentiate between your physical mental side because the physical side of the Afar is now enhancing your mental side. Just like your perception. Ten hands a workout. And so you have feedback up and feedback back down. And that's just a great, you know, highlight You brought up because now it's really inclusive. Were we're so often thinking this isolated manner. Oh, if we've been to this or we run this, this will happen. But we don't think about it in this recursive loop manor where what I did to my muscle, right, our muscle releases these myo times. I go talk to our brain, which then go back and talk to our muscle. And we have the endocrine system working together to orchestrate this all and just the whole idea of be a farm for a game It's not just right the muscles and the scheming Preconditioning, but it's also a fact that you're putting the person in a state That's more conducive. Two performance itself, because so often and this isn't to go on a rant and I apologise. And this is something you buy a top about, right? Avoiding the sympathetic states, All right, we don't want to be sitting there before game doing deep belly breathing because we need to be ready to roll. There's a reason why you get excited in these situations and a really excellent full loop example. How Don't comes together there. >> Yeah, I think one last little piece with that, too, is black. Tate has been shown and exercise of a specific lactate now to have been associated with BDNF, right? So that brain derived neurotrophic factor that exercise stimulates like Miracle Gro for the brain, >> and that if >> you're sitting around watching, you know, lecture for an hour, get up to ten SWATs. Walk around, and all of a sudden you have a renewed focus. And so with that to your point of it's all connected is you have an athlete who essentially is going to get a benefit from that. But we're also, you know, and there they'll never watch this, so I'll say it. I do planting that placebo. My burbage is really, really careful. And hey, just so you know, you wear this attempt ten, fifteen minutes before you do some ISOs, your ankle will feel better. It has an ability to mitigate. Think like him. Planting that sense of this is gonna work because we'll see Bo Effect works. We know it does. So there's a little bit of, you know, mix of art and science and how we imply these technologies and saying they like, Hey, Logan, just say no, you wear this before that game, your ankle will feel better. You're gonna feel looser, going to hell faster and just letting them roll with that and don't need to tell him anything else. And I think that to your point of it's all connected can then maximise whatever intervention you want to, then increase performance. >> Yeah, and I'll avoid a rant here. I'll keep it short, I promise. But what you hit on? Perfect. Especially since that. Look at some of studies regarding attendance, they'll look at it and see that the timid itself is healthy, yet they feel pain, and they've done lost studies where they're saying an external stimulus. So something like a metre gnome in the background going Ping Ping Ping and you're focused on the stimulus instead of the pain. And you now begin to de associate your knee with pain because the stimulus and regards to the tempo that's going on the background, you're doing it. Why didn't exercise So now? Because you're focused on this external stimulus fall during exercise, you begin to disassociate pain with your, you know, near tendon during that movement and just really shows how coupled the system is and how our brain talks your body body. And if we perceive that we're healthy right? You said, Oh, mixing the heart and the science while you're mixing the science of the science, right? Your you understand that perception is reality is not necessarily. We like to call it art because there's no number to put behind it. Really. It's, you know, the science that our body is deeply into connected and how are neurons from the brain talked to our muscles? Are muscles tough back to our brain are all essentially one and how everything from your nutrition, your perception to your stress from school, you're emotional state, whether you got a text message from someone that made you upset all effects, your internal load off the body itself. And regardless of what external only put and no matter how hard you want to work, if your internal system isn't able to handle the stimulus they're going to put on it in terms of the load you're going to give then what we're doing is it? It's really falling short of what we're actually trying to accomplish because we're essentially using external load to infer what's going on. But there's so many things that go on inside the body outside of external load that we're only using one system to monitor the internal system. We're kind of I was a falling short, but not maybe doing all that we can. >> D'oh Yeah, I mean, I think the you know not to rant myself, but that's one of the biggest mistakes that we as a sissy practitioners make, is the assumption with general adaptation Centrum theory that you're getting people and that they're adapting at the rate into the dose that you think is appropriate that we're making that assumption as to where they're at. So when we say, Oh, they're at home, you know, stasis. And we're going to apply to weeks of ah loading scheme, and then we're gonna unload, and then we're gonna push it higher because they're going to super compensate. I think that is a load of crap. I think that we want that to be the case because we want to feel justified and feel good ofwhat we d'oh. But in many cases, you really have to dial in all the factors associated with overreaching all the factors associated with performance and mix them and have checks and balances to see truly, if somebody is where you think they are and if you got them where they are and if not, what was the reason why was there an energy insufficiency? Was there a Micronesian problem? Was there associated stress damaging the functioning, The A access All those things have you know they come in to play, but we are so rigid and and a lot of our thinking me included Holy, guilty. This we work in four to six week block. So yeah, you know, my own load is gonna be a three week three. Well, maybe your own unload should be a week nine. You know, like, how do you know that they're not ready for Maura. Maura, Amore. Um, you know, so that I think that assumption of not necessarily taking into consideration that connectedness between all these systems Ah, can get us into trouble to make us have false positives. I think I think we really congrats pawn the stuff that's not there >> now, that's that's couldn't be said better because we like to make it simple, because we can understand Simple. And when we make it complex, we realize we don't really understand that much. But the more we appreciate as complex, the more we can appreciate how applying something simple, like we think a load ten push ups really isn't as simple as it may be. And that at times, can cause paralysis by analysis. Where you have so many things >> going on at once and to consider I'm not saying that we just sit there and measure every single subsystem. I know you're not either, >> but the idea that we need to appreciate that and see where can we maybe refer. Teo, Turn, Tio. That isn't just in the lane off. How much weight do we lift? How much low do we give someone But what other factors could be involved and that athletes life. That's not getting the results that we think this external load should be leading. Tio, it's a great check engine light, because now we have this external load. Hey, I expected to be here in three months, and you're not there. That's okay. Who knows whose fault it is? No one's. But the idea is that now we can turn different people because we didn't see the expected results. We can dive a little deeper, and that's allowing us to utilize our resource is whether it's a friend. You know, a doctor. You know, another practitioner, you know, to help arm us with the information to be the best that we can be. >> Yeah, I think that's what the external load comes in, right. You gotta know if they're not meeting expectations or the desired outcomes. No. Are they typically matching people in practice? You know that are similar positional demands. Are they typically being asked to do something that isn't looking normal? That would then we can kind of backtrack and see how they were doing it. What the fuck? Jack is associated with an internal load work, and again, we don't. We don't monitor everything. We don't think it's necessary. We try and find what's appropriate for his team and scenario. But I think again, if you're mindful and you know you're athletes and you know the scenario of what you're trying to put them in, you can then kind of use your your coaching, I to say, Okay, what are the things that I think may be influencing? Yeah, providing Malad a patient, you know, orange, the desired stimulus, you know, desired outcome. Now, what are we doing to them that we should be seeing or think we should be saying. And if I know them, what is essentially a confounding variable to that? >> Yeah, No, that's perfect. You don't assess everything. A because you can't and be known as time. But you assess what's pertinent and you're aware of what's apartment and you act out the check engine light and facilitate where you can now, well said, because I think both ends resettle. Let's be so simple and just do this or let's on Lee do this aspect over here. But when you take in consideration, all of it, you allow yourself to be the best you can be in your position that you're in because you're not trying to solve everything. You just try to facilitate where you can. Yeah, perfect for Chase. And I want to hold you up too long, and I really appreciate you being here. I want to wrap it up before finishing up here. I got, I guess, two questions for you. I didn't send them to you ahead of time so that I can if you don't have a quick answer, that's fine. The first one is it's pretty simple. I'm not going. I don't mean Resource is in terms of O go to Pub Med or go to this paper. But are there any individuals out there that you can possibly listen to or find that you have found the very informative and not just in terms of all that's good information, but sometimes change the way you think about how you do your job. >> I'm talking to you right now. It's a lot of my my thoughts and know how I address of, you know, some of the the bio mechanics and physics of what we're doing. You know, it's definitely not an area that I'm strong in, and I think you've done a great job of putting information out there for the public tio toe, you know, be able to digest an easy manner, man, you know, a public resource. You know, this may sound kind of cheesy and maybe a little bit of roast sci fi, but I still re t Nation and Goto like all those you know, you know, Jim Wendler sites and freed all the Westside stuff. And, you know, I think you can't isolate sports science and sail. It's just Dad are, Oh, it's just, you know, pumping out research out of the lab or Oh, it's physiology or urge technology. I think each practitioners gonna have their own flavour and what they like and what they bring to the table. And I think that we need to cater to that. Each person should say, Hey, this is what I'm good at. These are my skills. I want to learn more about tax and if X s o happens to be baseball and throwing and overhead athletes than you're going to find the Mike Ryan holds air crises and really dive into that. And if you want to know about traditional pure ization schemes and force plays, you're gonna look at the stone stuff. You're gonna look at half, you're going to look at people who are early pioneers in it. So I think, you know, I don't have ah, necessarily a one person go follow, but it's more of a question to the question is what do you want to know about? What do you like? What's something that's really really, you know, kind of hits the button for you and then just start Googling stuff start, you know, typing these these keywords in and people will start popping up. And I think that's my development has come has jumped. The greatest, I guess Leaves is when I started diving into these rabbit holes of what I want to learn about right now and just saying for the next two weeks, I'm going all in on, you know, let's see saturation lost muscle from Samo, too. You know, I'm just learn everything I can about my loving and hemoglobin and mad a crit and all that stuff. So it's really more about finding what you want to know at that time and just doing a deep dive and then finding something else, doing a deep that and before you know it, you're times years to that and you have a, you know, a well rounded hopefully, you know, face of knowledge to pull from. >> And my last question for you chase. And this might be a tough one for you to answer the that you are the ghost of social media. Yeah, That the king of the King of trolling my page. You know that you are interested. People are interested in following up on what you're doing. Where can they find more information about yourself? What links or handles either. Twitter, Instagram. Would you advise him to look up into and keep a tab on yourself? >> So the only thing I'm using, as I have on Instagram and at Underscore Chase felt so It's It's simple. It's like toe like to troll you and fight in every now and then. But, ah, that's basically what I got. I got a couple post up there. But maybe maybe if, uh, I get a little help, we'll see how it Ah, how it grows. >> Yeah. I highly advise you guys following him because we continue to push him to post more stuff. I shouldn't be the only one privileged to get his text messages at obscure hours, highlighting some interesting topics I would love for it to be shared publicly. So I'm not being the third party siphoning off his knowledge and posting there. Yeah, well, they could chase. I really appreciate you hanging here and be able to be our first guest again here. The reason why I wanted you on first you quite a bit played a big role in my development and continue, Tio. And we all wish the best for you. Um, it really was great to have you here and thank you. >> All right, man, I appreciate it was a lot of fun. >> All right. Awesome. Well, thank you guys for listening again. My handle here is strong. Sorry. At strong underscore by science. I did that all wrong. It's at strong. Underscored by underscore science. I should know my own handled by now. I use Instagram, I think my Twitter's handles at strong underscore science. Who knows? We'll make a link to it. We'll be sharing this podcast here shortly with different clips as well. For those of you who don't have the attention span to listen to an hour toy mint podcast will die some of this up. So thank you guys for listening. Really appreciate it and take care.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)