hybrid work is the new reality according to the most recent survey data from enterprise technology research cios expect that 65 of their employees will work either as fully remote or in a hybrid model splitting time between remote and in office remote of course can be anywhere it could be home it could be at the beach overseas literally anywhere there's internet so it's no surprise that these same technology executives cite security as their number one priority well ahead of other critical technology initiatives including collaboration software cloud computing and analytics which round out the top four in the etr survey now as we've reported securing endpoints was important prior to the pandemic but the explosion in the past two plus years of remote work and corollary device usage has made the problem even more acute and let's face it managing sprawling i.t assets has always been a pain patch management for example has been a nagging concern for practitioners and with ransomware attacks on the rise it's critical that security teams harden it assets throughout their life cycle staying current and constantly staying on top of vulnerabilities within the threat surface welcome to this special program on the cube enable and secure the everywhere workplace brought to you by ivanti in this program we highlight key partnerships between avanti and its ecosystem to address critical problems faced by technology and security teams in our first segment we explore a collaboration between avanti and sentinel one where the two companies are teaming to simplify patch management my name is dave vellante and i'll be your host today and with me are nayaki nayar who's the president and chief product officer at avanti and nick warner president and security of the security group at sentinel one welcome naki and nick and hackie good to have you back in the cube great to see you guys thank you thank you dave uh really good to be back on cube uh i'm a veteran of cube so thank you for having us and um look forward to a great discussion today yeah you better thanks okay hey good nick nick good to have you on as well what do we need to know about this partnership please so uh if you look at uh we are super excited about this partnership nick thank you for joining us on this session today um when you look at ivanti ivanti has been a leader in two big segments uh we are a leader in unified endpoint management with the acquisition of mobileye now we have a holistic end-to-end management of all devices be it windows linux mac ios you name it right so we have that seamless single pane of glass to manage all devices but in addition to that we are also a leader in risk-based patch management um dave that's what we are very excited about this partnership with the with central one where now we can combine the strength we have in the risk-based patch management with central one's xdr platform and truly help address what i call the need of the hour with our customers for them to be able to detect uh vulnerabilities and being able to remediate them proactively remediate them right so that's what we are super excited about this partnership and nick would love to hand it over to you to talk about uh the partnership and the journey ahead of us thanks and you know from center one's perspective we see autonomous vulnerability assessment and remediation as really necessary given the evolution uh in the sophistication the volume and the ferocity of threats out there and what's really key is being able to remediate risks and machine speed and also identify vulnerability exposure in real time and you know if you look traditionally at uh vulnerability scanning and patch management they've really always been two separate things and when things are separate they take time between the two coordination communication what we're looking to do with our singularity xdr platform is holistically deliver one unified solution that can identify threats identify vulnerabilities and automatically and autonomously leverage patch management to much better protect our customers so maybe maybe that's why patch management is such a challenge for many organizations because as you described nick it's sort of a siloed from security and those worlds are coming together but maybe you guys could address the specific problems that you're trying to solve with this collaboration yeah so if you look at uh just in a holistic level uh dave today cyber crime is at catastrophic heights right and this is not just a cio or a cso issue this is a board issue every organization every enterprise is addressing this at the board level and when you double click on it one of the challenges that we have heard from our customers over and over again is the complexity and the manual processes that are in place for remediation or patching all their operating systems their applications their third party apps and that is where it's very very time consuming very complex very cumbersome and the question is how do we help them automate it right how do we help them remove those manual processes and autonomously intermediate right so which is where this partnership between ivanti and central one helps organizations to bring this autonomous nature to bring those proactive predictive capabilities to detect an issue prioritize that issue based on risk-based prioritization is what we call it and autonomously remediate that issue right so that's where uh this partnership really really uh helps our customers address the the top concerns they have in cyber crime or cyber security got it so prioritization automation nick maybe you could address what are the keys i mean you got to map vulnerabilities to software updates how do you make sure that your the patches there's not a big lag between your patch and and the known vulnerabilities and you've got this diverse set of you know i.t portfolio assets how do you manage all that it's a great question and i and i think really the number one uh issue around this topic is that security teams and it teams are facing a really daunting task of identifying all the time every day all the vulnerabilities in their ecosystem and the biggest problem with this is how do they get context and priority and i think what people have come to realize through the years of dealing with with patch management uh and vulnerability scanning is that patching without the context of what the possible impact or priority of that risk is really comes down to busy work and i think what's so important in a totally interconnected world with attacks happening at machine speed is being able to take that precious asset that we call time and make sure you properly prioritize that how we're doing it from sentinel one singularity xdr perspective is by leveraging autonomous threat information and being able to layer that against vulnerability information to properly view through that lens the highest priority threats and vulnerabilities that you need to patch and then using our single agent technology be able to autonomously remediate and patch those vulnerabilities whether or not it's on a mac a pc server a cloud workload and the beauty of our solution is it gives you proper clarity so you can see the impact of vulnerabilities each and every day in your environment and know that you're doing the right thing in the right order got it okay so the context gives you the risks profile allows you to prioritize and then of course you can you know remediate what else should we know about this this joint solution uh in terms of you know what it is how i engage any other detail on how it addresses the the problem specifically yeah so it's all about race against the time um uh dave when it's how we help our customers uh detect the vulnerability prioritize it and remediate it the attackers are able to weaponize those vulnerabilities and and have an attack right so it's really it's how we help our customers be a lot more proactive and predictive address those vulnerabilities versus um before the attackers really get access to it right so that's where our joint solution in fact i always say whatever edr with this edr or mdr or xdr the r portion of that r is very one he comes in our neurons for patch management or what we call neurons but risk based patch management combined with um central ones xdr is where we truly uh bring the combined solutions to to to life right so the r is where ivanti really plays a big part in uh in the joint solution yeah absolutely the response i mean people i think all agree you're going to get infiltrated that's how you respond to it you know the thing about this topic is when you make a business case a lot of times you'll go to the cfo and say hey if we don't do this we're going to be in big trouble and so it's this fear factor and i get that it's super important but but are there other measurements of success that that you you can share in other words how are customers going to determine the value of this joint solution so it's a mean time to repair let me go nick and then i'm sure you have your uh metrics and how you're measuring the success it's about how we can detect an issue and repair that issue it's reducing that mean time to repair as much as possible and making it as real-time as possible for our customers right that's where the true outcome through success and the metric that customers can track measure and continuously improve on nick you want to add to that for sure yeah you know you make some great great points niaki and what what i would add is um what sentinel one singularity platform is known for is automated and autonomous detection prevention and response and remediation across threats and if you look traditionally at patch management or vulnerability assessment they're typically deployed and run in point-of-time solutions what i mean by that is that they're scans and re-scans the way that advanced edr solutions and xdr solutions such as single one singularity platform work is we're constantly recording everything that's happening on all of your systems in real time and so what we do is literally eliminate the window of opportunity between a patch being uh needed a vulnerability being discovered and you knowing that you have that need for that vulnerability to be patched in your environment you don't have to wait for that 12 or 24-hour window to scan for vulnerabilities you will immediately know it in your network you'll also know the security implications of that vulnerability so you know when and how to prioritize and then furthermore you can take autonomous hatching measures against that so at the end of the day the name of the game in security is time and it's about reducing that window of opportunity for the adversaries for the threat actors and this is a epic leap forward in in doing that for our customers and that capability nick is a function of your powerful agent or is it architecture where's that come from that's a great question it's it's a combination of a couple of things the first is our agent technology which performs constant monitoring on every system every behavior every process running on all your systems live and in real time so this is not a batch process that that kicks up once a day this is always running in the background so the moment a new application is installed the moment a new application version is deployed we know about it we record it instantaneously so if you think about that and layer against getting best in class vulnerability information from a partner like avanti and then also being able to deploy patch management against that you can start to see how you're applying that in real time in your environment and the last thing i i'd like to add is because we're watching everything and then layering it against thread intel and context using our proprietary machine learning technology that that idea of being able to prioritize and escalate is critical because if you talk to security providers there's a couple different uh challenges that they're facing and i would say the top two are alert fatigue and then also human human power limitations and so no security team has enough people on their team and no security teams have an absence of alerts and so the fact that we can prioritize alerts surface the ones that are the most important give context to that and also save them precious hours of their personnel's time by being able to do this autonomously and automatically we're really killing two birds with one stone that's great there's the business case right there you just laid out some other things that we can measure right it all comes back to the data doesn't it we got to go but i'll give you the last word yeah i mean we are super excited about this partnership uh like nick said uh we believe in how we can help our customers discover all the assets we have they have um manage those assets but a big chunk of it is how we help them secure it right secure uh their devices the applications the data that's on those devices the end points and being able to provide an experience a service experience at the end of the day so that end users don't have to worry about securing you don't have to think about security it should be embedded it should be autonomous and it should be contactually personalized right so uh that's the journey we are on and uh thank you nick for this great partnership and look forward to a great journey ahead of us thank you yeah thanks to both of you nick appreciate it okay keep it right there after this quick break we're gonna be back to look at how ivanti is working with other partners to simplify and harden the anywhere workplace you're watching the cube your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage [Music] you

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well happy New Year, one and all welcome to 2021 in Cube Conversation continuing our ongoing series. I hope your New Year is off to a great start. I know that the end of 2020 was a very good one for Ivanti. And Jim Schaper, the CEO is going to join us to talk about that as is Nayaki Nayyar, or rather the EVP and the Chief Product Officer. So Nayaki and Jim, good to have you here with you on theCUBE and Happy New Year to you. >> Thank you, John. Happy New Year to you. 2020, I think for a lot of us couldn't get out of here quick enough. Although we had some great things happen to our company at the very end of the year. So anxious to talk to you about it and we appreciate the opportunity. >> You bet. So we're talking about two major acquisitions that you made that both closed near the end of the year back in December, not too long ago. One with Pulse Secure, the other with MobileIron. Two companies that provide you with additional expertise in terms of mobile security and the enterprise security space. And so Jim, if you would, let's first talk about just for the big picture, the acquisitions that were made and what those moves will do for you going forward. >> Okay, great, John. We closed both acquisitions interestingly enough, on December 2nd. We've been fortunate to have them part of our company now for about the last 30 days. One of the things that we made a decision on a number of months ago was that we had a real opportunity in the markets that we serve to really build our business more quickly through a series of acquisitions that strategically made sense for us, our investors and more importantly our customers. And that really is why we chose MobileIron and Pulse, for different reasons but nonetheless all very consistent with our longterm strategy of securing the end points on every network, in every location around the world. And so consequently, when you think about it and we've all witnessed here over the last 30 days or so, all of the security breaches, all of the things that go along with that, and our real focus is ensuring that every company and every individual on their network, outside their firewall, inside their firewall, on any device is secure. And so with these two particular acquisitions, in addition to the assets that we already had as a part of Ivanti, really puts us in a competitively advantaged position to deliver to the edge, and Nayaki will talk about this. The ability to secure those devices and ensure that they're secure from phishing expeditions or breaches or all of those kinds of things. So these two particular acquisitions really puts us on the map and puts us in a leadership position in the security market. So we're thrilled to have both of them. >> Before I go off to Nayaki, I want to follow with the point that you've made Jim talking about security breaches. We're all well aware. You know, the news from what we've been hearing out from the federal level about the state actors and the kind of these infiltrations of major US systems if not international systems. Some Interpol data, I read 207 some odd percent increase in breaches just in the post COVID time or in the COVID time, the past year. That gets your attention, does it not? And what does that say to you about the aggressive nature of these kinds of activities? >> Well, that they're getting more sophisticated every day and they're getting more aggressive. I think one of the most frightening conversations I had was a briefing with our chief security officer about how many attempted breaches of our network and our systems that he sees every single day. And we're able to identify what foreign actors are really trying to penetrate our systems or what are they trying to do. But the one thing I will leave you with is they're becoming much more sophisticated, whether you're inside the firewall or whether you're on your iPhone as an extension of the network, there the level of sophistication is startling. And unfortunately in many cases, as evidenced by the recent breaches, you don't even know you've had a breach for could be months, weeks, days. And so what damage is done. And so as we look forward, and as Nayaki kind of walks you through our product strategy, what you're going to hear a lot of is how do we self protect? How do we self-learn the devices at the edge, on the end of the networks, such that they can recognize foreign actors or any breach capability that somebody is trying to employ? And so, yeah, it's frightening how sophisticated and how frequent they have become. >> I think the one thing that really struck me as I read about the breaches was not so much the damage that has been done, but the damage that could be done prospectively and about which we have no idea. You don't know, it's like somebody lurking in your closet and they're going to stay there for a couple of months and wait for the time that maybe your guard is even more down. So I was, that's what shocks me. And they Nayaki, let's talk about your strategy then. You picked up obviously a couple of companies, one in the, kind of the enterprise IT space. Now the one in the VPN space, add into your already extensive portfolio. So I imagine from your office, wearing the hat of the chief product officer, you're just to look in your chops right now. You've got a lot more resources at your disposal. >> Yeah, we are very very busy John, but to Jim's point, one of the trends we are seeing in the market as we enter into the post COVID era, where everyone is working from anywhere, be it from home, be it from office, while on the move, every organization, every enterprise is struggling with this. What we call this explosive growth of devices. Devices being mobile devices, client-based devices, IoT devices, the data that is being generated from these devices, and to your point, the cybersecurity threats. It is predicted that there has been 30000% increase in the cybersecurity threats that are being targeted primarily at the remote workers. So you can imagine whether it's phishing attacks, malware attacks, I mean just an explosive growth of devices, data, cybersecurity attacks at the remote workers. So organizations need automation to be able to address this growth and this complexity which is where Ivanti's focus in discovering all the devices and managing those devices. So as we bring the MobileIron portfolio and Ivanti's portfolio together, now we can help our customers manage every type of devices be it Windows devices, Mac devices, Linux, iOS, Android devices, and secure those devices. The zero trust access that users need, the remote users need, all the way from cloud access to the endpoint is what the strength of both MobileIron and Pulse brings to our entire portfolio holistically. So we are truly excited for our customers. Now they can leverage our entire end to end stack to discover, manage secure and service all those devices that they now have to service for their employees. >> Explain to me, or just walk me through zero trust in terms of how you define that. I've read about trust nothing, verify everything, those kinds of explanations. But if you would, from your perspective, what does zero trust encompass, not only on your side, but on your client's side? Because you want to give them tools to do things for themselves to self heal and self serve and those kinds of things. >> So, zero trust is you don't trust anything. You validate and certify everything. So the access users have on your network, the access they have on the mobile devices, the applications they are accessing, the data that they are accessing. So being able to validate every access that they have when they come into your network is what the whole zero trust access really means. So, the combination of Ivanti's portfolio and also Pulse that zero trust access all the way from as users are accessing that network data, cloud data, endpoint data, is where our entire zero trust access truly differentiates. And as we bring that with our UEM portfolio with the MobileIron, there is no other vendor in the market that has that holistic offering, internal offering. >> I'm sorry, go ahead, please. >> It's interesting, John, you talk about timing is everything, right? And when we began discussions with MobileIron, it was right before COVID hit. And we had a great level of expertise inside the pre-acquisition of Ivanti to be able to secure the end points at the desktop level. But we struggled a bit with having all of the capabilities that we needed to manage mobile devices and tablets and basically anything that is attached to the network. That's what they really brought to us. And having done a number of acquisitions historically in my career, this was probably the easiest integration that we had simply because we did what they didn't do and they did what we didn't do. And then they brought some additional technologies. But what's really changed in the environment because of this work from home or work from anywhere as as we like to articulate it, is you've got multiple environments that you've got to manage. It isn't just, what's on the end of the VPN, the network, it's what's on the end points of the cloud. What kind of cloud are you running? You're running a public cloud, you're running a private cloud. Is it a hybrid environment? And so the ability to and the need to be able to do that is pretty significant. And so that's one of the real advantages that both the Pulse as well as the MobileIron acquisitions really brought to the combined offering from a product standpoint. >> Yeah, I'd like to follow up on that then, just because the cloud environment provides so many benefits, obviously, but it also provides this huge layer of complexity that comes on top of all this because you just talked about it. You can have public, you can have hybrid cloud, you can have on-prem, whatever, right? You have all these options. And yet you, Ivanti, are having to provide security on multiple levels and multiple platforms or multiple environments. And how much more complex or challenging is your mission now because of consumer demand and the capabilities the technology is providing your clients. >> Well, it's certainly more complex and Nayaki is better equipped to probably talk in detail about this. But if you just take a step back and think about it, you think about internet of things, right? I used to have a thermostat. And that thermostat control was controlled by the thermostat on the wall. Now everything is on WiFi. If I've got a problem, I had a a problem with a streaming music capability which infected other parts of my home network. And so everything is, that's just one example of how complicated and how wired everything is really become. Except when it comes to the mobile devices, which are still always remote. You've always got it with you. I don't what it was like for you, John, but you know, historically I've used my phone on email, texts and phone calls. Now it's actually a business tool. But it's a remote business tool that you still have to secure, you still have to manage and you still have to find an identify on the end of the network. That's where we really come into play. Nayaki, anything you want to add to that? >> Yeah, so, to Jim's point, John, and to your question also, as customers have what we call the multi-cloud offering. There are public clouds, private clouds, on-prem data centers, devices on the edge, and as you extend into the IOT world, being able to provide that seamless access, this is a zero trust access all the way from the cloud applications to the applications that are running on-prem, in your data centers and also the applications that are running on your devices and the IoT applications, is what that entire end to end zero trust access, is where our competitive strength resides with Pulse coming into our portfolio. Before Ivanti didn't have this. We were primarily a patch management vendor in the security space, but now we truly extend beyond that patch to this end to end access all the way from cloud to edge is what we call. And then when we combine that with our UEM portfolio in our endpoint management with MobileIron and also service management, that convergence of positive three pillars is where we truly differentiate and compete and win in the market. >> Nayaki, how does internet of things factor into this? Cause I look at sensor technology, I'm just thinking about all the billions of what you have now, right? With whether it's farming or agricultural inputs, business inputs, meteorological, or whatever. I'm sure, you're considering this as well as part of a major play of yours in terms of providing IoT security. How more proliferated is that now and how much of that is kind of in your concern zone you might say? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, just taking these trends we have in managing the end points, we will extend that into the IoT world also. John, when we say IoT world, in an industry where the devices are like healthcare devices. So, stay tuned, in January release we'll be releasing how we will be discovering managing and securing for the healthcare devices like Siemens devices, Bayer devices, Canon devices. So, you're spot on how we can leverage the strength we have in managing end points. Also IoT devices, that same capabilities that we can bring to each of the industry verticals. Now we're not trying to solve the entire vertical market but certain industry verticals where we have a strong footprint. Healthcare is a strong footprint for us. Telcos is a strong footprint for us. So that's where you will see us extending into those IoT devices too. >> Okay, so, in going forward, Jim, if you would just, let's talk about your 2021 in terms of how you further integrate these offerings that you've acquired right now. All of a sudden you've got 30 days of, you know, which is snap of a finger. But what do you see how 2021 is going to lay out, especially with distributed workforces, right? We know that's here. That's a new normal. And with a whole new set of demands on networks and certainly the need for security. >> That's exactly correct, John. I mean, everything is changed and it's never going back to the way it was. You know, everybody has their own definition of the new normal. I guess my definition is at some point in time when things do return to some form of normality, a portion of our workforce will always work from home. To what degree remains to be seen. I don't think we're different from virtually any other industry or any other company. It does put increased demands ,complexity and requirements around how you run your internal IT business. But as Nayaki talked about kind of our virtual service desk offering where you're not going to have a service desk anymore. It's got to be virtual. Well, you have to be able to still provide those services outside of your normal network. And so that's going to be a continued big push for us. I'm incredibly pleased with the way in which the employee bases of the acquired companies have really folded in and become one with our company. And I think as we all recognize cultural differences between organizations can be quite significant and an impediment to really moving forward. Fortunately for us, we have found that both of these organizations fit really nicely from an employee, from a values perspective, from a goals and objectives perspective. And so we did most of the heavy lifting on all the integration shortly after we closed the transactions on the 2nd of December. And so we've moved beyond what I would call the normal kind of concerns and asked around what's going to happen in this and that. We're now kind of heads down in what's the long-term integration going to look like from a product standpoint. We're already looking at additional acquisitions that will continue to take us deeper and wider into our three product pillars, as Nayaki described. And that'll be an ongoing kind of steady dose of acquisitions as we continue to supplement our organic growth within organic growth. >> But you've got to answer my question. I was going to ask you, you founded the company four years ago. There were two big acquisitions back in 2017. We waited four years Jim, until you dip back into that pole again. So the plan, maybe not to wait four years before moving on. >> No trust me, you won't be waiting another four years. Now you've got to bear in mind, John. I wasn't here four years ago. >> That's right, okay. Fair enough. That's okay. I want to thank you both for the time today. Congratulations on sealing those deals back in December and we certainly wish you all the best going forward. And of course, a very happy and a very safe new year for you and yours. >> Same to you, John. Thanks so much for the time. And so it was a pleasure to spend time with you today. >> Thank you, John. Happy New Year again. Thank you. Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and today I'm talking with Ivanti again, Nayaki Nayyar, their Chief Product Officer EVP is back with us, as is another Cube alumni, Sumedh Thakar, the President and Chief Product Officer of Qualys. Nayaki, sweet, great to have you guys both back on the program. >> Great to be back here, Lisa. I think it's becoming a habit for me to be here, talking to you almost... >> I like it. >> every week. >> Good to be here, thank you for inviting me. >> So, let's go right into some exciting news here, so Ivanti has had a lot of momentum in the last week or so, Nayaki with launch announcements, talk to us about what you're announcing today in terms of an expansion with the Ivanti-Qualys partnership. >> So Lisa, as you remember, this week we had a great week this week with the launch of our Ivanti neurons platform, that really helps our customers address end-to-end management of their endpoints and security of those endpoints. How we can help them, would be called self fuel, self secure and self service the endpoints. And one of the key strengths Ivanti has, in our portfolio, is our ability to manage all the patches. Today, with our Ivanti patch management solution, we patch approximately 1.2 billion patches on an annual basis. So that's a pretty big volume, and we are extremely excited as a part of this launch announcement, to also share the partnership we have with Qualys and how we are extending and helping Qualys with their overall vision for VMDR. >> So Sumedh, let's go right into that, talk to us about the VMDR, vulnerability management has been around for a while, what is VMDR and Qualys perspective? And what are you looking to do with your partnership with Ivanti? >> I should know about vulnerability management being around for a while, I've been 18 years at Qualys, so we've been doing for a long time, and, what's happened is with the hybrid infrastructure exploding and a lot more devices being added and focus shifting from just servers to endpoint, I think that is just a need to be able to do vulnerability management, in addition, also have the ability to do assessment of your devices in terms of inventory, etcetera, so, discovering your devices, being able to do vulnerability assessment, configuration assessment, but also be able to prioritize those vulnerabilities on which one do you really need to patch because you just have way too many vulnerabilities. And then at the end, all of this vulnerability management is not useful if we can't do something about it, and that's where, you need the ability to patch and fix those issues, and this is where VMDR really brings that workflow in a single platform end-to-end, So instead of just throwing a big report of CVEs, we provide the ability to go from detection of the device, to the patching, and this is where Ivanti partnership has been something that has really helped our customers because they bring in that patching piece, and this is one of the most complicated things you do, and because taking a vulnerability and mapping it to a particular patch is very complex to do and that's where the Ivanti partnership is helping us. >> And so, this is an expansion Sumedh, you guys have been doing this for Windows and Linux, and now this is adding Mac support and others. Tell me a little bit more about the additional capabilities that you're enabling. >> What's interesting is that, when we started working on this, this was before the pandemic hit, and COVID has certainly added a very interesting twist to the patching challenge, and the ability for the system admins to suddenly patch 100,000 to 200,000 devices, which are not in your office with a high speed internet anymore, they are sitting in little apartments all over the world with low bandwidth, WiFi connections, etcetera, how do you patch those endpoints? And so when, while the focus of the beginning was a lot more on Windows and Linux, which are more on the server side, with the pandemic hitting, there is a big need now for people also to be able to do their Macs and other endpoints that are now remote and at people's homes, and so obviously, with the success of the patch management capabilities on Windows that we got with Ivanti, they are a natural partner for us to also expand that into being able to do it for the Macs as well, and so, now we're working together to get this done for the Macs. >> So Nayaki, in terms of the announcements from Ivanti that they've been coming out the last week or so, we talked with Jeff Abbott last week about the partnerships and the GTM, talk to me about from a strategic perspective, how does the expansion of the Qualys partnership dial up Ivanti's vision? >> Lisa, when you take a look at what's really happening across every enterprise, every large company, especially during COVID, and post COVID, is what we call this explosive growth of remote workers, as everyone is trying to manage what the transformation to remote working means, the explosive growth of devices that now have to be managed by every IT organization, not to mention how to secure those devices, which is where this partnership with Qualys becomes extremely strategic for us. Now we can extend that overall vision that we have with our Ivanti neurons to discover every device we have, the customers' have, sense any security vulnerabilities, anomalies that are on those devices, prioritize those based on risk-based priority of it and going through priority as we embed more and more AI Amal into it, and get into what we call this auto remediation, remediating all those vulnerabilities, which nicely fits into Qualys's, or our VMDR vision and strategy. So, this truly helps our customers, go beyond just managing the endpoints to now what we call sub securing those endpoints, being able to automatically detect all security vulnerabilities and issues and get closer and closer to the self remediation of those vulnerabilities, and that's why this partnership makes, a great strategic benefit for all of our customers and large enterprise. >> So Sumedh, talk to us about the VMDR lifecycle, give us a picture of where your customers are and that how does this really going to help them deal with the new normal of even more devices going to be remote for a long period of time? >> what's happening now is that, this is being extended to home devices, customers in the past were only looking at enterprise devices that were owned by the organization, and we continuously now see, we can't get a new laptop to the user, or they're using their home device, home desktop, because it's bigger screen, more powerful, whatever it is, so people are starting to do that, and you can't really stop them from doing that if you want to get work done, and so, essentially VMDR is four things, which is, continuous asset inventory discovery, Second is, detection of all security issues, including vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Third is the prioritization based on the knowledge of the device, and what's running on the device just because you have a severity, five vulnerability or highly exploitable vulnerability does not mean that you need to prioritize that as the first one to patch, and then you need to be able to patch it, and so that's the four elements that make up the VMDR lifecycle, and as customers have no good way to detect what devices are there, what is connecting to the VPN, because now they don't actually, physically see the devices, the traditional network devices that were... office firewalls that are sitting in the office, that were detecting devices are now not useful because everybody's outside the firewall. And so that entire life cycle, is something that customers want to do, because at the end, you want to reduce your risk quickly. And having a single platform that does all of that, is the key benefit that we get from there. >> Talk to me a little about the go-to market, in terms of how are your customers, joint customers buying the solution? >> I think what we've really worked on is typically what happens today is the customers'... different vendors are providing individual pieces, you have to go buy a different inventory solution, a different vulnerability solution, a different prioritization, a different patch solution, so, working with Ivanti, we've really worked on creating a single platform, and this took us a quite a bit of time to really make that engineering integration work, to be able to have Ivanti patch management directly embedded into the Qualys' agent. So that way, customers don't have to deploy another agent, and they don't have to buy different solutions for different consoles, so, from a go-to market perspective, we keep it very simple for our customers, they essentially have a one price for the entire asset and then if they choose to do the patch management, this is something that we sell as a capability that is directly available through Qualys and Ivanti has done a huge amount of work to integrate seamlessly in the back end to help the customer so that they don't have to, buy from one, buy from another and try to integrate it themselves. >> And Lisa if you look at it, it's really a way for customers to handle heterogeneous landscape, patching of heterogeneous landscape that they have, in their environment all the way from the data centers to those endpoints, the Windows devices, Mac devices, Linux devices, and in future, we'll also be supporting multiple other devices and platforms through Qualys VMDR, absolutely. >> Let's talk about the target audience and really understanding, from a security perspective, it's top of mind for the C-suite all the way up to the board, now with COVID and the increase in ransomware, and some of the things, the device spread, that's probably only going to spread even more, Nayaki, starting with you, how are you seeing the customer conversations change? Are you now not just talking to ITs elevated up the stack? Is this a CEO, board level concern that you're helping them to remediate? >> Absolutely, Lisa, this conversation about cyber security challenges, especially as organizations are trying to figure out what this transformation to remote working means, this is really not just limited to an IT organization or a CIO level conversation, this is a C-suite conversation at the CEO level, and in most cases, I'm also seeing this becoming a board conversation and I'm on a couple of boards myself, and this is truly a board conversation where discussing how we help enterprises transform to remote working and cyber security challenges as more and more workers are working from home, securing those devices is top of mind, for pretty much CEOs and the boards, and helping them through the transition is a number one priority. So, this is between the partnership with Qualys and Ivanti, for us to offer this joint solution, and really make it available where they can address the security concerns that they have, in their environment. >> And Sumedh, in terms of target market, we talked with Nayaki and Jeff last week about, from a vertical perspective, they've got a lot of strengths in healthcare and retail, for example, are you looking at any leading edge markets right now, verticals that really are at most risk? Or are you attacking us from a GTM perspective, or in a horizontal way? >> It's not even our choice anymore, because what's happened with remote working in no matter what industry you are in, everybody's workers are working from home essentially, and using laptops and the number of attacks have significantly multiplied because now that this endpoint is outside of your traditional defenses that you have in an office environment, these endpoints are a lot more vulnerable, and they are in a home network, I have devices in my home network for my kids that are running all kinds of fortnight and things like that, that now actually could have access to my work laptop, so that is becoming a big concern and the other realization that you cannot really use enterprise solutions as you have in the past, for patching and securing your endpoint that's not inside the enterprise, because if a single SMB goes vulnerability patches 350 Megs for one device, if you have that patch 1000 devices trying to download that over VPN, it's just not going to work, and it kills the VPN, so that is this big push towards moving into a cloud based method of deploying these patches, So you going to actually get these patches deployed without hitting your VPN environments, and this is really the big thing, and the other day I read something that that asked like, what is accelerating the digital transformation to the cloud for your enterprise? And, there was a CEO and the Sea So and then COVID, so unfortunately, the pandemic has been bad in many ways, but in other ways, it has really helped organizations move more quickly, to get approvals from the board and the management because the other option is just not a choice anymore, which is trying to use on-prem solution so that resistance to cloud based solutions is significantly decreasing because, today, we're all sitting in different locations and meeting every day on video, etcetera and that's really powered by that cloud-based platforms that we have today. >> I call it the COVID catalysts, there are a lot of interesting things that are positive, that are being catalyzed as a result of this massive change. One more question Sumedh for you, in terms of, this enabling VMDR to become a category, a target market for endpoint security, how does this help? >> I think, the more we can provide the customer ability to reduce the number of different steps that they have to go through and the different tools that they have to purchase and multiple agents and multiple consoles that they have to put together, then it just becomes a category in itself because you kind of have that ability to do detection, prioritization and response in a single solution, which is something that nobody else offers today because everybody is focused on just one aspect of it, and so, today the response from our customers has been absolutely tremendous, they are extremely happy to have this ability to very quickly figure out what's wrong, one of the things we didn't talk a lot about, but I would say in patch management process, the biggest challenge and where most time is spent is mapping a CVE to a specific patch that needs to be deployed on a specific machine, because of 64-bit architecture, 32-bit architecture, so, the Ivanti catalog helps us tremendously to help bring the knowledge that we have on the CVEs to that catalog, and then give our customers a way to be able to get those patches deployed in a very, very quick way, and so that essentially is just created this new category, when you have this end-to-end ability on a single platform. So whether it comes from Qualys or somebody else, I think the need is there to say, when I'm looking at patch management, I want the discovery of vulnerability and patching all of that to be done together. >> And that speed is absolutely critical. So in terms of the general availability, Sumedh, is this available now, when do customers get access? >> So with the partnership with Ivanti, VMDR in general has been available now for our customers for a couple of months, but now with the enhanced partnership, it was available for Windows or is currently available for Windows and now we are working with Ivanti for the next few months to get the Mac version out, so, we would think about in the next couple of quarters, we will have that available through Qualys VMDR, the ability to patch the Macs as well. >> Excellent. Nayaki let's go ahead and take this home with you, in terms of give me kind of an overall, round this out, the expansion of the partnership, the importance of helping customers in these disparate environments, and the momentum that this gives Ivanti for the rest of the year and going into 2021? >> This really rounds our entire Ivanti's vision and strategy, reservoir, our ability to discover every asset customers have on their endpoints and point assets as devices, being able to manage those devices holistically and to secure those devices, and also do service management of those devices and I had mentioned this, we are the only vendor in the market, that can do all of this end-to-end all the way from discovery, to security, to service managing the devices which... and the partnership with Qualys really helps as round it off across the board is full lifecycle of endpoint management, device management, and also enables us to extend to the natural adjacencies of IoT with Ivanti neurons, vision and strategy and truly get into a world of what we call self healing and self securing, the autonomous edge that we really strive to in the longer term. >> Congratulations both of you on this expansion of the partnership, we thank you for taking the time to explain to us the value in it, the challenges that this going to solve for your customers, Nayaki it's always great to have you on the program, thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, thank you Lisa and Sumedh, absolutely a great pleasure talking to all of you. >> Thank you for inviting me and good seeing both of you and I look forward to seeing you guys again. Have a good day >> Yeah, Sumedh. Great to meet you as well. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

(calm music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and today, I'm talking to Ivanti again and Intel, some breaking news. So please welcome two guests, the EVP and Chief Product Officer of Ivanti, Nayaki Nayyar. She's back, and we've also got the VP and GM of Business Client Salute Platforms for Intel, Stephanie Hallford. Nayaki and Stephanie, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be back here with you Lisa, and Stephanie glad to have you here with us, thank you. >> Thank you, we're excited >> Yeah, you guys are going to break some news for us, so let's go ahead and start. Nayaki, hot off the presses is Ivanti's announcement of its new hyper-automation platform, Ivanti Neurons, helping organizations now in this new next normal of so much remote work. Now, just on the heels of that, you're announcing a new strategic partnership with Intel. Tell me about that. >> So Lisa, like we announced, our Ivanti Neurons platform that is helping our customers and all the IT organizations around the world to deal with this explosive growth of remote workers, the devices that would work is used, the data that it's getting from those devices, and also the security challenges, and Neurons really help address what we call discover all the devices, manage those devices, self-heal those devices, self-secure the devices, and with this partnership with Intel, we are extremely excited about the potential our customers and the benefits that customers can get. Intel is offering what they call Device as a Service, which includes both the hardware and software, and with this partnership, we are announcing the integration between Intel's vPro platform and Ivanti's Neurons platform, which is what we are so excited about. Our joint customers, joint enterprises that are using both the products can now benefit from this out of the box integration to take advantage of this Device as a Service combined offer. >> So Stephanie, talk to us from Intel's perspective. This is an integration of Intel's Endpoint Management Assistant with Ivanti Neurons. How does this drive up the value for the EMA solution for your customers who are already using it? >> Right, well, so vPro is just to step everyone back, vPro is the number one enterprise platform trusted now for over 14 years. We are in a vast majority of enterprises around the world, and that's because vPro is essentially our best performing CPUs, our highest level of security, our highest level manageability, which is our EMA or "Emma" manageability solution, which Ivanti is integrating, and also stability, so that is the promise to IT managers for a stable, the Intel Stable Image platform, and what that allows is IT managers to know that we will keep as much stability and fast forward and push through any fixes as quickly as possible on those vPro devices because we understand that IT networks usually QUAL, you know, not all at one time, but it's sequential. So vPro is our number one enterprise built for business, validated, enabled, and we're super excited today because we're taking that remote manageability solution that comes with vPro, and we are marrying it with Ivanti's top class in point management solution, and Ivanti is a world leader in managing and protecting endpoints, and today more than ever, because IT's remote and Intel. For instance, our IT over one weekend had to figure out how to support a hundred thousand remote workers, so the ability for Ivanti to now have our remote manageability in band, out of band, on-prem, in the cloud, it really rounds out. Ivanti's already fantastic world-class solution, so it's a fantastic start to what I foresee is going to be a great partnership. >> And probably a big target install base. Now, can you talk to me a little bit about COVID as a catalyst for this partnership? So many companies, the stuff they talked about a great example of Intel pivoting over a weekend for a hundred thousand people. We're hearing so many different numbers of an explosion of devices, but also experts and even C-suite from tech companies projecting maybe 30 to 40% of the workforce only will go back, so talk to me about COVID as really driving the necessity for organizations to benefit from this type of technology. >> Yeah, so Lisa, like Stephanie said, right, as Intel had to take hundred thousand employees remote over a weekend, that is true for pretty much every company, every organization, every enterprise independent of industry vertical that they had to take all their workforce and move them to be primarily remote workers, and the stats of BFC is what used to be, I would say, three to four percent before COVID of remote working. Post-COVID or during COVID, as we say, it's going to be around 30, 40, 50%, and this is a conversation and a challenge. Every IT organization, every C-level exec, and, in most cases, I'm also seeing this become a board conversation that they're trying to figure out not just how to support remote workers for a short time, but for a longer time as this becomes the new normal or the next normal, whatever you call that, Lisa, and really helping employees through this transition and providing what we call a seamless experience as we employees are working from home or on the move or location agnostic, being able to provide a experience, a service experience that understands what employee's preferences are, what their needs are, and providing that consumer with experiences, what this joint offering between Intel and Ivanti really brings together for our joint customers. >> So you talked about this being elevated to the board level conversation, you know, and this is something that we're hearing a lot of that suddenly there's so much more visibility and focus on certain parts of businesses, and survival is, so many businesses are at risk. Stephanie, I'd like to get your perspective on how this joint solution with Intel and Ivanti, do you see this as an opportunity to give your customers not just a competitive advantage, but for maybe some of those businesses who might be in jeopardy like a survival strategy? >> Absolutely, I mean, the, you know, while we both Ivanti and Intel have our own IT challenges and we support our workers directly, we are broadly experienced in supporting many many companies that frankly, perhaps, weren't planning for these types of instances, remote manageability overnight, security and cyber threats getting more and more sophisticated, but, you know, tech companies like Ivanti, like Intel, we have been thinking about this and experiencing and planning for these things and bringing them out in our products for some time, and so I think it is a great opportunity when we come together and we bring that, you know, IP expertise and IT expertise, both IP technical and that IT insight, and we bring it to customers who are of all industries, whether it be healthcare or financial or medium businesses who are increasingly being managed by service providers who can utilize this type of device as a service and endpoint manageability. Most companies and certainly all IT managers will tell you they're overwhelmed. They are traditionally squeezed on budget, and they have the massive requirement to take their companies entirely cloud and cloud oriented or maybe a hybrid of cloud and on-prem, and they really would prefer to leave network security and network management to experts, and that's where we can come in with our platform, with our intelligence, we work hard to continue to build that product roadmap to stay ahead of cyber threats. Our vPro platform, for instance, has what we call Intel Hardware Shield to set up technologies that actually protects against cyber attack, even under the OS, so if the OS is down or there's a cyber attack around the OS, we actually can lock down the BIOS and the Firmware and alert the OS and have that communication, which allows the system to protect those areas that need to be protected or lock down or encrypt those areas, so this is the type of thing we bring to the party, and than Ivanti has that absolute in Point Management credibility that there's just, I think, ease, So if IT managers are worried about moving to the cloud and getting workers remote and, you know, managing cyber threats, they really would prefer to leave this management and security of their network to experts like Ivanti, and so we're thrilled to kind of combine that expertise and give IT managers a little bit of peace of mind. >> I think it's even more than giving IT managers a peace of mind, but so talk to me, Nayaki, about how these technologies work together. So for example, when we talked about the Neurons and the hyper-automation platform that you just announced, you were talking about the discovery, the self-healing, self-securing of all these devices within an organization that they may not even know they have EDGE devices on-prem cloud. Talk to me about how these two technologies work together. Is it discovering all these devices first, self-security, self-healing? How does then EMA come into play? >> So let me give an analogy in our consumer world, Lisa. We all are used to or getting used to cars where they automatically heal themselves. I have a car sitting in my garage that I haven't taken to a workshop for last four years since I bought it, so it's almost a similar experience that combined offering things to our customers where all these endpoints, like Stephanie said, we are, I would say, one of the leading providers in the endpoint management where we support today. Ivanti supports over 40 million endpoints for our customers, and combining that with a strong vPro platform from Intel, that combined offering, which is what we call Device as a Service, so that the IT departments or the enterprises don't have to really worry about how we are discovering all of those devices, managing those devices. Self-healing, like if there's any performance issues, configuration drift issues, if there are any security vulnerabilities, anomalies on those devices, it automatically heals them. I mean, that is the beauty of it where IT doesn't have to worry about trying to do it reactively. These neurons detect and self-heal those devices automatically in the background, and almost augmenting IT with what I call these automation bots that are constantly running in the background on these devices and self-healing and self-securing those devices. So that's a benefit every organization, every company, every enterprise, every IT department gets from this joint offering, and if I were on their side, on the other side, I can really sleep at night knowing those devices are now not just being managed, but are secure because now we are able to auto-heal or auto-secure those devices in the background continuously. >> Let's talk about speed cause that's one of the things, speed and scale, we talk about with every different technology, but right now there's so much uncertainty across the globe, so for joint customers, Stephanie talked about the, you know, the large install base of customers on the vPro platform, how quickly would they be able to leverage this joint solution to really get those endpoints under management and start dialing down some of the risks like device sprawl and security threats? >> So the joint offering is available today and being released the integration between both the platforms with this announcement, so companies that have both of our platforms and solutions can start implementing it and really getting the benefit out of it. They don't have to wait for another three months or six months. Right after this release, they should be able to integrate the two platforms, discover everything that they have across their entire network, manage those, secure those devices and use these neurons to automatically heal and service those endpoints. >> So this is something that could get up and running pretty quickly? >> It's an AutoBox connection and integration that we worked very closely, Stephanie's team and my team had been working for months now, and, yeah, this is an exciting announcement not just from the product perspective, but also the benefit it gives our customers, the speed, the accuracy, and the service experience that they can provide to their end user, employees, customers, and consumers, I think, that's super beneficial for everyone. >> Absolutely, and then that 360 degree view. Stephanie, we'll wrap it up with you. Talk to us about how this new strategic partnership is a facilitator or an accelerant of Intel's device as a service vision. >> Well, you know, first off, I wanted to commend Nayaki's team because our engineers were so impressed. They, you know, felt like they were working with the PhD advanced version of so many other engineering partners they'd ever come across, so I think we have a very strong engineering culture between our two companies and the speed at which we were able to integrate our solutions, and at the same time start thinking about what we may be able to do in the future, should we put our heads together and start doing a joint product roadmap on opportunities in the future, network connectivity, wifi connectivity, all sorts of ideas, so huge congratulations to the engineering teams because the speed at which we were able to integrate and get a product offering out was impressive, but, you know, secondarily, on to your question on device as a service, this is going to be by far where the future moves. We know that companies will tend to continue to look for ways to have sustainability in their environments, and so when you have Device as a Service, you're able to do things like into end supporting that device from its start into a network to when you end of life a device and how you end of life that device has severe, some sustainability and costs, you know, complexities, and if we're able to manage that device from end to end and provide servicing to alert IT managers and self-heal before problems happen, that helps obviously not only with business models and, you know, protecting data, but it also helps in keeping systems running and being alert to when systems begin to degrade or if there are issues or if it's time to refresh because the hardware is not new enough to take advantage of the new software capabilities, then you're able to end of life that device in a sustainable way, in a safe way, and, even to some degree, provide some opportunity for remediation of data and, you know, remote erase and continue to provide that security all the way into the end, so when we look at device as a service, it's more than just one aspect. It's really taking a device and being responsible for the security, the manageability, the self-healing from beginning to end, and I know that all IT managers need that, appreciate that, and frankly don't have the time or skillsets to be able to provide that in their own house. So I think there's the beginnings today, and I think we have a huge upside to what we can do in the future. I look at Intel's strengths in enterprise and how long we have been, you know, operating in enterprises around the world. Ivanti's, you know, in the vast majority of Fortune 100s, and when you've got kind of engineering powerhouses that are coming together and brainstorming it's, I think, it's a great partnership for relief for customer pain points in the future, which unfortunately there's going to be more probably. >> And this is just the beginning. >> I think that's one thing we can guarantee. It's what, sorry? >> Yeah, and it's just the beginning. This partnership is just the beginning. You will see lot more happening between both the companies as we define the roadmap into the future, so we are super excited about all the work, the joint teams, and, Stephanie, I want to take this opportunity to thank you, your leadership, and your entire organization for helping us with this partnership. >> We're excited by it, we are, we know it's just the beginning of great things to come. >> Well, just the beginning means we have to have more conversations. The cultural fit really sounds like it's really there, and there's tight alignment with Ivanti and Intel. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me. Nayaki, great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you, thank you, Lisa. Thank you for hosting us, and, Stephanie, it's always a pleasure talking to you, thank you. >> Likewise, looking forward to the launch and all the customer reactions. >> Absolutely. >> Yes, all right, thanks Nayaki, thanks Stephanie. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. 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>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by two guests from Ivanti, today. Please welcome its President, Jeff Abbot and its Chief Product Officer, Nayaki Nayyar. Jeff and Nayaki, it's so great to talk to you today. >> Pleasure to speak to you, Lisa. >> Pleasure to be here, Lisa, look forward to this. >> Me too. So Jeff, let's start with you, transformation, you got some big news that you're going to be sharing and breaking through theCUBE Conversation today which we're going to dig into but there's been a lot of transformation at the top at Ivanti, you're new, tell me about that and what's the shake up that's been going on there to really drive this company forward? >> Yeah. We have got a lot of transformation going on, Lisa. And it's been an exciting ride for the first six months of my tenure at Ivanti. I came in January as president along with our new CEO, who has been Chairman, Jim Schaper. And when Jim and I started talking about Ivanti last fall, the challenges were pretty clear. It's a company that's had outstanding employees, fantastic customers, and a real heritage of innovation. But they had leveled off a little bit. And the idea behind the new executive team was to bring in a team of veterans to take it to the next level, really to grow to a billion dollars and beyond, both organically and through acquisitions. So you're right, we brought in a fantastic team of veterans people that Jim and I have both worked with: Angie Gunter, new Chief Marketing Officer, Mary Trick, new Chief Customer Officer, we recently hired Nayaki Nayyar, who's with us today, our Chief Product Officer, John Flavin, the Head of our Industry Business Unit, and a host of others that have all come in with a single mission to take Ivanti to the next level. >> So Nayaki, let's dig into Ivanti's vision, lot of change, lot of momentum, I imagine with that change, but what's your vision? >> So let's take a step back, Lisa and you look at, what I call Ivanti's position of strength. And when you look at the entire portfolio Ivanti has, one of the key strengths Ivanti has is its ability to discover, secure, manage and service the endpoints. And if you look at the entire marketplace, there is no vendor in the market today, most of them UEM vendors don't have service management, service management don't have UEM, our ability, Ivanti's ability to do this end to end management of endpoints all the way from discovery to security to service management is what our key strength is. That's our competitive advantage, bringing these three pillars together under one umbrella and having a holistic story. Especially in this day and age of COVID and post COVID, where everyone is trying to manage those endpoints, secure those endpoints, and have almost a seamless experience as remote becomes the next normal going forward for every enterprise, Lisa. >> Yeah, the next normal. Well, there's data scatter, there's device scatter and it's now almost like so many people working from home overnight a few months ago that now will have almost a relationship with our devices because they're our lifeline. So for an organization to be able to understand where all those devices are, people are now working from home, but as you shared, Nayaki, with me the other day, there's some gartner data that demonstrates that 3.6% of the workforce before COVID was working from home. It might be 10X that post COVID So the amount of device scatter and data scatter and need to secure, that challenge is even going up. So how does Ivanti help? How do you solve that challenge? >> So Lisa, if you put yourself in any large enterprise and organization that is dealing with this post COVID or addressing the needs of a remote worker, the remote workers are going through, I would say, explosive growth where they used to be single digits 3% 4% before COVID, and now, during COVID, and after COVID, it's probably going to be I would say, 30, 40% of remote workers that every enterprise has to now provide that service, that seamless service experience as they're working from home, they could be on the move. So providing that seamless experience is, I would say, number one priority and a key challenge for every enterprise. So what we are going to be releasing and launching and announcing to the market given our position of strength in managing endpoints is how we help that seamless experience and what I call the ambient experience for an end user independent of where they are working from, they could be working from home, they could be on the move, or office. >> Which is critical these days. But before we dig into the announcement, Jeff, I wanted to ask you, some of the stats that I've been seeing in terms of the C suite and the amount of decisions that the C suite has had to make in the last four months has been more than over the last five or so years. Talk to us a little bit about how Ivanti got together this new C suite to make the decision to announce what you're going to talk about today so quickly. >> Now, that's a great point. And it's one that we had to, quite frankly, Lisa. The market is demanding a hyper-automation, it's demanding more agnostic deployment, it needs more flexibility in terms of the ability to be self driven and sense and service without a whole lot of intervention. So we knew that when we came in as a new leadership team, the first thing we had to do was get the go-to-market strategy in order, which we did. We balanced our direct sales strategy with our partner strategy. We made some changes in the marketing organization to a more contemporary content-focused demand generation style, and we reset the company's focus on customer outcomes. And in so doing, we changed the mentality to success as measured by are we meeting our customers intended business goals? And that led us very quickly to say, "Listen, the unified IT message we've been using for the last few years has been great, and our customers have responded well to it, and we've acquired a lot of new customers with that message, but the game has changed." And as Nayaki was leading up to, the expectation has changed. And the entire IT space is relatively mature but the expectations and the pressure on that space has grown tremendously, as you pointed out, in the last few years. Just think of the number of devices we all now have to manage as a company, and it's growing. And as Nayaki pointed out as she discusses our launch, it's growing almost exponentially. So we knew that we had to have a new product strategy, we had to take the unified IT message and start to think differently about how the IT leaders in the field and our various customers around the world, how their game has changed and lean in to what they need in terms of automation, AI, bot technology, and so on. And that's what we're announcing with this latest release. >> All right, Nayaki, take it away. What are you announcing? >> Yeah, so what we're super-excited about, Lisa, is to Jeff's point, to handle this explosive growth, growth of devices, growth of data that is being generated from those devices, and also this explosive growth of remote workers. Meaning the only way to handle this growth is through what we call automation and we are taking that next, advanced automation, that leap frog strategy of what we call hyper-automation, embedding that into our entire stack, into our UEM endpoint management stack, into our security stack and also service management to help customers, what we call, self-heal, discover all the devices continuously, optimize the performance, optimize any configuration drifts, and proactively predictively remediate any issues, any issues that you see on those devices, and get into a world of what we call self-healing autonomous edge. Where it's continuously detecting every issue and being able to predictively and cognitively self-heal that edge. And this is what we are launching, is what we branded as Ivanti Neurons, is the brand that we are launching for these automation, this hyper-automation bots, that every company can deploy these hyper-automation bots into their network that will constantly discover every device you have across your entire network, discover any performance issues, configuration drift issues, security issues, vulnerabilities, anomalies, and really get into what we call self-healing, self-securing and providing a service experience that we are used to in our day to day life or in our consumer world. So that's what we are announcing, super-excited about the overall launch. The fact that every enterprise, every company, and it's not tied to any single vertical, Lisa, any vertical organization can leverage these neurons and get that closer to self-healing of those devices that they have to now manage every organization that has to now manage. >> I know Ivanti has a lot of strengths and several verticals, one of them being healthcare. And I can imagine right now, the last five months, the hyper status that every hospital and clinic is in, I'm curious, though, about the name. Jeff, talk to me about in this new, the next normal that we're living in, Neurons, what does that mean and what does it mean to your customers? >> Yeah, great question. And I know this will resonate with you, Lisa, as an accomplished biologist. With the idea is with what we're providing and what we're launching with Neurons, there's a sense of hyper-scale, hyper-automation, like the synapses in your brain, handles so much information at once. So we wanted to personalize the launch of these solutions. When you see the announcement next week, you'll see a series of products across the spectrum Ivanti solutions; the ITSM, endpoint management, security and so on. And we address in each of those areas, the self-sensing, self-healing, self-servicing, each of those business processes. But like your synapses or your neurons in your brain, there'll be a lot of super-fast automation, super-fast sensing of challenges and addressing those challenges. And that's why we went with Neurons. It was actually a pretty fun contest in the company and we really believe Neurons will connect with our target market. >> I love it. And the biologist part of me is gone, "That makes sense." So Nayaki, over to you. And in terms of that connectivity perspective, there's so many disparate data sources out there, it's only growing. And Jeff, you mentioned this, how can one of your existing 25,000 customers, use, deploy, this on top of their existing infrastructure to start connecting data sources that they may not even know they can connect or that they may not know does it make even sense to connect them? >> Yeah, so the beauty of the entire Neuron network is it uses MQTT protocol, Lisa, which is the protocol that immediately detects every device, be it endpoint desktops, laptops, mobile devices, or even, I was suggesting IoT devices, that it automatically detects. And senses if there is anything happening on those devices, predicts if there is any issue that may happen, like I said, performance issues, configuration drift issues, security issues and pulls that data in real time. The beauty of this is the speed at which it pulls its data, I've seen customers who can deploy this across their entire network around the world and within seconds, it's able to pull the data into a centri console, and give ourselves a full 360 view of every device you have, every user that's using those devices all the applications that are running on those devices and the services that are being delivered to those devices. So just the power of being able to pull that much data in seconds and provide that 360 view of what we call, a Neuron Workspace, for any IT organization to have that full 360 view, and detect and predict that there's any issue and almost like get into a self-healing remediated before it interrupts your productivity or interrupts your... Any service disruption. I think you were trying to say something, go ahead. >> I was just going to add to that, Nayaki. And you asked this or made this point, Lisa, Nayaki and I are speaking to the healthcare industry almost every day. We are very in tune with the challenges they're experiencing, obviously, with what's happening right now around the world. And as Nayaki is describing, the Neurons we intend to be a very seamless improvement to their existing IT processes and so on. In fact, when I described this to some of the hospitals I've been speaking to, and certainly the IT staff and leaders within, they are fascinated and very excited about what we're describing. Because if you think about it, IT challenges down at the device level in the healthcare industry can be life critical. And they need to solve those IT challenges very fast. They need to know when their new endpoints are online, they need to know when they need servicing, and then they know when their software needs patching. We're not talking about just being at home and being frustrated if you're having an IT challenge, we're talking about life and death. So Neurons is absolutely what the healthcare industry is asking for in terms of self-healing, self-sensing, self-securing and so on, they need those attributes in their business model, now definitely more than ever. >> Absolutely, they do. So Nayaki, talking to customers in healthcare, whatnot, I can see this being a great tool for the IT analyst but also maybe even helping the IT analysts and business users have better relationships that overall help drive a business forward. >> Yeah, so you put yourself in an end user or line of business, they expect, and especially in this day and age of post COVID, Lisa, they expect a consumer grade experience to be delivered to them. They expect their service provider to know exactly where they're working from, what devices they have, how all those devices are not just secure, but understands the preferences I need as an individual and provides that service experience to me. So I mean that, I would say, a close tie in between what the business wants, the end users in those lines of business want and how IT or any service organization can provide that service to employees, customers, and consumers is what really Neurons, I would really... Helps us get closer and closer to consumer grade experience that we all are used to in our day to day life. And to Jeff's point, in addition to healthcare, which is a strong industry vertical for us, some other industries, retail is another big industry that we are very strong in, Lisa, and also supply chain rugged devices in a warehouse. So it really gives us a huge expansion opportunity beyond just managing the IT devices or endpoints to also managing the IoT devices by industry vertical, in those segments, where we already have a very, very strong foothold, because of the technology that we have that powers this whole thing in the backend. >> And we're seeing some of the numbers of 40+ Billion, connected devices in the next few years. So Jeff, let's end this with you. I know there's more coming, but you probably have a great partnership suite that you're working with to enable this, talk to us a little bit about the partners, and then what's next? >> Yeah, no, great point, Lisa. I come from a heritage of companies that have leveraged our partners. And we continue to grow our partner network. We believe strongly in the strength of the extended ecosystem, solution partners, delivery partners, global systems integrators, they all have a role in Neurons. And we're excited to continue to provide the platform for mutual growth between us and those partners. And what's really important is, these are companies that our customers really love as well. So we're going to continue to, in some cases, tie our solutions together, in some cases, extend our services organization through partners, and in some cases, we'll actually service our customers through our channel partner network. We actually went through a little bit of a rationalization to really zero in on our most strategic partners, we've done that, we've finished that in the first six months of coming on board. And now we are hitting the gas pedal and going full speed to market with a great group of partners and again, you'll see that ecosystem more and more as part of our strategy. >> Excellent. So Neurons announced, what's next? >> Well, there's quite a bit behind Neurons. So it will take us probably into at least 2021 getting all the solutions launched, and getting them ingrained with our customers out there. Well, we fully intend to continue to innovate. And if there's one thing I leave you with, Lisa, it's that that's our big announcement more than anything. I mean, Ivanti's had a history of innovation, it's a company that practically invented patching, and keeping all of the devices up to speed on the latest virus protection software and so on, there's a lot of legacy companies within our footprint that are now completely tied together and under the Neuron strategy under Nayaki's leadership we intended to put innovation out in the marketplace, quarter after quarter after quarter, but Neurons for now will keep us quite busy. So we're very excited. >> Well, congratulations on that. Ivanti, innovation, hyper-automation. Jeff, Nayaki, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for joining me on theCUBE today. Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you for having us. >> For my guests, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Conversation. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, I'm Peter Burress. And welcome back to know the Cube conversation. This one from B M sees Helix Immersion Day at Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. Once again, we've got a great set of topics for today Today, Right now we're gonna talk about is the everybody talks about the explosion in the amount of data, but nobody talks about the resulting or associated explosion in software. And that may in fact, be that an even bigger issue than the explosion and data. Because ultimately, we want to apply that data and get work done. That's gonna require that we rethink service's rethink service management, rethink operations and rethink operations management in the context of how all this new software is gonna create new work but also can perform new classes of work. Soto have that conversation. We've got a couple of great guests. New York. And here is the BMC president of Digital Service is in operations management division to BMC. Welcome back to the Cube. >>Thank you. >>And me Here shoot Close the CEO of Automation anywhere here. Welcome to the Cube. So Naoki, I want to start with you. A year ago, we started on this journey of how this new digital service is is going to evolve to do Maur types of work for people. How has be emcees? Helix Platform evolved in that time. >>So if you remember last time, it's almost a year. Back when we launched Helix, which was all around taking the service management capability that we had on Prem Minute available in cloud continue rise so customers can run and cut of their choice and provided experience through various channels bought as channel off that customer experience. This is what we had released last time. We call it the three C's for Helix, Everything in cloud containerized with cognitive capabilities so customers can transform that experience in this version. What we are extending helix is with the operation side. So although I Tom capabilities that we have in our platform are now a part off Felix, so we have one entering platform so that customers can discover every asset that they have on prominent loud monitor those assets detected anomalies service bought four lines of business and for i t. For immediate issues that happen, vulnerabilities that are there in the system and automatically optimized capacity and cost on holistic. This whole closed loop off operations and service coming together is what this next day off innovations that were launching BMC Helix >>Soma here New York He's talked about very successfully, and Felix has been a very successful platform for improving user experience. But up front, I noted that we're not just talking about human beings as users anymore. We're talking about software is users R p a robotic process. Automation is a central feature of some of these new trends. Tell us a little bit about how robotic process automation is driving an increased need for this kind of digital service in operations management capability? >>Sure think it a high level you have to think of. The new organization has augmented organization that are human and what's working side by side, each doing what they're best at. And so, in a specific example of a service organization, uh, the the BMC hell ex ist Licht Alexis Taking this is Think of this as a utility where the way you plug it into an electricity outlet and switch on the light and you get the electricity, you plug into the BMC helix, and behind it, you have augmented workforce of chat boards are pia bots, human beings each doing what they're best at and giving a far superior customer experience and like any other that is happening now. And that's the future off service industry. >>But when you point a human, so to speak metaphorically into that system, there's a certain amount of time there's a certain amount of training. There's a certain, and as a consequence, you can have a little bit more predictable scale. That doesn't mean that you don't end up with a lot of complexity, but our p A seems that the potential of our P A seems that you're going to increase the rate at which these users, in this case, digital users are going to enter into the system. You don't have a training regimen you can attach to them. They have to be tested. They have to be discovered. You have to be put in operation with reliability. How is that ultimately driving the need for some of these new capabilities? >>I think you if you think of this, if you think of this box as a digital workers, you almost have to go through the same process that you would go through human beings. You onboard them in terms of you, configure them. You trained them with cognitive capabilities and the and then in. The one difference is the monitor themselves. Without any bias they give, they can give you. They can give their own performance rating performance rating card. Um, but the beauty off this is when human and what's work together because there are some functions that the bots can do well. And then at some point they can hand off to the human beings and human beings. Do some of the more interesting work that is based on judgment. Call customer service. All of that, um, so that the combination is is the end goal for everybody >>and to add would be here said right, that customer experience, whether you're providing experience to employees, are consumers and customers. That is the ultimate goal. That's ultimate result of what you want to get and the speed at which you provided experiences, the accuracy of which you provide experience of the cause, that which you provided experience becomes a competitive sensation, which is where all this automation, this augmentation that they're doing with humans and bots is what enables us to do that right for or large enterprise customers May major service organizations trying to transform into that beautiful. >>But increasingly, it seems as though the, uh, the things that we have to do to orchestrate in ministry Maur users digital and human undertaking Maur complex tasks where each is best applied is really driving a lot of new data mentioned upfront, an enormous amount of software and you said new experiences. But those experiences have to be reliable, have to be secure. They have to be predictable. So that suggests this overwhelming impact of all of these capabilities. You talk about a digital tsunami? What are some of the key things? Do you think Enterprise is gonna have to do to start engaging that? >>Yeah, I'm incredibly college 40 nursery revolution. Whether we call our initial transformation, I think what we all are experiencing is the tsunami Texan ami, right, Tsunami of clouds, where you have corruption clouds, private clouds have a close marriage clouds, tsunami of devices, not just more valid visors, but also has everything alone, as is getting connected devices, tsunami of channels. I mean, as an end user, I wantto experience that in the channel of my preference lack as a journalism as a channel tsunami of bots, off conversation, bullets in our Peabody. So in this tsunami, I think what everyone is trying to figure out is, how do they manage this explosion? It's humanly impossible to do it all manually. You have toe augment it. But of course, intelligence, I'm all. But then, of course, boss, become a big part of that augmentation toe. Orchestrate all of them back to back cross. >>I would say that the this is no longer nice to have, because if you look it from over consumer's perspective, last 20 years of digital technologies off from my Amazons and Google's of the World, Netflix and others they have created this mind set off instant customer gratification, and we all been trained for it. So what was acceptable five years ago is no longer acceptable in our own lives, I e. And so this new standard off instant result instant outcome. Instant respond. Instant delivery V. Just expected. Right. Once you're end, consumer begins to do that. We as a business is no longer have a choice that's writing on the wall. And so what? This new platform Zehr doing like you'd be emcee. Hellickson automation anywhere is delivering their instant gratification. And when you think about it, more and more of the new customers that are millennials, they don't know any other way. So for them, this is the only experience they will relate. Oh, so again, this is not nice to see Oh, it is. But it is the only way only the world will operate, right? >>Well, what we're trying to do is take on new classes of customer experience, new operational opportunities to improve our profitability, innovate and find new value propositions. But you mentioned time arrival rate of transaction is no longer predictable. It's gonna be defined by the market, not by your employees. We could go on and on and on with that. What is taught us a little bit about automation anywhere and what automation anywhere is doing to try to ensure that as businesses go off to attend to the complexity creates new value at the same time can introduce simplicity where they could get scale and more automation. >>Sure, you earlier mentioned that with explosion of data came the explosion off applications And what? Let me focus on what problem or permission anywhere solves. If you look at large organizations, they have vast amount of applications, sometimes 408 100 few 1000 what we have seen. What we've been doing historically is using people as a human bridges between this applications. And we have a prettier that way for too long. And that's the world today. >>So humans are the interface >>humans at the bridges between applications and often called the salty air operations. That's the easiest way to describe it. So the what are two mission ever does is it offers this technology platform robotic process automation area in an Arctic split form that integrates all off it together into a seamless automation bought that can go across and with the eye it can make intelligent, intelligent choices. Um, and so now take that Combined with the BMC, Alex, and you have a seamless service platform that can deliver superior experience. >>So we've got now these swivel chair users now being software, which means that we could discover them more easily. We can monitor them more easily, and that feeds. He looks >>absolutely so you know, in our consumer wall, in a day to day life We are used to a certain experience of how we consume data or consume experiences with our TVs and all the channels that experience that we have an identity. Life is what people expect when they walk into the company, right walking to the Enterprise, which every IittIe organization is trying to figure out. How do they get to that level of maturity? So this is what the combination of what we're doing with Felix and automation anywhere brewing's that consumer great experiences into an enterprise >>world. Some here when we think about our p A. We're applying it in interesting and innovative ways, no question about it. But there are certain patterns of success. Give us some visibility into what you are seeing leads to success. And then what's the future of our P? A. How's that gonna involve over the next few years? >>Sure. Um, R P has been deployed across virtually every industry and virtually every department, so there are many ways to get started in All of them are right. But often we find is that you can either start in a central organization where in terror organization is doing everything centrally. It is a great way to get started. But eventually we learned that the Federated Way is the best way to end where hundreds of offices all over the world, if you are especially large organization, each business unit is doing it with I t providing governments and central security and policies and an actual bots running and being implemented all over the world eventually for a large gilt transformation. That is a common pattern we have seen among successful customers. >>And where do you think this is? Houses pattern going to evolve as enterprises gained more familiarity with it, innovating new and interesting ways and his automation anywhere, and others advance the state of the art. Where do you think it's gonna end up? >>The read is going is is I define it as an app store experience or a Google play experience. So if you think about how we operate over mobile devices today, if you want something on your device, you would look for a nap that does that. We're getting to a point where there is bought for everything in a digital worker for everything. So if you need certain job done, you first go to a what store? Uh that is an automation anywhere website. Look for about that. Does something higher or download that Bart. Get the work done and it comes pre built. Like many. There are works with BMC Felix on many of those, So s. So that is your 1st 1st way you will look, look for getting your work done in a new body economy. And if it if there's no but available, then you look for other options. It will transform how we work and how we think of >>work. In many respects, it's the gig economy with perfect contractor, and it's that leads to some very in string challenges. Ultimately, we start thinking about service Is so Ni aki based on what me here just talked about. Where does digital service is go as our P A joins other classes of users in creating those new experiences at new Prophet points and new value propositions, >>it becomes a competitive. How you provide that service can become a big competitive sensation for financial institutions. For telcos, which is a service industry, right, you're providing that service and, like two meters point, then the user hits that switch. They expect the light to come on If I'm an end user, that consumer warning a service from my telco provider, all from my, um, financial institution. I expect that service to be instantaneous at the highest accuracy accuracy at which super wide is gonna start driving competitor, official for financial institutions of financial institution Telco two Telco and that So I C companies, differentiating and really surviving are thriving in the long term. >>It's no longer becoming something that's nice to have its jacks or better in business, too. >>That's right. And the demo of the live demo that we saw today was really impressive because it sure that what would have taken a few days to happen now happens in three minutes. Right? It is, which is, which is almost the time it takes to call an uber. You know, when interpreters begin to do work at a pace that what you call an uber that's that's that's the future. Yes, it's here. >>Yes, so do I mean the demo that we do the entire enter and demo to request additional storage and being able to provisional remediating issues that we see predict cost and make it available to the end user develop whoever it is is asking for it in minutes. Alright, which used to take days and days. No, no, no, not to mention sometimes in pixels. >>It's typically done faster at scale, with greater reliability. Greater greater security, Certainly greater predictability, et cetera. All right. Here. Shukla, CEO of automation Anywhere. Yeah. Kenny, our president off the dental Service is and operations management division at BMC. Thanks both of you for being on the Cube. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Once again, I'm Peter Burress and I want to thank you for participating in this cube conversation from Santa Clara Marriott at B M sees helix immersion days until next time.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, we are live here in Las Vegas, located at the Sands. Day three of our coverage here at re:Invent. AWS starting to wrap things up, but still, I think, making a very major statement about the progress they're making in their making in their market. 45,000 plus attendees here, thousands of exhibitors and exhibit space being used here in hundreds of thousands of square footage. Sort of a reflection of the vibrancy of that market. I'm with James Kobielus, who's the lead analyst at Wikibon and we're joined, once again, second appearance on theCUBE in one day, how 'bout that for Nayaki Nayyar, who is the President of Digital Services Management at BMC. Glad to have you back, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you, John, thank you, Jim. Great to be here and I'm becoming a pro at this, right? >> You are. >> My second time of the day. >> We'll punch your card and you win a prize by being on theCUBE more than once a day. >> Twice in four hours, I mean, that's a pretty good track record. >> We'll pick up your toy, you know. >> Tell me about, first off, just your thought about the show in general. I mean, you've been in this environment for some time now, but I'm kind of curious what you think about what you're seeing here and the sense of how this thing's really taking off. >> So, first of all, it's just the energy, the vibe, the fun that we're having here is just amazing. But, I do want to drop to the keynote that Andy did yesterday, it's just phenomenal the pace at which AWS is innovating. Just to be releasing over 1300 features in a year, that is phenomenal. >> James: I think he said innovations in a year. >> Features a year. >> Did he say features, okay. >> Yeah, I think so. But, independent of that, I'm just saying the pace at which, and their model of new stuff that they're bringing to the market is just phenomenal. For customers like us, vendors, it's just phenomenal. >> We hear a lot about, I mean, it's the buzzword, digital transformation and all that. So, what does it really mean to service? What transformation is happening in that, what is that pushing you on that side of the fence to have to be thinking about now? >> You said the word, digital, and sometimes it's very hyper-used. And what we have done at BMC, since our core is service management, we have defined what service management looks like for our customers in this digital age. And we have defined it, because we were primarily in I.T. service management for the last 10-15 years, the future of the service management in this digital world is what we call cognitive service management. Where service management is no longer just reactive, it is proactive and it is also a conversational through various agents like chatbots, or Alexa or virtual agents. So, it's a complete transformation that we are experiencing and we are driving most of that change for our customers right now. >> And, of course, the word cognitive signals the fact that there's some artificial intelligence going on behind the scenes, possibly to drive that conversational UI. With that in mind, I believe that, at BMC, you are one of AWS's partners for Alexa for businesses, is that true? And you're bringing it into an I.T. service management context. That's sounds like an innovation, can you tell us more about that? >> Absolutely, so we announced partnership with AWS on multiple fronts. One of them is with Alexa, Alexa for Business, where we do integrate with Alexa for providing that end user experience. So, Alexa was known for consumer world, my son used it all the time. >> Tell me the temperature? >> But now, we are looking at how we could bring it into the enterprise world, especially to provide service to all employees. So that, you don't actually have to send an email or pick up the phone to call a service agent, now you can actually interact with Alexa or a chatbot to get any service you need. So that's what we call omni-channel experience for providing that experience for end users, employees, customers, partners, anyone. >> So, do you have, right now, any reference customers, it's so new? Or, can you give us a sense for how this capability is working in the field in terms of your testing? Do business people understand, or are they comfortable, with using essentially a consumer appliance as an interface to some serious business infrastructure? Like, being able to report a fault in a server, or whatnot. There's a risk there of bringing in a technology, like a consumer technology, before it's really been accepted as a potential business tool. Tell us how that's working. >> That's a very interesting. We are actually seeing a very fast pace at which customers are adopting it. As we speak, I have three customers I'm working with right now, who not only wants to use a chatbot, or a virtual agent, for providing service, not just to employees but to the end customers, also want to use Alexa inside their company for providing service to their employees. So, it's starting the journey, we already have the integration that is working with Alexa. Customers have gotten very excited about it, they're doing POCs, they're starting their journey. I think in the next couple of years, we'll see a huge uptake with customers wanting to do that across the board. >> Well, give me an example, if I'm working and I need to go to Alexa Business, how deep can I go? What kind of problems can be solved? And then, at what point where does that shut off and then we trip over to the human element? >> James: Don't forget where the A.I. fits in to the picture. If you could just have a little bit of the plumbing, not too much. >> So, let me give you like two segments, one is the experience through Alexa, the second one is, where does deep learning get embedded into the process. So, usually every company has level one, level two service desk agents who are taking the calls, are responding to emails for resetting passwords or fixing foreign issues, laptop issues. So, that level one, level two service desk process is what is being replaced through a chatbot or an Alexa. So, now you can take the routine kind of a task away from having a human respond to it, you can have Alexa or a chatbot respond, do that work. The second piece, for high-complex scenarios, is where it switches. So, being able to automatically switch between an Alexa to a live agent, is where the beauty comes in and how we handle the transition. It has all the historical interaction through the whole journey for the customer. >> But then, Alexa forwards any information it has gained from the conversations- >> That interaction history we call it. >> To a human being who takes it to the next step. >> Nayaki: So when I- >> Can a human kick it back to Alexa at some point? >> No, no, we haven't seen that go back. It's usually, level one, level two is where Alexa takes care and then level three is where the human takes care and goes forward. Now, the second piece, the A.I.-ML piece. In a service management, there are a lot of processes that are very, I would say, routine and very manual. Like, every ticket that comes in, customers have millions of tickets that come in on a periodic basis. Every ticket that comes in, how you assign the ticket to the right individual, log the ticket and categorize the ticket is a very labor intensive and expensive process. So, we are embedding deep learning capabilities into that so we can automate, customers can automate all of those. >> James: Natural language processing, is that? >> With NLP embedded into it. Now, customers can choose to use an NLP engine of their choice, like Watson, or Amazon, or Cortana. And then, that gets fed back into the service management process. >> In fact, that's consistent with what AWS is saying about the whole deep learning space. They are agnostic as to the underlying deep learning framework you use to build this logic, whether it be TensorFlow or MXNet, or whatever. So, what you're saying is very consistent with that sort of open framework for plugging deep learning, or A.I., into the, in this case, the business application. Very good. So, developers within your customer base, what are you doing, BMC, to get developers up to speed on what they'll need to do to build the skills to be able to drive this whole service management workflow? >> So, all this work that we're doing with, what we call these cognitive services, they're all micro services that we are built into our platform. That, not only we are using in our own applications, like in Remedy, like in, what we call digital workplace, but also we have made it available for all the developers, partners, ecosystems, to consume it in their own applications. Just like what Amazon is doing with their micro services strategy, we have micro services for every one of these processes that developers can now consume and build their own special use cases, or use cases that are very unique to their business or to their customers. >> So who, I mean we were talking about this before we started the interview, about invent versus innovation, so, on the innovation side, what's driving that? I mean, are these interactions that you're having with customers and so you're trying to absorb whatever that input is, that feedback? Or, are you innovating almost in a vacuum, or in space a little bit, and are providing tools that you think could get traction? >> No, in fact, no, we are not just dreaming in our labs and saying, "This is what we should go do." (laughing) >> James: Dreaming in our labs. >> That's not where the driver is. What's really happening, independent of the industry, you pick any industry like telcos or financial industry, any industry is going through a major transformation where they are under competitive pressure to provide a service at the highest efficiency, highest speed, at the lowest cost. So if I'm a bank, or if I'm a telco, when a customer calls me and they have an issue, the pace at which I provide the service, the speed, and the cost at which I provide that service, and the accuracy at which I provide that service, is my competitive advantage. So, that is what is actually driving the innovations that we are bringing to market. And, all the three things that I talked about, end user experience through bots or through virtual agents, how we are automating the processes inside the service management, and how we are also providing it for the developers. All these three, create a package for our customers in every one of those industries, to address the speed, the efficiency and the cost for their service management. >> John: Go ahead James. >> At this show, AWS, among their many announcements that are building on their A.I., they have a new product called, and it's related to this, the accuracy, it's called Amazon Comprehend. Which is able to build on Polly, their NLP, their Natural Language Processing, to be able to identify in a natural language, entities like, "Hey, my PC doesn't work "and I think it's the hard drive," those are entities. But, also identify sentiment, whether the customer is very angry, mildly miffed, and so forth. Conceivably, you could use, or your customers could use that information in building out skills that are more fine-grained in terms of handing off to level two or level three support, "Okay, we've identified with a high degree of confidence "that the problem might reside in this particular component "of the system, the customer is really out of joint, "you need to put somebody on this right away." So forth and so on. Any thoughts about possibly using this new functionality within the context of Alexa for Business as you were deploying it at BMC? In the future? Your thoughts? >> Absolutely, in fact that was what I was very excited about that, when they announced that. You know, in an NLP, NLP has been around for many years now and there's been a lot of experiments around NLP. >> The first patent for NLP was like in the late '50s. >> But the maturity of NLP now, and the pace at which, like Amazon, they're innovating is just phenomenal. And the real beauty of it would be, when an NLP engine can really become intelligent when it can understand the sentiment of the customer, when the customer is saying something, it should detect that the customer is angry, happy, or on the edge. We are not there yet, I'm really excited to see the announcements from AWS on the Comprehend side. If they really can deliver on that understanding sentiment, I think it would be phenomenal. >> I don't want to get us off the tracks, but it's a fascinating point. Because, as you know words, in a static environment can be misinterpreted one of 50,000 ways. So, how do you get this A.I. to apply to emotional pitch, tone, agitation? How do you recognize that? >> That is where NLP, the maturity of an NLP, is what's gonna be game changing in the long term. For it to be able to know what the underlying sentiment. >> Anger, excitement, joy, despair, I mean, all those things. "I've had enough," can be said many different ways. >> And that's when we'll switch to a live agent, if it's not able to do it, we will quickly switch to a live agent. (laughing) >> The bot gives up, right? (laughing) >> Or is it emotion threshold where a human being might be the best immediate front-line support. >> Just curious, it's fascinating. Well, thank you for the time, we certainly appreciate that. And, we promise, this'll be it for the day. (laughing) All right, no more CUBE duty. But, we certainly wish you all the best down the road. And, like you, I think we've certainly seen, and have a deeper appreciation for what's happening in this marketplace with what we've seen here this week. It was extraordinary. >> Fascinating. >> Thank you, John, it was a pleasure. And really excited to have two CUBE interviews in a day. >> John: How 'bout that? >> But, I think it's a great forum for us to get our message out and get the world to know what we are doing as BMC and the innovations we're beginning. >> We're excited to talk to real innovators in the business world, so, all power to you. >> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you. >> Nice to meet you. Back with more, we are live here at re:Invent AWS in Las Vegas. Back with more live here on theCUBE right after this break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCube covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey! Welcome back to theCube's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017 from beautiful Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with my co host Keith Townsend. We're very excited to welcome back Cube alumni Nayaki Nayyar from BMC. The president of Digital Services Management. Welcome back to theCube! >> Thank you Lisa. Thank you Keith. Really excited to be here. I've been here before and I love this forum and how you are able to scale this and get our word around the world on this forum; thank you. >> Well fantastic. So one of the first things I wanted to ask you, you know, we hear buzz words all the time. Every event that we're at no matter what and I wanna know what is Multi-Cloud? What does it mean to your customers? Or do they say "Nayaki, what is Mutli-Cloud? "Do we need one?" >> Yes. So you know that's a very good question. Every customer I go talk to the number one challenge they have is what we call this Multi-Cloud challenge. Because now customers are evolving their workloads. We heard from Andy how everyone is evolving the workloads into cloud. But it's not one cloud. They have hybrid clouds, managed clouds, private clouds you name it. The privilege of clouds is becoming a norm now. And how you help them manage the complexity of these Multi-Cloud is what is very unique for BMC and all the technology that they are releasing in the market is that's our sweet spot right now. >> So when a customer comes and says "help me navigate this process." Where do you start? >> Yeah, so you know the number one. You'd be surprised. When customers are planning the migration or they're in the journey of migrating their workloads to cloud the first thing is they have to know what they own. Discovering their assets and it'd be interesting for most of the CIOs or heads of technology that I talk to they don't even know what they own across all the data centers. So we have a product called Discovery for Mutli-Cloud. Where it can discover all assets customers have on-prim but also assets across AWS. That is a partnership we announced with AWS. And with Azure or any other clouds that they have. And it actually builds a relationship across all of these assets so you can plan if you move one of those assets what is the impact on the rest of the service. That is the beauty of it. >> So Nayaki, I really love the discovery conversation and it is a big challenge for most enterprises. AWS announcing 1,300 features this year alone. Amazing skill. But those assets don't look like traditional CI, configuration items, that we've seen in the past. There's server-less, there's databases. What does an asset look like in BMC so that we normalize that and look at it across multiple clouds. >> There are like technology assets but most importantly when we took a look at an asset it is a business asset. You're providing a service. End to end service. The service could be listing as a service for an eBay website. And for that service you have databases. You have application service. You have code running on various parts. That is what discovery does. Being able to discover for that service. That business service that you have. Delivering to your customers or to your business what all is mapped to that service. So when you actually asses that impact. If you move any one of them or bring any one of them down. What is the impact to that business service. >> So obviously something like a dependency. If I have a listing service for eBay and it's designed for eBay process but I move it somewhere else what does that mean towards basically the employee that needs to go and list an item on eBay their job is impeded. >> Yeah so it immediately detects what impact any one of those assets are moved or brought down or shut down for whatever reason what is the impact on the rest of the relationships and also the business outcome or business service that you are providing. >> So one of the things that John likes to take on is the concept of Multi-Cloud. Getting more into this definition of Mutli-Cloud. Is that we're not running workloads everywhere, are we? Saying that we can't defeat gravity and the speed of light. That you're not going to have AI running and AWS and across object storage and Google. Multi-cloud. How are customers using Multi-cloud? >> Yeah, so I would not say you would not have like 20 clouds that you are using. Typically companies have, of course on-prim, everyone has on-prim, all large enterprises. But then they also have a private cloud of their own. But then have one or two public clouds that they may have workloads. They may have AWS for sure and Azure. So typically that's what a customer landscape looks like. But even within these four or five clouds that you have to manage it's still a big landscape that technology leaders have to manage and secure. >> Talk to us about what you guys have heard this week from AWS. One of the things that you mentioned this year alone over 1,300 new services and features. Last year I think it was 1,117. So the accelerated pace of innovation at AWS is mind blowing. Do you think they probably need like a neck brace? They're going at such warp speed. But I'm wondering how does their pace of innovation with your strategic partnership. How does that influence BMC and what are some of the things that excite you about what you've heard this week. >> So a couple of things. The very first one is for our customers, BMC has what we call Remedy, one of the largest suite for helping customers manage ITSM or IT Service Management. Most of our customers are moving that workload into public clouds like AWS so for us instead of trying to run it our own cloud or in our data centers it's easier for our customers to just move that workload into clouds. So with the pace of innovation that AWS is releasing with 1,300 new features, we don't have to invest in all that. Or our customers don't have to invest on the infrastructure there. We can just focus on the app side, the Remedy side. That's one. The second one I was so excited about was Arora. The announcement of Arora on Postgres. We were actually working very closely with AWS right now on certifying Remedy with Arora and Postgres. We are like few weeks, few months away from that announcment and that release and once that gets out all of our customers should be able to migrate to their gravity system onto Arora with using Postgres as a database which is a huge cost savings for companies on the database side. So those are the two big announcements we are very excited about. >> So, I know this talks to the pace of change. So you guys cutting edge to move Remedy to Postgres on Arora. Serverless for Arora was just announced yesterday. How does that impact? >> That even makes it our job even more easier right? For it to be able to just scale elastically without being like dependent on any one instance or one server is I think this tremendously futuristic and can help our customers and for us not to manage those server assets in AWS. Absolutely. >> So reducing friction. What does it mean to consume Remedy as a service versus worrying about all of that infrastructure. What does that actually mean to your customer? >> So it's not consuming Remedy as a service. It's service management as a service. Right. So if you look at customers want to provide IT Service Management to their employees. How they consume that with a combined solution from BMC and AWS is the beauty of our partnership coming together. >> Let me ask you on that front, what is some of the feedback that you're getting from customers that helps reinforce the partnership with AWS and improve it? >> Yeah, in fact, after we announced the partnership with AWS I would say the intake. The flood of questions I got from customers around the world is they're so happy to hear the partnership because now they can have BMC and AWS at the table discussing how we move their workload, which they had on-prim into AWS and leverage the strength and the power of what AWS gives along with the power of what Remedy gives. >> So service management a huge. You know I've heard CEOs and CIOs call Service Management the ERP of IT. Meaning this is the central point where I go to consume IT services. How does Mutli-Cloud impact the consumption of IT services through something like Remedy. >> Yes. So think of it right. In the past you were providing service management for all your on-prim assets. Now your assets are all over Mutli-Cloud. So it is like Multi-Cloud service management. So we do have the next iteration of Remedy which we call Mutli-Cloud Service Management. So now customers can use launches to provide service for their on-prim assets but all their cloud assets through one service management tool. That's one. But even more little futuristic that Viore announced with AWS is what we call Cognitive Service Management. Is service management a future is not reactive, it's proactive. You detect an issue before it actually happens and proactively provide that service and that is where our integration with Alexa and the AI services come from Amazon. >> So as customers prepare to get ready for Multi-Cloud and the interface into Service Management, what are some of the things that they should be thinking about today? >> So as customers, first of all discover, making sure you discover all the assets, plan the phase at which those assets will move into cloud but then don't forget that at the end of the day you're providing a service to your end customers or end employees. How that service is provided through a single, I would say technology set or single suite, will take them a long ways. So that's where AWS and BMC's suite really becomes very powerful as customers are planning this journey. >> You mentioned Alexa for business and of course we heard all about that this morning. I see a smile on your face. What is that gonna mean for BMC? >> So in fact we announced a partnership with Amazon on Alexa for Business. Well think of it when you go to work and instead of typing a ticket for requesting a service, you just ask Alexa. Alexa, my laptop's not working or my phone is having an issue and it automatically >> Alexa, my laptop. (laughing) >> So that is where we call Alexa for Business where it's not just for consumer world it's not entering into what I call the enterprise world and being able to provide that experience, that end user experience right, through what we call virtual agents and virtual assistants like Alexa for customers and employees to just ask a question and the entire service will be fulfilled right through Alexa. >> So obviously some of the first thoughts that come to my mind when it comes to that type of service. I had an Alexa at home for a little while and I should probably start calling it Echo cause we're setting off a bunch of echos all across the world here. But I quickly got rid of it because my nine year old would come in the room and would say "Order ten cases of bubble gum." And there's no authentication. So, how are those types of enterprise issues getting addressed? >> So, that's what we call enterprise grade. How do you bring enterprise rigor into the technology that is coming from the consumer world. That's why when you ask Alexa for a certain service or a request. It will validate whether you have the authorization to get that service. And all of that integration inside our core ITSM Suite is already done and that's where the power of Alexa plus Remedy really becomes powerful. >> So how many cases of gum do you actually have? >> I don't even like gum so it's gonna take her a while to chew through all of that. (laughing) >> Oh well if only we had more time to explore that. Nayaki, thank you so much for coming back visiting us on theCube and sharing the excitement at BMC. Your energy and excitement for what you guys are doing is electric so thank you for sharing that. >> Thank you Lisa. Thank you Keith. It was an absolutely pleasure and thank you everyone. Thanks a bunch. >> Awesome. And we want to thank you for sticking around with us for my co-host Keith Townsend I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live at AWS re:Invent 2017. Don't go anywhere. We have great more segments coming back. (pop tech music)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, welcome to another Wikibon digital community event, this one sponsored by BMC Software. Every organization faces the challenge of how to do service management and operations management better. The ideal is to start bringing them together, but traditionally, they've been undertaken by different groups, often utilizing different tools. And that's what we're going to talk about today in today's digital community event. What can we do to improve our digital business operations, competitiveness, and customer experience, by doing a better job of bringing together those core resources that handle service management and operations management activities. As with all digital community events, this one's going to feature some upfront conversations with a number of thought leaders in this crucial space, and then we're going to run a crowd chat, which will be your opportunity to share your insights, ask your questions, and ultimately, communicate with others like you in the community that focuses on this important issue. So stay through to the end and help us participate in that digital community event. Now, recently, I had an opportunity to attend BMC Helix's Immersion Day, and while there, theCUBE was able to conduct a number of different interviews. One of the best ones we had was a great conversation with Nayaki Nayyar, who is the president of service management and operations management at the BMC Helix division, and Mihir Shukla, who is the CEO of Automation Anywhere. Let's hear what they had to say about the potential of bringing service management and operations management together. >> So, Nayaki, I want to start with you. A year ago, we started on this journey of how this new digital services platform is going to evolve to do more types of work for people. How has BMC's Helix platform evolved in that time? >> So, if you remember last time, it was almost a year back when we launched Helix, which was all around taking the service management capability that we had on prem, made it available in Cloud, containerized, so customers can run in cloud of their choice, and provided experience through various channels, bought as a channel of that customer experience. This is what we had released last time, we call it the three C's for Helix, everything in cloud, containerized, with cognitive capabilities, so customers can transform their experience. In this version, what we are extending Helix is with the operations side, so all the ITOM capabilities that we have in our platform are now a part of Helix, so we have one end-to-end platform, so that customers can discover every asset that they have on prem and cloud, monitor those assets, detect any anomalies, service both for lines of business and for IT, remediate any issues that happen, vulnerabilities that are there in the system, and automatically optimize capacity and cost and holistically, this whole closed loop of operations and service coming together is what this next wave of innovations that we are launching with BMC Helix. >> So, Mihir, Nayaki's talked about, very successfully, and Helix has been a very successful platform for improving user experience, but up front I noted that we're not just talking about human beings as users anymore, we're now talking about software as users. RPA, robotic process automation, is a central feature of some of these new trends. Tell us a little bit about how robotic process automation is driving an increased need for this kind of digital service in operations management capability. >> Sure, think in a high level, you have to think of the new organization as augmented organization that are human and bots working side by side, each doing what they're best at. And so in a specific example of a service organization, where BMC Helix is taking this is, think of this as a utility, where the way you plug it into an electricity outlet and switch on the light and you get the electricity, you plug into the BMC Helix, and behind it you have augmented workflows of chart bots, RPA bots, human beings, each doing what they're best at, and giving a far superior customer experience, unlike any other. That is happening now, and that's the future of service industry. >> But when you plug a human, so to speak, metaphorically, into that system, there's a certain amount of time, there's a certain amount of training, and as a consequence you can have a little bit more predictable scale. That doesn't mean that you don't end up with a lot of complexity, but RPA seems, the potential of RPA seems that you're going to increase the rate at which these users, in this case, digital users, are going to enter into the system, you don't have a training regimen you can attach to them, they have to be tested, they have to be discovered, they have to be put in operation with reliability, how is that ultimately driving the need for some of these new capabilities? >> I think if you think of these bots as digital workers, you almost have to go through the same process that you would go through human beings. You onboard them, in terms of, you configure them, you train them with cognitive capabilities, and then the one difference is they monitor themselves, without any bias, they can give their own performance rating card. But the beauty of this is when human and bots work together, because there are some functions that the bots can do well and then at some point they can hand off to the human beings, and human beings do some of the more interesting work that is based on judgment call, customer service, all of that. So that the combination is the end goal for everybody. >> And to add to what Mihir said, right, that customer experience, whether you're providing an experience to employees or consumers or end customers, that is the ultimate goal, that's the ultimate result of what you want to get, and the speed at which you provide that experience is the accuracy at which you provide experience, the cost at which you provide that experience becomes a comparative differentiation, which is where all this automation, this augmentation that they're doing with humans and bots, is what enables us to do that, right? For all large enterprise customers, major service organizations trying to transform into that future goal. >> But increasingly it seems as though the things that we have to do, to orchestrate and administrate, more users, digital and human, undertaking more complex tasks where each is best applied, is really driving a lot of new data, as I mentioned upfront, an enormous amount of new software, and you said new experiences, but those experiences have to be reliable, have to be secure, they have to be predictable. So that suggests this overwhelming impact of all of these capabilities. You talk about a digital tsunami. What are some of the key things that you think enterprises are going to have to do to start engaging that? >> Yeah, and whether we call it revolution, whether we call it digital transformation, I think what we all are experiencing is a tsunami, tech tsunami, right, tsunami of clouds where you have professional clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, managed clouds. Tsunami of devices, not just the mobile devices, but also as everything is getting connected, IoT devices. Tsunami of channels, as an end user, I want to experience that in the channel of my preference, Slack as a channel, SM as a channel. A tsunami of bots, of conversation bots and RPA bots, so in this tsunami, I think what everyone is trying to figure out is, how do they manage this explosion? It's humanly impossible to do it all manually you have to augment it, with of course, intelligence AIML, but then of course bots become a big part of that augmentation to orchestrate all of that back to back process. >> I would say that this is no longer nice to have, because if you look at it from a more consumer's perspective, last 20 years of digital technologies from Amazons and Googles of the world, Netflix and others, they have created this mindset of instant customer gratification. And we all been trained for it, so what was acceptable five years ago is no longer acceptable in our own lives. And so this new standard of instant result, instant outcome, instant respond, instant delivery, we just expect it, right? Once your end consumer begins to do that, we as a business no longer have a choice, that's writing on the wall. And so what these new platforms are doing, like with BMC Helix and Automation Anywhere, is delivering that instant gratification, right? And when you think about it more and more of the new customers that are millennials, they don't know any other way. So for them, this is the only experience they will relate to, so again, this is not nice to have. It is the only way world will operate, right? >> We're going to turn back to the conversation that I had with Nayaki and Mihir shortly, but first, let's see what BMC's actually doing as they try to bring together service management and operations management, by watching a quick demo that they've prepared. (techno music) (music continues) >> Great demonstration of how these technologies are coming together in a real world sense. Now let's hear more of the conversation I had with Nayaki and Mihir about bringing together service management and operations management, but specifically focusing on how this class of technology is going to be extended, and made even more powerful for business as they think about not just IT, but other classes of automation. Let's hear what they had to say. >> So if you look at large organizations, they have vast amount of applications. Sometimes 400, 800, few thousand. And what we have been doing historically is using people as a human bridges between these applications, and we have operated that way for too long, and that's the world today. >> So humans are the interface, they're the system interfaces. >> Humans are the bridges between applications, and we often call it a swivel chair operations, that's an easiest way to describe it. So what Automation Anywhere does, is it offers this technology platform, robotic process automation, AI in an RTX platform, that integrates all of it together into a seamless automation bot that can go across, and with AI it can make intelligent choices. And so now we can take that, combined with the BMC Helix, and you have a seamless service platform that can deliver a superior experience. >> So we've got now the swivel chair users, now being software, which means that we can discover them more easily, we can monitor them more easily, and that feeds Helix. >> Absolutely, so you know in our consumer world, in our day to day life, we are used to a certain experience of how we consume data or consume experiences with our TVs and all the channels. That experience that we have in our day to day life is what people expect when they walk into the company, right, walk into the enterprise, which every IT organization is trying to figure out how do they get to that level of maturity. So this is what the combination of what we are doing with Helix and Automation Anywhere, brings that consumer grid experiences into an enterprise world. >> So Mihir, when we think about RPA, we're applying it in interesting and innovative ways, no question about it. But there are certain patterns of success, give us some visibility into what you are seeing leads to success, and then what's the future of RPA, how's that going to evolve over the next few years? >> Sure, so RPA has been deployed across virtually every industry and virtually every department. So there are many ways to get started and all of them are right. But often we find is that you can either start in a central organization wherein that organization is doing everything centrally. It is a great way to get started, but eventually we learn that the federated way's the best way to end. Where hundreds of offices all over the world, if you're especially a large organization, each business unit is doing it with IT providing governance and central security and policies, and actual bots running and being implemented all over the world. Eventually for a large-scale transformation, there is a common pattern we have seen among successful customers. >> And where do you think this pattern going to evolve, as enterprises gain more familiarity with it, innovate in new and interesting ways, and as Automation Anywhere and others advance the state of the art, where do you think it's going to end up? >> The rate it's going is, is I define it as an app store experience or a Google Play experience. So if you think about how we operate our mobile devices today, if you want something on your device, you will look for an app that does that. We are getting to a point where there is bot for everything, and a digital worker for everything, so if you need certain job done, you first go to a bot store, that is an Automation Anywhere website, look for a bot that does something, hire or download that bot, get the work done, and it comes prebuilt like many there are works with BMC Helix, and many others. So that is your first way you will look for getting your work done in a new bot economy, and if there's no bot available, then you look for other options. It will transform how we work and how we think of work. >> In many respects, it's the gig economy with perfect contractor, right? And it leads to some very interesting challenges, ultimately, when we start thinking about services. So Nayaki, based on what Mihir just talked about, where does digital services go as RPA joins other classes of users in creating those new experiences at new profit points and new value propositions? >> It becomes a compare of how you provide that service, can become a big competitive differentiation for financial institutions, for Telcos, which is a service industry, right, you provide that service, and like to Mihir's point, when the user hits that switch, they expect the light to come on, so if I'm an end user, the consumer, wanting a service from my Telco provider or from my financial institution, I expect that service to be instantaneous, and the highest accuracy, accuracy at which you provide is going to start driving competitive differentiation from financial institution to financial institution, Telco to Telco, and that's how I see companies differentiating and really surviving or thriving in the long term. >> Now let's hear from a really important partner, a CDO, someone who's thinking about how these technologies are going to be applied to the front lines of business change. Sanjay Srivastava is the CDO at Genpact, and he and I had a great conversation at BMC Immersion Days about what this means to digital business transformation. How will service management and operations management in combination accelerate and make more successful businesses' efforts to transform digitally. Let's hear what Sanjay had to say. >> So tell us a little bit about, what is a digital service outcome and why is it so important? >> Yeah, well I think the reality is that what technology is doing is it's disintermediating the ecosystem, so many of the industries are clients-operated, and they have to go back and reimagine their value proposition at the core of what they do with the use of new, innovative technologies, and it's that intersection of new capabilities, of new innovative business models that really use emerging technologies, but intersect them with their business models, with their business processes, and the requirements of their clients, and help them rethink, reimagine, and deliver their new value proposition. That's really what it's all about. >> So a digital service outcome would then be the things that the business must do and must do well, but ideally, with a different experience or with a different degree of flexibility and agility, or with a different cost profile, have I got that right? >> Correct. >> So when we think about that, what are some of the key elements of a digital service success? >> We like to think about three critical success factors in driving any digital transformation. The first one is the notion of experience, and what I mean by that is not user interface for a piece of software, but the journey of a customer, an employee, a provider, a partner, in engaging with you and your business model. When we think about journey mapping that scientifically, we think about design, thinking on the back of that, and we think about re-imagining what the new experience looks like. One of the largest things we've got in the industry is digital transformation on the back of cost take out of productivity or efficiency is insufficient drive and optimize the value that digital can bring. And using experience as the compass, as sort of the north star in that journey is a meaningful differentiator and driver of business benefit, so that's number one. I think the second area that's become increasingly apparent is the intersection of domain with digital. And the thinking there is that to materialize the benefit of digital in an enterprise, you have to intersect it with the specifics of that business, how users interact, what clients seek, how does business actually happen? We talk about artificial intelligence a lot, we do a lot of work in AI as an example, and the key thing about machine learning is goal orientation, and what is goal orientation? It's about understanding the specifics of the environments, you can actually orient the goal of the machine learning algorithm to deliver high accuracy results. And it's something that can often easily get overlooked, so indexing on the two halves of the whole, the yin and the yang, the piece around digital, and the innovative technologies, and being able to leverage and take advantage of them, but equally, be founded in domain, understand the environment, and use that knowledge to drive the right materialization of the end outcome. And that's the second critical success factor, I think, to get it right. I think the third one is the notion of how do you build a framework for innovation? You know, it's not the sort of thing where a large fortune company, Fortune 500 companies can necessarily experiment and it's a little bit of a go happy go lucky strategy, doesn't really work, you have to innovate at scale, you have to do it in a fundamental fashion, you have to do it as a critical success factor. And so one of the biggest things we focus on is how do you innovate at the edge? Innovation must be at the edge, this is where the rubber meets the road. But governance has to be at the core. >> Well let me build on that for a second, 'cause you said innovation's at the edge, so basically that means where the brand promise is being enacted for the customer, and that could be at an industrial automation setting or it could be in just making a recommendation, it could be any number of things, but it's where the value proposition is realized for the customer. >> Correct, that's exactly right, and that's where innovation must happen. So as a large corporation, you must be able, it's important to set up a framework that allows you to do innovation at the edge, otherwise it's not meaningful innovation if you, "Well, it's just a lot of busy work." And yet as you do that, and as you change your business model, as you bring new components to the equation, how do you drive governance, and it's increasingly becoming more important, you think about, we're going to be in a AI first world increasingly, more and more that's the reality of the world we're going in, and in that AI first world, I work here in Palo Alto, walk into my office, a couple of hundred people any given day. If tomorrow morning I walked in and 100 people didn't show up for work, I would know right away, because I can see them. Now fast forward to an environment where we have digital workers, we have automation bots, we have conversational AI Chatbots. And in that world, understanding which of my AI components are on, which ones are off, which ones showed up for work today, which ones fell sick, and really being able to understand that governance, and that's just the productivity piece of it. Then you think about data and security, AI changes complete dimensions on that. And you think about bias and explainability, it just become increasingly important, a notion of a digital ethics board, and thinking about ethics more pervasively. So I think that companies and clients we serve that do really well in digital transformation are those that key in on those three things, the notion of experience is the true compass for how you drive transformation. The ability to intermix domain and digital in a meaningfully intersecting fashion. And to be thoughtful, proactive, and get governance right up front in the journey to come. >> So let me again build on that a little bit, 'cause people are increasingly recognizing that we're not going to centralize with cloud, we're going to greater distribute. We're going to distribute data more, we're going to distribute function more, but you just added another dimension, that some of us have been thinking about for a long time, and that's this notion of distributing authorities so that an individual at the edge can make the decision based on the data and the resources that are available, with the appropriate set of authorities, and that has to be handled at a central, in a overall coherent governant way. So that leads to the next question. >> And just before you go there, I mean I think the best example of that, is we do that, most corporations do that really well in the financial scheme of things. Businesses at the edge make decisions on a day to day basis on pricing and relationships and so on and so forth, and yet there's a central other committee that looks through the financials and makes sure it meets the right requirements and has the right framework, and much in the same way, we're going to start seeing digital ethics committees that become part of these large corporations as they think about digitizing the business. >> Governance at the end of the day is how do you orchestrate multiple divergent claims against a common set of assets, and being able to do that is absolutely essential, and it leads to this notion of we've got these ideas of digital business, digital services and operations management. How are we going to weave them together utilizing some of these new technologies, new fabrics that are now possible to both achieve the outcomes we're talking about at scale and at speed? >> Yeah, well the technology capabilities are improving really well in that area, and so the good news is they're the set of tools that are now available that give you the ingredients, the components of the recipe that's required to make dinner, if you will. The work that needs to happen is actually how to orchestrate that, to figure out which components need to come in, and how do you pull together a vertical stack that has the right components to meet your needs today, and more importantly, to address the needs of the future, because this is changing like no other time in history. >> You want options with everything you do now, you want to make sure that you have a string of options for the future, and it's especially important here. >> That's right, that's exactly right. And the quick framework we've established there is sort of the three-legged stool of, how do you integrate quickly, how do you modularize your investments and then how do you govern them into one integrated whole, and those become really important. I'll give you examples, much of the work we do, we'll work with a consumer bank for instance, and they'll want to do a robotic process automation engagement, we'll run them for nine months, they'll get 1800 robots up and running. And the next question becomes, well now we have all this data that we didn't really have, because now we have an RPA running, how do I learn some machine learning insights from there, and so we then work with them to actually derive some insights and get these questions answered. And then the engagement changes to, well now that we have this pattern recognition then we understand more questions are going to be asked, how do I respond to those questions, A, automatically, and before they get asked, this notion of next best action. And so you think about that journey of a traditional client, the requirements change from robotics to machine learning to conversational AI to something else, and keeping that string of investments, that innovative sort of streak true, and yet being able to manage, govern, and protect the investments, that's the key role. >> We want to thank all the thought leaders that participated in preparing their thoughts for this digital community event, especially the folks at BMC Software. But now here's your opportunity to weigh in on how you see service management and operations management coming together in your business. How's it going to affect your IT organization, your IT organization's ability to serve your business, and your business overall? This is your opportunity to participate in a crowd chat where the community comes together and shares insights, asks each other questions, and engages with these thought leaders to try to get the answers that you need to move forward on the journey to bring together service management and operations management in your shop. Let's crowd chat!

(dynamic music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBEConversation. This is another very special CUBEConversation in that it's part of a product launch. Today, BMC has come on to theCUBE to launch Helix, a new approach to thinking about cognitive services management. And we're, over the course of the next 20 minutes or so, gonna present some of the salient features of Helix and how it solves critical business problems. And at the end of the segment, at the end of this video segment, we're gonna then go into a CrowdChat and give you, the community, an opportunity to express your thoughts, ask your questions, and get the information that you need from us analysts, from BMC, and also from your peers about what you need to do to exploit cognitive systems management in your business. Now this is a very real problem, this is not something that's being made up. The reality is we're looking at a lot of data-first technologies that are transforming the way business works. Technologies like AI, and machine learning, and deep learning, technologies like big data, having an enormous impact about how businesses behave. These technologies invoke much greater complexity at the application at the systems level and Wikibon strongly believes that we do not understand how businesses can pursue these technologies and these richer applications without finding ways to apply elements of them directly into the IT service management stack. And the reason why is if you don't have high-quality, lower-cost, speedy automation inside how you run your service management overall platform, then it's going to create uncertainty up hiring stack and that's awful for digital business. So to better understand and take us through this launch today, we've got some great guests. And it starts, obviously, with the esteemed Nayaki Nayyar who is the President of the Digital Services Management business unit at BMC, CUBE alum. Nayaki, thanks very much for being here. >> Thank you, Peter, really excited to be here and look forward to our conversation. We are too excited about the launch of BMC Helix and happy to share the details with you. >> So let's start with the why. Obviously, there's a... You know, I've articulated kind of a generalization of some of the challenges that businesses face but it goes deeper than that. Take us through some of the key issues that your customers are facing as they think about this transition to a new way of running their business. >> So, let's put ourselves in the customers' shoes. Then you look at what their journey looks like. Customers are evolving from the online world into the digital world and what we see is, what we call, cognitive world. And the way their journey looks like, especially as customers are entering into the digital world, there are proliferation of clouds. They don't have just one cloud, they have private clouds, hybrid clouds, managed clouds, we call it multi-cloud. So they're entering into a multi-cloud world. In addition, there's also proliferation of devices. It's not just phones that we have to worry about now. As IoT's getting more and more relevant and prevalent, how you help customers manage all the devices and how you provide the service through not just one channel but channel of our customers' or consumers' preference. It could be a Slack as a channel, SMS as a channel, Skype as a channel. So across this multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-channel, this explosion of technology that is happening in every customer's landscape, and to address this explosion, is where AIML, chatbots, and virtual agents really play a role for them to handle the complexities. So the automation that AIML, chatbots, and virtual agents bring to help customers address these multi-cloud, multi-channel, multi-device world is what we call how we have them evolve from ITSM to cognitive services management. >> Let's talk about that a little bit. We'll get into exactly what you're announcing in a second but historically when we thought about service management we thought about devices. What you're really describing, this transition is, again that notion of how all of these different elements come together in, sometimes, very unique ways and that's what's driving the need for the cognitive. It's not just, you can do multiple clouds, multi-devices, multiple channels, it's your business can put them together in ways that serve your business' needs the best. And now we need a service management capability that can attend to those resources. >> Absolutely. So if you go 10, 15 years back, BMC had a great portfolio. We had Remedy Service Management Suite. We also had Discovery to help customers discover the on-prem assets and provide its service to remedy service management. That's what we had, we were very successful. ITSM, as a category, was created for that whole space. But in this new world of multi-cloud, right, where customers have private clouds, managed clouds, hybrid clouds, multi-devices where IoT is becoming more and more relevant, and multi-channel, customers now have to discover these assets. We call it Discovery as-a-Service but now they can discover the assets across AWS, Azure, OpenStack, and Cloud Foundry and evolve into providing service from reactive to proactive service, and that's what we call Remedy as-a-Service, and then extend that service beyond IT to also lines of business. Now you wanna also provide that service to HR, and procurement, and also various lines of business. And the most important thing is how you provide that experience to your end-users and your end-customers is what we call Digital Workplace-as-a-Service where now customers can consume that service in channel of their preference. They can consume that service through mobile device, of course through web, but also Slack, SMS, chatbots, and virtual agents. So that's what we are combining all of that, that entire suite, we are containerizing that suite using Dockers and Kubernetes so that now customers can run in their choice of cloud. They can run it in AWS cloud, Azure cloud, or in BMC cloud. This whole suite is what we call BMC Helix and helps our customers evolve from ITSM to what we call cognitive services management. >> So that's what BMC's announcing today. >> Yes. >> It's this notion of BMC Helix. >> Yes. >> And it's predicated on the idea, if I can, also of, not only you're going to use these technologies to manage new stuff, we have to bring the old stuff forward. Additionally, we're gonna see a mix of labor, or people, and automation as companies find the right mix for them. >> Right. >> And so we wanna bring and sustain these practices and these approaches forward. Nobody likes a forced migration, especially not in an IT organization. >> Right. >> So that's how we see Helix. if I got this right. >> Yes. >> Helix is gonna help customers bring their existing assets, existing practices, modernize them using some of the new technologies and that's how we get to this new cognitive vision. >> Absolutely. The investments customers have already made in their on-prem assets, in their managing their IT assets, that same concepts come into this new multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-channel world but now it extends beyond that. It extends beyond just IT to also lines of business and also all these, what we call, omni-channel experiences that you can provide. And this whole suite is, what we call, 3 C's, Helix stands for 3 C's. Everything as a service, Remedy as-a-Service, Discovery as-a-Service, Business Workplace as-a-Service, containerized so that customers can run this in the choice of their cloud, they can run in AWS cloud, Azure cloud, or our cloud with cognitive capabilities, with AIML, and chatbots. And that's how we help them evolve from that existing implementations to this whole new world as they enter into the cognitive world. >> Exciting stuff. >> Absolutely. We are very excited about it. We've been working with a lot of customers already, and we have made really, really good traction. >> So let's do this, Nayaki, let's take a look at a product video that kinda describes how this all comes together in a relatively simple, straightforward way. >> Absolutely. (upbeat music) >> Hi, Peter Burris again, welcome back. We're talking more about BMC's Helix announcement. Great product video. Once again, we're here with Nayaki Nayyar, but we're also being joined by Vidhya Srinivasan who's in Marketing within the Digital Services Management unit at BMC. Thank you very much for joining us in theCUBE. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> So we've heard a lot about the problems, we've heard a lot about BMC Helix as a solution, but obviously it's more than just the technology. There's things that customers have to think about, about how these technologies, how service management, cognitive service management's going to be impacting the business. As businesses become more digital, technology and related services get dragged more deeply into functions. So, Nayaki, tell us a little bit more about how the outcomes within business, the capabilities of businesses are gonna change as a consequence of applying these technologies. >> Absolutely, Peter. So if you look at, traditionally, IT service management was a very reactive process. Every ticket that came in was manually created, assigned, and routed. That was a very reactive process. But as we enter into this cognitive world and you apply intelligence, AIML, you evolve into what we call a proactive and predictive. Before an issue actually happens, you want to resolve that issue. And that's what we call the cognitive services management. And the real business outcomes, you put yourself in a customer's shoes who's providing this service and evolving into this proactive, predictive, and cognitive world, they wanna provide that service at the highest accuracy, at the highest speed, and the lowest cost. That's what is gonna become competitive advantage for every company indifferent of the industry. They could be in a telco, they could be in high-tech, or pharmaceutical. It doesn't matter which industry they are in, how they provide this service at the highest accuracy, highest speed, and lowest cost is gonna be fundamentally a competitive advantage for these customers. >> And when we talk about accuracy, again we're not just talking about accuracy in a technology context. We're talking about accuracy in terms of a brand promise, perhaps. >> Absolutely. >> Or a service promise, or a product promise. >> Yes. >> That's the context. We wanna make sure that the customer is getting what they expect fast, with accuracy, and at low cost. >> Right, every time you tweet or you're SMS-ing your service provider, you expect that response to be at the highest accuracy, at the speed, and the cost. >> So when we start talking about multi-channel, Vidhya, what we're really saying is that this is not just your, you know, this is not just service management for the traditional technology service desk. We're talking about service management for other personas, other individuals, other consumers as well. Take us through that a little bit. >> Yeah, that's right. So we actually take a very holistic approach, right, across the enterprise. So we have end-users who are, at the end of the day, the key subscribers or consumers of our service and we wanna make sure they're very happy with what we provide. We have the agents which kinda goes to the IT persona that people know about in the service desk. But then, as Nayaki said earlier, it's also about extending to a lines of business so you have HR agents, right, people who support HR requests, people who support facilities or procurement request. So making sure that the agent persona is able to do everything that they need to do at the most efficiency level that they can so that they can meet their SLAs to their end consumers is a big part of what Helix, BMC Helix and cognitive service management can provide. And ultimately, when you think about this transformation and where they wanna go, there's a lot of custom applications and custom needs that businesses have. So really thinking about the developer persona and how you actually embed and build intelligent applications through our cognitive microservices that BMC Helix provides is a big part of that value proposition we provide. So as you navigate through this journey and become a cognitive enterprise, how do you make sure that all of these personas throughout your enterprise is able to deliver and get value out of this is what BMC Helix provides for the whole enterprise. >> So the whole concept of incorporating these cognitive capabilities into a service management stack allows us to not only envision, in a traditional way, more complex applications but actually extend this out to new classes of users because we are masking a lot of the complexity and a lot of the uncertainty associated with how this stuff works from that customer. >> That's correct. >> For end-users, for agents, and for developers, and consumers, and customers too. >> Great. >> That's good. >> So you know what... Great conversation. But let's hear what a customer has to say about it, shall we? >> Absolutely, okay. >> My name is Marco Jongen. I work for a company called DSM. And I'm the Director for Service Management within the Global Business Services department. Royal DSM is a global science-based company active in health, nutrition, and materials. And by connecting our unique competencies in life science and in material sciences, DSM is driving economic prosperity, environmental progress, and social advance to create sustainable value for all stakeholders simultaneously. The Global Business Service department is serving the 20,000 employees of DSM spread over 200 locations globally. We are handling, annually, about 600,000 tickets, and we are supporting four business functions: finance, HR, procurement, and IT. We started together with BMC on a shared services transformation across IT, HR, finance, and procurement. And we created a unified ticketing system and a self-service portal using the Remedy system and the Digital Workplace environment. And with this, we are now able to handle all functions in one unified ticketing tool and giving visibility to all our employees with questions related to finance, HR, purchasing, and IT. We were still have and involved with BMC in bringing this product to the next level and we are very excited in the work we have done with BMC so far. >> That was great to hear Royal DSM is transforming its shared services organization with cognitive services management. But, Nayaki, there's no such thing as an easy transformation especially one of this magnitude. We're talking about digital business which is, we're using data assets differently, it's affecting virtually every feature of business today. And now we've got a technology set that's gonna have potentially an enormous impact on IT but everything that IT is being, or everywhere that IT is being employed. That kind of a transformation is not something that people do lightly. They expect their suppliers to help them out. So what is BMC gonna do to ensure that customers are successful as they go through this transformation to cognitive services management? >> Absolutely, Peter. I always say these transformations are not one-month, two-month transformations. These are multi-year transformations and it's a journey that customers go through. We partner very closely with customers in this journey, assessing their requirements, understanding what their future looks like, and helping them every step of the way. Especially in service management, this change, this transformation that is happening, is gonna be very disruptive to their end-to-end processes. Today, all service desks are manned by individuals. Every ticket that comes in gets manually created, assigned, and routed. But if you fast forward into the future world in the next two to three years, that service desk function, which is especially level zero, level one, level two, service desk function, will completely get replaced by bots or virtual agents. It could be 50-50, 70-30, you can pick what the percentage-- >> Whatever the business needs. >> Right? But it is coming. And it is very important for customers to see that change and that transformation that is happening and to be ready for it. And that's where we are working very closely with them in making sure it's not just a system transformation. It's also the people side and the process that have to change. And companies who can do that, what we call cognitive service management using bots and virtual agents at the highest accuracy, highest speed, and the lowest cost, I keep coming back to that because that is what is gonna give them the highest competitive advantage. >> Lot to think about. >> Absolutely. >> Exciting future, crucial for IT if it's gonna succeed moving forward, but even if the business choose to use cloud, you're going to need to be able to discover and sustain service management at a very, very high level. >> Absolutely. How we discover, how we help them discover, how we help them provide that service proactively, predictively, and provide that experience through omni-channel experiences, what this whole thing brings together for our customers. >> Excellent, this has been a great conversation. Nayaki Nayyar, President of BMC's Digital Services Management business unit. Thank you very much for being here on theCUBE and working with us to help announce Helix. Now don't forget folks, that immediately after this, we'll be running the CrowdChat. And in that CrowdChat, your peers, BMC experts, us analysts will be participating to help answer your questions, share experience, identify simpler ways of doing more complex things. So join us in the CrowdChat. Once again, Nayaki, thank you very much. >> Thank you, Peter, and thank you everyone. Thank you all.