>>We're back in Boston, the Cube's coverage of AWS reinforced 2022. My name is Dave ante. Steve Malanney is here as the CEO of Aviatrix longtime cube alum sort of collaborator on super cloud. Yeah. Uh, which we have an event, uh, August 9th, which you guys are participating in. So, um, thank you for that. And, yep. Welcome to the cube. >>Yeah. Thank you so great to be here as >>Always back in Boston. Yeah. I'd say good show. Not, not like blow me away. We were AWS, um, summit in New York city three weeks ago. I >>Took, heard it took three hours to get in >>Out control. I heard, well, there were some people two I, maybe three <laugh>, but there was, they expected like maybe nine, 10,000, 19,000 showed up. Now it's a free event. Yeah. 19,000 people. >>Oh, I didn't know it >>Was that many. It was unbelievable. I mean, it was packed. Yeah. You know, so it's a little light here and I think it's cuz you know, everybody's down the Cape, >>There are down the Cape, Rhode Island that's after the fourth. The thing is that we were talking about this. The quality of people are pretty good though. Yeah. Right. This is there's no looky lose it's everybody. That's doing stuff in cloud. They're moving in. This is no longer, Hey, what's this thing called cloud. Right. I remember three, four years ago at AWS. You'd get a lot of that, that kind of stuff. Some the summit meetings and things like that. Now it's, we're a full on deployment mode even >>Here in 2019, the conversation was like, so there's this shared responsibility model and we may have to make sure you understand. I mean, nobody's questioning that today. Yeah. It's more really hardcore best practices and you know how to apply tools. Yeah. You know, dos and don't and so it's a much more sophisticated narrative, I think. Yeah. >>Well, I mean, that's one of the things that Aviatrix does is our whole thing is architecturally. I would say, where does network security belong in the network? It shouldn't be a bolt on it. Shouldn't be something that you add on. It should be something that actually gets integrated into the fabric of the network. So you shouldn't be able to point to network security. It's like, can you point to the network? It's everywhere. Point to air it's everywhere. Network security should be integrated in the fabric and that wasn't done. On-prem that way you steered traffic to this thing called a firewall. But in the cloud, that's not the right architectural way. It it's a choke point. Uh, operationally adds tremendous amount of complexity, which is the whole reason we're going to cloud in the first place is for that agility and the ability to operationally swipe the card and get our developers running to put in these choke points is completely the wrong architecture. So conversations we're having with customers is integrate that security into the fabric of the network. And you get rid of all those, all those operational >>Issues. So explain that how you're not a, a checkpoint, but if you funnel everything into one sort of place >>In the, so we are a networking company, uh, it is uh, cloud networking company. So we, we were born in the cloud cloud native. We, we are not some on-prem networking solution that was jammed in the cloud, uh, wrapped >>In stack wrapped >>In, you know, or like that. No, no, no. And looking for wires, right? That's VM series from Palo. It doesn't even know it's in the cloud. Right. It's looking for wires. Um, and of course multicloud, cuz you know, Larry E said now, could you believe that on stage with sat, Nadela talking about multi-cloud now you really know we've crossed over to this is a, this is a thing, whoever would've thought you'd see that. But anyway, so we're networking. We're cloud networking, of course it's multi-cloud networking and we're gonna integrate these intelligent services into the fabric. And one of those is, is networking. So what happens is you should do security everywhere. So the place to do it is at every single point in the network that you can make a decision and you embed it and actually embed it into the network. So it's that when you're making a decision of does that traffic need to go somewhere or not, you're doing a little bit of security everywhere. And so what, it looks like a giant firewall effectively, but it's actually distributed in software through every single point in a network. >>Can I call it a mesh? >>It's kind of a mesh you can think of. Yeah, it's a fabric. >>Okay. It's >>A, it's a fabric that these advanced services, including security are integrated into that fabric. >>So you've been in networking much of >>Your career career, >>37 years. All your career. Right? So yay. Cisco Palo Alto. Nicera probably missing one or two, but so what do you do with all blue coat? Blue coat? What do you do with all that stuff? That's out there that >>Symantics. >>Yes. <laugh> keep going. >>Yeah, I think that's it. That's >>All I got. Okay. So what do you do with all that stuff? That's that's out there, you rip and replace it. You, >>So in the cloud you mean yeah. >>All this infrastructure that's out there. What is that? Well, you >>Don't have it in the right. And so right now what's happening is people, look, you can't change too many things. If you're a human, you know, they always tell you don't change a job, get married and have a kid or something all in the same year. Like they just, just do one of 'em cuz you it's too much. When people move to the cloud, what they do is they tend to take what they do on Preem and they say, look, I'm gonna change one thing. We're gonna go to the cloud, everything else. I'm gonna keep the same. Cuz I don't wanna change three things. So they kind of lift and shift their same mentality. They take their firewalls, their next gen fire. I want them, they take all the things that they currently do. And they say, I'm gonna try to do that in the cloud. >>It's not really the right way to do it. But sometimes for people that are on-prem people, that's the way to get started and I'll screw it up and not screw it up and, and not change too many things. And look, I'm just used to that. And, and then I'll, then I'll go to change things, to be more cloud native, then I'll realize I can get rid of this and get rid of that and do that. But, but that's where people are. The first thing is bring these things over. We help them do that, right? From a networking perspective, I'll make it easier to bring your old security stuff in. But in parallel to that, we start adding things into the fabric and what's gonna happen is eventually we start adding all these things and things that you can't do separately. We start doing anomaly detection. We start doing behavioral analysis. Why? Because the entire network, we are the data plan. We see everything. And so we can start doing things that a standalone device can't do because not all the traffic steered to them. It can only control what's steered to you. And then eventually what's happening is people look at that device. And then they look at us and then they look at the device and they look at us and they go, why do I have both of this? And we go, I don't know. >>You don't need it. >>Well, can I get rid of that other thing? That's a tool. >>Sure. And there's not a trade off. There's not a trade off. You >>Don't have to. No. Now people rid belts and suspenders. Yeah. Cause it's just, who has, who has enough? Who has too much security buddy? They're gonna, they're gonna do belt suspenders. You know anything they can do. But eventually what will happened is they'll look at what we do and they'll go, that's good enough. That happened to me. When I was at Palo Alto networks, we inserted as a firewall. They kept their existing firewall. They had all these other devices and eventually all those went away and you just had a NextGen >>Firewall just through attrition, >>Through Atian. You're like, you're looking, you go, well, that platform is doing all these functions. Same. Thing's gonna happen to us. The platform of networking's gonna do all your network security devices. So any tool or agent or external, you know, device that you have to steer traffic to ISS gonna go away. You're not gonna need it. >>And, and you talking multi-cloud obviously, >>And then don't wanna do the same thing. Whether man Azure, you know the same. >>Yeah. >>Same, same experie architecture, same experience, same set of services. True. Multi-cloud native. Like you, that's what you want. And oh, by the way, skill, gap, skill shortage is a real thing. And it's getting worse. Cause now with the recession, you think you're gonna be able to add more people. Nope. You're gonna have less people. How do I do this? Any multicloud world with security and all this kind of stuff. You have to put the intelligence in the software, not on your people. Right? >>So speaking of recession. Yep. As a CEO of a well funded company, that's got some momentum. How are you approaching it? Do you have like, did you bring in the war time? Conig I mean, you've been through, you know, downturns before. This is you are you >>I'm on war time already. >>Okay. So yeah. Tell me more about how you you're kind of approaching this >>So recession down. So didn't change what we were doing one bit, because I run it that way from the very beginning. So I've been around 30 years, that's >>Told me he he's like me. You know what he said? >>Yeah. Or maybe >>I'm like, I want be D cuz he said, you know, people talk about, you know, only do things that are absolutely necessary during times like this. I always do things that are only, >>That's all I >>Do necessary. Why would you ever do things that aren't necessary? >><laugh> you'd be surprised. Most companies don't. Yeah. Uh, recession's very good for people like snowflake and for us because we run that way anyway. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, I, I constantly make decisions that we have to go and dip there's people that aren't right for the business. I move 'em out. Like I don't wait for some like Sequoia stupid rest in peace. The world's ending fire all your people that has no impact on me because I already operated that way. So we, we kind of operate that way and we are, we are like sat Nadel even came out and kind of said, I don't wanna say cloud is recession proof, but it kind of is, is we are so look, our top customer spends 5 million a year. Nothing. We haven't even started yet. David that's minuscule. We're not macro. We're micro 5 million a year for these big enterprises is nothing right. SA Nadel is now starting to count people who do billion dollar agreements with him billion over a period of number of years. Like that's the, the scale we have not even >>Gun billion dollar >>Agreements. We haven't even under begun to understand the scope of what's happening in the cloud. Right. And so yeah, the recession's happening. I don't know. I guess it's impacting somebody. It's not impacting me. It's actually accelerating things because it's a flight to quality and customers go and say, I can't get gear on on-prem anyway, cuz of the, uh, shortage, you know, the, uh, uh, get chips. Um, and that's not the right thing. So guess what the recession says, I'm gonna stop spending more money there and I'm gonna put it into the cloud. >>All right. So you opened up Pandora's box, man. I wanna ask you about your sort of management philosophy. When you come into a company to take, to go lead a company like that. Yeah. How, what, what's your approach to assess the team? Who do you, who do you decide? How do you decide who to keep on the bus? Who to throw off the bus put in the right seats. So how long does that take you? >>Doesn't take long. When I join, we were 30, 30, 8 people. We're now 525. Um, and my view on everything and I I've never met Frank Lubin, but I guarantee you, he has the same philosophy. You have a one year contract me included next year, the board might come to me and say, you were the right CEO for this year. You're not next year. Ben Horowitz taught me that it's a one year contract. There's no multi-year contract. So everybody in the company, including the CEO has a one year >>Contract. So you would say that to the board. Hey, if you can find somebody better, >>If, and, and you know what, I'll be the first one to pull myself, fire myself and say, we're, we're replacing me with somebody better right now. There isn't anybody better. So it's me. So, okay, next year maybe there's somebody better. Or we hit a certain point where I'm not the right guy. I'll I'll, I'll pull myself out as the CEO, but also internally the same thing just because you're the right guy this year. And we hire people for the, what you need to do this year. We're not gonna, we don't hire, oh, like this is the mistake. A lot of companies make, well, we wanna be a billion dollars in sales. So we're gonna go hire some loser from HPE. Who's worked at a company for a billion dollars. And by the way has no idea how they became a billion dollars, right. In revenue or billions of dollars. >>But we're gonna go hire 'em because they must know more than we do. And what every single time you bring them in what you realize, they're idiots. They have no idea how we got to that. And so you, you don't pre-hire for where you want to be. You hire for where you are that year. And then if it's not right, and then if it's not right, you'd be really nice to them. Have great severance packages, be, be respectful for people and be honest with them. I guarantee you Frank, Salman's not, if you're not just have this conversation with a sales guy before I came into here, very straight conversation, Northeast hockey player mentality. We're straight. If you're not working out or I don't think you're doing things right. You're gonna know. And so it's a one year, it's a one year contract. That's what you do. So you don't have time. You don't the luxury of >>Time. So, so that's probably the hardest part of, of any leadership job is, and people don't like confrontation. They like to put it off, but you don't run away from it. It's >>All in a confrontation, right? That's what relationships have built. Why do war buddies hang out with each other? Cuz they've gone through hell, right? It's in the confrontation. And it's, it's actually with customers too, right? If there's an issue, you don't run from it. You actually bring it up in a very straightforward manner and say, Hey, we got a problem, right? They respect you. You respect them, blah, blah, blah. And then you come out of it and go, you know, you have to fight like, look with your wife. You have to fight. If you don't fight, it's not a relationship you've gotta see in that, in that tension is where the relationship's >>Built. See, I should go home and have a fight tonight. You gotta have a fight with your wife. <laugh> you know, you mentioned Satia and Nadella and Larry Ellison. Interesting point. I wanna come back to that. What Oracle did is actually pretty interesting, do we? For their use case? Yeah. You know, it's not your thing. It's like low latency database across clouds. Yeah. Who would ever thought that? But >>We love it. We love it because it drives multi-cloud it drives. Um, and, and, and I actually think we're gonna have multi-cloud applications that are gonna start happening. Um, right now you don't, you have developers that, that, that kind of will use one cloud. But as we start developing and you call it the super cloud, right. When that starts really happening, the infrastructure's gonna allow that networking and network security is that bottom layer that Aviatrix helps once that gets all handled. The app, people are gonna say, so there's no friction. So maybe I can use autonomous database here. I can use this service from GCP. I can use that service and, and put it all into one app. So where's the app run. It's a multicloud app. Doesn't exist today. >>No, that doesn't happen today. >>It's it's happen. It's gonna happen. >>But that's kind of what the vision was. No, seven, eight years ago of what >>It's >>Gonna, that would be, you know, the original premise of hybrid. Right? Right. Um, I think Chuck Hollis, the guy was at EMC at the time he wrote this piece on, he called it private cloud, but he was really describing hybrid cloud application and running in both places that never happened. But it's starting to, I mean, the infrastructure is getting put in place to enable that, I guess is what you're saying. >>Yep. >>Yeah. >>Cool. And multicloud is, is becoming not just four plus one is a lot of enterprises it's becoming plus one, meaning you're gonna have more and more. And then there won't be infrastructure clouds like AWS and so forth, but it's gonna be industry clouds. Right? You've you've talked about that again, back to super clouds. You're gonna have Goldman Sachs creating clouds and you're gonna have AI companies creating clouds. You're gonna have clouds at the edge, you know, for edge computing and all these things all need to be networked with network security integrated. And you mentioned fact >>Aviatrix you mentioned Ben Horowitz, that's mark Andreesen. All, all companies are software companies. All companies are becoming cloud companies. Yeah. Or, or they're missing missing opportunities or they might get disrupted. >>Yeah. Every single company I talk to now, you know, whether you're Heineken, they don't think of themselves as a beer company anymore. We are the most technologically, you know, advanced brewer in the world. Like they all think they're a technology company. Now, whether you're making trucks, whether you're making sneakers, whether you're making beer, you're now a technology company, every single company in >>The world, we are too, we're we're building a media cloud. You're you know, John's, it's a technology company laying that out and yeah. That's we got developers doing that. That's our, that's our future. Yep. You know? Cool. Hey, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Great to see you. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back right after this short break. It keeps coverage. AWS reinforced 20, 22 from Boston. Keep it right there. >>You tired? How many interviewed.

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome back to the cube's ongoing coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm excited to introduce our next segment. We're going to dig into the intersection of machines and humans and the changing nature of work, worker productivity, and the potential of humans. With me is Glenn Finch, who is the global managing partner for data and AI at IBM Glenn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave. Good to be with you, always a lot of fun to chat. >> I'm interested in this concept that you've been working on about amplifying worker potential. You've got humans, you've got digital workers coming together. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing at that intersection. >> You know, it's interesting for most of my career I've always thought about amplifying human worker potential. And, you know, I would say over the last five years, you know we start to think about this concept of digital workers and amplifying their potential so that human potential can extend even further. What's cool is when we get them both to work together: amplifying digital worker potential, amplifying human worker potential, to radically change how service is experienced by an end consumer. I mean, that's really the winner is when you start seeing the end consumer, the end user fundamentally feeling the difference in the experience. >> I mean, a lot of the, you see a lot of the trade press and the journalists, they like to focus on the sort of the negative of automation. But when you talk to people who have implemented things take, for example, RPA, they're so happy that they're not having to do these menial tasks anymore. And then it's sort of the interesting discussion is, okay, well, what are you doing with your free time? What are you doing with your weekends? So how should we be thinking about that? What you, what you called amplifying human worker potential, what has to occur for that outcome? >> And you know, that all my life I've spent time making money for people, right? And this last year I was involved in a project where it, it fundamentally changed is tied to answer that exact question. You know, the service men and women in America who are willing to risk their lives, you know for our country, they file claims for medical benefits. And on average, it would take 15 days to get a response. We actually, for about 70 or 80% of them we've taken that down to like 15 minutes. And to do that, you can't just drop in a RPA. You can't just drop in AI. You, it's not one thing, right? It's this, it's this seamless interaction between digital workers and human workers, right? So that a lot of the more routine mundane tasks can be done by AI and, and robotics, but all of the really hard complex cases that only a human being can adjudicate, that's what the folks that were doing the more mundane work can go focus on. So, I mean, that's what makes me come to work every day is if I can change the life of a service man or woman that was willing to risk their lives for our country. So that that's, that's the concept. Now, the critical piece of what I said, it's not about implementing AI and robotics anymore, because a lot of that starts to get very rote, but picking up on, okay, we've liberated this block of human capability. How do we reposition it? How do we re-skill it? How do we get them to focus on new things? That's just as important the human change aspect, incredibly important. >> Yeah. I mean, that's interesting, because you're right. I mean, the downside, you mentioned RPA a lot of it is paving the cow path and you know the human in the loop piece has been has been missing and that's obviously changing. But what about the flip side of that equation? Where, you know, you asked the question, okay what can humans do that machines can't do? That equation you know, continues to evolve, but maybe you could talk about where you've amplified the digital worker potential. >> Yeah. So, you know, one of our clients has Anthem and you know, they've been on a variety of programs with us to talk about this, but, you know we just recorded, you know, another session with them for Think where the Chief Technology Officer came and talked about how they wanted to radically change their member experience. And when you think about the last year, I mean, I don't know, Dave, I know you travel a lot cause I see you in all the places that I'm in. But I don't know if you remember, like 15 months ago if you had to wait on the phone for two minutes you thought it was an eternity, right? You're like, what's the matter with me? I'm a frequent flyer. I deserve a better service than this. Then as COVID started roll around, those wait times were two hours, and then 30 days into COVID, if you got a call back within two days or two weeks, it was a blessing, right? So all of our expectations changed in an instant, right? So I have to say over the last 12 to 15 months that's where we've been spending a lot of our time in all of those human contact, human touch places to radically transition the ability to be responsive and touch people with the same experience that we had 15 months ago to get an answer back in two minutes. You can't get enough people right now to do that. And so we're forced to make sure that the digital experience is what that needs to be. So the digital worker has to be up and on, and extending the brand experience the same way that the human worker was back when everybody could be at a call center. That make sense, Dave? >> Yeah. I mean, what I think I like about this conversation Glenn is it's not an either/or, it's not a zero-sum game, which it kind of, they sort of used to be, I mean we've talked about this before humans and machines have always replaced humans at certain tasks, but it never really had cognitive tasks. And that's why I think there's a lot of fear out there, but what you're talking about is, is a potential to amplify both human and digital capabilities. And I think that people might look at that and say, well, wait a minute. Isn't it a zero-sum game, but it but it's not. Explain why. >> Yeah. So we're never finding the zero-sum game, because there is always something for people to do, right? And so, you know I talked about the one amplification of digital worker at Anthem. Let me switch to an amplification of a human worker. So state of Rhode Island, you know, we had the great honor to work with their governor and their department of health and human services around again, around the whole COVID thing. We started out just answering basic questions and helping with contact racing. And then, from there, we moved into, you know helping them with their data in AI, being able to answer questions. Why are there hotspots? Why, you know, should I shut this portion of the city down? Should I shut bars down? Should I do this? And the governor and the health and human services director were constantly saying in press briefings in the morning. Well, you know, we learned from our partners IBM that we want to consider this, right? And we did pinpoint vaccinations and other things like that. To me, that's that whole continuum. So, you know, we liberated some people from one spot. They went to work in another spot, all human beings guided by AI. So, you know, I think this is all about, you know for the first time in our lives, being able to realize sort of the, the vaulted member experience or client experience that everybody's already talked about using a blend of digital workers and human workers. It's just, it's all about the experience I think. >> I mean, you're, you're laying out some really good outcomes and you mentioned some of the, you know, the folks in the military, the healthcare examples and I'm struck because if you think about the, look at the numbers, I mean the productivity gains over the last 20 years particularly in the US and Europe, it's not the case for China because their productivity is exploding, but but it's gone down. And so when you think about the big problems that we face in society: climate change, income inequality, I mean these are big chewy problems that, you know aren't going to, humans, you just can't throw humans at the problem that's, that's been been proven. And I'm curious as to if, you know how you see it in terms of some of those other outcomes of, and the potential that is there. And, can you give us a glimpse as to what tech is involved underneath all of this? >> Sure. So, you know the first one outcomes you know that whole picture changes with the business cycle, right? I'd love to tell you that it's always these three outcomes, but, you know during downturns and business cycles cost-based outcomes are, you know, are paramount, because people are thinking about survival, right? In upticks, people are worried about, you know converting new business, growth, they're worried about net promoter score, they're worried about experience score. And then over the last 12 to 18 months, you know we've seen this whole concept of carbon footprint and sustainability all tied into the outcomes. So, hey, did you realize that shifting these 22 legacy applications from here to the cloud would reduce your carbon footprint by 3%? No. Right? And so, the big hitters are always, you know, the, the cost metric, the sort of time to value or the whole cycle time and the process and net promoter score. Those are generally in all of the, you know all the plays, obviously the bookends, you know around what's happening with, you know, the the economy, what's happening with carbon, what's happening with sustainability are always in there. Now on the technology side, boy, that's the cool part about working for IBM, right? Is that there's a new thing that shows up on my door every two weeks from either the math and science labs, or from a new ecosystem partner. And that's one of the things that I will say about you know, over the last 12 to 15 months, you've seen this massive shift from IBM to go away from pure blue, to embrace the whole ecosystem. So, you know, Dave the stuff I work with every day is you know, AI, computer vision, blockchain, automation, quantum, connected operations, not just software robots but now human robots, digital twin, all these things where we are digitally rendering what used to be a very paper-based legacy, right? So, boy, I couldn't be more excited to be a part of that. And then now with the opening up to all the hyperscalers, the Microsoft, the Google, the Amazon, the, you know, Salesforce, Adobe, all those folks, it's like a candy store. And quite honestly, my single greatest challenge is to kind of bring all of that together and point it at a series of three or four buyers at a chief marketing officer, experience officer for the whole customer piece. At a chief human resource officer around the town piece and at a CFO or a chief procurement officer for finance and supply chain. I'm sorry to answer, so, you know, long-winded, but it's, it's awesome out there. >> That was a great answer. And I think, you know, I joked the other day, Glenn that Milton Friedman must be turning over in his grave because he said, you know the only job of a company is to make profits for its shareholders and increase shareholder value. But, ironically, you know things like ESG, sustainability, climate change, they actually make business sense. So it's really not antithetical to, you know Friedman economics necessarily, but it's a good business. And I think, I think the other thing that I'm excited about is that there is some like deep tech we're seeing an explosion of of something as fundamental as processing power like we've never seen before, but he talks about, you know Moore's law being dead well, okay. With the doubling of of processor performance every 24 months, we're now at a quadrupling when you include GPU's and NPUs and accelerators and all that. I mean, that is going to power the the next wave of machine intelligence. And that really is exciting. >> Yeah. I, you know, it's I feel blessed every day to come to work that you know, I can, amass all these technologies and change how human beings experience service. I mean that's, man, that whole service experience that's what I've lived for, for, you know two and a half decades in my career, is to not to just to make and deploy stuff that's cool technically, but to change people's lives. I mean, that's it for me, that's, you know, that's that's the way that I want to ride, so I couldn't be more excited to do that stuff. >> Well Glenn thanks so much for coming on your passion shows right through the camera. And hopefully we're, face-to-face, you know, sometime soon maybe, maybe later on this year, but for sure. Knock on wood, 2022. All right. Hey, great to see you, thank you so much >> Dave. Same to you, thanks. Have a great rest of the day. >> All right, thank you. And thanks for following along with our continuing broadcast of IBM Think 2021, you're watching the cube the leader, digital tech coverage, be right back.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, welcoming back to the program one of our CUBE alumn. Dominique Dubois joins me. She's the Global Strategy and Offerings Executive in the Business Transformation Services of IBM. Dominique, it's great to talk to you again. >> Hi Lisa, great to be with you today. >> So we're going to be talking about the theme of this interview. It's going to be the ROI of AI for business. We've been talking about AI emerging technologies for a long time now. We've also seen a massive change in the world. I'd love to talk to you about how organizations are adopting these emerging technologies to really help transform their businesses. And one of the things that you've talked about in the past, is that there's these different elements of AI for business. One of them is trust, right, the second is ease of use, and then there's this importance of data in all of these important emerging technologies that require so much data. How do those elements of AI come together to help IBM's clients be able to deliver the products and services that their customers are depending on? >> Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. So, when we look at AI and AI solutions with our clients, I think how that comes together is in the way in which we don't look at AI, or AI application solution, independently, right. We're looking at it and we're applying it within our customer's operations with respect to the work that it's going to do, with respect to the part of the operations and the workflow and the function that it sits in, right. So the idea around trust and ease of use and the data that can be leveraged in order to kind of create that AI and allow that AI to be self-learning and continue to add value really is fundamental around how we design and how we implement it within the workflow itself. And how we are working with the employees, with the actual humans, that are going to be touching that AI, right, to help them with new skills that are required to work with AI, to help them with what we call the new ways of working, right, 'cause it's that adoption that really is critical to get the use of AI in enterprises at scale. >> That adoption that you just mentioned, that's critical. That can be kind of table stakes. But what we've seen in the last year is that we've all had to pivot, multiple times, and be reactionary, or reactive, to so many things out of our control. I'm curious what you've seen in the last year in terms of the appetite for adoption on the employees front. Are they more willing to go, all right, we've got to change the way we do things, and it's probably going to be, some of these are going to be permanent? >> Yeah. Lisa, we've absolutely seen a huge rise in the adoption, right, or in the openness, the mindset. Let's just call it the mindset, right. It's more of an open mindset around the use of technology, the use of technology that might be AI backed or AI based, and the willingness to, and I will say, the willingness to try is really then what starts that journey of trust, right. And we're seeing that open up in spades. >> That is absolutely critical. It's just the willingness, being open-minded enough to go, all right, we've got to do this, so we've got to think about this. We don't really have any other choices here. Things are changing pretty quickly. So talk to me, in this last year of change, we've seen massive disruptions and some silver linings for sure, but I'd love to know what IBM and the state of Rhode Island have done together in its challenging time. >> Yeah, so, really interesting partnership that we started with the state of Rhode Island. Obviously, I think this year, there's been lots of things. One of them has been speed, so everything that we had to do has been with haste, right, with urgency. And that's no different than what we did with the state of Rhode Island. The governor there, Gina Raimondo, she took very swift action, right, when the pandemic started. And one of the actions she took was to partner with private firms, such as IBM and others, to really help get her economy back open. And that required a lot of things. One of them, as you mentioned, trust, right, was a major part of what the governor there needed with her citizenships, with her citizens, excuse me, in order to be able to open back up the economy, right. And so, a key pillar of her program, and with our partnership, was around the AI-backed solutions that we brought to the state of Rhode Island, so inclusive of contact tracing, inclusive of work that we had provided around AI-based analytics that allowed really the governor to speak to citizens with hard facts quickly, almost real time, right, and start to build that trust, but also competence, and competence was the main, one of the main things that was required during this pandemic time. And so, there were, through this, the AI-based solutions that we provided, which were, there were many pillars, we were able to help Rhode Island not only open their economy, but they were one of the only states that had their schools open in the fall, and as a parent, I always see that as a litmus, if you will, of how our state is doing, right. And so they opened in the fall, and they, as far as I know, have stayed open. And I think part of that was from the AI-based contact tracing, the AI-backed virtual, sorry, AI analytics, the analytics suite around infections and predictions and what we were able to provide the governor in order to make swift decisions and take action. >> That's really impressive. That's one of the challenges I've had living in California, is you (mumbles) you are going to be data-driven than actually be data-driven, but the technology, living in Silicon Valley, the technology is there to be able to facilitate that, yet there was such a disconnect, and I think that's, you bring up the word confidence, and customers need confidence, citizens need confidence, knowing that what we've seen in the last year has shown in a lot of examples that real time isn't a nice-to-have anymore, it's a requirement. I mean, this is clearly life-and-death situations. That's a great example of how a state came to IBM to partner and say, how can we actually leverage emerging technologies like AI to really and truly make real-time data-driven decisions that affect every single person in our state. >> Mm-hmm. Absolutely, absolutely! Really, really, I think, a great example of the public-private partnerships that are really popping up now, more and more so because of that sense of urgency and that need to build greater ecosystems to create better solutions. >> So that's a great example in healthcare, one that our government in public health, and I think everybody, it will resonate with everybody here, but you've also done some really interesting work that I want to talk about with AI-driven insights into supply chain. We've also seen massive changes to supply chain, and so many organizations having to figure out, whether they were brick-and-mortar only, changing that, or really leveraging technology to figure out where do we need to be distributing products and services, where do we need to be investing. Talk to me about Bestseller India, and what it is that you guys have done there with intelligent workflows to really help them transform their supply chain. >> Yeah, Bestseller India, really great, hugely successful fashion forward company in India, and that term fashion forward always is mind boggling to me because basically, these are clothing retailers who go from runway to store within a matter of days, couple of weeks, which always is just hugely impressive, right, just what goes into that. And when you think about what happens in a supply chain to be able to do that, the requirements around demand forecasting, what quantities, of what style, what design, to what stores, and you think about the India market, which is notoriously a difficult market, lots of micro-segments, and so very difficult to serve. And then you couple that what's been happening from an environmental sustainability perspective, right. I think every industry has been looking more about how they can be more environmentally sustainable, and the clothing industry is no different. And when, and there is a lot of impact, right, so a stat that really has hit home with me, right: 20% of all the clothes that are made globally goes unsold. That's all a lot of clothing, that's a lot of material, and that's a lot of environmental product that goes into creating it. And so, Bestseller India really took it to heart to become not only more environmentally sustainable, but to help itself and be digitally ready for things like the pandemic that ultimately hit. And they were in a really good position. And we worked with them to create something called Fabric AI. So Fabric AI is India's only, first and only, AI-based platform that drives their supply chain, so it drives not only their decisions on what design should they manufacture, but it also helps to improve the entire workflow of what we call design to store. And the AI-based solution is really revolutionary, right, within India, but I think it's pretty revolutionary globally, right, globally as well. And it delivered really big impact, so, reductions in the cost, right, 15-plus reduction in cost. It helped their top line, so they saw a 5% plus top line, but it also reduced their unsold inventory by 5% and more, right. They're continuing to focus on that environmental sustainability that I think is a really important part of their DNA, right, the Bestseller India's DNA. >> And it's one that so many companies and other industries can learn from. I was reading in that case study on Bestseller India on the IBM website that I think it was 40 liters of water to make a cotton shirt. And to your point about the percentage of clothing that actually goes unsold and ends up in landfills, you see there the opportunity for AI to unlock the visibility that companies in any industry need to determine what is the demand that we should be filling, where should it be distributed, where should we not be distributing things. And so I think it was an interesting kind of impetus that Bestseller India had about one of their retail lines or brands was dropping in revenue, but they had been able to apply this technology to other areas of the business and make a pretty big impact. >> Yeah, absolutely. So they had been been very fortunate to have 11 years of growth, right, in all of their brands. And then one of their brands kind of hit headwinds, but the CIO and head of supply chain at that time really had the foresight to be able to say, you know what, we're hitting a problem, one of our brands, but this really is indicative of a more systemic problem. And that problem was lack of transparency, lack of data-driven, predictive, and automation to be able to drive a more effective and efficient kind of supply chain in the end, so, really had the forethought to dive into that and fix it. >> Yeah. And now talk to me about IBM Garage Band, and how's that, how did that help in this particular case? >> Yeah. So, in order to do this, right, it was, they had no use of AI, no use of automation, at the time that we started this. And so to really not only design and build and execute on Fabric AI, but to actually focus on the adoption, right, of AI within the business, we really needed to bring together the leaders across many lines of businesses, IT and HR, right. And when you think about pulling all of these different units together, we used our IBM Garage approach, which really is, there are many attributes and many facets of the IBM Garage, but I think one of the great results of using our IBM Garage approach is being able to pull from across all those different businesses, all of which may have some different objectives, right, they're coming from a different lens, from a different space, and pulling them together around one focus mission, which for here was Fabric AI. And we were able to actually design and build this in less than six months, which I think is pretty dramatic and pretty incredible from a speed and acceleration perspective. But I think even more so was the adoption, was the way in which we had, through all of it, already been working with the employees 'cause it's really touched almost every part of Bestseller India, so really being able to work with them and all the employees to make sure that they were ready for these new ways of working, that they had the right skills, that they had the right perspective, and that it was going to be adopted. >> That, we, if we unpack that, if we had time, that can be a whole separate conversation because the important, the most important thing about adoption is the cultures of these different business units have to come together. You said you rolled this out in a very short period of time, but you also were taking the focus on the employees. They need to understand the value in it. why they should be adopting it. And changing that culture, that's a whole other separate conversation, but that's an, that's a very interesting and very challenging thing to do. I wish we had more time to talk about that one. >> Yeah. It really is an, that the approach of bringing everyone together, it makes it just very dynamic, which is what's needed when you have all of those different lenses coming together, so, yeah. >> It is, 'cause you get a little bit of thought diversity as well when we're using AI. Well, Dominic, thank you for joining me today. Talked to me about what you guys are doing with many different types of customers, how you're helping them to integrate emerging technologies to really transform their business and their culture. We appreciate your time. >> Well, thank you, Lisa. Thanks >> For Dominique Dubois, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital event. (upbeat music)

(serene music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, welcoming back to the program one of our CUBE alumn. Dominique Dubois joins me. She's the Global Strategy and Offerings Executive in the Business Transformation Services of IBM. Dominique, it's great to talk to you again. >> Hi Lisa, great to be with you today. >> So we're going to be talking about the theme of this interview. It's going to be the ROI of AI for business. We've been talking about AI emerging technologies for a long time now. We've also seen a massive change in the world. I'd love to talk to you about how organizations are adopting these emerging technologies to really help transform their businesses. And one of the things that you've talked about in the past, is that there's these different elements of AI for business. One of them is trust, right, the second is ease of use, and then there's this importance of data in all of these important emerging technologies that require so much data. How do those elements of AI come together to help IBM's clients be able to deliver the products and services that their customers are depending on? >> Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. So, when we look at AI and AI solutions with our clients, I think how that comes together is in the way in which we don't look at AI, or AI application solution, independently, right. We're looking at it and we're applying it within our customer's operations with respect to the work that it's going to do, with respect to the part of the operations and the workflow and the function that it sits in, right. So the idea around trust and ease of use and the data that can be leveraged in order to kind of create that AI and allow that AI to be self-learning and continue to add value really is fundamental around how we design and how we implement it within the workflow itself. And how we are working with the employees, with the actual humans, that are going to be touching that AI, right, to help them with new skills that are required to work with AI, to help them with what we call the new ways of working, right, 'cause it's that adoption that really is critical to get the use of AI in enterprises at scale. >> That adoption that you just mentioned, that's critical. That can be kind of table stakes. But what we've seen in the last year is that we've all had to pivot, multiple times, and be reactionary, or reactive, to so many things out of our control. I'm curious what you've seen in the last year in terms of the appetite for adoption on the employees front. Are they more willing to go, all right, we've got to change the way we do things, and it's probably going to be, some of these are going to be permanent? >> Yeah. Lisa, we've absolutely seen a huge rise in the adoption, right, or in the openness, the mindset. Let's just call it the mindset, right. It's more of an open mindset around the use of technology, the use of technology that might be AI backed or AI based, and the willingness to, and I will say, the willingness to try is really then what starts that journey of trust, right. And we're seeing that open up in spades. >> That is absolutely critical. It's just the willingness, being open-minded enough to go, all right, we've got to do this, so we've got to think about this. We don't really have any other choices here. Things are changing pretty quickly. So talk to me, in this last year of change, we've seen massive disruptions and some silver linings for sure, but I'd love to know what IBM and the state of Rhode Island have done together in its challenging time. >> Yeah, so, really interesting partnership that we started with the state of Rhode Island. Obviously, I think this year, there's been lots of things. One of them has been speed, so everything that we had to do has been with haste, right, with urgency. And that's no different than what we did with the state of Rhode Island. The governor there, Gina Raimondo, she took very swift action, right, when the pandemic started. And one of the actions she took was to partner with private firms, such as IBM and others, to really help get her economy back open. And that required a lot of things. One of them, as you mentioned, trust, right, was a major part of what the governor there needed with her citizenships, with her citizens, excuse me, in order to be able to open back up the economy, right. And so, a key pillar of her program, and with our partnership, was around the AI-backed solutions that we brought to the state of Rhode Island, so inclusive of contact tracing, inclusive of work that we had provided around AI-based analytics that allowed really the governor to speak to citizens with hard facts quickly, almost real time, right, and start to build that trust, but also competence, and competence was the main, one of the main things that was required during this pandemic time. And so, there were, through this, the AI-based solutions that we provided, which were, there were many pillars, we were able to help Rhode Island not only open their economy, but they were one of the only states that had their schools open in the fall, and as a parent, I always see that as a litmus, if you will, of how our state is doing, right. And so they opened in the fall, and they, as far as I know, have stayed open. And I think part of that was from the AI-based contact tracing, the AI-backed virtual, sorry, AI analytics, the analytics suite around infections and predictions and what we were able to provide the governor in order to make swift decisions and take action. >> That's really impressive. That's one of the challenges I've had living in California, is you (mumbles) you are going to be data-driven than actually be data-driven, but the technology, living in Silicon Valley, the technology is there to be able to facilitate that, yet there was such a disconnect, and I think that's, you bring up the word confidence, and customers need confidence, citizens need confidence, knowing that what we've seen in the last year has shown in a lot of examples that real time isn't a nice-to-have anymore, it's a requirement. I mean, this is clearly life-and-death situations. That's a great example of how a state came to IBM to partner and say, how can we actually leverage emerging technologies like AI to really and truly make real-time data-driven decisions that affect every single person in our state. >> Mm-hmm. Absolutely, absolutely! Really, really, I think, a great example of the public-private partnerships that are really popping up now, more and more so because of that sense of urgency and that need to build greater ecosystems to create better solutions. >> So that's a great example in healthcare, one that our government in public health, and I think everybody, it will resonate with everybody here, but you've also done some really interesting work that I want to talk about with AI-driven insights into supply chain. We've also seen massive changes to supply chain, and so many organizations having to figure out, whether they were brick-and-mortar only, changing that, or really leveraging technology to figure out where do we need to be distributing products and services, where do we need to be investing. Talk to me about Bestseller India, and what it is that you guys have done there with intelligent workflows to really help them transform their supply chain. >> Yeah, Bestseller India, really great, hugely successful fashion forward company in India, and that term fashion forward always is mind boggling to me because basically, these are clothing retailers who go from runway to store within a matter of days, couple of weeks, which always is just hugely impressive, right, just what goes into that. And when you think about what happens in a supply chain to be able to do that, the requirements around demand forecasting, what quantities, of what style, what design, to what stores, and you think about the India market, which is notoriously a difficult market, lots of micro-segments, and so very difficult to serve. And then you couple that what's been happening from an environmental sustainability perspective, right. I think every industry has been looking more about how they can be more environmentally sustainable, and the clothing industry is no different. And when, and there is a lot of impact, right, so a stat that really has hit home with me, right: 20% of all the clothes that are made globally goes unsold. That's all a lot of clothing, that's a lot of material, and that's a lot of environmental product that goes into creating it. And so, Bestseller India really took it to heart to become not only more environmentally sustainable, but to help itself and be digitally ready for things like the pandemic that ultimately hit. And they were in a really good position. And we worked with them to create something called Fabric AI. So Fabric AI is India's only, first and only, AI-based platform that drives their supply chain, so it drives not only their decisions on what design should they manufacture, but it also helps to improve the entire workflow of what we call design to store. And the AI-based solution is really revolutionary, right, within India, but I think it's pretty revolutionary globally, right, globally as well. And it delivered really big impact, so, reductions in the cost, right, 15-plus reduction in cost. It helped their top line, so they saw a 5% plus top line, but it also reduced their unsold inventory by 5% and more, right. They're continuing to focus on that environmental sustainability that I think is a really important part of their DNA, right, the Bestseller India's DNA. >> And it's one that so many companies and other industries can learn from. I was reading in that case study on Bestseller India on the IBM website that I think it was 40 liters of water to make a cotton shirt. And to your point about the percentage of clothing that actually goes unsold and ends up in landfills, you see there the opportunity for AI to unlock the visibility that companies in any industry need to determine what is the demand that we should be filling, where should it be distributed, where should we not be distributing things. And so I think it was an interesting kind of impetus that Bestseller India had about one of their retail lines or brands was dropping in revenue, but they had been able to apply this technology to other areas of the business and make a pretty big impact. >> Yeah, absolutely. So they had been been very fortunate to have 11 years of growth, right, in all of their brands. And then one of their brands kind of hit headwinds, but the CIO and head of supply chain at that time really had the foresight to be able to say, you know what, we're hitting a problem, one of our brands, but this really is indicative of a more systemic problem. And that problem was lack of transparency, lack of data-driven, predictive, and automation to be able to drive a more effective and efficient kind of supply chain in the end, so, really had the forethought to dive into that and fix it. >> Yeah. And now talk to me about IBM Garage Band, and how's that, how did that help in this particular case? >> Yeah. So, in order to do this, right, it was, they had no use of AI, no use of automation, at the time that we started this. And so to really not only design and build and execute on Fabric AI, but to actually focus on the adoption, right, of AI within the business, we really needed to bring together the leaders across many lines of businesses, IT and HR, right. And when you think about pulling all of these different units together, we used our IBM Garage approach, which really is, there are many attributes and many facets of the IBM Garage, but I think one of the great results of using our IBM Garage approach is being able to pull from across all those different businesses, all of which may have some different objectives, right, they're coming from a different lens, from a different space, and pulling them together around one focus mission, which for here was Fabric AI. And we were able to actually design and build this in less than six months, which I think is pretty dramatic and pretty incredible from a speed and acceleration perspective. But I think even more so was the adoption, was the way in which we had, through all of it, already been working with the employees 'cause it's really touched almost every part of Bestseller India, so really being able to work with them and all the employees to make sure that they were ready for these new ways of working, that they had the right skills, that they had the right perspective, and that it was going to be adopted. >> That, we, if we unpack that, if we had time, that can be a whole separate conversation because the important, the most important thing about adoption is the cultures of these different business units have to come together. You said you rolled this out in a very short period of time, but you also were taking the focus on the employees. They need to understand the value in it. why they should be adopting it. And changing that culture, that's a whole other separate conversation, but that's an, that's a very interesting and very challenging thing to do. I wish we had more time to talk about that one. >> Yeah. It really is an, that the approach of bringing everyone together, it makes it just very dynamic, which is what's needed when you have all of those different lenses coming together, so, yeah. >> It is, 'cause you get a little bit of thought diversity as well when we're using AI. Well, Dominic, thank you for joining me today. Talked to me about what you guys are doing with many different types of customers, how you're helping them to integrate emerging technologies to really transform their business and their culture. We appreciate your time. >> Well, thank you, Lisa. Thanks >> For Dominique Dubois, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital event. (upbeat music)

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes ongoing coverage of IBM Think 2021. The virtual edition, my name is David and I'm excited to introduce our next segment. We're going to dig into the intersection of machines and humans and the changing nature of work, worker productivity and the potential of humans with me is Glenn Finch, who's the global managing partner for data and ai at IBM Glenn great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >>Dave good to be with you. Always a lot of fun to chat. >>So I'm interested in this concept that you've been working on about amplifying worker potential. You've got humans, you've got digital workers coming together and maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing at that intersection. >>You know, it's um it's interesting for most of my career, I've always thought about um amplifying human worker potential. And you know I would say over the last five years we start to think about this concept of digital workers and amplifying their potential so that human potential can extend even further. What's cool is when we get them both to work together, amplifying digital worker potential. Amplifying human worker potential to radically change how services experienced by an end consumer. I mean that's really the winner is when you start seeing the end consumer, the end user fundamentally feeling the difference in the experience. >>I mean a lot of the you see a lot of the trade press and the journalists they like to focus on the sort of the negative of automation. But when you talk to people who have implemented things they take it, for example R. P. A. They're so happy that they're not have to do these menial tasks anymore. And then it sort of the interesting discussion is, okay well what are you what are you doing with your free time? What are you doing with your weekend? So how should we be thinking about that? What you what you called? Amplifying human worker potential? What has to occur for that outcome? >>You know? Um The all my life I've spent time making money for people, right? And this uh last year I was involved in a project where it fundamentally changed. It's tied to answer that exact question. You know the servicemen and women in America who are willing to risk their lives. Um you know for our country um they file claims for medical benefits. And on average it would take 15 days to get a response Actually for about 70 or 80 of them. We've taken that down to like 15 minutes and to do that. You can't just drop in a R. P. A. You can't just drop in a. I. It's not one thing right? It's this it's this seamless interaction between digital workers and human workers right? So that a lot of the more routine mundane tasks can be done by ai and robotics. But all of the really hard complex cases that only a human being can adjudicate. That's what the folks that were doing, the more monday work can can go focus on. So I mean God that's what makes me come to work every day is if I can change the life of a serviceman or woman that was willing to risk their lives for our country. So that's that's the concept now. The critical piece of what I said, it's not about implementing Ai and robotics anymore because a lot of that started to get very wrote but picking up on okay we've liberated this block of human capability. How do we reposition it? How do we re skillet? How do we get them to focus on new things? That's just as important. The human change aspect incredibly important. >>Yeah, I mean that's interesting because you're right. I mean the downside, you mentioned our P. A. A lot of it is paving the cow path and you know the human in the loop piece has been it's been missing and that's obviously changing. But what about the what about the flip side of that equation? Where you know you ask the question okay what can humans do that machines can't do that equation continues to evolve. But maybe you could talk about where you have amplified the digital worker potential. >>Yeah. So you know um one of our clients is anthem and you know we've you know they've been on a variety of programs with us to talk about this. But you know, we just recorded, um, you know, another session with them for think where, um, the chief technology officer came and talked about how they wanted to radically change their member experience. And when you think about the last year, I mean, I don't know. Dave, I know you travel a lot because I see you in all the places that I'm in, right? But I don't remember like 15 months ago, if you had to wait on the phone for two minutes, you thought it was an eternity, right? You're like, what's the matter with me? I'm a frequent flyer. I deserve a better service on this. Then as Covid started to roll around those wait times or two hours and then 30 days into Covid. If you got a call back within two days or two weeks, it was a blessing. Right? So all of our expectations changed in an instant. Right? So I have to say, over the last 12-15 months, that's where we've been spending a lot of our time in all of those human contact human touch places to radically transition the ability to be responsive, touch people with With the same experience that we had 15 months ago to get an answer back in two minutes. You can't get enough people right now to do that. And so we're forced to make sure that the digital experience is what that needs to be. So the digital worker has to be up and on and extending the brand. Experience the same way that the human worker was back when everybody could be at a call center. That makes sense. Yeah. I >>mean, I think I like about this conversation, Glenn is it's not an either or. It's not a zero sum game, which is kind of, it's sort of used to be. I mean, we've talked about this before. Humans have machines have always replaced humans at certain tasks, but never really a cognitive task. And that's why I think there's a lot of fear out there. But what you're talking about is is the potential to amplify both human and digital capabilities. And I think people might look at that and say, well wait a minute, is it isn't a zero sum game, but it's not explain why. >>Yes, So we're never finding the zero sum game because there is um there is always something for people to do, right? And so, you know, I talked about the one an amplification of digital worker at anthem, let me let me switch to an amplification of a human worker, right? So state of Rhode Island, Um you know, we had the great honor to work with their governor and their Department of Health and Human Services, around again, around the whole covid thing. We started out just answering basic questions and helping with contact tracing. And then from there we moved into helping them with their data and ai being able to answer questions. Why are there are hotspots? Why should I shut this person of the city down? Should I shut fires down? Should I do this? And the Governor and Health and human Services Director were constantly saying on press briefings in the morning. Well, you know, we learned from our partners, IBM, that we want to consider this, right? And we we did pinpoint vaccinations and and other things like that. To me, that's that whole continuum. So, you know, we liberated some people from one spot. They went to work in another spot. All human beings guided by ai so, you know, I think this is all about, you know, for the first time in our lives being able to realize sort of the vaulted member experience or client experience that everybody has already talked about using a blend of digital workers and human workers. It's just it's all about the experience. I think >>you're laying out some really good outcomes. You mentioned some of the folks in the military, the healthcare examples. Um and I'm struck because if you think about look at the numbers, I mean the productivity gains over the last 20 years, particularly in the US. and Europe, doesn't it's not the case for China the productivity exploding, but but it's gone down. And so when you think about the big problems that we face in society, um climate change, income inequality, I mean, these are big, chewy problems that, you know, what kind of humans, you just can't throw humans at the problem that's, that's been proven. Um, and I'm curious as to if you know how you see it in terms of some of those other outcomes of the potential that is there and, and, and can you give us a glimpse as to what tech is involved underneath all this? Sure. >>So, you know, um, the first of all on outcomes, you know, that whole picture changes with the business cycle, right? I'd love to tell you that it's always these three outcomes, but you know, during downturns in business cycles, costs based outcomes are, you know, are paramount because people are thinking about survival right? In upticks, people are worried about, you know, converting new business growth, they're worried about net promoter score, they're worried about experience score. And then Over the last 12 to 18 months, you know, we've seen this whole concept of carbon footprint and sustainability All tied into the outcomes. So hey, did you realize that shifting these 22 legacy applications from here to the cloud would reduce your carbon footprint by 3%? No. Right. And so, so you know, the big hitters are always, you know, the cost metric, the sort of time to value or the whole cycle time of the process and net promoter score. Those are generally in all of the, you know, all the plays, obviously the book ends, you know, around, um, what's happening with, you know, the, the economy, what's happening with carbon, what's happening with sustainability are always in there. Now, the technology side boy, that's the cool part about working for IBM, right, is that there is a new thing that shows up on my door every two weeks from either the math and science labs or from a new ecosystem partner. Right. And that's one of the things that I will say about over the last 12 to 15 months, you've seen this massive shift from IBM to to go away from pure blue to embrace the whole ecosystem. So you know, Dave the stuff I work with every day is, you know, ai computer vision, Blockchain automation, quantum uh connected operations. Uh not just software robots, but now human robots, Digital Twin, all these things where we are digitally rendering um what used to be a very paper based legacy. Right. So boy, I couldn't be more excited to be a part of that. And then now with the opening up to all the hyper scholars, the Microsoft, the google the amazon, the, you know, uh salesforce adobe, all those folks. It's like a candy store. And quite honestly, my single greatest challenge is to kind of bring all of that together and point it at a series of three or 4 buyers at a chief marketing officer experience officer for the whole customer piece, at a chief human resource officer around the town peace and at a CFO or a chief procurement officer for finance and supply chain. I'm sorry to answer. So, you know, long winded, but it's it's awesome out there. >>It was a great answer. And I think, you know, I joke the other day, glenn that Milton Friedman must be turned over his grave because he said, you know, the only job of a company has to make profits for shareholders and increase shareholder value. But but you're but but ironically, you know, things like E. S. G. Sustainability, his climate change, he said they actually make business sense. So it's really not antithetical to Friedman economics necessarily but it's good business. And I think I think the other thing that I'm excited about is that there is some like deep tech we're seeing an explosion of of something as fundamental as processing power like we've never seen before but he talks about Moore's law being dead. Well okay with the doubling of of of of processor performance every 24 months. We're now at a quadrupling when you include GPU S. And N. P. U. S. And accelerators and all. I mean that is gonna power the next wave of machine intelligence and that really is exciting. >>Yeah I am. You know it's I feel blessed every day to come to work that you know I can you know a mass all these technologies and change how human beings experience service. I mean that's man, that whole service experience. that's what I've lived for for, you know, 2.5 decades in my career is to not just just to make and deploy stuff. That's cool, technically, but to change people's lives. I mean, that's it for me. That's you know, that's that's the way that I want to ride. So I couldn't be more excited to do that stuff. Well, glad >>Thanks so much for coming on. Is your your passion shows right through the camera and hopefully we'll face to face, you know, sometime soon, maybe, maybe later on this year. But for sure Lockwood 2022. All right. Hey, great to see you. Thank you so much. >>Dave same to you. Thanks have a great rest of the day. >>All right. Thank you. And thanks for following along with our continuing broadcast of IBM think 2021 you're watching the cube the leader in digital tech coverage right back. Mhm. Yeah.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage cube live program for re:Invent 2020. This is our Q virtual. We're not in person like we normally are. Today is the AWS public sector. Worldwide celebration day. A lot of content coming from Teresa Carlson and her team and highlighting everything. Of course, the cube channel on the re:Invent events site. Well, the content we streaming there, if you go to the description, you can click on the link and check out all the on-demand interviews. We've done hundreds of videos live before the event pre recorded as well as here live today for public sector day, I'm showing Lisa Martin co-hosts of the cube. Who's been involved in a lot of those interviews. Uh, Lisa, great to see you before we good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Likewise. Good to see you too, John. Glad that you're staying safe. >>Well, a lot of good action. And before we get started, I do want to put a plug out for, um, some Salesforce, big party virtual event. Uh, Salesforce is having a big party at re:Invent 2020 a virtual house party with chance the rapper performing an exclusive set with surprise celebrities and DJ in residence December 10th that's tomorrow at 5:00 PM Pacific, go to salesforce.com/big party to check out chance the rapper. Uh, I'm a big fan. Of course my kids are more fans than, uh, check out the sales report. Okay. Back to cube virtual Lisa. Great to see you. >>Likewise John. So public sector day, a lot of transformation mean re:Invent being reinvented, being virtual 500,000 registered. And so, so much has changed, but a lot also that Teresa Carlson spoke about in her keynote and this morning about the transformation across the public sector, that's really been driven by necessity with COVID. It was really impressive to hear and see all of the good things that AWS is facilitating across healthcare, government, education, state, and local. You name it. >>Yeah. The thing I love about Theresa is she's always been ever since I've known her now she's been on the cube every year, since 2013, since we've been covering re:Invent, she's always had a big, bold vision, and she's always kind of stayed on that track. And this year that was really clear out of the box on her, her leadership session. You got to think big and you got to look at the value of the data. That was the key message from her, her and her group public sector, by the way, has been highly active with the COVID pandemic. A lot of public services have been leveraging Amazon cloud to serve, uh, their, their, their people, whether it's getting them the checks for entitlements or getting them, you know, pharmacy drugs and whatnot, and helping them with the pandemic. But clearly Amazon has stepped up and helped education with, with, uh, remotes. So Theresa's team has been pretty busy. So I think that they had more time to prepare for the virtual keynote. I should've gotten chock full of more announcements. >>Yeah. And also some great examples. As you mentioned, we heard from UK biobank, some of the interviews also that have already happened on the kid that you've done showed some amazing work that AWS has helped to facilitate for school districts in Los Angeles, for example, the government of Rhode Island. And those are some of the great things cabbage, what they were able to enable Kevin's to do, to deliver small business loans of so quickly. A lot of that, I thought, I wish we're hearing more about how technology is facilitating so much. Goodness, in COVID on the news. Of course, we're hearing a lot of the challenges with online learning, but there's a lot of amazing things that AWS has been able to facilitate incredibly quickly. >>You know, one of the concerns I have with Theresa and her team years and years ago was this idea of national parks, right? You know, we have spaces where we can go visit and why isn't there a cyber version of that. And so you S you saw that progression and she'd been doing a lot of deals where they're using the cloud and donating their technology for the betterment of society. And one of the things that was, um, news today was an advancement of their open data registry, which has been kind of this open commons of, you know, health data and whatnot. And now they have all the sequencing data that's searchable, readable, uh, from the national Institute of health for DNA sequencing. So this is going to be, again, more commons, like approach is starting to see that I think this is going to be a real big trend lease. >>I think you're going to start to see the big companies have to really contribute to society in a way that we've never seen before, because they have the large scale. You can donate large compute to say research projects. So you starting to see, uh, from Teresa's team, the bubbling up of these new shared experiences around technology for the betterment of society. I think that sequencing was one, the renewable energy project. Another one, again, they're investing in women owned businesses and underrepresented minorities, and at small, medium size businesses to fund them, we saw a guy launching stuff in space that can create, you know, synthetic satellites. So you can look through clouds. This is new. I mean, this is interesting. >>It is interesting. And it actually, to your point is impactful at every level across the globe, going from when they talked about we farm creating this network of small scale of farmers, connectivity was their biggest problem. And now there's over a million. I'm sure that number it's probably even bigger. I've connected farmers due to AWS. You talked about also it's the cord 19 search, which is the expansion of their open research dataset. COVID open research data set that is only possible because of cloud computing and AWS hundreds of thousands of assets in there. Um, 200 plus open data sets for genomic research. She talked about how that's been at the of some of the things that we've seen go on so quickly with operation work speed, uh, with respect to the vaccine. So a lot of acceleration when we know public sector kind of traditionally not necessarily fast movers, but of course, as we've all said, a number of times recently necessity is the mother of invention and the speed element and the connectivity element were things that really spoke loudly to me with what Teresa said today, about the importance of extracting value from data. >>You know, when I talked to Andy Jassy and he talked about this in his keynote, the digital transformation is on full display. And the necessity being the mother of invention is a great phrase, the system and sticking because you can't hide. I mean, you have to deliver these services in the public sector, or, you know, people's lives are going to be impacted in certainly this there's death involved, right? So you have that and then you've got education. I mean, people want to see that changed quicker. There's always been conscious, Oh, education has got to be re-imagined well, guess what? There's no school open. So we got to re-imagine it now. So you get a lot of pressure, unprecedented demand. She said, Theresa said, three's a crosswind actually set onstage for education change. Um, so that's huge. Right? And then the other thing that she mentioned, I think that's going to be a big focus. >>It's not as, um, you know, headline news oriented is this whole jobs training piece. Um, that's a huge deal because the, the tsunami that hits so fast on this digital transformation, because the COVID, we're going to have a post COVID era of rapid acceleration of new skills. So people gotta get trained. So this ain't going to be the boring training programs, the guy who get kind of get better. So I think you're going to see some innovation Lisa, around how people think about delivering and constructing training programs to be much more real world thinking outside the box, you're going to start to see new things. Otherwise it's just going to be too slowly, the training right now. It's just, you know, sign up for the courseware and get a certification. Yeah, you got to do those things, but how can you get sort of cases done faster? How do you get people with the skills in their hands and virtual hands, if you will, to stand up more cloud, more AI, the pressure's there. So we can, that's going to be a huge thing to watch. >>Okay. The pressure is there. You're right. And a need is there. She talked about a lot of the demand that their customers are driving for some of the services and the education services as well that they're offering. But I'd like to point about upskilling focusing on the people, not just the people, but also the diversity inclusion. And we all know how impactful thought diversity is. So their, their dedication, their in their focus there, and also her recommendation to be bold. And I think in the education, respect was really critical. There is no time like now to move digital transformation. If education systems aren't there, then you know, it's a huge challenge and it impacts every person, every element of every family. So what they're able to do there, by focusing on the people and enabling folks to get trained faster, more resources online can only be a good, you know, Theresa >>Has always, um, has her own flare to style to her. She's incredible business woman and have such respect for her. She's been so successful. Um, but she always sends her presentations with the, kind of the, the kind of her to dues. Um, and you kind of pointed that out. So just review them with you. And I want to get your reaction. Number one, she said, you got to re-imagine and enable a digital, a digitally enabled business. Number two, identify data has an realized value and then increase your diversity. And she pointed to avis.training. Um, and that's kind of her kind of get out there and do those things so digitally enabled business, get that unrealized day to get it into work and increase your diversity. And then she had had a big party every year just said, instead of a party go out and do a random act of kindness act. So, yeah, typical, three's a flare, you know, she kind of ended it with a random act of kindness, but, but her bold vision, those are practical, uh, mandates. What's your reaction to, to that? >>I bold vision. I absolutely 100% I think right now is the time that no business can afford to be hiding under the covers. We have to be, they have to be very thoughtful and very prescriptive, but be bold. There's so much opportunity right now. We're seeing a ton of invention and innovation, John, that we've seen over the last nine months. There's a lot of COVID catalysts that we've been talking about on the cube that are really fantastic. So I think that recommendation to set a bold vision is absolutely imperative, not easy to achieve, but I think right now more than ever, it could really be what sets apart, the winners and losers of tomorrow. >>Yeah. I love it. I just say that on this final note, um, cloud and AI is really in play cloud-scale machine learning, which essentially feeds AI is all about data compute going down to the chip level, AI and software and data is critical for cloud. So really awesome keynote again, leadership session by Teresa Carlson, and there's a whole site of content available. Checkout the cube page, click down on the main page. You'll see that description. You'll see a link to the re:Invent page and check on public sector. A lot of great content. Lisa final question for us to kind of close out this keynote leadership session analysis here on all sector day. I want to get your take on, um, the interviews you've done with the Amazon folks and partners and customers. What are the themes that have been boiling out of those? What have you have been hearing? What's your take and observation of the common pattern? >>You know, given the fact that we haven't all been able to be together at my last cube event in person was reinvent 2019. And we're so used to having, you know, three, four days of wall-to-wall coverage, two sides, being able to have those close personal conversations with our guests this year really did a phenomenal job of recreating that same experience, digitally there's tremendous amount of innovation happening. I think that was the one thing that really jumped out at me, the speed with which it's happening, how so many different types businesses have pivoted, not once, but again and again, and again, as times are changing and how even I yesterday I interviewed Boone, supersonic CEO, some of the things that they're facilitating to get commercial supersonic flight back that fully cloud and AI machine learning can do that. There was no stoppage of innovation this year. In fact, that actually got faster. And I think that was a resounding theme and a lot of positivity from the guests. >>You know, the cue, his business was to go to events and extract the signal from the noise. Guess what? There's no physical events. We have the cube virtual. We have pivoted. We are now in our eighth, ninth month of cube virtual. It's been a new model. We've gotten more interviews, more people can just click into the cube virtual. We have more virtual sets, the Cuban virtualized Lisa. Although I miss them in real life as a whole new ballgame for us, >>It is a whole new ball game. And it also provides a lot of opportunities for businesses to get their messaging out and connect and engage with their audience, which is important. >>Well, I miss real life. I miss everybody out there. I wish we could be there in person. Uh, the world will stay hybrid. I think with virtual, I think this has been a great format. There's been some great benefits, but we want to be in person. I want you on the desk with us. So, and all the folks out there I wish we could see. And then we'll see you next year. Thanks everyone for watching the key. This is our keynote analysis and leadership analysis of the worldwide public sector. Teresa Carlson, Kenya. I'm John from Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, okay. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage here. Reinvent 2020 for a W s amazing content happening here within across the industry on digital transformation and more, more important than ever in the public sector has been mawr impacted by anyone during the cove and pandemic. And we're here remotely with the Cube Virtual because of the pandemic. Got a great guest, Kim, a jurist. She's the leader on the U. S. Education, state and local government for a W s public sector Kim, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Remotely, at least we get to have a remote interview. >>Well, thank you for taking the time. This is This is our world these days, so it's good to be able to connect. >>Well, thanks for coming on. We're doing some specialty programming around public sector, mainly because it's such an important area. Uh, Andy Jassy Esquina, which is for the best conference at large at reinvent talks broadly, but I think it highlights what's going on in your world and that is this facing the truth. Um, this digital transformation has been forced upon us. It's accelerated and it's get busy, busy building or get busy figuring out how it might unwind and mawr education virtual remote if we >>didn't >>have video conference, and this could have been a disaster even further, but certainly has impacted everybody in the government education. How is it impacting share with us? What's going on? >>You know, I think that difficult partisans. When we turned on the news early days there in Cove it it was clear that students weren't learning and citizens couldn't get in contact with their government to ask for support. Um, I would say it was that moment in time where the technical debt that whether your state, local or education, you had to quickly realized that you need to connect with your students and your citizens. But I take a look at how quickly they were able to turn across the US Many of them realized what usually took years, literally turned into innovating overnight to support students as well as those filing for on unemployment claims. And I think that's what we heard a lot of, and those were some of the opportunities that Amazon really took, uh, to our customers said, Hey, we can help you solve these problems with great services such as connect >>you know, Connect came up in the keynote multiple times, and he really spend time on that as a as a disruption slash enabler for value. Can you share how cloud has scaled up some of your customers? I know connects, been pretty prominent in the public sector for Covic support and really has changed in saves lives in many cases. Can you share an example of how it's worked out? >>Absolutely. I mean, Rhode Island is is a great example. They use Amazon connect. They helped the state literally address this massive surgeon of unemployment insurance applications due to Cova 19. But literally the call times and the vines were cut down in What they were able to do is answer the call, not just have it be on a fast busy or a disconnect. Whether it was Department of Labor at Rhode Island, whether it was the state of Kentucky or the state of West Virginia, all those authorities use had to deal with that surge, and they were able to do it successfully and literally, in some cases, overnight to support citizens. That's how quickly they were able to innovate and hit those call centers, Um, effectively. But it's not just about the call center, because keep in mind they would go into those call centers with connect. They were able to actually take those calls from home, and we saw that in education as well. Take a look at L. A unified school district. What they had to do to quickly transition from in person training to supporting these students remotely. They had to do it overnight, and they use connect their asses well, not only to support the students, the teachers or the staff, but they took that opportunity to really continue educating and continue serving. >>You know, one of the things I was talking anti about in my one on one interview before reinvent was necessity is the mother of all invention in these days, and I think that came from a quote from one of your customers, like interviewed when asked, You know how the innovation strategy come about, and that's what they said. They said we needed it really bad, and we had to move quickly and then Andy said in his keynote that everything is on full display right now, meaning that the pandemic is forced one and you can see who's winning and who's not based on where they are in the cloud journey. So have to ask you leaderships a big part of this. What is the trend that you're seeing within your world because, you know, government not known for moving fast. And this is a speed game at this point. Healthcare. A big part of that. You got education. Government. What's >>the >>leadership mindset on innovating right now? And can you share because, yeah, you got some easy, you know, examples. Now the point is, hey, way have connect with people were like productivity opportunity that's now the new normal. So even in life does come back. There's new new things that have been discovered. Is that resonating with your your customers? And can you share the leadership mindset? >>Absolutely. So make no mistake. It was never a question of if it was a question of when the pandemic clearly is accelerating it. But, you know, we've been working with over 6500 government agencies and collaborating with them to really focus on some of their mission critical, um called based services. So and this is the new normal. They recognize it. And it's the foundation that during the pandemic that it's been said to say, Hey, we're going to push and we're gonna push quicker because they were actually able to demonstrate that they could do it. I'll give you an example. It's It's a heartbreaking one from my perspective. Being a mom, um, l. A. County Department of Child and Family Services, They operated their analog child protection hotline. Now the numbers are are unfortunate and staggering. But when you took a look at the peak before the pandemic, the call center received as many as 21,000 reports of child abuse and neglect in a month. During those pick times, up to 100 staff members would log in and literally take 120 back to back calls per hour. Now, when you think about that legacy environment with Amazon connect, they were able to continue the service, continue the support to help these Children and available 24 7, and they were able to do it from their homes. So e mean it gives me chills, just thinking about three unfortunate situations. But they were able to quickly move and and continue to support. Yeah, >>and the thing to I want to just bring up also had a customer I interviewed from Canada. I think they were partner with a censure. They had unemployment checks, they couldn't get out, and entitlement things that were literally checks and connect stood up that in like, record time. He was convinced. He's like he was kind of Amazon fan, but he was kind of still out of Amazon. He was like, I'm convinced we're gonna use Amazon going forward. It was a tipping point for him. There's a lot of these tipping points going on right now. This has been a big theme of this reinvent so far. Yeah, cloud transition, two full cloud value. This is the new normal What? What what what can clients get when they have budget or trying to get budget when they say the benefit? The clouds are what? >>Well, I mean again, use another use case. I'll go back to another example in L. A county. So when you think about l. A county itself, um, I won't give you the exact numbers because I don't know him off the top, but approximately 10 million residents and employs over 100,000 staff again. Look at the cost savings that they saw. So, you know, technical data is a problem. Being able to invest is a challenge because of budgets, but they were able to save 60% in one year from there on prem environment and licensing costs. But the cost is one piece. If you could take 17% fewer calls and you're solving those challenges by using a i N M l. Through the technology of what they were gathering through those calls, it made a huge impact and improved their service to their citizens. So you know it. The cost savings air there. And there are so many examples that states air, recognizing that they need to move quicker because they could take advantage of those costs, especially with some of the budget challenges we're going to see across the U. S. >>And the machine learning examples are off the charts. So, Kim, I gotta ask, you going forward now in reinvent what's the big focus for you and your teams and your customers because you guys are very customer focused. You're working backers from the customers. We hear that on and on what is going on in your customer base? One of the priorities, >>um, priorities for us will always remain on the mission to which our customers are focusing on. If we think about education, the question is, how are they re imagining the the delivery and the success in this new world that we're dealing with? So we'll continue to work and innovate with our partners and with amazing All right, a text that are in our business take a look at blackboard, right? They were able to scale 50 times their normal capacity globally, literally within 24 hours they're looking at How do they continue to innovate to serve? We're gonna work with K through 12 through academic medical centers and research, because when you think about what we need is we need to find that vaccine we need to find the ability to treat and serve. We're focused on those missions with the states, the research and the education teams. >>It's been unusual year learning is changing remote learning, remote work, the workforce, the workplace, the workloads. They're all changing. Onda clouds a big part of it. Um, final question for you. What's the take away for reinvent this year means different. You mentioned some of those highlights. What's the big take away for your audience? >>I think for state local education is it's available. It's now, and they have to serve their students and citizens quit. Um, what they've been able to do in the cloud again? A zay said at the start of the interview. They can now do overnight within minutes and hours and and support their citizens. And they have to do it quickly. So, >>uh, coyote to coyote goodness for the state and local governments to >>absolutely it's going to continue. And I think the important part is focused on the opportunity of innovating and supporting the mission >>Can Great to see you. Thanks for the insight. Thanks for the update. Appreciate it. We'll be following it. A lot of great successes. You guys have been having the Cuban involved in a bunch of them and we'll continue to follow the transformation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Enjoy Sena. >>Okay. This is the Cube Virtual. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching more coverage. Walter Wall reinvent 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, welcome to the Cubes Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin and I have a Cube alumni joining me Next. Aaron Kelly, the GM of product marketing at AWS Aaron. Welcome back to the program. >>Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Likewise, even though we don't get to all be crammed into Las Vegas together, uh, excited to talk to you about Amazon Connect, talk to our audience about what that is. And then let's talk about it in terms of how it's been a big facilitator during this interesting year, that is 2020. >>Great, yes, for sure. So Amazon Connect is a cloud contact center where we're really looking to really reinvent how contact centers work by bringing it into the cloud. It's an Omni Channel, easy to use contact center that allows customers to spin up contact centers in minutes instead of months. Its very scalable so can scale to 10 tens of thousands of agents. But it also scaled down when you when it's not in use and because it's got a pay as you go business model. You only pay when you're engaging with collars or customers. You're not paying for high upfront per agent fees every month. So it's really been a great service during this pandemic, as there's been a lot of unpredictable spikes in demand, uh, that customers have had to deal with across many sectors, >>and we've been talking for months now about the acceleration that Corbett has delivered with respect to digital transformation. And, of course, as patients has been wearing fin globally. I think with everybody when we're calling a contact center, we want a resolution quickly. And of course, as we all know is we all in any industry are working from home. So are they. So I can imagine during this time that being able to have a cloud contact center has been transformative, I guess, to help some businesses keep the lights on. But now to really be successful moving forward, knowing that they can operate and scale up or down as things change. >>Yeah, that's exactly right. And so one of the key benefits of connect his ability to very quickly on board and get started, you know, we have some very interesting and examples like Morrisons, which is a retailer in the UK They wanted to create a new service as you highlighted, which was a door, you know, doorstep delivery service. And so they needed to spin up a quick new contact center in order to handle those orders. They were able to do it and move all their agents remotely in about a day and be able to immediately start to take those orders, which is really powerful, you know. Another interesting example is the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training. Which part of their responsibility is to deliver unemployment benefits for their citizens? Obviously a huge surge of demand there they were able to build an entirely new context center in about nine days to support their citizens. They went from a knave ridge of about 74 call volume sort of capacity per minute to 1000 call on capacity per minute. And in the first day of standing up this new context center, they were able to serve 75,000 Rhode Island citizens with their unemployment benefits. So really ah, great example of having that cloud scalability that ability to bring agents remotely and then helping citizens in need during a very, very difficult time, >>right? So a lot of uses private sector, public sector. What are some of the new capabilities of Amazon connected? You're announcing at reinvent. >>Yeah, So we announced five big capabilities this during reinvent yesterday that really spanned the entire experience, and our goal is to make it better for agents so they're more efficient. That actually helps customers reduce their costs but also create a better collar experience so that C sat could go up in the collars, can get what they need quickly and then move on. And so the first capability is Amazon Connect Voice I D, which makes it easier to validate that the person calling is who in fact, they say they are so in this case, Lee. So let's say you're calling in. You can opt in tow, have a voice print made of you. The next time you call in, we're able to use machine learning to match that voiceprint to know. Yes, it is Lisa. I don't need to ask Lisa questions about her mother's maiden name and Social Security number. We can validate you quickly as an agent I'm confident it's you. So I'm less concerned about things like fraud, and we can move on. That's the first great new feature. The second is Amazon Connect customer profiles. So now, once you join the call rather than me is an agent having to click around a different systems and find out your order history, etcetera. I could get that all surface to me directly. So I have that context. I can create a more personalized experience and move faster through the call. The third one is called Wisdom. It's Amazon Connect wisdom, which now based on either what you're asking me or a search that I might make, I could get answers to your questions. Push to me using machine learning. So if you may be asking about a refund policy or the next time a new product may launch, I may not know rather than clicking around and sort of finding that in the different systems is pushed right to me. Um, now the Fourth Feet feature is really time capability of contact lens for Amazon connect, and what this does is while you were having our conversation, it measures the sentiment based on what you're saying or any keywords. So let's say you called it and said, I want a refund or I want to cancel That keyword will trigger a new alert to my supervisor who can see that this call may be going in the wrong direction. Let me go help Aaron with Lisa. Maybe there's a special offer I can provide or extra assistance so I can help turn that call around and create a great customer experience, which right now it feels like it's not going in that direction. And then the last one is, um, Amazon Connect tasks where about half of an agents time is spent on task other than the call follow up items. So you're looking for a refund or you want me Thio to ship you a new version of the product or something? Well, today I might write that on a sticky note or send myself a reminder and email. It's not very tracked very well. With Amazon Connect task, I can create that task for me as a supervisor. I could then X signed those tax and I can make sure that the follow up items air prioritized. And then when I look at my work. You is an agent. I can see both calls, my chats and my task, which allows me to be more efficient. That allows me to follow up faster with you. My customer, Andi. Overall, it's gonna help lower the cost and efficiency of the Contact Center. So we're really excited about all five of these features and how they improve the entire life cycle of a customer contact. >>And that could be table stakes for any business in terms of customer satisfaction. You talked about that, but I always say, You know, customer satisfaction is inextricably linked to employee satisfaction. They need. The agents need to be empowered with that information and really time, but also to be able to look at. I want them to know why I'm calling. They should already know what I have. We have that growing expectation right as a consumer. So the agent experience the customer experience. You've also really streamline. And I could just see this being something that is like I said, kind of table stakes for an organization to reduce churn, to be able to service more customers in a shorter amount of time and also employee satisfaction, right, >>right that's that. That's exactly right. Trader Grills, which is one of our, you know, beta customers using some of these capabilities. You know, they're saying 25% faster, handle times so shorter calls and a 10% increase in customer satisfaction because now it's personalized. When you call in, I know what grill you purchased. And so I have a sense based on the grill, you purchase just what your question might be or what you know, what special offers I might have available to me and that's all pushed to me is an agent, So I feel more empowered. I could give you better service. You have, you know, greater loyalty towards my brand, which is a win for everyone, >>absolutely that empowerment of the agent, that personalization for the customer. I think again we have that growing demanded expectation that you should know why I'm calling, and you should be able to solve my problem. If you can't, I'm gonna turn and find somebody else who can do that. That's a huge risk that businesses face. Let's talk about some of the trends that you're seeing that this has been a very interesting year to say the least, what are some of the trends in the context center space that you guys were seeing that you're working Thio to help facilitate? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the biggest trends that we're seeing is this move towards remote work. So as you can imagine, with the pandemic almost immediately, most customers needed to quickly move their agents to remote work scenario. And this is where Amazon Connect was a great benefit. For as I mentioned before, we saw about 5000 new contact centers created in March in April. Um, Atiya, very beginning of the pandemic. So that was a very, uh, that's a very big trend we're seeing. And now what we're seeing is customers were saying, Hey, when I have something like Amazon Connect that's in the cloud, it scales up. It provides me a great experience. I just need really a headset in a Internet connection from my agents. I'm not dealing with VPNs and, ah, lot of the complexity that comes with trying to move on on premises system remote. We're seeing a huge, you know, search of adoption and usage around that the ability to very quickly create a new context center around specific scenarios are use cases has been really, really powerful. So, uh, those are the big trends moving to remote remote work and a trend towards, um, spinning of new context that is quickly and then spending them back down as that demand moves or or those those those situations move >>right. And as we're all experiencing, the one thing that is a given during this time is the uncertainty that remains Skilling up. Skilling down volume changes. But looking as if a lot of what's currently going on from home is going to stay for a while longer, I actually not think about it. I'm calling into whether it's, you know, cable service or whatnot. I think What about agent is actually on their couch at home like I am working? And so I think it's being able to facilitate that because is transformative, and I think I think I'll step out on limbs side, you know, very potentially impact the winners and the losers of tomorrow, making sure that the consumer experience is tailored. It's personalized to your point and that the agents are empowered in real time to facilitate a seamless and fast resolution of whatever the issue is. >>Well, and I think you hit on it earlier as well. Agents wanna be helpful. They wanna solve a customer problem. They wanna have that information at their fingertips. They wanna be on power to take action. Because at the end of their day, they want to feel like they helped people, right? And so being able to give them that information safe from wisdom or being able to see your entire customer profile, Right? Right. When you come on board or know that you are Lisa, um, and have the confidence that I'm talking to Lisa, I'm not. This is not some sort of, you know, fishing, exercise, exercise. These are all really important scenarios and features that empower the agent, lowers cost significantly for the customer and creates a much better customer experience for you. The collar? >>Absolutely. And we all know how important that is these days to get some sort of satisfying experience. Last question. Erin, talk to us about, you know, as we all look forward, Thio 2021. For many reasons. What can we expect with Amazon? Connect? >>Well, we're going to continue to listen to our customers and hear their feedback and what they need, which what we certainly anticipate is continued focus on that agent efficiency, giving agents mawr of the information they need to be successful and answer customers questions quickly, continuing to invest in machine learning as a way of doing that. So using ML to identify that you are who you say you are, finding that right information. Getting data that I can use is an agent Thio. Handle those tasks and then automate the things that you know I really shouldn't have to take steps is a human to go do so if we need to send you a follow up email when when your product ships or when your refund is issued. Let me just put that in the system once and have it happened when it executes. So that level of automation continuing to bring machine learning in to make the agent experience better and more efficient, which ultimate leads to lower costs and better see set. These are all the investments. You'll see a sui continue for it next year. >>Excellent stuff, Erin, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, ensuring what's next and the potential the impact that Amazon connect is making. >>Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here >>for Aaron Kelly. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

>>Bye from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's keeps coverage here in San Francisco at the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm John, your host, as cybersecurity goes to the next generation as the new cloud scale, cyber threats are out there, the real impact a company's business and society will be determined by the industry. This technology and the people that a cube alumni here, caramel Jaffer, SVP, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for iron net. Welcome back. Thanks to Shawn. Good to be here. Thanks for having so iron net FC general Keith Alexander and you got to know new CEO of there. Phil Welsh scaler and duo knows how to scale up a company. He's right. Iron is doing really well. The iron dome, the vision of collaboration and signaling. Congratulations on your success. What's a quick update? >> Well look, I mean, you know, we have now built the capability to share information across multiple companies, multiple industries with the government in real time at machine speed. >>Really bringing people together, not just creating collected security or clip to defense, but also collaborating real time to defend one another. So you're able to divide and conquer Goliath, the enemy the same way they come after you and beat them at their own game. >> So this is the classic case of offense defense. Most corporations are playing defense, whack-a-mole, redundant, not a lot of efficiencies, a lot of burnout. Exactly. Not a lot of collaboration, but everyone's talking about the who the attackers are and collaborating like a team. Right? And you guys talk about this mission. Exactly. This is really the new way to do it. It has, the only way it works, >> it is. And you know, you see kids doing it out there when they're playing Fortnite, right? They're collaborating in real time across networks, uh, to, you know, to play a game, right? You can imagine that same construct when it comes to cyber defense, right? >>There's no reason why one big company, a second big company in a small company can't work together to identify all the threats, see that common threat landscape, and then take action on it. Trusting one another to take down the pieces they have folk to focus on and ultimately winning the battle. There's no other way a single company is gonna be able defend itself against a huge decency that has virtually unlimited resources and virtually unlimited human capital. And you've got to come together, defend across multiple industries, uh, collectively and collaboratively. >> Do you mean, we talked about this last time and I want to revisit this and I think it's super important. I think it's the most important story that's not really being talked about in the industry. And that is that we were talking last time about the government protects businesses. If someone dropped troops on the ground in your neighborhood, the government would protect you digitally. >>That's not happening. So there's really no protection for businesses. Do they build their own militia? Do they build their own army? Who was going to, who's going to be their heat shield? So this is a big conversation and a big, it brings a question. The role of the government. We're going to need a digital air force. We're going to need a digital army, Navy, Navy seals. We need to have that force, and this has to be a policy issue, but in the short term, businesses and individuals are sitting out there being attacked by sophisticated mission-based teams of hackers and nation States, right? Either camouflaging or hiding, but attacking still. This is a huge issue. What's going on? Are people talking about this in D C well, >> John, look not enough. People are talking about it, right? And forget DC. We need to be talking about here, out here in the Silicon Valley with all these companies here at the RSA floor and bring up the things you're bringing up because this is a real problem we're facing as a nation. >>The Russians aren't coming after one company, one state. They're coming after our entire election infrastructure. They're coming after us as a nation. The Chinese maybe come after one company at a time, but their goal is to take our electoral properties, a nation, repurpose it back home. And when the economic game, right, the Iranians, the North Koreans, they're not focused on individual actors, but they are coming after individual actors. We can't defend against those things. One man, one woman, one company on an Island, one, one agency, one state. We've got to come together collectively, right? Work state with other States, right? If we can defend against the Russians, California might be really good at it. Rhode Island, small States can be real hard, defends against the Russians, but if California, Rhode Island come together, here's the threats. I see. Here's what it's. You see share information, that's great. Then we collaborate on the defense and work together. >>You take these threats, I'll take those threats and now we're working as a team, like you said earlier, like those kids do when they're playing fortnight and now we're changing the game. Now we're really fighting the real fight. >> You know, when I hear general Keith Alexander talking about his vision with iron net and what you guys are doing, I'm inspired because it's simply put, we have a mission to protect our nation, our people, and a good businesses, and he puts it into kind of military, military terms, but in reality, it's a simple concept. Yeah, we're being attacked, defend and attack back. Just basic stuff. But to make it work as the sharing. So I got to ask you, I'm first of all, I love the, I love what he has, his vision. I love what you guys are doing. How real are we? What's the progression? >>Where are we on the progress bar of that vision? Well, you know, a lot's changed to the last year and a half alone, right? The threats gotten a lot, a lot more real to everybody, right? Used to be the industry would say to us, yeah, we want to share with the government, but we want something back for, right. We want them to show us some signal to today. Industry is like, look, the Chinese are crushing us out there, right? We can beat them at a, at some level, but we really need the governor to go do its job too. So we'll give you the information we have on, on an anonymized basis. You do your thing. We're going to keep defending ourselves and if you can give us something back, that's great. So we've now stood up in real time of DHS. We're sharing with them huge amounts of data about what we're seeing across six of the top 10 energy companies, some of the biggest banks, some of the biggest healthcare companies in the country. >>Right? In real time with DHS and more to come on that more to come with other government agencies and more to come with some our partners across the globe, right? Partners like those in Japan, Singapore, Eastern Europe, right? Our allies in the middle East, they're all the four lenses threat. We can bring their better capability. They can help us see what's coming at us in the future because as those enemies out there testing the weapons in those local areas. I want to get your thoughts on the capital markets because obviously financing is critical and you're seeing successful venture capital formulas like forge point really specialized funds on cyber but not classic industry formation sectors. Like it's not just security industry are taking a much more broader view because there's a policy implication is that organizational behavior, this technology up and down the stack. So it's a much broad investment thesis. >>What's your view of that? Because as you do, you see that as a formula and if so, what is this new aperture or this new lens of investing to be successful in funding? Companies will look, it's really important what companies like forge point are doing. Venture capital funds, right? Don Dixon, Alberta Pez will land. They're really innovating here. They've created a largest cybersecurity focused fund. They just closed the recently in the world, right? And so they really focus on this industry. Partners like, Kleiner Perkins, Ted Schlein, Andrea are doing really great work in this area. Also really important capital formation, right? And let's not forget other funds. Ron Gula, right? The founder of tenable started his own fund out there in DC, in the DMV area. There's a lot of innovation happening this country and the funding on it's critical. Now look, the reality is the easy money's not going to be here forever, right? >>It's the question is what comes when that inevitable step back. We don't. Nobody likes to talk about it. I said the guy who who bets on the other side of the craps game in Vegas, right? You don't wanna be that guy, but let's be real. I mean that day will eventually come. And the question is how do you bring some of these things together, right? Bring these various pieces together to really create long term strategies, right? And that's I think what's really innovative about what Don and Alberto are doing is they're building portfolio companies across a range of areas to create sort of an end to end capability, right? Andrea is doing things like that. Ted's doing stuff like that. It's a, that's really innovation. The VC market, right? And we're seeing increased collaboration VC to PE. It's looking a lot more similar, right? And now we're seeing innovative vehicles like stacks that are taking some of these public sort of the reverse manner, right? >>There's a lot of interests. I've had to be there with Hank Thomas, the guys chief cyber wrenches. So a lot of really cool stuff going on in the financing world. Opportunities for young, smart entrepreneurs to really move out in this field and to do it now. And money's still silver. All that hasn't come as innovation on the capital market side, which is awesome. Let's talk about the ecosystem in every single market sector that I've been over, my 30 year career has been about a successful entrepreneurship check, capital two formation of partnerships. Okay. You're on the iron net, front lines here. As part of that ecosystem, how do you see the ecosystem formula developing? Is it the same kind of model? Is it a little bit different? What's your vision of the ecosystem? Look, I mean partnerships channel, it's critical to every cyber security company. You can't scale on your own. >>You've got to do it through others, right? I was at a CrowdStrike event the other day. 91% of the revenue comes from the channel. That's an amazing number. You think about that, right? It's you look at who we're trying to talk about partnering with. We're talking about some of the big cloud players. Amazon, Microsoft, right? Google, right on the, on the vendor side. Pardon me? Splunk crashes, so these big players, right? We want to build with them, right? We want to work with them because there's a story to tell here, right? When we were together, the AECOS through self is defendant stronger. There's no, there's no anonymity here, right? It's all we bring a specialty, you bring specialty, you work together, you run out and go get the go get the business and make companies safer. At the end of the day, it's all about protecting the ecosystem. What about the big cloud player? >>Cause he goes two big mega trends. Obviously cloud computing and scale, right? Multi-cloud on the horizon, hybrids, kind of the bridge between single public cloud and multi-cloud and then AI you've got the biggies are generally will be multiple generations of innovation and value creation. What's your vision on the impact of the big waves that are coming? Well, look, I mean cloud computing is a rate change the world right? Today you can deploy capability and have a supercomputer in your fingertips in in minutes, right? You can also secure that in minutes because you can update it in real time. As the machine is functioning, you have a problem, take it down, throw up a new virtual machine. These are amazing innovations that are creating more and more capability out there in industry. It's game changing. We're happy, we're glad to be part of that and we ought to be helping defend that new amazing ecosystem. >>Partnering with companies like Microsoft. They didn't AWS did, you know, you know, I'm really impressed with your technical acumen. You've got a good grasp of the industry, but also, uh, you have really strong on the societal impact policy formulation side of government and business. So I want to get your thoughts for the young kids out there that are going to school, trying to make sense of the chaos that's going on in the world, whether it's DC political theater or the tech theater, big tech and in general, all of the things with coronavirus, all this stuff going on. It's a, it's a pretty crazy time, but a lot of work has to start getting done that are new problems. Yeah. What is your advice as someone who's been through the multiple waves to the young kids who have to figure out what half fatigue, what problems are out there, what things can people get their arms around to work on, to specialize in? >>What's your, what's your thoughts and expertise on that? Well, John, thanks for the question. What I really like about that question is is we're talking about what the future looks like and here's what I think the future looks like. It's all about taking risks. Tell a lot of these young kids out there today, they're worried about how the world looks right? Will America still be strong? Can we, can we get through this hard time we're going through in DC with the world challenges and what I can say is this country has never been stronger. We may have our own troubles internally, but we are risk takers and we always win. No matter how hard it gets them out of how bad it gets, right? Risk taking a study that's building the American blood. It's our founders came here taking a risk, leaving Eagle to come here and we've succeeded the last 200 years. >>There is no question in my mind that trend will continue. So the young people out there, I don't know what the future has to hold. I don't know if the new tape I was going to be, but you're going to invent it. And if you don't take the risks, we're not succeed as a nation. And that's what I think is key. You know, most people worry that if they take too many risks, they might not succeed. Right? But the reality is most people you see around at this convention, they all took risks to be here. And even when they had trouble, they got up, they dust themselves off and they won. And I believe that everybody in this country, that's what's amazing about the station is we have this opportunity to, to try, if we fail to get up again and succeed. So fail fast, fail often, and crush it. >>You know, some of the best innovations have come from times where you had the cold war, you had, um, you had times where, you know, the hippie revolution spawn the computer. So you, so you have the culture of America, which is not about regulation and stunting growth. You had risk-taking, you had entrepreneurship, but yet enough freedom for business to operate, to solve new challenges, accurate. And to me the biggest imperative in my mind is this next generation has to solve a lot of those new questions. What side of the street is the self driving cars go on? I see bike lanes in San Francisco, more congestion, more more cry. All this stuff's going on. AI could be a great enabler for that. Cyber security, a direct threat to our country and global geopolitical landscape. These are big problems. State and local governments, they're not really tech savvy. They don't really have a lot ID. >>So what do they do? How do they serve their, their constituents? You know, look John, these are really important and hard questions, but we know what has made technology so successful in America? What's made it large, successful is the governor state out of the way, right? Industry and innovators have had a chance to work together and do stuff and change the world, right? You look at California, you know, one of the reasons California is so successful and Silicon Valley is so dynamic. You can move between jobs and we don't enforce non-compete agreements, right? Because you can switch jobs and you can go to that next higher value target, right? That shows the value of, you know, innovation, creating innovation. Now there's a real tendency to say, when we're faced with challenges, well, the government has to step in and solve that problem, right? The Silicon Valley and what California's done, what technology's done is a story about the government stayed out and let innovators innovate, and that's a real opportunity for this nation. >>We've got to keep on down that path, even when it seemed like the easier answer is, come on in DC, come on in Sacramento, fix this problem for us. We have demonstrated as a country that Americans and individual are good at solve these problems. We should allow them to do that and innovate. Yeah. One of my passions is to kind of use technology and media to end communities to get to the truth faster. A lot of, um, access to smart minds out there, but young minds, young minds, uh, old minds, young minds though. It's all there. You gotta get the data out and that's going to be a big thing. That's the, one of the things that's changing is the dark arts of smear campaigns. The story of Bloomberg today, Oracle reveals funding for dark money, group biting, big tech internet accountability projects. Um, and so the classic astroturfing get the Jedi contract, Google WASU with Java. >>So articles in the middle of all this, but using them as an illustrative point. The lawyers seem to be running the kingdom right now. I know you're an attorney, so I'm recovering, recovering. I don't want to be offensive, but entrepreneurship cannot be stifled by regulation. Sarbanes Oxley slowed down a lot of the IPO shifts to the latest stage capital. So regulation, nest and every good thing. But also there's some of these little tactics out in the shadows are going to be revealed. What's the new way to get this straightened out in your mind? We'll look, in my view, the best solution for problematic speech or pragmatic people is more speech, right? Let's shine a light on it, right? If there are people doing shady stuff, let's talk about it's an outfit. Let's have it out in the open. Let's fight it out. At the end of the day, what America's really about is smart ideas. >>Winning. It's a, let's get the ideas out there. You know, we spent a lot of time, right now we're under attack by the Russians when it comes to our elections, right? We spent a lot of time harping at one another, one party versus another party. The president versus that person. This person who tells committee for zap person who tells committee. It's crazy when the real threat is from the outside. We need to get past all that noise, right? And really get to the next thing which is we're fighting a foreign entity on this front. We need to face that enemy down and stop killing each other with this nonsense and turn the lights on. I'm a big believer of if something can be exposed, you can talk about it. Why is it happening exactly right. This consequences with that reputation, et cetera. You got it. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate your insight. Um, I want to just ask you one final question cause you look at, look at the industry right now. What is the most important story that people are talking about and what is the most important story that people should be talking about? Yeah. Well look, I think the one story that's out there a lot, right, is what's going on in our politics, what's going on in our elections. Um, you know, Chris Krebs at DHS has been out here this week talking a lot about the threat that our elections face and the importance about States working with one another and States working with the federal government to defend the nation when it comes to these elections in November. Right? We need to get ahead of that. Right? The reality is it's been four years since 2016 we need to do more. That's a key issue going forward. What are the Iranians North Koreans think about next? They haven't hit us recently. We know what's coming. We got to get ahead of that. I'm going to come again at a nation, depending on staff threat to your meal. Great to have you on the QSO is great insight. Thanks for coming on sharing your perspective. I'm John furrier here at RSA in San Francisco for the cube coverage. Thanks for watching.

from San Mateo its the cube covering scalar innovation day brought to you by scaler but I'm John four with the cube we are here in San Mateo California official innovation day at Skylar's headquarters with Steve Neumann the founder of scalar and Jeff Mathis a software engineer guys thanks for joining me today thanks for having us thanks great to have you here so you guys introduced power queries what is all this about yes so the vision for scalar is to become the platform users trust when they want to observe their systems and power queries is a really important step along that journey power queries provide new insights into data with a powerful and expressive query language that's still easy to use so why is this important so we like to scaler we like to think that we're all about speed and a lot of what we're known for is the kind of the raw performance of the query engine that we've built that's sitting underneath this product which is one measure of speed but really we like to think of speed as the time from a question in someone's head to an answer on their screen and so the whole kind of user journey is part of that and you know kind of traditionally in our product we've we provided a set of basic capabilities for searching and counting and graphing that are kind of very easy for people to access and so you can get in quickly pose your question get an answer without even having to learn a query language and and that's been great but there are sometimes the need goes a little bit beyond that the question that some wants to ask is a little bit more complicated or the data needs a little bit of massaging and it just goes beyond the boundaries what you can do in kind of those basic you know sort of basic set of predefined abilities and so that's where we wanted to take a step forward and you know kind of create this more advanced language for for those more advanced cases you know I love the name power query so they want power and it's got to be fast and good so that aside you know queries been around people know search engines search technology discovery finding stuff but as ai/an comes around and more scales and that the system this seems to be a lot more focus on like inference into intuiting what's happening this has been a big trend what do you what's your opinion on that because this has become a big opportunity using data we've seen you know file companies go public we know who they are and they're out there but there's more data coming I mean it's not like it's stopping anytime soon so what's the what's the innovation that that just gonna take power queries to the next level yes so one of the features that I'm really excited about in the future of power queries is our autocomplete feature we've taken a lot of inspiration from just what your navbar does in the browser so the idea is to have a context-sensitive predictive autocomplete feature that's going to take into account a number of individual the syntactic context of where you are in the query what fields you have available to you what fields you've searched recently those kinds of factors Steve what's your take before we get to the customer impact what's the what's the difference it different what's weird whereas power queries gonna shine today and tomorrow so it's some it was a kind of both an interesting and fun challenge for us to design and build this because you're you know we're trying to you know by definition this is for the you know the more advanced use cases the more you know when you need something more powerful and so a big part of the design question for us is how do we how do we let people you know do more sophisticated things with their logs when the when they have that that use case while still making it some you know kind of preserving that that's speed and ease of use that that we like to think we're known for and and in particular you know they've been you know something where you know step one is go you know read this 300 page reference manual and you know learn this complicated query language you know if that was the approach then you know then we would have failed before we started and we had we have the benefit of a lot of hindsight you know there a lot of different sister e of people manipulating data you know working with these sophisticated different and different kinds of systems so there are you know we have users coming to us who are used to working with other other log management tools we have users or more comfortable than SQL we have users who really you know their focus is just a more conventional programming languages especially because you know one of the constituencies we serve our you know it's a trend nowadays that development engineers are responsible also for keeping their code working well in production so they're not experts in this stuff they're not log management experts they're not you know uh telemetry experts and we want them to be able to come in and kind of casual you know coming casually to this tool and get something done but we had all that context of drawn with these different history of languages that people are used to so we came up with about a dozen use cases that we thought kind of covered the spectrum of you know what would people bring bring people into a scenario like this and we actually game to those out well how would you solve this particular question if we were using an SQL like approach or an approach based on this tool or which based on that tool and so we we did this like big exploration and we were able to boil down boil everything down to about ten fairly simple commands that they're pretty much covered the gamut by comparison you know there are there other solutions that have over a hundred commands and it obviously if it's just a lot to learn there at the other end of the spectrum um SQL really does all this with one command select and it's incredibly powerful but you also really have to be a wizard sometimes to kind of shoehorn that into yeah even though sequels out there people know that but people want it easier ultimately machines are gonna be taking over you get the ten commands you almost couldn't get to the efficiency level simplifying the use cases what's the customer scenario looked like what's that why is design important what's what's in it for the customer yeah absolutely so the user experience was a really important focus for us when designing power queries we knew from the start that if tool took you ten minutes to relearn every time you wanted to use it then the query takes ten minutes to execute it doesn't take seconds to execute so one of the ways we approached this problem was to make sure we're constantly giving the user feedback that starts as soon you load the page you've immediately got access to some of the documentation you need you use the feature if you have type in correct syntax you'll get feedback from the system about how to fix that problem and so really focusing on the user experience was a big part of the yeah people gonna factor in the time it takes to actually do the query write it up if you have to code it up and figure it out that's time lag right there you want be as fast as possible interesting design point radical right absolutely so Steve how does it go fast Jeff how does it go fast what are you guys looking at here what's the magic so let me I'm going to step over to the whiteboard shock board here and we'll so chog in one hand Mike in the other will will evaluate my juggling skills but I wanted to start by showing an example of what one of these queries looks like you know I talked about how we kind of boil everything down to about 10 commands so so let's talk through a simple scenario let's say I'm running a tax site you know people come to our web site and they're you know they're putting their taxes together and they're downloading forms and tax laws are different in every state so I have different code that's running for you know you know people in California versus people in Michigan or whatever and I can you know it's easy to do things like graph the overall performance and error rate for my site but I might have a problem with the code for one specific state and it might not show up in those overall statistics very clearly so I don't know I want to get a sense of how well I'm how I am performing for each of the 50 states so I'm gonna and I'm gonna simplify this a little bit but you know I might have an access log for this system where we'll see entries like you know we're loading the tax form and it's for the state of California and the status code was 200 which means that was successful and then we load the tax form and the state is Texas and again that was a success and then we load the tax form for Michigan and the status was a 502 which is a server error and then you know and millions of these mixing with other kinds of logs from other parts of my system and so I want to pull up a report what percentage of requests are succeeding or failing by state and so let me sketch for it first with the query would look like for that and then I'll talk about how how we execute this at speed so so first of all I have to say what which you know of all my other you know I've drawn just the relevant logs but this is gonna be mixed in with all the other logs for my system I need to say which which logs I care about well maybe as simple as just calling out they all have the this page name in them tax form so that that's the first step of my query I'm searching for tax form and now I want to count these count how many of these there are how many of them succeeded or failed and I want to cluster that by state so I'm gonna clustering is with the group command so I'm gonna say I want to count the total number of requests which is just the count so count is a part of the language total is what I'm choosing to name that and I want to count the errors which is also going to be the count command but now I'm going to give it a condition I want to only count where the status is at least 500 and I rather you can see that but behind the plant is a 500 and I'm gonna group that by state so we're we're counting up how many of these values were above 500 and we're grouping it by this field and what's gonna come out of that is a table that'll say for each state the total number of requests the number of errors oh and sorry I actually left out a couple of steps but so it's but actually let's draw what this would give us so far so it's gonna show me for California maybe I had nine thousand one hundred and fifty two requests thirteen of them were errors for Texas I had and so on but I'm still not really there you know that might show me that California had you know maybe California had thirteen errors and Rodi had 12 errors but only there were only 12 requests for Rhode Island Rhode Island is broke you know I've broken my code for Rhode Island but it's only 12 errors because it's a smaller population so that's you know this analysis is still not quite gonna get me where I need to go so I can now add another command I've done this group now I'm gonna say I'm gonna say let which triggers a calculation let error rate equal errors divided by total and so that's going to give me the fraction and so for California you know that might be 0.01 or whatever but for Rhode Island it's gonna be one 100% of the requests are failing and then I can add another command to sort by the error rate and now my problem states are gonna pop to the top so real easy to use language it's great for the data scientists digging in their practitioners you don't need to be hard core coder to get into this exactly that's the idea you know groups or you know very simple commands that just directly you know kind of match the English description of what you're trying to do so then but you know yeah asked a great question then which is how do we take this whole thing and execute it quickly so I'm gonna erase here you're getting into speed now right so yeah bit like that how you get the speed exactly speed is good so simplicity to use I get that it's now speed becomes the next challenge exactly and the speed feeds into the simplicity also because you know step one for anything any tool like this is learning the tool yeah and that involves a lot of trial and error and if the trial and error involves waiting and then at the end of the wait for a query to run you learn that oh you did the query wrong that's very discouraging to people and so we actually think of speed really then becomes some ease of use but all right so how do we actually do this so you've got you know you'll have your whole mass of log data tax forms other forms internal services database logs that are you got your whole you know maybe terabytes of log data somewhere in there are the the really important stuff the tax form errors as well as all the other tax form logs mixed in with a bigger pile of everything else so step one is to filter from that huge pile of all your logs down to just the tax form logs and for that we were able to leverage our existing query engine and one of the main things that makes that engine there's kind of two things that make that that engine as fast it is as it is it's massively parallel so we we segment the data across hundreds of servers our servers so all this data is already distributed across all these servers and once your databases you guys build your own in-house ok got it exactly so this is on our system so we've already collected we're collecting the logs in real time so by the time the user comes and types in that query we already have the data and it's already spread out across all these service then the you know the first step of that query was just a search for tax form and so that's our existing query engine that's not the new thing we've built for power queries so that existing very highly optimized engine this server scans through these logs this service insula these logs each server does its share and they collectively produce a smaller set of data which is just the tax form logs and that's still distributed by the way so really each server is doing this independently and and is gonna continue locally doing the next step so so we're harnessing the horsepower of all these servers each page I only have to work with a small fraction of the data then the next step was that group command we were counting the requests counting the errors and rolling that up by state so that's the new engine we've built but again it each server can do just its little share so this server is gonna take whichever tax form logs it found and produce a little table of counts in it by state this server is gonna do the same thing so at each produce they're a little grouping table with just their share of the logs and then all of that funnels down to one central server where we do the later steps we do the division divide number of errors by total count and and then sort it but by now you know here we might have you might have trillions of log messages down to millions or billions of messages that are relevant to your query now we here we have 50 records you know just one for each state so suddenly the amount of data is very small and so the you know the later steps may be kind of interesting from a processing perspective but they're easy from a speed perspective so you solve a lot of database challenges by understanding kind of how things flow once you've got everything with the columnar database is there just give up perspective of like what if the alternative would be if we this is like I just drew this to a database and I'm running sequel trillions of log files I mean it's not trivial I mean it's a database problem then it's a user problem kind of combine what's order of magnitude difference if I was gonna do the old way yeah so I mean I mean the truth is there's a hundred old ways know how much pain yes they're healthy you know if you're gonna you know if you try to just throw this all into one you know SQL sir you know MySQL or PostgreSQL bytes of data and and by the way we're glossing over the data has to exist but also has to get into the system so you know in you know when you're checking you know am i letting everyone in Rhode Island down on the night before you know the 15th you need up to the moment information but the date you know your database is not necessarily even if it could hold the data it's not necessarily designed to be pulling that in in real time so you know just sort of a simple approach like let me spin up my SQL and throw all the data in it's it's just not even gonna happen I'm gonna have so now you're sharding the data or you're looking at some you know other database solution or ever in it it's a heavy lift either way it's a lot of extra effort taxing on the developers yeah you guys do the heavy lifting yeah okay what's next where's the scale features come in what do you see this evolving for the customers so you know so Jeff talked about Auto complete which you were really excited about because it's gonna again you know a lot of this is for the casual user you know they're you know they're a power user of you know JavaScript or Java or something you're they're building the code and then they've got to come in and solve the problem and get back to what they think of as their real job and so you know we think autocomplete and the way we're doing it we're we're really leveraging both the context of what you're typing as well as the history of what you and your team have done in queried in the past as well as the content of your data every think of it a little bit like the the browser location bar which somehow you type about two letters and it knows exactly which page you're looking for because it's relying on all those different kinds of cues yeah it seems like that this is foundational heavy-lift you myself minimize all that pain then you get the autocomplete start to get in a much more AI machine learning kicks in more intelligent reasoning you start to get a feel for the data it seems like yeah Steve thanks for sharing that there it is on the whiteboard I'm trying for a year thanks for watching this cube conversation

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, if the queue covering Vita Winter warmer, twenty nineteen brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hi, I'm stew Minutemen. And this is the Cube Worldwide Leader and live tech coverage. >> We're on the ground here at the V Tug winter warmer, and it is twenty nineteen. It's actually, the thirteenth year of this event was one of the original, if not the original Veum, where user groups covers virtual ization, cloud computing and even Mohr, always great to be able to get back to the community, get some good interviews and no better person helped me start with my first interview at a show of the year. But good friend of the program, Keith Towns and he is the CTO advisor. And he's also now a slew front architect with the M. Where Keith. Thanks for joining >> us. Thanks for having me on the cute. >> Yeah. So, Keith, I mean, you were host of our program for a number of years. You're now, you know, back working on the vendor side. But you know, you know this community. You know what I always say in my career, There, certain communities, an ecosystem where there's just love to be a part of it. And the virtual ization group. You know, I've been part of it for a long time. You know, Veum, wear and beyond, though, you know people that you know, they get excited, They geek out on the technology and they love to share. And that's why we come to events like this. >> Yeah, it is amazing. Just, you know, the every every show is getting smaller, but maybe with the session of a Ws re event, but I don't think the intensity has shrunk at all. You get around friends, you know, we're just at a desk and one of the ten days, actually, how did I get a job doing X? And the community was like, Oh, you just talk to the people at this table. So it is. It is a great, great commute. >> Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic you talk about. You know, we've seen the huge growth in Meetups in user groups and regional shows. You know, vm Where does Veum World but the VM world being where forums around the globe. I'm sure you probably have to go for a few of those they've been doing well. I'm right back in my emcee Daisy M. C. Did a number of those. So we see you. Amazon Reinvent is growing, but oh, my God, they're regional shows are ridiculous. I I've said some of those regional shows either different communities or different localities can actually be even better than some of the big shows on. You know, we love Keith. We're happy to welcome you here to the home of the NFC Championship. New England Patriots ur >> First off, Congratulations. The wait went a little better for you to bare sand and say, You know what? Tom Brady won't play forever, so enjoy it. This is amazing backdrop through him. Little finish that you've not involved. Invited me to a veto before now. >> Oh. Oh, I'm sorry, Keith. It's It's a community thing that absolutely got to come. Absolutely. I've had friends. Most of them. It is local. I'm talking to users from Maine and Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut and like so you gave a keynote this morning and you didn't True fashion. You did a block post about reality check leading in, and I thought it was a great way for us to start is, You know, there's so much change in the industry, uh, those of us that are technologies that you know, we're super excited because there's so much new stuff. It's not like Oh, jeez, you know, twenty nineteen is probably going to be just like twenty eighteen. It's like, Oh, my gosh, what did I do in twenty eighteen? What do I have to change? How do I keep up? How do I manage it? I would love to get your viewpoint. You know what's going on with Keith? And you're talking about a lot of users, so you know how help share, You know, what is the reality? Check that everybody's going >> to know. We're talking about a pre recording in the banter. Just, you know, whether it's, you know, Vienna where we're hip Theo and all the stuff that Casey Kelsey Hightower is going out with Cooper Netease. Then as you spent spent out to serve earless, uh, infrastructures Cole scripting it centre. There's much to learn that you're a bit overwhelmed and we're seeing this out. You know, as I'm talking to executive CTO CEOs, VP of infrastructure, they're filling the same kind of excitement at the same time. Overwhelmed this Like what? What's what's really You know, we had the big cloud movements over a few years ago where I think we're at the height cycle where organizations are starting to understand that. You know, Cloud isn't the destination is part of a strategy, and everyone seems to be in the throes of figuring out what that means for us. We're just on the crowd chat, talking about multi Cloud and the drivers around. Multi Cloud. You guys did a great job hosting that cloud shit chat, nothing. We saw the gambit off where people are. You know, uh, there's not really a business rationality people who are really in the throes of trying to figure it out. >> Yeah, actually, I love to comment friend of ours that we've had on the program before, Bobby Allen from Cloud General said when he's working with companies, if they ask for a three year strategy plan, he said, I will not do it unless we guarantee that we will go revisit it every six months because I looked back. You know, Clay Christensen, you no way talks about strategy is strategy is a point in time thing, not something that you write it in stone. I've been saying for a couple of years cloud strategies that companies today is, they wrote it in ink and the ink still drying. And, you know, you're probably going to need toe, you know, go through it and change it because it is changing fast and therefore, you know, huge. Out I started Deploy something. Oh, wait, what about the next thing? Or there's some new practice or something to do it. So it is challenging because I need to run my business. Today. I got to set my budget for the year, usually, um and it's I need to be agile. But, you know, I can't constantly be tearing everything up and you're not going to be throwing it out or re training and skills. I mean, there's so many challenges. >> So still, you might remember when when I was on the other side of the the table. I, uh it was meant at somewhat of a D that Veum where moves at the speed of the aisle, and it was picked up as Maury compliment. But >> it was a >> big I'll be honest that it was a dig. And what I've learned the past few months is that Veum, where has to move at the speed of the CIA, is no longer and It's not just being wherever the community has and the CIA always faced with that we could do a few years ago. A cloud strategy, and that thing can sit on the desk for a year, and it would still be valid. But the bobbies point, if you're going to do a strategy and three year strategy, got to revisit that every six months and this agility that were not accustomed to previously in the industry, we have to now become super agile and figure out how do we keep the lights on and innovate at the pace That business, these witches? Pretty good chance. >> Yeah, it's attorney were beginning the year I made a comment personally said, You know, I'm not a big believer in, you know, setting. You know, Resolutions. Mohr. You know, let's set goals Your runner, I do some biking and it's like, Okay, you know, I've got a big race I want to do this year. I'm gonna work myself, you know, towards that goal and raise the money. You've got a certain target and something that you could do over the year. It's and there's no way that you do that, cos you know they've got goals that they need to accomplish and business. And it's great to say, Oh, well, we need to be more efficient. We need to do some down something different. But, you know, reality is, you know, it's not just digital transformation of modernizing. It was, you know. Oh, okay. Do I need to transform my backup? You know, data protection, you know, huge activity going on in the marketplace right now, you know? So, what >> is sixty million noon investment in one >> week? Exactly. You know, the wave of hyper convergence is one that really changed a lot of architectures and had people change. You know, we've talked cloud computing. They're what are some of the, You know, some of the big, you know, movements that you see, you know, will you? Tracking the industry? It was kind of the the intel refunds for a cycle, and, you know, Oh, well, it's the next version of Microsoft or, you know, Veum, where operating system would be one of those big, you know, kind of ticked. Talks of what? What are some of the big commonalities that you're seeing Al? So they're actually moving people to >> new things without a doubt. There is one conversation that customers cannot get the enough of. And I had Ah, on my little vlog. I had game being from Vienna, where V P off the Storch and Business availability unit and I challenged her on the via Where? Vision around this. But customers cannot get enough of having a conversation around data. What they What do they do with data? And how does a move data? How did they get compute closest to data? How did we get data they're closest to? They're re sources. We talked about it on the multi cloud conversation, but by far conversations are around. Howto they extract value from data had really protect data, and howto they make sure their compliant with the data is something that that's driving a lot of innovation and a lot of conversation. A lot of interest. >> Yeah, Keith, it's a great one. When I look at you know, our research team, that wicked bond data is that the center of everything. In many ways, the failings of big data was talking about, You know, the challenges. I have infrastructure. No, the growth and the variety and blah, blah, blah and everything that's not what important to the business they don't care about, You know, it's like, Oh, well, there's a storage problem in a network problem. It's the business says there's data, you know? Do I protect my bird business to make sure that I'm not a risk? You know, all the things like DDP are coming And can I livered value? Do I Can I get new lines of business? Can I generate revenue out of that? And I've seen early signs that we've learned this whole, You know, a I m l movement. You know, data, Really? At the center. All right, we've seen enough storage. We went from talking about storing data to about, you know, that data ecosystem, Andi, even computing and I ot data where data needs to be, how I work it. Absolutely a center. So, yeah, it's great to hear that. Customers are identifying that. We've been doing like, chief data officer events for many years. You know, where does data live? Is that a CEO Thing? Is that a different part of the business? I don't know if you've got anything you're seeing from, you know, your customers is Tau, >> who owns the Data initiative, So it's really interesting. I had a conversation with a major bank, and it was a one on one with the CDO and what I thought was the most tricky part of the conversation is that here, Not only does he report directly into the CIA, which you know is to be expected, but he meets regularly with the board of directors. So data were seen. I've seen these seedy old rolls being popped up, and it's not just about the technology as you mentioned. It's about the whole approach about this asset that we have. It's so critical that worth creating a sea level position that today might reporting to the CEO but is most definitely accountable to the border director. >> Well, yeah, Keith, it's that the trend we've been watching for a while, as it used to be, it was a cost center. And, you know, it's kind of, you know, that's what it was considered today. If it isn't in, you know, direct relationship, working with the business, the business will go find somebody else to do it. The whole stealthy movement. You know, I can go find an answer for what I'm doing. I think about project I've worked on in my career and been like, I wish it was easy. You know, fifteen years ago, it was today to do those. But we see security's a board level discussion data as a board level discussion is excellent. And all of those things that traditionally you would think that own them. Having awareness and visibility and information communication flow between the board in the C suite is great progress. You >> know, it's interesting. I was a big proponent of this prior to coming on The vendor side is that vendors have to start having conversations outside of it. So traditional infrastructure of injustice, his goal. Hurry, right saw and where the whole the Dale emcee Dale Technologies they have to skill up and have conversations with CIA moles. Seo's CEO Ole's H R directors because the these buying centers now have power to go out and buy solutions. You know, talked about in my no keynote this morning. You know how many people have worked day? How many people have salesforce applications? They had nothing to do when I had no nothing to do with the procurement of off these solutions. The ball is moving outside of just traditional for court technology is starting to get to the point where regular users can consume business users can consume these massive, massive solutions based on technology and just happens to be a label. The technology, whether sales Force worked in >> Sochi, thought on this this whole point there want to ask you, In my career, there's often been groups inside a business that didn't get along. And we, you know, built silos. You know, the storage in the network team don't get along cloud and traditional I t You know what we're fighting? You know who owns it? Turf wars Managing that, You know, have we built silos in multi cloud today? Is everybody holding hands and, you know, pointing the business in the same direction, you could kind of give us the good the bad. So what? We need to work on going forward. >> I think the good is that you know that the umbrella of infrastructure starting to work as a single. Uh, you So you have storage, compu networking, even configuration man groups that were kind of confrontational before and territorial. Those groups are starting. Tio. Come on. Their one senior manager or one senior executive looking at? How do you provide services as a group and providing those services? I think we're we're starting to see Silos is actually the developer versus the infrastructure group is developers just wantto FBI, too. A set of services. They want infrastructure to get away. Developers themselves. Haven't you know, kind of katende enough of the scars from heaven have to do operations, So there's a different view off the world. And, uh, today I think developers haven't yet getting the budget power off operations. But the business wants solutions, and they're going out there competing with traditional Teo get the dollars to run the services in the cloud or or wherever, however they consumed them, whether it's, you know, just saw Chick fil a's deploying two thousand ten points to run six thousand containers at the edge. Is that something that's run by tears? That something wrong? Run by developers? I don't know. Check feeling well enough to know about. This is what we're seeing in >> industry. Yeah. All right. Well, keep towns. And always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to check him out see Teo advisor on Twitter, check out his blogged. And of course, thank you so much for watching. We'll be back. Uh, lots more coverage here at V tug. Winter warmer, twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Toronto Canada, it's The Cube, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello, everyone welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in conjunction with the Blockchain futurist happening this week it's run. I'm John Fourier, my cohost Dave Vellante, we're here with Cube alumni, Bradley Rotter, pioneer Blockchain investor, seasoned pro was there in the early days as an investor in hedge funds, continuing to understand the impacts of cryptocurrency, and its impact for investors, and long on many of the crypto. Made some great predictions on The Cube last time at Polycon in the Bahamas. Bradley, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thank you, good to see both of you. >> Good to have you back. >> So I want to just get this out there because you have an interesting background, you're in the cutting edge, on the front lines, but you also have a history. You were early before the hedge fund craze, as a pioneer than. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that and than how it connects to today, and see if you see some similarities, talk about that. >> I actually had begun trading commodity futures contracts when I was 15. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is a small state in the Midwest. >> I've heard of it. >> And I was in charge of >> Was it a test market? (laughing) >> I was in charge of hedging our one corn contract so I learned learned the mechanisms of the market. It was great experience. I traded commodities all the way through college. I got to go to West Point as undergrad. And I raced back to Chicago as soon as I could to go to the University of Chicago because that's where commodities were trading. So I'd go to night school at night at the University of Chicago and listen to Nobel laureates talk about the official market theory and during the day I was trading on the floor of the the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Grown men yelling, kicking, screaming, shoving and spitting, it was fabulous. (laughing) >> Sounds like Blockchain today. (laughing) >> So is that what the dynamic is, obviously we've seen the revolution, certainly of capital formation, capital deployment, efficiency, liquidity all those things are happening, how does that connect today? What's your vision of today's market? Obviously lost thirty billion dollars in value over the past 24 hours as of today and we've taken a little bit of a haircut, significant haircut, since you came on The Cube, and you actually were first to predict around February, was a February? >> February, yeah. >> You kind of called the market at that time, so props to that, >> Yup. >> Hope you're on the right >> Thank you. >> side of those shorts >> Thank you. >> But what's going on? What is happening in the capital markets, liquidity, why are the prices dropping? What's the shift? So just a recap, at the time in February, you said look I'm on short term bear, on Bitcoin, and may be other crypto because all the money that's been made. the people who made it didn't think they had to pay taxes. And now they're realizing, and you were right on. You said up and up through sort of tax season it's going to be soft and then it's going to come back and it's exactly what happened. Now it's flipped again, so your thoughts? >> So my epiphany was I woke up in the middle of the night and said oh my God, I've been to this rodeo before. I was trading utility tokens twenty years ago when they were called something else, IRUs, do you remember that term? IRU was the indefeasible right to use a strand of fiber, and as the internet started kicking off people were crazy about laying bandwidth. Firms like Global Crossing we're laying cable all over the ocean floors and they laid too much cable and the cable became dark, the fiber became dark, and firms like Global Crossing, Enron, Enron went under really as a result of that miss allocation. And so it occurred to me these utility tokens now are very similar in characteristic except to produce a utility token you don't have to rent a boat and lay cable on the ocean floor in order to produce one of these utility tokens, that everybody's buying, I mean it takes literally minutes to produce a token. So in a nutshell it's too many damn tokens. It was like the peak of the internet, which we were all involved in. It occurred to me then in January of 2000 the market was demanding internet shares and the market was really good at producing internet shares, too many of them, and it went down. So I think we're in a similar situation with cryptocurrency, the Wall Street did come in, there were a hundred plus hedge funds of all shapes and sizes scrambling and buying crypto in the fall of last year. It's kind of like Napoleon's reason for attacking Russia, seemed like a good idea at the time. (laughing) And so we're now in a corrective phase but literally there's been too many tokens. There are so many tokens that we as humans can't even deal with that. >> And the outlook, what's the outlook for you? I mean, I'll see there's some systemic things going to be flushed out, but you long on certain areas? What do you what do you see as a bright light at the end of the tunnel or sort right in front of you? What's happening from a market that you're excited about? >> At a macro scale I think it's apparent that the internet deserves its own currency, of course it does and there will be an internet currency. The trick is which currency shall that be? Bitcoin was was a brilliant construct, the the inventor of Bitcoin should get a Nobel Prize, and I hope she does. (laughing) >> 'Cause Satoshi is female, everyone knows that. (laughing) >> I got that from you actually. (laughing) But it may not be Bitcoin and that's why we have to be a little sanguine here. You know, people got a little bit too optimistic, Bitcoin's going to a hundred grand, no it's going to five hundred grand. I mean, those are all red flags based on my experience of trading on the floor and investing in hedge funds. Bitcoin, I think I'm disappointed in Bitcoins adoption, you know it's still very difficult to use Bitcoin and I was hoping by now that that would be a different scenario but it really isn't. Very few people use Bitcoin in their daily lives. I do, I've been paying my son his allowance for years in Bitcoin. Son of a bitch is rich now. (laughing) >> Damn, so on terms of like the long game, you seeing the developers adopted a theory and that was classic, you know the decentralized applications. We're here at a Cloud Blockchain kind of convergence conference where developers mattered on the Cloud. You saw a great developer, stakeholders with Amazon, Cloud native, certainly there's a lot of developers trying to make things easier, faster, smarter, with crypto. >> Yup. >> So, but all at the same time it's hard for developers. Hearing things like EOS coming on, trying to get developers. So there's a race for developer adoption, this is a major factor in some of the success and price drops too. Your thoughts on, you know the impact, has that changed anything? I mean, the Ethereum at the lowest it's been all year. >> Yup. Yeah well, that was that was fairly predictable and I've talked about that at number of talks I've given. There's only one thing that all of these ICOs have had in common, they're long Ethereum. They own Ethereum, and many of those projects, even out the the few ICO projects that I've selectively been advising I begged them to do once they raised their money in Ethereum is to convert it into cash. I said you're not in the Ethereum business, you're in whatever business that you're in. Many of them ported on to that stake, again caught up in the excitement about the the potential price appreciation but they lost track of what business they were really in. They were speculating in Ethereum. Yeah, I said they might as well been speculating in Apple stock. >> They could have done better then Ethereum. >> Much better. >> Too much supply, too many damn tokens, and they're easy to make. That's the issue. >> Yeah. >> And you've got lots of people making them. When one of the first guys I met in this space was Vitalik Buterin, he was 18 at the time and I remember meeting him I thought, this is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. It was a really fun meeting. I remember when the meeting ended and I walked away I was about 35 feet away and he LinkedIn with me. Which I thought was cute. >> That's awesome, talk about what you're investing-- >> But, now there's probably a thousand Vitalik Buterin's in the space. Many of them are at this conference. >> And a lot of people have plans. >> Super smart, great ideas, and boom, token. >> And they're producing new tokens. They're all better improved, they're borrowing the best attributes of each but we've got too many damn tokens. It's hard for us humans to be able to keep track of that. It's almost like requiring a complicated new browser download for every website you went to. We just can't do that. >> Is the analog, you remember the dot com days, you referred to it earlier, there was quality, and the quality lasted, sustained, you know, the Amazon's, the eBay's, the PayPal's, etc, are there analogs in this market, in your view, can you sniff out the sort of quality? >> There are definitely analogs, I think, but I think one of the greatest metrics that we can we can look at is that utility token being utilized? Not many of them are being utilized. I was giving a talk last month, 350 people in the audience, and I said show of hands, how many people have used a utility token this year? One hand went up. I go, Ethereum? Ethereum. Will we be using utility tokens in the future? Of course we will but it's going to have to get a whole lot easier for us humans to be able to deal with them, and understand them, and not lose them, that's the big issue. This is just as much a cybersecurity play as it is a digital currency play. >> Elaborate on that, that thought, why is more cyber security playing? >> Well, I've had an extensive background in cyber security as an investor, my mantra since 9/11 has been to invest in catalyze companies that impact the security of the homeland. A wide variety of security plays but primarily, cyber security. It occurred to me that the most valuable data in the world used to be in the Pentagon. That's no longer the case. Two reasons basically, one, the data has already been stolen. (laughing) Not funny. Two, if you steal the plans for the next generation F39 Joint Strike Force fighter, good for you, there's only two buyers. (laughing) The most valuable data in the world today, as we sit here, is a Bitcoin private key, and they're coming for them. Prominent Bitcoin holders are being hunted, kidnapped, extorted, I mean it's a rather extraordinary thing. So the cybersecurity aspect of if all of our assets are going to be digitized you better damn well keep those keys secure and so that's why I've been focused on the cybersecurity aspect. Rivets, one of the ICOs that I invested in is developing software that turns on the power of the hardware TPM, trusted execution environment, that's already on your phone. It's a place to hold keys in hardware. So that becomes fundamentally important in holding your keys. >> I mean certainly we heard stories about kidnapping that private key, I mean still how do you protect that? That's a good question, that's a really interesting question. Is it like consensus, do you have multiple people involved, do you get beaten up until you hand over your private key? >> It's been happening. It's been happening. >> What about the security token versus utility tokens? A lot of tokens now, so there's yeah, too many tokens on the utility side, but now there's a surge towards security tokens, and Greg Bettinger wrote this morning that the market has changed over and the investor side's looking more and more like traditional in structures and companies, raising money. So security token has been a, I think relief for some people in the US for sure around investing in structures they understand. Is that a real dynamic or is that going to sustain itself? How do you see security tokens? >> And we heard in the panel this morning, you were in there, where they were predicting the future of the valuation of the security tokens by the end of the year doubling, tripling, what ever it was, but what are your thoughts? >> I think security tokens are going to be the next big thing, they have so many advantages to what we now regard as share certificates. My most exciting project is that I'm heavily involved in is a project called the Entanglement Institute. That's going to, in the process of issuing security infrastructure tokens, so our idea is a public-private partnership with the US government to build the first mega quantum computing center in Newport, Rhode Island. Now the private part of the public-private partnership by the issuance of tokens you have tremendous advantages to the way securities are issued now, transparency, liquidity. Infrastructure investments are not very liquid, and if they were made more liquid more people would buy them. It occurred to me it would have been a really good idea if grandpa would have invested in the Hoover Dam. Didn't have the chance. We think that there's a substantial demand of US citizens that would love to invest in our own country and would do so if it were more liquid, if it was more transparent, if the costs were less of issuing those tokens. >> More efficient, yeah. >> So you see that as a potential way to fund public infrastructure build-outs? >> It will be helpful if infrastructure is financed in the future. >> How do you see the structure on the streets, this comes up all the time, there's different answers to this. There's not like there's one, we've seen multiple but I'm putting a security token, what am i securing against, cash flow, equity, right to convert to utility tokens? So we're starting to see a variety of mechanisms, 'cause you have to investor a security outcome. >> Yeah, so as an investor, what do you look for? >> Well, I think it's almost limitless of what these smart securities, you know can be capable of, for example one of the things that were that we're talking with various parts of the government is thinking about the tax credit. The tax credit that have been talked about at the Trump administration, that could be really changed on its head if you were able to use smart securities, if you will. Who says that the tax credit for a certain project has to be the same as all other projects? The president has promised a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure investment program and so far he's only 1.5 trillion away from the goal. It hasn't started yet. Wilbur Ross when, in the transition team, I had seen the white paper that he had written, was suggesting an 82% tax credit for infrastructure investment. I'm going 82%, oh my God, I've never. It's an unfathomable number. If it were 82% it would be the strongest fiscal stimulus of your lifetime and it's a crazy number, it's too big. And then I started thinking about it, maybe an 82% tax credit is warranted for a critical infrastructure as important as quantum computing or cyber security. >> Cyber security. >> Exactly, very good point, and maybe the tax credit is 15% for another bridge over the Mississippi River. We already got those. So a smart infrastructure token would allow the Larry Kudlow to turn the dial and allow economic incentive to differ based on the importance of the project. >> The value of the project. >> That is a big idea. >> That is a big idea. >> That is what we're working on. >> That is a big idea, that is a smart contract, smart securities that have allocations, and efficiencies, and incentives that aren't perverse or generic. >> It aligns with the value of the society he needs, right. Talk about quantum computing more, the potential, why quantum, what attracted you to quantum? What do you see as the future of quantum computing? >> You know, you don't you don't have to own very much Bitcoin before what wakes you up in the middle of the night is quantum computing. It's a hundred million times faster than computing as we know it today. The reason that I'm involved in this project, I believe it's a matter of national security that we form a national initiative to gain quantum supremacy, or I call it data supremacy. And right now we're lagging, the Chinese have focused on this acutely and are actually ahead, I believe of the United States. And it's going to take a national initiative, it's going to take a Manhattan Project, and that's that's really what Entanglement Institute is, is a current day Manhattan Project partnering with government and three-letter agencies, private industry, we have to hunt as a pack and focus on this or we're going to be left behind. >> And that's where that's based out of. >> Newport, Rhode Island. >> And so you got some DC presence in there too? >> Yes lots of DC presence, this is being called Quantum summer in Washington DC. Many are crediting the Entanglement Institute for that because they've been up and down the halls of Congress and DOD and other-- >> Love to introduce you to Bob Picciano, Cube alumni who heads up quantum computing for IBM, would be a great connection. They're doing trying to work their, great chips to building, open that up. Bradley thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Always great to see you, impeccable vision, you've got a great vision. I love the big ideas, smart securities, it's coming, that is, I think very clear. >> Thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. The Cube coverage here live in Toronto. The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, more live coverage, day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Blockchain futurist conference. This is the first global Cloud Blockchain Summit here kicking off the whole week. Stay with us for more after this short break.

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Fortinet Acclerate 18. Brought to you by Fortinet. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Fortinet's Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin joined by my cohost, Peter Burris. And we're excited to be joined by a Fortinet customer, Troy Miller the Director of Technical Resources from Clark County School District. Troy welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Lisa: So, you're local. You're in the Vegas area. Tell us a little bit about Clark County, I noticed some impressive numbers of size, and about your role. >> Clark County School District we service about 320,000 students a day, 41,000 employees. It's the entire county which, last I heard, was about the size of Rhode Island. So, basically, that's geographically large as well. My role in the district as Director of Technical Resources. We bring in 80 gigs of internet each day for all those people to consume. And we're responsible for the Edge security. So, we don't get down to the desktop yet but we just make sure they have a successful and reliable internet. >> So, 320,000 students and 41,000 employees. How many devices is that connecting to the network? Or do you have any idea? >> Even ones that were just district-owned might be closer to 420,000 probably, if you count all the labs. And then another everyone brings in their own one or two or three devices with them. Their phone, their iPad, their laptop. So, there's not an exact count but I'm guessing well over 450,000 probably. >> And you've been with Clark Country for awhile and you've been in education for awhile. Talk to us about the technology evolution that you've seen take place. The opportunities that that gives educators and students we well as the opportunities that it provides on the security side that you have to combat. >> Yeah, a long time ago, I've taught for four years from, I think it was '93 to '97, and I got into the department I'm in now. But back then it was one computer that a teacher didn't know how to use and rarely turned on to now they're using, whether it be smart boards, giving out iPads, Chromebooks, and so on. Every kid's connected and it's important. We're now a Google school district. So, Google Classroom using Google sites and so on. And so, it's important. And the evolution of that is just that when you have a reliable internet, and so Fortinet has definitely increased our stature in that. Day to day instruction can take place, not interrupt them. Cause if they lose their internet for two minutes we've deprived these students for all kinds of education. It's important and now everything is reliant upon it. Even our student management system, our ERP. All that stuff is now, some hosted internationally some hosted externally. So, security is a very important part of that. >> And when you think about the role that you play, you have a specific role within the school district. How does the ability to use a Fortinet-like product inside your role impact your ability to collaborate and coordinate with others in the school district to make sure that everything is running seamlessly? >> Yeah, that's important is that for us using the Fortinets that we have, it was important to be able to get better insight. I'm excited about the stuff in the conference this year to really improve upon that. But to be able to properly secure those say VPN connections going out to outside services or to better serve the students in the schools or other business transactions that take place. So, it's important on that. And then we can see if something's starting to break down somewhat where to go. And again, our district's pretty separated. It's siloed a bit. And so, it's important we know which department to go to if we're seeing issues with certain things. >> Now, local government's are notoriously difficult to work with for some technology vendors. How has it been for Clark County working with members of the Fortinet ecosystem. Because security is obviously an increasingly important feature of, well, virtually everything, but including local municipalities. >> Right. And Fortinet's been awesome. We worked with them through our managed service proprietor, Mosaic451. So, when we moved towards Fortinet just a year and a half ago, that made it a very seamless move because they had the expertise that we didn't at the time. We were brand new to the Fortinet platform. They brought in people from all over to help out with that to either install it, to set up the policies and so on. So, yeah, working with municipalities is difficult. Working for one's even more difficult. But Fortinet has made that very easy. >> What was the catalyst for bringing on Fortinet in terms of some of the challenges that you guys have with your firewalls? Was their any sort of one event or type of events that really catalyzed, hey, we're got to transform here? >> Yeah, there was a series of events actually. About a year and a half ago, we were undergoing about daily one hour, two hour DDoS attacks, fragmented UDP attacks. And our previous firewall vendors they couldn't, one they couldn't diagnose it. And two even once they did, it couldn't handle it. We were basically firewalling our firewall with our EdgeRouter. And so, that was when I said something has got to change. And that's when I contacted Mosaic451 and said, I need help. I can't be doing this every day cause the staff, obviously, were upset. And so was I. And so, Fortinet actually back then, our first involvement with Fortinet, they sent out two chassis and said, "Here. Try them out. See if this will stop the attack. We think it will." And we got them going within a few days and sure enough, it did. And so that told me I needed to make a move. It took, obviously, some budget trapeze acts to get that done. But within six months we were then on Fortinet. And again, once we got the equipment back everyone was able to help out and get us set up. We're unique in what we had and moving our policies and so on. So, they've been integral in that. >> So, impact perspective. It sounds like you went from these daily DDoS attacks to zero? >> Troy: Yeah. >> In how short of a time period? >> They stopped on their own beginning of January of that year. But we haven't had one at all since then. Or we've had small ones but the Fortinets handled them without a problem. They barely bumped them, you know. >> So, pretty big impact there that you've been able to make? >> Yeah, we went from-- >> Lisa: Pretty quickly. >> Yeah, yeah it was six months before we finally made the Fortinet decision. And we were fortunate we didn't have to go through an RFP process on that. Because that would have taken forever, and I didn't want to do that. And so, I already said we did our RFP. This one doesn't work. We know this other one doesn't work. So, guess what's left? So, that's the way we ended up with Fortinet. And I said we're very happy with them so far. >> In terms of some of the announcements that they have made today, around utilizing AI technology. They've also talked about their Fabric-Ready Partner Program. You've talked about a partner there. What are some of the things that excite you about what you've heard from them today? Does that give you reassurance that not only did we make the right decision but this is something that's going to help us as we evolve and as security threats naturally evolve and grow as well that you feel like you have a good foundation on the security side. >> Yeah, precisely. I'm very excited from what I saw. And you know, there's things, education, especially in this state, is extremely underfunded. So, I'd love to go out and just say, "Oh, I'd like to buy this. I'd like to buy that." We're up and running with the security fabric. And I'm excited about it. But what I'm really excited is the opportunity to grow. We can really assume some progress with that. And so, while I can't take full advantage of it or even go to the FortiOS 6 probably anytime soon. But we will be able to start laying the groundwork, and I can plan out to start filling off those check boxes in that security fabric, and start providing a better more secure internet for what I'm responsible for, what I can consume. >> So, education like everything else is changing. What are the set of options that become more available to you to Clark County School District as a consequence of bringing in a new security fabric that's capable of accommodating a little more complexity, a little bit more automation? >> Well, yes, a little bit of all that. For us, what I'm excited about with the Fortinet is that one, we've got something robust that's going to last us for five to seven years. Those will last even beyond our 80 gigs we're using now if we need to go beyond that before I retire. But the exciting part of that is, like I said, by adding in those different security fabric pieces I think we'll be able to improve bit by bit. And I know while they're going to improve them even more by the time we finally get there. So, that's exciting. >> You talked about ... I'd like you to elaborate a little bit more on your organization. It sounds, I don't want to say fragmented, but there's different centers. How has, I should say, what you guys have been able to achieve by bringing Fortinet in in terms of we talked about this dramatic reduction or elimination of DDoS. Are you able to leverage that as sort of a best practice within the school district. Do you see opportunities that this Fortinet partnership can have for you in that respect? >> It gives us some validity. It shows that it did make a difference. We didn't just spend some money on it no reason. Yeah, because of its being siloed, what the Fortinets will give us now is we can know exactly which department to send certain tickets to. What we see whether it's to be malware or something pinging out that shouldn't. We can better address where it's coming from and what to do with it. And again, Mosaic is our sock. So, working with them, working with Fortinet we've been able to improve our response to minor incidents as they happen. >> Are there other natural issues that the County of Las Vegas deals with that makes Fortinet especially relevant? I mean, obviously, great distances. But you know, you've got large mountains surrounding here. It's a very dry environment. Are you finding that there's just things about the location that makes Fortinet that much better choice? >> I don't really think environmental ... Pretty much what makes this the best choice is not really where we are but just what we do. Like I said, the internet comes to us, and then we kind of spray it out from there. And so, that availability and reliability is what's important. Sort of where we are doesn't quite matter. But it is the ability to be able to service the customers. >> So, we kind of look at the security transformation that you're on. You've talked to us about some of the achievements that you've made so far in the first year. What are some of things throughout the rest of 2018 that your looking forward to enabling your environment with your Fortinet partnership? >> Some of the things I'm excited about there is, like you had mentioned before the AI part of that. That I'm really excited to hopefully implement. That just takes some ... I can use the eyes I have. I only have four security people basically for that organization. Two of them from Mosaic, two of my own people. And so, if I can have those people addressing bigger concerns than malware or stuff like that. And VAI can better handle that, so instead of digging through logs, we can just, there it is, block it or it's already blocked. That would save us. And I could use that talent for more serious items. We already completed our Edge redesign the networks. Now, we're not redundant on that. We're working on our internal network. So, if we can spend more time making those things more robust to then take advantage of the security fabric as we're able to take advantage of it then that's all the better. >> In most enterprises, there's a partnership that has to be established between security architecture, security operations, the business, and especially the employees. Employees have to take an active roll to successfully do security. Kids and schools are not necessarily well known for having consistent behaviors. How has that affected your environment? And what can enterprises learn as they think about having to serve increasingly unruly customers in their markets? >> Yeah, that's one of the things I'm just starting to dip my toe in to plan for next year is more of an education for it but then holding them accountable for that education. Yeah, I don't know which is worse, the teachers or the students. (Peter laughs) I'm guessing the teachers. (Lisa laughs) They'll click on anything they see. So, it's important to educate them first before I start rolling out some efficient testing on them and so on. But we have to start doing that because otherwise it doesn't matter if something comes in or they get it off their tablet. Now, they've infected the internal and it didn't even get to us, right? And so, it's important that education is important. We're going to start trying to hold them accountable for it. But that's a huge challenge where I'm at. That's like climbing Everest there. >> So, is Fortinet going to help? I think it will. Fortinet's going to be able to help for us to be able to have that insight on what's still working, what's not. We're still seeing these things. >> And also recognizing patterns and seeing what people tend to do wrong will probably help you pinpoint what you need to, that partnership. What the user needs to take more responsibility for. >> Right and that's the thing. It better identifies those issues. You see where they've improved or what still needs to be worked on. >> Peter: Great. >> Well, congratulation on what you've achieved so far. >> Oh, thank you. >> And thank you so much for sharing your success story with us. You're on a journey, and we wish you continuing success with that. >> Thank you. >> For my cohost, Peter Burris, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE's coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. We'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat techno music)

(computer mouse clicking) >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at Google for the sixth annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards and we're very excited to be joined by one of the award winners, Beth Cohen. You are with Verizon, congratulations on the award, Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, yes. >> So tell me what you do for Verizon. >> So what I do for Verizon is I come up with new products, and we've been focusing over the last few years on software defined networking, which is a brand new, cutting edge area that not only Verizon is new to but also the entire world is new to. So what we're doing is we're taking cloud concepts and applying them to network services and I'm actually involved, in addition to that, in a new initiative called edge computing. So there's going to be white paper coming out shortly on that and that all came out of my work at Verizon on the products, the software defined networking products I've been working on. >> Wow, so you are a pioneer. We'll get to more of that a little bit later but what are some of the things that excite you about being on the leading edge of software defined networking and edge computing? >> Well, what's really exciting to me is working with the customers and getting them excited about this new technology and how it's really changing the world. And they're all excited about it because they understand that the future is here and that they need to embrace it. >> So one of the things that I found was really interesting when I was doing some research on you is you've worked with several technology companies to help them change their product strategy direction, taking advantage of the cloud. So I mentioned the work pioneer earlier but you're clearly influential. How have you been able to work with companies of presumably diverse cultures to help them change direction? >> So that's an interesting question. The company has to be ready for it and some companies are not, actually. But the companies, fortunately I've had the opportunity to work with some companies that were ready for either whether they recognized, in one case, their market was disappearing, literally, as their customers were leaving and they didn't have any new customers and they recognized that they needed to take a new direction to survive. And what they did is they had some really unique, interesting technology around high availability and survivability, which is something that companies really need but theirs was a hardware based solution and what I helped them do is to really come up with a new way of looking at it that was a software based solution that they could apply to classrooms. >> Wow, so tell me about the influence there. What's that process like to show them, like you were saying, some of them, customers are drying up, obviously this is an impetus for change, what were some of the obstacles that you helped them identify and overcome to identify, "This is why we have to shift direction, "this is going to be much more beneficial?" >> So, they obviously were in great pain, as their balance sheet was drifting down but they had to realize that their skill sets, that they had some people that had some great skill sets but they had to really think differently about what they were doing. So one of the things I did is help them understand the new technologies that they were going to be adopting. So I did some training, worked out some training with them and gave them a two day training session on a cloud technology and what it was about and how it could apply to them. I also had to understand what they were doing and their secret sauce so that I could really extend that and say, "Okay, your job's not going to go away "but you really need to add some additional skills "to be successful in this new direction." >> What are some of the fears, technology fears, that you've heard as, not just an influencer helping companies to make the right directional changes, but also even at your current career at Verizon? What are some of the things that people are afraid of regarding technology that you can help them see, "Ah, it's not so bad?" (laughing) >> So, you know, Verizon's a telecom and telecom's, what I like to say to people is, "What we're selling is reliability, right, "so every time you make that cell phone call, "it goes through, right?" And Verizon prides itself on that and every time you have that connection, it works every time. Well, there's a lot of technology and a lot of operations and a lot of support services that go on behind the scenes to make that actually happen. And the general public's probably just not aware of that. But the people inside the company are very afraid to get away from, "Well, we've always done this and we have to continue doing "this because we do have that five nines reliability that we "have to deliver," and so it's very difficult to say, "Oh, well we'll do it differently now." So, there has to be a lot of education around, and gaining the trust that yes, this new technology can be used and can deliver those five nine reliability statistics and SLA's that you're used to delivering. >> Do you think it's more of a fear of maybe cultural change than it is actual technology? >> I'd say it's probably a combination of both. Verizon's a technology company so obviously we embrace technology and we have a lot of really smart people working for the company who love technology. But we also, we want to service our customers and we don't want to get that angry phone call about, "The network's down." So, there's kind of a combination to make sure that we deliver to our customers what they expect. >> Exactly. So I mentioned the word pioneer earlier, you have a really interesting career path that I think is very inspirational. In the last couple minutes that we have here, share with us about, how did you get from what you studied in school to being a leader in software defined networking at Verizon? >> Wow, so I studied architecture, as in building architecture, I went to Rhode Island School of Design, which is completely, totally opposite. Although, I do tell people, I learned a whole lot about creativity and critical thinking, which is very valuable skills to apply to being a pioneer because when you're in cutting edge, what I spend most of my time doing is connecting the dots and saying, "Oh, this technology can be applied here," or, "These two technologies can work together, "have you ever thought of that?" "Oh wow, never." (laughing) So that's why I end up spending my career being on the cutting edge of things. >> I love that. You bring up a great point that is, in a lot of fields, no matter what you study, there are great lessons to be learned from, for example, applying the creativity and technology, there's a great value there and so I think that's very inspiring to others who might be interested in different things and know that there's a lot of cross pollination. Last question-- >> I have one more comment about that. >> Oh, please go for it. >> There's no such thing as wasted time, everything I've done over the years has always ended up being a learning experience for me. I spent two years being a cook at a fancy French restaurant in Phillidelphia and that was a learning experience too. (laughing) >> And I love that and you're absolutely right, all these experiences build one on the other on the other and I agree with you that, and I hope a lot of people feel the same, that there isn't a waste of time, it's not a wrong step, it's something that you can learn from and they'll be a better person, a better worker, a better boss for it. >> And a mean cook. >> Exactly, I got to get some recipes from you. So last question, the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud award, really quickly, how did you find out about that and what does this award mean to you? >> I'm very excited about it. I have to admit, it was a big surprise for me. Somebody nominated me and they sent me a note on LinkedIn and I had completely forgotten about it and then I get this email and so I was like just stunned so I'm very excited about it. >> And it seems, like I've said, I've used the word pioneer a number of times, and you're very inspiring and I'm sure that the people that bestowed the award are very thrilled to have you in the class as this is the sixth year. >> Yes. >> Well Beth, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE and sharing your story and again, congratulations on the award. >> Thank you again. >> I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at Google, thanks so much for watching. Bye for now. (upbeat music)