welcome back to the cube's presentation of the aws executive summit at re invent 2021 made possible by accenture my name is dave vellante we're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who change their behavior to live healthier lives a real passion of of mine and getting to the really root cause of health with me now are simon guest who's the chief executive officer of generality vitality gmbh and niels mueller who's the managing director at the cloud first application engineering lead for the european market at accenture gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks for having us you're very welcome simon generally vitality it's a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put into practice tell us how does it all work sure no problem and thanks for for having us on dave it's a pleasure to be here so look uh generally vitality is in its uh it's core pretty simple concepts so it's uh it's a program that you have on your phone and the idea of this program is that it's a it's a wellness coach for you as an individual and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your your lifestyle and your wellness and hopefully help you to lead a healthier and a more sort of mindful life i guess is is the best way of summarizing it from um from our point of view with insurance company of course you know our historical role has always been to uh be the company that's there if something goes wrong you know so if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your in your life or in your family's life that's that's historically been our role but what we see with generality vitality is something a little bit different so it's a program that really is uh supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life it's something that we already have in in four european markets in fact in five from this week i'm a little bit behind the time so we're live already in in germany in france in austria and italy and in spain and fundamentally what we what we do dave is too is to say to customers look if you want to understand your health if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more by visiting the doctor more by eating healthier by healthy choices on a daily basis we're going to help you to do that and we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices and we're going to reward you for for doing the same so you know we partner up with with great companies like garmin like adidas like big brands that are let's say invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well make good choices be healthy have an insurance company that partners you along that journey and if you do that we're going to reward you for for that so you know we're here not just in the difficult times which of course is one of our main roles but we're here as a partner as a lifetime partner to you too to help you feel better and live a better life i love it i mean it sounds so simple but but it's i'm sure it's very complicated to to make the technology simple for the user you've got mobile involved you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech but first i want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes simon that you've analyzed what's the feedback that you're getting from your customers what does the data tell you how do the incentives work as well what what is the incentive for the the member to actually do the right thing sure look i think actually the the covered uh situation that we've had in the last sort of two years has really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value so i mean look just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for for customers so what we try to do with them is is to get customers to understand uh their current health situation you know using their phone so uh you know we ask our customers to go through a sort of health assessment around how they live what they eat how they sleep you know and to go through that sort of process uh and to give them what a vitality age which is a sort of uh you know sort of actuarial comparison with their real age so i'm i'm 45 but unfortunately my my vitality age is 49 and it means i have some work to do to bring that back together uh and what we see is that you know two-thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life and if what if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span so how long are they going to live healthier for so you see them really engaging in this in this approach of understanding their current situation then what we know actually because the program is built around this model that uh really activity and moving and exercise is the biggest contributor to living a healthier life we know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illness is like you know poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising and so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more and it's not about being an athlete it's about you know getting off the the underground one station earlier walking home or making sure you do your 10 000 steps a day and what we see is that that sort of 40 of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how how much they are exercising and at the same time what we do is we set we set our customers weekly challenges to say look if you can move a little bit more than last week we are going to to reward you for that and we see that you know almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week and it's really a fantastic level of engagement that normally is an insurer uh we don't see the way the rewards work is is pretty simple it's similar in a way to an airline program so every good choice you make every activity you do every piece of good food that you eat when you check your on your health situation we'll give you points and the more points you get you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a gold and then a platinum status and the the higher up you get in the status that the higher the value of the rewards that we give you so almost a quarter of our customers now and this is accelerated through provide they've reached that platinum status so they are the most engaged customers that we we have and those ones who are really engaging in the in the program and what we really try to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says if you live well you make good choices you improve your health you you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more uh valuable rewards for for doing that and some of those rewards are are around health and wellness so it might be that you get you get a discount on on gym gear from adidas it might be that you get a discount on a uh on a device from garmin or it might be actually on other things so we also give people amazon vouchers we also give people uh discounts on holidays and another thing that we we did actually in the last year which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations because we we work in generality with a with a sort of um campaign called the human safety net which is helping out the poorest people in society and some what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves they convert it into a charitable donation so we're actually also thinking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal good so we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of uh of engagement with our customers i mean that's a powerful cocktail i love it you got the the data because if i see the data then i can change my behavior you got the gamification piece you actually have you know hard dollar rewards you could give those to charities and and you've got the the most important which is priceless can't put a value on good health i got one more question for simon and niels i'd love you to chime in as well on this question how did you guys decide simon to engage with accenture and aws and the cloud to build out this platform what's the story behind that collaboration was there unique value that you saw that that you wanted to tap that you feel like they bring to the table what was your experience yeah look i mean we worked at accenture as well because the the the sort of construct of this vitality proposition is a pretty a pretty complex one so you mentioned that the idea is simple but the the build is not so uh is not so simple and that that's the case so accenture's been part of that journey uh from the beginning they're one of the partners that we work with but specifically around the topic of rewards uh you know we're we're a primarily european focused organization but when you take those countries that i mentioned even though we're next to each other geographically we're quite diverse and what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go and get to market with an increasing amount of efficiency and and to do that we needed to work with somebody who understood our business has this historical let's say investment in in the vitality concept so so knows how to bring it to life but that what then could really support us in making uh what can be a complex piece of work as simple and as as replicable as possible across multiple markets because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we do we move to a new market so we need to find a balance between having a consistent product a consistent technology offer a consistent customer experience with the fact that we we operate in quite diverse markets so this was let's say the the reason for more deeply engaging with accenture on this journey thank you very much niels why don't you comment on on that as well i'd love to to get your thoughts and and really really it's kind of your role here i mean accenture global si deep expertise in industry but also technology what are your thoughts on this topic yeah i'd love to love to comment so when we started the journey it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages different partners for the rewards there's different reward partners in the different markets so we needed to build in an asset basically that could work as a tempos centrally standardizing things but also leaving enough flexibility to to then localize in the individual markets and if we talk about some of the more specific requirements so one one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the basically the authentication needs to happen and we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform and we were able to do that at the end through the aws cognito service sort of wrapping the individual markets uh local idp systems and by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of idp solution in place for markets that do not have a local idp solution in place or don't want to use it for for this purpose yeah so you had you had data you have you had the integration you've got local laws you mentioned the flexibility you're building ecosystems that are unique to the to the local uh both language and and cultures uh please you had another comment i interrupted you yeah i know i just wanted to expand basically on the on the requirements so that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets but then there were further requirements for example like being able to operate that platform with very low operations overhead there is no large i.t team behind generally vitality that you know works to serve us or can can act as this itis backbone support so we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot and that was another big big driver for first of all going to cloud but second of all making specific choices within cloud so we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example manage database services you know with automatic backup with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that you know has all this built in which usually maybe a database administrator would take care of and we applied that concept basically to every component to everything we looked at we we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot how can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible and then land it on these services and for example we also used the the api gateway from from aws for our api services that also came in handy when for example we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call and then we could just with a flick of a button basically introduce caching on the level of the api gateway and really improve the user experience because the data you know wasn't updated so much so it was easier to cache so these are all experiences i think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that that drove that to to have a good user experience niels would you say that the architecture is is a sort of a data architecture specifically is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated you know centralized governance or is it more of a centralized view what if you could talk about that yeah it's it's actually a centralized platform basically so the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of that infrastructure so the data is separated in a way obviously by the different tenants but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if if the need arises from from the business and the reason i ask that simon is because essentially i look at this as a as largely a data offering for your customers and so niels you were talking about the local language and simon as well i would imagine that that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements and so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security that's not a trivial challenge i wonder if you both could comment on that yeah maybe maybe i'll give a start and then simon can chime in so um what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience right so so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer what rewards have been redeemed what rewards can be unlocked on the next level and we we foreshadow a little bit to to motivate to incentivize the customer and as that data sits in an aws database in a tenant by tenant fashion and you can run analysis on top of that maybe what you're getting into is also the let's say the exercise data the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built but i'm sure simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well yeah please yeah sure sure yeah sure so look i think them the topic of data and how we use it uh in our business is a very is very interesting one because it's um it's not historically being seen let's say as the remit of insurers to go beyond the you know the the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be but actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in in this kind of product and and what i mean by that is uh look if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from from generali and we are giving you access to this uh to this program and through that program you are living a healthier life and that might have a you know a positive impact on generali in terms of you know maybe we're going to increase our market share or maybe we're going to lower claims or we're going to generate value out of that then one of the points of this program is that we then share that value back with customers through the rewards on the platform that we that we've built here and of course being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the of the the different stages of how you of how much value you are creating and it's also interesting to know that you know in a couple of our markets we we operate in the corporate space so not with retail customers but with with organizations and one of the reasons that those companies give vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce they want to see higher presenteeism lower absenteeism of employees and of course being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the vitality program and things like that is also is also important and as we've said the markets are very different so we need to be able to to take the data uh that we have out of the vitality program uh and be able in in the company that that i'm managing to to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses we are able to make good decisions about the kind of insurance products we i think what's interesting to uh to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate stays purely within the vitality business itself and what we do inside the vitality business is to analyze that data and say okay is this is this also helping our insurance businesses to to drive uh yeah you know better top line and bottom line in the in the relevant business lines and this is different per company and per mark so yeah being able to interrogate that data understand it apply it in different markets and different uh distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an is an important one yes it's an excellent example of a digital business in in you know we talk about digital transformation what does that mean this is what it means i i'd love i mean it must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry you're lowering overall cost i mean if people are getting less sick that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products you can give back some to your corporate clients you can play that balancing act you can gain market share and and you've got some knobs to turn some levers uh for your stakeholders which is which is awesome neil something that i'm interested in i mean it must have been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success i mean you're obviously removed it's up it's up to generality vitality to get adoption for for their customers but at the same time the efficacy of your solution is going to determine you know the ease of of of delivery and consumption so so how did you map to the specific goals what were some of the key kpis in terms of mapping to their you know aggressive goals besides the things we already touched on i think one thing i would mention is the timeline right so we we started the team ramping in january or february and then within six months basically we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase and within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets so this speed to value speed to market that we were able to achieve i think is one of the key um key criteria that also simon and team gave to us right there was a timeline and that timeline was not going to move so we needed to make a plan adjust to that timeline and i think it's both a testament to to the team's work that they did that we made this timeline but it also is enabled by technologies like cloud i have to say if i go back five years ten years if if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally there would have been no way to do this in 12 months right that's for sure yeah i mean simon you're a technology company i mean insurance has always been a tech heavy company but but as niels just mentioned if you had to do that with it departments in each region so my question is is now you've got this it's almost like non-recurring engineering costs you've got that it took one year to actually get the first one done how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective not withstanding any you know local regulations and figuring out to go to market is that compressed yeah so if you are specifically technology-wise i think we would be able to set up a new market including localizations that often involves translation of because in europe you have all the different languages and so on at i would say four to six weeks we probably could stand up a localized solution in reality it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved obviously but just our piece of the solution we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market but but simon that means that you can spend time on those other factors you don't have to really worry so much about the technology and so you've launched in multiple european markets what do you see for the future of this program come to america you know you can fight you can find that this program in america dave but with one of our competitors we're not we're not operating so much in uh but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure but yes you're right so look i think from from our perspective uh you know to put this kind of business into a new market it's not it's not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a as a service on a standalone basis to customers we want to link it with with insurance business in the end we are an insurance business and we want to to see the value that comes from that so there's you know there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way also from a customer publishing point of view with our distribution and they are they are quite different so so yeah look coming to the question of what's next i mean it comes in three stages for me so as i mentioned we are uh in five markets already uh in next in the first half of 2022 we'll also come to to the czech republic and poland uh which we're excited to to do and that will that will basically mean that we we have this business in in the seven main uh general markets in europe related to life and health business which is the most natural uh let's say fit for something like vitality then you know the next the sort of second part of that is to say okay look we have a program that's very heavily focused around uh activity and rewards and that that's a good place to start but you know wellness these days is not just about you know can you move a bit more than you did historically it's also about mental well-being it's about sleeping good it's about mindfulness it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to well-being and and covert has taught us and customer feedback has taught us actually that this is something where we need to to go and here we need to have the technology to move there as well so to be able to work with partners that are not just based on on on physical activity but also also on mindfulness so this is how one other way we'll develop the proposition and i think the third one which is more strategic and and we are you know really looking into is there's clearly something in the whole uh perception of incentives and rewards which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically so i think we need to learn you know forget you know forgetting about the specific one of vitality being a wellness program but if there's an insurer there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that and it creates value for us as an insurer then then this is probably you know a place we want to investigate more and to be able to do that in in other areas means we need to have the technology available that is as i said before replicable faster market can adapt quickly to to other ideas that we have so we can go and test those in in different markets so yes we have to we have to complete our scope on vitality we have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale all of those rewards at real scale and uh to have the technology that allows us to do that without without thinking about it too much and then to say okay how do we widen the proposition and how do we take the concept of vitality that sits behind vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business and that's really what the future is is going to look like for us you know the the isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business you're out of business and pre-kov a lot of these stories were kind of buried uh but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving and this is an awesome example jeff another point is that jeff amebacher one of the founders of cloudera early facebook employee famously said about 10 12 years ago the best and greatest engineering minds of our my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads and this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives so guys congratulations best of luck really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome really appreciate you your time on the cube thank you thanks bye-bye all right and thanks for watching this segment of thecube's presentation of the aws executive summit at reinvent 2021 made possible by accenture keep it right there for more deep dives [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back. We're here in the main stage in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Normally, we're over there on theCUBE set, but here we've got a special presentation. We'll talk about Totogi and the new CEO of Totogi is Danielle, who is also the CEO of TelcoDR, Digital Revolution. Great to see you. And of course, Robin Langley, we interviewed you in theCUBE, CTO of Totogi. This is a main stage conversation because this is the big news. >> Yeah. >> You guys launched there with a hundred million dollar investment. We covered that news a couple weeks ago and you as the CEO. What's the story. Tell us what is happening with Totogi? Why such a big focus? What's the big push? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about Totogi because I really think this team is working to build public cloud tools for Telco the right way. It's everything I've been talking about. I talked about it yesterday in my keynote and this is really the execution of that vision. So, I'm super excited about that. A couple of days ago, Rob and I were talking about the charging system, but there's another product that Totogi introduced to the world and that's the webscale BSS system. So I think we're going to talk about that today. It's going to be great. >> Let's get into actually the charging system, which was great processing here. What is this focus? What is BSS about with cloud? How does the public cloud innovation change the game with this? >> Well, a little bit like charging. I mean, there are maybe, you know, a hundred plus BSS systems out there, why does the world need yet another BSS? And I think one thing is we're coupling up with public cloud, which gives it that webscale element. Right? We can have a platform. Never do another upgrade again, which I think is really exciting. But I think the really key thing that we're working on is we're building on top of an open API standard. And a lot of vendors talk about their APIs, why is this different? These are standards developed by TM forum, right? It's an independent body in our industry. They've been working on these, sorry, open APIs, and all the different vendors signed a manifesto that say, "I pledge. I pledge to support the open API", but if you look at the leaderboard and everyone is Sub10, Sub5, right? And so it's kind of like, going through the actions and not falling, you know, saying it, but not following it up and we're doing it. >> Wow, so... >> Yeah. >> Dave: Robin, you guys just popped up on the leaderboard. You went from a standing start to, I think more than 10. >> Yeah. >> I don't think that's ever been done before, has it? >> No, so we were out there. We published 12 APIs and we've got a quote from, you know, TM forums saying, essentially I've never seen anyone move so fast and to publish. And it's our intent to publish, you know, 50 plus, all of their APIs by the end of the year. >> So, how were you able to do that? I mean, like, were you holding them back? Just kind of dumping them on one day? This is the nature of the new business, isn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely and then you think about BSS. It's just, you know, been known for years to be a spaghetti of, you know, applications, you know, disparate data, data being duplicated, systems not talking to each other, lots of different interface types. And it was crying out to be just, you know, sold properly in the cloud. And the public cloud is perfect for this. You know, we can build a model and start, rather than looking at the applications first, you know, let's look at the model, the unified model and build on those open APIs and then start to, you know, allow people to come in and create an ecosystem of applications all using that same model. >> If you don't mind me asking you, if you can explain. 'Cause we talked before we weren't on camera, but we talked about the cloud and you were explaining to me how this is perfect for the challenges that you guys are trying to solve. What about the public cloud dynamic or innovation component that you guys are leveraging? Take us through a little bit on that, because I think that's a big story here that's under the covers is... >> Yeah. >> What you're capable of doing here. Do you mind explaining? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. So the cloud gives us this true scalability across everything. You know, we can scale to billions of records. So we can hook in, you know, to suck in data from, you know, our on-premise systems anywhere. We have, you know, a product called Devflow, so we used to do that. And it can really allow us to bring that data in, scale-out, use standard term cloud innovations, like Lambda functions and AWS, you know, DynamoDB, and present that, you know, through that open API. So we can use, you know graphQL, you know, present that with rest on top. And so you can then build on top of that. You can take any low code, no code application building tool you like, put that on top and then start building your own ecosystem. You can build inventory systems, CRM, anything you like. >> Well one thing that's really interesting about these projects is they usually take months, years to deploy, right? And what we're doing is we're providing, almost BSS as a service, right? It's an API layer that anyone can go to. Maybe you need to use it for five minutes, five months, five years, right? With the open standard and your own developers can learn how to use this text stack and code to it doesn't require us. And so we're really trying to get away from being an SI, you know, systems integrator or heavy services revenue, and instead build the product that enables the telcos to use their own people, to build the applications that they, they know what they want, and so, here you go. >> It's a platform. >> Yeah. >> It's a platform. >> So, how do you connect to systems on the ground? Like what's the modern approach to doing that? >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah so, telcos have, you know, a huge amount of data on premise. They have difficulties you can get to it. So, as I mentioned before, we had this Devflows product and it has connectors. We have like 30 plus connectors to all the standard sort of, billing systems, CRM systems, you know, we can hook into things like Salesforce. And we can create either, you know, couple of a real-time interface in there, or we can start to suck data into the cloud and then make it available. So, if they want to start with a nice, easy step and just build slowly, we can just hook in and pull that information out. If there may be, you know, an attribute that you want to, you know, use in some of that application, you can easily get to it. And then, you know, over time you start to build your data into the cloud and then you've got the scale, you know, and all the innovations of that brings with it. >> So is Devflow an on-ramp, if you will, for the public cloud, is that the way you were thinking about it? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I call it the slurper. (group chuckles) Right. I mean, these telcos have, like Robin was saying, spaghetti systems that have been, you know, customized and connected and integrated. I mean, it is a jungle out there of data. They're not going to be able to move this in one step. We just think of like a pile of spaghetti, like the whole bowl. >> Overcooked spaghetti. >> Right overcooked, the whole bowl comes out and it's really hard to just pull out one noodle and the rest is there and what are you going to do? And so the slurper, right, Devflows, allows you to select which data you want to pull out. It could be one time, you could have it sync. You don't have to do the whole thing and it doesn't disrupt the production environment that's on-premise. But now you're starting to move your data into the public cloud and then like Robin was saying, you can throw it up against quick sites. You can throw it up against different Amazon services. You can create new applications. And so it's not this like, you know, big bang kind of approach. You can start to do it in pieces and I think that's what the industry needs. >> I'm talking about this the other day, when we're talk about charging. What a lot of vendors will do is they'll put a wrapper around it, containerize it and then shove it into the public cloud and say, "Okay". >> Check mark. >> Yeah a checkbox. And it affects how they price, if they price the same way. But we talked a lot about pricing the other day, really pricing like cloud, consumption pricing. How are you pricing in this case? >> Same with the charging system. The BSS system is paid by the use, paid by the API call. So, really excited to introduce yet, again, a free tier. We think we're doing 500 million API calls per month for free. We think this is great for a smaller telco where like, you're experimenting and just getting to know the system and before you like, go all in and buy. And I think that API pricing is going to go right at the heart of some of these vendors that love to charge by the subscriber or a perpetual license agreement, right? They're not quite moving as a service. And so, yeah. >> Are you saying, they're going to be disruptive in the pricing in terms of lower cost or more, consumable. >> And I think it's also an easier on ramp, right? It's easier to start paying by the use and experimenting. And it's really easy, just like I was talking about with charging, where you're going to get the same great product that you would sell to a tier one at a price that you can afford. And now those smaller two or three guys aren't having to make a trade off between great technology, but I'm paying through the nose or sacrifice on the tech, but I can afford it. And so, I think you're going to see this ecosystem of people starting to learn how to code and think in this way. Telcos have already decided that they want to adopt the TM forum, open APIs. They're on all the RFPs. Do you support it? Everyone says they support it, but we don't see anyone really doing it. They're not on the leaderboard. >> And there's transparency, because you're pricing by API call, right? Versus the spaghetti, you guys call it, the hairball of what am I paying for? >> Right, you're getting, all of this. It's by the subscriber. It's millions and millions of dollars. Oh, and you know, you're going to need to buy a bunch of consulting revenue to make it all work and talk to each other. Pay up, right? And that's what we're living in today. And I'm taking us to the, you know, public cloud future by the API. >> This is the big cloud revolution. It's unbundling has been a really big part of the consumption of technology paid by the usage, get in, get some value, get some data, understand what it is, double down on it, iterate. >> Put it up with different services that are available that we don't have, but Amazon uses, right? They have call centers up there, they have ML that you may want to use like, start using it, start coding, start learning about the AWS tech stack. >> So is it available now? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, it's available now. We've already published the swagger for the BSS APIs. So, you know, they can come on board, they can go to access to all the API straight away and start using it. They can load up their favorite REST clients and then start developing. >> So you got a dozen APIs today. Where are we headed? What can we expect? >> All by the end of the year. There's over 50 APIs. You know, the number one guy on the board is at like 22, 21, 22 APIs covered. We'll be 50 plus by the end of the year. And we're just going to blow doors. >> The API economy has come to telco. >> Yeah, I mean, it's really BSS' Lego pieces, right. Assembling these different components and really opening it up. And I think there's been a lot of power by the vendors to keep it locked down, keep it close. Yes, we have an API, but you got to use our people to do it. Here's the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that you're going to pay us and keep us in business, and fat and happy, and I'm coming right in on the low end. Right, dropping that price, opening it up. I think telcos are going to love it. >> Well, Mike, you said too, you'll allow the smaller telcos to have the same, actually, better capabilities than the larger telcos, right? Maybe the stack's not as mature or whatever, but they'll get there and they'll get there with a simpler, easier to understand pricing model and way, way faster. >> Yeah. >> All right and that's where the disruption comes. >> And I Think this is where AWS has really done well as a hyper scaler against their competition, is that they've really gotten to market very quickly with their services. Maybe they're not perfect, but they ship 'em. And they get them out there and they get people using them. They use them internally and they get them out. And I think this is where maybe some of the other hyperscalers, they hold them back and they wait until they're a little bit more mature. And AWS is one because they've been fast. And I want to sort of copy that feat. >> I think your idea of subscriber love in your keynote, and I think applies here because Amazon web services has done such a great job of working backwards from the customer. So they'd ship it fast on used cases that they know have been proven through customer interactions. >> Yep. >> They don't just make up new features. And then they iterate. They go, "Okay". >> Start simple, grow on that, learn from the market. What are people using? What are they not using? Iterate, iterate, iterate. >> Okay, so with that in mind, working backwards from your customer, how do you see the feature set evolving for this functionality? How do you see it evolving as a product? >> Yeah, I mean, I think all of the BSS systems today have been designed with manual people on the other side of the screen, right? And we've seen chat bots take off, we've seen, you know, using chat as support. I think we need to start getting into more automation right? Which is really going to change up telco, right? They have thousands of customer support agents and you're like, "Dude, I just want a SIM, that's all I need". >> Yeah. >> Just like, where do I push a button and send an Uber to my house and drop it off or eSim. And so, speeding up business, empowering the subscriber. We know how to interact, we just went through COVID where we learned about different apps that overnight, you can like order all of your groceries and order all of your food and there it is, and it was contactless and... >> It's funny, you said future of work, which we love that term, "work". Workloads, work force, you got all these kind of new dynamics going on with cloud enablement and the changes is radical. And the value is there. There's value opportunities. >> I mean like, you know, where are the ARVR applications, right? Where your agent pops. I saw the demo. There's a strife in Austin and they're going to kill me 'cause I can't remember their name. But they had a little on your mobile phone, a little holographic customer support. Like, "How can I help you"? Right. And I'm like, "Where's that", like, imagine you're like, ATT, you're not like on the phone for like an hour and a half trying to like, figure out what's wrong. And it's like, you know, it knows what's wrong. It understands my needs and so, no one's working on that. We're still working on, keyboards. >> Right, that and chat bot is a great example because it's all AI, and where's the best AI? It's in the cloud because that's where the data is. That's where the best of modeling has been. (chuckles) >> I think your point, it's the scale of data. >> Absolutely. >> And machine learning and AI needs a lot of data points to get really good. I mean, I'm old, I'm 50. I graduated in 1993. I took an AI class from Niels Nielsen, like the godfather of AI, right? Okay, like that AI, even 10 years ago AI, it's just moving so quickly and it's now super affordable. >> Well, I really want to thank you guys for coming up and sharing that knowledge and insight, congratulations on the product and open APIs. Love open API's open source with some new revolution. Danielle and Robin. Thank you so much. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations. Thank you everyone for coming. (crowd applauding) (people whooping) Okay, back to you in the studio at Cloud City.

(hopeful futuristic music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are really excited to have this cube conversation here in the Palo Alto studio with a real close friend of theCUBE, and repeat alumni, Leslie Berlin. I want to get her official title; she's the historian for the Silicon Valley archive at Stanford. Last time we talked to Leslie, she had just come out with a book about Robert Noyce, and the man behind the microchip. If you haven't seen that, go check it out. But now she's got a new book, it's called "Troublemakers," which is a really appropriate title. And it's really about kind of the next phase of Silicon Valley growth, and it's hitting bookstores. I'm sure you can buy it wherever you can buy any other book, and we're excited to have you on Leslie, great to see you again. >> So good to see you Jeff. >> Absolutely, so the last book you wrote was really just about Noyce, and obviously, Intel, very specific in, you know, the silicon in Silicon Valley obviously. >> Right yeah. >> This is a much, kind of broader history with again just great characters. I mean, it's a tech history book, but it's really a character novel; I love it. >> Well thanks, yeah; I mean, I really wanted to find people. They had to meet a few criteria. They had to be interesting, they had to be important, they had to be, in my book, a little unknown; and most important, they had to be super-duper interesting. >> Jeff Frick: Yeah. >> And what I love about this generation is I look at Noyce's generation of innovators, who sort of working in the... Are getting their start in the 60s. And they really kind of set the tone for the valley in a lot of ways, but the valley at that point was still just all about chips. And then you have this new generation show up in the 70s, and they come up with the personal computer, they come up with video games. They sort of launch the venture capital industry in the way we know it now. Biotech, the internet gets started via the ARPANET, and they kind of set the tone for where we are today around the world in this modern, sort of tech infused, life that we live. >> Right, right, and it's interesting to me, because there's so many things that kind of define what Silicon Valley is. And of course, people are trying to replicate it all over the place, all over the world. But really, a lot of those kind of attributes were started by this class of entrepreneurs. Like just venture capital, the whole concept of having kind of a high risk, high return, small carve out from an institution, to put in a tech venture with basically a PowerPoint and some faith was a brand new concept back in the day. >> Leslie Berlin: Yeah, and no PowerPoint even. >> Well that's right, no PowerPoint, which is probably a good thing. >> You're right, because we're talking about the 1970s. I mean, what's so, really was very surprising to me about this book, and really important for understanding early venture capital, is that now a lot of venture capitalists are professional investors. But these venture capitalists pretty much to a man, and they were all men at that point, they were all operating guys, all of them. They worked at Fairchild, they worked at Intel, they worked at HP; and that was really part of the value that they brought to these propositions was they had money, yes, but they also had done this before. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> And that was really, really important. >> Right, another concept that kind of comes out, and I think we've seen it time and time again is kind of this partnership of kind of the crazy super enthusiastic visionary that maybe is hard to work with and drives everybody nuts, and then always kind of has the other person, again, generally a guy in this time still a lot, who's kind of the doer. And it was really the Bushnell-Alcorn story around Atari that really brought that home where you had this guy way out front of the curve but you have to have the person behind who's actually building the vision in real material. >> Yeah, I mean I think something that's really important to understand, and this is something that I was really trying to bring out in the book, is that we usually only have room in our stories for one person in the spotlight when innovation is a team sport. And so, the kind of relationship that you're talking about with Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari, and Al Alcorn who was the first engineer there, it's a great example of that. And Nolan is exactly this very out there person, big curly hair, talkative, outgoing guy. After Atari he starts Chuck E. Cheese, which kind of tells you everything you need to know about someone who's dreaming up Chuck E. Cheese, super creative, super out there, super fun oriented. And you have working with him, Al Alcorn, who's a very straight laced for the time, by which I mean, he tried LSD but only once. (cumulative laughing) Engineer, and I think that what's important to understand is how much they needed each other, because the stories are so often only about the exuberant out front guy. To understand that those are just dreams, they are not reality without these other people. And how important, I mean, Al Alcorn told me look, "I couldn't have done this without Nolan, "kind of constantly pushing me." >> Right, right. >> And then in the Apple example, you actually see a third really important person, which to me was possibly the most exciting part of everything I discovered, which was the importance of the guy named Mike Markkula. Because in Jobs you had the visionary, and in Woz you had the engineer, but the two of them together, they had an idea, they had a great product, the Apple II, but they didn't have a company. And when Mike Markkula shows up at the garage, you know, Steve Jobs is 21 years old. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> He has had 17 months of business experience in his life, and it's all his attack for Atari, actually. And so how that company became a business is due to Mike Markkula, this very quiet guy, very, very ambitious guy. He talked them up from a thousand stock options at Intel to 20,000 stock options at Intel when he got there, just before the IPO, which is how he could then turn around and help finance >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> The birth of Apple. And he pulled into Apple all of the chip people that he had worked with, and that is really what turned Apple into a company. So you had the visionary, you had the tech guy, you also needed a business person. >> But it's funny though because in that story of his visit to the garage he's specifically taken by the engineering elegance of the board >> Leslie Berlin: Right. >> That Woz put together, which I thought was really neat. So yeah, he's a successful business man. Yes he was bringing a lot of kind of business acumen value to the opportunity, but what struck him, and he specifically talks about what chips he used, how he planned for the power supply. Just very elegant engineering stuff that touched him, and he could recognize that they were so far ahead of the curve. And I think that's such another interesting point is that things that we so take for granted like mice, and UI, and UX. I mean the Atari example, for them to even think of actually building it that would operate with a television was just, I mean you might as well go to Venus, forget Mars, I mean that was such a crazy idea. >> Yeah, I mean I think Al ran to Walgreens or something like that and just sort of picked out the closest t.v. to figure out how he could build what turned out to be Pong, the first super successful video game. And I mean, if you look also at another story I tell is about Xerox Park; and specifically about a guy named Bob Taylor, who, I know I keep saying, "Oh this might be my favorite part." But Bob Taylor is another incredible story. This is the guy who convinced DARPA to start, it was then called ARPA, to start the ARPANET, which became the internet in a lot of ways. And then he goes on and he starts the computer sciences lab at Xerox Park. And that is the lab that Steve Jobs comes to in 1979, and for the first time sees a GUI, sees a mouse, sees Windows. And this is... The history behind that, and these people all working together, these very sophisticated Ph.D. engineers were all working together under the guidance of Bob Taylor, a Texan with a drawl and a Master's Degree in Psychology. So what it takes to lead, I think, is a really interesting question that gets raised in this book. >> So another great personality, Sandra Kurtzig. >> Yeah. >> I had to look to see if she's still alive. She's still alive. >> Leslie Berlin: Yeah. >> I'd love to get her in some time, we'll have to arrange for that next time, but her story is pretty fascinating, because she's a woman, and we still have big women issues in the tech industry, and this is years ago, but she was aggressive, she was a fantastic sales person, and she could code. And what was really interesting is she started her own software company. The whole concept of software kind of separated from hardware was completely alien. She couldn't even convince the HP guys to let her have access to a machine to write basically an NRP system that would add a ton of value to these big, expensive machines that they were selling. >> Yeah, you know what's interesting, she was able to get access to the machine. And HP, this is not a well known part of HP's history, is how important it was in helping launch little bitty companies in the valley. It was a wonderful sort of... Benefited all these small companies. But she had to go and read to them the definition of what an OEM was to make an argument that I am adding value to your machines by putting software on it. And software was such an unknown concept. A, people who heard she was selling software thought she was selling lingerie. And B, Larry Ellison tells a hilarious story of going to talk to venture capitalists about... When he's trying to start Oracle, he had co-founders, which I'm not sure everybody knows. And he and his co-founders were going to try to start Oracle, and these venture capitalists would, he said, not only throw him out of the office for such a crazy idea, but their secretaries would double check that he hadn't stolen the copy of Business Week off the table because what kind of nut job are we talking to here? >> Software. >> Yeah, where as now, I mean when you think about it, this is software valley. >> Right, right, it's software, even, world. There's so many great stories, again, "Troublemakers" just go out and get it wherever you buy a book. The whole recombinant DNA story and the birth of Genentech, A, is interesting, but I think the more kind of unique twist was the guy at Stanford, who really took it upon himself to take the commercialization of academic, generated, basic research to a whole 'nother level that had never been done. I guess it was like a sleepy little something in Manhattan they would send some paper to, but this guy took it to a whole 'nother level. >> Oh yeah, I mean before Niels showed up, Niels Reimers, he I believe that Stanford had made something like $3,000 off of the IP from its professors and students in the previous decades, and Niels said "There had to be a better way to do this." And he's the person who decided, we ought to be able to patent recombinant DNA. And one of the stories that's very, very interesting is what a cultural shift that required, whereas engineers had always thought in terms of, "How can this be practical?" For biologists this was seen as really an unpleasant thing to be doing, don't think about that we're about basic research. So in addition to having to convince all sorts of government agencies and the University of California system, which co-patented this, to make it possible, just almost on a paperwork level... >> Right. >> He had to convince the scientists themselves. And it was not a foregone conclusion, and a lot of people think that what kept the two named co-inventors of recombinant DNA, Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer, from winning the Nobel Prize is that they were seen as having benefited from the work of others, but having claimed all the credit, which is not, A, isn't fair, and B, both of those men had worried about that from the very beginning and kept saying, "We need to make sure that this includes everyone." >> Right. >> But that's not just the origins of the biotech industry in the valley, the entire landscape of how universities get their ideas to the public was transformed, and that whole story, there are these ideas that used to be in university labs, used to be locked up in the DOD, like you know, the ARPANET. And this is the time when those ideas start making their way out in a significant way. >> But it's this elegant dance, because it's basic research, and they want it to benefit all, but then you commercialize it, right? And then it's benefiting the few. But if you don't commercialize it and it doesn't get out, you really don't benefit very many. So they really had to walk this fine line to kind of serve both masters. >> Absolutely, and I mean it was even more complicated than that, because researchers didn't have to pay for it, it was... The thing that's amazing to me is that we look back at these people and say, "Oh these are trailblazers." And when I talked to them, because something that was really exciting about this book was that I got to talk to every one of the primary characters, you talk to them, and they say, "I was just putting one foot in front of the other." It's only when you sort of look behind them years later that you see, "Oh my God, they forged a completely new trail." But here it was just, "No I need to get to here, "and now I need to get to here." And that's what helped them get through. That's why I start the book with the quote from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Sallah asks Indy, you know basically, how are you going to stop, "Stop that car." And he says, "How are you going to do it Indy?" And Indy says, "I don't know "I'm making it up as I go along." And that really could almost be a theme in a lot of cases here that they knew where they needed to get to, and they just had to make it up to get there. >> Yeah, and there's a whole 'nother tranche on the Genentech story; they couldn't get all of the financing, so they actually used outsourcing, you know, so that whole kind of approach to business, which was really new and innovative. But we're running out of time, and I wanted to follow up on the last comment that you made. As a historian, you know, you are so fortunate or smart to pick your field that you can talk to the individual. So, I think you said, you've been doing interviews for five or six years for this book, it's 100 pages of notes in the back, don't miss the notes. >> But also don't think the book's too long. >> No, it's a good book, it's an easy read. But as you reflect on these individuals and these personalities, so there's obviously the stories you spent a lot of time writing about, but I'm wondering if there's some things that you see over and over again that just impress you. Is there a pattern, or is it just, as you said, just people working hard, putting one step in front of the other, and taking those risks that in hindsight are so big? >> I would say, I would point to a few things. I'd point to audacity; there really is a certain kind of adventurousness, at an almost unimaginable level, and persistence. I would also point to a third feature at that time that I think was really important, which was for a purpose that was creative. You know, I mean there was the notion, I think the metaphor of pioneering is much more what they were doing then what we would necessarily... Today we would call it disruption, and I think there's a difference there. And their vision was creative, I think of them as rebels with a cause. >> Right, right; is disruption the right... Is disruption, is that the right way that we should be thinking about it today or are just kind of backfilling the disruption after the fact that it happens do you think? >> I don't know, I mean I've given this a lot of thought, because I actually think, well, you know, the valley at this point, two-thirds of the people who are working in the tech industry in the valley were born outside of this country right now, actually 76 percent of the women. >> Jeff Frick: 76 percent? Wow. >> 76 percent of the women, I think it's age 25 to 44 working in tech were born outside of the United States. Okay, so the pioneering metaphor, that's just not the right metaphor anymore. The disruptive metaphor has a lot of the same concepts, but it has, it sounds to me more like blowing things up, and doesn't really thing so far as to, "Okay, what comes next?" >> Jeff Frick: Right, right. >> And I think we have to be sure that we continue to do that. >> Right, well because clearly, I mean, the Facebooks are the classic example where, you know, when he built that thing at Harvard, it was not to build a new platform that was going to have the power to disrupt global elections. You're trying to get dates, right? I mean, it was pretty simple. >> Right. >> Simple concept and yet, as you said, by putting one foot in front of the other as things roll out, he gets smart people, they see opportunities and take advantage of it, it becomes a much different thing, as has Google, as has Amazon. >> That's the way it goes, that's exactly... I mean, and you look back at the chip industry. These guys just didn't want to work for a boss they didn't like, and they wanted to build a transistor. And 20 years later a huge portion of the U.S. economy rests on the decisions they're making and the choices. And so I think this has been a continuous story in Silicon Valley. People start with a cool, small idea and it just grows so fast among them and around them with other people contributing, some people they wish didn't contribute, okay then what comes next? >> Jeff Frick: Right, right. >> That's what we figure out now. >> All right, audacity, creativity and persistence. Did I get it? >> And a goal. >> And a goal, and a goal. Pong, I mean was a great goal. (cumulative laughing) All right, so Leslie, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the book; go out, get the book, you will not be disappointed. And of course, the Bob Noyce book is awesome as well, so... >> Thanks. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes and congratulations. >> Thank you so much Jeff. >> All right this is Leslie Berlin, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. See you next time, thanks for watching. (electronic music)