>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to theCube's continuous coverage HPE Discover 2022 and from Las Vegas the formerly Sands Convention Center now Venetian, John Furrier and Dave Vellante here were excited to welcome in Jen Huffstetler. Who's the Chief product Sustainability Officer at Intel Jen, welcome to theCube thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> You're really welcome. So you dial back I don't know, the last decade and nobody really cared about it but some people gave it lip service but corporations generally weren't as in tune, what's changed? Why has it become so top of mind? >> I think in the last year we've noticed as we all were working from home that we had a greater appreciation for the balance in our lives and the impact that climate change was having on the world. So I think across the globe there's regulations industry and even personally, everyone is really starting to think about this a little more and corporations specifically are trying to figure out how are they going to continue to do business in these new regulated environments. >> And IT leaders generally weren't in tune cause they weren't paying the power bill for years it was the facilities people, but then they started to come together. How should leaders in technology, business tech leaders, IT leaders, CIOs, how should they be thinking about their sustainability goals? >> Yeah, I think for IT leaders specifically they really want to be looking at the footprint of their overall infrastructure. So whether that is their on-prem data center, their cloud instances, what can they do to maximize the resources and lower the footprint that they contribute to their company's overall footprint. So IT really has a critical role to play I think because as you'll find in IT, the carbon footprint of the data center of those products in use is actually it's fairly significant. So having a focus there will be key. >> You know compute has always been one of those things where, you know Intel's been makes chips so that, you know heat is important in compute. What is Intel's current goals? Give us an update on where you guys are at. What's the ideal goal in the long term? Where are you now? You guys always had a focus on this for a long, long time. Where are we now? Cause I won't say the goalpost of changed, they're changing the definitions of what this means. What's the current state of Intel's carbon footprint and overall goals? >> Yeah, no thanks for asking. As you mentioned, we've been invested in lowering our environmental footprint for decades in fact, without action otherwise, you know we've already lowered our carbon footprint by 75%. So we're really in that last mile. And that is why when we recently announced a very ambitious goal Net-Zero 2040 for our scope one and two for manufacturing operations, this is really an industry leading goal. And partly because the technology doesn't even exist, right? For the chemistries and for making the silicon into the sand into, you know, computer chips yet. And so by taking this bold goal, we're going to be able to lead the industry, partner with academia, partner with consortia, and that drive is going to have ripple effects across the industry and all of the components in semiconductors. >> Is there a changing definition of Net-Zero? What that means, cause some people say they're Net-Zero and maybe in one area they might be but maybe holistically across the company as it becomes more of a broader mandate society, employees, partners, Wall Street are all putting pressure on companies. Is the Net-Zero conversation changed a little bit or what's your view on that? >> I think we definitely see it changing with changing regulations like those coming forth from the SEC here in the US and in Europe. Net-Zero can't just be lip service anymore right? It really has to be real reductions on your footprint. And we say then otherwise and even including in our supply chain goals what we've taken new goals to reduce, but our operations are growing. So I think everybody is going through this realization that you know, with the growth, how do we keep it lower than it would've been otherwise, keep focusing on those reductions and have not just renewable credits that could have been bought in one location and applied to a different geographical location but real credible offsets for where the the products manufactured or the computes deployed. >> Jen, when you talk about you've reduced already by 75% you're on that last mile. We listened to Pat Gelsinger very closely up until recently he was the number one most frequently had on theCube guest. He's been busy I guess. But as you apply that discipline to where you've been, your existing business and now Pat's laid out this plan to increase the Foundry business how does that affect your... Are you able to carry through that reduction to, you know, the new foundries? Do you have to rethink that? How does that play in? >> Certainly, well, the Foundry expansion of our business with IBM 2.0 is going to include the existing factories that already have the benefit of those decades of investment and focus. And then, you know we have clear goals for our new factories in Ohio, in Europe to achieve goals as well. That's part of the overall plan for Net-Zero 2040. It's inclusive of our expansion into Foundry which means that many, many many more customers are going to be able to benefit from the leadership that Intel has here. And then as we onboard acquisitions as any company does we need to look at the footprint of the acquisition and see what we can do to align it with our overall goals. >> Yeah so sustainable IT I don't know for some reason was always an area of interest to me. And when we first started, even before I met you, John we worked with PG&E to help companies get rebates for installing technologies that would reduce their carbon footprint. >> Jen: Very forward thinking. >> And it was a hard thing to get, you know, but compute was the big deal. And there were technologies and I remember virtualization at the time was one and we would go in and explain to the PG&E engineers how that all worked. Cause they had metrics and that they wanted to see, but anyway, so virtualization was clearly one factor. What are the technologies today that people should be paying, flash storage was another one. >> John: AI's going to have a big impact. >> Reduce the spinning disk, but what are the ones today that are going to have an impact? >> Yeah, no, that's a great question. We like to think of the built in acceleration that we have including some of the early acceleration for virtualization technologies as foundational. So built in accelerated compute is green compute and it allows you to maximize the utilization of the transistors that you already have deployed in your data center. This compute is sitting there and it is ready to be used. What matters most is what you were talking about, John that real world workload performance. And it's not just you know, a lot of specsmanship around synthetic benchmarks, but AI performance with the built in acceleration that we have in Xeon processors with the Intel DL Boost, we're able to achieve four X, the AI performance per Watts without you know, doing that otherwise. You think about the consolidation you were talking about that happened with virtualization. You're basically effectively doing the same thing with these built in accelerators that we have continued to add over time and have even more coming in our Sapphire Generation. >> And you call that green compute? Or what does that mean, green compute? >> Well, you are greening your compute. >> John: Okay got it. >> By increasing utilization of your resources. If you're able to deploy AI, utilize the telemetry within the CPU that already exists. We have customers KDDI in Japan has a great Proofpoint that they already announced on their 5G data center, lowered their data center power by 20%. That is real bottom line impact as well as carbon footprint impact by utilizing all of those built in capabilities. So, yeah. >> We've heard some stories earlier in the event here at Discover where there was some cooling innovations that was powering moving the heat to power towns and cities. So you start to see, and you guys have been following this data center and been part of the whole, okay and hot climates, you have cold climates, but there's new ways to recycle energy where's that cause that sounds very Sci-Fi to me that oh yeah, the whole town runs on the data center exhaust. So there's now systems thinking around compute. What's your reaction to that? What's the current view on re-engineering a system to take advantage of that energy or recycling? >> I think when we look at our vision of sustainable compute over this horizon it's going to be required, right? We know that compute helps to solve society's challenges and the demand for it is not going away. So how do we take new innovations looking at a systems level as compute gets further deployed at the edge, how do we make it efficient? How do we ensure that that compute can be deployed where there is air pollution, right? So some of these technologies that you have they not only enable reuse but they also enable some you know, closing in of the solution to make it more robust for edge deployments. It'll allow you to place your data center wherever you need it. It no longer needs to reside in one place. And then that's going to allow you to have those energy reuse benefits either into district heating if you're in, you know Northern Europe or there's examples with folks putting greenhouses right next to a data center to start growing food in what we're previously food deserts. So I don't think it's science fiction. It is how we need to rethink as a society. To utilize everything we have, the tools at our hand. >> There's a commercial on the radio, on the East Coast anyway, I don't know if you guys have heard of it, it's like, "What's your one thing?" And the gentleman comes on, he talks about things that you can do to help the environment. And he says, "What's your one thing?" So what's the one thing or maybe it's not just one that IT managers should be doing to affect carbon footprint? >> The one thing to affect their carbon footprint, there are so many things. >> Dave: Two, three, tell me. >> I think if I was going to pick the one most impactful thing that they could do in their infrastructure is it's back to John's comment. It's imagine if the world deployed AI, all the benefits not only in business outcomes, you know the revenue, lowering the TCO, but also lowering the footprint. So I think that's the one thing they could do. If I could throw in a baby second, it would be really consider how you get renewable energy into your computing ecosystem. And then you know, at Intel, when we're 80% renewable power, our processors are inherently low carbon because of all the work that we've done others have less than 10% renewable energy. So you want to look for products that have low carbon by design, any Intel based system and where you can get renewables from your grid to ask for it, run your workload there. And even the next step to get to sustainable computing it's going to take everyone, including every enterprise to think differently and really you know, consider what would it look like to bring renewables onto my site? If I don't have access through my local utility and many customers are really starting to evaluate that. >> Well Jen its great to have you on theCube. Great insight into the current state of the art of sustainability and carbon footprint. My final question for you is more about the talent out there. The younger generation coming in I'll say the pressure, people want to work for a company that's mission driven we know that, the Wall Street impact is going to be financial business model and then save the planet kind of pressure. So there's a lot of talent coming in. Is there awareness at the university level? Is there a course where can, do people get degrees in sustainability? There's a lot of people who want to come into this field what are some of the talent backgrounds of people learning or who might want to be in this field? What would you recommend? How would you describe how to onboard into the career if they want to contribute? What are some of those factors? Cause it's not new, new, but it's going to be globally aware. >> Yeah well there certainly are degrees with focuses on sustainability maybe to look at holistically at the enterprise, but where I think the globe is really going to benefit, we didn't really talk about the software inefficiency. And as we delivered more and more compute over the last few decades, basically the programming languages got more inefficient. So there's at least 35% inefficiency in the software. So being a software engineer, even if you're not an AI engineer. So AI would probably be the highest impact being a software engineer to focus on building new applications that are going to be efficient applications that they're well utilizing the transistor that they're not leaving zombie you know, services running that aren't being utilized. So I actually think-- >> So we got a program in assembly? (all laughing) >> (indistinct), would get really offended. >> Get machine language. I have to throw that in sorry. >> Maybe not that bad. (all laughing) >> That's funny, just a joke. But the question is what's my career path. What's a hot career in this area? Sustainability, AI totally see that. Anything else, any other career opportunities you see or hot jobs or hot areas to work on? >> Yeah, I mean, just really, I think it takes every architect, every engineer to think differently about their design, whether it's the design of a building or the design of a processor or a motherboard we have a whole low carbon architecture, you know, set of actions that are we're underway that will take to the ecosystem. So it could really span from any engineering discipline I think. But it's a mindset with which you approach that customer problem. >> John: That system thinking, yeah. >> Yeah sustainability designed in. Jen thanks so much for coming back in theCube, coming on theCube. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> All right. Dave Vellante for John Furrier, we're sustaining theCube. We're winding down day three, HPE Discover 2022. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon re Mars two days of coverage, we're getting down to wrapping up day one. I'm John furrier host of the cube space is a big topic here. You got machine learning, you got automation, robotics, all spells Mars. The two great guests here to really get into the whole geo scene. What's going on with the data. We've got Marcus Norren business development and geo data. Sogeti part of cap Gemini group, and Yoki well kissed portfolio lead data and AI with Sogeti part of cap, Gemini gentlemen, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Thanks >>For having us. >>Let me so coming all the way from Sweden to check out the scene here and get into the weeds and the show. A lot of great technology being space is the top line here, but software drives it. Um, you got robotics. Lot of satellite, you got the aerospace industry colliding with hardcore industrial. I say IOT, robotics, one, whatever you want, but space kind of highlights the IOT opportunity. There is no edge in space, right? So the edge, the intelligent edge, a lot going on in space. And satellite's one of 'em you guys are in the middle of that. What are you guys working on? What's the, the focus here for cap gem and I Sogeti part of cap >>Gemini. I would say we focus a lot of creating business value, real business value for our clients, with the satellites available, actually a free available satellite images, working five years now with this, uh, solutioning and, uh, mostly invitation management and forestry. That's our main focus. >>So what's the product value you guys are offering. >>We basically, for now the, the most value we created is working with a forest client to find park Beal infests, uh, in spruce forest. It's a big problem in European union and, uh, Northern region Sweden, where we live now with the climate change, it's getting warmer, the bark beetle bases warm more times during the summer, which makes it spread exponentially. Uh, so we help with the satellite images to get with data science and AI to find these infestations in time when they are small, before it's spread. >>So satellite imagery combined with data, this is the intersection of the data piece, the geo data, right? >>Yeah. You can say that you have, uh, a lot of open satellite data, uh, and uh, you want to analyze that, that you also need to know what you're looking for and you need data to understand in our case, a certain type of damage. So we have large data sets that we have to sort of clean and train ML models from to try to run that on that open data, to detect these models. And, and when we're saying satellite data and open data, it's basically one pixel is 10 by 10 meters. So it's not that you will see the trees, but we're looking at the spectral information in the image and finding patterns. So we can actually detect attacks that are like four or five trees, big, uh, using that type. And we can do that throughout the season so we can see how you start seeing one, two attacks and it's just growing. And then you have this big area of just damage. So >>How, how long does that take? Give me some scope to scale because it sounds easy. Oh, the satellites are looking down on us. It's not, it's a lot of data there. What's the complexity. What are the challenges that you guys are overcoming scope to scale? >>It's so much complexity in this first, you have clouds, so it's, uh, open data set, you download it and you figure out here, we have a satellite scene, which is cloudy. We need to have some analytics doing that, taking that image away basically, or the section of the image with it cloudy. Then we have a cloud free image. We can't see anything because it's blurry. It's too low resolution. So we need to stack them on top of each other. And then we have the next problem to correlate them. So they are pixel perfect overlapping. Yeah. So we can compare them in time. And then they have the histogram adjustment to make them like, uh, the sensitivity is the same on all the images, because you have solar storms, you have shady clouds, which, uh, could be used still that image. So we need to compare that. Then we have the ground proof data coming from, uh, a harvester. For instance, we got 200,000 data points from the harvester real data points where they had found bark Beal trees, and they pulled them down. The GPS is drifting 50 meters. So you have an uncertainty where the actually harvest it was. And then we had the crane on 20 meters. So, you know, the GPS is on the home actually of the home actual machine and the crane were somewhere. So you don't really know you have this uncertainty, >>It's a data integration problem. Yeah. Massive, >>A lot of, of, uh, interesting, uh, things to adjust for. And then you could combine this into one deep learning model and build. >>But on top of that, I don't know if you said that, but you also get the data in the winter and you have the problem during the summer. So we actually have to move back in time to find the problem, label the data, and then we can start identifying. >>So once you get all that heavy lifting done or, or write the code, or I don't know if something's going on there, you get the layering, the pixel X see all the, how complex that is when the deep learning takes over. What happens next? Is it scale? Is it is all the heavy lifting up front? Is the work done front or yeah. Is its scale on the back end? >>So first the coding is heavy work, right? To gets hands on and try different things. Figure out in math, how to work with this uncertainty and get everything sold. Then you put it into a deep learning model to train that it actually run for 10 days before it was accurate, or first, first ation, it wasn't accurate enough. So we scrap that, did some changes. Then we run it again for 10 days. Then we have a model which we could use and interfere new images. Like every day, pretty quickly, every day it comes a new image. We run it. We have a new outcome and we could deliver that to clients. >>Yeah. I can almost imagine. I mean, the, the cloud computing comes in handy here. Oh yeah. So take me through the benefits because it sounds like the old, the old expression, the juice is not worth the squeeze here. It is. It's worth the squeeze. If you can get it right. Because the alternative is what more expensive gear, different windows, just more expensive monolithic solutions. Right? >>Think about the data here. So it's satellite scene. Every satellite scene is hundred by a hundred kilometers. That pretty much right. And then you need a lot of these satellite scene over multiple years to combine it. So if you should do this over the whole Northern Europe, over the whole globe, it's a lot of data just to store that it's a problem. You, you cannot do it on prem and then you should compute it with deep learning models. It's a hard problem >>If you don't have, so you guys got a lot going on. So, so talk about spaghetti, part of cap, Gemini, explain that relationship, cuz you're here at a show that, you know, you got, I can see the CAPI angle. This is like a little division. Is it a group? Are you guys like lone wolves? Like, what's it like, is this dedicated purpose built focus around aerospace? >>No, it's actually SOI was the, the name of the CAPI company from the beginning. And they relaunched the brand, uh, 2001, I think roughly 10, 20 years ago. So we actually celebrate some anniversary now. Uh, and it's a brand which is more local close to clients out in different cities. And we also tech companies, we are very close to the new technology, trying things out. And this is a perfect example of this. It was a crazy ID five years ago, 2017. And we started to bring in some clients explore, really? Open-minded see, can we do something on these satellite data? And then we took it step by step together of our clients. Yeah. And it's a small team where like 12 >>People. Yeah. And you guys are doing business development. So you have to go out there and identify the kinds of problems that match the scope of the scale. >>So what we're doing is we interact with our clients, do some simple workshops or something and try to identify like the really valuable problems like this Bruce Park people that that's one of those. Yep. And then we have to sort of look at, do we think we can do something? Is it realistic? And we will not be able to answer that to 100% because then there's no innovation in this at all. But we say, well, we think we can do it. This will be a hard problem, but we do think we can do it. And then we basically just go for it. And this one we did in 11 to 12 weeks, a tightly focused team, uh, and just went at it, uh, super slim process and got the job done and uh, the >>Results. Well, it's interesting. You have a lot of use cases. We gotta go down, do that face to face belly to belly, you know, body to body sales, BI dev scoping out, have workshops. Now this market here, Remar, they're all basically saying a call to arms more money's coming in. The problems are putting on the table. The workshop could be a lunch meeting, right. I mean, because Artis and there's a big set of problems to tackle. Yes. So I mean, I'm just oversimplifying, but that being said, there's a lot going on opportunity wise here. Yeah. That's not as slow maybe as the, the biz dev at, you know, coming in, this is a huge demand. It will be >>Explode. >>What's your take on the demand here, the problems that need to be solved and what you guys are gonna bring to bear for the problem. >>So now we have been focus mainly in vegetation management and forestry, but vegetation management can be applicable in utility as well. And we actually went there first had some struggle because it's quite detailed information that's needed. So we backed out a bit into vegetation in forestry again, but still it's a lot of application in, in, uh, utility and vegetation management in utility. Then we have a whole sustainability angle think about auditing of, uh, rogue harvesting or carbon offsetting in the future, even biodiversity, offsetting that could be used. >>And, and just to point out and give it a little extra context, all the keynotes, talk about space as a global climate solution, potentially the discoveries and or also the imagery they're gonna get. So you kind of got, you know, top down, bottoms up. If you wanna look at the world's bottom and space, kind of coming together, this is gonna open up new kinds of opportunities for you guys. What's the conversation like when you, when this is going on, you're like, oh yeah, let's go in. Like, what are you guys gonna do? What's the plan, uh, gonna hang around and ride that wave. >>I think it's all boils down to finding that use case that need to be sold because now we understand the satellite scene, they are there. We could, there is so many new satellites coming up already available. They can come up the cloud platform, AWS, it's great. We have all the capabilities needed. We have AI and ML models needed data science skills. Now it's finding the use cases together with clients and actually deliver on them one by >>One. It's interesting. I'd like to get your reaction to this Marcus two as well. What you guys are kind of, you have a lot bigger and, and, and bigger than some of the startups out there, but a startup world, they find their niches and they, the workflows become the intellectual property. So this, your techniques of layering almost see is an advantage out there. What's your guys view of that on intellectual property of the future, uh, open source is gonna run all the software. We know that. So software's no going open source scale and integration. And then new kinds of ways are new methods. I won't say for just patents, but like just for intellectual property, defen differentiation. How do you guys see this? As you look at this new frontier of intellectual property? >>That's, it's a difficult question. I think it's, uh, there's a lot of potential. If you look at open innovation and how you can build some IP, which you can out license, and some you utilize yourself, then you can build like a layer business model on top. So you can find different channels. Some markets we will not go for. Maybe some of our models actually could be used by others where we won't go. Uh, so we want to build some IP, but I think we also want to be able to release some of the things we do >>Open >>Works. Yeah. Because it's also builds presence. It it's >>Community. >>Yeah, exactly. Because this, this problem is really hard because it's a global thing. And, and it's imagine if, if you have a couple of million acres of forest and you just don't go out walking and trying to check what's going on because it's, you know, >>That's manuals hard. Yeah. It's impossible. >>So you need this to scale. Uh, and, and it's a hard problem. So I think you need to build a community. Yeah. Because this is, it's a living organism that we're trying to monitor. If you talk about visitation of forest, it's, it's changing throughout the year. So if you look at spring and then you look at summer and you look at winter, it's completely different. What you see. Yeah. Yeah. So >>It's, it's interesting. And so, you know, I wonder if, you know, you see some of these crowdsourcing models around participation, you know, small little help, but that doesn't solve the big puzzle. Um, but you have open source concepts. Uh, we had Anna on earlier, she's from the Amazon sustainability data project. Yeah, exactly. And then just like open up the data. So the data party for her. So in a way there's more innovation coming, potentially. If you can get that thing going, right. Get the projects going. Exactly. >>And all this, actually our work is started because of that. Yes, exactly. So European space agency, they decided to hand out this compar program and the, the Sentinel satellites central one and two, which we have been working with, they are freely available. It started back in 2016, I think. Yeah. Uh, and because of that, that's why we have this work done during several years, without that data freely available, it wouldn't have happened. Yeah. I'm, I'm >>Pretty sure. Well, what's next for you guys? Tell, tell me what's happening. Here's the update put a plug in for the, for the group. What are you working on now? What's uh, what are you guys looking to accomplish? Take a minute to put a plug in for the opportunity. >>I would say scaling this scaling, moving outside. Sweden. Of course we see our model that they work in in us. We have tried them in Canada. We see that we work, we need to scale and do field validation in different regions. And then I would say go to the sustainability area. This goes there, there is a lot of great >>Potential international too is huge. >>Yeah. One area. I think that is really interesting is the combination of understanding the, like the carbon sink and the sequestration and trying to measure that. Uh, but also on top of that, trying to classify certain Keystone species habitats to understand if they have any space to live and how can we help that to sort of grow back again, uh, understanding the history of the, sort of the force. You have some date online, but trying to map out how much of, of this has been turned into agricultural fields, for example, how much, how much of the real old forest we have left that is really biodiverse? How much is just eight years young to understand that picture? How can we sort of move back towards that blueprint? We probably need to, yeah. And how can we digitize and change forestry and the more business models around that because you, you can do it in a different way, or you can do both some harvesting, but also, yeah, not sort of ruining the >>Whole process. They can be more efficient. You make it more productive, save some capital, reinvest it in better ways >>And you have robotics and that's not maybe something that we are not so active in, but I mean, starting to look at how can autonomy help forestry, uh, inventory damages flying over using drones and satellites. Uh, you have people looking into autonomous harvesting of trees, which is kind of insane as well, because they're pretty big <laugh> but this is also happening. Yeah. So I mean, what we're seeing here is basically, >>I mean, we, I made a story multiple times called on sale drone. One of my favorite stories, the drones that are just like getting Bob around in the ocean and they're getting great telemetry data, cuz they're indestructible, you know, they can just bounce around and then they just transmit data. Exactly. You guys are creating a opportunity. Some will say problem, but by opening up data, you're actually exposing opportunities that never have been seen before because you're like, it's that scene where that movie, Jody frost, a contact where open up one little piece of information. And now you're seeing a bunch of new information. You know, you look at this large scale data, that's gonna open up new opportunities to solve problems that were never seen before. Exactly. You don't, you can't automate what you can't see. No. Right. That's the thing. So no, we >>Haven't even thought that these problems can be solved. It's basically, this is how the world works now. Because before, when you did remote sensing, you need to be out there. You need to fly with a helicopter or you put your boots on out and go out. Now you don't need that anymore. Yeah. Which opened up that you could be, >>You can move your creativity in another problem. Now you open up another problem space. So again, I like the problem solving vibe of the, it's not like, oh, catastrophic. Well, well, well the earth is on a catastrophic trajectory. It's like, oh, we'll agree to that. But it's not done deal yet. <laugh> I got plenty of time. Right. So like the let's get these problems on the table. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is, this is the new method. Well, thanks so much for coming on the queue. Really appreciate the conversation. Thanks a lot. Love it. Opening up new world opportunities, challenges. There's always opportunities. When you have challenges, you guys are in the middle of it. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks guys. Okay. Cap Gemini in the cube part of cap Gemini. Um, so Getty part of cap Gemini here in the cube. I'm John furrier, the host we're right back with more after this short break.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE! Covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Upgrade 2020. It's the NTT Research Summit covering a lot of really deep topics around a lot of the basic core research that NTT is sponsoring. Kind of like the old days of Mobell or some of the other kind of core research. And we're excited to have our next guest to go. A little bit beyond the core research and actually talk about working with people today. So we'd like to welcome in Alex Bennett. He is the global senior vice president of the intelligent workplace for NTT. Alex, good morning? >> Good morning, Jeff. How are you doing. >> Terrific. So I think for a lot of people, you know, probably know the NTT name, certainly in the States, but are not familiar with, I think, you know, the degree of which you guys have this huge business around services and workplace collaboration, I wonder if you can give us kind of a high level summary of the services angle at NTT, you know, beyond just putting in communications infrastructure equipment. >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, the NTT, as you said, is it's a huge organization, Very well known in Japan and growing in last year that we brought together about 32 different brands under the entity limited brand and we have NTT data services as well. So our role is really to look at the client requirements, the business needs that they have and be able to provide end to end solutions and wrap them with our services to make sure they've got, you know, efficiency gains, but also improving employee experience and experience around, you know, improving how they connect to their customers as well. >> Right, right. So obviously COVID-19, what was, you know, kind of a light switch moment back in March has now turned into, you know, kind of an ongoing, a new normal here we are six months plus into this, into this thing, really no end in sight in the immediate term. So, you know, people were thrown into the situation where work from home, work from anywhere had to happen with no prep. You've been in the business for a long time working on solutions. So there's the obvious things like security and access, but what are some of the less obvious things that people should be thinking about when they think about supporting their employees that are not now coming into the office? >> Well, I mean, it's been interesting, right. I said I have been in the sector for a long time and a lot of the themes have been the same for the last 10, 15 years, you know, how do we improve employee experience? How do we start to look at things like wellbeing? You know, how does it have an impact on productivity? And how do you make sure that we make it simple for people to carry out their tasks? Now, something I get asked a lot is this idea of how do we make it frictionless? A lot of the time, people don't really care about the brand or the technology. They just want to be able to carry out their role from whatever industry sector they aren't doing it efficiently and do it well, but also to be able to interact. I think it's been really important. And this pandemic has brought about this view, that people haven't been able to socialize in the same way they have in the past and work is really about people, you know, the workplace is also about people and how you connect those people into customers and provide efficiencies in that area. So the conversations I've been having in the last, you know, six to seven months, it's been quite interesting that the programs they were taking 18 months, 24 months, 36 months over, have had to be accelerated and really deployed in about three months. And then that's brought about the lows of operation on policy concerns. So as you mentioned, as you start to have this new, what we're calling, you know, distributed workforce, especially those organizations which have been perhaps more enterprise specific, you know, which are going into carpeted office environments, they've been requested by governments to only work from home. And that's brought about a huge impact to how people work, but also socialize. So from a technology standpoint, you've asked people, right, you're going to work from home, actually, do you have network connectivity? Can you actually connect with a technology tool? Like, you know, collaboration to be able to speak to your customers, to speak to your GOPs. Now what device are you actually working on? So we saw this real drive around what is this sort of immediate business continuity requirement for a secure remote worker. >> Right. And that brought about other concerns as well. >> Right. So there's so many layers to this conversation. I'm psyched to dig into it. But one of the ones I want to dig in is kind of tools overload, you know, this idea of collaboration and, you know, trying to get your work done and trying to get bears removed. At the same time though, it just can't seems like we just keep getting more tools added to the palette that we have to interact with every day, whether it's lack or a sauna or Salesforce or box, or you know, the list goes on and on and on. And the other thing that just seems strange to me is that right, all of these things have a notification component. So it's almost like the noise is increasing. I don't hear a lot of people ripping out old tooling or ripping out old systems. So how do you help guide people to say, that there's all these great collaboration tools, there's all these great communication tools, but you can't have all of them firing all the time and expect people to actually have time to get work done. >> Yeah. And it's also, you know, some people are used to that, you might have a digital native who's used to using multiple tools, but you don't have others that actually haven't been taught or a learning program about how to use different tools for different applications. And that becomes that person becomes frustrated and their productivity levels can go down. I think that what we'd really try and do is understand what are the business requirements by the persona? And also if you think of that distributed worker, that's now having to work from home and go into the office for specific tasks that are allowed, are they a sales person? No. Are they actually working in HR? What do they need and what are the tasks they need? And that start to provide the right types of tools and technology specifically for them and make sure they have a learning path that's driven around how they actually enable that technology. But you're right though. I think one of the thing that COVID founder's that doesn't happen overnight, you know, that's an engagement process. COVID hit and everyone was at home straight away. So we did see this huge transition from what may have been a legacy on premise application to starting to use more cloud based applications. And almost everyone was thrown in at the deep pant. Right? Well, here you go, just get on and use it. And at the same time they had WeChat or they had no other types of applications like WhatsApp and there were all these channels were happening. And they always had an impact on things like compliance and security, because all of a sudden, you're not using a corporately approved platform and solution. And you're starting to talk about perhaps confidential information. That's not in a way that is actually retained inside of a corporate network for the compliance and regulatory components. Right. So it's been a really interesting time in the last few months. >> Right. Well, so let's just touch on security for a minute. 'Cause obviously security is a huge concern. As you said, there's a whole bunch of security. You get kind of new security issues. One is just, everybody's working from home, whether they've got to VPN or not, or they're on their... You know, whatever their cable provider. You don't know what devices they're on, right? There's so many different devices and too as these apps have proliferated all over all these devices, whether access Salesforce on my phone or on my laptop or on my computer at work. Right. All very different. So when you look at the kind of security challenge that has come from distributed workforce with this super acceleration, you know, how many customers are ready for it, it's just caused a complete, you know, kind of fire, a hair on fire reaction to get up to speed, or, you know, are a lot of the systems of the monitored system relatively well locked down. So it wasn't a giant, you know, kind of adjustment back in March. >> Really. It depends on the type of company culture it was before. You know, what we've actually seen from some research we've done very recently across 1500 different companies, those organizations that have really invested become more digital disruptors. Now that they've embedded an idea of agility, they've actually already got a distributed workforce. They've already started to move a lot of their platforms and applications to the cloud. They've started to think about these IT policies and security. Previously, they've been very successful in how they've been able to pivot and drive this business continuity. I think for others that have been, no have large installed base of employees, no have set policies in place it's been harder for them to transition. And what we've seen is that they're the organizations that have really tried to integrate some of the new technologies into the old and that that's quite difficult sometimes. So, you know, around security, out of those 1500 organizations, nearly 70% of them said that they have a higher level of risk and concern about this. You're already in compliance today than they had prior to the pandemic. >> Right. >> What also is brought about is this idea of moving from a sort of perimeter security now where you'd come into an office and you have this perimeter where the network's secure, the physical location, and security, containerize the applications. And you've got to empower employees more now because you know, people are going to be mobile. They're going to be using multiple devices in different locations, all around the world. So we're seeing this transition as people move to cloud based platform, security is starting to get embedded into the application and it goes back to that persona aspect. So you can start to initiate things like you know, data loss protection and rights management about the content an individual has based on their location or the confidentiality of that document or piece of information. So that's where we're seeing this move is sort of really accelerating to the group, take the stress away from the employee embedded into an actual system and an application. And that has the intelligence to work out the security and the compliance on behalf of the individual. >> Right. You know, where I was going to go is, you know, there's a lot of conversations now about certain companies announcing that people can just work from home for the foreseeable future, especially here in Silicon Valley. And you mentioned that, you know, for some people that were already kind of down at digital transformation path, they're in good shape. Other people, you know, weren't that far, and of course all the means on social media are, you know, what drove your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question. So I just want to get, you know, kind of a longterm perspective. You've been in this space for a long time. I think there's going to be, you know, a significantly increased percentage of people that are working from home. A significantly increased percentage of the time, if not a hundred percent of the time. How do you see this kind of, you know, extending out and how will it impact the way that people motivate? 'Cause at the end of the day, you've written a ton of blog posts on this, you know, motivation equals profitability. And a motivated engaged people do better work and do get better results on the bottom line. How do you see this as this as (indistinct) rules for six months, 12 months, 24 months, when there's some mishmash of combination of work from home and work from the office? >> I think probably the first thing to say is that from the research we've done, we think that's going to differ by different geographies. I mean, it's interesting when you look at areas like India and perhaps South Africa where the network connectivity home is actually not as good as in Northern Europe or North America, and actually it becomes quite hard to carry out your role and task at home. And it can become really frustrating. There's also sort of health and safety components to also working at home. Now we've had a lot of people, especially the younger generation who are in shared home, shared facilities. Now who's going to pay for the internet, the bundles, you know, and actually you only have your bedroom and is it healthy to work at your bedroom all day? So when you really sort of peel back the layers of this, this is a really complex environment, and it's also dependent on the industry sector you are. You're actually driving. But at a high level, one thing we're really seeing is most people still want to have a level of human interaction. That we as humans like to like to work together and engage together. And in fact, about 80% of the respondents of our report actually said, they want to come back to the office. Now this, this speaks to this idea of choice and flexibility. 'Cause it's not just about coming back for five days a week, eight to five, it's about going actually I've got a task to carry out. It'd be really helpful if I was with my team face to face. >> Right. >> And I can come in for four hours, book my time in that physical space, carry that out, and then I can go home and do that sort of really the research based work which I can do in the safety of my own environment. So that's what we're seeing across the industry whereas before. Now, I think everyone's trying to build these really nice big offices that looked fantastic, more huge and talked about your brand. Most organizations now are repurposing space 'cause they're not going to have as many people inside of those physical locations, but they're motivating for them to come in for creative work, you know, to be social, to think about how they do cross agile team development. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that's what we're starting to see today. >> Yeah. It's really interesting you think of some young engineer that just graduated from school, gets a job at Google and you know, you get all your food there and they'll do your dry cleaning and they'll change the oil in your car and they'll, you know, take care of everything. And, and so there's this little growth in these little micro houses. Well guess what, now you don't have any of that stuff anymore. The micro house with no kitchen or kitchen that does look so attractive. And I want to shift gears a little bit more detail on NTT. You know, we've talked to lots of people about new ways to work. IBM, Citrix, you know, VM-ware has a solution and you work with big company. So how does NTT fit in, you know, kind of a transformation process big and that on the big scale, but more kind of an employee engagement and a work from anywhere type of engagement. How do you guys fit within, you know, big system integrators, like a center that are driving organizational change and, you know, kind of all this other suite of technology that they might already have in place. >> Yeah. I mean, we sort of sit in that role of a service delivery organization as well as systems integrator. So our role is to actually go into those clients and sit down with them, which is now virtually, rather than in person a lot of the time. And really understand what are those business KPIs they have and help them shape that strategy. And to do that, you've got to understand what they have today, that view of the assets. And that goes across multiple components as you said, from, you know, desktop application, security, inclusive of culture, property assets, network. And what we do is really take a holistic view of those areas that go for you to reach that business goal, that KPI, you know, this is the project that you're going to have to do. And anything around employee engagement ultimately is fed also by how good your network is and how secure that network is to deliver those applications efficiently for that employee to carry out their task in that frictionless way. So we have a very holistic view about how we then deliver Upgrade. That the core infrastructure, we do that secure by design is our sort of policy and everything we do, you know, security is embedded into what we do, and then we deliver that outcome. But then we erupt things like adoption services. I think one thing in the past, you know, people say here's a technology, go on and do it. Especially nowadays, you've got quite complex platforms. You've got to really understand how do you give information to people to self serve them, that sort of nudge technology, so they can understand how to carry it out on that idea of adoption training. Change of management is becoming ever increasingly important for our clients. >> Right. So I wan shift gears again, Alex, and talk about the show Upgrade 2020. Lot of (laughs) a lot of really heavy science going on here in healthcare, in IT, in a whole bunch of areas. Pretty exciting stuff, you know, we've talked to some other guests about some of the real details and I'm definitely going to attend some sessions and have my brain exploded I'm sure. But I'm just curious of how it fits with what your doing, you know, you've been involved, as you said, not necessarily the NTT, but you've been involved in kind of workplace collaboration tools for a long, long time. You know, how do you see, you know, kind of basic research and some of this really fundamental research, you know, kind of helping you and your customers and your solutions, you know, as we kind of moved down the road. >> Alright, hold at that. The main conversation we're having with executives today is this idea of employee wellbeing and experience is fundamental to the success of their business. 'Cause it drives customer centricity productivity gains. You've got to think about how technology can underpin that and deliver insights to you. So, you know, the new currency is data. And what I find really interesting around and what we're talking about with Upgrade 2020 is this ideas of digital twins. So when you think of this concept of a digital twin, it all is based on this idea of extensibility. So all your decisions that you're making right to today, you know, these short term decisions you having to do for business continuity, you've got to think about the longterm impact of how you're going to be able to ingest that data from all those systems into a central area, to give you insight. Now, from that insight, you've then got the, you know, the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually say right, for this component how many of my employees really are? Then well, are they doing well in the productivity gains? And from my property estate, you know, how many of my properties are actually reducing the energy consumption? And are we adhering to our sustainability goals? Are they well? So the actual physical environment is safe for those employees. So all of those disparate platforms have to come together into that one area and give you insight. So that the marrying of physical space with the how humans interact all into a digital twin, I think is really interesting and something I'm speaking to clients about day in, day out. >> I love that, that is awesome. You know, we're first exposed to the digital twin concept years ago, doing some work with general electric, because they were doing a lot of digital twin work around, you know, engines on airplanes and, you know, simulate an airplane engine that's running on a plane in the Middle East, it's going to act very different than a plane that's running in Alaska. And then, you know, I love the concept of digital twin around the context of people in medicine, right. And modeling a heart or modeling a behavior system or cardiovascular system. How are you talking about digital twins? 'Cause it sounds like you're talking about kind of a combination between, you know, kind of individual people and how they're doing versus some group of people as a unit or organization. And then you even mentioned, you know, sustainability goals and buildings. So when you're talking about digital twin in this context, what are the boundaries? How are you organizing that thing that you can then do, you know, kind of tests and kind of predictive exercises to see how the real thing is going to do relative to what the digital twin did. >> Yeah. But it goes back to defining those business outcomes. And most of the discussions we're having is, yeah, obviously increased productivity, but it's also a reducing costs. A big one we've seen in my area is attraction retention of talent. You know, intellectual property is going to differentiate organizations in the future as technology sort of standardizes. But sustainability again from the research we've done is really high up on the executives agenda. You know, the idea that we, as NTT as well, we have a duty to society to actually start giving back a view of how technology can improve the sustainability goal. And in fact, we've just become the business Avenger for the UN sustainability goal, number 11, around the idea of communities and smart cities. So the clients that I'm speaking to when they're looking at those business objectives are no 10, 15% of my, my actual costs associated to my property. We've now got a new distributed workforce, but I've got a huge amount of energy going into those properties. Now we can actually connect now building management systems into now that digital twin. We can also start to look at the other platforms such as lifts, you know, also all the heating and air ventilation. And start to get the data that allows us to model and predict when certain issues may occur. So, you know, as less people start coming in, you'll have occupancy data. You'll be able to say, you're actually, this location has only been used 30% capacity. We could reduce the amount of space we have, or in fact, we don't need that space at all. And in that space, we know that we're running an HVAC system and air conditioning a hundred percent of the time. You start to actually reduce that and you can reduce energy consumption by 30%. Now goes back to this whole idea of extensibility on one building that can have a big impact, but across 500 buildings that we're NTT have, that's a significant amount of energy that we can change. >> Jeff: Right. >> And also you can then start to think about the idea of, you know, more different type of power purchasing agreement with sustainable energy going into those environments. >> So many, you know, kind of so many interesting twists and turns on this journey since, you know, that COVID hit. And it is going to be really fascinating to see kind of what sticks and, you know, and the longterm ramifications. 'Cause we're not going back to the way that it was. I think that's not even a question. Just the last thing on kind of the data, you know, we saw some really, I think not such great things early on in this thing where, you know, you get put us basically a sniffer on and you know, our people sitting in front of their computer all day. I saw some nasty thing on Twitter the other day. My boss wants me to be on Zoom calls all day long. I mean, do people get it that, you know, there's an opportunity to increase motivation, not decrease motivation by, you know, a responsible use and a good use of this data versus, you know, a potential perception of, well now they're just big brothering me to death. >> It's such a hot topic, right? I mean, even before COVID we had, you know, the GDPR compliance in Europe. But that ultimately is a global compliance and the West coast America also got a similar one now about what data you're actually keeping about me as an individual. And I should have access to that and I can not speak to my company about it. And is it big brother or actually using that data to help inform me as an individual ways of improving the way I work or working in a way that has a better balance for me as an individual. And we're having these conversations with our clients right now about how we do this, because they having to work with workers counselors in countries like Germany. Because track and trace does have that view of that sort of big brother. What, where are you? What are you doing? And how long have you been on your computer? I think it's down to the culture of your business and the purpose that you have and how you engage with your employees, that you show that data to be about all benefiting them as an individual. Now, I'm going back to that digital twin, that the view of ingesting data, then from perhaps platforms like, you know, Cisco WebEx or Office 365, and you can see how long they are actually in front of their screen. You can then start to predict and see where you may have burnout or in fact affect change where you say RHR policy should dictate, you shouldn't be working 14 hours a day. That's not good for you. It's not good for us. And actually nudge them and teach them about taking no time away from the desk and actually having a better work balance. And that's important because it all goes back to increases the productivity longterm, but it's great brand association and it's good for attraction and retention of talent. >> Right, Right. Well, I think the retention and attraction is a huge thing. You keep talking about productivity and obviously in your blog post talking about engagement, right. And engagement is such a direct tie to that. And then at the bottom line (giggles) it's kind of like diversity of opinion. It actually makes good business sense. And you actually put more money in the bank at the end of the day, when you do some of these more progressive, you know, kind of approaches to how you manage the people. 'Cause they're not machines, they're people. >> Yeah. And you should allow them to make decisions. You know, that again, distributed working, you've got to think of how to empower them with the tools that gives them the choice to make decisions. And you know, that that decision making is more democratized inside of organizations that are successful. But if you don't have the technology that allows them to do that, it goes back to a hierarchical decision making. And that takes time, it's slower to market, and then you know, you're not as successful as your competition. So we're really trying to prove that this idea of thinking about people first using the data that backs it up you know, with empirical data to show the benefits, is the way forward for organizations today. >> Yeah. Alex, great conversation. Certainly nothing but opportunity (laughs) I had for you and what you do in this really fast evolving and transformative space, which is so important. Which is how do people work? How do they feel good? How are they engaged? How are they productive and really contribute? And at the end of the day, it is good business. So exciting times, good luck on the show and some of this crazy research coming out of it on the digital twin, and we look forward to continuing to watch the story unfold. >> Thank you very much, Jeff. >> Alright. He's Alex. I'm Jeff. You're watching Upgrade 2020. The continuous coverage from theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] me [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] um [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so so [Applause] so [Music] so welcome to cyber security insights we're excited to talk to you today about some of the key developments in the cyber security area let me start off by saying you know security's always been a board room topic boards care about it but right now it's actually getting even more important given what's happening covered 19 given the risk the world faces the fact that 70 percent of the workforce is now really working from home at vmware we have all of our employees working for we made that a mandate not just required but we're taking a cautious approach as to how they come back that's the reality of many of our customers but the bad guys are not staying still 148 increase in ransomware during this time they're just looking for every way to take advantage of innocent people working at home and then we've seen 52 percent increase of all attacks in the march time frame targeting the financial sector so it's very important that you we have a different approach to security because our belief is the security industry has been broken uh you'll see on this chart 5000 odd vendors 15 or 20 different categories and it's often i described like going to a doctor to stay healthy and she tells you you've got to take 5 000 tablets and you fall off your chest and that's just not possible you know so how do you prevent staying having 5000 tablets taking 5000 tablets to stay healthy you eat your vegetables your fruit your proteins drink your water you make it part of your hygiene and that's what needs to happen in security we've got to move away from this bolted on approach siloed approach where you've got you know various differences feels like even 5000 tablets 5000 security tools are all kind of like healthcare deem themselves very important and also from security that's just focused on threats and the new approach needs to be one that's more built-in intrinsically part of the platform like making a part of your diet more unified as opposed to just siloed across all of the key pillars of security and a lot more context-centric rather than just threat centric to do this we've been looking at kind of the value proposition of vmware we're you know about a 10.8 billion dollar company and have played across these three or four layers off being a digital foundation for the world any cloud any app any device with intrinsic security you've seen this from us several uh over the last several years what we've sought to do is layer into that diagram five or six important control points in security that we think are going to be super important to make security intrinsic let's start off on the bottom right corner of this with network security we think a new approach for network security means that if you look at data center networking or firewalls or load balancing or sd-wan what is a 30 billion dollar opportunity a new approach you know could be one way you could have in one platform all of those capabilities in something that's more software-defined that's what we've been doing uh in with nsx a platform some customers call us sort of the tesla of networking because we're taking a somewhat you know traditional hardware-defined approach to networking and building a more software-defined networking stack for security much the same way a tesla is building a software-defined car if you go to the left-hand side you see kind of the endpoints but it's two different forms of endpoint an endpoint that's on the client side near the device a laptop tablet a phone or a endpoint that's closer to the server a workload or a container and in both areas we believe we have an opposition proposition to really be the best uh security solution for endpoint and workload security identity we think there's a tremendous opportunity to be the best solution that not just some ourselves but also partners with the best of breed players for example um octa or azure active directory in cloud security we're going to do a lot ourselves for example cloud security posture management but we're also going to partner with the likes of well web gateways and and proxies like z scale or netscope and then analytics is the big kahuna because the more data that you have the more equipped you are to prevent breaches and what we believe here is this notion of what the analysts are now calling xdr collecting telemetry from all of these control points which we have exposure to network endpoint workload identity cloud and having one big data lake where you reason over this with a variety of behavioral and ai algorithms and then provide the best way by which you can protect customers from possible future security events this is something we well best because we actually collecting the most telemetry of anybody from disparate different sources and you're gonna only see this increase so vmware's proposition uh as you look at this we today have a billion dollar security business i know you're gonna listen to that and say wow where did that come from some customers call us one of the best kept uh security secrets in the industry uh a significant about that comes from network security a growing part of it now comes from endpoint security we think the opportunity is to take that billion dollar business it's about 20 000 odd customers and double or triple that by really focusing in these five or six control points you're going to see us build the best products in each of these categories but one that's intrinsic and also works between them in ways that are incredible let me give you a couple examples with carbon black we're going to make it agentless on the server side with vsphere nobody else can do that we're going to do that and you're going to see that very soon with carbon black we're going to make it unified with workspace 1 on the console so you have a unified approach there on both the console and the agent something that you also start seeing from us very soon these are things that nobody else in users can do network security you're going to see from one platform data center networking load balancing firewalls and sd-wan beautiful security-centric networking story so this is the approach for folks and now i think as we listen to several of the thought leaders and analysts you're going to hear them get into this story in more detail thank you very much let's continue in this show cyber security insights and now we'd like to explore the unified approach of security and i.t how do you unify them as a foundation for success our special guest today is chris sherman who's senior analyst at forrester and a pretty renowned security uh researcher and thought leader himself chris welcome to the show great to be here with you sanjay you know i'm sitting here in my living room in cleveland ohio as we uh ride down the curve right fighting off a cabin fever and staying healthy hope you're doing the same chris i'm doing well but listen i look at your beautiful looking um you know i can't confess that my background is my natural i've got a virtual background is that actually your living room or is that a virtual background it is this is my living room we built the house last year and it's also my little private iot lab because you know i'm a huge nerd and i love my devices we've been you know kind of a big fan of a lot of the forester research zero trust security you mentioned your research and iot uh i.t security and i'd like to explore this a little further with you chris i'm a big fan of your research read a lot of your stuff uh but let's kind of focus in you know clearly in this time having security strategy and i.t strategy be together in this current climate many organizations have had to pivot uh due to covert 19. you know one example is employees having to work at home which raises a whole host of cyber security issues and you know having reviewed the research results it makes them i think even more relevant the need for security and i.t to join forces i believe right now to defeating the cyber criminals during the pandemic um so that we don't have this risk and quite frankly you know we've been finding the risk is even higher because the bad guys aren't sleeping uh even if there's a crisis going on so maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this research and your findings absolutely yeah so you know i think the genesis of this research really started with a conversation i had with some of your team members back in november uh we talked about you know the high level of friction between these two teams right between i.t and security and frankly the lack of support that a lot of the existing tools in the market really have for you know integrating the two and when you look across the industry there really aren't a whole lot of resources for buyers or you know technology strategists that you know want to understand these dynamics and you know this is really what led to vmware commissioning forester to uh you know this past february to survey over 1400 security and it ops decision makers across the globe we really wanted to probe those dynamics right you know what's holding companies back from eliminating this friction right this really was actually the largest sample size of any commissioned study that i've been a part of here at forester and it really led to some excellent results and and data as you know from the uh published research i'm looking forward to to reading them and knowing more about it and you know i think if you think about the research and uh you know there's a shift in security driving alignment and collaboration security and it's you know kind of the top initiative we see in the next 12 months uh maybe even tell us about why the relationship between these security and id teams um you know are important whys have been strained across both you know all three of people process and technology yeah i mean so i team security really are two sides of the same coin right but unfortunately their teams have struggled to work well together for many years according to our survey date it's gotten to the point where 83 of both team staff report a negative relationship between the two it's very unfortunate but there are many reasons for this you know many reasons for this friction especially with the vp director and manager roles between the security and the ite teams you know at a high level most of this is driven by the fact that security and i.t have differing priorities right our data backs us up you know you have i.t on one side that's focused on technology efficiency and uptime and from our conversations with it staff it's clear you know they view security as philosophically opposite you know to this right often as roadblocks to accomplishing their goals and then on the other side security's top priority is as you'd expect responding to security events and incidents and preventing compromises and this difference in priorities is the source of a lot of friction also both security and i.t staff are really unhappy with the technology that the tools specifically that they're using or the security tools the c cios and csos you know that we talked to all had the same complaint they have too many disjointed tools in fact the average across our study was 27 security products on average in each organization and even the most established security solutions like take firewalls for example you know it caused some serious angst right we found that only 52 percent of respondents felt that their firewalls were satisfactory in terms of the performance and the security uh efficacy i think you know listen a couple of points i'll point point out from what you talked about that resonate deeply with us one is when you talked about uh i don't know it was 25 or 27 odd tools i'd be surprised the number of csos i talked to who say it's in the dozens one i think i always sort of keep a record for the number of tools i've heard one tell me it was like 100 different security tools i asked you know him was there a hundred different consoles so it's just the number of tools and consoles uh the other one that you resonated with me was even in one of the more mature areas like firewalls you would have thought oh people are really happy there we find the same level of dissatisfaction with people saying listen traditional hardware-based approaches appliance-based approaches lots of policy way way too complicated um now let's talk a little bit about staffing i think it's it's you know listen at the end of the day security is a team sport it does depend on products and processes and technology but there's also people and you know we security teams are understaffed they're increasingly dealing with a complex portfolio of these non-integrated products how uh is this impacting teams and what can companies you do as you advise them to reduce complexity from the plethora of different products that are often point products today well you're right right finding and training the right item security staff is really critical to the success of the respective teams unfortunately this continues to be a major pain point right across the whole industry in fact 64 of the security teams that we surveyed and 53 of the it teams reported they're understaffed but yeah i mean amid this global pandemic when most organizations are focused on surviving and you know maybe keeping the lights on or i guess in this case maybe the vpn's running right and getting by with limited resources and protecting an increasingly remote workforce it's much more difficult to collaborate and work together across teams but our data showed that one of the major results of this you know the formation of communication silos you know teams aren't communicating enough right they're they're communicating within their or organization designed for their particular use case right with very little integration and collaboration across those silos and you know this is where tools could help right most of the time though they the tools actually just reflect or amplify those silos by reinforcing the division right between the two teams ultimately organizations may be looking for technologies that can support the needs of both it and security right this will help alleviate any tension that might arise over things like competition over limited resources right ideally once the teams come together and agree on goals as well as objectives and and measures of success for that matter right they can address their technology stack inherent complexity wisely said listen the security attacks are becoming more sophisticated uh organizations are considering now i think the approach as you've described is a unified strategy to address these critical issues uh can you tell us more about how you've seen these unified approaches to security strategy being effective well so i mean it seems like we've been talking about unifying the tools and strategies by you know i.t ops and security for years right but it's only been recently that we've seen the two sides really demonstrate any appetite to actually do so unfortunately most of the tools again right on the market are focused on one or the other and integrations are only starting to really accelerate to the point where our true unified vision is even possible this not only aligns teams under common goals right having a common tool set but it also aligns workflows between those two teams and helps foster collaboration uh listen uh you mentioned a couple of these these examples are really good for people to kind of grop you know in this have you uh outside of these exams or any other sort of tangible results uh that you think companies can expect uh as they bring together their security and id strategies and make them more unified what are the results from your research you think customers can expect to gain yeah there are several other you know clear benefits right that we identified in this research right the benefits to unifying the tech stacks between it ops and security our research showed that companies with a unified strategy reported fewer security incidents fewer data breaches which makes sense right given how critical endpoint configuration and overall i.t hygiene is to the security posture of an organization also you know building security capabilities directly into the it infrastructure helps to motivate non-security staff to take some ownership right over basic security fundamentals and this all helps speed right this this increases the speed to you know both detect new threats and uh respond once they're you know identified you know time to containment right this was also validated by our survey data a common strategy really can empower both to you know mitigate risk ensure continuous compliance and improve you know their threat response uh workflows you know between the two teams really companies need to find tools that meet the needs of both teams and at the end of the day as you pointed out security is a team sport right we all benefit from working together to protect the business and its employees right from malicious actors especially in these difficult times that's great chris thank you for uh your research um um so i just encourage all of you are listening um if you want to um you know get chris's research um you know go to this url on the screen here and you'll be able to download it uh we're excited about it i mean listen you know personally when i watch it teams and security teams sometimes sort of spar each other um you know i i i think that increasingly whether the security team reports under the cio sometimes that's the case sometimes security teams report into the chief legal officer or they report maybe into the cfo wherever reporting structures are only you have to build a team sport because there's aspect of this that's policy aspects of this that are technology there are aspects of this that are people uh thank you for this research chris as always i'm a fan of uh the stuff as are all of we and what you're right so it's always good to be able to see more this is also much of the other extended uh forest to work like zero trust that have become kind of the things that i've seen now becoming more pervasive in the industry so thank you all for listening to this uh and we hope we'll continue to serve you in the course of this program cyber security insights with more insights like this it's my pleasure right now to also continue this uh cyber security insights series now with a wonderful interview um with the head of security and infrastructure at circle k suzanne hall um i've had a chance to briefly meet her prior to this and she's got an incredible vision of how infrastructure security comes together uh in the context of retail so i'm looking forward to the discussion suzanne thank you for joining us today thanks sanjay glad to be here great hey listen maybe i'll start with um you know circle okay some folks may know you in the locality in the areas where they shop or whatever have you but many folks around the country may not and we're assuming there'll be a very large audience watching this tell us a little bit about the company what you guys do uh what's your vision and how are you serving uh customers and consumers oh terrific oh well yeah so circle k uh many people do not realize it's actually a canadian-owned company we are a global uh convenience and fuel service organization uh with with offices all across north america uh large part of northern europe um and with franchises in a large part of asia as well we're the second largest convenience store company in the world and the 11th largest retailer we yeah we acquired circle k the brand um back in the early 2000's and uh our goals right now over the next five years are to try and double in size um which is a pretty aggressive goal goal considering uh our organization which really is taking a you know 60 billion dollar organization and trying to double that in the next five years so wish us luck let's focus now a little bit more on the infrastructure and security part of it um it's interesting that you own both as you think about those areas um you know how are they linked together and what have you been doing to tie uh infrastructure topics and security topics which are often you know you have a ciso and then a cto owns infrastructure in your case you own both and i think it's a classic way in which you know we're trying to kind of get traditional it teams the security work world to go you're living it then you're breathing and you're implementing your team uh how is it working out and how are you making it work yeah oh sorry it was actually a key part of me being attracted to the to this world i've been here about 18 months um i really feel for certain organizations culturally if you can make it work where security operations can function together um it really empowers your security team to move things quickly and it also gives me the opportunity to take ultimately super scarce resources from the security side and build uh more security acumen within my network teams and my hosting teams and my infra um so that i get actually really smart technologists that also get security collaborating with really great security folks that also get technology there's a lot of synergies that i that i get from that from combining these two organizations and where circle k was before i got here you know we we um did need to rapidly mature a lot of our security program um because it had just um grown uh i think the organization grew beyond the competencies of the security team before i got here and so by having both sides of that house i was really able to move things quickly um kind of i don't have to i don't have to uh negotiate between the network team and the hosting team the security team because they all report up to me and i get i get to pick who wins all the time so it works really well i'd love to talk to you but just cover it it's on on everybody's mind it's changed transformed how we all work you and i are doing this interview work from home uh if we were doing it in different concerts i have to come to you or come to us we have done this in the studio together or in an event um and certainly it's you know kind of changing the ways in which we work and family life and so on and so forth but how is it changing your business how is it changing your i.t organization uh and how have you had to adapt to um you know this time that we're sheltering place work at home yeah well it's really it's changed everything for us as i'm sure for for most of your of your clients as well um you know obviously serp okay being convenience we are uh on the front lines we are open across the globe we may have some small stores that may get closed for periodic periods of time or maybe some shortened hours but we've got convenience workers and gas station workers working around the globe through coven so we've had to change how the stores look and feel um we've had to rapidly deploy things like curbside delivery to really adjust to uh customers um wants and expectations and then we've had to take the entire back office and put people working at home which was not our culture um before this all happened and we had to do that almost like in watching a wave go across the globe as it started uh offices started closing in northern europe first uh and then and then all the way through to ireland and then and then obviously the east coast and canada and all the way through to the west coast so um we actually had a very short period of time to create a remote working uh operation um luckily enough um we had some really talented folks we put a couple different solutions in place and uh within two weeks or so we were able to get everybody working remotely that could work remotely and then that really empowered us to support all those operations folks that needed to get things like plexiglass into the stores hand sanitizers into the stores masks uh um into the stores uh to serve our customers and to serve our staff i'd like to move on um then to the um the kind of the context of this infrastructure and i.t workers and security work i.t teams and security teams working better together one of the things we find often and we did some research with forester that where companies performed well and had great you know security prevention practices breaches places where i t and security work well together and traditionally often csos uh may be separate from the infrastructure team sometimes csos don't even report into ci support elsewhere and that can be uh not intensely so sometimes intentionally but often just a silo or a warring mentality you're good evidence now where you're bringing these together let's talk a little away from technology for a second and the people process collaboration how have you been able to bring these cultures together so that they work together for the common good of either cost saving protection whatever have you yeah you know um and so i've had the benefit of being a cso and a cio and a couple different organizations and also i was in i was in consulting for many years i worked for a big four uh from a letter of cyber practice with one of the big four firms and i'll tell you cyber programs uh move fast forward best when there's a couple of key elements in place and the first one is you have to have shared goals anytime that the cyber team is trying to implement something um in that the network team isn't on board with or the network team picked a tool they don't want to implement the tool that the cyber team is as um and has selected i mean that's that's always a recipe for failure so somehow you have to really work on aligned goals and i do that even though i own the infrastructure teams and the security teams um nobody's successful if we're not all successful together and really focusing on what does success look like for for each one of the each one of our areas and look sometimes you know we do have to take some uh educated risks in the environment you know for responding to things quickly but we also don't take we don't um let those risks sort of linger and and never get remediated right so we really work together to make sure that any new risks that we're taking on we have a focus on how we're going to mitigate that and we hold ourselves accountable and um and the network team is equally accountable for responding to security events as a security team is the key element i also say to my security teams is when you're working with production operations teams and and folks you've got to have skin in the game you've got to recognize that they're trying to keep systems up and running 24 7 you know for the operations of the organization right so we can take credit cards and cash in the stores and make the sales and deliver the goods and services when we need to if the security team isn't seen as fully on board with that mission and that um that responsibility then there's there's a non-equity sort of relationship going on between the two different teams so you really need to bring them all together and make sure that everybody um understands supports each other's wins and goals it's awesome that you've been a cio and a ciso and you've seen all of these in various different companies i'm sure maybe in smaller bigger wherever have you so you're able to really relate to that uh i find the csos i talk to uh most of my relationships in the years past have been with cfos and cios uh i set myself a personal goal this year as we started getting more into security as i've been shaping that strategy of the company to meet a thousand cesars i was 15 years ago at symantec and most of the csos i know are retired and moved on so uh it's a good new way of my understanding and i find as i talk to them so refreshing the ones who are strategic like yourself uh have had tremendous experience in id or are also owned them and are able to paint a vision that's very collaborative as to as opposed to ones who don't then are also able to strategically bring teams together so it's really good to to see that i'd like to kind of just work a little bit more into security because i mean your strategy plays into the reason we're quite carbon black um and you i have some obviously you know knowledge and investment vmware but i'm listening as i was listening to prior to getting on to this you know program together you're probably doing more with carbon black which is awesome i mean it'll probably strengthen our relationship with vmware too and of course but we can talk a little bit about that what's been your history carbon black why you picked them and where do you see that going on the endpoint security um and then i'll talk a little bit about how we're trying to try that into infrastructure too yeah so um so my relationship with carbon black goes back to uh almost right after i first arrived at circle k um obviously i know uh from having come from consulting a number of different uh tools and products out there um although carbon black always had a really good reputation and strength and um i went to carbon black pretty early on and said you know here's my here's my situation i've got a little bit of carbon black and a little bit of other things in different places i really want to standardize on a single tool i really want to get to a better visibility of my overall network and of my of my risks and ultimately i want to have a single pane of glass but um that you know i've got folks working from an eyes on 24 7. um you know carbon black hands a table really quickly and had a great vision uh for how they could get us uh standardized across some different versions that we had um and when i said okay i want to do this in six weeks or fewer um they didn't say we can't make that happen um i think a lot of people on my team wish that they'd said that we can't make that happen but um but now we were able to really rather quickly um deploy and and get up to speed across all of our stores across all of our networks all of our you know we're a very distributed organization i've got offices all across north america and europe um and uh and we were able to in six weeks get get standardized and get things up and running and i had gained great visibility uh in that and i'm a big believer when looking at all sorts of tools whether they're input tools or security tools that you know you can tell whether or not you've picked the right solution if it's fit for purpose relatively quickly if it feels like it's too hard to implement if it just feels like it's you're not getting the value out of out of something in a relatively quick period of time you really do need to look at whether or not the tool you're looking at is fit for purpose in your environment and i would say the carbon black team and the carbon black tool that made it really easy for us and um you know it's giving us great visibility we have been able to uh detect and respond to a number of different instances you know retail is a very uh high threat high target industry these days um so it's been it's been super helpful in us defending um circle k in our environment and with 130 000 employees i suspect your number of endpoints are in the tens of thousands on the client side and probably just as many in terms of server-side endpoints right so your your kind of surface area of potential endpoints is pretty large oh indeed and you know but you know you have over 15 000 stores every store has multiple point of sale systems and at multiple uh computers laptops tablets devices um and that's and that's even before i go out into the uh what we call the forecourt which is where the gas dispensers and pumps are so yeah it's very complex well listen we look forward to that journey together part of what she has talked about here is a key part to our vision uh folks listening to this is to basically bring together security to make it key parts of the infrastructure both in the endpoint the network and the cloud thank you for your partnership i look forward to getting to know you and your team better um thank you also for all you're doing to serve the community during these tough times especially those workers at circle key that are the front line in the stores we appreciate you tremendously and we look forward to continuing this dialogue thank you very much thank you thank you everybody for watching this cyber security insight segments titled security as a team sport we talked about the shift in security and how security is moving to a shared responsibility model in this team sport in this segment we also discussed the benefits of a consolidated security and an i.t strategy that allows for fewer breaches and a faster response to security incidents as key benefits that have implemented a common strategy for those who have done this i encourage all of you to watch this part two of cyber security insights the securities of dual mission and we will have two security leaders discussing how security helps not only protect but help drives the business forward thank you all for watching this segment [Music] you

>> live from London, England. It's the queue covering a ws summat. London twenty nineteen Brought to you by Amazon Web services >> Welcome back to London Summit Everybody, this is David Lamont and you watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We loved to go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is our one day coverage of a WS summit London, and it's packed house twelve thousand people here. The twenty six thousand people registered, which is just outstanding. Chris Bunches. Here's the general manager of a MIA for cloud reach, and he's joined by Mark Randy, whose CEO of signal FX. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Okay, let's start with signal effects. What's going on at the show? What's the buzz like? >> Very busy. Dozens deep. A lot of demonstrations feature in our massively scalable metrics platform and distributed tracing platform. So we've had a very good show. Good showing in London. >> Good. We're going to get into some of that. Chris, tell us about cloud reach. What you guys do? >> Sure. So Cloud Reach was founded in two thousand and nine. So quite a long time ago in the history of cloud confusing, at least >> was right after the Cloud City with >> quite a pure vision around helping complex organizations to adults public cloud computing technologies to doom or faster and better. That's all we've ever done. It's all we ever intend to do way work these days with enterprise organizations across the cloud lifecycle starting with adoption, helping them to understand White Cloud. How am I going to do this? How am I going to move my data center's into the cloud? How am I gonna build new services moving on through the life cycle? We help them with that. At that migration, we helped them to shut down their data centers on rebuild them in a WS. We helped build New Cloud native Services. Using the latest offerings from from Amazon and other cloud providers, we worked with him on Data analytics, helping them to generate insights from their data. Data flows in an ever faster pace from across the across the world into their organization. On all of that is wraps with an MSP manage service twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. >> So, Mark, I gotta ask you so back back in the day, the narrative was that the public law was going to kill every man, his service provider out there. It's been nothing but a tailwind for your business. Business is booming. What's what actually happened to give you that? Left >> on the signal effects side I look, the big trends are the move to the cloud number one. The second piece is just a change in the architecture's you know, the move to communities, the introduction for elastic burst e type use cases of things like Lambda and and that even more importantly, just the process of developing software movement from, you know, waterfall, Dad, agile and the Whole Dev ops movement in introduction of micro services. So that's it's It's just a lot of a lot of these ways been going on for quite some time, but they're really starting to hit the shore to shore right now, and I think it's been a great great opportunity for companies like Cloud Reach Tio to take advantage of were very excited by the partnership. >> Well, it has. It has ripple effects on the rest of the business, doesn't it? I was saying earlier in a segment that it used to be the business of No, we can't do that because and now you look around this audience, it's all doers and builders, and, you know, it's it's actually great marketing because it works, doesn't it? So clouded has been a fundamental component of >> Yeah, I mean, our whole businesses around making t v enabler helping businesses to innovate. Once upon a time, the message was all around. Cost saving is the reason to move to the cloud, and there's still an element of that. Nobody wants to pay Mohr, but actually, increasingly, what we're seeing is organizations moving to Amazon because they want the agility, they want to move faster. And they don't want to be the the culture of no and have a process that takes six months to deliver a new service to the business. They want to be out of deliver things in hours or minutes in the some cases, and they want to do so quickly on they want to innovate, a pace that they've never been able to before, partly from a competitive threat perspective and partly from a market opportunity. There's so much, but we can deliver to customers if we put our minds to it and use the primitives, the Amazon providers, as building blocks to enable new >> services. You know where you live in the Bay Area. I spent a lot of time out there, were based in Palo Alto and use a vortex that unique that sometimes I think way think that that's where all the action is. You come to London and you see all these startups. Every business is becoming a software company. And you know, we don't in Silicon Valley in America have a monopoly on innovation anymore, >> not even close. So there's a lot of great innovation all over Europe. Uh, here in the U K. All the way to Northern Europe, Doc, uh, Paris Way we see it across the board. So >> So what are people doing? They building new cloud native APS in the public loud. Are they doing a lifted shift and trying to get more agility out of those traditional APs? What's the landscape? Looks like? >> It's ah, combination of the two. The startup organizations, of course, is starting with no legacy. There's nothing to my great and they are building cloud native and they're doing so far, >> we have no I d >> no. Yeah, technically, before nine years, four hundred on eBay test migrations. But that's the only hardware for the museum. Exactly the larger organizations. They have huge volumes of legacy infrastructure, some of it dating back to the seventies. In the case of financial institutions or public sector, then all of that is an opportunity to modernize, and not just for the agility and innovation but in some cases just to reduce risk. There is huge business risk in these old, untouched, dusty, cobweb ridden servers that nobody understands anymore. And there's a really opportunity to move that to the public cloud, reduce and remove that risk. And while you're there, take advantage of the new technologies and innovative deliver a better service to you or in consumer whoever that may be >> so prik uber, Netease and micro services, even though containers have been around for a while. But the modern doctors ascendancy. You know why? To K was the year of the decade of modernization. It was like four or five years leading up to y two K at some I T shop said, Okay, we're going to modernize, but but none of these micro services existed, so it really was. It was about dates, maybe some application portfolio rationalization. What's different today that I could take those apse that were written in the seventies with a lot of custom code? How am I able to modernize, though >> I think it's the maturity of the services. You look at something a platform like Amazon. There's one hundred twenty hundred thirty, or Mohr. It grows almost every week. Building blocks primitives, the Amazon are providing, and its a rating on it. At an incredible rate on DH, there's almost a service for everything. And when you think they've run out of services to introduce, a new services is created. And, you know, we talked about micro services. They introduced Lambda back in two thousand fourteen, which was there. Serve Elice environment driving event based micro services architectures, and it's ahead of the game. It's ahead of the curve. It's causing people to think very differently about what's even possible from a night perspective. And there's no way. In most organizations, you, Khun, build that kind of infrastructure on that kind of platform that is build and costs you on a Microsoft microsecond basis. I mean, it's it's >> incredible. It was amazing. I remember the first virtual machine. It would be anywhere that I saw spun up like, Wow, this is going to change the world. And then the cloud comes along like a while. This is going to change the world. And now survivalists. I don't even have to deploy servers anymore. It's side by Amazon >> way. See this? Even even in some of the more traditional organizations we we worked with in the UK and in Germany and France and elsewhere, you don't even need to be looking at service. Just the ability toe programmatically spin up a virtual machine without a human touching anything. That's incredible to some organizations, right? They're used to it, taking six months to provision of infrastructure to deploy an application. Now they can click a button, and by the time they've made a cup of coffee, it's it's up and running, and it's It changes the way people >> think So much Talk about Cloud Region signal effects. What's the partnership like between you two and what's your partnership like with eight of us? >> Um, on the cloud reach side, we went through an extensive evaluation by cloud reach, and over several months they evaluated all the alternatives on the market and ended up selecting us to be their standard for their many service provider business. It's We're super excited about that. On the go for it, we're rolling that out with them there. Current customer based on DH. We were hoping that, uh, using signal effects, that cloud reach that will help them be the point of spear on all cloud native. You know, in their marketplaces, they go pursue other customers, so it's pretty excited about. >> So it's not a pressure release deal, not a Barney deal. Like we like to say that >> they're up there, They're a paying customer. And, you know, I made a big bet on signal effects going forward. >> So why the choice to go with manage service provider? You have You could have built it yourself and take us through that. >> Yeah. I mean, the nature of the business we're in is very much predicated on the fact that you don't build it yourself. You know, you look at the market and if somebody is already doing it well and provides excellent service as a commodity, you use it. We've been in the MSP space since round about twenty ten very soon after the the company was was founded, and we know it pretty well. We have a large customer base. We are one of the top tier MSP for along the major cloud vendors in the world, lots of large organizations. However, as we look to refresh our tooling with a view on Maura, an application centric approach, which is what all of our customers want and expect a CZ we look to micro services and the very latest platforms and technologies he's being released by the hyper scale cloud vendors. We recognize the need for a newer, more modern tooling on DH. After a thorough evaluation, a CZ mark says signal effects came out on top. Why is that? Partly it's the cloud native element. You know, some of that sounds a little bit like a marketing buzzword, but in reality, what it means is the company was founded relatively recently and as a result, was geared towards modern technology. So out of the box they support doctor, they support containers, they understand, and they're orchestrated around micro services. It deals with scale on volume, and we we want to low test things in a big way. We only serve large scale and surprise customers. And they are going to throw tens of thousands of containers on micro services at their tooling, and it has to be able to track tto handle that massive volume of transactions. >> It's a complicated picture, actually. You know, sometimes micro services aren't so micro. Yes, and you've got to secure all these containers. Got spinning up of'Em is easy. >> Well, >> you see multiples. So how do you guys deal with that? I mean, you're obviously experts at it, but But give us the sales pitch >> on. Yeah. So I think you kind of you covered it earlier with, You know, all these great new technology with introduction of micro services. I mean, developers in our writing it the running it, they're pushing code directly into production environment. You know, you went from releasing code once or twice a year, a few years back now toe several releases and you know your people lifting shift. They're starting with a few micro services. Someone we're getting up into the hundreds, even thousands in our most advanced deployments. It it it ends up being worth a situation Where Alright, all this innovation is great, but it also introduces a ton of complexity. And based on the way we've architect of our system, really time streaming like within seconds, you're going to need to see it, to react to it, whatever the use cases. And that's what differentiates signal FX is this massively scalable streaming architect we built for from a Metrix platform standpoint and then from an Eastern West standpoint for your from your custom code are Micro Services, a PM solution on top of that to go help measure what those transactions air how they're performing across the entire complex environment. So we feel like we're just purpose built for today to help in the lift and shift crowd and or for the more advanced customers, they're intothe point dozens, if not hundreds of micro services. >> Tell me more about this metrics platform you mentioned a couple times. What is that all about? >> Well, we start with essentially, you know, the three big pillars are logs, metrics and eight p. M. And you know, our company was found it. We have deep roots. Back in the two thousand seven ranges, our founders were you know, they built the monitoring stack at Facebook and so had several years, you know, kind of earning and learning that secret. You know, in the early days, they didn't call it Dev Ops. Back then they called it move fast, break things, didn't call >> it. They didn't call it >> a micro services. I mean, and then twenty, twenty, thirteen, early, two thousand fourteen. That's when the founders got together and started. The company is also the same time frame. Doctor came out. Were just purpose built for this for this environment. >> Final thoughts. Yeah. Thie event where you guys were headed. Maybe little road map, if you could. >> The event has been incredible. Every year it gets a little bit bigger. It gets a little bit more exciting. There's, ah, bigger range of organizations, different industries. And it changes a little bit over time. This year, financial services has been particularly of interest for us, but this event is a lot of large large banks, investment houses, those kind of companies here on DH. That's been really exciting for us. I think trend I'm most excited about is really around machine learning. Amazon talked about it in the keynote this morning and democratization of very, very complex technology bring it to the masses is a as a manage service that can be provisioned in minutes and seconds. And to me that something that's that's really exciting and using the signal FX platform, we're now in a position to provide manage service wrappers around the machine learning based solutions that we build for our >> customers. Yeah, the financial services. Interesting. Back in two thousand nine when you started, a lot of the banks in New York thought they could scale and compete essentially with KWS >> world. The world changes very quickly. Absolutely >> final thoughts for you. >> Yeah, I think they think we're moving past that point. You know, even the later adopters. I think we're moving past that point and look at that name there getting pressure from the startup community, whether it's intact or or any industry's gonna have that type of pressure. You talked about that y two k moment. I think in any vertical out there, it's that you know those cloud native type companies the companies are becoming software companies were going toe transform yourself or you're going to have some pressure from the start up going forward. We're >> guys. I'm thrilled that you could make time to come in the queue. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. All right. Keep it right there. But it is. Dave Alonso will be back with our next guests right after this short break. You watching the Cube from London? Eight of US Summit right back.

>> Live from London England, it's The Cube, covering .Next Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to The Cube, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Joep Piscaer. And you're watching The Cube, and actually Bear Grylls is going to be on the keynote shortly, but we're gonna talk a little bit more tech first. First of all I wanna welcome back to the program Chris Kaddaras is the senior vice president and general manager for EMEA with Nutanix, and welcome to the program for the first time, Sylvain Siou, senior director of Systems Engineering, also for EMEA with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright so Chris, we were thinking back, two years ago, the first European show in Vienna, I had you on the program, and you were fresh on, I always loved getting people when they're fresh into the company because they have the why they're joining in, why they think they're doing things. So, bring us up to speed. Two years, couple things have changed in Nutanix, couple things have changed in the industry, but why don't you bring us up to speed? >> Sure, no I'm happy to do that. First I'll tell you that some of the things I told you on the show two years ago actually proved true. I could see the energy in Vienna at that time in regards to what I call kind of a religious following in Nutanix because of the compelling-ness of the technology and the solution, and that hasn't stopped. One thing that I wasn't quite prepared for is just the rate of growth of this company, and how our customers really embraced us in the market. Now in the EMEA market we've had some success I would say. The team's done a really good job. When I started we had less than a thousand customers, now we have over 3,000 customers. When I started with Nutanix, in the region we had about 200 employees, now we have almost 800 employees in the region. So collectively as a region we're growing a bit faster than the rest of the world which is a good thing for us, and customers are showing their appreciation for us, so it's been a really good experience, but something like the hyper-growth that we have at Nutanix takes some getting used to when you come from other companies, but it's been a really good thing for our customers. The thing that I think I'm the most proud of is we've done that hyper-growth and we've still kept our NPS score above 90 for our customers, so our customers are getting a really good experience both from our sales teams, our product, our implementation teams, and our support teams, that it's kept everything in check for our customers which I'm really proud of. >> Well congratulations on that. Sylvain I have to think that your team has something to do with that NPS score. In my career, I have great respect for the SEs, they're the one that have to not only know the product inside and out, but they need to be working closely with the customers, have a good viewpoint on the customers. Being here at a European show, I wanna get your viewpoint. Tell us, what's different here compared to what you hear from people back at Corporate, what are some of the differences here your team sees? >> So we have a very good relationship with Corporate, so we're really aligned and we're involved in the project in same way as any other region. I think we were faster on some very big accounts, and that was really surprising and also the, I think the timing for the need of the customer to solve situation after virtualization was the exact timing when we start in EMEA, the product was mature enough so that was exactly the right timing, it's five years ago when I joined, so really we solved this first situation and after that everything we promised in term of making this platform a true cloud platform for enterprise is there, I think all these services on top of it, who have the same kind of services you can see on public cloud, is there, we show it this morning, and now giving the ability to the customer to manage situation with this cloud from different providers and what is on premise is there, so I think all the control, the costs on the compliance and so on have done a lot to manage the situation and take you through the control everyday. >> So, what is the adoption maybe compared to the US for the core products that you have now versus the additional services? Is there a big change or a big difference between the US and Europe or, what are you seeing with your customers? >> So, we follow the same path. There is some region and maybe I will relay on Chris, some region that we invest later than the others so, of course France, Germany, UK, Northern Europe was really the beginning and after that we have more southern regions or eastern region that come after, but we are surprised sometimes because people can jump to the last technology faster than the others, so I don't think there are really rules, there is really people who is painpoint, we have the solution, and when it fits, they go faster. >> Yeah I think from a solution perspective we are thriving at the same rate our emerging technologies into the market as our other regions in the world. In some cases we're ahead, things like IoT, what was originally called Sherlock, we're ahead, we have like first customer, second customer to start coming to adopt, so we do have markets within the EMEA region that are much earlier adopters compared to other regions. Think of places like the Middle East, the Nordics, France, adopting much quicker than some other regions of the world. So we see our new products starting to roll, we're really excited about Xi Leap, I know that the first instantiation went live, I think yesterday or today within the Americas, we're looking forward to going live within London, and then moving in to mainland Europe from there, and I think that will be a huge difference-maker for us in the markets as well. >> So looking at those regions specifically, I know there's a couple of markets in Europe, especially Germany, that have such strict data sovereignty laws that it makes it really difficult to actually do business from a DR or cloud perspective. How's Nutanix dealing with that? >> I think that's where we... When we have our SAS-based products, that's a challenge. When we have our cloud-based products, that's a challenge.` So, for our cloud-based products we have a plan really quickly to go into places that have data sovereignty compliance regulations that they have to adhere to. So Germany, we have a plan to go into Germany really quickly; we obviously have a plan to go into some other markets, Amsterdam, we have a plan to go into London for cloud. For SAS, a lot of customers are consuming SAS and they're okay if there's a good security problem, parameter around SAS, and they're consuming Salesforce.com without data centers, they're consuming other products that way so, as long as we put the right security parameters in place, then their consumption model around SAS is typically gonna work, I don't see us distributing SAS data centers all throughout every market in the world to do that. Our core product right now consumption is mostly local, and it's consumed either in an appliance way or it's consumed in a software way, so that's not something that we have to worry about. >> Yeah it's interesting, you wonder if North America has a greater adoption of public cloud, if that actually gets you an advantage in the EMEA region here to get deeper with some of the core and essential offerings. >> It does; customers will adopt a private cloud because of those data sovereignty regulations. But a lot of the uber-clouds have come in and solved that, they've come in into country, they've created gov clouds, they've done it in Germany, they've done it in the UK, so they're starting to solve that, but they have to put out a lot of investment to do that. But it has given us a lead in the marketplace, but there are certain markets that are very much like the US market, so the UK, it's very similar to the US market with regards to uber-cloud or public cloud adoptions so in that market we have a lot of opportunities with somebody like Beam, because they've consumed a lot of the other uber-clouds, whether it's AWS, UCP, or... And we have that opportunity to sit down and provide them with solutions. >> Sylvain, what else are you hearing from your customers, what are some of the pain points that they're feeling that your team's able to help with? >> Clearly in the past we saw the proliferation of the VM, and we find a way to control that, but with the cloud the proliferation is without any limits. So really this is something important for the customer to take back control, take control of the shuttle IT and so on, and it's very lowly. And also I want to take a specific point really the R&D are really taken care of when we see in the field, I will take just an example, the synchronus replication, metro-culturing and stuff like this to high availability, between (inaudible) and so on, it's typically European, because we have fiber, we are really city close to each other and so on, in America, that makes no sense, and really at really early stage of the company we get the R&D taking care of that, developing specifically for our market what is needed for our market, and it means that we're a really global company and not really American company, we have also R&D in different places, we have in Serbia with Frame, we have in India, and so on, so really to be really taking care of each issue or pain point of the customer is really our main driver. >> So one of those other differences I see a lot is the scale of the organization, the size. So what is an SMB in the Americas might be an enterprise in Europe. So what are the solutions you have for those types of customers, for that problem? >> So definitely we need, so we are talking to customers we have a critical science, they need to have a minimum of VM to face the issue of the bottom neck of the storage or the management part and so on, but also we have example of small customers just need a platform that works, and don't want to have anyone taking care of it. And so now it's like you phone, you don't take care of the storage and CPU, it's just your application and that's it, could be internal, external, and so on, so really the SMB of course is not the main market for us, it's more the big account and so on, but we have all kinds of customers in any verticals, there is no specific one that we cover, and it's really because the platform is something that has become just normal to be invisible. >> Yeah I would add on that, if you don't mind, I'd say that the nice thing about the product is it's in a form factor in a pricing mechanism that can be consumed from SMB all the way up to global accounts. That's the nice thing. Now, maybe we spend a lot of our field resource on mid-market up, because that's where we get larger transactions from customers, and it's just a value conversation with regards to return on investment, but the nice thing is our product can be consumed at the smallest customer. We have just released new pricing mechanisms that allow our customers to now consume at much smaller levels, so we're not allow for SMB but for ROBO, because if you think about it if you just have a one size fits all pricing structure how does that work in the data center, that same price doesn't work in the ROBO area, so you have to give the customers the ability to look at the same experience in the remote office or the small sites compared to a data center, and that's something that we've just kinda brought to the market in the last three to four months, and I think that's a real advantage of not only the product but the pricing structure. >> Chris, we wanna give you the final word. If EMEA customers, what do you want them taking away from this week? >> Sure. I think, they've already told me, and I'll tell you, which is good, 'cause it's what I want them to take away, is just the credibility that Nutanix is here for the enterprise work load, they can look at their entire data center delivery mechanism on a Nutanix platform. But also Nutanix is a company they should be looking for for their cloud-based platform. There is a decision in the marketplace to be had right now around what do you use for your cloud, lack of a better word, orchestration layout, cloud automation layout? And there's only a few choices in the market today, some of them are more open source, some of them are specific vendors, and what I want them to take way is Nutanix is an option for that, leave it up to me and my team to prove why we think we're the best option for it, but that's really what I want them to take away, the credibIlity of tier one platforms running Nutanix in their data center, and then two, Nutanix for the cloud-based platform. >> Congratulations on the progress. I wanna say some feedback I've heard from customers is despite how fast Nutanix has been growing, they still feel that they're getting the personal touch, don't feel like just a number for some fast-growing company so congrats on that, I know a lot of effort goes into that. Alright so we're at the end of the Day 1 for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Minimn, be sure to join us tomorrow for a full day of wall-to-wall coverage. Of course go to theCube.net for all the websites to watch us live and on demand for all the shows we're doing and once again thank you for watching the cube. (digital music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is SiliconANGLE Media's coverage of theCUBE at Nutanix .NEXT in East Frant. Really excited to have on the program Rob Lloyd who is the CEO of Hyperloop One. Off of the keynote this morning Rob, thank you so much for finding time to join us. It's great to join you. So, it's interesting. I've been watching Hyperloop since the day one when it got announced. I'm study mechanical engineering. So transportation's something I looked at. But I've been in the tech world. I knew you back from your Cisco days. When I talked to some friends of mine that didn't know about Hyperloop, you kind of explain it was like, "Oh! Remember the bank pneumatic tubes? "It's like we're going to do that with people." And they're like, "That sounds crazy!" And then you say, "Well, Elon Musk is behind it." And they're like, "Well, OK, another Elon Musk thing "that's probably going to be near impossible, "but they will find a way to make it work." >> Rob: Mm-hmm. You talked a little about your journey in the keynote this morning, but let's start, Hyperloop One. Pre-revenue, give kind of a thumbnail of the company and where you are today. So it's a three year old company. Literally in a garage, in the very late part of 2014, our founder, co-founder, started on November 2nd. So, just an idea. A white paper that Elon wrote, which was the concepts of something very different. A new mode of transportation. Slightly outraged by the expense and archaic nature of the High-Speed Rail in California proposal. So, that's the starting point. A company that was founded, co-founded by Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist, and some brilliant engineer, Josh Giegel. Now, from that point, 300 people, 245 million dollars raised and just this summer, having only started on the designs, tested some concepts: a magnetic levitation, a custom-design linear electric motor, evacuating a tube to the equivalent of 200,000 feet above the Earth's surface. We built a full-scale prototype. 500 meters prove the tech is working, and the cool part is that the speed with which this engineering and development is occurring is like nothing else. So, it's kind of DevOps for hardware. And we saw what happened when people kind of went to Agile Development Methodologies. We saw it in tech. But it really hasn't hit the traditional methods of transportation, where people build in silos. They're not closely associated with a fabricator or a welder. And we have mechanical engineers working with fabricators working with welders, and you make amazing progress when you see that happen. You stated, it's been over 100 years since we had a kind of major new transportation model. The tooling that allows you to prototype this... I know, it's kind of, friend of mine, it's watching the space stuff and watching the videos that you put out. Everything from testing the engine, to the pod. If I remember, wasn't there a contest around the pods, too? Well, actually, yeah. The tools we have today, the analytics tools, the way we can model things, didn't exist when we did our first moonshots, when the United States said we're going to put a man on the moon and NASA was mobilized and the country was excited. We didn't have the tools we have today. So we have much, much better tools. We have methodologies and approaches that are not accepted everywhere but are embraced in our company. And you make things happen that were taking five years from an engineering perspective. And you can build a full-scale prototype in 10 months. That really changes the speed with which this can occur. Most people say this would take a decade. This is going to take three years. As I said, like other Elon Musk companies, you've got strong conviction at Hyperloop One. Some of the things that kind of skeptics come up with reminds me a lot of autonomous vehicles. "Ah, well, regulators are never going to let it happen, "and, gosh, safety." It's like "I'm putting software? "It's going to do this? We're going to be going at what speeds?" And you know, "How fast?" And all these things. How long's this going to take before its reality? Can you give us a little bit of that road map, as to how we make sure that once somebody actually goes in this, that they're not going to end up just completely flattened? So, the way that we're approaching this is actually different than the way in which most new technologies are regulated in transportation. We're going to partner with one or two countries. We're going to partner with the regulator while we're designing the commercial version of our technology. So while we commercialize, which is the next two to three years of our road map, we know the tech works. Now you build a commercial offer. You build the car. You build the pod. We will commercialize this. We're going to work with them now, so we don't come to them in three to five years and say, "Would you please certify this?" And in doing so, we actually bring a huge opportunity to the countries that go first. We ran a global competition, to kind of AKA Peter Diamandis, who's on our board, like the X Prize. We actually asked countries, "Who'd like to build the world's first Hyperloop?" 2,600 people registered. 100 serious submissions. Dozens of them are now real projects moving forward with government support. So, the short answer is, we have to do it differently. We're going to partner with a regulator while we're commercializing the tech. And then when we get there, of course you want it to be safe. Of course you'll need certification. But you do that now rather than later. And you'll end up bringing benefits to a country that chooses to go first. Did I hear right that the first solution is probably going to be in the Middle East? There is a good probability that's the case. The land is fairly flat. We can build along existing right-of-ways. There's massive investments in airports and ports there. Wherever there's a very dense transportation hub today, airports, downtown centers, connections to metro or train stations, that's where we want to put kind of a Hyperloop portals. So think of it as the backbone between two data centers. All the activity going on in the data center, we want to connect those high-density locations. But it's not just one-to-one. We can branch on and branch off. So it's sort of like point-to-point packet switching. One of the things that really excited me in your presentation that I didn't know as well is you talked about kind of the sustainability, the energy of this compared to other options, as well as the affordability. Something that really could help a lot of environments. Could you speak to those? Yeah, so... There is absolute science about the substitution rates that will go to a faster mode of transportation if the price is right. So, our model as we analyze opportunities around the world, in the United States, in Europe, Northern Europe, Canada, India, and the Middle East, where we see a lot of our projects today... If we price at the same price level of the current mode of transport, you'll get almost 100% conversion, because why not? Why wouldn't I go, in nine minutes, to Abu Dhabi from Dubai, instead of what could be a two-hour car drive? But why not price it for the ticket of a metro ride? Then you'll get really high ridership, high utilization. The economics of building infrastructure, a PPP structure that would bring private equity, debt, pension funds, sovereign funds together, to invest in that new infrastructure, that's how it's going to work. So that's the passenger case. And then on the freight side, you know, seriously, we forgot that this on-demand economy is based on a transportation network that effectively is 100 to 200 years old. Steel cans, right? This idea of a container was invented, a standard-sized container that goes on ships. The ships unload them in ports. They sit a couple of days. Then a truck puts it on the back, and they drive through our cities. Or it goes on the back of a train and takes seven to ten days to get to its consumer. That doesn't work anymore, in this world of Amazon, on-demand, Alibaba commerce. The only option they have is to pay for air freight, which is five to six times more than it would cost to carry those same packages and goods in a Hyperloop cargo system. Huge opportunity. Rob, speak about sustainability, kind of the energy required for this compared to other modes of transportation. We take some energy to remove the pressure inside the tube which obviously reduces resistance. It's an all-electric motor. Because we have little resistance and no friction, because we're floating on magnets, effectively floating on a magnetic cushion, once you're up to speed, you're pretty much gliding, like gliding in space. >> Stu: What speed do we think that'll be? Well, by the way, this really is, I'm being very candid, it depends on the route. It depends on how straight we can get a right-of-way. It depends on the levels, so flat and straight means you can go fast. If you're going to go 300 kilometers, we can go six, seven, eight hundred miles an hour which is faster than an aircraft. And obviously city center to city center, then we don't have the drive of an hour and a half, the vagaries of weather, and all that other stuff, which has made air travel for most of us just a somewhat demoralizing experience. So, solar power, wind power, and in some environments where we do have a lot of sun, we can just have the tube covered with solar panels and make the entire thing energy neutral, which is really, really amazing. A new mode of transportation that doesn't consume any energy. Yeah, maybe Elon can help with some of the solar stuff. Elon's got that stuff. How much is Elon involved? So he's not involved in our company. His idea, right? His brainchild. Our company was formed to commercialize that, and there are others that are now in this market. I think we're the leader. No, I know we're the leader. We've demonstrated the technology no one else has. And we're there. I mean, this is a go-for-it business. So we're going for it. Well you just had a new partnership with Virgin announced recently. So Richard Branson, you know... Yeah, so Virgin Hyperloop One, a brand that actually has been known for customer experience, thinking of the customer, delivering an experience, taking on the giants as he did with Virgin Atlantic, putting people into space now from a commercial perspective, as well as satellites. So think of his companies and transportation and how that brings comfort to governments and investors, that we're here to actually really make something big happen, and Richard's done that. He's a serial entrepreneur. And that brand typically stands for an excellent experience. Yeah. He has pretty good track record as a risk taker out there, too. Some of the extreme things that he had done, but absolutely, the comfort and the brand there... Pre-revenue, you said a couple of years until we're there, but you mentioned even that you've got kind of a pipeline of orders already, so sounds like-- Well the projects are big, so this is infrastructure. We won't be financing that. That will be done by people that find governments and pension funds and sovereign funds and insurance companies that invest in infrastructure. But if you take a look at the projects because they're big, they start with billions and they go up from there. So it's kind of fun to think that you're first order could be three billion. It's kind of neat to go from this pre-revenue stage to the size of projects that we'll have. That three billion will be spent on, some will be on contractors, some will be on infrastructure, but for us, the revenues that will come will be high margin. We're building a software platform that will connect with other modes of transport and manage the massive amounts of data we'll be collecting off the pod and the track, the headway between these vehicles, which could be as close as ten seconds traveling at that speed, and then obviously you've got to have a whole lot of control software and a whole IoT Platform built in. Last question I have for you. We're here at a technology show. Just throw out there: software, massive amounts of data, I've got to have the analytics going into it, and there, is the tech all ready? How's the industry doing to support some of these kind of moonshot-type of activities? High-speed networking is going to be a big deal for us. So we probably need kind of an evolution of 5G because we're moving so fast inside that enclosed area that we're going to need some radio technology to keep all of those devices connected. That's a little bit of a push. Listen, we're starting from scratch. So we have a clean sheet. So we have legacy to integrate. That's typically an advantage. We're not trying to do mechanical switching. We'll do a digital switch, which means you'll actually just bump a vehicle off onto an on-ramp and weave it back in with software, kind of like packets on the network. But clean sheet. I think we have tools required to do everything that we're looking for today, an industry that's evolved, has developed around IoT, and a plethora of options that our architects and engineers are working on today. Gosh, all my background thinking about packet loss and things like that, it gets me a little bit nervous, but I know you've got lots of engineers working to solve that problem. Rob Lloyd, Hyperloop One. Really appreciate you joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT in Nice, France. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering food IT: Fork to Farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back here and ready, Jeffrey Frick with theCUBE. We are in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum at a really unique event. It's food IT: Fork to farm, not the other way around, which you might think, "Hm, that doesn't make sense," but actually it does, really by the consumer-driven world that's hitting everything including the food and agriculture and we're really excited to have the guys running this show, representing The Mixing Bowl. Rob Trice is the founder and Michael Rose, partner, of The Mixing Bowl. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, first off, a little history on this event, it's the first time we've been here. I think you said there's about 350 people, really a broad spectrum: academe, technology, farmers, from New Zealand, I think was the one I heard from the furthest place. What's kind of the genesis of this show? >> So, my background is 15 years in mobile internet, telecom venture capital and my wife, actually, a couple of years ago, started running a cattle ranch out on the Pacific Coast and through that I saw how little technology was being used on the ranch and amongst local food producers. I came back to Silicon Valley and none of the big food or ag. players were here then, four years ago. Monsanto just had up a venture group, Unilever and Nestle had one person each here, but by and large, Silicon Valley's IT innovation ecosystem was not focused on food and agriculture. So I started The Mixing Bowl as a little bit more than just a Meetup group and we did it a couple of times and then somebody said, "You know, we should do a conference on this topic." So the first year we did it at Stanford with a partner of ours, and we thought might have 150 people come. We had over 300 people come and it was this kind of audience, kind of cross-section of technologists, food and agriculturalists. So that's when I said, "You know, I'm done with telecom. I want to go ride this food tech, ag. tech wave and see where the heck this comes to roost." So, it's been four years now and I'm pleased to be working not only with Michael, but then our colleagues Seana and Brita, and having a blast, learning a lot. >> Okay, so that's the conference. What about for The Mixing Bowl specifically, what is your charter as an organization? >> Well we've got three aspects of our business, so the first one is information sharing, so doing events like this. We do themed events, we did a water-tech for agricultural event down in Fresno. And then we also are contributing writers for Forbes. We also have an advisory business where we work with large corporates who are seeking innovation and trying to bring innovation to the food and ag. Sector, trying to bring technology and innovation. And then we have an investment side of our business, out of the brand Better Food Ventures. So we invest in the space as well, we have about 12 companies in our portfolio. >> That's interesting that you said there wasn't a lot of tech in ag. here and yet, we talked to Paul from Ford, we talked about their conference that they have at Salinas and of course, Sacramento Valley, San Fernando Valley, or not San Fernando Valley, San Joaquin Valley is a huge producer of food. So why do you think it was so late to come here? >> Well, I think that there have been other opportunities and I think that there's a misperception that agriculture doesn't need IT and I think what we've now realized is there's a huge opportunity, whether it is Internet of Things or looking at tracking and transparency, there's a lot of inefficiencies in our food production system and there also are a lot of societal challenges that we have. Everyone talks about feeding nine billion people by 2050, but then also we look at food safety, we look at what the consumer wants, which is why we're here today, talking about the fork to the farm. Consumers want change in food. They want different kinds of food. They want it delivered to them in different ways. All of these are opportunities for tech to be applied to food and agriculture. >> So we love being here. Go ahead, Michael. >> No, I was just going to say, I think it's like any other vertical in any other sector that starts to adopt technology over time. And even in the ag. sector, you've seen in the commodity crops in the Midwest with the automation that they adopted technology early but you've got other sectors, whether it's the specialty crops down in Salinas or people who are doing almonds, etc. Those people are starting to adopt technology, they're just a little further behind than you are with commodity crops. >> Right. It's funny, we interviewed the guy from Caterpillar a few weeks ago, and they are already running huge fleets of autonomous vehicles in mining. Obviously they have a lot of equipment involved in agriculture as well, so it seems kind of start and stop depending on the vendors that you're talking about. But one of the big themes we talk about, we go to a lot of platform shows, right? It's Cloud, it's edge, it's connectivity, it's big data, drones, I mean, as you look at some of these big classifications of technology that are now being applied in ag. are there any particular ones that kind of jump out as either the catalyst or the leading edge of adoption that's really helping drive this revolution? >> I guess, if you think about the fact that we're kind of looking at this staircase of adoption. One thing that we need to do is actually digitize information and that's one of the challenges that we have. Once we digitize, then we can start to manage operations based on that data, then we can start to optimize, and then we can automate. So it's a four-step staircase that we look at and I think in a lot of cases, even at restaurants, a lot of them are still placing orders via fax and telephone. We need to get off of that and start getting them to order online through online platforms and so forth. So, at any rate, one area that I'm particularly excited about is aerial imaging for agriculture because I think you are instantaneously, by just doing a flyover, providing farmers with more information than they've ever had. In some cases, I think you could actually argue, you're going from a data desert to a data flood. Now the challenge is moving up that staircase to go make sense of that data and then ultimately be able to give prescriptive machine-learning or artificial intelligence-based recommendations to that farmer on how to do a better job, whether that is increasing sustainability, maximizing yield, looking at pricing, any of those kind of things. >> Right, one of the things you hear real often in every industry, is kind of the old guy using intuition versus becoming really a data-driven organization. Are you seeing that classic conflict, or do people get it pretty quickly when you can provide the data to show them things that they could never really see before? >> I was going to say, one of the biggest challenges that's also dictating the market timing is the fact that average American farmer is about 65, so we now are having this turn as the kids are coming back who are tech-enabled back to the production point, back to the farm and starting to take over farms from their parents. And their parents, of course, have just been maybe a little slower to adopt new technology. So it's just a timing issue. I think the other thing is, there are all the different pieces, whether it's the sensors or whether it's the connectivity of data or whether it's the storage of data, there needs to be a solution and they need to be integrated. And so we see this on the farm, getting that data off and then getting it stored and then how to use it. But then you also see this in restaurants. In restaurants, you have all of the delivery services coming in, so a restaurant can have seven different delivery services picking up from the restaurant. And they have seven different iPads that they have to manage with their point of sales system and very few of them currently will integrate with a POS, right? >> Right. And I think whether it's in a restaurant or on a farm, this lack of integration, API integration, making it a usable solution as opposed to a number of features, is where we're probably going to see a lot more tech innovation. I think unfortunately what you're probably also going to see is a lot of consolidation because you've had venture capital-backed companies with solutions for food and agriculture that have their own proprietary solution, their own OS. And we know that, from other tech sectors, that's not a long-term viable strategy. Ultimately, the data will be free, it will open up, it will interconnect, and we just need to happen in food and in agriculture. >> And are they getting that? Because the classic farmer dilemma that you learn in economics 101 is they have a great crop, crap prices go in the toilet. They have a crappy crop, price is up but they don't have enough quantity to share and gaming the system, and who's going to plant what? Do they start to see the value of sharing some level of data aggregation for the benefit of all? >> I think there's a misperception out there that farmers won't share their data. The reality is they're willing to share their data, if it's providing some value to them. A lot of people want to charge these farmers for their data without any demonstrable benefit to using that data. And I think where you can find a solution, I think the farmers are, speaking generally here, I think the other thing is, farmers know, if you're not paying for the data, you probably are the product, right? And they're smart enough to figure that out, so they don't want people misusing their data for reasons that aren't clear to them. And they've had bad experiences with that in the past. >> It's not any different than any other sector. I mean, go back seven years ago when people said, "Well, we're going to mix your data up with somebody else's data, but it's not a problem, right? Zeros and ones, it's bits." And they were both like, "Nooo," and they got over it, right? >> Right, but the other thing I'll say is I think that the challenges are changing and this is not just standard commodity ups and downs, particularly if you look at here in California, the specialty crops. We have lost access to what has been a cheap labor pool historically and we need to automate. So now we need to go where northern Europe has already gone, in terms of automating production for specialty crops and then things like climate change are causing different crops to grow in different seasons and we need to be able to predict that, we need to take more of it indoors as a nice complement to outdoor growing. So there's a lot of different things that farmers are dealing with now that they really haven't had to deal with in the future. And I think the same is true on the restaurant side. >> Yeah, and the predictability of understanding what your needs are going to be is going to be so important here, particularly because we need to see more automation, both on the farm and production and the restaurants. I know a lot of people talk about being concerned about losing their jobs to automation or robotics, but the reality is, the National Restaurant Association says in the next 10 years, we have a shortage of 200,000 line cooks. >> Jeff: Just line cooks? >> Just line cooks, right. So when you see someone like Chowbotics who's here showing the automated customized salad maker, there's clearly a need in the market place for these kind of approaches. >> The other thing too is you touch on such big, global societal issues. Obviously we're in California here, water. We had a really wet winter, but you know, I'm looking for the water track, I mean that's got to be a huge piece of this whole thing. You have the environmental concern, again, in California, there's always the fight between the farmers that want the water in the rivers and the environmentalists who want to keep the salmon swimming upstream. These are not simple problems that have an obvious solution, and as I think somebody said in they keynote, there's no free trade-off. You've got to make decisions based on values and they're not simple problems. So you guys are right in the middle of a lot of big society changes. >> Yeah, and I think that's one of the things. This is not just a US or a California thing. Globally, things are changing. And whether it is China having more disposable income available to eat more meat and what the ramifications of that are versus other societies with more environmental challenges moving front and center to them, the labor challenge. There's a lot of different things that are happening globally and we don't really have that connectivity layer globally to share this innovation to find the right solutions and get them addressing these market challenges. >> Right. >> Yeah, I would say the thing is, it is complex, so they're going to be talking about tomato growth later on today, and the example somebody was giving is we went to precision watering instead of spray, well, when you go to drip irrigation, you actually have to pressurize an entire system so you actually use more energy. So we use less water but we burn more coal, more oil, whatever it may be, to pressurize the system. And then if it produces a product that has more water content, you spend more energy drying it on the backend. So there's trade-offs. I would say the other thing that we found is really interesting is people ask us if we're social impact investors and we aren't but we have a social impact consideration about what we do, but pretty much everything that you see in this space right now from an innovative side is moving the ball forward, either it's better nutrition, it's less input, it's less chemicals, less water. So this innovation in food and ag. is just by its nature having a very positive impact. >> Right, two years ago, we called food IT macro to micro, and fundamentally what we believe at The Mixing Bowl is, as Michael said, at Better Food Ventures, we don't consider ourselves social impact investors, first and foremost, we want to keep financial grounding. However, I think at a core level, we all believe that harnessing IT to go address these societal challenges in food and agriculture is the biggest thing that we can make. So the reality is we're not going to be able to do much more with the chemical era, we've maximized the yield that we can get there. So now we are going to be looking at IT and how can we actually apply IT to these different challenges and I'm going to cough now. (Jeff laughs) (Rob coughs) >> Well, even something, people think IT and they think highly technical and they think of Cloud, they think of data connections, well look at food waste. The bulk of food waste that happens in our society happens at the home to the restaurant. So even if it's an iPhone app that's teaching our children how to deal with food waste in their home, it's a technical approach, it's hugely impactful. And it's those kind of touch points that will make a difference. >> Right, right. Well, Rob, Michael, thanks for inviting us, it's really fun to come to more of an application-centered show than an infrastructure show and see how the impact of Cloud and big data and sensors and IOT and drones and all of these things are having material impact on us day by day. So congratulations on the event and we'll let you go back to the keynote stage, they're waiting for you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are at the Food IT show in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back with the next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit 2016. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. Here, live in Silicon Valley, at Amazon Web Services, AWS Summit, in Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm here with my co-host. Introducing Lisa Martin on theCUBE, new host. Lisa, you look great. Our first guest here is David Richards, CEO of WANdisco. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Good to see you, John, as always. >> So, I've promised a special CUBE presentation, $20 bill here that I owe David. We played golf on Friday, our first time out in the year. He sandbagged me, he's a golfer, he's a pro. I don't play very often. There's your winnings, there you go, $20, I paid. (smooching) (laughing) I did not well challenge your swing, so it's been paid. Great fun, good to see you. >> It was great fun and I'm sorry that I cheated a little bit, mirror in the bathroom still running through your ears. >> I love the English style. Like all the inner gain and playing music on the course, it was great a great time. When we went golfing last week, we were talking, just kind of had a social get-together but we were talking about some things on the industry mind right now. And you had some interesting color around your business. We talked about your strategy of OEMing your core technology to IBM and also you have other business deals. Can you share some light on your strategy at WANdisco with your core IP, and how that relates to what's going on in this phenom called Amazon Web Services? They've been running the table on the enterprise now and certainly public cloud for years. $10 billion, Wikibon called that years ago. We see that trajectory not stopping but clearly the enterprise cloud is what they want. Do you have a deal with Amazon? Are you talking to them and what is that impact your business? >> Well I mean the wonderful thing is if you go to AWS Marketplace, you go to that front page, we're one of the feature products on the front page of the AWS Marketplace, so I think that tells you that we're pretty strategic with Amazon. We're solving a big problem for them which is the movement of data in and out of public cloud. But you asked an interesting question about our business model. When we first came into the whole big date marketplace we went for the whole direct selling thing like everybody does, but that doesn't give you a lot of operational leverage. I mean we're in accounts with IBM right now, you mentioned earlier, MR technology. At a big automotive company they have 72 enterprise sales guys, 72. We could never get to that scale any time soon. >> And you have relationships too. So it's not like they like, you know, just knocking on doors selling used cars. They are strategic high-end enterprise sales. >> Exactly. That gives us a tremendous amount of operational leverage and AWS is one of the great stories, will be one of the great IT stories of the century. To go from zero to 15 billion. If AWS was an independent company, faster than any other enterprise software company in the history of mankind, is just incredible. >> Yeah, well, enterprise obviously, they care about hybrid cloud, which you know all about through your IBM relationship. Andy Jassy at Amazon, the CEO now of Amazon. Newly announced title, he's certainly SVP, basically he's been the CEO of Amazon. He's been on record, certainly on stage, and on theCUBE saying, why do even companies need data centers? That kind of puts you out of business. You have a data center product, or is the cloud just one big data center? Will there ultimately be no data center at all? What's your thoughts? >> That's a great question. We see the cloud as just one great big data center or actually many great big data centers. And how you actually integrate those together, how you move data between data centers, how you arbitrage been cloud vendors. Are you really going to put all your eggs into one basket? You're going to put everything into AWS. Everything into Azure. I don't think you will. I think you'll need to move data around between those different data centers and then how about high availability? How do you solve that problem? Well WANdisco solves that problem as well. >> So a couple of questions for you David. One of the things that Dr. Wood said in the keynote today was friends don't let friends build data centers. So I wanted to get your take on that as well as from an IBM perspective. We just talked about the OEM opportunity that you're working there to get to those large enterprises. Does that mean that you're shifting your focus for enterprise towards IBM? Where does that leave WANdisco and Amazon as we see Amazon making a big push to the enterprise? >> So I think that was some big news that came out last week that was missed largely by the industry, which was the FCA, the financial regulatory authority in the United Kingdom, came out and said, we see no reason why banks cannot move to cloud from a regulatory perspective. That was one of the big fears that we all had which is are banks actually going to be able to move core infrastructure into a public cloud environment? Well now it turns out they can. So we're all in on cloud. I mean, we can see, if you look at the partnerships that we're focused on, it's the sort of four/five cloud vendors. It's the IBM, the AWS, Azure, Oracle, when they finally built that cloud, and so on. They're the key partnerships that we see in the marketplace. That will be our go-to market strategy. That is our go-to market strategy. >> So one of the things that's clear is the data value and you do a lot of replications. So one of the things that, I forget which CUBE segment we've done over the years, that's Hurricane Sandy I think it was, in New York City. You guys were instrumental in keeping the up-time and availability. >> Lisa mentioned, Amazon vis-a-vis IBM, obviously two different strategies, kind of converging in on the same customer. Amazon's had problems with availability zones and they're rushing and running like the wind to put up new data centers. They just announced a new data center in India just recently. Andy Jassy and team were out there kicking that off. So they're rushing to put points of presence, if you will, for lack of a better word, around the world. Does that fit into your availability concept and how do customers engage with you guys with specifically that kind of architecture developing very fast? >> I think that's a really great question. There are problems, there have been historic problems with general availability in cloud. There are lots of 15-minute outages and so on that cost billions and billions of dollars. We're working very closely and I can't say too much about it with the teams that are focused on enabling availability. Clearly the IBM OEM is very focused on the movement of data from the hybrid cloud, I'm from a data availability perspective. But there's a great deal of value in data that sits in cloud and I think you'll see us do more and more deals around general cloud availability moving forward. >> Is there a specific on that front project that you can share with us where you've really helped a customer gain significant advantage by working with AWS and facilitating those availability objectives, security compliance? >> So, one of the big use cases that we see, and it's kind of all happening at once really, is I built an on-premise infrastructure to store lots and lots of data, now I need to run compute and analytics against that data and I'm not going to build a massive redundant infrastructure on-premise in order to do that, so I need to figure out a way to move that data in and out of cloud without interruption to service. And when we are talking about large volumes of data, you simply can't move transactional data in and out of cloud using existing technology. AWS offers something called Snowball where you put it into a rugged ICE drive and then you ship it to them, but that's not really streaming analytics is it? Most of our use cases today are either involved in either the migration of data from on-premise into cloud infrastructure, or the movement of data for an atemporal basis so I can run compute against that data and taking advantage of the elastic compute available in cloud. They are really the two major use cases that web, and we're working with a lot of customers right now that have those exact problems. >> So majority of your customers are more using hybrid cloud versus all in the public cloud? >> Hybrid falls into two categories. I'm going to use hybrid in order to migrate data because I need to keep on using it while it's moving. And secondly I need to use hybrid because I need to build a compute infrastructure that I simply can't build behind firewall. I need to build it in cloud. >> So the new normal is the cloud. There was a tweet here that says, database migration, now we can have an Oracle Exadata data dispute that we're ready to throw into the river. (David laughs) Database migration is a big thing and you mentioned it on the first question that moving in and out of the cloud is a top concern for enterprises. This is one of those things, it's the elephant in the room, so to speak. No pun intended AKA Hadoop. Moving the data around is a big deal and you don't want to get a roach motel situation where you can check in and can't check out. That is the lock-in that enterprise customers are afraid of with Amazon. You're thoughts there, and what do you guys offer your customers. And if you can give some color on this whole database migration issue, real, not real? >> The big problem that the Hadoop market has had from a growth perspective is applications. And why they had a problem, well it's the concept of data gravity. The way that the AWS execs will look at their business the way that the Azure execs will look at their business at Microsoft. They will look at how much data they actually have. Data gravity. The implication being if I have data then the applications follow. The whole point of cloud is that I can build my applications on that ubiquitous infrastructure. We want to be the kings of moving data around right? Wherever the data lands is where the applications follow. If the applications follow, you have a business. If the applications don't follow, then it's probably a roach motel situation, as you so quaintly put it. But basically the data is temporal. It will move back to where the applications are going to be. So where the applications are, and it's who is going to be the king of applications, will actually win this race. >> So, question, in terms of migration, we're hearing a lot about mass migration. Amazon's even doing partner competency programs for migration. Not to trivialize it, talk to us about some of the challenges that you are helping customers overcome when they sort of don't know where to start when it comes to that data problem? >> If it's batch data, if it's stuff that I'm only going to touch if it's an archive, that I only going to touch once in a blue moon, then I can put it into Snowball and I can ship my Snowball device. I can sort of press the pause button akin to when I'm copying files into a network drive where you can't edit them, and then wait for two months, three months. Wait for them to turn up in AWS and that's fine. If it's transactional data where maybe 80% of my data set changes on a daily basis and I've got petabyte scale data to move, that's a hard problem. That requires active transactional data migration. That's a big mouthful, but that's really important for run-time transactional data. That's the problem that we solve. We enable customers, without interruption to service to move a massive scale active transactional data into cloud without any interruption of service. So I can still use it while it's moving. >> One of the things we were talking about before you came on was the whole global economy situation. I think a year and a half ago, or two years ago, you predicted the housing bubble bursting in London. You're in the London Exchange, you're a public company. Brexit, EU. These are huge issues that are going to impact, certainly North America looking healthy right now but some are saying that there's a big challenge and certainly the uncertainty of the U.S. presidency candidates that are lack of thereof. The general sentiment in the U.S. We're in a world of turmoil. So specifically the Brexit situation. You guys are in London. What does this impact your business and is that going to happen? Or give us some color and insight into what the countrymen are thinking over there. >> Okay, so, I get asked by, I live here of course, and I've lived here for 19 years. It feels like I'm recolonizing sometimes, I have to say. No, I'm joking. I get asked by a lot of Americans what the situation is with Brexit and why it happened. And for that you have to look at economics. If you sort of take a step back, in Northern Europe nine of the 10 poorest parts of Northern Europe are in the U.K. And one, only one of the top 10 richest parts is in the U.K. and that's London. So basically outside of London the U.K. has a really big problem. Those people are dissatisfied. When people are dissatisfied, if they're not benefiting from an economic upturn, if governments make it, like the conservative government for the past four years made huge cuts, those people don't benefit, and they really feel pissed off and they will vote against the government. >> John: So protest vote pretty much? >> Brexit was really, I think, a protest vote. It's people dissatisfied. It's people voting basically anti-immigration which is, being in the U.S., is a really foreign thing to us. >> But there are some implications to business. I mean obviously there's filings, there's legal issues, obviously currency. Have you been impacted positively, negatively and what is the outlook on WANdisco's business going forward with the Brexit uncertainty and/or impact? >> We're in great shape because we buy pounds. We buy labor that's now discounted by 20% in the U.K. I just got back from the U.K. If you want to go on vacation, Americans, anywhere, go to London this summer and go shopping because everything is humongously discounted for us American's right now. It's a great time to be there. So from a WANdisco perspective-- >> John: How does that affect the housing bubble too? >> I said to you about a year ago that the London housing market was akin to the jewelry shops that existed in Hong Kong a few years ago, where the Chinese used to come over and basically launder money by buying huge diamonds and bars of gold and things. If you look at the London housing market it is primarily fueled by the Saudis and by the Russians who have been buying Hyde Park Corner 100 million pounds, $160 million, well $140 million now, apartments and so on in London. Now seven, and I repeat seven housing funds in the U.K. last week canceled redemptions. Which means that they can foresee liquidity problems coming in those funds. I think you're about to see a housing crash in London, the like of which we've never seen before, and I think it would be very sad and I think that will make people really question the Brexit decision. >> John: So sell London property now people? >> Yes. >> Before the crash. >> And go shopping, I heard the go shopping. So following along that, you talked about the significant differential between London and the rest of the U.K. You're from Sheffield, you're very proud of that. You've also been proud of your business really helping to fuel that economy. How do you think Brexit is going to affect WANdisco in your home area of Sheffield. >> I don't think it really will. I think our employees there, relative terms, very well paid. They're working on interesting things. They're working very closely with the AWS team, for example, the S3 team, the MR team. And building our technology, we're liaising very closely with them. They're doing lots of interesting things. I suspect their vacations into Europe and their vacations to the United States have just gone up by about 20% which will reduce the amount of beer that they can drink. It's a big beer drinking part of the world in Sheffield. Sheffield is, in terms of cost of living, is relatively low compared to the rest of the U.K. and I think those people will be pretty happy. >> David, I appreciate you coming on theCUBE. I want to give you the final word here on the segment because you're a chief executive officer of a public company. You've been in the industry for awhile. You've seen the trials and tribulations of the Hadoop ecosystem. Now basically branded as the data ecosystem. As Hortonworks has recently announced, Hadoop Summit is now being called Data Works Summit. They're moving from the word Hadoop to Data. Clearly that's impacting all the trends. Cloud data, mobile is really the key. I want you, and I'm sure you get this question a lot, I would like you to take a minute and explain to the audience that's watching, what's this phenom of Amazon Web Services really all about? What's all the hub-bub about? Why is everyone fawning over Amazon now? When you go back five years ago, or 10 years ago when it started, they were ridiculed. I remember when this started I loved it, but they were looked at as just a kind of a tinkering environment. Now they're the behemoth and just on an unstoppable run and certainly the expansion has been fantastic under Andy Jassy's leadership. How do you explain it to normal people what's going on at Amazon? Take a minute please. >> So Amazon is, and that's a brilliant question, by the way. Amazon is the best investor-relation story ever, and I mean ever. What Bezos did is never talked about the potential size of the market. Never talked about this thing was going to generate lots of cash. He just said, you know what, we're building this little internet thing. It might, it might not work. It's not going to make any money. And then in the blink of an eye, it's a $15 billion revenue business growing faster than any other part of his business and throwing off cash like there's no tomorrow. It is just the most non-obvious story in technology, in business, of any public company ever. I mean AWS, arguably, as a stand alone entity, is almost worth as much as Oracle. An unbelievable, an unbelievable story and to do that with all the complexity. I mean mean running a public company with shareholder expectations, with investor relations where you have to constantly be positive about what's going on. For him to do that and never talk about making a profit, never talk about this becoming a multi-billion dollar segment of their business, is the most incredible thing. >> So they've been living the agile. Certainly that's the business story, but they've been living the agile story relative to announcing the slew of new products. Basic building blocks S3, EC2 to start with, as the story goes from Andy Jassy himself, and then a slew of new services. It's a tsunami of every event of new services. What is the disruptive enabler? What's the disruption under the hood for Amazon? How do you explain that? >> Well, I mean what they did is they took a really simple concept. They said, okay, storage, how do we make storage completely elastic, completely public, in a way that we can use the public internet to get data in and out of it. Right? That sounds simple. What they actually built underneath the covers was an extremely complex thing called object store. Everybody else in the industry completely missed this. Oracle missed it, Microsoft missed it, everybody missed it. Now we're all playing catch-up trying to develop this thing called object store. It's going to take over, I mean, somebody said to me, what's the relevance of Hadoop in cloud? And you have to ask that question. It's a relevant question. Do you really need it when you've got object store? Show me side-by-side, object store versus every, you know, Net Apple, Teradata, or any of those guys. Show me side-by-side the difference between the two things. There ain't a lot. >> Amazon Web Service is a company that can put incumbents out of business. David, thanks so much. As we always say, what inning are we in? It's really a double-header. Game one swept by Amazon Web Services. Game two is the enterprise and that's really the story here at Amazon Web Services Summit in Silicon Valley. Can Amazon capture the enterprise? Their focus is clear. We're theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)