>>mhm >>Hello welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo alto California and john for with the cube we had a great conversation around the rise of the cloud and the massive opportunities and challenges around analytics data ai suggestion. Air ceo of thought spot is here with me for conversation. Great to see you. Welcome back to the cube. How are you? >>Well john it is so good to be back. I wish that we could do one of those massive set up that you have and do this face to face but zoom is not bad. >>You guys are doing very well. We have been covering you guys been covering the progress um great technology enabled business. You're on the wave of this cloud analytics you're seeing, we've seen massive changes and structural changes for the better. It's a tailwind for anyone in the cloud data business. And you also on the backdrop of all that the Covid and now the covid is looking at coming out of covid with growth strategies. People are building modern or modernizing their infrastructure and data is not just a department, it's everywhere. You guys are in the middle of this. Take us through what's the update on thought spot. What are you guys doing? What do you see the market right now? Honestly, delta variants coming coming strong but we think will be out of this soon. Where where are >>we look I think it all starts with the users like you said the consumers are demanding more and more from the business they are interacting with. You're no longer happy with being served like uh I'm gonna put you all in a bucket and then Delaware services to you. Everyone's like look look at me, I have likes and dislikes that is probably going to be different from someone that you think are similar to me. So unless you get to know me and deliver bespoke services to me, I'm gonna go somewhere else who does that And the call that the way you do that is through the data that I'm giving to you. So the worst thing you can do is to take my data and still treat me like an average and numbers and what's happening with the cloud is that it is now possible and it wasn't okay. So I grew up in India where newspapers will always have stock market summary on like one full page full of takers and prices and the way it used to work is that you wake up in the morning you look at the newspaper, I don't know if you have had the same thing and then you call your broker is based on in place of that. Can you imagine doing that now? I mean the information is at your fingertips. Hurricane IDa either is actually going to enter in Louisiana somewhere. What good is it? Yesterday morning state on this morning state if I'm trying to make a decision on whether I should pack my stuff and move away or you know finding to from home depot supply chain manager. I shouldn't figure out what should I be doing for Louisiana in the next two days, this is all about the information that's available to you. If you plan to use it and deliver better services for your consumer cloud makes it possible. >>You know, it's interesting you mentioned that the old way things were it seems so slow, then you got the 15 minute quotes, then there's now a real time. Everything has to be real time. And clearly there's two major things happening at the same time which makes exciting the business model and the competitive advantages for leaders and business to use data is critical but also on the developer side where apps are being developed if you don't have the data access, the machine learning won't work well. So as machine learning becomes really courted driving ai this modern analytics cloud product that you guys announced brings to bear kind of two major lifts the developer app modernization as well as competitive advantage for the companies that need to deploy this. So you guys have announced this modern approach analytics cloud, so to speak. What are some of the challenges that companies are having? Because you gotta, if you hit both of those you're gonna right a lot of value. What are some of the challenges for people who want to do this modern cloud? >>I think the challenge is basically all inside in the company. If you ask companies why are they failing to modernize? They will point to what's inside, it's not outside the technology is there the stack is the vendors are there, It is sometimes lack of courage at the leadership level which is a huge problem. I'll give an example. Uh, we have recently announced what we call thoughts part everywhere, which is our way of looking at how to modernize and bring the data inside that you're looking forward to where you are because Lord knows we all have enough apps on our Octa or a single sign on. The last thing you need is one more how no matter how good it is, they don't want to log into yet under their tool, whether it's thought spot or not. But the insights that you are talking about needs to be there when you need. And the difference is uh, the fundamental approach of data analytics was built on embedded model. You know what we are proposing is what we call data apps. So the difference between data apps and the typical dashboard being embedded into your analytics model is sort of like think of it. Uh newspapers telephones and the gap in between. So there is newspapers radio that is walkie talkie and telephone. They're all different and newspapers get printed and it comes to you and you read in the morning, you can talk back to it, you can drag and drop, you can change it right walkie talkies on the other hand, you know, you could have one conversation then come back to that. Whereas phone, you can have true direction conversation? They're all different if you think of embedding it is sort of like the newspaper, the information that you can't talk back. So somebody resembling something that came out monday, you're going to a board meeting on Wednesday and you look at that and make decisions. That is not enough in the new world, you just can't do that. It's not about what a lot of tools can actually answer what the real magic the real value for customers are unlocked when you ask three subsequent questions and answer them and they will come down to when you hear what you have to know. So what? Right and then what if and then the last is what next Imagine you can answer those three questions every business person every time no matter how powerful the dashboard is, they will always have the next question. What? So what? Okay the business customers are turning so what is it good, is it bad? Is it normal or the next question is like now what what do I do with it two, the ability to take all these three questions so what and what a fun. Now what? That requires true interactivity, you know, start with an intent and with an action and that is what we are actually proposing with the data apps which is only possible if you're sitting on top of a snowflake or red shift kind of really powerful and massive cloud data warehouse where the data comes and moves with agility. >>So how has this cloud data model rewritten the rules of business? Because what you're bringing up is essentially now full interactivity really getting in, getting questions that are iterating and building on context to each other. But with all this massive cloud data, people are really excited by this. How is it changing business than the rules of business? >>Yeah. So think about, I mean topical things like there is a hurricane able to enter, hit the cost of the United States. It's a moving target. No one knows exactly where it is going to be. There is only 15 models from here. 10, 10 models from Europe that's going to predict which way it's going to take every millimeter change in that map is going to have significant consequences for lives and resources and money. Right. This is true for every business. What cloud does this? Uh you have your proprietary data for example, let's say you're a bank and you have proprietary data, you're launching a new product And the propriety data was 2025 extremely valuable. But what what's not proprietary but what is available to you? Which could make that data so much more relevant if you layer them on top census data, this was a census here. The census data is updated. Do you not want that vaccination leader? We clearly know that purchasing power parity will vary based on vaccinations and county by county. But is that enough? You need to have street by street is county data enough. If you're going to open startup, Mr Starbucks? No, you probably want to know much more granular data. You wanna know traffic. Is the traffic picking up business usually an office space where people are not coming to office or is it more of a shopping mall where people are still showing all of these data is out there for you? What cloud is making it possible? Unlike the old era where you know, your data is an SFP oracle or carry later in your data center, it's available for you with a matter of clicks. What thought sport modern analytics. Cloud is a simple thing. We are the front end to bring all of this data and make sense of it. You can sit on top of any cloud data and then interact with a complete sort of freedom without compromising on security, compliance or relevance. And what happens is the analysts, the people who are responsible for bringing the data and then making sure that it is secure and delivered. They are no longer doing incremental in chart updates and dashboard updates. What they're doing is solving business problems, business people there freely interacting and making bigger decisions. That actually adds value to their consumers. This is what your customers are looking for, your users are looking for and if you're not doing it, your competitor will do that. So this is why cloud is not a choice for you. It's not an option for you. It is the only way and if you fail to take that back the other way is taking the world out of a cliff. >>Yeah, that's I love it. But I want to get this uh topic of thoughts about anywhere, but I want to just close out on this whole idea of modern cloud scale analytics. What technology under the hood do you guys see that customers should pay attention to with thought spot and in general because the scale there. So is it just machine learning? We hear data lakes, you know, you know different configurations of that. Machine learning is always thrown around like a buzzword. What new technology capability should every executive by your customer look for when it comes to really doing analytics, modern in the cloud >>analytics has to be near real time, Which means what two things speed at scale, make sure it's complex, it can deal with complexity in data structure. Data complexity is a huge problem. Now imagine doing that at scale and then delivering with performance. That means you have to rethink Look Tableau grew out of excellent worksheets that is the market leader, it is a $40 billion dollar market with the largest company having only a billion dollars in revenue. This is a massive place where the problems need to be solved differently. So the underlying technology to me are like I said, these three things, number one cannot handle the cloud scale, you will have hundreds of billions of rows of data that you brought. But when you talk about social media sentiment of customers, analysis of traffic and weather patterns, all of these publicly available valuable data. We're talking trillions of rows of data. So that is scale. Now imagine complexity. So financial sector for example, there is health care where you know some data is visible, some data is not visible, some some is public assumption not or you have to take credit data and let it on top of your marketing data. So it becomes more complex. And the last is when you answer ask a question, can you deliver with absolute confidence that you're giving the right answer With extremely high performance and to do that you have to rebuild the entire staff. You cannot take your, you know, stack that was built in 1990s and so now we can do search So search that is built for these three things with the machine learning and ai essentially helping at every step of the way so that you're not throwing all this inside directly to a human, throw it to a i engine and the ai engine curates what is relevant to you, showing it to you. And then based on your interaction with that inside, I improve my own logic so that the next interaction, the next situation is going to be significantly better. My point is you cannot take a triple a map and then try to act like this google maps. One is built presuming and zoom out and learn from you. The other one is built to give you rich information but doesn't talk back. So the staff has to be fundamentally rebuilt for the club. That's what he's doing. >>I love I love to buy direction. I love the interactivity. This topic of thought spot everywhere, which you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned data apps which by the way I love that concept. I want to do a drill down on that. Uh I saw data marketplace is coming somewhat working but I think it's going to get it better. I love that idea of an app um, and using as developers but you also mentioned embedded analytics. You made a comment about that. So I gotta ask you what's the difference between data apps and embedded analytics? >>Embedded analytics means that uh you know the dashboards that you love but the one that doesn't talk back to you is going to be available inside the app that you built for your other So if a supply chain app that was built by let's say accenture inside that you haven't had your dashboard without logging into tablet. Great. But what you do, what's the big deal? It is the same thing. My point is like I said every time a business user sees a chart. The questions are going to come up. The next 10 question is where the values on earth for example on Yelp imagine if you will piece about I'm hungry. I want to find a restaurant and it says go to this burrito place. It doesn't work like that. It's not good enough. The reason why yell towards is because I start with an intent. I'm hungry. Okay show me all restaurants. Okay I haven't had about it for a while. Let me see the photos. Let me read the reviews. Let me see if my friends have eaten, let me see some menu. Can I walk there? I do all of this but just what underneath it. There is a rich set of data that probably helped have their own secret source and reviews and then you have google map powering some of them. But I don't care all of that is coming together to deliver a seamless experience that satisfies my hunger. Which will be very different from if you use the same map at the same place you might go to an italian place. I go to bed right. That is the power of a data app in business people are still sitting with this. I am hungry. I gotta eat burrito. That's not how it should be in the new world. A business user should have the freedom to add exactly what the customers require looking for and solve that problem without delay. That means every application should be power and enriched with the data where you can interact and customized. That is not something that enterprise customers are actually used to and to do that you need like I said a I and search powering like the google map underneath it, but you need an app like a yelp like app, that's what we deliver. So for example, uh just last week we delivered a service now app on snowflake. You know, it just changes the game. You are thinking about customer cases. You're a large company, you have support coming from Philippines and India some places the quality is good. Some places bad dashboards are not good enough saying that okay, 17% of our customers are unhappy but we are good. That's not the world we live in. That is the tyranny of >>average, >>17% were unhappy. You got to solve for them. >>You mentioned snowflake and they had their earnings. David and I were commenting about how some of the analysts got it all wrong. And you bring up a really good point that kind of highlights the real trend. Not so much how many new customers they got. But there do what customers are doing more. Right? So, so what's happening is that you're starting to see with data apps, it does imply Softwares in there because it's it's application. So the software wrapping around data. This is interesting because people that are using the snowflakes of the world and thought spot your software and your platform, they're doing more with data. So it's not so much. I use snowflake, I use snowflake now I'm going to do more with it. That's the scale kicking. So this is an opportunity to look at that more equation. How do you talk >>with >>when you see that? Because that's the real thing is like, okay, that's I bought software as a service. But what's the more that's happening? What do you see >>that is such an important point? Even I haven't thought about it that john but you're absolutely right. That is sometimes people think of snowflake is taking care of it and no. Yeah, yes, Sarah later used to store once and zeros and they're moving it into club. That is not the point. Like I said, marketplace as an example when you are opening it up for for example, bringing the entire world's data with one click accessible to you securely. That is something you couldn't do on number two. You can have like 100 suppliers and all of a sudden you can now take a single copy of data and then make it available to all of them without actually creating multiple copies and control it differently. That's not something without cloudy, potentially could do. So things like that are fundamentally different. It is much more than like one plus one equals two. It is one plus one is 33. Like our view is that when you are re platform ng like that, you have to think from customer first. What does the customer do? The customer care that you meant from Entre into cloud or event from Teradata snowflake. No, they will care if their lives are better. Are they able to get better services are able to get it faster. That's what it is. So to me it is very simple. The destiny of an insight or data information is action, right? Imagine you're driving a car and if your car updates the gas tank every monday morning, imagine how you know, stressful your life will be for the whole week. I have to wait until next monday wanting to figure out what, whether I have enough gas or not, that's not the new world, that information is there, you need to have it real time and act on it. If you go through the Tesla you realize now that you know, I'm never worried about mileage because it is going to take me to the supercharger because it knows what I need to get to, it knows how long it is going to be, how bad the traffic is. It is synthesizing all of that to give me peace of mind. >>So this is a great >>conversation. That's a >>great question. It's a great conversation because it's really kind of brings in kind of what's happening, you see successful companies that are working with cloud scale and data like you're talking about, it's you get in there, you get the data, the data apps and all of a sudden you hit it, you hit the value equation and it's like almost like discovering oil all of a sudden you have a gusher and then people just see massive increase in value. It's not like the outcome, it's kind of there, you've got to kind of get in there and this is the scale piece and you see people having strategies to do that, they say okay we're gonna get in there, we're going to use the data to iterate but also watch the data learn where's that value, This is that more trend and and there's a successful of the developing. So I have to ask you when you, when you talk about people and culture, um that's not the way it used to be, used to be like okay I'm buying an outcome. I deployed some software mechanisms and at the end of the day there's some value there. Maybe I write it off maybe I, you know, overtime charges and some accounting thing. All changed the culture and the people in charge now are transforming the management techniques. What do you see as a successful mindset for a customer as they managed through these new paradigms and new new success formulas. >>I see a fork in leadership when it comes to courage. There are people with the spine and there are people without the spine and the ones with the spine are absolutely killing it. They are unafraid. They are not saying, look, I'm just going to stick with the incumbents that I've known for the last 20 years. Look, I used to drive a Toyota forever because I love the Toyota. And then you know after Nutanix IPO went to Lexus still Toyota because it's reliable. I don't, I'm not a huge card person. It works. But guess what? I knew they were missing Patrick and I care about the environment. I don't want to keep pushing hydrocarbons out there. It's not politics. I just don't like burning stuff into the earth atmosphere. So when Tesla came out, it's not like I love the quality I don't personally like alone mask, you know after that Thailand fiasco of cave rescue and all of that. But I can clearly see that Toyota is not going to catch up to Tesla in the next 10 years. And guess what? My loyalty is much more to doing the right thing for my family and to the world. And I switched this is what business leaders need to know. They can't simply say, well, tabloid as search to. They're not as good as thought sports. We'll just stick with them because they have done with us. That's what weak leaders do and customers suffer for that. What I see like the last two weeks ago when I was in new york. I met with them. A business leader for one of the largest banks in the world with 25,000 people reporting to him. The person walks into the room wearing shorts and t shirts uh, and was so full of energy and so full of excitement. I thought I'm going to learn from him and he was asking questions about how we do our business in bed and learning from me. I was humbled, I was flawed and I realized that's what a modern business leader looks like. Even if it is one of the largest and oldest banks in the world, that's the kind of people are making big difference and it doesn't matter how all the companies, how old their data is they have mainframes or not. I hear this excuses all the type of er, mainframes, we can't move, we have COBOL going on. And guess what? You keep talking about that and hear leaders like him are going to transform those companies And next thing you know, there are some of the most modern companies in the world. >>Well certainly they, we know that they don't have any innovation strategy or any kind of R and D or anything going on that could be caught flat footed in the companies that didn't have that going on, didn't have the spine or the, the, the vision to, to at least try the cloud before Covid when Covid hit, those companies are really either going out of business or they're hurting the people who were in the cloud really move their teams into the cloud quicker to take advantage of uh, the environment that they had to. So this became a skill issue. So, so this is a big deal. This is a big deal. And having the right skills are people skilled, it will be a, I both be running everything for them. What is your take on that? >>This is an important question. You can't just say you got to do more things or new things and not take care of all things. You know, there's only 89, 10 hours so you can work in their uh, analysts in the Atlantic species constantly if your analysts are sitting there and making incremental dashboards and reports change every day and then backlog is growing for 56 days and the users are unhappy because you're not getting answers and then you ask them to go to new things. It's just not going to be enough and you can hire your way out of it. You have to make sure that if you say that I have 20 100 x product already, I don't want 21st guess what? Sometimes to be five products, you need to probably go to 21 you got to do new things to actually take away the gunk off the old and in that context, the re skilling starts with unburdening, unburdening of menial task, unburned routine task. There is nothing more frustrating than making reports and dashboards that people don't even use And 90% of the time analysts, they're amazing experiences completely wasted when they're making incremental change to tabloid reports. I kind of believe thought spot and self service on top of cloud data takes away all of that without compromising security and then you invest the experienced people. Business experience is so critical. So don't just go and hire university students and say, okay, they'll go come and quote everything the experience that they have in knowing what the business is about and what it matters to their users, that domain experience and then uplevel them res kill them and then bring fresh energy to challenge that and then make sure there is a culture that allows that to happen. These three things. That's why I said leadership is not just about hiring event of firing another, it's about cultivating a culture and living that value by saying, look if I am wrong, call me, call me out in public because I want to show you how I deal with conflict. So this is I love this thing because when I see these large companies where they're making these massive changes so fast, it inspires you to say you know what if they can do it, anyone can do it. But then I also see if the top leadership is not aligned to that. They are just trying to retire without the stock tanking too much and let me just get through two more years. The entire company suffers. >>So that's great to chat with you got great energy, love your business, love the energy, love the focus. Um it's a new wave you're on. It's a big wave um and it's it's relevant, it's cool and relevant and it's the modern way and people have to have a spine to be successful if not for the faint of heart, but the rewards are there if you get this right. This is what I I love about this new environment. Um so I gotta ask you just to kind of close it out. How would you plug the company for the folks watching that might want to engage with you guys. What's the elevator pitch? What's the positioning? How would you describe thought spot in a bumper sticker or in a positioning statement. Take a minute to talk about that. >>Remember martin Anderson said that software is eating the world, I think it is now time to update that data is eating everything including software. If you don't have a way to turn data into bespoke action for your customers. Guess what? Your customers are gonna go somewhere where they that's happening right? You may not be in the data business but the data company is going to take your business. Thought spot is very simple. We want to be the friend tent for all cloud data when it comes to structured because that's where business value numbers is world satisfaction and dissatisfaction for reduces allying it is important to move data to action and thought Spot is the pioneer in doing that through search and I >>I really think you guys want something very powerful. Looking forward to chatting with you at the upcoming eight of a startup showcase. I think data is a developer mindset. It's an app, it's part of everything. It will. Everyone's a data company, everyone is a media company. Data is everything you guys are on something really big and people got a program it with it, make experiences whether it's simple scripts, point and click. That is a new kind of developer out there. You guys are tapping into it. Great stuff. Thank >>you for coming on. Thank you john it's good to talk to you. >>Okay. It's a cube conversation here in Palo alto California were remote. We're virtual. That's the cube virtual. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. Please welcome Puneet Dhawan, the Director of Product Management, Hyper-converged infrastructure for Dell Technologies. Puneet great to see you today. >> Thank you, for having me over. >> And we've got a customer that's going to be articulating all the value that Puneet's going to talk about. Please welcome Greg Altman, the IT infrastructure manager from Swiff-Train. Hey, Greg, how are you today? >> I'm doing well. Thank you. >> Excellent. All right guys. So Puneet, let's start with you, give us a little bit of an overview of your role. You lead product management, for Dell Technologies partner aligned HCI systems. Talk to us about that? >> Sure, absolutely. Um so, you know, it's largely about providing customers the choice. My team specifically focuses on developing Hyper-converged infrastructure products for our customers that are aligned to key technologies from our partners, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, et cetera. And that, you know, falls very nicely with meeting our customers on what technology they want to pick on, what technology they want to go with, whether it's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, we have to source from the customers. >> Let's dig into Microsoft. Talk to us about Azure Stack HCI. How is Dell Tech working with them to position this in the market? >> Sure, um, this is largely about following the customer journey towards digital transformation. So both in terms of where they are in digital transformation and how they want to approach it. So for example, we have a large customer base who's looking to modernize their legacy Hyper-V architectures, and that's where Azure Stack HCI fits in very nicely, and not only our customers are able to modernize the legacy architectures using the architectural benefits of simplicity, high performance, simple management, scalability. (Greg breathes heavily) For HCI for Hyper-V, at the same time, they can connect to Azure to get the benefits of the bullet's force. Now on the other end, we have a large customer base who started off in Azure, you know, they have cloud native applications, you know, kind of born in the cloud. But they're also looking to bring some of the applications down to on-prem, or things like disconnected scenarios, regulatory concerns, data locality reasons. And for those customers, Microsoft and Dell have a department around Dell EMC Integrated solutions for Azure Stack Hub. And that's what essentially brings Azure ecosystem, on-prem so it's like running cloud in your own premises. >> So you mentioned a second ago giving customers choice, and we always talk about that at pretty much every event that we do. So tell me a little bit about how the long standing partnership that Dell Technologies has with Microsoft decades. How is that helping you to really differentiate the technology and then show the customers the different options, together these two companies can deliver? >> Sure, so we've had a very long standing partnerships, actually over three decades now. Across the spectrum whether we talk about our partnership more on the Windows 10 side, and the modernization of the workforce, to the level of hybrid cloud and cloud solutions, and helping even customers, you know, run their applications on Azure to our large services offerings. Over the past several years, we have realized how important is hybrid cloud and multicloud for customers. And that's where we have taken our partnership to the next level, to co-develop, co-engineer and bring to the market together our full portfolio of Azure Stack Hybrid Solutions. And that's where I've said, meeting customers on where they are either bringing Azure on-prem, or helping customers on-prem, modernize on-prem architectures using Azure Stack HCI. So, you know, there's a whole lot of core development we have done together to simplify how customers manage on-prem infrastructures on a day-to-day basis, how do they install it, even how they support it, you know, we have joined support agreements with Microsoft that encompassed and bearing the entirety of the portfolio so that customers have one place to go, which is Dell Technologies to get not only the product, either in US or worldwide, to a very secure supply chain to Dell EMC, at the same time for all their support consulting services, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. We offer all those services in very close partnership with Microsoft. >> Terrific. Great. Let's switch over to you now, probably we talk about what Swiff-Train is doing with its Azure Stack HCI, tell our audience a little bit about Swiff-Train what you guys are what you do. >> Well, Swiff-Train is a full covering flooring wholesaler, we sell flooring across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, even into Florida. And we're an 80 year old company, 80 plus. And we've been moving forward with kind of hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense. And when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old, well five, six years old, running Windows 2012 2016, it was time to upgrade. And when we look at doing a large scale upgrade, like that, we called Dell and say, you know, this is what we're trying to do, and what's the new technologies that we can do that makes the migration work easier. And that's where we wound up with Azure Stack. >> So from a modernization perspective, you mentioned 80 plus year old company, I was looking on the website 1937. I always like to talk to companies like that, because modernizing when you've been around for that long it's challenging, it's challenging culturally , it's challenging historically, But talk to us a little bit about some of the specifics, that you guys were looking to Dell and Microsoft to help modernize. And was this really to drive things like, you know, operational simplicity, allow the business to have more agility so that it can expand in some of those other cities, like we talked about? >> Absolutely. We were dealing with a long maintenance window five or six hours every week patching, updating. Since we moved to Azure Stack HCI, we have virtually zero downtime. That allows our night shifts or weekend crews to be able to keep working. And the system is just bulletproof. It just does not go down. And with the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center, and Dell's OpenManage Plug-in, I log into one pane of glass in the morning, and I look and I say, "Hey, all my servers are going great. Everything's in the green." I know that that day, I'm not going to have any infrastructure issues, I can deal with other issues that make the business money. >> And I'm sure they appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the the actual implementation and the support as, as Puneet talked about all of the core development, the joint support that these two powerhouses deliver. Tell us about that implementation. And then for your day to day, what's your interaction with Dell and or Microsoft like? >> Well, for the implementation, we worked with our Dell representative. And we came up with a sizing plan. This is what we needed to do, we had eight or nine physical servers that we wanted to get rid of. And we wanted to compress down. Now we're definitely went from eight or nine to you servers down to three rack units of space with an edge, including the extra switches and stuff that we had to do. So I mean we were able to get rid of a lot of storage space or rack space. And as far as the implementation was really easy. Dell literally has a book, you follow the book and it's that simple. (Puneet chuckles) >> I like that I think more of us these days, can you somewhat write a book that we can just follow? That would be fantastic. One more question, Greg for you, before we go back to Puneet. As Puneet talked about in the beginning from describing his role, that you know, Dell Technologies works with a lot of other vendors. Why Azure Stack HCI for Swiff-Train? >> Well, it made sense for us. We were already moving, several of our websites were already moved to Azure, we've been a Hyper-V user for many years. So it was just kind of a natural evolution to migrate in that direction, because it kind of pulls all of our management tools into one, well you know, a one pane of glass type of scenario. >> Excellent. All right Puneet back to you. With some of the things that you talked about before and that Greg sort of articulated about simplifying day-to-day. Greg, I saw in my notes that you had this old aging infrastructure, you were spending five hours a week patching maintain, that you say is now virtually eliminated, Puneet, Dell Technologies and Microsoft had done quite a bit of work to simplify the operational experience. Talk to us about that, and what are some of the measurable improvements that you guys have made? >> Sure. It all starts with neither on how we approach the problem, and we have always taken a very product-centric approach at Azure Stack HCI. You know, unlike, some of our competition, which had followed. There is a reference architecture, you can put Windows Server 2019 on it and go run your own servers, and the Hyper-converged Stack on it, but we have followed a very different approach where we have learned quite a lot, you know, we are the number one vendor in HCI space, and we know a thing or two about HCI and what customers really need there. So that's why from the very beginning, we have taken a product-centric approach, and doing that allows us to have product type offers in terms of our Kx notes that are specifically designed and built for Azure Stack HCI. And on top of that, we have done very specific integration to the management Stack, we've been doing Admin Center, that is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage, both on-prem, Hyper-converged infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VM's that you're running on Azure, to provide customers a very seamless, you know, a single pane of glass for both the on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services. And in doing that, our customers have really appreciated how simple it is to keep their clusters running, to reduce the maintenance windows, based on some of our internal testing that we have done. IT administrators can reduce the time they spend on maintaining the clusters by over 90%. Over 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself. And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state. So you don't have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right founder from 10 different places, making sure whether they are qualified or not when running together, we provide one single pane of glass that customers can click on, and you know, see whether their questions are compliant or not, and if yes go update. And all this has been possible by a joint engineering with Microsoft. >> Can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution, which is what you're delivering, versus competitors that are only delivering a reference architecture? >> Absolutely. So if you're running just a reference architecture, you are running an operating system, systems Stack on a server, we know that when it comes to running HCI, that means running also business critical applications on a clustered environment. You need to make sure that all the hardware, the drivers, the founder, the hard drives, the memory configuration, the network configurations, all that can be very complex very easily. And if you have reference architectures, there is no way to know, but then running certified components in my note are not. How do you tell then? If a part fails? How do which part to sell or send, you know, for a replacement? If you're just running a reference architecture, you have no way to say the part the hard drive that failed, the one that was sent to the customer to replace whether that is certified for Azure Stack HCI or not? You know, what, how do you really make a determination, what is the right firmware that needs to be applied to a cluster of what other drivers that apply to be cluster, that are compliant and tested for Azure Stack HCI. None of these things are possible, if you just have a reference architecture approach. That's why we have been very clear that our approach is a product-based approach. And, you know, very frankly this is how we have... that's the feedback we've provided the Microsoft to, and we've been working very, you know, closely together. And you see that, now in terms of the new Azure Stack HCI, that Microsoft announced at Inspirely this year, that brings Microsoft into the mainstream HCI space as a product offering, and not just as a feature or a few features within the Windows Server program. >> Greg, I saw in the notes with respect to Swiff-Train that you guys have with Azure Stack HCI, you have reduced Rackspace by 50%, you talked about some of the Rackspace benefits. But you've also reduced energy by 70%. Those are big, impactful numbers, impacting not just your day-to-day but the overall business. >> That's true, >> Last question for you, Greg. If you think about how can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution versus a reference architecture. For your peers watching in any industry. what's your... what are your top recommendations for going with a validated all in one solution? >> Well, we looked at doing the reference architecture's path, if you will, because we're hands on we like to build things and I looked at it and like Puneet said, "Drivers and memory and making sure that everything is going to work well together." And not only that everything is going to work well together. But when something fails, then you get into the finger pointing between vendors, your storage vendor, your process vendor, that's not something that we need to deal with. We need to keep a business running. So we went with Dell, it's one box, you know, but one box per unit and then you Stack two of them together you have a cluster. >> You make it sound so easy. >> Let us question-- >> I put together children's toys that were harder than building the Stack I promise you, I did it in an afternoon. >> Music to my ears Greg, thank you. (Greg giggles) >> It was that easy >> That is gold >> Easier to put together Azure Stack HCI than some, probably even opening the box of some children's toys I can imagine. (all chuckling) >> We should use that as a tagline. >> Exactly. You should, I think you have a new tagline there. Greg, thank you. Puneet, well last question for you, Would Dell Technologies World sessions on hybrid cloud benefits with Dell and Microsoft? Give us a flavor of what some of the things are that the audience will have a chance to learn. >> Yeah, this is a great session with Microsoft that essentially provides our customers an overview of our joint hybrid cloud solutions, both for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Azure stack HCI as well as our joint solutions on VMware in Azure. But much more importantly, we also talk about what's coming next. Now, especially with Microsoft as your Stack at CIO's a full blown product. Hyper hybrid, you know, HCI offering that will be available as, Azure service. So customers could run on-prem infrastructure that is Hyper-converged but managed pay bill for as an Azure service, so that they have always the latest and greatest from Microsoft. And all the product differentiation we have created in terms of a product-centric approach, simpler lifecycle management will all be applicable, in this new hybrid, hybrid cloud solution as well. And that led essentially a great foundation for our customers who have standardized on Hyper-V, who are much more aligned to Azure, to not worry about the infrastructure on-prem. But start taking advantages of both the modernization benefits of HCI. But much more importantly, start coupling back with the hybrid ecosystem that we are building with Microsoft, whether it's running an Azure Kubernetes service on top to modernize the new applications, and bringing the Azure data services such as Azure SQL Server on top, so that you have a consistent, vertically aligned hybrid cloud infrastructure Stack that is not only easy to manage, but it is modern, it is available as a pay as you go option. And it's tightly integrated into Azure, so that you can manage all your on-prem as well as public cloud resources on one single pane of glass, thereby providing customers whole lot more simplicity, and operational efficiency. >> And as you said, the new tagline said from, beautifully from Greg's mouth, "The customer easier to put together than many children's toys." Puneet, thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on with Azure Stack HCI, what folks can expect to learn and see at Dell Tech World of virtual experience. >> Thank you. >> And Greg, thank you for sharing the story, what you're doing. Helping your peers learn from you. And I'm going to say on behalf of Dell Technologies, that awesome new tagline. That was cool. (Greg chuckles) (Lisa chuckles) >> Thank you. 'Preciate your time. >> We're going to use it for sure. (Greg chuckles) >> All right, for Puneet Dhawan and Greg Altman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Qualys Security Conference 2019, brought to you by Qualys. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in Las Vegas at the Bellagio, at the Qualys Security Conference, pretty amazing, it's been going on for 19 years, we heard in the keynote. It's our first time here, and we're excited to have our first guest, he was a keynote earlier this morning, the author of nine books, Richard Clarke, National Security and Cyber Risk expert, and author most recently of "The Fifth Domain." Dick, great to see you. >> Great to be with you. >> Absolutely. So you've been in this space for a very long time. >> I started doing cybersecurity in about 1996 or 1997. >> So early days. And preparing for this, I've watched some of your other stuff, and one of the things you said early on was before there was really nothing to buy. How ironic to think about that, that first there was a firewall, and basic kind of threat protection. Compare and contrast that to walking into RSA, which will be in a couple of months in Moscone, 50,000 people, more vendors than I can count on one hand, now there's too much stuff to buy. Do you look at this evolution? What's your take? And from a perspective of the CIO and the people responsible for protecting us, how should they work through this morass? >> Well, the CIO and the CFO, got used to thinking cyber security costs a little bit, 'cause you can only buy, this is 1997, you can only buy antivirus, firewall, and maybe, in 1997, you could buy an intrusion detection system. Didn't do anything, it just went "beep," but you could buy that too. So you had three things in 1997. And so that resulted in the IT budget having to take a tiny little bit of it, and put it aside for security, maybe 2%, 3% of the budget. Well, now, if you're only spending 2 or 3% of your IT budget on security, somebody owns your company, and it's not you (laughs). >> And that's 2 or 3% of the IT budget, that's not the whole budget. >> No, that's the IT budget. What we found in researching the book, is that secure companies, and there are some, there's companies that don't get hacked, or they get hacked, but the hack gets in, immediately contained, identified, quarantined. The damage is done, but it's easily repaired. Companies that are like that, the resilient companies, are spending 8%, 10%, we found companies at 12 and 17%, of their IT budget on security, and to your point, how many devices do you have to buy? You look at the floor at any of these RSA Conventions, Black Hat, or something, now there are 2000 companies at RSA, and they're all selling something, but their marketing message is all the same. So pity the poor CSO as she goes around trying to figure out, "Well, do I want to talk to that company? "What does it do?" We found that the big banks, and the big corporations, that are secure, have not three, anymore, but 75, 80, different, discreet cybersecurity products on their network, most of it software, some of it hardware. But if you've got 80 products, that's probably 60 vendors, and so you got to, for yourself, there's the big challenge, for a CSO, she's got to figure out, "What are the best products? "How do they integrate? "What are my priorities?" And, that's a tough task, I understand why a lot of the people want to outsource it, because it's daunting, especially for the small and medium-size business, you got to outsource it. >> Right, right. So the good news is, there's a silver lining. So traditionally, and you've talked about this, we talk about it all the time too, there's people that have been hacked and know it, and people that have been hacked and just don't know it yet, and the statistics are all over the map, anywhere you grab it, it used to be hundreds of days before intrusions were detected. Kind of the silver lining in your message is, with proper investments, with proper diligence and governance, you can be in that group, some they're trying to get in all the time, but you can actually stop it, you can actually contain it, you can actually minimize the damage. >> What we're saying is, used to be two kinds of companies, those that are hacked and knew it, and those that are hacked that don't, that didn't know it. Now there's a third kind of company. The company that's stopping the hack successfully, and the average, I think, is a 175 days to figure it out, now it's 175 minutes, or less. The attack gets in, there's all the five or six stages, of what's called "the attack killchain," and gets out very, very quickly. Human beings watching glass, looking at alerts, are not going to detect that and respond in time, it's got to be automated. Everybody says they got AI, but some people really do (laughs), and machine learning is absolutely necessary, to detect things out of the sea of data, 75 different kinds of devices giving you data, all of them alarming, and trying to figure out what's going on, and figure out in time, to stop that attack, quarantine it, you got to move very, very quickly, so you've got to trust machine learning and AI, you got to let them do some of the work. >> It's so funny 'cause people still are peeved when they get a false positive from their credit card company, and it's like (laughs), do you realize how many of those things are going through the system before one elevates to the level that you are actually getting an alert? >> So the problem has always been reducing the number of false positives, and identifying which are the real risks, and prioritizing, and humans can't do that anymore. >> Right, right, there's just too much data. So let's shift gears a little bit about in terms of how this has changed, and again, we hear about it over and over, right, the hacker used to be some malicious kid living in his mom's basement, being mischievous, maybe, actually doing some damage, or stealing a little money. Now it's government-funded, it's state attacks, for much more significant threats, and much more significant opportunities, targets of opportunity. You've made some interesting comments in some of your prior stuff, what's the role of the government? What's the role of the government helping businesses? What's the role of business? And then it also begs the question, all these multinational business, they don't even necessarily just exist in one place, but now, I've got to defend myself against a nation state, with, arguably, unlimited resources, that they can assign to this task. How should corporate CIOs be thinking about that, and what is the role, do you think, of the government? >> Let's say you're right. 20 years ago we actually used to see the number of cyber attacks go up on a Friday night and a Saturday night, because it was boys in their mother's basement who couldn't get a date, you know, and they were down there having fun with the computer. Now, it's not individuals who are doing the attacks. It is, as you say, nation states. It's the Russian Army, Russian Intelligence, Russian Military Intelligence, the GRU. The North Korean Army is funding its development of nuclear weapons by hacking companies and stealing money, all over the world, including central banks, in some cases. So, yeah, the threat has changed, and obviously, a nation state is going to be far more capable of attacking, military is going to be far more capable of attacking, so, CISOs say to me, "I'm being attacked by a foreign military, "isn't that the role of the Pentagon "to defend Americans, American companies?" And General Keith Alexander, who used to run Cyber Command, talks about, if a Russian bomber goes overhead, and drops a bomb on your plant, you expect the United States Air Force to intercept that Russian bomber, that's why you pay your taxes, assuming you pay taxes. What's the difference? General Alexander says, whether that's a Russian bomber attacking your plant, or a Russian cyber attack, attacking your plant, and he says, therefore, people should assume the Pentagon will protect them from foreign militaries. That sounds nice. There's a real ring of truth to that, right? But it doesn't work. I mean, how could the Pentagon defend your regional bank? How could the Pentagon defend the telephone company, or a retail store? It can't. It can barely defend itself, and they're not doing a great job of that either, defending the federal government. So, do you really want the Pentagon putting sensors on your network? Looking at your data? No, you don't. Moreover, they can't. They don't have enough people, they don't have enough skills. At the end of the day, whatever the analogy is about how the Defense Department should defend us from foreign military attack, they can't. And they shouldn't, by the way, in my view. The conclusion that that gets you to, is you got to defend yourself, and you can, right now, if you use the technology that exists. The government has a role, sure. It can provide you warnings, it can provide the community with intelligence, it can fund development and stuff, can train people, but it cannot defend your network, you have to defend your network. >> And you have municipalities, I think it's Atlanta, is the one that keeps getting hit, there's-- >> Well Louisiana, just the other night, the whole state of Louisiana government unplugged from the internet, because it was being hit by a ransomware attack. The whole city of Baltimore's been down, the whole city of Atlanta, as you said. There's a real problem here, because people, many of them are paying the ransom, and they pay the ransom, and they get their network back right away. People ask me, "Can I trust these criminals?" Well you can trust them to give you your network back, because they have a reputation to maintain. Think about that. This whole thing about ransomware depends on their reputation, the bad guys' reputation. If they get a reputation for not giving you your network back when you pay, no one's ever going to pay, so they do give it back, and sometimes that's a lot quicker, and a lot cheaper, than saying no and rebuilding your network. But if we give them the money, what are they doing with it? Yeah, they're buying Ferraris to drive round the streets of Moscow, but some of that money is going back into R&D, so they can develop more effective attacks. >> So it's an interesting take, right, so most people, I think, would say that the cybersecurity war is completely always going to be kind of cat and mouse, whack-a-mole, that the bad guys are always a little step ahead, and you're always trying to catch up, just the way the innovation cycle works. You specifically say no, that's not necessarily always true, that there are specific things you can do to, not necessarily have an impenetrable wall, but to really minimize the impact and neutralize these threats, like a super white blood cell, if you will. So what are those things that companies should be doing, to better increase their probability, their chance, of, I don't know, blocking-- >> Depends on the size of the company. >> Absorbing. >> Depends on the size of the company. But I think whether you're a small-to-medium business, or you're an enterprise, you begin in the same place. And I do this with all of my consulting contracts, I sit down with the leadership of the company individually, and I ask every one of them, "What are you worried about? "What could happen? "What could a bad guy do to you "that matters to your company?" 'Cause what matters to one company may not matter to another company. And you can't spend your entire budget defending the network, so let's figure out exactly what risk we're worried about, and what risk we're just kind of willing to tolerate. And then, we can design security around that, and sometimes that security will be outsourced, to a managed security provider. A lot of it means getting into the cloud, because if you're in Amazon or Microsoft's cloud, you've got some security automatically built in, they've got thousands of people doing the security of the cloud, and if your server's in your basement, good luck. (laughs) >> So, as you look forward, now you said you finished the book earlier in the year, it gets published, and it's out, and that's great, but as you said, it's a fast-moving train, and the spaces develops. 10 years from now, we don't want to look at 10 years from now, it's way too long. But as you look forward the next couple, two, three years, what are you keeping an eye on, that's going to be, again, another sea change of both challenge and opportunity in this space? >> The three technologies we talk about in the book, for the three-year time horizon, 'cause I can't get beyond three years, more machine learning on the defense, but also more machine learning on the offense, and where does that balance work out? To whose advantage? Secondly, quantum computing, which, we don't know how rapidly quantum computing will come onto the market, but we do know it's a risk for some people, in that it might break encryption, if the bad guys get their hands on the quantum computer, so that's a worry. But one I think most immediately, is 5G. What 5G allows people to do, is connect millions of things, at high speed, to the internet. And a lot of those things that will be connected are not defended right now, and are outside firewalls, and don't have end-point protection, and aren't really built into networks on a secure network. So I worry about 5G empowering the Internet of Things, and doing what we call expanding the attack surface, I worry about that. >> Right, Richard, well thank you for taking a few minutes, and congrats on the book, and I'm sure within a couple of years the gears will start turning and you'll put pen to paper and kick another one out for us. >> Number 10. >> All right. He's Richard, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Qualys Security Conference at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Hi. I'm stupid, man. And this is a special on the ground here a the be Tugg Summer Slam and happy to welcome Thio, the program A longtime friend. But first time on the program. Somebody that's known this community for many years. Louisiana Coast is a senior systems engineer in the hyper convert infrastructure space at BM. Where Luigi great to talk >> to you again. >> Thank you. Stew. Actually, this has been one of my bucket list item since e. M. C. World 2010 when the Cube actually first started. >> Yeah. So you've been watching since the beginning. You knew me back from, you know, disclosure. I used to work at AMC, and I've been working with being work for a long time. So you've had a number of jobs. One of those consistencies out there is. I know when I would go to the winter warmer, I would usually see them. There are. Your wife is helped out at the event here also, So give us a way to start off a little bit. Like what is this event being met? You, Your career. Oh, and your friendships over the years. Oh, >> man, that's That's a great question to do. Actually, um, I don't think I would be where I am today without this particular user group. It was my first ever user group in my first ever, really major exposure into the M. We're in January 2010 at the first winter warmer that I attended. So for me, it it actually gave me exposure into the technology and then to see the community and the user's behind that. And I was already following you on Twitter at the time. And you were kind of my mentor into the social space, Ian getting involved in there and to have it all accumulate together. And it was just for me, honestly was amazing. And it was life changing >> liberty. My apologies for introducing to the quagmire that is currently Twitter. But you know l series, right? You know, you got on. You've been in a huge proponent of community activities there. You've now attended. You really think so? You've been at PM world of numbers. Free tip. There one you've been Tonto discovers with H P. When you were there. You know what's different about, you know, a regional event like this compared >> to some of the big ones. >> Well, I think the conversations that you have at most of those events of the same, I think where the benefit regionally is, you can meet up with these people afterwards for coffee, for tea. You can continue that conversation in person a lot easier on and also having the same being in the same geographical region. It helps you relate to some of it. You can. You can laugh about some of the nuances with weather or just, you know, the local sports and what's happening there. And you could just It's more like home, Right? And you get that sense of comfort when you go out to a big conference, right? Yes, you're gonna know people. Were you in a strange environment? You kind of like your little more reserved. >> Like when I talked to Chris Giladi here. He says they don't like when we talk about the Patriots, but your big patriots, >> I have diarrhea. >> Okay. All right. The other thing, you really talk about jobs here. You know something? I know over the years, I've loved helping introducing people on helping them get jobs. The S E positions are always something that every company is going to walk around this expo floor. You're always going to see people that are hiring, and you're gonna find people that that that need jobs. You know what, your >> ears I I would say that's >> the biggest thing about the regional area is when you're actually in the market for a new job. I mean, for me, if you look at me. I started out years ago as a sys admin. Then I went to Tech marketing, and I went to Social Media Marketing. And now I'm doing Essie work for GM wear, which is still a dream, in my opinion, to be working at GM where but for me, it's you build those connections and you have those conversations, those real world conversations. I was just speaking with a gentleman earlier who's possibly contemplating a job change, right? That's not a conversation he would have. Just normally he feels comfortable with these users in the experiences that they've had and and he wants to learn from that. And I'm happily to share that information with anyone. >> Yeah, Luigi, what are some of the things that you've seen? You change the industry, that impact, you know, you were involved with, You know, Matt and Sean hoping Thio, with the social media aspect of this event, Really? You know, being an open 10 toe embrace, not just >> virtualization cloud computing, obviously things like Dev ops, achieving work words or something that a heavily focused on it. >> Yeah, I would think from, if I look at it, I was actually >> having this conversation last night with Hans and are a friend of his, and I was explaining to her about the V tug and how it came about. And, you know, if you really think about back in 2012 you know, companies weren't talking multi cloud or multi virtualization technologies and the user groups started that. And if you look at where the the trend is now in the marketplace, it's plowed. It's this. It's that, you know. So the user's started to dictate that back then. So for me, it's really about that right? He and you know it allows you to stay abreast with the thing. And I don't know if I really entered your question because I'm a went off on a tangent with my a d d. But it was more about that watching the technology change and being ableto have those conversations with with people in from from NSC roll perspective, it keeps you in the touch of actually what the user's they're going through because you listen to them, you know, they start talking to you, even if you could sit in on some of these sessions like they start posing real challenges to you. >> All right, So, Luigi, you know what? I want to give you the final word. You know, we talk a little about the community, how you participated in at the end of an error. So you know what? You're takeaways here in any final memories >> that you want from the >> final memories would have to be my very first V tug. Or at the time was New England. The mug summer slammed. It was my wife's birthday. And I said, Your baby, I'm going to Maine for the day. And she's like, What's my birthday? Yeah, but this is gonna be important for us in the long run, from a career perspective. And here it is, nine years later. You know, I came home that that day with three lobsters for her. You know, I got a sweet talker. >> Um, but, >> you know, nine years later, she works and participates in the user group and gets back. And I now work for the company that we were supporting as a user in community. So for me, that's gotta go full circle. It's pretty surreal if you ask me. >> I >> had a question for you. Stay. >> Oh, I don't know if you turn the mike on, >> I know that I'm a diehard Yankees fan, But which way do you go? Yankees Red Sox? >> Well, come on, we do. You know that Like you. And like a certain Tom Brady, I am still a Yankee fan born and raised in New Jersey S o. Just don't talk about it and we win too much. But my boss is a die hard Red Sox fan, and New England fans are pretty fanatical. And don't don't you understand? Like Patriots fans have become just like 80 perennial winners. You think that they're always going to drive that and a little bit too arrogant. So looking forward to the banner unveiling for the Patriots number nine. Number six for TB 12 man, Team it, of course I will be there I've been lucky enough to be. It was actually it was the Giants connection with a tree. It's that got me there. But I do love football, and I'll miss having the V tug event. There was fun, you know, not meeting one with the alumni from there s so, uh, already, you know, sharing my share in my allegiance is there. I have not converted to the Red Sox, then was a nice place to go. But I'm more of a football God and the Patriots are my number one t never. Yeah, I think I >> think that's the other thing that I respect about. Yours were both patriots in Yankee things that I had to throw that out there. >> All right, well, Luigi, welcome to the Cube, Alumni. Thanks so much always for your >> support over the year and your contributions community. >> And be sure to check out the cute Dunnett were, of course, at PM world. We've got the entire executive team on all the big flower shows. I'm student event as always. Thank you so >> much for watching

>> from Seattle WASHINGTON. It's the Q covering AWS Imagine brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back, You're ready. Geoffrey here with the Cube were in Seattle, >> Washington downtown, right next to the convention center for the AWS. Imagine e d. You show. It's a second year of the show found by Andrew Cohen. His crew, part of Theresa's public sector group, really focused on education. Education means everything from K through 12 higher education and community college education, getting out of the military and retraining education. It's ah, it's a really huge category, and it's everything from, you know, getting the colleges to do a better job by being on cloud infrastructure, innovating and really thinking outside the box are really excited to have the man who's doing a lot of the work on the curriculum development in the education is Ken Eisner is the director of worldwide education programs for AWS. Educate can great to see you. Thank you so much for having absolutely nice shot out this morning by Theresa, she said. She just keeps asking you for more. So >> you want to deliver for Theresa? Carl says she is. She is a dynamo and she drives us >> all she does. So let's dive into it a little bit. So, you know, there was, Ah, great line that they played in the keynote with Andy talking about, You know, we cannot be protecting old institutions. We need to think about the kids is a story I hear all the time where somebody came from a time machine from 17 76 and landed here today. It wouldn't recognize how we talk, how we get around, but they would recognize one thing, and unfortunately, that's the school house down at the end of the block. So you guys are trying to change that. You're really trying to revolutionize what's happening in education, give us a little bit of background on some of the specific things that you're working on today. >> Yeah, I I think Andy, one of the things that he mentioned at that time was that education is really in a crisis on. We need to be inventing at a rapid rate. We need to show that invented simplify inside that occassion. Andi, he's incredibly, he's correct. The students are our customers, and we've got to be changing things for them. What we've been really excited to see is that with this giant growth in cloud computing A W S. It was the fastest I T vendor to ever hit $10,000,000,000 a year. The run rate We're now growing at a 42% or 41% year over year growth Ray and $31,000,000,000 a year Lee company. It's creating this giant cloud computing opportunity cloud computing in the number one Lincoln Skill for the past four years in Rome, when we look at that software development to cloud architecture to the data science and artificial intelligence and data analytics and cyber security rules. But we're not preparing kids for this. Market Gallop ran a study that that showed about 11% of business executives thought that students were prepared for their jobs. It's not working, It's gotta change. And the exciting thing that's happening right now is workforce development. Governments are really pushing for change in education, and it's starting to happen >> right? It's pretty amazing were here last year. The team last year was very much round the community college releases and the certification of the associate programs and trial down in Southern California, and this year. I've been surprised. We've had two guests on where it's the state governor has pushed these initiatives not at the district level, the city level, but from the state winning both Louisiana as well as Virginia. That's pretty amazing support to move in such an aggressive direction and really a new area. >> Yeah, I was actually just moderating a panel where we had Virginia, Louisiana, in California, all sitting down talking about that scaling statewide strategy. We had announcements from the entire CUNY and Sunni or City University of New York and State University of New York system to do both two and four year programs in Cloud Computing. And Louisiana announced it with their K 12 system, their community college system and their four year with Governor John Bel Edwards making the announcement two months ago. So right we are seeing this scaling consortium, a play where institutions are collaborating across themselves. They're collaborating vertically with your higher ed and K 12 and yet direct to the workforce because we need to be hiring people at such a rapid ray that we we need to be also putting a lot of skin in the game and that story that happened so again, I agree with Andy said. Education is at a crisis. But now we're starting to see change makers inside of education, making that move right. It's interesting. I wonder, >> you know, is it? Is it? I don't want to say second tier, that's the wrong word, but kind of what I'm thinking, you know, kind of these other institutions that the schools that don't necessarily have the super top in cachet, you know who are forced to be innovative, right? We're number two. We try harder. As they used to say in the in the Hertz commercial. Um, really a lot of creativity coming out of again the community colleges last year in L. A. Which I was, I was blown away, that kind of understand cause that specifically to skill people up to get a job. But now you're hearing it in much more kind of traditional institutions and doing really innovative things like the thing with the the Marines teaching active duty Marines about data science. >> Yeah, who came up with that idea that phenomenal Well, you know, data permeates every threat. It's not just impure data science, jobs and machine learning jobs. There's air brilliantly important, but it's also in marketing jobs and business jobs. And so on. Dad Analytics, that intelligence, security, cybersecurity so important that you think, God, you Northern Virginia Community College in U. S. Marine Corps are working for to make these programs available to their veterans and active military. The other thing is, they're sharing it with the rest of the student by. So that's I think another thing that's happening is this sharing this ability, all of for this cloud degree program that AWS educate is running. All these institutions are sharing their curricula. So the stuff that was done in Los Angeles is being learned in Virginia is the stuff that the U. S Marine Corps is doing is being available to students. Who are you not in military occupations? I think that collaboration mode is is amazing. The thing they say about community colleges and just this new locus of control for education on dhe. Why it's changing community colleges. You're right there. They're moving fast. These institutions have a bias for action. They know they have to. You change the r A. Y right? It's about preventing students for this work for, but they also serve as a flywheel to those four year institutions back to the 12 into the into the workforce and they hit you underserved audience. Is that the rest? So that you were not all picking from the same crew? You cannot keep going to just your lead institutions and recruit. We have to grow that pipeline. So you thank thank these places for moving quick brand operating for their student, right? >> Right, And and And that's where the innovation happens, right? I mean, that's that's, uh, that that's goodness. And the other thing that that was pretty interesting was, um, you know, obviously Skilling people up to get jobs. You need to hire him. That's pretty. That's pretty obvious and simple, but really bringing kind of big data attitude analytics attitude into the universities across into the research departments and the medical schools. And you think at first well, of course, researchers are data centric, right? They've been doing it that way for a long time, but they haven't been doing it and kind of the modern big, big data, real time analytics, you know, streaming data, not sampling data, all the data. So so even bringing that type of point of view, I don't know mindset to the academic institutions outside of what they're doing for the students. >> Absolutely. The machine learning is really changing the game. This notion of big data, the way that costs have gone down in terms of storing and utilizing data and right, it's streaming data. It's non Columbia or down, as opposed to yeah, the old pure sequel set up right that that is a game changer. No longer can you make just can you make a theory and tested out theories air coming streaming by looking at that data and letting it do some work for you, which is kind of machine learning, artificial intelligence path, and it's all becoming democratized. So, yes, researchers need to need learn these new past two to make sense and tow leverage. This with that big data on the medical center site, there are cures that can be discerned again. Some of our most pressing diseases by leveraging data way gonna change. And we, by the way, we gotta change that mindset, not just yeah, the phD level, but actually at the K 12 levels. Are kids learning the right skills to prepare them for you this new big data world once they get into higher ed, right? And then the last piece, which again we've seen >> on the Enterprise. You've kind of seen the movie on the enterprise side in terms of of cloud adoption. What AWS has done is at first it's a better, more efficient way to run your infrastructure. It's, you know, there's a whole bunch of good things that come from running a cloud infrastructure, but >> that's not. But that's not the end, right? The answer to the question >> is the innovation right? It's It's the speed of change, of speed development and some of the things that we're seeing here around the competitive nature of higher education, trying to appeal to the younger kids because you're competing for their time and attention in there. And they're dollar really interesting stuff with Alexa and some of these other kind of innovation, which is where the goodness really starts to pay off on a cloud investment. >> Yeah, without a doubt, Alexa Week AWS came up with robo maker and Deep Racer on our last reinvent, and there's there's organizations at the K 12 level like First Robotics and Project lead. The way they're doing really cool stuff by making this this relevant it you education becomes more relevant when kids get to do hands on stuff. A W S lowers the price for failure lowers the ability you can just open a browser and do real world hands on bay hands on stuff robotics, a rvr that all of these things again are game changers inside the classroom. But you also have to connect it to jobs at the end, right? And if your educational institutions can become more relevant to their students in terms of preparing them for jobs like they've done in Santa Monica College and like they're doing in Northern Virginia Community College across the state of Louisiana and by May putting the real world stuff in the hands of their kids, they will then start to attract assumes. We saw this happen in Santa Monica. They opened up one class, a classroom of 35 students that sold out in a day. They opened another co ward of 35 sold out in another day or two. The name went from 70 students. Last year, about 325 they opened up this California cloud workforce project where they now have 825 students of five. These Northern Virginia Community College. They're they're cloud associate degree that they ran into tandem with AWS Educate grew from 30 students at the start of the year to well over 100. Now the's programs will drive students to them, right and students will get a job at the end. >> Right? Right, well and can. And can the school support the demand? I mean, that's That's a problem we see with CS, right? Everyone says, Tell your kids to take CS. They want to take CS. Guess what? There's no sections, hope in C. S. So you know, thinking of it in a different way, a little bit more innovative way providing that infrastructure kind of ready to go in a cloud based way. Now we'll hopefully enable them to get more kids and really fulfill the demand. >> Absolutely. There's another thing with professional development. I think you're hitting on, so we definitely have a shortage in terms of teachers who are capable to teach about software development and cloud architecture and data sciences and cybersecurity. So we're putting AWS educators putting a specific focus on professional development. We also want to bring Amazonian, Tze and our customers and partners into the classroom to help with that, because the work based learning and the focus on subject matter expert experts is also important. But we really need to have programs both from industry as well as government out support new teachers coming into this field and in service training for existing teachers to make sure, because yes, we launch those programs and students will come. We have to make sure that were adequately preparing teachers. It's not it's not. It's not easy, but again, we're seeing whether it's Koda Cole out of yeah out of, uh, Roosevelt High School. Are the people that were working with George Mason University and so on were seeing such an appetite for making change for their students? And so they're putting in those extra hours they're getting that AWS certification, and they're getting stronger, prepared to teach inside the clients. >> That's amazing, cause right. Teachers have so many conflict ing draws on their time, many of which have nothing to do with teaching right whether it's regulations. And there's just so many things the teachers have to deal with. So you know the fact that they're encouraged. The fact that they want t to spend and invest in this is really a good sign and really a nice kind of indicator to you and the team that, you know, you guys were hitting something really, really positive. >> Yeah, I think we've had its this foam oh fear of missing out opportunity. There's the excitement of the cloud. There's the excitement of watching your kids. You're really transformed their lives. And it could be Alfredo Cologne who came over from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. You wiped out his economic potential and started taking AWS educate. And you're learning some of these pathways and then landing a job as the Dev Ops engineered. When you see the transformation in your students, no matter what their background is, it is. It is a game changer. This has got to be you. Listen, I love watching that women's team when I win the World Cup, and that the excitement cloud is like the new sport. Robotics is the new sport for these kids. They'll bring them on >> pathways to career, right. We'll take for taking a few minutes in The passion comes through, Andrew Koza big passion guy. And we know Teresa is a CZ Well, so it shines through and keep doing good work. >> Thank you so much for the time. Alright, he's can on Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're in downtown Seattle. A aws. Imagine e d. Thanks for watching. >> We'll see you next time.

>> from Seattle WASHINGTON. It's the Q covering AWS Imagine brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube were in Seattle, >> Washington downtown, right next to the convention center for the AWS. Imagine e d. You show. It's a second year of the show found by Andrew Cohen. His crew, part of Theresa's public sector group, really focused on education. Education means everything from K through 12 higher education, community college education, getting out of the military and retraining education. It's ah, it's a really huge category, and it's everything from, you know, getting the colleges to do a better job by being on cloud infrastructure, innovating and really thinking outside the box are really excited to have the man who's doing a lot of the work on the curriculum development in the education is Ken Eisner is the director of worldwide education programs for AWS. Educate can Great to see you. Thank you so much for having absolutely nice shot out this morning by Theresa, she said. She just keeps asking you for more. So >> you want to deliver for Theresa. Carl says she is. She is a dynamo, and she drives us >> all she does, so just dive into it a little bit. So, you know, there was, Ah, great line that they played in the keynote with Andy talking about, You know, we cannot be protecting old institutions. We need to think about the kids is a story I hear all the time where somebody came from a time machine from 17 76 and landed here today. It wouldn't recognize how we talk, how we get around, but they would recognize one thing, and unfortunately, that's the school house down at the end of the block. So you guys are trying to change that. You're really trying to revolutionize what's happening in education, give us a little bit of background on some of the specific things that you're working on today. >> Yeah, I think Andy, one of the things that he mentioned at that time was that education is really in a crisis on. We need to be inventing at a rapid rate. We need to show that invented, simple, fine inside education, and he's incredibly, he's correct. The students are our customers and we've got to be changing things for them. What we've been really excited to see is that with this giant growth in cloud computing a W. S. It was the fastest I T vendor to ever a $10,000,000,000 a year. The run rate. We're now growing at a 42% or 41% year over year growth Ray and $31,000,000,000 a year Lee company. It's creating this giant cloud computing opportunity, cloud computing in the number one linked in skill for the past four years in Rome. When we look at that software development to cloud architecture to the data science and artificial intelligence and data analytics and cyber security rules. But we're not preparing kids for this. Market Gallop ran a study that that showed about 11% of business executives thought that students were prepared for their jobs. It's not working, It's gotta change. And the exciting thing that's happening right now is workforce development. Governments are really pushing for change in education, and it's starting to happen right? It's pretty amazing were here last year. >> The team last year was very much round the community college releases and the certification of the associate programs and trial down in Southern California, and this year I've been surprised. We've had two guests on where it's the state governor has pushed these initiatives not at the district level, the city level, but from the state winning both Louisiana as well as Virginia. That's pretty amazing support to move in such an aggressive direction and really a new area. >> Yeah, I was actually just moderating a panel where we had Virginia, Louisiana, in California, all sitting down talking about that scaling statewide strategy. We had announcements from the entire CUNY and Sunni or City University of New York and State University of New York system to do both to end four year programs in Cloud Computing. And Louisiana announced it with their K 12 system, their community college system and their four year with Governor John Bel Edwards making the announcement two months ago. So right, we are seeing this scaling consortium, a play where institutions are collaborating across themselves. They're collaborating vertically with your higher ed and K 12 and yet direct to the workforce because we need to be hiring people at such a rapid ray that we we need to be also putting a lot of skin in the game. And that story that happened So again, I agree with Andy said. Education is at a crisis. But now we're starting to see change makers inside of education, making that move right. It's interesting. I wonder, >> you know, is it is it? I don't want to say second tier, that's the wrong word, but kind of what I'm thinking, you know, kind of these other institutions that the schools that don't necessarily have the super top in cachet, you know who are forced to be innovative, right? We're number two. We try harder. As they used to say in the in the Hertz commercial. Um, really a lot of creativity coming out of again the community colleges last year in L. A. Which I was, I was blown away, that kind of understand cause that specifically to skill people up to get a job. But now you're hearing it in much more kind of traditional institutions and doing really innovative things like the thing with the the Marines teaching active duty Marines about data science. >> Yeah, who came up with that idea that phenomenal Well, you know, data permeates every threat. It's not just impure data science, jobs and machine learning jobs. There's air brilliantly important, but it's also in marketing jobs and business jobs. And so on. Dad Analytics that intelligence, security, cybersecurity so important that you think, God, you Northern Virginia Community College in U. S. Marine Corps are working for to make these programs available to their veterans and active military. The other thing is, they're sharing it with the rest of the student by. So that's I think another thing that's happening is this. Sharing this ability all of for this cloud degree program that AWS educate is running. All these institutions are sharing their curricula. So the stuff that was done in Los Angeles is being learned in Virginia's stuff the U. S. Marine Corps is doing is being available to students. Who are you not in military occupations? I think that collaboration mode is is amazing, the thing they say about community colleges and just this new locus of control for education on dhe. Why it's changing community colleges. You're right there. They're moving fast. These institutions have a bias for action. They know they have to. You change the r A. Y right. It's about preventing students for this work for, but they also serve as a flywheel to those four year institutions back to the 12 into the into the workforce and they hit you underserved audience is that the rest is so that you were not all picking from the same crew. You cannot keep going to just share lead institutions and recruit. We have to grow that pipeline. So you thank thank these places for moving quick and operating for their student, right? >> Right, And and And that's where the innovation happens, right? I mean, that's that's, ah, that that's goodness. And the other thing that that was pretty interesting was obviously Skilling people up to get jobs, you need to hire him. That's pretty. That's pretty obvious and simple, but really bringing kind of big data attitude analytics attitude into the universities across into the research departments and the medical schools. And you think at first, of course, researchers are data centric, right? They've been doing it that way for a long time, but they haven't been doing it in kind of the modern big, big data. Real time analytics, you know, streaming data, not sampling data, all the data. So so even bringing that type of point of view, I don't know, mindset to the academic institutions outside of what they're doing for the students. >> Absolutely. The machine learning is really changing the game. This notion of big data, the way that costs have gone down in terms of storing and utilizing data and right, it's streaming data. It's non Columbia or down, as opposed to yeah, the old pure sequel set up right that that is a game changer. No longer can you make just can you make a theory and tested out theories air coming streaming by looking at that data and letting it do some work for you, which is kind of machine learning, artificial intelligence path, and it's all becoming democratized. So, yes, researchers need to need learn these new past two to make sense and tow leverage. This with that big data on the medical center site, there are cures that could be discerned again some of our most pressing diseases by leveraging data, way gonna change. And we, by the way, we gotta change that mindset, not just yeah, the phD level, but actually at the K 12 levels. Are kids learning the right skills to prepare them for you? This new big data world once they get into higher ed, right? And then the last piece, which again we've seen >> on the Enterprise. You've kind of seen the movie on the enterprise side in terms of of cloud adoption. What AWS has done is at first it's a better, more efficient way to run your infrastructure. It's, you know, there's a whole bunch of good things that come from running a cloud infrastructure, but >> that's not. But that's not the end, right? The answer to the question >> is the innovation right? It's It's the speed of change, of speed, a development and some of the things that we're seeing here around the competitive nature of higher education, trying to appeal to the younger kids because you're competing for their time and attention in there. And they're dollar really interesting stuff with Alexa and some of these other kind of innovation, which is where the goodness really starts to pay off on a cloud investment. >> Yeah, without a doubt, Alexa Week AWS came up with robo maker and Deep Racer on our last reinvent, and there's there's organizations at the K 12 level like First Robotics and project lead the way they're doing really cool stuff by making this this relevant you education becomes more relevant when kids get to do hands on stuff. A W S lowers the price for failure lowers the ability you can just open a browser and do real world hands on bay hands on stuff. Robotics, A R V R. That all of these things again are game changers inside the classroom. But you also have to connect it to jobs at the end, right? And if your educational institutions can become more relevant to their students in terms of preparing them for jobs like they've done in Santa Monica College and like they're doing in Northern Virginia Community College across the state of Louisiana and by May putting the real world stuff in the hands of their kids, they will then start to attract assumes. We saw this happen in Santa Monica. They opened up one class, a classroom of 35 students that sold out in a day. They opened another co ward of 35 sold out in another day or two. The name went from 70 students. Last year, about 325 they opened up this California Cloud Workforce Project, where they now have 825 students of five. These Northern Virginia Community College. They're they're cloud associate degree that they ran in tandem with AWS Educate grew from 30 students at the start of the year to well over 100. Now these programs will drive students to them right and students will get a job at the end. >> Right? Right, well in Ken. And can the schools sports a demand? That's that's a problem we see with CS, right? Everyone says, Tell your kids to take CS. They want to take CS. Guess what? There's no sections, hope in C. S. So you know, thinking of it in a different way, a little bit more innovative way providing that infrastructure kind of ready to go in a cloud based way. Now we'll hopefully enable them to get more kids and really fulfill the demand. >> Absolutely. There's another thing with professional development. I think you're hitting on, so we definitely have a shortage in terms of teachers who are capable to teach about software development and cloud architecture and data sciences and cybersecurity. So we're putting a W. C. Educate is putting a specific focus on professional development. We also want to bring Amazonian, Tze and our customers and partners into the classroom to help with that, because the work based learning and the focus on subject matter expert experts is also important. But we really need to have programs both from industry as well as government out support new teachers coming into this field and in service training for existing teachers to make sure, because yes, we launch those programs and students will come. We have to make sure that were adequately preparing teachers. It's not, it's not. It's not easy, but again, we're seeing whether it's Koda Cole out of out of, uh Roosevelt High School. Are the people that were working with George Mason University and so on were seeing such an appetite >> for >> making change for their students? And so they're putting in those extra hours they're getting that AWS certification, and they're getting stronger, prepared to teach inside the class. That's >> amazing, cause right. Teachers have so many conflict ing draws on their time, many of which have nothing to do with teaching right whether it's regulations and there's just so many things the teachers have to deal with. So you know the fact that they're encouraged the fact that they want t to spend and invest in this is really a good sign and really a nice kind of indicator to you and the team that, you know, you guys were hitting something really, really positive. >> Yeah, I think we've had its this foam oh fear of missing out opportunity. There's the excitement of the cloud. There's the excitement of watching your kids. You're really transformed their lives. And it could be Alfredo Cologne who came over from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. You wiped out his economic potential and started taking AWS educate and you're learning some of these pathways and then landing a job has the Dev ops engineer to Michael Brown, who went through that Santa Monica problem and >> landed an >> internship with Annika. When you see the transformation in your students, no matter what their background is, it is. It is a game changer. This has got to be you. Listen, I love watching that women's team when I win the World Cup, and that the excitement cloud is like the new sport. Robotics is the new sport for these kids. They'll bring them on >> pathways to career, right, well, take for taking a few minutes in The passion comes through Andrew Koza, Big passion guy. And we know Teresa is as well. So it shines through and keep doing good work. >> Thank you so much for the time. Alright, He's Can I'm Jeff, You're watching the Cube. We're in downtown Seattle. A aws. Imagine E d. Thanks for >> watching. We'll see you next time.

>> from Seattle WASHINGTON. It's the Q covering AWS Imagine brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the cue, we're in downtown Seattle at the AWS. Imagine, Edie, you event. It's a small conference. It's a second year, but it'll crow like a weed like everything else does the of us. And it's all about Amazon and a degree. As for education, and that's everything from K through 12 community college, higher education, retraining vets coming out of the service. It's a really big area. And we're really excited to have fresh off his keynote presentations where he changed his title on me from what it was >> this morning tow. It was the senator duties >> David Raymond, the director of what was the Virginia Cyber Range and now is the U. S. Cyber range. Virginia Tech. David, Great to see you. >> Yeah, Thank you. Thanks. So the Virginia cyber age actually will continue to exist in its current form. Okay, Well, it'll still serve faculty and students in the in the Commonwealth of Virginia, funded by the state of Virginia. Now the U. S. Cyber Angel fund will provide service to folks outside over, >> so we jumped ahead. So? So it's back up. A step ladder is the Virginia, >> So the Virginia Cyber Range provides courseware and infrastructure so students could do hands on cyber security, educational activities in Virginia, high schools and colleges so funded by the state of Virginia and, um provides this service at no charge to the schools >> and even in high school, >> even in high school. Yes, so now that there are now cybersecurity courses in the Virginia Department of Education course catalogue as of two years ago, and I mean they've grown like wildfire, >> I'm just so a ton of talk here about skills gap. And there's tremendous skills gap. Even the machine's gonna take everybody's job. There's a whole lot of jobs are filled, but what's interesting? I mean, it's the high school angle is really weird. I mean, how do you Most high school kids haven't even kind of clued in tow, privacy and security, opting in and opting out. It's gotta be a really interesting conversation when now you bring security into that a potential career into that and directly reflects on all those things that you do on your phone. >> Well, I would argue that that's exactly the problem. Students are not exposed to cyber security, you know. They don't want the curia potentials are they really don't understand what it is we talked about. We talked about teenagers being digital natives. Really? They know how to use smartphones. They know how to use computers, but they don't understand how they work. And they don't understand the security aspects that go along with using all this technology. And I would argue that by the time a student gets into college they have a plan, right? So I have a student in college. He's he's gonna be a doctor. He knows what a doctor is. He heard of that his whole life. And in high school, he was able to get certified as a nursing assistant. We need cyber security in that same realm, right? If we start students in high school and we and we expose them to cybersecurity courses, they're all elective courses. Some of the students will latch onto it, and I'll say, Hey, this is what I want to be when I grew up. And in Virginia, we have we have this dearth of cyber security expertise and this is true across the country. In Virginia, right now, we have over 30,000 cyber security jobs that are unfilled. That's about 1/3 of the cyber security jobs in this state. And I mean, that's a serious problem, not only in Virginia but nationwide. And one of the ways to fix that is to get high school students exposed to cybersecurity classes, give them some real hands on opportunities. So they're really doing it, not just learning the words and passing the test, and I mean really again in Virginia, this is this is grown like wildfire and really thinks revolutionized cybersecurity education in the state. >> And what are some of the topics that say, a high school level, where you know you're kind of getting versed on the vocabulary and the terminology vs when they go into into college and start to take those types, of course, is >> yeah, so in Virginia, there's actually cybersecurity courses across the C T E career pathways. And so SETI is the career and technical education curricula. And so there are courses like cyber security and health care, where students learn about personal health data and how to secure that specific specific kinds of data, they learn about the regulations behind that data. There's healthcare in manufacturing, where students learn about industrial control systems and you know how those things need to be secured and how they're different from a laptop or a phone. And the way those air secured and what feeds into all of those courses is an introductory course. Cyber security fundamentals, where students learn some of the very basics they learn the terminology. They learn things like the C I. A. Triad right, confidentiality, integrity and availability of the three basic components of security that you try to maintain for any system. So they start out learning the basics. But still they're doing that hands on. So they're so they're in a network environment where they see that you know that later on in the course during Capstone exercises, they might see someone trying to attack a computer that they're that they're tasked to defend and a defender of what does that look like? What are the things that I'm going to do? That computer? You know, I might install anti virus. I might have a firewall on the computer. And how do I set that up and etcetera etcetera. So high school start with the basics. As as students progressed through their high school years, there are opportunities to take further more advanced classes in the high schools. And then when they get to college, some of those students are gonna have latched onto cyber security as a potential career field. Now, now we've got him right way, get him into the right into the right majors and into the right courses. And our hope is that that's gonna sort of kick start this pipeline of students in Virginia colleges, >> right? And then I wonder if you could >> talk a little bit about the support at the state level. And it's pretty interesting that you had him from the state level we heard earlier today about supported the state level. And it was Louisiana for for another big initiative. So you know that the fact that the governor and the Legislature are basically branding this at the state level, not the individual school district level, is a pretty strong statement of the prioritization that they're putting on this >> that has been critical to our success. If we didn't have state level support, significant state level support, there's no way we could be where we are. So the previous governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, he latched on to cyber security education as one of his signature initiatives. In fact, he was the president of the State Governors Association, and in that role he cybersecurity was one of his condition. So so he felt strongly about educating K 12 education college students feeding that cybersecurity pipeline Onda Cyberangels one of one of a handful of different initiatives. So they were veterans scholarships, and there were some community college scholarships and other other initiatives. Some of those are still ongoing so far are not. But but Cyber Range has been very successful. Funded by the state provides a service at no cost to high schools and colleges on Dad's Been >> critically, I can't help. We're at our say earlier this year, and I'm just thinking of all the CEOs that I was sitting with over the course of a couple of days that are probably looking for your phone number right now. Make introduction. But I'm curious. Are are the company's security companies. I mean, Arcee is a huge show. Amazon just had their first ever security conference means a lot of money being invested in this space. Are they behind it? Have you have you looked for in a kind of private company participation to help? Because they desperately need these employees? >> Definitely. So we've just started down that road, Really? I mean, our state funding has kept us strong to this point in our state funding is gonna continue into the foreseeable future. But you're right. There are definitely opportunities to work with industry. Certainly a DBS has been a very strong partner of our since the very beginning. They really I mean, without without the help of some, some of their cloud architects and other technical folks way could not have built what we built in the eight of us. Cloud. We've also been talking to Palo Alto about using some of their virtual appliances in our network environments. So yeah, so we're definitely going down the road of industry partners and that will continue to grow, I'm sure >> So then fast forward today to the keynote and your your announcement that now you taking it beyond just Virginia. So now it's the U. S. Cyber range. Have that come apart? Come about. What does that mean? >> Yes, So we've been We've been sharing the story of the Virginia cyber range for the last couple of years, and I goto national conferences and talk about it. And, um, just to just sort of inform other states, other other school systems what Virginia's doing. How could you? How could you potentially match what we're doing and what The question that I keep getting is I don't want to reinvent the wheel. How can I buy what you have? And that's been sort of a constant drumbeat over the last couple of years. So we decided fairly early on that we might want to try to expand beyond Virginia, and it just sort of the conditions were right about six months ago. So we set a mark on the wall, he said. In Summer of 2019 we're gonna make this available to folks outside of Virginia. And so, so again, the Virginia Cyberangels still exist. Funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia, the U. S cyber range is still part of Virginia Tech. So within Virginia Tech, but we will have to we will have to essentially recoup our costs so we'll have to spend money on cloud infrastructure and We'll have to spend salary money on folks who support this effort. And so we'll recoup costs from folks that are outside of Virginia using our service. But, um, we think the costs are gonna be very competitive compared to similar efforts. And we're looking forward to some successes here. >> And do you think you're you're kind of breakthrough will be at the high school level, the You know, that underground level, you know, where do you kind of see the opportunities? You've got the whole thing covered with state support in Virginia. How does that get started in California? How's that get started here? Yeah, that's a Washington state. >> That's a great question. So really, when we started this, I thought we were building a thing for higher ed. That's my experience. I've been teaching cyber security and higher ed for several years, and I knew I knew what I would want if I was using it, and I do use it. So I teach classes at Virginia Tech Graduate program. So I I used the Virginia side in my class, and, um, what has happened is that the high schools have latched onto this as I mentioned, and Most of our users are high schools. In Virginia, we have 180. Virginia High School is using the Virgin Cyber. That's almost >> 188 1 >> 180. That's almost half the high schools in the state using the Virginia cyber age. So we think. And if you think about, you know, higher. Ed has been teaching cybersecurity classes that the faculty members who have been teaching them a lot of them have set up their own network infrastructure. They have it set up the way they want it, and it ties into their existing courseware, and you know they're going to use that, At least for now. What we provide is is something that makes it so that a high school or a community college doesn't have to figure out how to fund or figure out how to actually put this network architecture together. They just come to us. They have the flexibility of the flexibility to use, just are very basic plug and play network environments, or they have flexibility to, um, make modifications depending on how sophisticated they themselves are with with, you know, manipulating systems and many playing the network so so Our expectation is that the biggest growth is going to be in the high school market, >> right? That's great, because when you say cyber range God, finally, Donna me use it like a target range. It's like a place to go practice >> where the name comes from, right? >> Absolutely. If I finally like okay, I get it. So because it's not only the curriculum and the course where and everything else but it's actually an environment, it depends on the stage things and do things exactly >> So students could d'oh offensive, offensive and defensive cybersecurity activities. And so early on, when we were teaching students howto hack essentially in colleges, you know, there were people who were concerned about that on the military case we make for that is you can't teach somebody how to defend unless they understand how they're gonna be attacked. The same is true in this case. So all of our all of our course, where has lots of ethics and no other legal and other other discussions embedded throughout. So students understand the implications of what their actions would be if they do it somewhere else. And, um, right, these are all isolated network environments their places where students can get hands on in a place where they can essentially do whatever they want without causing trouble on the school network or on the Internet. And it's very much akin to a rifle range, >> right? Like you said, you can have different scenarios. And I would imagine there's probably gonna be competitions of you think. Fact. You know what's going on in the robotics world for lots of all these things, right? Like white hat, black hat hacker. Well, very, very exciting. David, Congratulations. And it sounds like you're well on your way. Thanks. Great. Alright, >> He's David. I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube were at Washington State Convention Centre just across the street at a W s. Imagine. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. >> Thanks.

>> From Seattle, Washington, it's the Cube! Covering AWS Imagine, brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine EDU Conference, it's the second year of the conference, we came up last year, I think it was like 400 people, this year's like 800 people, like all the Amazons, it grows and grows and grows. Really again, specifically a carve out from the public sector group, all about education, that's K-12, that's higher education, it's community college education, it's retraining vets, it's a huge thing. We're really excited to have the ring leader this whole event, he's just coming off the keynote, he's Andrew Ko, he's a global education director for AWS, working for Teresa. Andrew, great to see you. >> Thank you very much for having us here. >> What an event! >> Yes! >> And good job on the keynote, you guys covered a lot of different segments. This education opportunity challenge-- >> Yah. >> Is so multifaceted. >> Yes. >> Now how do you kind of organize again, what are the ways that you kind of look at this opportunity? >> Well, that's a great point, we could go on for days and for so many of the important topics, but we've really broken it down into three themes that we've carried on from last year. Really wanted to help and assist when it comes to employability. As we talk about the growth of AWS Cloud, what we're finding is there's a tremendous amount of lack of skilled talent to really fulfill those demands. So workforce is one of those particular areas. Secondly, we're seeing a tremendous growth on machine learning. The way to really predict things, whether it's student success or research. Finally, we also have a third theme that is come around innovation and transformation. Not so much always about the IT, but how are people moving along quickly on their Cloud journey? And really enabling a lot of their stakeholders, like researchers, medical centers, as well as students, to really adopt and learn technology but also embrace it in very very new innovative ways. >> Right. It's it's funny, there was a video showed in the keynote with Andy and I just want to pull the quote where you said it's not about protecting today, the infrastructure-- >> Yup. >> And we've joked many times on air about if when the time machine and you pulled somebody from 1760 and they came here-- >> Andrew: Yah. >> The only thing they'd recognize is the schoolhouse, right? >> Andrew: Right. >> But you guys are really working to change that. Everything from really, Cloud as an infrastructure efficiency play-- >> Andrew: Right. >> All the way through Cloud as an enabler for innovation, doing some really crazy things with Alexa and some of the other projects that are underway. >> Absolutely. And and we always start with our customers first. They're really the ones that have that vision and want to ensure that it's improved, and so we're excited to be a part of that journey. And as just a couple examples on how that is starting to change, is through this adaptive way of looking at information and data, and as an example as I mentioned that we're going to have an incredible panel sessions of many of our speakers, and one of which I like to call out is with the California Community College. They have over 2.1 million students at any given year, and now with the technology, they can start to try to look at patterns of success for students, patterns of challenges, and really start to make education more interactive, which is a one-way like what you were mentioning maybe it was a hundred years ago. >> Right, with the chalkboard. (chuckles) >> So it's so funny with, we talk about ML and AI-- >> Yup. >> You know, everyone's talks in the paper about, you know, the machines are going to take all of our jobs, but if you go to the back pages of the paper, I don't know if they have that anymore-- >> Yah. (chuckles) >> There's a whole lot of open recs, right? >> Yup. >> People can't hire fast enough for these jobs-- >> Right. >> So it's actually that's a much bigger problem than them taking jobs away right now, so this re-skilling is really really significant. >> Absolutely. And we always say that there's not necessarily always a jobs gap, but it's really a skills gap that are going unfulfilled. So there is a change in a lot of the talents that are required, but that's why it's so important for us representing education. That's not just about the infrastructure but how do we better prepare not just the learners of today that need some re-skilling, but also the learners for tomorrow, and provide them a pathway in a way to be interested in it, but also more importantly, getting jobs. >> Jeff: Right. >> The end of day, it's not just about a learning thing, it's about an economic thing. And so we're finding all those announcements as you heard earlier, such as Brazil. With SENAI, they're going to now announce that this curriculum is going to be available for 2.5 million education learners across the entire country, working with 740 universities so we're really excited to be behind that, and we would love to take the credit but really it's our customers, it's our leaders, it's those individuals that are really cutting edge and making those things happen. >> Jeff: Right. So again, last year was a lot about the community college and the certification of those programs, the accreditation. This year you're introducing bachelor programs, and-- >> Yes. >> Really amazing statement in the keynote about the governor of the state of Louisiana-- >> Yes. >> Basically dictating the importance of having a four-year degree based on Cloud skills. That's pretty significant. >> It's exciting. I mean, and I would say, as living in Virginia we're excited to see Northern Virginia alongside with Santa Monica Community College and Columbus Day Community College jointly together created, it wasn't us that created it, it was actually the faculty members and we got together created it, and the governor of Louisiana just took it to the next level. He really, alongside with his leadership team, of the individual leaders of the state community colleges as well as the universities said not only are we going to adopt the two-year across the state but we're going to have it articulate, allowing for students to get credit at the four-year. >> Jeff: Right. >> And why that's important, Jeff, is that we want to make sure that the pathway has on-ramps of how and where you can intersect and to get re-skilled, but also off-ramps. Some of them may get jobs right away at community college, some of them want to go to a four-year and go have more deeper learning and a different experience so-- >> Jeff: Right. >> All those options are now open. >> Right. >> And having that governor just indicates that it's important at a massive massive scale. >> Jeff: Yah. So another thing, we we have to talk about Alexa right? I forget how many millions of units you said are sold-- >> Hundred million devices last time I checked, yah. 70,000 skills. >> Lots and lots of skills, right, the skills. So it's pretty interesting in terms of really kind of helping the universities, beside just be more efficient with the Cloud infrastructure but actually appeal to their customers' students-- [Andrew] Yah. >> In a very very different way. And a pretty creative way to use Alexa and what's what's fascinating to me is I don't think we've barely scratched the surface-- >> Andrew: That's correct. >> Of voice, as a UI. >> Andrew: Yah. >> We won't. We're old, we have thumbs. (chuckles) >> But the kids coming up, right? Eventually that's going to flip-- >> Andrew: Right. >> And it's going to be more voice than keyboards so you guys took an interesting tack from the beginning, opening up the API to let people program it, versus just learning-- >> Absolutely. >> Another method. So some exciting skills, what are some of the ones that that surprise you as you go around-- >> Well-- >> To visit these customers? >> There's so many of them, it's hard to announce and discuss all of them but I would definitely say yes, this next generation, not the old fuddy-duddies like me, learn very differently now. And they're expecting to learn very differently and I think voice and natural user interface is going to be the big thing that people are going to be comfortable to talk to things and have responses back, and some of the things that we announced with our partners, well actually a few weeks ago that we mentioned in the keynote, like Kahoot!, one of the larger interactive ways of young students learning from gamification. Now they can actually speak to it, and engage in much different ways rather than just typing on a keyboard or or coding or typing things in phones, so that's exciting. Or ACT. As you just mentioned earlier, you have a young rising sophomore in a university. They probably had to, she or he had to probably study in order to get into college. Well, what if there was a voice-enabled advisor of how to take the test and the examination and that's what ACT launched. >> Jeff: Right. >> Just some small examples, and now we want to extend that excitement by encouraging other education technology companies to enroll their application by South by Southwest that we're going to announce the winners there-- >> Jeff: Right. >> Next year. So to have a lot of energy, have the educators, and just build on that incredible momentum. >> Alright Andrew, so before I let you go, I know that you got a couple thousand people here waiting to talk to you. (chuckles) The other thing is you guys have gone outside the classroom, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> Really interesting conversation about helping active-duty marines learn how to use data. Really interesting conversations about bringing the big data revolution more heavily into research and more heavily into medical and more heavily into those types of activities that happen at top-tier universities. >> Andrew: Yah. >> Really different way to again apply this revolution that's been happening on the commercial side, the enterprise side into which we play, and and helping people adapt and and evolve and really embrace big data as a tool in solving these other problems. >> Absolutely. And I think you mentioned some very important points there. Number one for us, we always think of learners as individuals that are just growing up through the educational system. But we also have learners that are lifelong learners, that have changing careers or alternating changing, so we're excited to be a part of the announcement with Northern Virginia Community College where they created a special program for Marine Corps, so they can come out and learn data intelligence, that would be applied for all, but also focused with the Marine Corps individuals there to really learn another skill set and apply it to a new occupation. >> Jeff: In their active duty. This is not for when they come out-- >> Absolutely. >> For for re-train. This is in while they're in their >> Very important. >> In their existing job. >> Absolutely. And that so that when they come out they have now applied skills in addition to the skills that they've learned being in the Marine Corps, so that they can also become really productive right after their enlistment there. >> Jeff: Right. >> And then you mentioned about research, I mean that is also an exciting thing that people so often also forget, that education also extends out there, and so like UCLA, they've created a new department blending medicine as well as engineering to tackle very important research like cancer and genomics, and so those complicated facets are now no longer is IT a separate conversation, but it's an infused way where much more high-performance computing can handle some interesting research to accelerate the outcomes. >> Right. Well Andrew, well thanks for inviting us to be here for the ride. We've we've been along the AWS ride (chuckles) >> For a while, from summits in 2012 and reinvents so we know it's going to grow, we're excited to watch it, and we'll see you next year. >> Jeff, thank you very much, and the ride is just beginning. >> Alright. He's Andrew, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube, we're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine EDU Conference. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back, everyone to our nation's capital. We are the Cube. We are live at A W s Public Sector summit. I'm your host Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Farrier. We're joined by Ken Eisner Director Worldwide Educational programs at a WS Thanks so much for coming on the show >> you for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit. About what? What you do as the director of educational programs. Sure, I head >> up a program called a Ws Educate a ws educate is Amazon's global initiative to provide students and teachers around the world with the resource is that they need really to propel students into this awesome field of cloud computing. We launched it back in May of 2,015 and we did it to fill this demand. If we look at it today, what kind of right in the midst of this fourth industrial revolution is changing the means of production obviously in the digital on cloud space, But it's also creating this new worker class all around. Yeah, the cloud Advanced services like machine learning I robotics, I ot and so on. And if you looked at the employer demand, um, Cloud computing has been the number one linked in skill for the past four years in a row. We look at cloud computing. We kind of divide into four families. Software development, cloud architecture, the data world, you know, like machine learning I data science, business intelligence and Alex and then the middle school opportunities like technical customer support, age and cybersecurity, which can range all the way from middle school of Ph. D. But yet the timeto hire these people has grown up dramatically. Glass door as study of companies over there platform between two thousand 92 1,050 18 and show that the timeto higher had increased by 80%. Yet just think about that we talk about I mean, this conference is all about innovation. If you don't have builders, if you don't have innovators, how the heck Kenya Kenya innovate? >> Can I gotta ask you, Andy, just to have known him for over eight years and reporting on him and covering it was on when when everyone didn't understand yet what it was. Now everyone kind of does our congratulations and success. But to see him on stage, talk passionately about education. Yeah, mean and knowing Andy means it's kind of boiled up because he's very reserved, very conservative guy, pragmatic. But for him to be overtly projecting, his opinion around education, which was really yeah, pretty critical means something's going on. This is a huge issue not just in politics, riel, state, local areas where education, where >> the root of income inequality it's it's a lot of. >> There's a lot of challenges. People just aren't ready for these new types of jobs that are coming out that >> pay well, by the way. And this is Elliott >> of him out there that are unfilled for the first time, there are more jobs unfilled than there are candidates for them. You're solving this problem. Tell us what's going on in Amazon. Why the fewer what's going on with all this? Why everyone's so jacked up >> a great point. I, Andy, I think, said that education is at a crisis point today and really talked about that racial inequality piece way. Timeto hire people in the software development space Cloud architecture um technical called cloud Support Age. It's incredibly long so that it's just creating excess costs into the system, but were so passionate, like if you look at going to the cloud, Amazon wants to disrupt areas where we do not see that progress happening. Education is an area that's in vast need for disruption. There are people were doing amazing stuff. We've heard from Cal Poly. We've heard from Yeah, Arizona State. Carnegie Mellon. There's Joseph Alan at North Northeastern. >> People are >> doing great stuff. We're looking at you some places that are doing dual enrollment programs between high school and community in college and higher ed. But we're not moving fast enough, but you guys >> are provided with educate your program. This is people can walk in the front door without any kind of going through gatekeepers or any kind of getting college. This is straight up from the front, or they could be dropouts that could be post college re Skilling. Whatever it is, they could walk in the front door and get skilled up through educators that correct, >> we send people the ws educate dot com. All you need is some element of being in school activity, or you won't be going back from Re Skilling perspective and you came free access into resource is whether your student teacher get free access into content. That's map two jobs, because again, would you people warm from the education way? All want enlightenment contributors to sai all important, But >> really they >> want careers and all the stats gallop ransom good stats about both what, yet students and what industry wants. They want them to be aligned to jobs. And we're seeing that there's a man >> my master was specifically If I'm unemployed and I want to work, what can I do? I walk into you, You can go >> right on and we can you sign up, we'll give you access to these online cloud. Career pathways will give you micro credentials so we can bad you credential you against you We belong something on Samarian Robo maker. So individual services and full pathways. >> So this a >> direct door for someone unemployed We're going to get some work and a high paying job, >> right? Right. Absolutely. >> We and we also >> give you free access into a ws because we know that hands on practice doing real world applications is just vital. So we >> will do that end. By the way, at the end of >> this, we have a job board Amazon customer In part of our job, we're all saying >> these air >> jobs are super high in demand. You can apply to get a job as an intern or as a full time. Are you through our job? >> This is what people don't know about Rebecca. The war is not out there, and this is the people. Some of the problems. This is a solution >> exactly, but I actually want to get drilled down a little bit. This initiative is not just for grown ups. It's it's for Kimmie. This is for you. Kid starts in kindergarten, So I'm really interested to hear what you're doing and how you're thinking about really starting with the little kids and particularly underrepresented minorities and women who are not. There were also under representative in the in the cloud industry how you're thinking expansively about getting more of those people into these jacks. And actually, it's still >> Day one within all y'all way started with Way started with 18 and older because we saw that as the Keith the key lever into that audience and start with computer science but we've expanded greatly. Our wee last year reinvent, We introduced pathways for students 14 over and cloud literacy materials such as a cloud inventor, Cloud Explorer and Cloud Builder. Back to really get at those young audiences. We've introduced dual enrollment stuff that happens between high school community college or high school in higher ed, and we're working on partnerships with scratch First Robotics Project lead the way that introduced, whether it's blocked based coding, robotics were finding robotics is such a huge door opener again, not just for technically and >> get into it absolutely, because it's hands on >> stuff is relevant. They weren't relevant stuff that they can touch that. They can feel that they can open their browser, make something happen, build a mobile application. But they also want tohave pathways into the future. They want to see something that they can. Eventually you'll wind up in and a ws the cloud just makes it real, because you, Khun do real worlds stuff from a browser by working with the first robot. Biotics are using scratch toe develop Ai ai extensions in recognition and Lex and Polly and so on. So we've entered into partnerships with him right toe. Open up those doors and create that long term engagement and pipe on into the high demand jobs of tomorrow. >> What do you do in terms of the colleges that you mentioned and you mention Northeastern and Cal Poly Arizona State? What? What are you seeing? Is the most exciting innovations there. >> Yes. So, first of all, we happen to be it. We're in over 24 100 institutions around the world. We actually, by the way, began in the U. S. And was 65% us. Now it's actually 35% US 65% outside. We're in 200 countries and territories around the world. But institutions such as the doing amazing stuff Polo chow at a Georgia Tech. Things that he's doing with visual ization on top of a ws is absolutely amazing. We launched a cloud Ambassador program to reward and recognize the top faculty from around the world. They're truly doing amazing stuff, but even more, we're seeing the output from students. There was a student, Alfredo Cologne. He was lived in Puerto Rico, devastated by Hurricane Maria. So lost his, you know, economic mobility came to Florida and started taking classes at local schools. He found a ws educate and just dove headlong into it. Did eight Pathways and then applied for a job in Dev Ops at Universal Studios and received a job. He is one of my favorite evangelists, but and it's not just that higher ed. We found community college students. We launched a duel enrolment with between Santa Monica College and Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, focusing again a majority minority students, largely Hispanic, in that community. Um, and Michael Brown, you finish the cloud computing certificate, applied for an internship, a mission clouds so again a partner of ours and became a God. Hey, guys, internship And they start a whole program around. So not only were seeing your excitement out of the institutions, which we are, but we're also seeing Simon. Our students and businesses all want to get involved in this hiring brigade. >> Can I gotta ask. We're learning so much about Amazon would cover him for a long time. You know all the key buzzwords. Yeah, raise the bar all these terms working backwards. So >> tell us about what's your >> working backwards plan? Because you have a great mission and we applaud. I think it's a super critical. I think it's so under promoted. I think we'll do our best to kind of promote. It's really valuable to society and getting people their jobs. Yeah, but it's a great opportunity, you know, itself. But what's your goal? What's your What's your objective? How you gonna get there, What your priorities, What do you what do you what do you need >> to wear? A pure educational workforce? And today our job is to work backwards from employers and this cloud opportunity, >> the thing that we >> care about our customers still remains or student on DH. So we want to give excessive mobility to students into these fields in cloud computing, not just today and tomorrow. That requires a lot that requires machine lurking in the algorithm that you that changed the learning objectives you based on career, so content maps to thes careers, and we're gonna be working with educational institutions on that recruited does. Recruiting doesn't do an effective job at matching students into jobs. >> Are we >> looking at all of just the elite institutions as signals for that? That's a big >> students are your customer and customer, but older in support systems that that support you, right? Like Cal Poly and others to me. >> Luli. We've also got governments. So we were down in Louisiana just some last month, and Governor Bel Edwards said, We're going to state why with a WS educates cloud degree program across all of their community college system across the University of Louisiana State system and into K 12 because we believe in those long term pathways. Never before have governors have ministers of country were being with the Ministry of Education for Singapore in Indonesia, and we're working deep into India. Never had they been more aligned toe workforce development. It creates huge unrest. We've seen this in Spain and Greece we see in the U. S. But it's also this economic imperative, and Andy is right. Education is at a crisis. Education is not solving the needs of all their constituents, but also industries to blame. We haven't been deeply partnered with education. That partnership is such a huge part of >> this structural things of involved in the educational system. It's Lanier's Internets nonlinear got progressions air differently. This is an opportunity because I think if the it's just like competition, Hey, if the U. S Department of Education not get their act together. People aren't going to go to school. I mean, Peter Thiel, another political spectrums, was paying people not to go to college when I was a little different radical view Andy over here saying, Look at it. That's why you >> see the >> data points starting to boil up. I see some of my younger son's friends all saying questioning right what they could get on YouTube. What's accessible now, Thinking Lor, You can learn about anything digitally now. This is totally People are starting to realize that I might not need to be in college or I might not need to be learning this. I can go direct >> and we pay lip >> service to lifelong education if you end. If you terminally end education at X year, well, you know what's what's hap happening with the rest of your life? We need to be lifelong learners. And, yes, we need to have off ramps and the on ramps throughout our education. Thie. Other thing is, it's not just skill, it's the skills are important, and we need to have people were certified in various a ws skills and come but we also need to focus on those competencies. Education does a good job around critical decision making skills and stuff like, um, collaboration. But >> do they really >> do a good job at inventing? Simplified? >> Do they teach kids >> to fam? Are we walking kids to >> social emotional, you know? >> Absolutely. Are we teaching? Were kids have tio think big to move >> fast and have that bias for action? >> I think that I want to have fun doing it way. Alright, well, so fun having you on the show. A great conversation. >> Thank you. I appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John. For your you are watching the cube. Stay tuned.

(funky upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody we're wrapping up day one of Cisco Live! Barcelona CUBE coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Donnie Williams is the IT Director at Scott Equipment out of Louisiana and Eric Herzog is back. He's the CMO of IBM Storage. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. So tell us about Scott Equipment. What do you guys do? What's the company all about? >> We're a heavy equipment dealer, so we've been in the business for 80 years, privately owned company. And so we started out in farm implement 80 years ago by the founder Tom Scott which is where the name Scott Equipment comes from. And so we transitioned over the years to construction equipment and we're now, so back in 2014 we sold all of our, the farm stores that handle all of that equipment, and now we're strictly servicing the construction industry and petrochemical industry. >> So you're a dealer of large equipment. And you service it as well, or? >> Yes we service it. We're primarily a rental company first. Then we also sell what we rent. We service it and it also parts as well. >> So we're talking massive? >> Yes big. If you think, one of our main clients is Volvo which if you've seen the show Gold Rush, that Volvo equipment that you see there, that's what we sell. >> It's incredible machines. >> Yeah, yeah they are I had a chance to play with one. I went to a Shippensburg Pennsylvania where their North America office is and had a chance to play with their largest excavator. That was fun. >> So is a lot of you IT centered on sort of the maintenance business and the service business or? >> Yes. Mostly Mirror is like a car dealership. So like I said, we do sale service, parts, all of that. >> So the business flow starts after the sale is made, obviously. >> Exactly, yes, we sell, yeah, exactly. We get the equipment out there in the territory and then the revenue continues to come in. >> So what are some of the challenges, the external challenges that are driving your business? >> So really, our, the whole heavy equipment industry is, is kind of behind the times in my, from a dealership perspective. From a manufacturer perspective. They're somewhat up with technology, especially Volvo, but from a dealership, they're mainly privately owned, so they're not, there's not a whole lot of resources in technology. That's not a focus for them. They're focused on the business side of it, so. When I first started at the company 10, 11 years ago now, there was one guy servicing 600 employees. And it was-- >> One IT person? >> One IT person. So, as you can imagine, it was a nightmare. I mean it's not the guy's fault. I don't blame him at all. It's just the way that they had done business and not changed. >> He was a bummed out IT person. >> Yeah, right exactly, yeah. >> Now how'd you guys find them? >> So they're a customer of ours for the verses stack. We have a partner that they've been buying their IBM and their Cisco gear from, and then when they were doing a modernization effort, the reseller talked to Scott and said, Donnie, what d'ya think? How about doing this converge infrastructure. Easier to employ at sep-tor. So it all came through their existing channel partner that they were using for both IBM gear and Cisco gear. >> So you wanted a solution that one guy could run, right? >> We've now at least grown that, our company to, now we have six total in our department. So we've changed a lot since I started 11 years ago. >> And what are they spending their time doing? >> Primarily, we do a lot of help desk, assistant administration, we do mostly, my focus is to make sure that our employees are satisfied so they can take care of the customer. And that's the primary goal and along with that comes systems administration, as well, so. >> But you know, a full stack like this. I mean the joke. You need more than one person. >> Right. But it's going to be simplified, you know what you're buying, >> Right, exactly. >> It's predictable, and therefore, you shouldn't need to be seen on a day to day basis. >> Yes, I like keeping things simple, simple as possible. So, that makes my job easier, it makes my team's job easier, as well. >> So what kind of things are you driving? Is it, ya know, data protection? Is it, what sort of, you know, use cases do you have on your stack? >> We're from our, we're servicing on our, with Cisco, I'm sorry, verses stack. It's mostly it's all private cloud. We're servicing applications that supplement our core ERP system. So, we have reporting solutions. When we first bought the verses stack, we were considering moving to another ERP system, and we would have that infrastructure in place to migrate to that. So we still have that, actually, element table as an option for us. >> The migration to a new ERP system? >> Yes. >> We should talk afterwords. >> We're avoiding that all costs. >> Right, well, of course. You don't want to convert if you don't have to. Yeah but sometimes it's a business case. Sometimes it's hard to make. We'll talk. >> Exactly. >> Cloud in your future or present? >> We're doing some-- >> SAS stuff, or? >> Yeah a little of that. I mean anything. I mean things that make sense for us to do cloud. Security services. We're doing, of course, probably the most common is hosting email. We're doing a lot of that. Share point. That type of solution in the cloud. >> How long you've been with the company? >> 11 years. >> 11 years, okay, so, thinking about the last decade, I mean a lot has changed. >> Yes. >> What are you most proud of? What's like your biggest success that you can share with us? >> Really building the IT department and bringing our company into the 21st century from a technology perspective. I mean, like I said, we had one person that was handling it. It was really impossible. I mean, you couldn't depend on one person and expect the company to survive long term. >> Yeah, that one person had to say no a lot. >> Exactly, right. He just couldn't get everything done. >> So, really that modernization and that's kind of where you guys came in, right? >> IT modernization play. The verses stack is heavily used for that and, you know, as we've said on the earlier interview, we had a CSPN. We've also used it to go to the next level from an IT transformation to the future. 'Cause in that case, as you know, that was a CSP who uses it to service, you know, hundreds of customers all across the UK in a service model. And in this case, this is more of a IT modernization, take the old stuff, upgrade it to what it was. They even had an old IBM blade servers. That's old this stuff was. Old XE6 Blade servers that must've been 10 years old before they went to the verses stack. >> How many people in the company? Roughly? >> Right now, we've actually sold off side since I've been with the company, we've sold off some of our nonperforming business units. We're probably roughly around 550 now. >> Okay. >> So I mean, we're actually more profitable now than we were 11 years ago. We have less employees, but our profitability is actually exceeded. >> Theme of simplification. >> Exactly, right. >> So what's the biggest challenge you face as the head of IT, today? >> The biggest, probably the biggest challenge would be me wanting to implement technologies that are not ready. I want to have the competitive edge of the industry. I want to be able to be ahead of the curve. And that's probably the biggest challenge. >> And you're saying you can't because the tech isn't ready? Or it's a skills issue? >> It's just the industry. Just trying to work with vendors and getting them to be ready for, I say vendors, manufacturers. They're our vendors. To get them to, and know their dealers as well. To all be acceptable to the technology's that's been there 20 years. >> What would you say is the top, number one, or the top things IBM has done to make your life easier? And what's the one thing they could to do that they're not doing that could make your life easier? What's the, start with what they've done. You know what the success is that have helped. >> Really, we've been a longtime IBM customer. We have not just the verses stack, but we also have the power system, which actually runs our core ERP. >> Ah, okay, so. >> So I mean, we've had long standing relationship with IBM. Reliability is there. The trust is there, as well. >> Yeah, long term partnership. Alright, what's the one thing they could do? If you could wave a wand and you said, IBM will to X, what would x be to make your life better? >> Cut the price. >> Ah, here we go! (all laughing) I should've prefaced that soon! Besides cut the price. Alright we'll leave it there on that topic. But you know, the power system thing brings up, you know, our friend Bob Piccano's running the cognitive systems group now. You guys doing some stuff with AI. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> So what we've done is two things. First of all, we've imbued inside of our systems AI all over the place. So for example, we tier data which can do not only to own array, but literally to 440 arrays that have someone else's logo on them. It's all AI done. So when the data's hot, it's on the fastest tier. So if you have 15,000 RPM drives and 7,200 RPM drives, it goes to 15,000 when it cools off. AI automatically moves it. The storage admin does nothing. You don't set palsies AI takes care of it. We have Flash, and you have hard drives. Same thing. It'll move around. And you could have an IBM array talking to an EMC array. So all sorts of technology that we've implemented that's AI in the box. Then on top of that, what we've done is come up with a series of AI reference architectures for storage as one of the critical elements of the platform. So what we've done is create what we call a data pipeline. It involves not only our storage arrays, but four pieces or our software, spectrum scale, which is giant scale off file system, in fact, the two fastest supercomputers in the world have almost half an exabyte of that software, storage with that software. Our spectrum discover, which we announced in CUBE 4, which is all about better management of metadata. So, for AI workloads, big data analytic workloads, the data scientist doesn't prep the data. They can actually talk to what we do, and you can create all these metadata templates, and then boom, they run an AI workload on Thursday, and then run an analytic workload on Friday, but all automated. Our archive, and then our cloud object storage. So, all that is really, think about it more as an oval, because when you're doing an AI system, you're constantly learning. So the thing you got to do is, one, you've got to have high performance and be able to handle the analytics which you we do on Flash. 'Kay, so the Flash is connected. You've got to be able to move the data around and part of the thing with the Spectrum Discover is that we can talk through an API, to a piece of AI software, to piece of analytic software, to a piece of big data software. And they can literally go through that API, create templates for the metadata, and then automatically suck what they need into their app and then munge it and then spew it back out. And then obviously on the archive side, want to be able quickly recall the data because if you think about an AI system, it's like a human. So let's give you my Russian example. So I'm old enough, when I was a kid, there were bomb shelters in my neighborhood that people dug in the backyard. Then we have, you know, Nixon lighting up the Chinese. Then we have Reagan and Gorbachev. Next thing you know, the wall comes down, right? Then the next thing you know, there's no longer a Soviet Union. All of a sudden, ah, the Russians might be getting a little aggressive even though they're no longer communist, and now you see, depending on which political party, that they're totally against us, or they're totally helping us, but, you know, if they really were hacking systems, whatever political party you're in, they really were hacking our systems trying to manipulate the election. Pro or con, the point is that's kind of like a cyber attack. And that's not a good thing. So we learn and it changes. So an AI system needs to understand and change, constantly learn, if all of a sudden you have flying cars, that's going to be different than a car with tires. Now a lot of it may be the same. The interior, all the amenities, but the engines going to be different, and there are companies, including the big three, four, five, auto, who are actually working on flying cars. Who knows if it'll happen, but the AI system needs to understand and learn that and constantly learn. And so, the foundation has to heavily resilient, heavily performant, heavily available, last thing you want is an AI system going down on you. Especially if you're in healthcare, or big giant manufacturing, like Volvo, his customer. When they're building those cranes and things, they must cost 50, 60 million dollars. If that assembly line goes down, it's probably a big deal for them. So you need AI systems that always keep your other systems up and running. So you have to have that solid foundation of storage underneath. >> Awesome, alright, we got to leave it there. Give the customer the last word. Donnie, first time in Barcelona, right? >> Yes it is. >> How are you finding the show and the city? >> Oh it's awesome. This is my fifth Cisco Live. First time in Europe, so yeah. Enjoying it. >> Good, good. Well thank you guys for coming to theCUBE. >> Great thank you for coming. >> Thank you! >> Really appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one Cisco Live! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back >> to Barcelona. Everybody would adapt. Wrapping up day one of Sisqo live Barcelona Cube coverage. I'm David. Long day. He's stupid men. You're watching the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage. Donnie Williams is it director at Scott Equipment out of Louisiana. And Eric hurts August back. He's the CMO of IBM storage. Gentlemen, good to see you. Welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. So tell us about Scott equipment. What do you guys do? Look, what's the company all about were >> a heavy equipment dealer, So we've been we've been in the business for eighty years, privately owned company. And so we're we're We started out and farm implement eighty years ago by the founder, Thomas Scott, which is where the name Scott equipment comes from. And so we transition over the years, Teo construction equipment, Andi were now back in two thousand fourteen, we sold all of our the farm stores that handled all of that equipment. And now we're We're strictly servicing the construction industry and petrochemical in >> history. So your dealer of exactly what equipment and your services as well? >> Yes. We service that we were primarily a rental company. First then then we We also sell what we rent. We service service it and and also parts as well. So we're talking massive? Yes, they got. If you if you think our one of our main lines is Volvo, which you have you have you seen the show? Gold rush that that Volvo equipment you see there, that's that's what we sell. So is incredible machine. Yeah, Yeah, they are. Hada chance tio to play with one. I went Teo Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. Where were their North America offices and had a chance to play with their largest excavator? That was That was >> fun. So is a lot of your Senate on sort of the maintenance business in the service business? >> Yes. So we were just mostly. Mirror is like a car dealership. If if you so we were like I said, we do sale service parts, all of that. >> So the business flow starts after the sale is made on >> exactly. Yes. We still like, Yeah, exactly. We get. We get equipment out there in the in the in the territory, and then the revenue continues tio to come in. >> So what are some of the challenges? The external challenges that are driving your business? You really >> are. The whole heavy equipment industry is It's kind of behind the times in my from a dealership perspective from from a manufacturer perspective there. They're somewhat up with technology, especially especially Volvo. But from a dealership there, there might mainly privately owned. So they're not there's not a whole lot of resource is in, and ah, in technology they don't. That's not a focus for them that they're they're focused on the business side of it. So what? We we're not When I first started the company ten, eleven years ago, now there was one guy servicing six hundred employees and and it was one eyed person, one i t person. So, as you can imagine, it was, it was a nightmare. Go. I mean, it's not the guy's fault. I don't blame him at all. Is this Is this the way that they had done business and not change bombed out, >> right? Exactly. Yeah. Guys >> find them. >> So their customer of ours for the versus stack, we have, ah, partner that they've been buying their IBM in their Cisco gear from. And then when they were doing a modernization effort, the reseller talk to Scott and said, Dani, what do you think? How about doing this? Converge infrastructure. Easier to play. It's after. So it all came through their existing channel. Part of that they were using for both IBM gear and Cisco Gear. >> So you wanted a solution. That one guy could run, right? We've now at least growing that company to house. We have six total in our in our department. So we've changed a lot since I started the eleven years ago. >> And why are they spending their time doing what? Premier >> Li? We do a lot of help desk on systems administration way do mostly, uh, are My focus is to make sure that our employees are satisfied that so they could take care of the customer, and that's that's the primary goal. And along with that comes comes systems administration. A cz. Well, so, But, >> you know, a full stack like this. I mean, the joke. You need more than one person, but it's going to be simplified. You know what you're buying, right? Predictable. And therefore, you shouldn't need to be seen on a basis. >> Yes, I like keeping things simple. Simple as possible. So that makes that makes my job easier. It makes my team's job easier. What >> kind of >> things you driving? Is it? You know, data protection, is it? You know what? What? What? What sort of, you know, use cases do you have on your stack >> on that Were from our were servicing on our with Francisco verse. Sorry versus stack. We are mostly it is all profit cloud were servicing applications. That's the supplement. Our court system. So we have reporting solutions. We were when we first bought it. The vs stack way were considering moving to another Air P system. Oh, and we would have that that infrastructure in place tio migrate to that. So we see what we still have that that actually on the table as a as an option >> for us, but the migration to a new Europe E system. Yes, we should talk afterwards. No, you >> were warning that it >> all about you. Of course, you don't want to convert if you don't have to write. But sometimes there's a business case. Sometimes it's hard to make you talk. Cloud in your in your future president were doing some that's ass stuff. >> Yeah, a little of that. I mean, anything. I mean things that that makes sense for us to to cloud I security services we're doing. Of course, probably most common is hosting email. Were doing a lot of that share point that that type of solution in the cloud >> How long you been with the company? Eleven years. Eleven years. Okay, So, thinking about the last decade, I mean, it's a lot of lot has changed. Yes. What's your What do you most proud of? What you like your biggest success that you can share with us. Oh, >> really? Building my the that dude the I T department and bringing our company into the twenty first system century from a from a technology perspective. I mean, like I said, we had one person that was that was handing. It was really impossible. I mean, you couldn't depend. Depends on one person. And and and, yeah, expect the company's or saw survive long term. Yeah, That one person had to say no a lot. Exactly. Right. Why would he? Just couldn't get everything >> done right? So that really that modernization? Yes, I know where you guys >> can. Ninety Mater, My team modernization play. The versus stack is heavily used for that. And, you know, as we said, on the earlier and every we had to see ESPN, we've also used it to do you know, to the next level from a night transformation to the future. Because in that case, as you know that was a CSP who uses it to service. You know, hundreds of customers all across the UK in a service model. And in this case, this is more of a mighty modernization. Take the old stuff, upgraded to what it was. They even have old IBM blade servers. That's how old the stuff wass old, actually, six played servers that must have been ten years old before they went to the Versus Stack. >> How many people in the company >> right now? We've actually sold off side since I've been with the company we sold off. Some of our non performing business units were probably roughly around five hundred fifty now. Okay, so I mean, we're Ah, we're actually more profitable now than we were eleven years ago from Ah, I mean, we have less employees, but our profitability is actually exceeded >> the name of simplification. Exactly. Right. So what's the biggest challenge you face Is the head of it today? The biggest, Probably >> the biggest challenge would be me wanting to implement technologies. They're not really not ready. I want it. I want tohave the competitive edge, that of the industry. I want to be able to be ahead of of the ahead of the curve. Uh, and that's probably the probably biggest challenge. And you're >> saying you can't Because the tech is ready or skills >> is just is just the industry just trying Teo. I work with vendors and getting getting them to be ready for I say, vendors, manufacturers, they're our vendors. Toe Get them Tio and other dealers as well. Teo Teo Albee. Acceptable to technology that's been there twenty years. >> What would you say is the but the top number one or the top things that IBM has done to make your life easier? And what's the one thing they could do that they're they're not doing that could make your life easier. What's the start with what they've done? You know whether successes, you know that >> really? Really. I mean, we've been a long time IBM customer. We have not, not just the versus Stack, but we also have the power system, which were actually runs are our core AARP. Um, okay. And so that we had long standing relationship with IBM, and the reliability is there. The trust is, >> there's well, a long term partnership. But what's the one thing they could do? One thing that you could If you could wave a wand and IBM will do x what would x B to make your life better? Uh, cut the price way. Go >> way. I should have prefaced that something that size >> on that topic. But you know, the power system thing brings up. You know, our friend Bob. Pity on who's running the cognitive systems group now You guys do with some stuff in a I talked about that a little bit. >> So what we've done is two things. First of all, we've been beauty inside of our system's ai ai all over the place. So, for example, we tear data which can weaken due not only to our own array, but literally two four hundred forty rays that have someone else's logo on them. It's all a eye dunce. When the data is hot, it's on the fastest here. So if you have fifteen thousand rpm drives in seventeen hundred rpm drives, it goes to fifteen thousand. When it cools off A. I automatically moves that the storage admin does nothing. You don't set policies, A takes care. We have flash and you have hard drive's same thing. It'll move around and you could have on IBM array talking to any AMC array. So all sorts of technology that we implement, that's a I in the box. Then, on top of that, what we've done is come up with a Siri's of a reference architectures for storage, as one of the critical elements in the platform. So we've done is create what we call a data pipeline. It involves not only our storage raise, but four pieces of our software spectrum scale, which is giant scale out file system, in fact, to fastest super computers in the world have almost half an exabyte of that software storage. With that software, our spectrum discover which we announced in queue for which is all about better management of metadata. So for a I workloads, big get anally work loves the data scientist doesn't prep the data. They can actually talk to what we do, and you could create all these meditate a template, then boom. They run a a ay workload on Thursday and then run a analytic workload on Friday. But all automated our archive and then our cloud objects towards. So all that is really think about it. Maura's an oval because when you're doing an A I system, you're constantly learning. So the thing you got to do is one you've got to have high performance and be ableto handle the analytics, which we do on flash. Okay, so the flashes connected, you've got to be able to move the date around. And part of thing with the spectrum Discover is that we can talk through an A P I to a piece of a AI software two piece of analytic software to piece of big data software, and they can literally go through that. AP I create templates for the metadata and then automatically suck what they need into their app and then munge it and then spirit back out and then obviously on the archives side, you want to be able to quickly recall the data, because if you think about a I system, it's like a human. So it's giving my Russian example. So I'm old enough. When I was a kid, there were bomb shelters in my neighborhood that people dug in the backyard. Then we have, you know, Nixon lightening up with the Chinese and we have Reagan and Gorbachev next, You know, the wall comes down right then. Next thing you know, there's no longer Soviet Union. All of a sudden, no, the Russians might get a little aggressive, even though they're no longer communist. And now, you see, depending on which political party. Either they're totally against us where they're totally helping us. But, you know, if they really were hacking systems whose whatever political party urine, they really were hacking our system, tried to manipulate the election pro or con. The point is, that's kind of like a cyber attack, and that's not a good thing. So we learn and it changes. So when a I system needs to understand and change constantly, learn. If all of a sudden you have flying cars, that's going to be different than a car with tires. Now, a lot of it, maybe the same, the interior, all the amenities. But the engine is going to be different. And there are companies, including the big Big three, four five who are actually working on flying cars, knows it will happen. But the A I system needs to understand and learn that and constantly learning. So the foundation has to be heavily resilient, heavily performance, heavily available, lasting one is an A I system going down on you, especially if you're in health care or big giant manufacturing. Like Volvo, his customer. When they're building those cranes and things, they must cost fifty sixty million dollars at that assembly line goes down its prey a big deal for them. So you need a I systems that always keep your other systems up and running. So you have to have that solid foundation storage underneath. >> Awesome. All right, we got to leave it there. Give the customer the last word. Donnie. First time in Barcelona, right? Yes. It ISS how you find in the show and the >> syphilis is awesome. This's my, actually my fifth, uh, Cisco lifers our first time in Europe, so yeah, enjoying it. >> Good. Good. Well, thank you, guys. For German of the >> correct. Thank you. Have you appreciate it? >> You're welcome. Alright. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back to rap Day one. Sisqo live Barcelona watching you.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante. You know the software industry is going through dramatic change. Obviously cloud is a piece of that. The drive towards simplification. Gone are the days of multi tens of millions of dollar implementations that take years and years with highly-customized software modifications. Those days are gone. People wanna simplify. They wanna be agile. Carter Lloyds is here. He's with QAD, an ERP manufacturing software specialist. Carter, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me here. I'm excited to talk to ya. >> Yeah, so I'm learning more about your company. Love the story and I'd like you to share it with our audience. Give us the brief overview of who QAD is. >> Absolutely, so maybe we should start with where we came from. So, it was about 40 years ago in 1979. Karl Lopker, our founder, and Pam Lopker, our co-founder, were in Santa Barbara, California. Karl had a company that was making sandals and he was running into some manufacturing problems and he needed some help and he needed some software to make it easier for him to manufacture. Pam came along, she wrote some software for him. He was very successful. That company turned into Deckers which now owns Uggs and is doing some great things and they decided along the way that although sandals are interesting, they thought software was more interesting. So they founded QAD and for 40 years we've been very focused on helping to make manufacturing easier through cloud ERP software now. >> That's a great story, so Pam is the coder. She's the alpha geek. >> Exactly. >> And they solved their own problem and then said, okay, let's take this to market. >> Exactly and that's why manufacturing, it's in our DNA. It's in our roots and it's what we're passionate about. >> Well so the obvious question that people are gonna have is how do you compete with the big whales in the market, particularly SAP? >> Okay, fantastic. I heard a quote recently that I've really locked onto and it's from the founder of the World Economic Forum and the quote is that in the old days, it used to be the big fish that would eat the small fish but in today's world, it's the fast fish that eats the slow fish and we see that not only as a metaphor for our position within the ERP industry, but what our customers are going through right now. That with all the rapid change that's going on, it's not about how big you are in economies of scale. It's about how resilient you are and how fast you can adapt. >> Well, that's interesting. So you're a smaller company, obviously, than the multi tens of billions of dollars that SAP and Oracle and others, but you're talking like a startup. >> Yep. >> Agile, speed. Is that how you think about yourselves? >> Absolutely, I think a startup mentality is always great to have, but rapid, agile, and effective. We believe that those are the requirements of our customers within the manufacturing business and that's what we need to be able to provide. >> So let's talk more about the differentiation. I mean you can't be all things to all people as a smaller company and a company that wants to be agile so what are some of the areas that you're focused on where you're having successes. >> Okay, absolutely, so historically, we focused on manufacturing, but that's too broad so we're focused on six verticals within manufacturing. So it's automotive, life sciences, food and beverage, consumer-packaged goods, electronics, and high tech. I'm sorry, industrial. So those are the main areas that we're focused on right now but within that, we're seeing a lot of challenges for manufacturers within that area. Again, it's this concept of change. We believe that the only constant is change and legacy ERP systems simply weren't designed for change. If there was no change, the system that you installed eight years ago would work just as well today as it did eight years ago, but that's not what's happening. We're seeing a disconnect between the business requirements and what the systems are able to provide. >> Now is your strategy to sort of build greater functionality into the software that sort of maps to companies' business processes or is it that the software is super flexible and can be adapted? Maybe you could describe that a little bit. >> It's both. So to start with, we want to not deliver to our customers a framework on which they need to build out their processes but realize that there are best practices and there are common processes within, amongst companies within a particular niche and so we want to come to the table with the very best industry best practices that we can and we do that. We also recognize, though, that each company is slightly different and to simply say adopt best practices and you must do that is not the right way to go. So we believe that our software can get our customers to 90% of their requirements and that's world-class but for that last 10%, don't ignore them. If that's where your competitive advantage is, where your differentiation is, then we need to give you a way to be able to meet those requirements and a way that is simple and does not lock you in to the software that you currently have. >> Mh-m, okay so Carter you're a global company. Maybe you could give us a sense of the sort of scope of your operations. >> Absolutely, so our customers are global and they've taken us global. We support over 65 countries in terms of the regulatory requirements so that out of the box, our software is able to do that. We believe that's industry-leading. We have operations all around the world, direct and through partners. >> So you guys have been around for a while. When you step back and think about some of the big trends, obviously cloud, everything is becoming, you know, about server size, what are the factors that you look at that are, you're trying to make tail winds for your company? >> Absolutely, so we've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years thinking about disruptors. So what are the common themes in these changes that our customers are facing and we've narrowed that down to three top disruptors. So the first one is anything is a service. So end users now are demanding not just products but what that product can do and the classic example is people don't want drills. They want holes. Why are we selling them drills? And we're seeing that sweep across manufacturing. We've got a customer that delivers industrial equipment to fast food chains and they don't wanna simply buy fryers. They want to be able to fry things so they're asking that vendor to be able to provide it as a service to be able to monitor and intervene so that they have more fryer up time which makes sense. That's the first one. The second one that we see is make to scale it order or mass customization. People want things the way that they want them and that's getting more pervasive throughout the supply chain. And then the third one is the digital transformation of manufacturing which many people call Industry 4.0. >> So on that last piece, very data-oriented >> Yes. >> And so maybe talk a little bit about how your customers are using data to transform their business and what role you guys play. >> Sure. It's absolutely critical when we think about how data has transformed the world of the consumer, it's incredible. What you are now able to do on the internet, even tied to anything as a service. The concept that we don't own movies anymore. We don't own music. We get it delivered as a service to us but the first step in doing that is to really digitize manufacturing. So it starts with the acquisition of company data and value chain data and then using that to be able to measure and optimize process to improve performance. >> So cloud is obviously another big trend in your business. You guys have moved to a cloud operating model whether it's on-prem or in your cloud but talk about your cloud strategy and what you guys are doing there, maybe some of your product portfolio. >> Absolutely, so we were very early to the cloud. Our first product went to the cloud in 2003 before it was even called the cloud. I think we called it on demand then and that was a supplier collaboration tool. We moved our flagship ERP system to the cloud in 2007 and since then, we've been building it for the cloud, optimizing, designing and it was an incredible experience for us that really had customer benefits because once you start to become a service-provider rather than a product-provider, you see it through your customers' eyes. So, depending on your viewpoint, you're either eating your own dog food or drinking your own champagne and it led us to understand some of the pains that people have in implementing ERP systems and upgrading them and then to design fixes so the software goes in faster, easier, and can be upgraded to a much greater extent. >> And so if you're gonna be in the cloud, your customers obviously wanna avoid a lot of custom modifications. We heard earlier that's sort of one of your differentiations and am I getting that right? As your customers move to the cloud, they're minimizing the need to do custom mods? >> So I would caveat that a little bit. I think the need still exists for that last-mile functionality to meet the individual requirements of the company but we think that customizations are evil. We want to eliminate customizations but still give them the ability to deliver on that need through extensions and new applications that are written in a non-intrusive way and can float above the system and therefore the system can be upgraded without breaking those connections. >> We're having to go back inside to the guts of those what you just called the last mile, right? >> Absolutely, so our customers are in the manufacturing business. They're not in the software business and part of the cloud-value proposition is allowing our customers to do what they do best which is to make great products and serve their customers and let us do what we do best which is delivering software through the cloud to them. >> And so your cloud products and your on-prem products are sort of identical from a code-based standpoint. Is that correct? >> They are, exactly. We do not believe that cloud should be a compromise. Our customers demand full-functionality ERP. That's what we had delivered previously on-premise and that's what we deliver on the cloud so it is identical software. >> So go back to this digital transformation for a minute 'cause you do a lot of conferences with theCUBE. You hear that. What does that mean to your customers? It's not just a buzz word. Every customer you talk to saying, digital, digital, digital. It's the number one driver of our business. What does that mean to your customer base? >> Absolutely, so for us it's not about the technology itself. It's about the use case and how it can make them better manufacturers and make manufacturing easier. So there are a couple of different areas that we've been exploring and we do that through a very pragmatic approach and we call that QAD Labs where we work with our customers around their use cases and how we can apply technology to it. So one of the areas that we're working on right now is around machine learning and it's to help automotive suppliers to take some of the signals that they're receiving from the OEMs in terms of what the requirements are and make sense of it so that what they are planning on delivering closely matches what the ultimate requirement will be from the OEMs. The OEM signals often jump around quite a bit and through machine learning, we can make better sense and not necessarily replace the planner, but provide additional information suggestions to the planner to make them more efficient. >> So the outcome is better predictability, sort of less heavy-lifting? >> Absolutely, so, much better customer service, less expediting of materials, and then also lower inventory. >> Talk about QAD Explore. It's coming up in May. When is it? What can people expect? What's it look like? >> Absolutely, so we have our user conference. Our global user conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, May sixth through ninth. It's a fantastic event. We get very excited about it. I guess we could say we get jazzed about it since it's in New Orleans. It allows us to really think about our customers, to meet with our customers, to have our customers network with each other, learn best practices, and see what we're doing and how we're trying to help them. >> What's the format of Explore? Like you've got obviously keynotes. Is it one-day, two-day? Maybe describe that a little bit. >> Absolutely, so it's a three-day event. The keynotes are fantastic. We try to do short, TED talk-type events with some of our executives so you can hear about our strategy and what we're releasing. We bring in industry experts and experts around the future of manufacturing and the future of business so that our customers can start to see where their area might be headed so that they can start to make decisions about where we're going and then in the afternoons we tend to go into breakouts where we can do deep dives into our solutions and businesses so that they can really understand the benefits that are available to them. >> So customers obviously attending. Will they present as well? >> We do have customers presenting. That's one of the main reasons our customers come actually is to hear from their peers and how they're solving problems. It's really a fantastic event. >> Well the Big Easy in May is a good place to be. It's a fun town. >> It's not a bad place to be and it actually starts the day after Jazz Fest so we can't complain about that either. >> Alright Carter Lloyds thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for your time. >> And giving us the overview of QAD. Alright and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see ya next time. You're watching theCUBE. (light techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live. We were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier your host with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg. Welcome to theCUBE. You are the Director of Product Management Converged Infrastructure Group at NetApp. >> Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. >> One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean I've wrote stories back when Tom Georges was the CEO when Amazon just came on the scene. NetApp has been really into the cloud and from the customer's standpoint but now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now startin' to be mindful. >> Absolutely. >> Of how to maximize the scale and with All Flash kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? >> So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp, is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco and in that we have got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for Healthcare which is in FlexPod we've been doing horizontal application so far which are like the data bases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical our application, the first one we're looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for Healthcare. That's the first piece that we are addressing. >> What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod's been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it because Cisco's CEO was onstage today talking about Cisco's value proposition, about the old ways now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool, new things going on with FlexPod. >> Correct, so the All Flash FAS, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year as customers keep wanting to improve their infrastructure with better latencies and better performance the All Flash FAS has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double-digit growth over the last five quarters consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about, the managed private cloud on FlexPod. >> Yeah, Arun, I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So I think back to when Cisco launched UCS it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. NetApp with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins is talking about onstage, how do I modernize, how do I get you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from you know, a good virtualized platform to this is, I think you said managed private cloud, FlexPod in Cisco. >> Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on I need a VM, small, medium, large, and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket, then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure, then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure's working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some DSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized and therefore these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as a managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds, a cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. >> Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live you guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? >> So we, all these solutions we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that what we do is there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies agree. >> So it's tightly integrated. >> It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned, the marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team. That's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer he knows that both Cisco and NetApp teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it all. >> Yeah, over in one of the other areas that's been talked about this show we talk about modernization. You talk about things like microservices. >> Yes. >> Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? >> Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads, the cloud-native workloads or the type two native. Type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with a Cisco cloud center platform, which is the quicker acquisition. And we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we are dealing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team the ACI fabric is very important to them. So that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on Healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco, as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. >> Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So say you've got a customer, obviously you guys have a lot of customers together with Cisco, they're doing some complex things with the technology, but for the customer out there that has not yet kinda went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? 'Cause a lot of storage guys are lookin' at All Flash, so check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they gotta integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and say the competition? >> So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos, but the advantage of taking a converged infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore is reduces their deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. >> So they got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. >> Yes. >> Okay, great, now I'm gonna ask you another question. This comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. >> Yes. >> So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are custom to verticals. But with cloud one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that, because these verticals, they gotta get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? >> Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep their data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions. And the security of their data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second pieces are analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insight you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability all in their control so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for health care what it does is when you have All Flash FAS it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. [Interviewer] - Yeah. >> Plus the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up so I can give an example on that too. >> Well before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big megatrend. It's not really kinda talked much about but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPs, the performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. >> Correct. >> So it's just you've gotta have table stakes of great, fast storage. >> Yes. >> But it's gotta be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? >> Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One I can name the customer. So they'll come at our booth tomorrow, in a minute here. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with they need a hospital, fast. And they decided on FlexPod because within three months with the wire one's architecture and application they could scale their whole IT data center for health care. So that has helped them tremendously to get it up and running. Second is with the All Flash FAS they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. >> Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job. In following NetApps recent success lately, as always, NetApp's always goin' the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show? So I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ah-ha? >> So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level within 10 base networking, its data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing, where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution we can provide the subscription base through the managed private cloud through our managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we have come up with this solution which matches both these trends of Cisco as well as NetApp. >> And the number of connected devices going up every day. >> Yes. >> More network connections, more geo domains, it's complicated. >> It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. >> Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp at Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)