>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us, the CEO of Avaap. Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon! >> Good to see you again! >> Absolutely, big pleasure, it was great talking to you for the last two years, and a pleasure to be back here. >> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap, I've read a little bit, I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language, what do the five letters represent? I mean how did you come up with the title? >> You know, that's the first question that gets asked, the two questions I get. >> Sorry to be cliche, but I'm just really curious! >> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?" and the other question is, "What is Avaap?" and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at Avaap, so, Agni, which is fire stands for passion, 'cause I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do; if you're passionate, you'll follow through and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation, sky is tied to goals, we're very ambitious. We've been able to have a rocket ship type of growth, so far, and we continue to aspire to do more. We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience, cause we like to be globally eco conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy, and the more there is transparency, the better there is organizational development. >> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions, and the relationship with Infor, walk us through that a little bit, of why you're here. >> Absolutely, so, we are Infor's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that, because we just came off the stage getting four awards with Infor this year. >> Congratulations! Fantastic. >> Yeah, thank you very much. They were overall partner of the year five years in a row. Our partnership with Infor, started five years ago, before that it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room, and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said "I want to do two things, I want to make software that is industry specific." And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said "We want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies. Cloud, mobile, big data." Right? So I had a great opportunity, and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the Infor basket, and just doing Infor. And that served us well of going from 20, at that point we were like 25 employees, to having over 450 today. >> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past is you got in early, and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in, so you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding? >> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead, so that actually, that's a question I got, is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't, because it's a validation of what's occurring in this eco system with the big system integrators coming in. And with a rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs, because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management, and we do what we do best, which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services. >> The deep, deep Infor, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? Infor's specialty is the last mile, micro-industry capabilities, and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep Infor expertise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So give us an example of, you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera. Where do you come in? where does Infor sort of, where does their micro services, or micro-function leave off, and where do you pick up? >> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example, in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christus Health, they are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60 thousand employees. They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, Supply Chain, Financial. Went through a large system selection process the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to Infor and Oracle as the two lenders that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on Infor as their vendor of choice, they did a services RFP, which we partnered with Deloitte, because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services, that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor, that we have within our healthcare team. So, we bridged and built an alliance, that, today is starting the project journey in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus, to make that project a success. >> In the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that Infor and Oracle had, were what? the coverage of the functionality across the suites, was it the cloud capabilities? What's the high level of that? >> So the one thing that I will tell you, is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable, so the way it's starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud, there's a lot of education already around single tenant, and multi-tenant, and they understand. So it starts with the cloud platform, that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform, and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant, as opposed to individually hosted for each customer. And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see what not a product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but their business processes, and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where Infor really came ahead at Christus. >> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean, Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?" I'm presuming the customer cares because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Verses okay, we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? >> Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts a customer to have to take their system down, and then bring it back up, and here it's done without the customer even finding out, so it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is a cost, which in today's world not as much, because hardware's become very cheap. But it's still conquered hardware that's sitting on the premise, as opposed to individually putting it out there, as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security, on multi-tenant capable software, it's more secure than your single tenant capability. >> And Avaap brings that to the table. So it's not, I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function, so yours is what? Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? >> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align, and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have a offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today, and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process, and post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare, is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR, you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR, and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other. And the systems need to be really integrated, to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that, so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in. >> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? >> Right. >> So what's goin on these days? You obviously, last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, there's some uncertainty around that, certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers, EMR is still you know, a big deal. What are the hot trends, what are the drivers, and how are you guys responding? >> ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market, so there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars, of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in a midst of what I think, is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry are on ERP platforms that we're seeing, there were 55 system selections done, just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years, we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. >> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead. >> So swap-- what's... the fundamental of that decision? >> So there are a lot of legacy providers, so the market is going to get consolidated, so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers, there's, if you count mid market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base. >> Very fragmented, isn't it? >> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright. >> So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform, officially said that they are stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional, individual health system that exist in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded, because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. >> Yeah I mean a lot of these, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini-computer era it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX, and we'll become a valuated re-seller, and healthcare was such a huge opportunity, and so under technologized, not a word but, and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated, now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right? >> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. >> Yeah, and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time, to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary, and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform, and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled, for the healthcare industry, specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today. >> Who does that last mile functionality, if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor, is it the SI, is it some other internal software developer? >> So, the software developers as Infor is, trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS, as an example come in, to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. >> You do that work, is that right? >> We do that work, absolutely. >> Okay, and then, how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their road map? Soma's got his ERD pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys, and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become advantageous for others? >> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product, that's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board, ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out. >> Well you could. >> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs >> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific, and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team, that allows us to see their road map and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP, for healthcare. So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point, manual, laborious, takes a business uses away. So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation, which has been in the field, we have, close to 100 customers using it, allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle, and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. >> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare, you have another interest inside of your business, with a little Beatles connection. So fill us in on that a little bit. >> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one, and I definitely want to talk on both of them, because those are important parts of our business, One is retail, we did get retail partner of the year award, and Stella McCartney, is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter, and has built a very reputable shoe company, that's a brand highly sought after, and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications, using cloud suite fashion, which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform. >> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right? >> That's cool, that is cool! >> Absolutely! >> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here, thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Congratulations on all the progress! >> It's always good to be here! >> It is full speed ahead. Good for you. Dhiraj Shah from Avaap >> Thank you! >> Back with more on theCUBE. We're at in Informen, Informer rather, (laughs) I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum! >> Inforum! >> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing) >> 2018, D.C. Did it again. >> Excellent! (bubbly music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C., it's TheCUBE. Covering InForum, D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, good morning and welcome to day two here on theCUBE at Inforum 2018. We are in the nation's capital, the Walter Washington Convention Center, and thank goodness the sun's come out today. Everybody's got big smile and cheery faces, it's good to see. Dave Vellante, John Walls here. We're just on top of the show floor. You'll see a lot of activity a little bit later on in the day. And it's a pleasure to welcome our first guest of the day, Billy Southerland who's the CEO of IronRoad. Billy, good morning to you. >> Good morning, thank you guys for having me on. >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> How's the show been for you so far? >> It's been great. Yeah, it's been great. Outside of the fact that we got bumped from our hotel when we first showed up so (chuckles) No, but show's been fantastic, always great to network, learn what other folks have going on and yeah, been phenomenal. >> Tell us about IronRoad. What you do and why you're here. >> Yeah, so we're an HR and outsourcing company. And we've been doing HR and payroll since 1997. Company started really just with an idea. So as we have grown through the years, working with mostly small to medium size businesses, we had an opportunity with Infor just a couple years ago to partner with them on the payroll side of things. And so it's been a new opportunity for us, one that our team is incredibly excited about. Just great opportunity to partner with some phenomenal software and so yeah, that's-- >> So, services that you guys provide, so HR, payroll, you've got a portal, onboarding. Take us through that. Is that full suite of-- full complement of services? >> It is, yeah. So our typical client is a smaller to medium sized employer and we'll go in and so many of the things that they've got to do internally that have nothing to do with why they got into business, they can outsource to us. So, anything from the beginning to the end of an employee's life cycle is what we manage. You name it and we do it for them so that they can go and focus on what they do. >> So let me probe that a little bit. So if I have-- let's say I have an HR issue with an employee. Maybe they're a little older and I'm concerned that I am going through the right steps giving that employee the right guidance. I don't want to expose my company to any lawsuits or whatever. Can I call you up and say, hey, give me some guidance on how I should handle this from an HR perspective? What do I have to document? You would help me with that? >> David, that's the perfect example, right? And so the whole liability of being an employer is something that they can share with us, right? So, somebody that focuses on HR knows those laws and rules and regs. They can pick up the phone, they call us, they say, hey Billy, got an issue, can you come out? One of our folks will go out, consult with them, make sure that everything's documented, managed properly. And yeah, that's exactly what we would do. >> Okay, so with healthcare compliance, Obamacare, PTO policies. I'm a small company. I want to make sure that I'm not killing my cash flow with balance sheets stuff. I mean all that stuff, you can help with? >> You got it. Yeah, absolutely. You bring up healthcare. I don't know any employee, employer regardless of the size who's not dealing with that, right? So the whole ACA compliance with Obamacare has been a tremendous boom for our business because people are looking left and right, how do we deal with this? What do we do? It's so complex for them, they're looking for experts to manage it. >> I mean that's kind of the tip of the spear. That's why, particularly small, mid-size businesses, it's healthcare first because it's so expensive and it's so important to the employees, right? >> It is, yeah and I would say most folks that we deal with it's number two line item right after payroll, right? I mean they're dealing with healthcare and everybody's looking for answers. It's like, how do we do this? And the employees are asking the same question, right? And they're looking at the employers saying, give me a solution. There is no real solution outside of being able to maybe aggregate with some other smaller employers so we can go to the large healthcare companies that are out there and say, okay I tell you what, we got about 5,000 people here now. What do you think about our buying power at this point? >> You get some scale and then do the works. >> That's it, you just scale it, exactly right. >> Okay, 1997. Well, first of all, you're Cincinnati-based, I'll come back and talk about that. But 1997, just coming into the dot come boom, the state of software was, back then PeopleSoft was the gold standard. There was no cloud, really, you had these software companies doing, forget what they even called it now, but it was like software as a service pre-SAS. Kind of clunky software and now you fast-forward to today, you know, you're all cloud, you're agile but so how'd you get started? Take us through kind of the technology progression. >> Yeah, so the start was an interesting one. I wish we could tell you we had a great idea but it was a complete accident, right? We were trying to, I was trying to help out two different friends who were in two separate businesses. They both had done extremely well in their separate businesses. So they started what is now IronRoad and after about 12 months, both of them had done so well in their other businesses, they looked at each and said, they each thought the other one was going to be pulling the wagon, right? And so neither one of them wanted to do it. So one of the guys came to me and said, hey Billy, you want to buy 50% of this? And I said, well, what is it? And he explained it to me and I said, I love this concept, it's a great idea. And so I said, how much? He said, $8,000. (laughing) >> It's like a lawnmower. >> I bought half a lawnmower, right? >> Such a great idea, you sure you don't want to charge more? >> Yeah, I said, $8,000? But he had no clients, right? They had a little bit of software that they purchased to be able to do the payroll. So that's really where we started. So kind of caveman like you said, David. And so-- >> What's your client base now? What do you have? >> So we're using the Infor Cloud base. The human management capital system. >> As far as the number of organizations that you're serving. How have you grown the business? >> Pardon. Yeah, so you know really, it's just been good old-fashioned hard work for us. We've not made any purchases, no acquisitions. And so we got some amazing people that have a real passion about what we do and we do it really well. The differentiator between us and some of the big guys that are out there really is our people. Your people talk about that but our people are really focused on it. So you know-- and pretty soon, that reputation begins to spread. Like you said, we're in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently we're operating in 38 different states. So little bit at a time, year after year, we've been digging and digging and digging. In regards to the question you asked, David, right? So we start with the lawnmower and here we end up sitting with you guys talking about Infor and this cloud-based suite that we've been able to manage and bring in and so really exciting for somebody like us. >> So talk a little bit more about the CloudSuite, how you use it, how you use it to differentiate from the competition, you know why it's maybe better than some of the other alternatives you see? >> That's a great question. Because most our businesses' professional employer organization. Most of the PEO softwares are fairly limited in what they can offer the employers that they're working with. And so we vetted, we had Anka Kalp... Our CIO was vetting five different systems a couple years ago. And in the midst of vetting those five different systems, we were introduced to Infor, right? As we began to see what this software could do, we started getting really excited. You talk about a differentiator in the workplace, nobody else has it, right? And so we started learning more and more the human capital management system for us, we started thinking, man if we could take this to employees-- employers, that have anywhere between 500 and 5,000 employees, this is a real differentiator for us, right? And so nope, like I said, nobody else in the PEO space has this software and it's been a tremendous opportunity for us to take to the marketplace. >> So that's kind of your sweet spot, 500 to 5,000? So not under 100, right? True SMB is kind of not your sweet spot? >> Well, actually we'll go all the way down to 20 employees. But the 20 employer companies, the resources that they have internally to be able to integrate the systems is a little more challenging. But we get it done. And so anywhere between 20 and probably 5,000 employees are the typical employer that we're working with. >> So what kind of integration items does a customer have to think about, specifically? >> So by integration-- >> You said, small companies don't have the resources to do the integration so what has to be done to do that integration? >> Yeah, so it's a lot of lifting, right? I mean, there's lots of work to be able to establish the systems with the employers that we're taking, you know, the software to. Just a lot of hands on between IronRoad and the companies that we're dealing with so the smaller companies are really focused on, you know, going out and doing whatever it is whether they're contractor, doctor's office. So to be able to have a resource that can dedicate the time, to be able to activate the system and make it do what they want it to do is somewhat challenging for the smaller employers. >> But wouldn't they have to do that with any outsource HR provider? >> They would. They may not be able-- they probably are not taking the software to the depth of its utilization or potential utilization. So they're kind of doing without it. >> So the bigger guy's getting more business value out of your offer. >> There's no doubt about it or the smaller guys, it just takes a little bit longer to get 'em there. That's really the challenge. They both get the same value, just takes a little bit longer. >> 21 years you been doing this. So, you've obviously seen business change. >> Not that old, I don't know how that happened. >> Well, you started very young. (laughing) >> I'm glad you said that. I wondered why they skipped me with the makeup. I thank you guys. >> Don't need it. We do. (laughs) So you been 21 years. >> Yes. >> So you've seen business change, right? >> Yes. >> You've seen technology change, right? >> Oof, night and day. >> So where now? Where are the pain points now? Because it seems like, oh we've solved all these problems, right? Automation, things are much easier. Well, there's always a, yeah, but. So what's the but now for your folks? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us in our industry is getting the message out. When we look at PEOs in Ohio, for example, about 2% of the workforce is working with the PEO. Because they're so few of 'em out there doing it really well, getting that message out to the employer because once we get 'em, once they come in and they see, you know you said they got to do this if they're outsourcing HR anyhow. Once they become aware of what's available to them, they don't leave, right? >> So their pain's still the same. >> Pain's still the same. >> You're just trying to get out, to let them know, you can help. >> That's it, that's it. I think that's probably our biggest pain point is how do you get this message out and different parts of the country, obviously, you've got different attitudes towards or people move at different paces. In Ohio, there's still, I'm looking at David saying, what is PEO? I've never heard of it. I don't know if I trust you. And so overcoming that is probably our biggest obstacle. >> Billy, you talk a little bit about Infor, it's products. If I understand it correctly, you're both a consumer and essentially a reseller of the services, which means you're running on the Amazon Cloud so talk about your relationship there, why Infor, why the product, how does it compare? Because you probably evaluated everything. >> We did, yeah. Yeah, we did. You know, for us, like I said, we vetted five different companies that we were looking at. And when we had a chance to look at the Infor proposal, the differentiator for us not only was the software, from our perspective, far and above better than anything else that we were looking at. They provided us with an opportunity since we were purchasing the software to be able to provide an in-tenant solution for current clients that Infor has. So an Infor client that looks at the software and says, hey, I want this, and yet they're still outsourcing their payroll, now has the ability to buy the software and outsource the payroll to IronRoad. And so you're taking the best in class cloud suite services from a human capital management system to the marketplace. And partnering with a company like Infor that really is a dream come true for us. >> So what makes it best in class? I mean, you know, Oracle's got good software. You got SAP out there, Workday's the hot company. Why is Infor, you said, better? Why is it better? >> Yeah, I think for us, just the ease of the employer being able to utilize the system. You can have the best thing in the world and people are people are people are people, right? They got to be able to get on there and use the stuff. And so I think the ease of being able to just the user-friendly side of what Infor does. They certainly have every option you can imagine. The capability, the software is as good, if not better, than any. But the ability for people to pick it up quickly and be able to use and make it real for their small business, to me that's the key, right? >> Was the use of AWS Cloud a factor? >> Um... >> Was that kind of transparent to you? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not really. Yeah, yeah. >> Is there an aha moment when you're out there when you are pitching? And when you look up people and the processes they go through and they been doing it the same way for decades? So when you break through, how do you know you've broken through? What is it that you use to break through? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah and for them, once we're able to articulate what this system actually does, there is an aha moment. And it's almost disbelief. It's because there's so many years of doing it the old way, right? And then they look and see it's kind of like me looking at the software that your company's created that was phenomenal, right? They're looking at it and go, come on, really? It really does that? And it's, yeah, it really does that. (chuckles) And we can do this different and you can go sell more widgets, right? >> Showing Billy our video search software, so I appreciate that. >> Amazing! I mean, it's unbelievable. >> It is. >> Yeah, Star Trek. >> So I want to ask-- >> Baiting myself. >> We're all in the same boat. >> I want to ask you about the resources that are required for you to do integration with Infor. Actually, so outside funding, other than the $8,000 that you put in, have you guys raised outside funding? >> David, that was a lot of money at the time, man. >> Yeah, no doubt. >> (laughs) A lot of money. >> You could do a lot with $8,000, but you can't build a full software suite so have you taken outside capital, or? >> We haven't. >> So, self-funded. >> Yeah, we're self-funded and frankly, fortunately, we've been able to manage through it. This partnership with Infor for us is a big big step for us, right? But at this point, we've been able to manage that without any funding outside and... >> Okay so it's not like an intense engineering effort, right? You're turnkey-ing this stuff largely. So you put more of your effort on onboarding clients from what I understand, right? >> Right and working with other Infor partners. Bails, for example, was our implementation manager and so our folks working with Bails to make sure because we've got hundreds of clients that in lots of different industries that we've got to go out and roll this implementation out into, right? And so it's a little different than the typical Infor arrangement because they're so many different industries represented just through IronRoad. >> And you guys dog food this? They don't like when I say dog food. Do you drink your own champagne? So you're utilizing your-- >> Much better. (chuckles) >> You're utilizing the Infor software in-house, correct? >> We are, we are, yeah, yeah. If, you know, from an implementation standpoint, easy to do that, right? You have somebody like Bails and Cyndian that has helped us, phenomenal at what they do, great partners for Infor. But then we've got to turn around and take that out to hundreds of different employers. So scaling that is a bit of a challenge. And again, depending upon the amount of resources that the different clients have, which all changes depending upon their size. But it's been great, yeah. So far so good, thank you so much Yeah, appreciate it. >> Well, Billy thanks for your time. We do appreciate it and I assume at Cincinnati, that you might be one of those long-suffering Bengals fans. >> Hey, time out! Hey, two in one. >> I know. >> Two in one, Andy Dalton. We're not big Carolina fans right now. >> One in two here in New England. >> You guys are trouble. >> Well, we'll see after this week. >> The 40-something maybe hit the big Tom. >> Alright. That discussion to continue off the air. Billy Southerland, IronRoad CEO. >> Thank you guys so much, yeah, enjoyed it. >> We'll continue. We are live here in Washington D.C. at Inforum 2018. Back with more on theCUBE in just a bit. (electronic music)

(music) >> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pure Accelerate 2017. We're here at Pure70 in San Francisco. I'm Dave Vallente with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're switching things up a little bit. Scott Dietzen is still on stage wrapping up the Keynotes. We're about a half hour late. Buses were running late today, so we're going to adjust a little bit. Vik Nagjee is here. He's the CTO of healthcare for Pure Storage and he's with Sathya Sankaran, who is with Catalogic. Gents, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Good to see you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Vik, let's start with you. Healthcare, your title, interesting. I don't think I've, well, very rarely do you see a storage company, especially one that's slightly under a billion dollars, with healthcare in somebody's title. What's that all about? You guys obviously, strategy and healthcare and lifesciences, data driven industry, you guys are all about the data these days, but how'd you come to this and tell us about what's going on in the healthcare world. >> Absolutely, you're absolutely correct. Coming from healthcare IT over several years it's been slow comings in terms of infrastrucure companies in and of themselves saying, "Hey, let's get really serious about healthcare as a vertical," and bringing in people who are subject matter experts and have done healthcare for a very long period of time. I think the realization was an inflection point in terms of saying, "We've actually as an industry spent so much money on digitizing healthcare that we've actually gotten to a point where we need to start seeing some returns on that." The way to accomplish that is by putting data to work, right? So there's this wonderful hashtag on Twitter, if you go check it out, hashtag put data to work. And I love it. Basically, it's about saying, "We have all this data. It's growing." As soon as you try to fit a curve to it, the curve changes because it's kind of growing unbounded. The beauty is we want it to, because in that data lies better patient care and outcomes and in that data, once you actually understand and start to harness it, lies better financial success for the organization. That's what we're about here at Pure. >> Okay, and from Catalogic's perspective, Sathya, what's your angle here? What's the partnership all about? What do you guys bring to the table? >> Talking about data, snapshots are like gym memberships, right? You put data to work. Snapshots are like, everybody has access to one but very few actually use that, right? So we want to put the data to work. We want to put your copies to work and snapshots are the best way to take a copy of your production dataset and spin it up for PC environments, training environments, release, testing, development. All of these work can actually be done outside through snapshots of datasets that are sitting on Pure Storage. >> But, just to be clear, you guys are the catalog for the snapshots. It's your snapshots actually, right? >> Absolutely, and that's one key differentiator here in terms of the partnership that we have. It's all within the same data plane. All of he data is absolutely captured, stored, snapshoted and managed through Pure, right? Catalogic provides to us a very, very great catalog integration to say, "Okay, how do I actually deal with this data and what do I do with it?" And plus some more that we'll talk about here in a second. >> Okay, let's come back to the healthcare, if we can for a second Stu. >> Stu: Yeah. >> Because the healthcare, it's all about electronic medical records, meaningful use, HIPA compliance, you know, on and on and on. A lot of really not fun stuff but really important things, Obamacare, etc. Are we, sort of, primarily focused there, Vik, or are we starting to see this notion of data value coming to healthcare? >> Absolutely, we're starting to see notion of data value coming to healthcare. The way that I like to describe it is that over the past 30 something years, we have built an amazing library, or repository, for healthcare data. This is data that we're just putting in, right? When you go back to the hospital, or the doctor, they pull the data back out, they look at it for a few seconds, and they come and see you for a 15 minute visit, right? You've been waiting for 2 and a half hours at this point, right, so not great patient experience. We're trying to change that as well. >> Surfing the web. >> Vik: Right, right. >> See what's wrong with it (laughing). >> Exactly, right? But what we're finding now is that there lies so much meaning in data in terms of actionable intelligence, not only to provide you better care and to take care of you, but to also treat populations and say, "Okay let's, as a general population, make people healthier." Yes, we're learning from sensors in cars. We're learning from the internet of things all over the place and data, just in general, is central now to healthcare. Everybody has taken data now and finally put it on the pedestal that it deserves to be on and they're understanding that data matters in healthcare. All data matters. >> Sathya, I wonder if you could bring us inside some of these customers. I remember when object storage first rolled out. It was like healthcare, oh great. We're going to have metadata. We're going to be able to use this. It felt like it was, "Oh, well, we check the box on compliance and put some stuff places," but we hadn't really been transforming the way data got used for healthcare. What are you seeing in your customer base? Any stories you can tell us? >> A couple of things to point out is all of these have electronic health card systems, right? They actually sit on a lot of different databases. There's SQL, there's Oracle. There's also an intersystem cache database. Epic is one of the largest EHR environments and it runs on intersystems cache. What we've done at this point is to kind of treat the cache database as a first-grade citizen. You know Oracle and SQL have always been treated that way by all the other data management companies. We are elevating cache database, which is a huge player in the healthcare market and delivering options to snapshots of applications as well, not just on premise, but also allow the first lady to go into the cloud. You just saw Dietzen announce that you can actually now do snapshots and offload them to cloud as well. With us, you have the ability to orchestrate those snapshots and clear up consistent snapshots and have them hold on premise and on cloud as well. So we act as the orchestration layer for all these snapshots and application Pure already provides. Some people may use clips today, but owning Pure is like owning a family-owned car and having four bald tires with strips. We add the ability to actually create and manage all your datasets. As it changes, we keep up with it and run those orchestration for you. >> I'd like to add on thing there actually, and Sathya hit one some really great points. From the business standpoint, what we're seeing, what I'm personally seeing as an evolution over time, is that given the fact that everybody realizes that data's important, right? What they're doing is bringing data back in to centralize control within these IT organizations at healthcare organizations. Typically, it's very siloed and departmental. It's coming back in, so the CIO is really getting a purview over, and their arms around, all of the data. Now, this brings up additional challenges, right? You have X number of copies for your environments. You're copy data management is very important in healthcare. As we're growing the data and it's just going crazy, we can't also have multiple copies and just keep going crazy, right? There used to be a time, and I can speak personally about Epic, because I used to work at Epic for many years, right? At Epic, there used to be a time where we would basically come up with configuration in terms of trying to figure out how much storage you need for, not just for capacity, but for performance purposes. We'd end up with some ungodly number of copies, right, just to make sure you actually had your environments and also the performance. With data reduction technology, especially what we have at Pure here from a data reduction standpoint for digital application and compression along with the copy data management pieces, you're able to say, "Okay, I can bring some semblance to this entire house, right?" The last part is, in terms of security, right, cyber security, with all rants aware and everything else that's going on, you really want to have, in healthcare, peace of mind to say that not only do you have air gapped copies that you can actually bring back that are relevant, but you've gone through on a regular basis and proven organically that you can do this and you can do this within your SLAs and your SLOs. >> It also seems important to me that you can share many more copies, virtual copies, of data out of a single flash instance-- >> Absolutely. >> Yup, yup. >> And then catalogic obviously helps you manage that. Can you guys talk about the specific solution that you're sort of developing or partnering with others, database partners or whomever, for healthcare? >> Yeah, so I can start out and then you can take it from there, right Sathya? I think the way that we looked at this was to say, "Okay, what's the day in a life, right? What's the day in a life of storage and system administrators at these large healthcare organizations that actually touch data, be they snapshots, or backups, or clones, or integrity checks, or restoration tests, or what have you, right? Also, understanding the environment strategy that folks like Epic, and Allstrips, and Metattack, and Sherner, and whoever else used, right? Basically saying, "Okay, how can we take all of these things and apply a standard common framework to build the automation and orchestration and cataloging associated with it, plus the auditing associated with it, and provide that as a all in framework for our healthcare organizations to take advantage of, minimizing a significant amount of human intervention and interaction, which as we know, has issues. We run into these problems all the time. You hear from customers horror stories once a month across the country somewhere the other customer has an administrator who, with great intentions, has actually gone the wrong way and restored a snapshot of production from yesterday back on production instead of-- >> Whoops happens really fast. >> Whoops happens, right? >> And fast (laughing). >> That's all we can say, right, whoops. That's sort of our goal in terms of saying, "How can we actually take the burden away so that they can keep the main thing, the main thing. Focus on innovations and focus on partnering with your organization to help them accomplish their goals. So, Sathya? >> Yeah, and the other piece to it, we talked about ransomware. In healthcare space, what happened in Europe and UK was a huge thing. A lot of the other solutions that deliver copy data management use an appliance storage, right, so they want to actually move all your data set onto an appliance and want it off of there. What we deliver is basically in place copy data management. Basically the data sits on your storage, sits on the first-grade storage that you bought and using, and with the ability to drive back to a snapshot point in time, we can actually immediately come up and run. So this is, again, going back to the formula one analogy, right, you could run a spare tire, which is what all the appliances deliver. You have a problem, you could run a spare tire for a while, but at some point, you have to take a downtime and go back to it. With us, it's a formula one pit stop. You have a ready copy that is perfectly good, available for you to replace any time you get it down. We deliver the control and the orchestration layer and we give you the ability to go back to your old production state at any point and fairly quickly, and we allow you to exercise your data by creating testing environments for your developers. We met the systems team yesterday at Accelerate. They told us some of their UK customers are creating 40 copies of non-production datasets from their production datasets for their app dev purposes. >> I'd like to add on one thing there, it's very interesting about the InterSystems piece. I also worked at InterSystems for several years and have a really great relationship with them. One of the applications that they have is something that we're working on very closely with them, is InterSystems HealthShare, right? The unique challenge around HealthShare is that you have an environment that has multiple database instances that are loosely affiliated, but they still have logical consistency across them. The Holy Grail there, or the key there, is in terms of being able to provide copy data management and application consistency across these instances. That's kind of the work that we're doing together. >> Yeah, and at that point, the storage becomes your common compute layer, to some extent, right? Because if you want to take a snapshot across 40 different systems that are all in different volumes and storage, the only way you can take an app consistent snapshot is to take a consistency group, or PR calls it production groups. We have to be able to define that and take snapshots from the storage layer. >> That fundamentally changing the data access paradigm, really. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming to The Cube and sharing your story in healthcare and best of luck. Really appreciate it. >> Vik: Thank you. >> Sathya: Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Vik: Thanks, Dave. >> Sathya: Thank, too. >> All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Pure Accelerate. This is The Cube. (music)

but cube at servicenow knowledge 14 is sponsored by service now here are your hosts Dave vellante and Jeff trick here we go hi buddy we're back this is Dave vellante with Jeff freak this is the cube we go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise we have a crowd chatting on its crowd chat / no 14 so check that out put your tweets in crouch at awesome engagement app Frank's Lupin is here president CEO of service now Frank it's it's a pleasure to have you back on the cube great to see again great to be here thanks things how you feeling I'm feeling great no I got that keynote got the keynote out this morning you had the financial analyst in yesterday had the industry analyst and they're working you hard absolutely it's a circus yeah so your keynote this morning was great I was right up front they have a nice spot for the industry analyst so appreciate that take good notes but one of the themes that you struck was really hit home to me because you talked about transforming IT from essentially a cost center into a value producer and how service now is at the heart of that and and how the role of the CIO is changing so one of you could sort of summarize and talk a little bit about how you see the role of IT and generally in the CIO specifically changing and what role service now plays in that transformation yeah just just to give a little bit on macro context right that's sort of the worst of all scenarios that we see out there where I t is essentially viewed as as a commodity as a utility and as a result you know people don't see much impact I just want to get a cheaper cheaper cheaper and they want to cut more costs out of the infrastructure and staffing levels and so on and actually is just an organization that we're tolerating because I guess we have to have email and Internet access and all that sort of thing now you go looking into broader world around what technology has done to change business right what amazon has done based on their technology platform what we've seen an online banking you know what we're seeing an online education there's just just incredible examples of innovation using technologies now aighty hasn't done that for their own enterprises they happen in some instances are some some really great examples out there where I t did impacted business but by and large IT is not viewed as to go to people that know how to bring technology into business you know in a way that that really turns the tables on the competition do some mind-blowing things i always ask CIOs when i when i meet him and says what have you done in the last 12 months that really blew people's minds or in terms of applying technology to business problems right and they start sort of thinking like i'll actually it is surely nothing i can think of well that's probably you know a question you should be asking yourself all the time right if it's not when lightning in a bottle when it's not the sort of thing that sort of lights up the whole enterprise like we won't do it is we have to do this that excitement then you're shooting too low and you know in general I find the the cost obsession and IT is an indication that we're not looking for the opportunity and I think that's that that's it that's a damn shame or we're here to change that well you talked about panning for gold was that proposed here in California and it's also a propellant you your company is smoking hot and you know your your commonly associated with the likes of workday and Salesforce and sponsor must be very very proud of that but also there's gold and then RIT shops right there's goal than those organizations that's not being being mined and and you know I think you talk about your penetration is what twenty percent of your your target your global 2000 where we have footprint in about eighteen percent of the enterprises that we think are relevant and appropriate to us but within those eighteen percent you know we were probably a third saturated so so very early innings for service now even though we've achieved considerable scale and very high growth at that scale so when you go into one of your accounts can you discern actual that actual value production vision that you set forth can you see it can you touch it can you you know to this to a skeptic a prospectus yeah Frank that sounds good but can you actually sort of provide proof points yeah managing surface is just essential in terms of economizing and saving money and here's why no I'll give you some some very pedestrian examples that we've seen in real life and the human resources department and probably get the example because I t everybody sort understands how to how the game works right HR organizations historically have not had service models they have that email and phones and so on the problem just called somebody as a result that was a huge amount of work that preoccupied the HR organization that nobody knew what people were working on and the staffing grew and grew and grew to deal with the growing volume of ink wires and problems and changes and so on until they have systems service models and they have reporting and analytics that showed them what was consuming their time once you know that you can put initiatives in place to start dealing with the underlying causes that are driving that work I have seen HR organizations dwindle their staffing by 50% just by understanding what of this day we're working on right that's what service management is all about instead of just delivering service you're managing and once that quarter drops by the way IT organizations they get this in space right because you know large enterprises they got fifty hundred thousand one hundred fifty thousand instance flowing to their organization a month it's a huge consumer of resource right if you go to these other service domains and you see very similar things this layer of software really optimizes that resource well the way they attack it oftentimes is human resource doesn't that scare a lot of prospects away when they hear oh wow near cup service now and they're going to replace all these these people it's a it's a good question actually wrote a blog post about it recently as well there is no doubt that in the economy at large we're going to see massive substitution from people to systems why because the technology is here and the economic imperative is here it's very much a societal and social question but you know here's the thing see alternative you know are we going to try and stop it and not do it it's going to happen the markets are going to run their course what needs to happen is that we adjust you know for example you know in education we have a lot of teachers right what's going to happen to teachers when education is delivered through online streaming well teachers gobble you want to become crooklyn developers in other words evolve and change in their roles because education is going online slowly but let's go into why because the format the service experience is that much better it scales that much better in step much more economical than what we currently have well you said today in your key note that the system is broken you know I'm having to put four kids through school I appreciate a nudge there to the educational system why did it take so long I mean these are the IT guys ease of the technology guys in the organization they're there to deliver value why did it take so long for this kind of transformational yeah wave Steve Jobs has been the late Steve Jobs been quoted many times people don't know what they want until I show it to him and that's sort of what we're doing we're showing it to him that's what we did this morning we're showing people what they can aspire to that's what we're here for we're trying to stimulate inspire motivate give people a sense of mission right as opposed to keeping the lights on managing crises running around with your hair on fire that's not a very attractive you know a view to half of your organization and what you do all day right yeah so I have it struck again by your keynote the Affordable Care Act affectionately known as Obamacare they not the government not a customer of yours or what's the scoop oh no they could you have helped with had problem we could have for sure but then again many people cook that for the foot of people then software and technology they look at something like that yeah last night I set a dinner with Adam infrastructure for Kaiser Permanente and they had a certainly know the problems of open enrollment that a massive scale and certainly we didn't want to trivialize the problem it is really really hard to need to operate the service like that at the scale that that they need to but there is no doubt that you know we don't need any new core technology to build systems like that I mean the technology exists the skills exists sure that I want to walk better than so let's talk about your business a little bit this year third year now right since you've joined service now exactly three years this week yeah so let's sort of break that down but when you when you join service now that the discussion was around and you talked about this yesterday the the whole team and everybody was looking at help desk saying wow how can these these these values be justified and of course you blew that away and now people are beginning to understand that it's interesting to note that data domain you sold the company i think for what 2.5 billion the entire market is is now greater than the market that it replaced interesting that's right the market was three billion it's now I according obviously bigger than three billion and growing yeah you know so that's kind of interesting now that's a much more confined market you know you talked about the tons of the team they're being finite you always knew it was finite here it's different you guys have started to sort of fine tune your tam analysis and communicate that it's still hard because you just don't know the how people are going to use your software they're finding new ways but the team and I took a stab and I came up with 30 billion but it was a top-down it wasn't a bottom up and it was I had to get the blog post out so it's kind of a back of the napkin but still it's very very large clearly a multiple of the IT service management market so I wonder if you could talk about sort of the the evolution of your thinking in terms of the market opportunity with service now were you always sort of where we are today or that have to evolve over time now it has evolved I'd say dramatically obviously the expansion from what used to be called help desk management to IT service management basically you know exploded the market at least 5-fold and they were licensing five to ten times as many people on our system now for itsm purposes then we used to and in the mid 90s during to help desk area because back then all we did was licensed people ever physically on the help desk right people that would take phone calls and emails and so on now really everybody in the IT organization is an actor and a participant in the workflow of service management you may be a DBA maybe a network engineer you're going to get when an incident comes in or a problem is defined you're going to be part of that workflow right so that Dad expansion was not understood early on but beyond that services is everything is everywhere and services everything and every physical and even non physical assets have service models around them so once you start looking forward you see it absolutely everywhere you know I don't know what's a few billion among friends you know I know all that the numbers are but this is heavily transformational I think one of the things that people struggle with they're looking for a line of sight right in our company like workday is viewed very possibly why because they're seeing them take dollar for dollar market evaluation away from companies that they can identify recipe in Oracle and so on feels very credible to gamma that's 250 billion dollars or mark oh I can see those guys from work the Oracle Sapa okay take a chunk out of their eyes I know you go look at service now you need to have more imagination there's this great court from Arthur Schopenhauer that I showed you yesterday which said you know you know takedowns to hit a target that nobody else can hit but it takes genius to hit a target on nobody else can see right it's transformational right what worked it does is modern with what service now does this transformation is fundamentally different so when you came on to service now I presume your focus was putting in the infrastructure and the process is to make sure that you could scale just having watched you in your career you're you're big on growth and yeah you're pretty aggressive so so take us through sort of you know where you sort of started and what the emphasis was and and where it is now be clearly you're investing in sales and marketing you're investing in AP I didn't know this the substantial number of global 2000 companies in asia-pacific so that's another so how is that I mean break that down into maybe one or two or three sort of segments of your attention and effort there there's sort of you can sort of split up in two major stages or phases the first phase you know when when I took over the helm of the company was very much focused on operationalizing stabilizing scale being able to deliver what we're already doing in a consistent and predictable manner and that was not a minor task because because the company had grown so fast but hadn't been able to basically catch itself in terms of bill into business building the organization underneath its business so that preoccupied us tremendously the whole thing about cloud is is not like there's a lot of people you know running around out there to actually no clout that understand clot that can build clouds and how many people do you know that I've actually done this because there's you know three years ago I mean they were far and few we actually recruited people that have built the original cloud of ebay because those guys were pioneers they have solved a lot of the problems associated with cloud early on we saw a lot of people that understood data centers the cloud this is almost in verse two data centers the mentality that you need to to run them davos phase one before us and we sort of got through that you know about you know a year and a half ago for sure about a year ago and we started to shift gears you know really from the operational infrastructure concentration that we've had to really trying to drive strategically the business towards enterprise service management they're really expanding the addressable market way beyond where we had been before we were going to market until i see i l-look itsm replacement you have to do it you're sitting on 10 15 20 year old software it's crappy it's got to go fine we're going to do that right but we want to give you this much bigger perspective managing service in the enterprise and you know make that a mission that you can own as a CEO and drive throughout your organization over a period of years and a lot of our customers have road maps that are 24 36 months and it shows you all the things they're going to knock off over that period of time and all the different you know parksley enterprises to sell is its engineering its market yourself so on yes okay so Tam expansion and now obviously accessing that to him we hire in a lot of sales people and go to market I was struck walking around the exhibit hall last night because you just announced app creator I think last year yep knowledge I was struck by you know that the booth down there with the number of apps I mean it's just astounding where that's going wouldn't have predicted you know some of them that I that I saw so that's obviously part of the the tam expansion as well I wonder if we could talk about the importance of a single system of record in order to achieve that vision because it's not always easy right politically people want to keep data in their own little silos so how does that work you can't force it in because it sort of just happen organically how critical is that to your success I mean when you have applications or services that relate to each other like for example you know this morning we showed in a demo I think we're sure like seven or eight different applications in the course of one demonstration the reason that is a single system of record matters so much when you do that is all these apps need to be aware of each other right when your when your staff in the projects you need to look at the resource management well that resource management relates to the skill requirements as well the skills that are available right what you don't want is these apps living in their own universes with their own data moss your own database because now you have to start the hack integrations between them to make any sense out of that and that's the world we lived and that's been the bane of software existence for for so long the ServiceNow said I'm not going to do that okay every application that relates to any other application they're going to be operating on exactly the same data model and by the way you see that throughout our platform right when you bring up an asset in the CMDB like a server or a rather or Santa whatever it is you'll be able to see all the other data artifacts throughout the platform like instantly problem of changes in projects and tasks that relate to that particular asset there's nobody else that can do that right and we provide the 360-degree visibility that makes application development so compelling because you know all the users are already defined the system you don't even have to get started with that you only define users once right you reuse all that and all the other artifacts already exists so you get this data gravitas that the more data that is there to richer the application with almond environment becomes yeah we talked about this too at the analyst meeting about the relationship to your M&A strategy you've got to be selective it's got to fit in to that single system of record does that however limit your choices in rule absolute limit our choices but you know this is the commitment from an architectural standpoint that we make us that we're not going to repeat what legacy vendors have done is I mean you know 50 apps whole stand along to hack integrations between them as I said that's the world our customers want to leave behind because it was just horrible former from an efficiency standpoint after a while all you people do is managing the operability of the patchwork plethora of assets that they have they're not doing anything productive and in our world they don't they do none of that right they're not upgrading software because it's the clouds you know we do that and they're not hacking integrations between apps because there is no constant of integration on service not with all the apps are aware through a shared data model so is there still plenty of M&A opportunity for you out there though I mean your stocks up I know it's off a little bit lately which I think it's really healthy I'm happy about that nice little breather but still you know you've made great progress adding value you can obviously use your stock as acquisition card co there's still plenty of opportunities for you notice there's absolutely tons of opportunities again in a day you know software infrastructure is it's very similar and very common between application itself for us to bring an application into our user interface framework I mean they have to have a user interface framework of some sort right so whether we replace what they have with ours with a replace the data structure we replace the underlying cloud we can do all those things right the question is is there going to be hard is it going to be expensive is it going to be time-consuming or maybe not as much and that will influence how attractive we are to the asset all right Frank we're way over on time but I could go forever i mean really appreciate you coming on CX for having us here it's really fantastic event all right keep it right to everybody we're back with our next guest this is the cube we're live from moscone right back

okay we're back here live ending up day one of IBM's information on demand exclusive coverage for SiliconANGLE and Wikibon and constellation research breaking down the day one analysis I'm John furrier and join my co-host E on the cube Dave vellante of course as usual and for this closing wrap up segment of day one we have analyst and founder of constellation research ray Wang former analyst big data guru software heading up the partner pavilion kicking off all the flying around the world your own event this month past month things going great how are you how are you doing we're going to great man there's a lot of energy in q3 q4 we've been watching people look at trying to spend down their budgets and I think people are just like worried that there's going to be nothing in 2014 right so they're just bending down we're seeing these big orders like tonight I've got to fly out to New York to close out a deal and help someone else that's basically it was a big day to deal that's going down this is how crazy it's going on and so it's been like this pretty much like for the last four or five weeks so flows budget flush I just wash this budget lunchtime what are you seeing for the deals out there give us some of the examples of some of the sizes and magnitude is it you know you know how are you up and run to get get some cash into secure what size scopes are you seeing up yeah i mean what we're seeing I mean it's anything from a quarter million into like five million dollar deals some of our platform we sing at all levels the one that's really hot we were talking about this that the tableau conference was the date of is right dative is is still really really hot but on the back end we're saying data quality pop-up we're seeing the integration piece play a role we also saw a little bit of content management but not the traditional content management that's coming in more about the text mining text analytics to kind of drive that I mean I'm not sure what are you guys seeing alone yeah so what we're seeing a lot of energy I've seen the budget flush we're not involved in the deals like you are Dave is but for me what I'm seeing is IT the cloud is being accepted I'll you know those has not talked about publicly is kind of a public secret is amazon is just destroying the value proposition of many folks out there with cloud they're just winning the developers hand over fist and you know i'm not sure pivotal with cloud family even catch up even OpenStack has really got some consume energy around we're following that so it opens stack yet amazon on the public cloud winning everything no money's pouring into the enterprise saying hey we got to build the infrastructure under the hood so you can't have the application edge if you don't have the engine so the 100 x price advantage and that's really a scary thing but I think softlayer gives IBM a shot here yeah we were talking about self leyva so you are seeing more I'm seeing it aight aight figure deals and big data right and it's starting to get up there so softly I'd love to get your take on soft layers we've been having a debate all day Oh softlayer jaws mckenna what do you what's your take you're saying it's a hosting I've been a look at first of all yeah I love putting a huge gap 9 million dollars per lock event data center hosting now if that's a footprint they can shave that and kind of give their customers some comfort I think that's the way i see it i mean just I haven't gone inside the numbers to see where it's going to be where this energy is but like we're software virtualization is going on where everyone's going on with virtualization the data center I'll give them a cloud play I just don't see ya didn't have one before I mean happy cloud I mean whistling private club Wow is their software involved I think it provides them with an option to actually deliver cloud services with a compression ratio on storage and a speed that they need to do to deliver mobile mobile data analytics right there's things that are there that are required so it gives them an option to be playing the cloud well I just saw I mean in the news coverage and the small inspection that we did I did was I just didn't reek of software innovation it's simply a data center large hosting big on you agree they didn't really have a northern wobblin driving him before this was brilliant on your Sun setting their previous all these chairs deal kind of musical chairs me for the music stops get something it was that kind of the deal no I think they are feel more like customers asking for something and they wanted IBM to have it yeah IBM works it's an irr play for IBM they're gonna make money on this team not a tuck under deal 900 million no I know but they'll make money on it that's IBM almost always does with it I'll leave it up to you guys to rip on I was your conference oh thanks hey constellation connecting enterprise was awesome we were at the half moon bay Ritz we had 220 folks that were there senior level individuals one of the shocking things for me was the fact that when we pulled the audience on day one two things happen that I would never imagine first thing as ninety percent of the folks downloaded our mobile app which was like awesome right so the network was with them the knowledge is with them when they leave the event and all the relationships the second thing that really shocked me we knew we had really good ratios but it was seventy-five percent of the audience that was line of business execs and twenty-five percent IT it was like we were we didn't have to preach to the choir it was amazing and the IT folks that were they were very very innovative on that end so it was awesome in that way so a lot like the mix the mix here is much more line of business execs the last week at hadoop world loose you know the t-shirt crowd right a lot of practitioners you know scoop I've flume hey we got the earth animals ever right oh but no this event is actually interesting IBM iod for me is like I didn't realize this when I didn't I looked at numbers when we're doing a partner event yesterday and there are thirteen thousand attendees here that actually makes that the biggest big data and analytics conference bigger than strata bigger than a whole bunch of other ones and so I mean this is pretty much the Nexus of what about open world big data over there but this is a big opera you see world any world cloud big data yeah hey the between no but so IBM's done a fantastic job of really transitioning this conference from sort of an eclectic swix db2 informix right I'm management routine fest right yeah and now it's like what are the business things I mean what are we trying to save around the world are they telling the story effectively it's a hard story to tell you got big data analytics cloud mobile in the middle and you got social business but then you got all this use case they have success stories if customers that creating business outcomes they telling the story effectively is it not enough speeds and fees is it too what's your take the stories are there we've seen like 122 case studies from the business partner side we just haven't seen them percolate out and I think they've got to do a better job evangelizing stories but what's interesting is like there's that remember we talked about this data to decision level there's that data level that was IBM right here's the database here's the structure here's the content management here's the unstructured stuff this is where it sets then there was that information management level which that they started to do which is really about cleaning the data connecting that data connecting to upstream and downstream systems getting into CRM and payroll and then they got to this level about insights which was all the Cognos stuff right so they've been building up the stat from data decisions so they got data information information to insight and then we're getting to this decision-making level which they haven't made a lot of the assets or acquisitions there but that's the predictive analytics that's the cognitive computing you can see how they're wrapping around there I mean there's a lot of vendors to buy there's a lot of opportunity out there's a lot to connect and they've been working on it for a while but I guess I got to ask you how they doing what's your report card from last year this year better better storytelling better messaging I think the stories are getting better but we're seeing them in more deals now right before we'd see a lot more SI p traditional SI p oracle you know kind of competes and a little bit of IBM Cognos now we're seeing them in a lot of end-to-end deals and what we're talking about it's not like I T deals these are line of business folks that say look I really need to change my shopping experience what do you guys have we see other things like you know the fraud examples that any was talking about those are hilarious I mean those are real I see em in every place right I mean even with Obamacare right there's gonna be massive amounts of fraud there any places that people going to want to go in and figure out how to connect or correct those kind of things yeah so so seeing the use cases emerge yeah and in particular me last week in a dupe world it was financial services you're talking risk you talk a marketing you're talking fraud protection to forecasting yep the big three and then underneath that is predicted predictive analytics so you know that's all sort of interesting what's your take on on Amazon these days you know they are crushing it on so many different unbelievable right on more billion this year maybe it's when you build a whole company which is basically on the premise of hey let's get people to offset our cost structure from November 15th to january first I mean it's pretty amazing what you can do it's like everyone's covering for it and even more funny it's like they're doing in the physical world with distribution centers I know if we talked about this before but what's really interesting is they've got last mile delivery UPS FedEx DHL can't cat can't handle their capacity so now the ability from digital to physical goods they've got that and beezus goes out and buys the post so he can make the post for example a national paper overnight again he can do home delivery things that they couldn't do before they can take digital ads bring that back in and so basically what they're doing on the cloud side they're also doing on the physical distribution side amazing isn't it they're almost the pushing towards sunday delivery right US Postal Service go into five day deliveries sort of the different directions amazon I'm Amazon's going to be the postal service by the time they're done we're all going to subsidize it so so I gotta get you take on the the Oracle early statement Larry Ellison said were the iphone for the data center that's his metaphor a couple of couple or global enrolls ago now you got open stack and though we kind of laugh at that but but amazon is like the iPhone you know it's disruptive its new its emerging like Apple was reading out of the ashes with Steve Jobs Oracle I think trying to shoehorn in an iphone positioning but if OpenStack if everyone's open and you got amazon here there is a plausible strategy scenario that says hey these guys can continue to to put the naysayers at the side of the road as they march forward to the enterprise and be the iphone they've turned the data center into an API so so we got the date as their lock in right so this sim lock in Apple has lock in so is that lock in what's your take of that scenario you think it's video in the open ecosystem world they're all false open because a walk-in also applies but but you've been even to this for a long time right and probably one of the things that you're seeing is that it's not about open versus closed it's about ubiquity right Microsoft was a closed evil empire back ten years ago now it's like oh the standard right it's like ok they're harmless Google was like open and now they're the evil empire right it just depends on the perception and the really is ubiquity Amazon's got ubiquity on it so i did is pushing their winning the developers the winning the developers they got the ecosystem they got ubiquity they've got a cost structure I mean I don't know what else could go wrong I think they could get s la's maybe and once that had I don't know what is Amazon's blind spot I mean s la's I think well a lumpy performance no one wants lumpy right they want the big Dayton who's got ever who's got better public as public cloud SL is denied well I think about what he just said us everybody no but here's think that's a public road statement not an amazon said let's crunch big data computation December fifteenth you tell me what this is all I want to know well I think I think an easy move is I mean this day you've got to do that on premise I just I just don't I just don't think that people are forecasting amazon the enterprise properly and you just set out the Washington Post that is a left-field move we can now look back and say okay I said makes sense amazon can continue to commoditize and disrupt and be innovative then shift and having some sort of on prem playing oh then it's over right then and then gets the stir days surrounded the castle but they really don't have a great arm tremblay have no on print but they could they could get one good I think they want to see well think they want to but I think with them what they figured out was let's go build some cool public service get everyone else to subsidize our main offerings right it's basically ultimate shared service everyone's subsidizing Amazon's destruction of their business right so if you're Macy is why the heck are you on amazon right you know if you're competing with them why the heck are you on Amazon you're basically digging your own grave I'm paying them to do it it's amazing I mean that's that's the brilliance of this goes invade they brag about it yeah digging your own brave like it's a you know put the compute power is great okay great but you're subsidizing Amazon's for the you know compute power so r a great shot great to have you here congratulations on your event constellation research awesome successful venues ahead last month top folks in you're doing a great job with your company and the end the day out today in the last word tell the folks what's happening with IBM what do you expect to hear from them tomorrow I know you're going to be another thing you had to fly to but what does IBM what's a trajectory coming out of the show for IBM what's your analysis I think the executives have figured out that the important audience here is really the line of business leaders and to figure out how to do couple things one democratize decision-making the second thing figure out how they can actually make it easy to consume IBM at different entry points and I think the third thing is really how can we focus on improving data visualization graphics I think you'll see something about that ray Wang on the cube cube alumni tech athlete entrepreneur new for his new firm not new anymore it's a couple years on his belt doing a great job but three years old congratulations we'll be back day two tomorrow stay with us here exclusive coverage of IBM information I'm John prairie with Dave vellante this is the cube will see you tomorrow the queue

>>Hi buddy, we're back. This is Dave Volante with the cube goes out to the shows. We extract the signal from the noise. Nate Silver's here. Nate, we've been saying that since 2010, rip you off. Hey Marcus feeder. Oh, you have that trademarks. Okay. So anyway, welcome to the cube. You man who needs no introduction, but in case you don't know Nate, uh, he's a very famous author, five 30 eight.com. Statistician influence, influential individual predictor of a lot of things including presidential elections. And uh, great to have you here. Great to be here. So we listened to your keynote this morning. We asked earlier if some of our audience, can you tweet it and you know, what would you ask Nate silver? So of course we got the predictable, how the red Sox going to do this year? Who's going to be in the world series? Are we going to attack Syria? >>Uh, will the fed E's or tightened? Of course we're down here. Who'd you vote for? Or they, you know, they all want to know. And of course, a lot of these questions you can't answer because it's too far out. But, uh, but anyway, again, welcome, welcome to the cube. Um, so I want to start by, uh, picking up on some of the themes in your keynote. Uh, you're here at the Tableau conference. Obviously it's all about about data. Uh, and you, your basic, one of your basic premises was that, um, people will misinterpret data, they'll just use data for their own own biases. You have been a controversial figure, right? A lot of people have accused you of, of bias. Um, how, what do you F how do you feel about that as a person who's, uh, you know, statistician, somebody who loves data? >>I think everyone has bias in the sense that we all have one relatively narrow perspective as compared to a big set of problems that we all are trying to analyze or solve or understand together. Um, you know, but I do think some of this actually comes down to, uh, not just bias, but kind of personal morality and ethics really. It seems weird to talk about it that way, but there are a lot of people involved in the political world who are operating to manipulate public opinion, um, and that don't really place a lot of value on the truth. Right. And I consider that kind of immoral. Um, but people like that I think don't really understand that someone else might act morally by actually just trying to discover the way the objective world is and trying to use science and research to, to uncover things. >>And so I think it's hard people to, because if they were in your shoes, they would try and manipulate the forecast and they would cheat and put their finger on their scale. They assume that anyone else would do the same thing cause they, they don't own any. Yeah. So will you, you've made some incredibly accurate predictions, uh, in the face of, of, of others that clearly had bias that, that, that, you know mispredicted um, so how did you feel when you got those, those attacks? Were you flabbergasted? Were you pissed? Were you hurt? I mean, all of the above having you move houses for, for you? I mean you get used to them with a lot of bullshit, right? You're not too surprised. Um, I guess it surprised me how, but how much the people who you know are pretty intelligent are willing to, to fool themselves and how specious arguments where meet and by the way, people are always constructing arguments for, for outcomes they happen to be rooting for. >>Right? It'd be one thing if you said, well I'm a Republican, but boy I think Obama's going to crush Romney electoral college or vice versa. But you should have an extra layer of scrutiny when you have a view that diverges from the consensus or what kind of the markets are saying. And by the way, you can go and they're betting Margaret's, you can go and you could have bet on the outcome of election bookies in the UK, other countries. Right. And they kind of had forecast similar to ours. We were actually putting their money where their mouth was. Agree that Obama was a. Not a lot, but a pretty heavy favorite route. Most of the last two months in the election. I wanted to ask you about prediction markets cause as you probably know, I mean the betting public are actually very efficient. Handicappers right over. >>So I'll throw a two to one shot is going to be to three to one is going to be a four to one, you know, more often than not. But what are your thoughts on, on prediction markets? I mean you just sort of betting markets, you'd just alluded it to them just recently or is that a, is that a good, well there a lot there then then I think the punditry right. I mean, you know, so with, with prediction markets you have a couple of issues. Number one is do you have enough, uh, liquidity, um, and my volume in the markets for them to be, uh, uh, optimal. Right. And I think the answer right now is maybe not exactly. And like these in trade type markets, knowing trade has been, has been shut down. In fact, it was pretty light trading volumes. It might've had people who stood to gain or lose, um, you know, thousands of dollars. >>Whereas in quote, unquote real markets, uh, the stakes are, are several orders of magnitude higher. If you look at what happened to, for example, just prices of common stocks a day after the election last year, um, oil and gas stocks lost billions of dollars of market capitalization after Romney lost. Uh, conversely, some, you know, green tech stocks or certain types of healthcare socks at benefit from Obamacare going into play gain hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in market capitalization. So real investors have to price in these political risks. Um, anyway, I would love to have see fully legal, uh, trading markets in the U S people can get bet kind of proper sums of money where you have, um, a lot of real capital going in and people can kind of hedge their economic risk a little bit more. But you know, they're, they're bigger and it's very hard to beat markets. They're not flawless. And there's a whole chapter in the book about how, you know, the minute you assume that markets are, are clairvoyant and perfect, then that's when they start to fail. >>Ironically enough. But they're very good. They're very tough to beat and they certainly provide a reality check in terms of providing people with, with real incentives to actually, you know, make a bet on, on their beliefs and people when they have financial incentives, uh, uh, to be accurate then a lot of bullshit. There's a tax on bullshit is one way. That's okay. I've got to ask him for anyway that you're still a baseball fan, right? Is that an in Detroit fan? Right. I'm a tiger. There's my bias. You remember the bird? It's too young to remember a little too. I, so I grew up, I was born in 78, so 84, the Kirk Gibson, Alan Trammell teams are kind of my, my earliest. So you definitely don't remember Mickey Lola cha. I used to be a big guy. That's right fan as well. But so, but Sony, right when Moneyball came out, we just were at the Vertica conference. >>We saw Billy being there and, and uh, when, when, when, when, when that book came out, I said Billy Bean's out of his mind for releasing all these secrets. And you alluded to in your talk today that other teams like the rays and like the red Sox have sort of started to adopt those techniques. At the same time, I feel like culturally when another one of your V and your Venn diagram, I don't want you vectors, uh, that, that Oakland's done a better job of that, that others may S they still culturally so pushing back, even the red Sox themselves, it can be argued, you know, went out and sort of violated the, the principles were of course Oakland A's can't cause they don't have a, have a, have a budget to do. So what's your take on Moneyball? Is the, is the strategy that he put forth sustainable or is it all going to be sort of level playing field eventually? >>I mean, you know, the strategy in terms of Oh fine guys that take a lot of walks, right? Um, I mean everyone realizes that now it's a fairly basic conclusion and it was kind of the sign of, of how far behind how many biases there were in the market for that, you know, use LBP instead of day. And I actually like, but that, that was arbitrage, you know, five or 10 years ago now, um, put butts in the seat, right? Man, if they win, I guess it does, but even the red Sox are winning and nobody goes to the games anymore. The red Sox, tons of empty seats, even for Yankees games. Well, it's, I mean they're also charging 200 bucks a ticket or something. you can get a ticket for 20, 30 bucks. But, but you know, but I, you know, I, I, I mean, first of all, the most emotional connection to baseball is that if your team is in pennant races, wins world series, right then that produces multimillion dollar increases in ticket sales and, and TV contracts down the road. >>So, um, in fact, you know, I think one thing is, is looking at the financial side, like modeling the martial impact of a win, but also kind of modeling. If you do kind of sign a free agent, then, uh, that signaling effect, how much does that matter for season ticket sales? So you could do some more kind of high finance stuff in baseball. But, but some of the low hanging fruit, I mean, you know, almost every team now has a Cisco analyst on their payroll or increasingly the distinctions aren't even as relevant anymore. Right? Where someone who's first in analytics is also listening to what the Scouts say. And you have organizations that you know, aren't making these kind of distinctions between stat heads and Scouts at all. They all kind of get along and it's all, you know, finding better ways, more responsible ways to, to analyze data. >>And basically you have the advantage of a very clear way of measure, measure success where, you know, do you win? That's the bottom line. Or do you make money or, or both. You can isolate guys Marshall contribution. I mean, you know, I am in the process now of hiring a bunch of uh, writers and editors and developers for five 38 right? So someone has a column and they do really well. How much of that is on the, the writer versus the ed or versus the brand of the site versus the guy at ESPN who promoted it or whatever else. Right. That's hard to say. But in baseball, everyone kind of takes their turn. It's very easy to measure each player's kind of marginal contribution to sort of balance and equilibrium and, and, and it's potentially achieved. But, and again, from your talk this morning modeling or volume of data doesn't Trump modeling, right? >>You need both. And you need culture. You need, you need, you know, you need volume of data, you need high quality data. You need, uh, a culture that actually has the right incentives align where you really do want to find a way to build a better product to make more money. Right? And again, they'll seem like, Oh, you know, how difficult should it be for a company to want to make more money and build better products. But, um, when you have large organizations, you have a lot of people who are, uh, who are thinking very short term or only about only about their P and L and not how the whole company as a whole is doing or have, you know, hangups or personality conflicts or, or whatever else. So, you know, a lot of success I think in business. Um, and certainly when it comes to use of analytics, it's just stripping away the things that, that get in the way from understanding and distract you. >>It's not some wave a magic wand and have some formula where you uncover all the secrets in the world. It's more like if you can strip away the noise there and you're going to have a much clearer understanding of, of what's really there. Uh, Nate, again, thanks so much for joining us. So kind of wanna expand on that a little bit. So when people think of Nate silver, sometimes they, you know, they think Nate silver analytics big data, but you're actually a S some of your positions are kind of, you take issue with some of the core notions of big data really around the, the, the importance of causality versus correlation. So, um, so we had Kenneth kookier on from, uh, the economist who wrote a book about big data a while back, the strata conference. And you know, he, in that book, they talk a lot about it really doesn't matter how valid anymore, if you know that your customers are gonna buy more products based on this dataset or this correlation that it doesn't really matter why. >>You just try to try to try to exploit that. Uh, but in your book you talk about, well and in the keynote today you talked about, well actually hypothesis testing coming in with some questions and actually looking for that causality is also important. Um, so, so what is your, what is your opinion of kind of, you know, all this hype around big data? Um, you know, you mentioned volume is important, but it's not the only thing. I mean, like, I mean, I'll tell you I'm, I'm kind of an empiricist about anything, right? So, you know, if it's true that merely finding a lot of correlations and kind of very high volume data sets will improve productivity. And how come we've had, you know, kind of such slow economic growth over the past 10 years, where is the tangible increase in patent growth or, or different measures of progress. >>And obviously there's a lot of noise in that data set as well. But you know, partly why both in the presentation today and in the book I kind of opened up with the, with the history is saying, you know, let's really look at the history of technology. It's a kind of fascinating, an understudied feel, the link between technology and progress and growth. But, um, it doesn't always go as planned. And I certainly don't think we've seen any kind of paradigm shift as far as, you know, technological, economic productivity in the world today. I mean, the thing to remember too is that, uh, uh, technology is always growing in and developing and that if you have roughly 3% economic growth per year exponential, that's a lot of growth, right? It's not even a straight line growth. It's like exponential growth. And to have 3% exponential growth compounding over how many years is a lot. >>So you're always going to have new technologies developing. Um, but what I, I'm suspicious that as people will say this one technology is, is a game changer relative to the whole history of civilization up until now. Um, and also, you know, again, a lot of technologies you look at kind of economic models where you have different factors or productivity. It's not usually an additive relationship. It's more a multiplicative relationships. So if you have a lot of data, but people who aren't very good at analyzing it, you have a lot of data but it's unstructured and unscrutinised you know, you're not going to get particularly good results by and large. Um, so I just want to talk a little bit about the, the kind of the, the cultural issue of adopting kind of analytics and, and becoming a data driven organization. And you talk a lot about, um, you know, really what you do is, is setting, um, you know, try to predict the probabilities of something happening, not really predicting what's going to happen necessarily. >>And you talked to New York, you know, today about, you know, knowledging where, you know, you're not, you're not 100% sure acknowledging that this is, you know, this is our best estimate based on the data. Um, but of course in business, you know, a lot of people, a lot of, um, importance is put on kind of, you know, putting on that front that you're, you know, what you're talking about. It's, you know, you be confident, you go in, this is gonna happen. And, and sometimes that can actually move markets and move decision-making. Um, how do you balance that in a, in a business environment where, you know, you want to keep, be realistic, but you want to, you know, put forth a confident, uh, persona. Well, you know, I mean, first of all, everyone, I think the answer is that you have to, uh, uh, kind of take a long time to build the narrative correctly and kind of get back to the first principles. >>And so at five 38, it's kind of a case where you have a dialogue with the readers of the site every day, right? But it's not that you can solve in one conversation. If you come in to a boss who you never talked to you before, you have to present some PowerPoint and you're like, actually this initiative has a, you know, 57% chance of succeeding and the baseline is 50% and it's really good cause the upside's high, right? Like you know, that's going to be tricky if you don't have a good and open dialogue. And it's another barrier by the way to success is that uh, you know, none of this big data stuff is going to be a solution for companies that have poor corporate cultures where you have trouble communicating ideas where you don't everyone on the same page. Um, you know, you need buy in from, from all throughout the organization, which means both you need senior level people who, uh, who understand the value of analytics. >>You also need analysts or junior level people who understand what business problems the company is trying to solve, what organizational goals are. Um, so I mean, how do you communicate? It's tricky, you know, maybe if you can't communicate it, then you find another firm or go, uh, go trade stocks and, and uh, and short that company if you're not violating like insider trading rules of, of various kinds. Um, you know, I mean, the one thing that seems to work better is if you can, uh, depict things visually. People intuitively grasp uncertainty. If you kind of portray it to them in a graphic environment, especially with interactive graphics, uh, more than they might've just kind of put numbers on a page. You know, one thing we're thinking about doing with the new 580 ESPN, we're hiring a lot of designers and developers is in case where there is uncertainty, then you can press a button, kind of like a slot, Michigan and simulate and outcome many times, then it'll make sense to people. Right? And they do that already for, you know, NCAA tournament stuff or NFL playoffs. Um, but that can help. >>So Nate, I asked you my, my partner John furry, who's often or normally the cohost of this show, uh, just just tweeted me asking about crowd spotting. So he's got this notion that there's all this exhaust out there, the social exhaustive social data. How do you, or do you, or do you see the potential to use that exhaust that's thrown off from the connected consumer to actually make predictions? Um, so I'm >>a, I guess probably mildly pessimistic about this for the reason being that, uh, a lot of this data is very new and so we don't really have a way to kind of calibrate a model based on it. So you can look and say, well, you know, let's say Twitter during the Republican primaries in 2016 that, Oh, Paul Ryan is getting five times as much favorable Twitter sentiment as Rick Santorum or whatever among Republicans. But, but what's that mean? You know, to put something into a model, you have to have enough history generally, um, where you can translate X into Y by means of some function or some formula. And a lot of data is so new where you don't have enough history to do that. And the other thing too is that, um, um, the demographics of who is using social media is changing a lot. Where we are right now you come to conference like this and everyone has you know, all their different accounts but, but we're not quite there yet in terms of the broader population. >>Um, you have a lot of kind of thought leaders now a lot of, you know, kind of young, smart urban tech geeks and they're not necessarily as representative of the population as a whole. That will over time the data will become more valuable. But if you're kind of calibrating expectations based on the way that at Twitter or Facebook were used in 2013 to expect that to be reliable when you want a high degree of precision three years from now, even six months from now is, is I think a little optimistic. Some sentiment though, we would agree with that. I mean sentiment is this concept of how many people are talking about a thumbs up, thumbs down. But to the extent that you can get metadata and make it more stable, longer term, you would see potential there is, I mean, there are environments where the terrain is shifting so fast that by the time you know, the forecast that you'd be interested in, right? >>Like things have already changed enough where like it's hard to do, to make good forecast. Right? And I think one of the kind of fundamental themes here, one of my critiques is some of the, uh, of, uh, the more optimistic interpretations of big data is that fundamentally people are, are, most people want a shortcut, right? Most people are, are fairly lazy like labor. What's the hot stock? Yeah. Right. Um, and so I'm worried whenever people talk about, you know, biased interpretations of, of the data or information, right? Whenever people say, Oh, this is going to solve my problems, I don't have to work very hard. You know, not usually true. Even if you look at sports, even steroids, performance enhancing drugs, the guys who really get the benefits of the steroids, they have to work their butts off, right? And then you have a synergy which hell. >>So they are very free free meal tickets in life when they are going to be gobbled up in competitive environments. So you know, uh, bigger datasets, faster data sets are going to be very powerful for people who have the right expertise and the right partners. But, but it's not going to make, uh, you know anyone to be able to kind of quit their job and go on the beach and sip my ties. So ne what are you working on these days as it relates to data? What's exciting you? Um, so with the, with the move to ESPN, I'm thinking more about, uh, you know, working with them on sports type projects, which is something having mostly cover politics. The past four or five years I've, I've kind of a lot of pent up ideas. So you know, looking at things in basketball for example, you have a team of five players and solving the problem of, of who takes the shot, when is the guy taking a good shot? >>Cause the shot clock's running out. When does a guy stealing a better opportunity from, from one of his teammates. Question. We want to look at, um, you know, we have the world cup the summer, so soccer is an interest of mine and we worked in 2010 with ESPN on something called the soccer power index. So continuing to improve that and roll that out. Um, you know, obviously baseball is very analytics rich as well, but you know, my near term focus might be on some of these sports projects. Yeah. So that the, I have to ask you a followup on the, on the soccer question. Is that an individual level? Is that a team level of both? So what we do is kind of uh, uh, one problem you have with the national teams, the Italian national team or Brazilian or the U S team is that they shift their personnel a lot. >>So they'll use certain guys for unimportant friendly matches for training matches that weren't actually playing in Brazil next year. So the system soccer power next we developed for ESPN actually it looks at the rosters and tries to make inferences about who is the a team so to speak and how much quality improvement do you have with them versus versus, uh, guys that are playing only in the marginal and important games. Okay. So you're able to mix and match teams and sort of predict on your flow state also from club league play to make inferences about how the national teams will come together. Um, but soccer is a case where, where we're going into here where we had a lot more data than we used to. Basically you had goals and bookings, I mean, and yellow cards and red cards and now you've collected a lot more data on how guys are moving throughout the field and how many passes there are, how much territory they're covering, uh, tackles and everything else. So that's becoming a lot smarter. Excellent. All right, Nate, I know you've got to go. I really appreciate the time. Thanks for coming on. The cube was a pleasure to meet you. Great. Thank you guys. All right. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Dave Volante and Jeff Kelly. We're live at the Tableau user conference. This is the cube.