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Mike Saur, CCI Systems & Omar Sultan, Cisco Systems | CUBE Conversation, August 2020


 

>> Announcer: From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and looking forward, we're going to be digging into one of my favorite topics and also the community always loves when we have it. Talking about networking, of course. Happy to welcome you to the program. I have two first time guests. First of all, we have Mike Saur. He is a solutions architect of NetDevOps with CCI. And joining us a long time friend of the program. First time on the program, Omar Saltun, who is a leader, product management for Network Services Orchestrator with Cisco. Omar and Mike, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, nice to be here. >> Thank you, sir. >> All right. So Mike, if you could just set up for us, CCI, Cisco partner, give us a little bit about the organization, what you specialize in, what you're known for. And tell us a bit about your role there. >> Sure. CCI systems is a trusted partner for typical mid market size service providers. That's primarily the focus and that's a lot of different areas of the business, cable access, CMTS, security, data center and now this next evolution of adding NetDevOps as that next step for trusted advisor. I've been in my role for about a year now at CCI with a strong passion for automation and finding the right fit tools to solve problems for our customers, whether that's a commercial product or a open source tool. So a lot of different problems out there and no one size fits all. So it's my passion to bring those types of solutions to CCIs customers. >> Wonderful. Mike, I'm hearing a lot of the themes that I'm very familiar with. I'm sure our audience is when we talk about Cisco, when we've gone to Cisco live, we've been in the DevNet zone. So having a lot of discussions about that NetDevOps piece, can you talk to us a little bit more, just the partnership with Cisco. I would love to hear how NetDevOps fits in with what you're doing and how that fits with Cisco too. >> Yeah, I've been working with Cisco on and off for the past 18 months to try to think outside the box. As we know, Network Services Orchestrator was primarily targeted at the large providers that have the investment resources, the programming staff, to be able to do that. So over the years, having various discussions with product management, Cisco and CCI have come together to partner to solve two of the big problems in our space for our customers. As far as the math problem of the investment that's needed to bring up Network Service Orchestrator, and then also the programming piece of that. So not a lot of the providers in the mid market space have that expertise. So CCI and Cisco are really pulling that all together with various trusted partners to bring that to life for them in a shorter timeframe, with more sets of controls, to bring them up to speed faster so that they can it with a martial arts type journey of starting small and integrating over different phases of the life cycle of automation. >> Great. Well, Omar, let's pull you into the discussion here. It tends to be in general from a product standpoint, a little bit easier to grow up market. We want to talk a bit about the mid market, so that Network Services Orchestrator, NSO. Help explain how that really can support the mid tier as Mike was saying. >> Sure, so we were a little crazy, we started at the top and starting to work our way down. So we're well established with tier one service providers, large enterprises, we have good markets penetration there. I think for us, it was a lot of growth opportunity down into the mid market, both on commercial and tier two, tier three service providers. I know that the challenge in NSO is awesome, but it's got a steep learning curve. So, these partnerships like the one here is perfect because it allows mid market customers to access the capability. But at the same time, they have someone to hold their hands. They have partners like CCI, that have both the technical expertise, as well as kind of understanding kind of what customer problems are, what operations and problem scaling look like in mid market, not just a tier one where the different markets, different requirements. >> Mike I would love to get your viewpoint as to what's happening inside your customers. So networking in general, obviously there's always new technologies that they need to integrate, but there's also the skill sets. NetDevOps, of course, helping pull people along to work closer with developers, coding more something we have to talk about. So the mid tier customer specifically, what challenges they face with bring us into some of those conversations, if you would. >> Right, so I preach a lot and talk about the vicious cycle of not automating. They don't have time 'cause they're too busy doing the day to day jobs. And I love to get into that vicious cycle and kind of bust that up and help to kind of think differently why they need to operate their networks differently. And they can take a lot of those tools and techniques from the software world and really help leverage them on their networks. There's just a skills gap right now with the mid market type folks. They're overworked, stressed. And with obviously the growth of IOT, more devices means more work. It's just a volume metric problem that certain automation tools can really make a difference in their world. And that's really what my passion is at, reducing human error, helping those businesses provide more uptime for their end customers and just driving a different way to operate networks in more efficiently in accurate way. >> And part of that... >> Please go ahead on that. >> And part of that is just not. You know those are the technical expertise, but there's also the how do you stitch things together? Any automation strategy is going to have more than one tool. And there's the idea of how do we stitch tools together? How do we build processes? How do we help up-skill customers? Those kinds of things. I mean, this is kind of the all the pieces that come together when you kind of mesh the technology and the apart for capabilities together. That's really what drives successful automation projects, and then get some of those problems solving and added value that we're talking about here. >> Yeah. I mean, Omar, when I think about scale and I think about automation, service fighters, you think would be some of the leading edge for some of that? Maybe just refresh our audience a bit as to how you help them along and how much, they used to kind of build a lot of their own toolings and that's challenging if you have to keep doing it itself. So why do they turn to Cisco for some of these solutions? >> I think two things, one, we build tools that survive scale, right? For NSO, we have customers managing hundreds of thousands of nodes at one time. So there's a scale on performance that comes from building SB class tooling. But the second piece is just understanding, you know, the operational environment service providers, have they have demanding requirements in terms of SLA scale, reg compliance, those kinds of things. And that's really what we've brought to the table is not just tools that have the power and the scale, but kind of understanding what the operational environment is for the typical tier one SP and making sure the tools mentioned to that. >> Michael... Please go ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of that businesses are changing fastly and keeping up with that speed of innovation is very difficult. And not to mention to, I mean, as a trusted partner for our customers, maybe the answer's not Cisco every time to be honest, maybe there's a different tool. So if we have a tool like NSO that could drive other vendors equipment, I think that makes customers feel safer, better, not vendor lock in. So the power that NSO brings is second to none, in my opinion. So I'm just all about flexibility and in solving problems for our customers. And to me, Network Services Orchestrator is that product. But like I said, there's a lot of integrations that need to be done and we need to break it down for these customers and get them to realize the value of it faster instead of the large deployments that you've seen in the tier one type of space. >> Yeah, Mike, you bring up a really good point. When I think traditionally about automation, we take a process or maybe we optimize a process and we automate it, but what companies need today is I need to react fast and I need to be able to make changes in the future if that's needed. So not fossilizing something, but being able to move forward. So it sounds like with NSO, some of your other things that you put together, you're helping customers not only do what they need today, but be ready for the future. Do I have that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it's just another progression of what CCI already is. That trusted advisor, we have the great opportunity that we talk to so many different providers of the same size, same business goals that we bring best in breed. And our talent that we have at CCI is just amazing and that's a passion that we're trying to get out there into the world that, Hey, we have horsepower and we're ready to help. We're about making lives better. So it's exciting. >> Yeah certainly in the mid market, one of the things we see is customers doing less building and more assembly. So in tier one, they have the time and resources to build stuff from scratch, to write services from scratch, those kinds of things. Mid-markets much more of a simply play, taking things off the shelf. No, maybe a little NSO, but it's also paired with a little bit of Ansible, a little bit of Python, and that's how they're going to handle their automation requirements, both, 'cause it's probably faster and probably in the long run, easier to maintain. >> Well, yeah. You bring up a great point, Omar. When I think traditionally that mid market and the channel partner often would be delivering prepackaged solutions. But today's solutions, you still need that a little bit of flexibility, that little bit of programming, they're not going to, throw a team of PhDs on it like some of the largest customers do. But they still need to be able to put things together and make them fit for what they need and ultimately their customers need. >> Yeah, I mean, every automation project it's still a snowflake. You take something or free VPN, right. Everyone does it, but everyone does it differently. There's no better, there's no worse. But if you're going to automate that you kind of start with an 80% solution, but then you need to line it up whether that's customer's infrastructure, their operations, their staff capabilities and those kinds of things. That's kind of getting over the finish line what CCI brings to the table in the mid market, sure. >> Yup. Mike, it's funny. I'm curious. CCI, does it have any relation with CCIE 'cause when we're talking about that skillsets that we need, obviously, you start, you think about Cisco certifications. How do you keep your team up on the latest technologies, making sure that they can be that trusted advisor that your customers need? >> Well, of course it's a combination of different things, classical learning, but I would say one of the big things is our collaboration capabilities. We have experts in many different areas and usually they have a secondary skill set and we collaborate. And a lot of times we make our own internal training that's more specific to our customers. So example, I really try to recommend to customers to move to EVPN technologies, but there's that learning curve that they don't know how to configure them. Next gen ethernet type of technologies for service providers. So by building an EVPN model and NSO, we're empowering them to leverage that sooner, faster with a smart tool like NSO. And that's really, some of the value that we have, we know what most of our customers use. The big guys tend to use layer three VPNs a lot of time. I would say just that a majority of our customers are very L two VPN vase or infrastructure services, and even offering them up to their own customers. So having a somewhat pre-packaged 80% as Omar had mentioned, and nothing's ever really the same all the time, but 80% of it probably is. And then we'll come in and then we can finish off that last 20% to make it come to life for that customer with a little bit of customization. So making it fit for their environment. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the biggest challenges out there for anyone is, okay, when do I have to revisit what I had? Is there a new technology? Is there a new way of doing things? So you just laid out like, you know, one way that customers, okay, this is the way I should be in my size thinking about VPN. Anything else? What, what kind of key things should people be hearing and they're saying up, if I have this problem, providers like CCI can help. >> Right. Just trying to increase the health of their network by having consistency checks. Over the years, networks have config wonder. It's very hard to keep that up even in the mid market networks. So the cleaner that your network is, the more uptime you're going to have, the easier it is for your network engineers and allows you to scale. Like I said, the time to businesses is just going rapidly. And being able to empower other teams like say knock or even sales engineering to build those L2VPNs for the customer. If you can build them faster by not escalating tickets to the core engineering team, you serve the customer faster and you freed up those network engineers to maybe be more proactive about building out the future network. Cause right now they're just stuck in that day to day grind. So config consistency, and like primary, like service builds L2, L3 VPN. Those are very popular. And one thing that I always like to challenge customers with is that a lot of times they're like, well, we can do it ourselves. And maybe some of these guys have a developer teams and typically they're more focused on the public facing website, internal apps. And I challenged like maybe you could... but what's your time worth to you? And the amount of man hours that were put into NSO, jumpstart you faster. And a lot of times I think you're going to gain more value in just getting that product that you can customize. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's a developer platform. So you bring it to life in your environment. >> Absolutely, there's so many things now that companies need to make that decision. Can they shift left? Can they push it to the platform? Are there solutions that just make things easier so that you can focus on really the things that are important to run your business and get the best utilization out of your people and the skillsets. Wonderful. Mike, Omar want to give you both, give us the final word takeaways you want people to have regarding kind of the opportunity that they can take advantage of, especially in the mid tier. Mike maybe we'll start with you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I am just passionate about getting CCIS name out there. Not only for NetDevOps, but all the other practices that we have at CCI to be that trusted advisor and come talk to us. We have account teams that already, we have systems engineers that are ready. And I feel like one thing leads to another and it snowballs so reach out and I'd love to have a conversation with every single one of them, whether it's a small organization or a large organization, we're here to help. And that's super important to us. >> I think for us, we see automation start, tactically to science project. So ones trying to deal with the pain pointer or dealing with something here frustrated with which is, I think where most folks start. I think that the trick is to work with your peers, talk to your leadership and figure out how you go from science project to strategy and kind of map out the longer journey and be a little thoughtful as you pick tools and figuring out what you want to automate and make sure it has some value to. >> Mike Saur, Omar Sultan, thank you both for joining. Appreciate the update and especially on the CCI and Cisco partnership. >> Thanks too. >> Thank you. Have a great day. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

Published Date : Aug 26 2020

SUMMARY :

leaders all around the world. friend of the program. the organization, what you specialize in, and finding the right fit tools and how that fits with Cisco too. for the past 18 months to about the mid market, I know that the challenge So the mid tier customer specifically, doing the day to day jobs. that come together when you kind of mesh of the leading edge and making sure the Please go ahead. and get them to realize and I need to be able to And our talent that we and probably in the long run, and the channel partner in the mid market, sure. on the latest technologies, of the value that we have, One of the biggest challenges Like I said, the time to and get the best utilization and come talk to us. and kind of map out the longer journey and especially on the CCI Have a great day. and thank you for watching

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Omar Tawakol, Cisco | Cisco Live EU Barcelona 2020


 

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco live 2020 brought by Cisco, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBEs live coverage, here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco live 2020, I'm John Furrier my cohost Dave Vellante here at theCUBE. The big story is it's not about the infrastructure's it's about the applications. Of course, Cisco has been connecting businesses with routers and gear throughout the years and their history. Got a great guest here Omar Tawakol, who is the Vice President and General Manager of the Contact Center for Cisco, Omar, thanks to have you on. You're a serial entrepreneur, sold your second company. Now here at Cisco leading the charge, a lot of action Contact Center. Sounds like an old school thing. We all know what Contact Centers are, but a lot of action going on there. Tell us what's happening. >> There's a huge amount of energy and focus in the Contact Center. Now. First of all, thank you for having me and really brands are really investing in it. There's, you know, over 22% growth in this category, so a lot of attention is on bringing Contact Center to the cloud. Infusing it with the AI and just making it a lot easier to serve customers with very high, almost unbounded kind of expectations out of the brand. So we need to really help them technically, >> And it's an impact area too for customers because there's real results. We all know the little started out of Microsoft, it was the little tool that came up, the little paper clip and windows, and it became Chatbots. Now we've seen recommendation engines, AI bots have been great. This is accelerates the customer experience in purchasing and support. What's the next level look like? What does it, what's the next milestone? What's the next industry point? >> Well, you know, one of the ones that we're focusing on is this idea of turning your agents into super agents. When you kind of look at automation, there's two ways to go at automation. One is automate the human out, and the other is kind of the opposite. Take the human and make them more accurate, extend the range, allow them to answer questions faster. So that's what we're doing in the Contact Center. And the way we approach that is we say, there's a certain number of tasks, that really shouldn't, that are simple, that should never hit a human. And so if we can put kind of voice bots and Chatbots on the front end and make those really good interactions, you take off the simple stuff. What you're left with is, the human interactions are now going to be, a little bit more complicated. So now you instead use AI, to help listen along with a human and put up suggestions. So for instance, someone's calling in and they're saying, Hey, I'm traveling from California to Barcelona and I'm calling T-Mobile or AT&T and saying, you know, extend my data plan for there, the AI will listen and say, Hey, we looked at your data plan. It's already covered. You don't have to pay anything else in Spain. So that's going to make the customer happy. Typically agent would have to take 17% of the time searching and putting you on hold. The AI can completely cut that off. And so that makes the agent happier, the customer happier. So there's a lot of ground for improving the experience just by applying AI there. >> There's big spectrum in Contact Center experiences, ranging from a totally asynchronous email us and we'll get back to you, you hope, to one that is, you know, somewhat painful, >> Yes. >> with a synchronous experience in a phone call. Different people like different approaches. I personally like to solve my problem on the phone. So, where do you see Cisco being able to take, its customers and the consumers experiences? What do you see in the next five years that looking like? >> Yeah, so basically the three areas of attack. First off, Cisco acquired Voicea, they acquired MindMeld, they acquired a company, so over half a billion in acquisitions over the past 18 months precisely to bring AI to collaboration. But we also partner with Google. We announced the Google CCII partnership, because we wanted best of breed, and proprietary to attack one problem, get to customer solution faster, in the way that customer wants to interact. So if they want to interact kind of in an automated fashion, make that better, sometimes that's not going to work. And the last thing I want to hear is, Agent, right, So we want to do tech, something's not going to work. In early on say transferring you to human, take all the context of the interaction they had given to the human and then suggest to the human, Hey, we think you should tell them that feature for free get to a customer resolution faster. I see this as a five year journey. >> But that started it starting today. Actually that's some of that's happening today where you would have to sit there, agent, agent, they go right away, >> Right. >> Others who maybe don't use your products or they, you know, you go into that endless loop, so you're starting to see improvements but still a lot of upside. I'm sure you'd agree, which is good. That's good news for the marketplace. >> Absolutely. The next part of there is that the phone call finishes, use AI to wrap it up so they don't spend five minutes, trying to type up the wrap up and then coach them, to be able to identify what went well, what didn't, did they comply, so that you can compress the learning because you know the agent churn is high. Reduce the agent churn, get them to learn faster, keep them there longer. All these, of innovations impact, the economics of running a Contact Center. >> And that's the big one. The economics I want to get into that because the impact is, right in the moment, but there's also, impacting the accelerating the journey of the customer, but also providing contextually relevant interactions. You said super agents, the expert. How do you know when to deploy the right talent, at the right time? These are the challenges I'm talking about that impact to the customer journey and where some specific examples are economically impacted. >> Yeah, so talk about customer journey. We acquired a company called CloudCherry in October and I've already integrated the product in, and it's now Webex Experience Management. And the whole insight that we had there, was that a customer's journey doesn't just show up at the Contact Center. They interact with your brand before, hopefully a lot before they ever get to Contact Center in the Contact Center after the Contact Center. So what we needed to do is have the analytics that ties together kind of essentially listening across 17 different channels. So by the time you come to a customer representative, they now know what you've done in other areas. They understand your sentiment and other areas and they can take that into account and say, we see that you've traveled with us before. The other thing that's even more important than that is now you can give to the management team, the full understanding of the journey. So you can tell them, you know what, these two drivers of your experience, perhaps it's average hold time, or perhaps it's the technical expertise of the person on the phone really drive NPS. So if you invest in that a little, you're going to get a much higher NPS. The alternative is what I call kind of the highest paid executive in the room making intuitive decisions which they think are awesome, which typically are not so awesome, but if they actually had the data, >> Yeah. >> It would be a lot more powerful. >> So having that legacy. Having that corpus to tap into. Talk about developer. We're in the dev net zone. A lot of companies have been trying to build, their own homegrown integrations maybe because of a database issue or other stuff. How do you guys look at your customers, when they say I want to build on top of it? >> It's a really good question. We were at a customer innovation board, where all of our customers were together, telling us what they wanted. And we were telling them about the new, set of AI capabilities that are coming out next quarter and almost unanimously when we asked them would you prefer us to first roll out a UI that has an embedded in it and then afterwards give you some APIs or would you prefer just to get the API first and they unanimous said, just give us API first. >> Really. >> We might not even use your interface, for that and I was like, okay, I'm not going to to take it personally. (laugh loudly) >> Good requirements to get out, Right straight with the customer. >> Do you see any industries as really, leading the charge of I think about, I think about retail. I mean it was going to Amazon war room, and you think about Amazon, they basically say here's a finite set of choices. Pick one and you may be lucky, you may not. Okay, boom end of story. But you've got a relationship with that retailer. Do you see any particular industries, airlines or others really leaning into this and predicting doing well? >> Yeah, we've seen quite a few. Where people are really kind of leaning forward, so finance and insurance, cause they have a very high volume of interactions that they have with customers. So getting this right really impacts the NPS and all their economics. Certainly you've seen in retail some innovative examples. We've see some airlines looking at trying to kind of make the journey a little bit smoother. Surprisingly, I've seen a bunch in healthcare, trying to make the patient experience better. Yeah, it's not, I can't say that(mumbles) cutting edge, but they're really putting a lot of an investment, seeing what's happening with other brands, experiences saying, Hey, we should really revolutionize the patient experience too. So this is pretty across the board? >> Well the upside is enormous. I mean you build a relationship through a Contact Center. I mean that's loyalty for life if they're really good at it. >> Yeah, and that's why I like the approach that says, don't try to automate humans out of that, we want to speak to humans and for many, many, many years to come. The human experience in helping. >> Yeah. >> It's just going to be awesome. So instead of just focusing on getting rid of them, make them more effective. >> I want to get your thoughts on your vision around, the industry because if you think about Contact Center, I think telephony old days, the industry used to be Voice Over IP came from the PBXs in the unified communication space, integrated in, and then in comes the cloud. So what is the real game changer, because that kind of just seemed like telephony market trying to be cool the internet, and it just felt kind of clunky to me and then all of a sudden over the past few years, almost a complete resurgence of robust features, new things. What's your vision? Do you agree with that and what's happening? >> I agree. I think the biggest thing that's happening is the expectation on feature velocity, where before the cloud, all these big enterprises were calculating, okay I have to upgrade a certain version, and it's going to cost me a certain amount of money and time, and I have to coordinate with other, kind of partners that I'm involved with. Whereas when you come to the cloud, you just can move a lot faster cause you leave it up to a company like Cisco to take care of rolling out features in the middle of the night and you not even have to worry about it You don't have to pay for it and you enjoy the features. So I think that's really going to change the game in a significant way. The only thing that's changing, cause you mentioned voice is if you think about your kids, they're growing up and there was this two years ago, a child first uttered Alexa before they uttered the parent's name. (loughs loudly) So that is a generation gap. >> Yeah, and it's a full coming spool circle, voice in a whole new way. >> Voice is coming back in a new way. >> Yeah. >> And we're going to enable a different type of interaction because of that. >> Yeah, Of course, we were talking here on theCUBE and it's being converted into metadata. As you know, text transcription, machine learning, is fed by texts and voice. Working together is a new dynamic. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you have to be completely linked, so now it's not just a blob of audio. I have all the metadata. I have it transcribed. You have NLP to give you an understanding, of the intent of what's happening there. It's searchable, it's linkable. This is going to be a new world here, and of course, as you know, that's what we did a Voicea, so I'm very excited about that. >> I want to tee that up. Congratulations on your acquisition. If someone looks at Cisco and you're fresh to the scene here, you've been an entrepreneur, I'd be like, Cisco really held all these acquisitions. It's going to be hard for them to be competitive. How do you answer that? If someone says that to you and you see them on the street or competitor might say that if someone says if the Cisco, we give thought acquisitions, you guys have done it, you are sold to them. You mentioned the other ones, all those acquisitions coming together. What's that response to that? >> You know you're about to talk to Shree and Amy and what they did is they came to me and they said, I want you to focus on integrated value. So within three months we both integrated deeply into meetings and the Contact Center and we're working on one with Calling. The mentality here is two things, keep the talent, number one, number two, deeply integrate. So it doesn't become a theory about we acquired this company, you really need to show value. to the customer base and that mentality, has been very good for us. If people get energized about that because when you're acquired, you now have this ability to affect hundreds of millions of users on the Webex platform. The faster you integrate to do that, everybody benefits. >> Speed is the new competitive advantage. >> Yes. Omar Thanks for coming on. I know you have a tight schedule. We're going to bring you back in the studio in Palo Alto. >> Thank you for having >> Where we could dive on your business. Thanks for coming in. It's theCUBES coverage I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante will be right back, after this short break. >> Thank you. Sorry, I got up to soon. (soft music)

Published Date : Jan 28 2020

SUMMARY :

and its ecosystem partners. Omar, thanks to have you on. First of all, thank you for having me We all know the little started out of Microsoft, And so that makes the agent happier, the customer happier. where do you see Cisco being able to take, take all the context of the interaction they had given where you would have to sit there, agent, agent, or they, you know, you go into that endless loop, Reduce the agent churn, get them to learn faster, that because the impact is, So by the time you come to a customer representative, How do you guys look at your customers, and almost unanimously when we asked them would you prefer like, okay, I'm not going to to take it personally. Good requirements to get out, and you think about Amazon, the journey a little bit smoother. I mean you build a relationship through a Contact Center. to humans and for many, many, many years to come. It's just going to be awesome. the industry because if you think about Contact Center, in the middle of the night and you not even Yeah, and it's a full coming spool circle, because of that. As you know, text transcription, machine learning, You have NLP to give you an understanding, If someone says that to you and you see them on the street I want you to focus on integrated value. We're going to bring you back in the studio in Palo Alto. Where we could dive on your business. Sorry, I got up to soon.

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Paul Savill, CenturyLink & Omar Sunna, GE Healthcare | VMworld 2019


 

>> Man: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's the Cube. (music) Covering VMworld 2019. (music) Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome, indeed, here to the cube and our coverage of VMworld 2019. We are in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. They're open, they're back in business and so is VMware. And we're watching the folks stream out from this morning's keynote session, Pat Gelsinger hosting that session. And it was an impressive setup to say the least. Thousands packing that ballroom downstairs for a plethora of announcements, all from Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Walls, Justin Warren joins us. We haven't been together for a while, it's good to see you.- It's been a little while, yeah. >> How've you been? >> I've been well, I've been well. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I'm surprised they brought us back together after the last time. >> I don't believe... let's not talk about that incident. >> I thought it went so well, we just end on a high note. But it is a pleasure to be with Justin, we'll be with him throughout the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, our coverage here. We're joined right now by two guests, Paul Savill, whose the SVP of Network and Technology Solutions at CenturyLink and Omar Sunna who is the Director of Digital Products at GE Health care. And gentlemen thanks for being with us, it's good to have you here on the Cube. >> Thank you John. >> First off, let's just, gimme, your both, your take just on VMWorld 2019. What you're looking for, what you're expecting, and kind of the early vibe that you have going on. Paul, why don't you take that first? >> Sure, one of the things I've really been impressed with is how VMware is expanding, the kind of open nature of it's relationships, it's developing it's ecosystem, really broadening it out, it's making a number of acquisitions to enable new capabilities. And we're really excited about that. CenturyLink and VMware have been partners for, I think, around 12, 15 years. As we've been building out our own cloud services and so it's a very exciting time to see all this technology coming together in the way that it is. >> I love with the way you put it too, acquisitions. Pat made a little comment about that, it's like, "I can't wait to find out who I'm "going to buy next." >> Yes. >> And they've been, certainly been in a full speed ahead modefor the past year, year and a half. Omar, you're take, early. >> Yeah, man, I think I look at it from a health care solutioning perspective and it's exciting to see this level of technology and kind of the building out of the ecosystem and what could it enable for health care consumers. Especially with the big focus around privacy and and data management. I think some of their, and security, some of their latest acquisitions could actually help grow that ecosystem and offer more options especially to the health care industry. >> All right, well now let's talk about your portfolio at work then, a little bit, at GE Healthcare. Obviously health systems, health care's a huge user you know, these days, well it's kind of simplifying it a bit, but just talk about what you're concerns are, what your attention is, and kind of the things that are keeping you up at night, these days, in terms of health care and what you're doing in the IT space. >> You know, I mean, I think the, you know when we look at our customer environment globally, you know, we tend to kind of summarize some of the key challenges for our customers around three pillars. Access, so being able to provide access to all the patients that need it, regardless of location. With aging population in a lot of developed countries, with also a lot of people having the means to receive more proactive health care, it is challenging the health systems to be able to provide adequate access to patients. Capacity, providing capacity when the resources, including the human capital resources, that health systems have. So how do you free up your specialists to make sure that they're able to provide the right level of patients who need it, patient care for the patients that need it. As well as clinical efficacy. How do we help with software applications, with technology, to help reduce the variation of care, and improve patient outcomes, regardless where the patient is receiving care, within the rural community or with advanced academic medical centers. So we try to kind of think of our solution technologies as helping our customers solve for access, capacity, and clinical efficacy. >> Yeah, so a lot of health care, it's kind of a retail setup in that there's lots of hospitals and other allied health professionals who have lots of different locations that they need to provide heath care for them and that technology needs to live where the patients are and where the doctors are. So it was interesting to see, in the key note, earlier this morning, talking about edge and different kinds of edge as well. We've got thin, medium, and thick edge, according to VMware. So how do you see that rise of edge computing effecting the way that you deal with health care. >> Yeah, I mean tremendous, actually, opportunity for us. And GE is working on capitalizing on the technology, on edge technology, to allow us to bring in AI application right to, where kind of within the customer network. And that is, that's helping us solve for a lot of concerns around private security as well as moving large data sets to the cloud to process, to be able to get benefit out of algorithm and additional applications. So that's actually an exciting area. And agree with you, I mean we're seeing more and more large distributed health care networks emorph, in the U.S. we've definitely seen huge merger and acquisition movement that we continue to see, and consolidation. And then we also see that globally. With regional delivery networks coming up and being able to have software applications live within this distributed network and provide information for the right clinician at the right time is a big initiative for us. And for us this makes a huge difference in the way our providers are able to deliver care for their patients. >> This seems like an ideal opportunity for the folks at CenturyLink to help you with that. >> Abso-- (nervous laughter) >> Yeah, that's right, I mean CenturyLink really, to that point, sees this landscape evolving rapidly. And we even have a phrase internally we use that, "The network is the data center." We believe that in the future, compute is going to be distributed so widely, in such a broad geography and dropped in places where it's most efficient to run it and where it's most efficient to connect it with network, that really, the data centers we think about it today, becomes this very widely distributed platform that is connected together with high performance networking solutions. And that's part of what we're working with GE Healthcare on. >> I'm old enough to remember when "The network is the computer" was the slogan that we're all following now, and it seems that's actually coming true now. Where we have this idea of it, it's not just cloud, and it's not just data centers, and it's not just edge, it's actually a combination of all of them. And you need to be able to deal with that technology wherever it needs to live. Which is, I think, is a positive change from what we were talking about a few years ago, where it seemed to be, we had to make one choice. Now the choice is you actually need a bit of everything. >> Right. >> Tell me about your decision, or at least in terms of on-prem, off-prem, and health care, I would assume, extremely sensitive, obviously, to security concerns and management and certain policies about who can access what, where, when and how, whatever. How are you going about making that decision in this new multi-cloud environment, this hybrid-cloud environment, when people are making migrations, you know, with their businesses, and they're going off-prem. But you, I would assume, have to be a lot more sensitive, or more sensitive to other factors than, perhaps, other businesses have to be. >> Yeah, we definitely do. There is, you know, with regulations, you know, and, for example in Europe, GDPR, there's in country regulations around where data resides. All of that kind of plays a factor in customer adoption of technologies and where they're comfortable. We've talked a lot of CIOs in the health care sector and a lot of them say, "Hey, listen we're on a journey, "we're used to hugging our servers, "we're used to controlling it, and technology has evolved. "But, in terms of our policies, ability to accept liability "of data breaches and what technology providers are willing "to sign up for. "All of that plays a roll in that journey." Like Justin had mentioned, it is actually a, in developing an ecosystem, where you have combination of on-prem and off-prem, is a lot of where health care health systems are investing their money. So we're seeing certain data that resides on-prem that is mission critical versus more historic data can go into cloud technology, cloud storage technology and others. But, there's no doubt that we're at an inflection point, we're seeing a lot more health systems sign up to cloud based SAS applications. Invest in private cloud hosting service, invest in also public cloud hosting services. And all of that actually will create, as a software provider, all that could actually help us create more opportunities and more solutioning for our customers. I love listening to some of the cloud computing power that would allow us to develop newer applications. So it's actually exciting, it's a journey with our customers, you know, we're choosing to kind of be alongside of our customers and help them. Doing a lot of education. And being able to have a relationship with CenturyLink, be able to see the advances and availability of resources that CenturyLink makes available for us as well as other partners that we have help us really make sure that we're able to build the right level of technology meeting the health care customer needs. >> So Paul, fill in the gaps a little bit about where CenturyLink is in trying to solve this, I wouldn't say dilemma, but it certainly is a puzzle of some sort, right, as decisions are made about what's going to be off loaded, what's not, how are we going to access, what do we allow. How do you see CenturyLink's role when you have a customer like Omar, like GE Healthcare, coming to you with their unique needs, and addressing those? >> Sure, well, as unique as GE Healthcare is in the health care industry, there are some common characteristics about how we are seeing enterprise customers look at these situations. And one of them is that placing compute on the premise itself, that, that is generally the most expensive real estate that an enterprise has when it has to go in the hospital, when it has to go at the retail store location. And a lot of enterprises today are doubling the amount of compute and storage that they're having at their premise locations every year because the volume is just growing so much. That's becoming a problem, because you don't want your, you don't want your hospital becoming a bigger and bigger data center, so to speak, right? And so the way that we're approaching the problem and working with this, is in VMware was actually, you know, expressing a very similar viewpoint about the edge and about how the thick edge and the thin edge, and the thin edge of the customer premise is where you want to have the lightest load, but you want to have the most critical applications that are sitting there, you want to have the information that you have to protect the most in a most guarded way that's most important for your operations there. But from there you can more efficiently run things from a distance backing out going all the way back to the public cloud core, if you connect it with high performance networking from end to end. And so what CenturyLink has been doing is putting together these solutions that make that balance of trade, so to speak, between the cost of compute, the cost of where you have to put it, to where it best can be housed, what kind of latency performance that it needs to have to meet it to the performance specification, all the way back to the public cloud design and how to tie it in to the public cloud. And that's where we've been building our competency and the solutions we've been putting together for customers. >> You mentioned the need for high performance networks in there so I've got to ask you about 5G. From what I know about 5G it looks like the kind of situation you have with health care, where you've got lots of mobile tablet devices, you've got lots of other actual equipment IoT devices in a health care situation. That seems like an ideal use case for 5G. Is that what hot 5G is actually for, is the hype real? >> Well, 5G is certainly going to transform the world in terms of it's ability to provide wireless high bandwidth connectivity and low latency connectivity to devices. But, edge compute is not about 5G. You can have edge compute without 5G. In fact, it's a bit of a myth that edge compute can't arrive until 5G comes, because edge compute is something that is available to do today. And, in fact, CenturyLink is deploying edge compute solutions with, by basically building fiber into enterprise locations and then housing compute at different areas of the network at the point that's most optimal for the solution. And there are a variety of wireless solutions that can be used in that campus environment other than 5G to connect wireless devices back securely and safely to that edge compute that sits there. >> But it seems like it still should be, or at least looks like it could be a game changer in what it's going to allow in terms of, I guess, advancing edge computing. >> Right? I mean, you're still going to provide new capabilities and new reach and new functionalities that don't currently exist. >> I take Paul's point, though, because there are other technologies like Wi-Fi 6, for example, which is, it's basically the same thing as 5G, it just uses a different radio communications mechanism. But, and I also take your point that you can do edge computing today, absolutely. You can put computing into retail situations and you can have, I mean we have tablet devices now. We have laptops. So we kind of have edge computing. We always have, it just now, now it has a name. >> Yes, that's correct. >> So, tell me before we let you go, Catalyst Award winner from CenturyLink and VMware, Paul, first off let's talk about how you assess that, what's the determination, the criteria, for that and then I'm going to let crow a little bit Omar, about receiving that award. But tell us about the Catalyst Award first. >> Yes, well we call it the Catalyst Award because, when you think about it, a catalyst is something that excites a chemical process. Technically that is the definition of catalyst. But catalyst, in the way we view it, is something that we wanted to recognize a person or a company, that we felt like was really driving innovation, that was really solving a problem and working, also collaboratively together with VMware and CenturyLink in solving some of these problems. So we looked at GE Healthcare and really felt like, in a place where certainly we have seen such great advances in health care administration and building to save people's lives. Oddly, medical errors is becoming an increasing amount of now the problems in terms of death rates. Because, while we have so many ways to solve problems, so many ways to address it, that portion of what's causing deaths is actually on the rise. And so GE Healthcare is taking the technology that they're deploying and helping to solve that problem, that's why we wanted to recognize Omar and the company today. >> An honor for you I would assume you're all pretty proud of that. >> Yeah, absolutely, and thank you, and, yeah, I mean it's was really fantastic to be recognized by our partners. And a great testimony to the team at GE Healthcare. And our team wakes up in the morning and our mission is to improve lives in the moment that matters. A lot of our technology is used in mission critical and the way we're able to deliver that to our customers relies heavily on our ability to leverage advances in technology and be able to improve our ability to deliver our different applications for our customers. So this, actually been fantastic, the relationship has been tremendous for us. Where we have hosted our solutions in CenturyLink, the level of support that we have received have really enabled us to deliver important application for our customers and meet their SLAs and meet their clinical use cases and the needs of software uptime. So that has been tremendous for us. >> Well congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Well then thanks for your time, both of you. And enjoy the show, enjoy San Francisco, we've got good weather this week. >> That's right, yeah. >> So get out and enjoy that, thank you Paul and Omar. Back with more on the Cube, you're watching our coverage here live in San Francisco in VMWorld 2019. (music)

Published Date : Aug 26 2019

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. We are in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. after the last time. it's good to have you here on the Cube. and kind of the early vibe that you have going on. of acquisitions to enable new capabilities. I love with the way you put it too, acquisitions. a full speed ahead modefor the past year, year and a half. of the ecosystem and what could it enable and kind of the things that are keeping you up at night, the health systems to be able to provide adequate of different locations that they need to provide data sets to the cloud to process, to be able to get benefit at CenturyLink to help you with that. that really, the data centers we think about it today, Now the choice is you actually need a bit of everything. other businesses have to be. And being able to have a relationship with CenturyLink, like Omar, like GE Healthcare, coming to you with their to the public cloud core, if you connect it in there so I've got to ask you about 5G. is something that is available to do today. in what it's going to allow in terms of, I guess, that don't currently exist. and you can have, I mean we have tablet devices now. and then I'm going to let crow a little bit Omar, But catalyst, in the way we view it, An honor for you I would assume you're all pretty And a great testimony to the team at GE Healthcare. And enjoy the show, enjoy San Francisco, So get out and enjoy that, thank you Paul and Omar.

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Omar Nawaz, Quantum | SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018


 

>> Announcer: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the crossroads, it's 101 and 92 in San Mateo, California. Lot of software companies have developed here. It's got a long history, at one point it was really kind of the all the software in Silicon Valley was based here versus chips in the south new media in the north. It's not quite the same anymore, that's really the roots of the area, you're probably stuck in traffic if your here, so look up, you'll see the SnapLogic sign, that's where we are, at their new headquarters. And we're excited to have practitioner, we love getting customers on, it's Omar Nawaz, he's the global head of digital transformation and a CISO, so not a small responsibility at Quantum. Great to see you. >> Well thank you for inviting me, I'm happy to be here. >> Absolutely. So you are one of these, could be the new unicorn, the head of digital transformation. So you were brought in for that role, you've been at the company a little over six months, less than a year. Why did they bring you in and where do you get started? >> Well, it's a very interesting role. Digital transformation is about change and we all know that that's hard, and that's why I specifically brought into the company, to help change the operating model and the business model for the company. So what I really do there is work with the leadership of the company and understand what their ambitions are. And then the exciting part starts, where my team and I actually help convert an ambition into reality. And so that we can create a measurable way to understand the reality we are creating for the ambition that we want to achieve is it really meaningful for us or not. >> And who do you report to? Who brought you in? >> So I actually report to the CFO of the company which >> CFO >> So you see the sort of different places where these roles fit in, but in our organization it made a lot of sense because as we're going through the transformation, it was important for us to sort of be close to the money, because it is investment required and you want to manage the cost as well, so that's where I'm at. >> And it's also very interesting that you're a CISO as well, Chief Information Security Officer, for those not following me on the acronym world. So security is a really important piece that is not an insignificant job, so how much of your time is transformation and how much of your time is CISO. >> I think most of my time is to transformation and it's part of when we look at security, we look at security as part of the transformation because as we evolve the company to a new model, it has ramification on how do we secure the new environment as well, so there's a split, I have more than one full time job, I guess you can say that. >> Welcome to Silicon Valley right? >> But yeah, I spend most of my time focused around digital transformation but security is a very important aspect of my role and we want to make sure the environment continues to be safe. >> So there's somebody out here watching this video, they're sitting in their office they just got the edict that they're now in charge of digital transformation at their company and they're pulling their hair out looking for CUBE interviews to help them out. So where do they go, how do they get started, what sort of resources should they be asking for, should they be leveraging, should they expect to give them some sort of success in this very very difficult role? >> So I think there's a lot of places where companies can start and I think of the things you have to understand is how digitally mature you as a company are. One of the key things in this industry is that we all see is that the speed and the rate of innovation is so tremendous and we see these waves of disruptive technology that comes in and there are companies that are adopting and embracing those technologies. And think about mobile or cloud or analytics or social, and those companies that adopt those technologies they can gain a certain level of proficiency and performance improvement, but the cycle is very very fast and now we are seeing yet another wave of technology innovation around IOT, API, artificial intelligence and so if you can quickly jump to that next round of technology and innovation then you can continue to build those efficiencies within the company and gain that competitive advantage or maintain that competitive advantage, and I think it's important for the companies to realize that they have to engage in this very very quickly and it's not a one time process either, it's never going to end, the transformation is never going to end, so you have to continually invest in it and where you start with it and where you go is to make sure that you understand where the company wants to go. >> Right. >> And how the technology can help you get there. That's sort of the hardest part of my job is to really convince the leadership and say this is where we will gain some significant benefit and so when I go to my CEO or CFO or the Board what I'm trying to help them understand is that by investing in technology A, B, C, whichever it is, this is what we achieve or this is sort of the picture, part of the puzzle we're trying to build. >> I love this concept, digital maturity, I've never heard anyone say that before, so it almost begs the question, is there some type of a checklist that you have to have made a minimum, either acknowledgement, I don't know if commitment is the right word, obviously you have to be 100 percent on cloud, but it does beg, is there some sort of, have you adopted some cloud, have you adopted some of this, some of that, some of this, to demonstrate A, that you're digitally mature or you're heading in that direction, and B, these are kind of necessary conditions to execute the digital transformation that I'm trying to put in place. >> Yeah, I don't have a specific measuring stick of where you measure your digital maturity but the things that you talked about, for example, if your organization is still dealing with sort of maintaining some of their own data centers and you're investing resources to that, you have not adopted cloud, mobile applications, you know your applications cannot be accessed remotely, then you're certainly not very digitally mature. Right. How much self service is available for your users internally or for your customers. Those are other signs of digital immaturity, another area to look at is, you know, you have a lot of data within the organization. How are you using that data? Is the data sitting in silos? Or is the data being integrated and now you can, you have analytics running on top of it. That's another measure of your maturity and as you look across the companies, you will see that there are companies who are sitting there in sort of that old traditional model of we're going to build these long term strategic plans and that's also a sign of accepting or adopting these technologies because they're hoping, they're waiting to really fully understand what the technology is going to be when they get there and they need to know all of those how and what it will look like when they get there and I think also to me that's also a sign of digital maturity of a company is do they understand what waves of disruption or technology is coming out. >> Right. So it's interesting, you said that you're biggest challenge is going to the Board and and the C suite and telling them how this is going to work. The other hand, they brought you in, not that long ago, with this very specific objective, so clearly you've got some great executive support. So how do you convince them and what are some of the things that you found just work, what are the right stories, what are the right examples, what are the right use cases, that even the digitally immature, finally are like ah now I get it. >> Yeah, so, I mean it helped that they were already thinking about it before they brought me in so that helps a lot, no doubt, I think the things that when I came in and I looked at the company, so there's many places where you can start, some of the areas you can think about is how do you improve the customer service, that's a very important aspect of how you become a better organization. So another area is process improvement and the third area is business model improvement, so I came in and I talked more about before we actually start looking at modifying or enhancing our business models, we need to get to a better, higher performance level within the organization and therefore I'm initially more focused on how do we improve our processes internally, right, and for us, based on our situation, and it varies for different companies, for us the first step in that was really to make sure that the people, systems, and the data are more interconnected. So even within that first step for me for the first phase for us was really to make sure that the people are connected, so do we have the right set of collaboration and communication tools, right, do we have the right set of analytics to sit on top of it, so we just finished that phase, we want to make sure that these are tangible, small steps, because you need to show some wins very very quickly so for us the first step was lets get the people connected. So we just did that, now the next step for us is to get our systems connected. So again, as I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of data that's sitting there, it has to be integrated. There's tremendous value that you can gain from that. So that's what we're getting into, this is our second phase of how do we connect the data together so this way we can start to get the next level of efficiency out of the company. >> So I am guessing after sitting here all day that the integration of your data, obviously we are at SnapLogic, is going to be easier than getting the people to change their processes and the connected people. What were some of the tricks to get people to adopt these new tools before we even start talking about the data? >> So I think there is, you have to show them the value obviously, if you talk about communication and collaboration tools I think the first thing is really about awareness. Right, there's a little bit of sort of top down, sort of mandate, or you may want to call sponsorship, that I think that that helps. >> Or stick >> Or stick, you know, so that helps. Because for some companies and for Quantum it was true that we did not have a corporate communication tool. There were multiple, right, so within the groups they were fine because they were able to communicate but between groups they were not able to, so we had to standardize on that, so I think that you kind of have to show these, there's always skepticism, because everything when people are used to certain things it seems to work for them right? >> I've always done it this way. >> Exactly right, so you have to show them new things and you have to create the awareness and then they start to see the value. It's not a one time thing, it's continuous effort, so we do lunch and learns, we do webinars, we do support sessions and things like this so this way people are more comfortable taking on the new technology. >> But it's so important right because your probability of success if you don't get the buy in from the participant is not very high, so the fact that you started there on the people before you really dove into the technology I think is pretty insightful and will probably increase your probability of success on the next phase tremendously, versus if you just integrated all the data and integrated all the apps and you still don't have people talking together, probably not going to be very successful. >> Exactly, because the data is in all these different business units and different groups and if they're not talking to each other, connecting the data has little or no value. So to me it's really about creating that connectivity so for us when you ask me, sort of, how do we start, so we start with connecting, connection is the first sort of phase of it and then the second is to empower people you know to create more self service and create more sort of autonomous units so that they can start to create value for themselves and for the company. So it's really about enabling the whole organization, sort of the ground swell type of approach, but you're going to first sort of bring the people to that sort of common place where it's easy for them to work, you bring the data along with it and then you standardize the environment or simplify it if you can and therefore it's easy for them to start taking on the services themselves. >> Right, so you finished the first phase and now the next phase is you're going to start integrating all the systems. >> Correct. >> So obviously, we're sitting here at SnapLogic, it's a big piece of what they do, so why did you decide to go with them and how are they helping you in this process? >> So for us, for this phase of digital transformation, you know there were two things that were really really important for us. One was really about how do we connect these systems together in a simple standardized way, so that was one criteria for us. And I believe SnapLogic does a great job and we're going to build it out at sort of the back core of our network. And then the second piece was really can we take this platform and make it available to our end users. So that they can create the connections or access the data that they want, right, and that's again where SnapLogic was able to demonstrate that this is very easy for them to use. So those were the two sort of very pivotal things for us as part of this phase of our digital transformation as to why we picked SnapLogic. >> Yeah it was funny 'cause you used the word self-service in your first phase so I think kind of this thing where your over and over and over it's so important to drive innovation in big companies is demarketerization demarketerization of the data, demarketerization of the tools and then let people find out things and then actually be able to execute. >> Exactly, because you know IT, there's a constant pressure on IT to cut costs, you know, so we cannot serve the whole company for all the things that needs to happen and the technology and the business is changing at such a rapid pace that unless we have experts who really understand that business unit function that well we are not the best people to build those things for them, they are the ones, but then you have a technology learning barrier or learning curve of do you need to put developers in there, so that's why to us this SnapLogic technology helps us that we believe that we can extend this ability to those users who really know their business, they can make the changes as they come, and the IT can help make sure that the right sort of infrastructure exists and the right sort of, level of connectivity exists. >> So I'm just curious, I know you're still early days in this project, but are there any Luddites that have kind of come around since you've been on this journey that suddenly just woke up and said oh okay now I get it now I see the value, now I kind of understand where we're trying to go, who maybe didn't think that way at the beginning. Or they all just know that they got to go. (laughs) >> No I think we are constantly learning along the way, I think that one of the key things that we learned just recently and SnapLogic is going to help us with that particular aspect of it is that we saw that there were a lot of systems that work fine, we don't use them, it's not a daily use type of thing, they get used quarterly, or annually, but we realized that if we can just bring more automation into those processes and we can tie it back to longer more historical data, then we can build more insights around it, so I think that when we show this to the users and especially the CFO now you all of a sudden sort of the lightbulbs go on and it's like oh this is great. Right, that I don't have to rely on only a small window of information, now I have a much broader window. >> Alright then, Omar thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your story with us. I wish you nothing but success on this. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm sure it will be long and exciting with twists and turns and highs and lows. So good luck. >> We're looking forward to that. >> Alright, he's Omar, I'm Jeff Frick. We're at SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

Published Date : Jun 5 2018

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by SnapLogic. of the all the software in Silicon Valley was based So you were brought in for that role, into the company, to help change the operating model So you see the sort of different places where these So security is a really important piece that is not I have more than one full time job, I guess you can aspect of my role and we want to make sure the environment should they be leveraging, should they expect to give One of the key things in this industry is that we all And how the technology can help you get there. is the right word, obviously you have to be 100 percent Or is the data being integrated and now you can, the things that you found just work, some of the areas you can think about is how do you the integration of your data, obviously we are at So I think there is, you have to show them the value so we had to standardize on that, so I think that you Exactly right, so you have to show them new things on the people before you really dove into the technology the environment or simplify it if you can Right, so you finished the first phase and now the build it out at sort of the back core of our network. Yeah it was funny 'cause you used the word pressure on IT to cut costs, you know, so we cannot now I see the value, now I kind of understand where we're and especially the CFO now you all of a sudden sort I wish you nothing but success on this. So good luck. We're at SnapLogic in San Mateo, California.

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Omar Nawaz, Quantum | SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018


 

>> Announcer: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the crossroads, it's 101 and 92 in San Mateo, California. Lot of software companies have developed here. It's got a long history, at one point it was really kind of the all the software in Silicon Valley was based here versus chips in the south new media in the north. It's not quite the same anymore, that's really the roots of the area, you're probably stuck in traffic if your here, so look up, you'll see the SnapLogic sign, that's where we are, at their new headquarters. And we're excited to have practitioner, we love getting customers on, it's Omar Nowaz, he's the global head of digital transformation and a CISO, so not a small responsibility at Quantum. Great to see you. >> Well thank you for inviting me, I'm happy to be here. >> Absolutely. So you are one of these, could be the new unicorn, the head of digital transformation. So you were brought in for that role, you've been at the company a little over six months, less than a year. Why did they bring you in and where do you get started? >> Well, it's a very interesting role. Digital transformation is about change and we all know that that's hard, and that's why I specifically brought into the company, to help change the operating model and the business model for the company. So what I really do there is work with the leadership of the company and understand what their ambitions are. And then the exciting part starts, where my team and I actually help convert an ambition into reality. And so that we can create a measurable way to understand the reality we are creating for the ambition that we want to achieve is it really meaningful for us or not. >> And who do you report to? Who brought you in? >> So I actually report to the CFO of the company which >> CFO >> So you see the sort of different places where these roles fit in, but in our organization it made a lot of sense because as we're going through the transformation, it was important for us to sort of be close to the money, because it is investment required and you want to manage the cost as well, so that's where I'm at. >> And it's also very interesting that you're a CISO as well, Chief Information Security Officer, for those not following me on the acronym world. So security is a really important piece that is not an insignificant job, so how much of your time is transformation and how much of your time is CISO. >> I think most of my time is to transformation and it's part of when we look at security, we look at security as part of the transformation because as we evolve the company to a new model, it has ramification on how do we secure the new environment as well, so there's a split, I have more than one full time job, I guess you can say that. >> Welcome to Silicon Valley right? >> But yeah, I spend most of my time focused around digital transformation but security is a very important aspect of my role and we want to make sure the environment continues to be safe. >> So there's somebody out here watching this video, they're sitting in their office they just got the edict that they're now in charge of digital transformation at their company and they're pulling their hair out looking for CUBE interviews to help them out. So where do they go, how do they get started, what sort of resources should they be asking for, should they be leveraging, should they expect to give them some sort of success in this very very difficult role? >> So I think there's a lot of places where companies can start and I think of the things you have to understand is how digitally mature you as a company are. One of the key things in this industry is that we all see is that the speed and the rate of innovation is so tremendous and we see these waves of disruptive technology that comes in and there are companies that are adopting and embracing those technologies. And think about mobile or cloud or analytics or social, and those companies that adopt those technologies they can gain a certain level of proficiency and performance improvement, but the cycle is very very fast and now we are seeing yet another wave of technology innovation around IOT, API, artificial intelligence and so if you can quickly jump to that next round of technology and innovation then you can continue to build those efficiencies within the company and gain that competitive advantage or maintain that competitive advantage, and I think it's important for the companies to realize that they have to engage in this very very quickly and it's not a one time process either, it's never going to end, the transformation is never going to end, so you have to continually invest in it and where you start with it and where you go is to make sure that you understand where the company wants to go. >> Right. >> And how the technology can help you get there. That's sort of the hardest part of my job is to really convince the leadership and say this is where we will gain some significant benefit and so when I go to my CEO or CFO or the Board what I'm trying to help them understand is that by investing in technology A, B, C, whichever it is, this is what we achieve or this is sort of the picture, part of the puzzle we're trying to build. >> I love this concept, digital maturity, I've never heard anyone say that before, so it almost begs the question, is there some type of a checklist that you have to have made a minimum, either acknowledgement, I don't know if commitment is the right word, obviously you have to be 100 percent on cloud, but it does beg, is there some sort of, have you adopted some cloud, have you adopted some of this, some of that, some of this, to demonstrate A, that you're digitally mature or you're heading in that direction, and B, these are kind of necessary conditions to execute the digital transformation that I'm trying to put in place. >> Yeah, I don't have a specific measuring stick of where you measure your digital maturity but the things that you talked about, for example, if your organization is still dealing with sort of maintaining some of their own data centers and you're investing resources to that, you have not adopted cloud, mobile applications, you know your applications cannot be accessed remotely, then you're certainly not very digitally mature. Right. How much self service is available for your users internally or for your customers. Those are other signs of digital immaturity, another area to look at is, you know, you have a lot of data within the organization. How are you using that data? Is the data sitting in silos? Or is the data being integrated and now you can, you have analytics running on top of it. That's another measure of your maturity and as you look across the companies, you will see that there are companies who are sitting there in sort of that old traditional model of we're going to build these long term strategic plans and that's also a sign of accepting or adopting these technologies because they're hoping, they're waiting to really fully understand what the technology is going to be when they get there and they need to know all of those how and what it will look like when they get there and I think also to me that's also a sign of digital maturity of a company is do they understand what waves of disruption or technology is coming out. >> Right. So it's interesting, you said that you're biggest challenge is going to the Board and and the C suite and telling them how this is going to work. The other hand, they brought you in, not that long ago, with this very specific objective, so clearly you've got some great executive support. So how do you convince them and what are some of the things that you found just work, what are the right stories, what are the right examples, what are the right use cases, that even the digitally immature, finally are like ah now I get it. >> Yeah, so, I mean it helped that they were already thinking about it before they brought me in so that helps a lot, no doubt, I think the things that when I came in and I looked at the company, so there's many places where you can start, some of the areas you can think about is how do you improve the customer service, that's a very important aspect of how you become a better organization. So another area is process improvement and the third area is business model improvement, so I came in and I talked more about before we actually start looking at modifying or enhancing our business models, we need to get to a better, higher performance level within the organization and therefore I'm initially more focused on how do we improve our processes internally, right, and for us, based on our situation, and it varies for different companies, for us the first step in that was really to make sure that the people, systems, and the data are more interconnected. So even within that first step for me for the first phase for us was really to make sure that the people are connected, so do we have the right set of collaboration and communication tools, right, do we have the right set of analytics to sit on top of it, so we just finished that phase, we want to make sure that these are tangible, small steps, because you need to show some wins very very quickly so for us the first step was lets get the people connected. So we just did that, now the next step for us is to get our systems connected. So again, as I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of data that's sitting there, it has to be integrated. There's tremendous value that you can gain from that. So that's what we're getting into, this is our second phase of how do we connect the data together so this way we can start to get the next level of efficiency out of the company. >> So I am guessing after sitting here all day that the integration of your data, obviously we are at SnapLogic, is going to be easier than getting the people to change their processes and the connected people. What were some of the tricks to get people to adopt these new tools before we even start talking about the data? >> So I think there is, you have to show them the value obviously, if you talk about communication and collaboration tools I think the first thing is really about awareness. Right, there's a little bit of sort of top down, sort of mandate, or you may want to call sponsorship, that I think that that helps. >> Or stick >> Or stick, you know, so that helps. Because for some companies and for Quantum it was true that we did not have a corporate communication tool. There were multiple, right, so within the groups they were fine because they were able to communicate but between groups they were not able to, so we had to standardize on that, so I think that you kind of have to show these, there's always skepticism, because everything when people are used to certain things it seems to work for them right? >> I've always done it this way. >> Exactly right, so you have to show them new things and you have to create the awareness and then they start to see the value. It's not a one time thing, it's continuous effort, so we do lunch and learns, we do webinars, we do support sessions and things like this so this way people are more comfortable taking on the new technology. >> But it's so important right because your probability of success if you don't get the buy in from the participant is not very high, so the fact that you started there on the people before you really dove into the technology I think is pretty insightful and will probably increase your probability of success on the next phase tremendously, versus if you just integrated all the data and integrated all the apps and you still don't have people talking together, probably not going to be very successful. >> Exactly, because the data is in all these different business units and different groups and if they're not talking to each other, connecting the data has little or no value. So to me it's really about creating that connectivity so for us when you ask me, sort of, how do we start, so we start with connecting, connection is the first sort of phase of it and then the second is to empower people you know to create more self service and create more sort of autonomous units so that they can start to create value for themselves and for the company. So it's really about enabling the whole organization, sort of the ground swell type of approach, but you're going to first sort of bring the people to that sort of common place where it's easy for them to work, you bring the data along with it and then you standardize the environment or simplify it if you can and therefore it's easy for them to start taking on the services themselves. >> Right, so you finished the first phase and now the next phase is you're going to start integrating all the systems. >> Correct. >> So obviously, we're sitting here at SnapLogic, it's a big piece of what they do, so why did you decide to go with them and how are they helping you in this process? >> So for us, for this phase of digital transformation, you know there were two things that were really really important for us. One was really about how do we connect these systems together in a simple standardized way, so that was one criteria for us. And I believe SnapLogic does a great job and we're going to build it out at sort of the back core of our network. And then the second piece was really can we take this platform and make it available to our end users. So that they can create the connections or access the data that they want, right, and that's again where SnapLogic was able to demonstrate that this is very easy for them to use. So those were the two sort of very pivotal things for us as part of this phase of our digital transformation as to why we picked SnapLogic. >> Yeah it was funny 'cause you used the word self-service in your first phase so I think kind of this thing where your over and over and over it's so important to drive innovation in big companies is demarketerization demarketerization of the data, demarketerization of the tools and then let people find out things and then actually be able to execute. >> Exactly, because you know IT, there's a constant pressure on IT to cut costs, you know, so we cannot serve the whole company for all the things that needs to happen and the technology and the business is changing at such a rapid pace that unless we have experts who really understand that business unit function that well we are not the best people to build those things for them, they are the ones, but then you have a technology learning barrier or learning curve of do you need to put developers in there, so that's why to us this SnapLogic technology helps us that we believe that we can extend this ability to those users who really know their business, they can make the changes as they come, and the IT can help make sure that the right sort of infrastructure exists and the right sort of, level of connectivity exists. >> So I'm just curious, I know you're still early days in this project, but are there any Luddites that have kind of come around since you've been on this journey that suddenly just woke up and said oh okay now I get it now I see the value, now I kind of understand where we're trying to go, who maybe didn't think that way at the beginning. Or they all just know that they got to go. (laughs) >> No I think we are constantly learning along the way, I think that one of the key things that we learned just recently and SnapLogic is going to help us with that particular aspect of it is that we saw that there were a lot of systems that work fine, we don't use them, it's not a daily use type of thing, they get used quarterly, or annually, but we realized that if we can just bring more automation into those processes and we can tie it back to longer more historical data, then we can build more insights around it, so I think that when we show this to the users and especially the CFO now you all of a sudden sort of the lightbulbs go on and it's like oh this is great. Right, that I don't have to rely on only a small window of information, now I have a much broader window. >> Alright then, Omar thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your story with us. I wish you nothing but success on this. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm sure it will be long and exciting with twists and turns and highs and lows. So good luck. >> We're looking forward to that. >> Alright, he's Omar, I'm Jeff Frick. We're at SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

Published Date : May 19 2018

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by SnapLogic. of the all the software in Well thank you for inviting and where do you get started? into the company, to help So you see the sort of me on the acronym world. part of the transformation aspect of my role and we want should they expect to give One of the key things in of the puzzle we're trying a checklist that you have Or is the data being the things that you found just work, some of the areas you can and the connected people. So I think there is, you kind of have to show these, and you have to create the on the people before you of bring the people to that Right, so you finished build it out at sort of the data, demarketerization of the sure that the right sort at the beginning. of the lightbulbs go on and I wish you nothing but success on this. and exciting with twists We're at SnapLogic in

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Omar Bham, Crypt0 | Blockchain Week NYC 2018


 

>> Announcer: From New York, it's The Cube! Covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Hello, and I'm John Furrier with The Cube. We're back here on the ground for coverage of Consensus 2018, part of Blockchain Week New York, and we've got some amazing action going on here. We got Omar Bham, who's with Crypt0, C-R-Y-P-zero. Also got a great podcast. Great to see you. Crypt0 News, you're doing a lot of great social. Love the hat, love the swag. >> Thank you so much. >> Lookin' good. >> Thank you so much. Yeah, this is a swag actually, a follower of mine actually sent me, so I get these random boxes of just shirts, but I love 'em because my entire closet is crypto shirts, and now Goodwill, because I donate all these crypto shirts. (laughs) >> That's awesome. >> Yeah, thanks. >> Well, great to have you on. >> A pleasure. >> You're a celebrity, media celebrity, but you're really an example of a rising new kind of stakeholder in the ecosystem and the community. You're producing content. You're producing with the community. It's a co-development model. You're building a network. >> Yeah, it's... >> Not audience, they're already there, but you've got a network. >> Yeah, it's that thing where you want to find that niche. >> You know? >> John: Yeah. >> And it's just we've been blessed, some of us, to find this space pretty early on and develop that presence before others perhaps could. It's just a blessing. >> So what's your take on all this place? I got to ask you, what's your thoughts? Massive crowd. What's the analysis? >> You know, I was here last year, and we were expecting, I think it was 2750 last year, this year 4000. Turns out to be 8000 people, and a big trending Twitter post today was do you think that you're getting work done? This is my Amin Gunsir. He's one of the big blockchain, he looks at the code very deeply in different blockchains. And so he said, do you feel like you're getting work done with that many people, or do you feel like you're not? And more people were actually getting work done. I think it was, like, 62% to 38%, the vote. (John chuckles) So even with the amount of people here, people are close, tight, and still getting work, you know, (mumbles). >> Well, one other thing, and this brings up a good point. I mean, when you're face to face at a physical event, you have engagement on a whole nother level. It's not digital. Not digital face to face. >> Yeah. >> And I was down in the cafeteria for the little cafe. It's supposed to be public, open, for when you buy your lunch. >> Yeah. >> It was like a conference room. I couldn't sit down. People having meetings. There is so much business being done, relationships being built. So this community really is kind of getting work done. >> Yeah. >> And a lot of it's relationship-based. >> Sure. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, it's a lot of it to do with old relationships blossoming into new relationships. It's that I trust somebody who I already trust. So a lot of these guys have been coming to conferences together for years. >> John: Right. >> And you get introduced to somebody, and then it just works that way. And that kind of a beautiful... >> John: Yeah. >> It's like a mesh network. It's not just coming here and trying to, you know, like, necessarily shill. It's like, oh, here's my friend who I trust. >> John: Yeah. >> We went to school together. And naturally automatically, maybe it's a human thing, we just connect to that person a little bit easier. >> Talk about the work you do. And you got a YouTube channel, you got a podcast, you do some Facebook. >> Yeah. >> What's the format of the show? What's your style? What are you looking for? What kind of content are you producing? Obviously it's very engaging, it's very popular. >> Yeah. >> What's your style? >> Well, originally my style was a belief that the economy was going to collapse, so I was a big investor in stocks, I was trading, and I was trying to save my 401(k). Believe it or not, this was a while back. And I was thinking, how do I grow my capital and preserve it? I was worried that we were going to have another collapse, like 2008 was the beginning of it. So I thought about the future, the singularity, and this one point where we look at Moore's law where computing prices get cut in half for chips every year and a half, was the original road map. Prices cut in half. And basically how do we connect that old world collapsing, perhaps, (John chuckles) into this new infrastructure? And cryptocurrency came at that point, where I had already had some bitcoin, and then Ethereum was coming out, and I realized Ethereum could very well provide that base protocol for the next internet of things, so... >> And the developer community uptake has been phenomenal for Ethereum. >> Yeah, it's incredible, yeah. >> So let's do a little show right now. Omar, what's going on? How's it going? (Omar laughs) What's the content like? What's the coolest thing you're seeing here? Share some stories from the show. What have you seen? >> Let me see. I did interviews with some huge people. So it's so cool just to run into, like, the creator of Lightcoin's right there giving out stickers for his cryptomagical friends. Creator of Monero talking about how he lost all his crypto in a boating accident to me yesterday. (John laughs) Talking to some big trader dudes. Hearing about some stuff I can't even talk about, like, because I promised, and we did a verbal NDA, and I honor those. But, I don't know, it's, everywhere you look, there's something to learn, and you'll be amazed. >> It's got everything into it. I mean, I love this wave, right, because one, technically it's some magical shit happening. >> Sure. >> And it's happening big time. Starting out is growing fast. Business side, radical disruption to business models. Community has been open source, kind of an extension to open source communities. So, and then you've got a glam factor, money. >> Um-hum. >> (laughs) Right, so, I mean, money, I mean... Well, what is it missing? >> You know, I had a friend actually tell me that he got kidnapped, he got kidnapped, tied up, and held at gunpoint for three hours for all his crypto, so he lost all his crypto. So mostly the people who are, like, way up there don't do all that flaunting and showy stuff. You look at the big developers aren't rolling up in the Lambos and Ferraris. Generally you want to be pretty humble and modest about what your earnings are. And so I think it's, maybe it's a sign of, like, that Floyd Mayweather phenomenon, let me show it off. >> John: Yeah. >> Yeah, let's flaunt it. But mostly, like, I think it's that, you know, when you work for somebody, you wear a suit. When you work for yourself, no offense. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> I think you look great. You go the jeans on. >> I'm not wearing a tie, so... >> Exactly. And then when you work for yourself, you can show up in pajamas. >> Yeah. >> So... >> Well, I got to agree with you that I love the mojo, and I think one of the things that's notable in this industry is the pioneers, the guys who are making the money on the front end, they're developers, too. >> Um-hum. >> They're not just, you know, guys rolling the financial Wall Street kind of thing. They're making money and they're paying it forward, right? There's a huge pay it forward culture here. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And I think that is, I think, the differentiator that no one sees, is that that ethos is self-governing. >> Um-hum. >> Yeah, I think there'll be a mainstream adoption pretty quickly. >> Um-hum. >> But still right now it's tight-knit. >> Um-hum. >> It's very cool, and it's a pay it forward culture. >> This is mainstream to me, man. Two years, seeing this space just blossom. But we're getting there. I think it's the early adopter phase. >> John: Yeah. >> Maybe a little bit of early adopter, early majority in the United States. It depends where you are in the world. In LA, everyone has at least heard of bitcoin... >> John: Yeah. >> ...or has some bitcoin where I live. It wasn't the case before when I was living in Miami and (mumbles). >> Well, Omar, I'm a big fan of your work. We showed you the clip or two. >> Oh, I'm a fan of yours. >> We're going to get that to you. >> I love what you're doing. Thank you so much for sharing it to me. >> Yeah. >> I have to have you on my own show, for sure. >> Yeah, what's the URLs? Give a plug, what's the URLs, YouTube channel, coordinates, how do people get in touch with you? >> You can go to youtube.com slash C-R-Y-P-T-zero, so it's basically crypto, but without a zero. You can go to Twitter, so you can follow me on... >> Without an O. >> Yeah? >> It's crypto without an O, or with an O? >> Not the letter O, just the letter, the number zero. >> The number zero, okay. >> So C-R-Y-P-T-zero. Then you go to Crypt0's News. Same way, I'm always Crypt0 with a zero at the end instead of a letter. So Crypt0's News, Instagram, Twitter. We're on SteamIt, Crypt0 everywhere. >> Well, let's do some code development together. You're now a Cube alumni. >> Yeah. >> Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much for having me. We just met... >> Yeah, yeah. >> ...but I'm really excited to have met you. Super personality, man. >> Love the new producers. We love co-developing. We do it out in the open. We're in the open right now. We're on the floor here at Consensus 2018 bringing you all the coverage. Going to do 10 more interviews tomorrow. I did eight interviews last night. We interview anything that moves that's high-quality. Omar, thanks for coming on. It's The Cube. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. >> Thanks, John. >> Announcer: Live from the campus of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's The Cube! Covering the MIT Chief Data Officer and the Information Quality Symposium. Now here's your host Stu Miniman.

Published Date : May 18 2018

SUMMARY :

Announcer: From New York, it's The Cube! We're back here on the ground Thank you so much. and the community. but you've got a network. and develop that presence before others perhaps could. I got to ask you, what's your thoughts? and still getting work, you know, (mumbles). you have engagement on a whole nother level. for when you buy your lunch. So this community really is kind of getting work done. And, you know, it's a lot of it to do with old relationships And you get introduced to somebody, and trying to, you know, like, And naturally automatically, Talk about the work you do. What kind of content are you producing? that the economy was going to collapse, And the developer community uptake What's the coolest thing you're seeing here? So it's so cool just to run into, like, I mean, I love this wave, right, kind of an extension to open source communities. Well, what is it missing? So mostly the people who are, like, I think it's that, you know, I think you look great. And then when you work for yourself, Well, I got to agree with you that I love the mojo, They're not just, you know, And I think that is, I think, Yeah, I think there'll be and it's a pay it forward culture. I think it's the early adopter phase. It depends where you are in the world. ...or has some bitcoin where I live. We showed you the clip or two. Thank you so much for sharing it to me. You can go to Twitter, so you can follow me on... Then you go to Crypt0's News. Well, let's do some code development together. Thank you so much for having me. ...but I'm really excited to have met you. We do it out in the open. and the Information Quality Symposium.

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Omer Singer, Snowflake & Julie Chickillo, Guild Education | Snowflake Summit 2022


 

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the queue of Lisa Martin with Dave Valante and we're live in Vegas. This is snowflake summit, 22, their fourth annual event. A lot of people here, a lot of news, a lot to unpack so far, and this is only day, day one. We've got two guests here with us to talk about, uh, cyber security, a very important topic, please welcome Omar singer the head of cyber security strategy at snowflake and Julie Chilo VP of security at Guild education. Welcome. Thank >>You. Thank you >>For having all of >>Our favorite topics. Yeah. Oh >>One. It's not boring. >>You know this much and you have so much more to learn now. So here >>We go. Cybersecurity is, is not to say it's boring. Not boring is an understatement. Yeah. Omar, I wanna start with you so much news coming out today. Talk to us about what's new with cybersecurity. Workload is snowflakes. Flywheel of innovation just seems to be getting bigger and faster. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, I'll tell you it's been a long road to get to where we are today. Um, my initial role at snowflake was to lead security engineering. So I've actually been using snowflake as the home for security data, basically from day one. And we saw that it worked, it worked really well. And we started hearing from customers that they were dealing with some of the same challenges that we faced as an internal security team. And we decided as snowflake that we wanna bring the benefits of the data cloud to cyber security teams at all of our customers. And that's what the workload is all about. >>Talk to us about the, the voice of the customer. Obviously we saw a lot of customer stories heard your customer. We're gonna be talking about Guild education in a minute, but in the voice of the customer, in terms of being influential, obviously you were an internal customer drinking that champagne like this tastes really good. This is better of the Flaco <laugh>, but how is the voice of the customer influential in terms of the, the cybersecurity workload, as we've seen the threat landscape change so much in the last two years alone? >>Sure, sure. And you know, security, it's a really hard problem. We like to think of it as a data problem. And when you start thinking about it, that way snowflake is re very relevant for it. But many security teams don't yet think about their challenge as a data challenge. And so they're struggling with a very fragmented data landscape. The facts are all over the place and they're not able to ask the kind of questions that they need to understand. Where are my risks? How are the bad guys gonna try to get into my network? And they can't reflect that to leadership to everybody that really cares about cyber security. This is a board level concern today without the unified data and without the analytics. Um, they really can't do any of that. And, and yeah, representing the customer is, is a big part of what I do. And we have great customers like, like Julie, who's been kind of with us on this journey. She's, she's a part of the movement. I mean, Julie, what, what has it been like, uh, for, for you? >>Oh, it's been, uh, it's been game changer for, for Guild for sure. When we first, uh, started, I didn't one, I didn't know this was a concept <laugh> so when I first started talking O me and, um, snowflake, uh, I had just heard through the grapevine that, that you could do, like, this was a thing you could use the data, you could get everything you needed in one place. And, um, it's been game changing for my team. Uh, we, we were in many different security tools. They were all isolated, siloed, and we're now able to move everything into one, uh, one area, uh, and get we're getting close to the one pane of glass, which I, um, I just heard was a mythical concept for >>Security for >>A long time. Yeah. For a long time. Um, so it's, uh, it's just been amazing and it's, uh, brought us closer to our data ops team. So I'm here this week, uh, with somebody from data ops, actually, that's awesome to help us out. >>So can you describe that further? I'm I'm, I'm, I'm amazed and skeptical the, the, the I'm imagining, you know, the Optiv chart that says eight, 8 million security tools on there, are you actually able, uh, describe how you're able to consolidate your tooling? >>So, one of, one of the biggest problem, one of the biggest problems we were facing initially was our SIM, um, the security incident and event management tool could not take anything from our DevSecOps tools. And so any security that we had in a developer pipeline was really isolated to that tool, and we could never get it into a SIM Sims just aren't meant they're not built to handle that they're built to handle, um, not, not really old school networks and, and data center traffic and everything I have is in the cloud. And so we were really, I, everything was isolated. So with snowflake, what we do is we, um, worked with our data ops team. We can move things from, um, like our, our scanning tools for, for the developer pipelines into snowflake. We can use then correlate different things such as, from like eight year ADP. Like if a, do you have somebody pushing code to production who's out on vacation, you can actually do that correlation with snowflake that was never available before. These are things we could never do before. And we're able to, um, just do correlations. You could not get in that you cannot get in a SIM. >>Why couldn't I just throw those into any old, you know, run of the mill cloud data warehouse? >>Well, you know, it's not just the scale, it's the complexity of the data. I think snowflake how we have the, the sche on read and then all of the kind of things that make snowflake really good for other departments turns out, works really well for security. And it's the ecosystem too. Nobody else has this ecosystem approach. You know, you heard on the keynote today that snowflake is the, this disrupting, um, the, the software application development, right? All, all that kind of focus. The tool consolidation doesn't need to mean that you only have one tool you can actually have best of breed, choose the tool you want. As long as the data's consolidated, you're not building more silos. And that's what our partners are doing. They're separating the application from the data. They're bringing the work to the data, and that's what you hear here. So Julie's team can still choose to use a variety of tools that get the job done, but all those tools are working off of the single source of truth. And that, that is unique to what snowflake >>Can enable. So we, we are Reiss. Uh, we should have asked you about Guild education, explain your, your, your organization. >>Oh, what does Guild do? Uh, so we're a late stage startup. Uh, we manage education as a benefit for, for large companies. So we, we house data from very large organizations with like their workforce and, and help students help, help their workforce go back to school. >>Okay. So unpacking some of the things you said, schema on Reed, but not necessarily no schema on, right. It's a little different, right. Because you're ingesting. Yeah. And then you're determining the scheme on read that's right. Right. Okay. So that makes it simple and fast for zoom, but you get data in and then you figure it out, bringing work to data. Can we just double click on that a little bit? Cuz I think when I think about that, we've heard terms like over the years bring compute to the data. That's what Hadoop was supposed to do. And it didn't, you know, it was like, everything was mm-hmm <affirmative> shoved. So what do you mean by that? How, how, what, what actually does that >>Mean? Yeah. So if you think about the traditional SAS solution, the vendor needed to invest in a data center and to have a data platform that would be scalable and robust because their service dependent on it and they couldn't trust that the customer would have that kind of data platform on the customer's side. What Snowflake's data cloud has done has democratized the data platform. So now you have startups to fortune 500 S the vendors, the customers, they're all uneven footing when it comes to the data platform. So now the vendors can say, bring your own snowflake. Why not? You know, and they can focus on building the best application to solve the real challenges that security teams have. But by the way, not only cybersecurity, we see this and for example, the, um, customer data space as well. So we're seeing more and more kind of SaaS industries seeing this approach and the applications are gonna come yeah. To the data platform of choice, uh, for the practitioner. >>Julie, can we talk about some of the outcomes that Guild education has achieved so far by working with this solution in terms of, we look at the threat landscape and how it's changed so much the last couple of years and how it's a matter of if, or sorry, when not, if I get hit with an attack, how, what are some of the key outcomes that a snowflake partnership and technology has enabled you to achieve? >>So the, the biggest one, again, it's around the Def sec ops program, um, where you see so many attacks these days happening in the code base. So you really have to be careful with your, your pipeline where the code's getting moved through, who has access, who can move code into production. Um, and these are so the, like if you're using GitHub or, um, like using a scanning tool called snake, they're, they're separate, like they're completely separate the only way that we can see who's moving code into production, or if there was a vulnerability or somebody turned off, the security tool is to move these logs, this data into snowflake, uh, and our engineering teams were already using snowflake. Uh, so that made it, that was an easy transition for us. I didn't have to go out and convince another team to support us somewhere else, but a great example where we were, we're seeing great, um, savings, not only in people time, but, but for security, um, we were having problems or the security or the <laugh>, the engineers were turning off our secure codes scanner. >>And we didn't find out until a little bit later. Uh, oh yeah. Yeah. So found out we, my team, we had a team, we spent about 160 hours going through a thousand pole requests manually. And I said, no, no more go find the go figure out where this data exists. We put it in a snowflake and we can create an automatic, uh, ping to the security team saying, Hey, they turned off the, the scanner, go check and see what, why did the scanner get turned off? So it's an immediate response from my team instead of finding out two months later. And this is just, isn't something you can do right now. That's you can't set it up. So, um, makes it so easy. Ping goes to slack. We can go to the, immediately to the engineering team and say, why did you >>Using using automation? >>Yeah. Did you, did you turn this off? Why did you turn it off? Get an exception in so one, it like helps with compliance, so we're not messing up our SOC two audit. Uh, and then two, from a security perspective, we are able to, to trust, but verify, um, which is a big part of the DevSecOps landscape, where they need code to move into production. They need a scan to run in under five minutes. My team can't be there to scan, you know, 10, like 10 times a day or a hundred times a day. So we have to automate all of that and then just get information as it comes in. >>Is it accurate to say that, um, you're not like shutting off your tools, you're just taking advantage of them and compressing the time to get value out of them or are you actually reducing the tool sets? >>No, we don't. Well, no, we, our goal wasn't to reduce the tool set. I mean, we did actually get rid of the SIM we were using. Uh, so we were partnering with one of, um, uh, snowflakes partners, um, >>Because yeah, but you still have a SIM, >>We still have it. It's just minimized what goes to the SIM, because most of what I care about, isn't actually going to a SIM. Yeah. It's all the other pieces that are in a cloud because we use all like, we're, we're a hundred percent in the cloud. I don't have servers, I don't have firewalls. We don't have routes routers or switches. So all the things I care about live in a cloud somewhere. And, and I want that information. And so a lot of times, um, especially when it comes to the engineering tools, they were already sending the information to snowflake or they're also interested. And so we're partnering like it's, we're doubling up on the use of the >>Data. Okay. And you couldn't get that outta your SIM. Maybe you're asking your SIM to do too much, or it just didn't deliver. >>No systems are built on search engines. You know, they don't, >>They, they can't do it. >>You kind of knew what you were looking for and you say, Hey, where did I see this? Where did I see that? Very different from data analytics and the kinds of question that security teams really want to ask. These are emergent properties. You need context, you need sequel, you need Python. That's how you ask the questions that security teams really want to ask the legacy Sims. They don't let you ask that kind of question. They weren't built with that in mind. And they're so expensive that by moving off of them, to this approach, you kind of pay for all these other solutions that, that then you can bring on. >>That seems to make the, what you just said. There was brilliant. It seems to make the customer conversation quite easy if they're saying, well, why should I replace my SIM? It's doing just fine. You just nailed it with, with what you said there. >>So, yeah. And we're, and we're seeing that happen extensively. And I'm excited that we have customers here at summit talking about their experience, moving off of a legacy SIM where the security team was off to the side, away from the rest of the company to a unified approach, the SIM and the other security solutions working on top of the snowflake and a collaboration between security and the data >>Team. So what does your security ecosystem look like? You've got SIM partners. Do you have identity access partners, endpoint partner. Absolutely. >>Describe that compliance automation ass. Yeah. We hear about companies really struggling to meet all the compliance requirements. Well, if all the data's already centralized, then I can kind of prove to my auditors and not just once a quarter, but once a day, I can make sure that all the environment is in compliance with whatever standard I have. So we see a lot of that cloud security is another big one because there's just 10 times more things happening in the cloud environment than in the data center. Everything is so heavily instrumented. And so we see cloud security solutions as significant as well. And the identity space, the list goes on and on. We do see the future being the entire security program uses connected applications with a single source of truth in the company's snowflake. And >>Would you say centralized, you, you it's logically centralized, right? I mean, it's virtually centralized, right? It's not, >>Well, that's >>Not shoved into one container, right? >>I mean, it's right. Well, that's the beauty of the data cloud, right? We, everybody that's on the data cloud is able to collaborate. And so whether it's in the same account or table or database, you know, that's really besides the point because all of the platform investments that snowflake is making on cross region, cross cloud collaboration means that once it's in snowflake, then it is unified and can be used together. But >>I think people misunderstand that sometimes. And BEWA made this point, uh, as the Christian about the global nature of, of snowflake and it's globally distributed, but it's logically a data cloud. >>Yeah. I like to call it one big database in the sky. You know, that's how I explain to security teams that are kind of new to the concept, but >>It's not, it's could be a lot of little databases, but it, but having the same framework, the same governance structure, the same security >>You're right. I think that's how it's achieved is what you're describing. You know, I think from the outcome, what the security team needs to know is that when there's some breach hitting the headline and they need to go to their leadership and say, I can assure you, we were not affected. They can be confident in that answer because they have access to the data, wherever it is in the world, they have access to ask you the questions they need to ask. >>And that confidence is critical. These days as that threat landscape just continues to change. Thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you. Talking about from a cyber security perspective, some of the things that are new, new at snowflake, what you guys are doing at Guild education and how you're really transforming the organization with the data cloud, we appreciate your insights. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thanks you guys for our guests and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue live from Las Vegas on the show floor of snowflake summit 22. We'll be right back with our next guest.

Published Date : Jun 14 2022

SUMMARY :

Welcome back to the queue of Lisa Martin with Dave Valante and we're live in Vegas. You know this much and you have so much more to learn now. Omar, I wanna start with you so much news coming out today. And we decided as snowflake that we wanna bring the benefits of the data cloud to cyber This is better of the Flaco <laugh>, but how is the voice of the customer influential The facts are all over the place and they're not able to ask the kind of questions that they need to that you could do, like, this was a thing you could use the data, you could get everything you needed in one place. actually, that's awesome to help us out. And so any security that we had in a developer pipeline was doesn't need to mean that you only have one tool you can actually have best of breed, Uh, we should have asked you about Guild education, Uh, we manage education as And it didn't, you know, it was like, everything was mm-hmm <affirmative> shoved. So now you have startups to fortune 500 S the vendors, So the, the biggest one, again, it's around the Def sec ops program, um, where you see so many And this is just, isn't something you can do right now. to scan, you know, 10, like 10 times a day or a hundred times a Uh, so we were partnering with one of, So all the things I care about live Maybe you're asking your SIM to do too much, or it just didn't deliver. You know, they don't, You kind of knew what you were looking for and you say, Hey, where did I see this? That seems to make the, what you just said. And I'm excited that we have customers here at summit talking about Do you have identity access Well, if all the data's already centralized, then I can kind of prove to my auditors and We, everybody that's on the data cloud is able to collaborate. And BEWA made this point, uh, as the Christian about the You know, that's how I explain to security teams that are kind of new to the concept, They can be confident in that answer because they have access to the new at snowflake, what you guys are doing at Guild education and how you're really transforming the organization

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Protect Against Ransomware & Accelerate Your Business with HPE's Cloud Operational Experience


 

>>Okay, okay, we're back, you're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of HBs Green Lake announcement. One of the things that we said on the Cuban. We first saw Green Lake was let's watch the pace at which H P E delivers new servants is what's that cadence like? Because that's a real signal as to the extent that the company's leading into the cloud and today we're covering that continued expansion. We're here with Tom Black, who was the general manager of HPC storage and Omar assad, who's the storage platform lead for cloud data services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise gentlemen welcome. It's good to see you. >>Thanks Dave. Thanks for having us today. Good to see you. >>Happy to be here. Dave. >>So obviously a lot has changed globally, but when you think of things like cyber threats, ransomware, uh, the acceleration of business transformation, uh, these are new things, a lot of it is unknown a lot of it was forced upon us tom what are you guys doing to address these trends? How are you helping customers? >>Sure, thanks for the question. So if you think back to what we launched in early May, kind of the initial cloud transformation of what was our traditional storage business. Um, we really focused on one key theme. Very customer and customer driven theme that the cloud operational model has one and that customers want that operational model, whether they're operating their workload in the cloud or whether they're operating that workload in their own facility or Nicolo kind of the same thing. So that was kind of our true north and that's what we launched out of the gate in May. But we did allude in May to the fact that we would have an ongoing series of new services coming out on the uh H B Green Lake edge to cloud platform. And just really excited today to be talking about somewhat that expansion looks like um we will continue uh through this month and through the quarters ahead to really add more and more services in that vein of focusing on bringing that true cloud services model to our customer. So we're really excited today to unveil kind of, we've entered the data protection as a service market with HP Green Lake. So this is really our expansion into a very top of mind topic and set of problems and solutions or headaches and aspirins, to quote an old friend um that Ceos faces, they think about how to manage data through its life cycle in their organization. >>When I talked to see IOS during the pandemic. Not that we're out yet, but really in the throes of it and asked them about things like business resilience that they said, you know, we really had to rethink our disaster recovery strategy. It was it was sort of geared toward a fire or a hurricane and we we just didn't even imagine this type of disaster if you will. So we really needed to rethink it. So when I, I see your disaster recovery as a service and capabilities like that. Is that the Xarelto acquisition? >>Yes. Dave thanks you. So we're super happy to have the Xarelto team now as part of our family. Um, just a brilliant team, a well respected technology, uh, kind of a blue chips at our customers and partners that really appreciate what zero has to offer. Um, as we looked at the data protection as a service market, one of the hardest problems is really in that disaster recovery space, I think Omar's gonna talk a little bit more about today. Um, but sort of really does bring the leading industry, what's called continuous data protection um, capability into our green lake platform. Um, we've just recently closed the acquisition and we're working on kind of integration plan as we speak now that we can actually talk to each other post close. Um, but you'll uh, you'll continue to see, you know, some really exciting milestones each and every quarter as we march forward with certain now as part of the family. >>So we all talk about how data is, is so important. We certainly learned during the pandemic that that if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and a digital business is a data business. So things like backup data protection as a service become increasingly critical. I know you have some capabilities there maybe you could share with us. >>Absolutely. So you know, one of the things that we noticed was as we took the storage business through its transformation and we started can work you know, with the launch of the electron 90 and the six K platform. We really really brought the cloud operational model to our customers. So one of the things that you know, feedback that was coming loud and clear to us is that as we look at the storage portfolio where we look at file block and object, which are now being transformed into a cloud operational experience, data protection, disaster recovery coming back into business after a disaster snapshot management. All of those capabilities, we still have to rely on our partner technologies in order to do that now. It's not bad that we have great partners in the data protection world, but what we're really focused on is that cloud operational model and cloud operational experience and to and as tom mentioned through the data management life cycle. So as a result of that, we talked to a lot of our customers, we talked to a bunch of partners and one of the things that was coming back was that yes, there are many data protection backup offerings on the market. But that true as a service experience that is completely integrated to the services experience of the storage that the customers is experiencing that is not there. So what we looked at was especially to the largest ecosystem, which is the VM ware ecosystems. So we're launching data protection as a service or backup as a service for our VM ware customers offered from data services, cloud console as a SAAS portal. 100% SAs service, nothing to install. No media servers, no application servers, no catalog servers, no backup targets, no patching, no expansion, no capacity planning. None of that is needed. All that's needed is sign on click. Give your V center credentials and off you go, that's it. That is it three clicks and you're in business. So currently, you know, in our, in our analysis we offer five x faster recovery from any of the competitive offerings that there there there are 3.5 better de doop ratios. But for our customers is as simple as this. VM is protected as this many dollars per gig per month. That's it. No backup target, no media server, no catalogs are nothing nothing to manage total Turkey off of the portal. So that's the cadence of services that if you promise and this is one of the first ones when it comes to data management that is coming out into the open. >>So you may have just answered this question, but I want to pose it and get you maybe just summarize it because tom was talking earlier about the customer mandate for cloud in a cloud operational model. So I want you to explain to the audience how you're making that real >>actually can I start that one should be the test was monday morning. Getting ready for this chat with you Dave they got me on console and I'm not kidding three clicks, I got back up and running off the lab VM ware instance so I'll pass it off to you the real answer. But if I could do it three clicks >>as well as a convenience of this service, even tom can be your back, you might be able to do with this. Uh again, you know, a very important question the when you, when you look at the cloud operational model as you abstracts the hardware and and take the management model up into a SAS service, it gives our customers that access to that continuous delivery access that we have. We're going to continue to make the service medal better in the cloud model and automatically customers get the value of it without even reinstalling or going through a patch cycle or an upgrade cycle. But as we get into this cloud operational model, one of the things that was missing was uh if you if you if you if you start to talk about applications, how our application workloads going to be deployed, how are they going to be protected and how are they going to be expanded? So what we did was we, we expanded our info site offerings by merging them into the data services, cloud console and we're releasing a new service called app insects. It is going to be available to our customers at the end of the month. Uh It is, nothing has to change. They don't have to install any sort of agents or or host modifications, nothing like that. If their customers of electra nimble primary boxes and they're using info site and data services, cloud console, they will automatically get app insights. What Athens sites does is it really teases apart all that data that we have been collecting within foresight and now with the acquisition of HPV cloud physics, we're merging them together and relating the operational stacked top to bottom. So discovering all the way from your application usage, network usage, storage, use it. IOP usage VM values cross, collaborating them and presenting that to a customer from an app or an outcome perspective all in the data services, cloud console. So what this does for our customers is it really really transforms not only their operational experience but also buying experience. Because if you remember in one of the earlier releases of data services cloud console we released this application called, you know, intelligent intent based provisioning in which you just describe your workload and we go ahead and we provision that app insights and info site, feed that information directly into that and cloud physics generates and results and displays those analytics back to us to your partner of record and to the H. B. So we can all come together on a common data driven discussion point with our customers to continue to make their journey better >>tom where's all the boxes, traditional storage is changing. I've actually been waiting for this day for a long, long time. We've certainly seen glimpses of it from the cloud players, but they don't have, you know, super rich portfolio storage portfolio. They're growing now, but this is a really good strong example of a company with a large storage portfolio. That's, I mean I haven't heard the word three power once today. Right. And so what that says to me, that's an indication that you're thinking like a cloud player, can you maybe talk >>to that? Sure. Yeah, we're just tremendously excited about this transformation and really the reception we've got in the market from analysts, from partners, from customers because you're right, you haven't heard us talk about a box at all today. It's really about a block service, a file on the object service, a backup and recovery service, disaster recovery service. That that's that is the the language, if you will of the business problems of our customers not, do they need to pick this widget or that widget. And how many apps can I get here and there? And which did the h a cage protection scheme be that, is that, is our job to manage underneath are true North, which is the cloud operational model. And so that's going to be really how we we've set our course and how we will uh kind of deliver products solutions offers into the market underneath that umbrella, Ultimately, um getting our customers wherever their data is Dave to be able to interact at that service level instead of at that infrastructure box >>level, you've got my attention wherever the data. So that's the north star here is this is, you know, you're not done today obviously, but you've got a vision to bring that to the cloud across clouds on prem out to the edge. That's the abstraction layer that you're gonna build, your hiding all that complexity. That's correct. And that's cloud. The definition of cloud is changing. >>Yeah, >>it's no longer started, it's no longer a remote set of services. Somewhere up in the cloud. It's expanding on prem hybrid across clouds edge >>everywhere. You're exactly right. Dave it is, cloud is more about the experience and the outcome. It gives a customer than actually where the compute or storage is. We've chosen to take a very customer an agnostic position of whether it's, you know, data in your premise, data in your cloud. We're going to help you manage that data and deliver, you know, that data to workloads and analytics, uh, wherever the, wherever the compute needs to be, where the data needs to be. Again, technologies like Xarelto giving instability and move data across clouds from facilities and clouds back and forth. So it's a really exciting new day for HP. Green Lake were just so super happy to bring these technologies out and really continue to follow on the course of doing what we said, we would do >>the new mindset starts there, I guess it's obviously knew certainly new technologies, uh, you're talking about machine intelligence is a metadata challenge. Absolutely. Big time, you know, long term that North Star that we talked about and applying that machine intelligence, all the experience that you gather data that you're gathering is, I think ultimately how customers want you to solve this problem >>in the middle of info site data services, cloud console and the instrumentation that is already shipping on our appliances, both in edge appliances and the data center appliances were collecting more than a trillion data points over the period of a quarter. Right at the end of the day. So it's harnessing that at the back end to cross relate and then using the cloud physics accusation. What we're doing is we can now simulate these things on behalf of our customers into the future timeline. So at the end of the day, it's really about listening to the customer and what outcomes that they want to achieve with their data storage is there we provide excellent persistence layers where customers can store their data safely. But at the end of the day it's customers choice, They can store their data out of the edge in compute servers, commodity servers, X 86 servers, they can have their data in the data center which they are privately owned or their data can be in a service provider or it can be in a hyper secular. The infrastructure of the persistence layer is independent from the data services. Cloud console data services. Cloud console provides our customers with a SAS based industry leading metadata rich management experience, which then allows you to draw conclusions. So services like cloud physics services like uh enforce it, provide the analytics and richness of the metadata, backup and recovery service allows us to index our customers data and add a rich metadata to that and then combine that with xylitol, which is our disaster recovery as a service offering. Going to start over here. That gives the customer a very simple slider as to where they want their protection levels to be, they want their protection to be instant or they want their protection to be lazy eight hours window. But the thing is at the end of the day, it's about choice without managing the complexities of the hardware >>underneath because programmable completely right I come in, what I'm hearing is file object blocks of your multi protocol. I got a full stack so data data reduction, my snaps might replicate whatever whatever I need it in there as a service. I can I can access latency sensitive storage if I need to or I can push it out to cheaper stores. I could push it out to the cloud, presumably I could someday I air gap it uh and it's all done as infrastructure as code and then different protection levels where I see this going. It really gets exciting is you're now a data company and you're bringing ai machine intelligence and driving data products, data services for your customers who are going to monetize that at their end of the value >>chain. That's right. That's right. And safely insecurity. Keeping in mind that was their toes technology. We can give you, you know, small second recovery points to protect against ransomware. So all of that operational elegance, all those insights and intelligence to help you build a more agile, um you know, workloads centric organization, but then to do it safely and securely against ransomware, that's kind of the storm, if you will. That's brewing. And we're just really excited to be at the eye of it. >>I'm excited to. This is uh I've been waiting for this day for a long time and we're not talking about envy, Emmy and Atomic Rights and I love that stuff by the way and I'm sure it's all under the covers, but that's not what drives business value guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cuban. David. >>Thanks for having us. It's been great. Thank you. >>All right. We're seeing a transformation all through the stack and keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for the Cuban. Our coverage of HBs Green Lake announcements right back mm mhm

Published Date : Sep 28 2021

SUMMARY :

One of the things that we said Good to see you. Happy to be here. So that was kind of our true north and that's what we launched out of the gate in May. Is that the Xarelto acquisition? market, one of the hardest problems is really in that disaster recovery space, I think Omar's gonna talk a little bit that if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and a digital business is a data business. So one of the things that you know, So I want you to explain to the audience how you're making that real actually can I start that one should be the test was monday morning. one of the things that was missing was uh if you if you if you if you start to talk about but they don't have, you know, super rich portfolio storage portfolio. And so that's going to be really how we we've set our course and how So that's the north star here is this is, It's expanding on prem hybrid across clouds edge We're going to help you manage that data and deliver, you know, that machine intelligence, all the experience that you gather data that you're gathering is, So at the end of the day, it's really about listening to the customer and what outcomes that I could push it out to the cloud, presumably I could someday I air gap it uh against ransomware, that's kind of the storm, if you will. Emmy and Atomic Rights and I love that stuff by the way and I'm sure it's all under the covers, Thanks for having us. This is Dave Volonte for the Cuban.

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Protect Your Data & Recover from Cyberthreats & Ransomware in Minutes


 

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of H P S. Green Lake announcement. We've been following Green Lake and the cadence of announcements making. Now we're gonna talk about ransomware, ransomware become a household term. But what people really don't understand is that virtually any bad actor can become a ransomware criminal by going on the dark web hiring a ransomware as a service sticking, putting a stick into a server and taking a piece of the action and that is a really insidious threat. Uh, the adversaries are extremely capable, so we're going to dig into that with Omar assad, who's the storage platform, lead cloud data services at H P E and Deepak verma vice president of product Zito, which is now an H P E company Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. >>Thank you. Welcome. Pleasure to be here. So >>over you heard my little narrative upfront. How does the Xarelto acquisition fit into that discourse? >>Thank you. Dave first of all, we're extremely excited to welcome Sir toe into the HP family. Uh, the acquisition of Puerto expands the Green Lake offerings from H P E uh, into the data protection as a service and ransomware protection as a service capabilities and it at the same time accelerates the transformation that the HP storage businesses going through as it transforms itself into more of a cloud native business, which sort of follows on from the May 4th announcements that you helped us cover. Uh, this enables the HP sales teams to now expand the data protection perimeter and to start offering data protection as a service and ransomware as a service with the best in class technologies uh, from a protection site as well as from ransomware recovery side of the house. And so we're all the way down already trying to integrate uh, you know, the little offerings as part of the Green lake offerings and extending support through our services organization. And the more of these announcements are gonna roll out later in the month. >>And I think that's what you want to see from it as a service offering. You want to see a fast cadence of new services that are not a box by a box that are applying. No, it's services that you want to access. So let's, let's talk about before we get into the tech, can we talk about how you're helping customers deal with ransomware? Maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing. >>First of all, extremely excited to be part of the HP family now. Um, Quick history and that we've been around for about 11 years. We've had about 9000 plus customers and they all benefit from essentially the same technology that we invented 11 years ago. First and foremost, one of the use cases has been continuous data protection. So were built on the CdP platform, which means extremely low RTO S and R P O S for recovery. I'll give you example there um, United Airlines is an application that cost them $1 million dollars for every hour that they're down. They use traditional approaches. That would be a lot of loss with Zito, we have that down two seconds of loss in case and the application goes down. So that's kind of core and fundamental to our plaque. The second uh critical use case that for us has been simplicity. A lot of customers have said we make the difficult, simple. So DRS is a complex uh process. Um, give you an example there. Hcea Healthcare Consolidated four different disaster recovery platforms into a single platform in Puerto and saved about $10 million dollars a year. So it's making that operations of having disaster recovery process is much simpler. Um the third kind of critical use case for us as uh, the environment has evolved as the landscape has involved has been around hybrid cloud. So being able to take customers to the platforms that they want to go to that's critical for us And for our customers an example, there is Kingston technology's so Kingston tried some competitive products to move to Azure, it would take them about 24 hours to recover 30 VMS or so with zero technology. They will get about all their 1000 VMS up in Azure instantaneously. So these are three use cases that were foundational. Built. Built the company in the tech. >>Nice. Thank you. Thank you for that. So simple works well these days, especially with all this complexity we have to deal with. Can we get into the secret sauce a little bit. I mean CdP has been around forever. What do you guys do that? That's different. Maybe you can talk about that. Sure. >>Um it's cdp based, I think we've perfected the technology. It's less about being able to just copy the data. It's more about what you do when things go bump. We've made it simpler with driven economies of scale lower and being platform agnostic. We've really brought that up across to whatever platforms once upon a time it was moving from physical to virtual or even across different virtualization platforms and then being able to move across to whatever cloud platform customer may want or or back >>to cbP continuous data protection by the way for the audience that may not know that go ahead. And >>one of the additional points that I want to add to the box comment over here is the the basics of platform independence is what really drew uh hp technologists into the technology because you know, one of the things we have many, we have the high end platform with the H B electra nine Kv of the electro six kids the midrange platform. Then we have a bunch of file and object offerings on the side. What zero does it University universally applies to all those technologies and along with, you know, as you pair them up with our computer offerings to offer a full stack but now the stack is disaster recovery capable. Natively with the integration of certo, you know, one of the things that, you know, Deepak talked about about the as your migrations that a lot of the customers are talking about cloud is also coming up as a D our use case for a lot of our customers, customers, you know, you know, as we went through thousands of customers interviews one of the, one of the key things that came back was investing in a D our data center which is just waiting there for a disaster to happen. It's a very expensive insurance policy. So absurd. Oh, through its native capabilities allows customers to do is to just use public cloud as a D our target and and as a service, it just takes care of all the format conversions and recoveries and although that's completely automated inside the platform and and we feel that, you know, when you combine this either at the high end of data center storage offering or the middle age offering with this replication, D. R. And ransomware protection built into the same package, working under the same hood, it just simplifies and streamlines the customers deployment. >>Come here a couple of things. So first of all historically, if you wanted to recover to appoint within let's say, you know, 10 seconds, five seconds you have to pay up. Big time. Number one. Number two is you couldn't test your D. R. It was too risky. So people just had it in, they had a checkbox on compliance but they actually couldn't really test it because they were afraid they were going to lose data. So it sounds like you're solving both of those problems or >>or you know we remember the D. R. Test where it was a weekend. It was an event right? It was the event and at the end of july that the entire I. T. Organizing honey >>it's not gonna be home this weekend. Exactly what >>we've changed. That is a click of a button. You can D. R. Test today if you want to you can have disaster recovery still running. You can D. R. Test in Azure bring up your environment an isolated network bubble, make sure everything's running and bring it and bring it down. The interesting thing is the technology was invented back when our fear in the industry was losing a data center was losing power was catastrophic, natural disasters. But the technology has lent itself very well to the new threats which which are very much around ransomware as you mentioned because it's a type of disaster. Somebody's going after your data. Physical servers are still around but you still need to go back to a point in time and you need to do that very quickly. So the technology has really just found itself uh appealing to new challenges. >>If a customer asks you can I really eliminate cyber attacks, where should I put my my if I had 100 bucks to spend. Should I spend it on you know layers and defense should I spend it on recovery. Both, what would you tell them? >>I think it's a balanced answer. I think prevention is 100% impossible. Uh It's really I'd say spend it in in thirds. You want to spend a third of it and and prevention a third of it maybe in detection and then a third of it in uh recovery. So it's really that balancing act that means you can't leave the front door open but then have a lot of recovery techniques invested in. It has to be it has to be a balance and it's also not a matter of if it's a matter of when so we invest in all three areas. Hopefully two of them will work to your advantage. >>You dave you you should always protect your perimeter. I mean that that goes without saying but then as you invest in other aspects of the business, as Deepak mentioned, recovery needs to be fast and quick recovery whether from your recovering from a backup disaster. Are you covering from a data center disaster a corrupted file or from a ransomware attack. A couple of things that zero really stitches together like journal based recovery has been allowed for a while but making journal based recovery platform independent in a seamless fashion with the click of a button within five seconds go back to where your situation was. That gives you the peace of mind that even if the perimeter was breached, you're still protected, you know, five minutes into the problem And, and that's the peace of mind, which along with data protection as a service, disaster recovery as a service and now integrating this, you know, recovery from ransomware along with it in a very simple, easy to consume package is what drew us into the >>more you can do this you said on the use the cloud as a target. I could use the cloud as an air gap if I wanted to. It sounds like it's cloud Native, correct? Just wrap your stack in kubernetes and shove it in the cloud and have a host and say we're cloud to No, really I'm serious. So >>absolutely, we we looked at that approach and that that's where the challenge comes in, Right? So I give you the example of Kingston technology just doesn't scale, it's not fast enough. What we did was developed a platform for cloud Native. We consume cloud services where necessary in order to provide that scalability. So one example in Azure is being able to use scale set. So think about a scenario where you just declare a disaster, you've got 1000 VMS to move over, we can spin up the workers that need to do the work to get 1000 VMS spin them down. So you're up and running instantaneously and that involves using cloud Native uh tools and technologies, >>can we stay on that for a minute, So take take us through an example of what life was like would be like without zero trying to recover and what it's like with Puerto resources, complexity time maybe you could sort of paint a picture. Sure. >>Let me, I'll actually use an example from a customer 10 Kata. They uh develop defensive fabrics, especially fabric. So think about firefighters, think about our men and women abroad that need protective clothing that developed the fibers behave. They were hit by ransomware by crypto locker. That this was before zero. Unfortunately it took they took about a two week uh data loss. It took them weeks to recover that environment, bring it back up and the confidence was pretty low. They invested in, they looked at our technology, they invested in the technology and then they were hit with a different variant of crypto locker immediately. The the IT administrators and the ITS folks there were relieved right, they had a sense of confidence to say yes we can recover. And the second time around they had data loss of about 10 seconds, they could recover within a few minutes. So that's the before and after picture giving customers that confidence to say yep, a breach happened, we tried our best but now it's up to recovery and I can recover without having to dig tapes out from some vault and hopefully have a good copy of data sitting there and then try that over and over again and there's a tolerance right before a time before which business will not be able to sustain itself. So what we want to do is minimize that for businesses so that they can recover as quickly as possible with as little data loss as possible. >>Thank you for that. So, Omar, there's a bigger sort of cyber recovery agenda that you have as part of, of green lake, I'm sure. What, what should we expect, what's next? Where do you want to take this? >>So uh excellent question point in the future day. So one of the things that you helped us, uh you know, unveil uh in May was the data services. Cloud console. Data services. Cloud console was the first uh sort of delivery as we took the storage business as it is and start to transform into more of a cloud native business. We introduced electra uh which is the cloud native hardware with the customers buy for persistent storage within their data center. But then data services, cloud console truly cemented that cloud operational model. Uh We separated the management from, from the devices itself and sort of lifted it up as a sas service into the public, public cloud. So now what you're gonna see is, you know, more and more data and data management services come up on the data services. Cloud console and and zero is going to be one of the first ones. Cloud physics was another one that we we talked about, but zero is the is the true data management service that is going to come up on data services, cloud console as part of the Green Lake services agenda that that HP has in the customer's environ and then you're gonna see compliance as a service. You're going to see data protection as a service. You're gonna see disaster recovery as a service. But the beautiful thing about it is, is choice with simplicity as these services get loaded up on data services, clown console. All our customers instantly get it. There's nothing to install, there's nothing to troubleshoot uh, there's nothing to size. All those capabilities are available on the console, customers go in and just start consuming Xarelto capabilities from a management control plane, Disaster recovery control plan are going to be available on the data services, cloud console, automatically detecting electro systems, rian Bear systems, container based systems, whichever our customers have deployed and from there is just a flip of a button. Another way to look at it is it sort of gives you that slider that you have data protection or back up on one side, you've got disaster recovery on one side, you've got ransomware protection on on the extreme right side, you can just move a slider across and choose the service level that you want without worrying about best practices, installation, application integration. All of that just takes control from the data services, cloud concepts. >>Great, great summary because historically you would have to build that right now. You can buy it as a service. You can programmatically, you know, deploy it and that's a game changer. Have to throw it over the fence to some folks. That's okay. Now, you know, make it make it work and then they change the code and you come back a lot of finger pointing. It's now it's your responsibility. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. We're excited to provide Zito continue provides the desert of customers but also integrate with the Green Green Lake platform and let the rest of Green Lake customers experience some of the sort of technology and really make that available as a service. >>That's great. This is a huge challenge for customers. I mean they do, I pay their ransom. Do not pay the ransom. If I pay the ransom the FBI is going to come after me. But if I don't pay the ransom, I'm not gonna get the crypto key. So solutions like this are critical. You certainly see the president pushing for that. The United States government said, hey, we got to do a better job. Good job guys, Thanks for for sharing your story in the cube and congratulations. Thank >>you. Thank you David. >>All right. And thank you for watching everybody. Uh this is the, I want to tell you that everything that you're seeing today as part of the Green Lake announcement is going to be available on demand as part of the HP discover more. So you got to check that out. Thank you. You're watching the cube. >>Mhm mm.

Published Date : Sep 28 2021

SUMMARY :

Uh, the adversaries are extremely capable, so we're going to dig into that with Omar assad, Pleasure to be here. over you heard my little narrative upfront. itself into more of a cloud native business, which sort of follows on from the May 4th announcements that you And I think that's what you want to see from it as a service offering. First and foremost, one of the use cases has been Thank you for that. It's more about what you do when things go bump. to cbP continuous data protection by the way for the audience that may not know that go ahead. technologists into the technology because you know, one of the things we have many, we have the high end platform with So first of all historically, if you wanted to recover to appoint within let's say, or you know we remember the D. R. Test where it was a weekend. it's not gonna be home this weekend. back to a point in time and you need to do that very quickly. Both, what would you tell them? So it's really that balancing act that means you can't leave the front door You dave you you should always protect your perimeter. more you can do this you said on the use the cloud as a target. So think about a scenario where you just declare a disaster, you've got 1000 VMS to move over, complexity time maybe you could sort of paint a picture. So that's the before and after picture giving customers that confidence to Thank you for that. So one of the things that you You can programmatically, you know, deploy it and that's a game changer. of the sort of technology and really make that available as a service. If I pay the ransom the FBI is going to come after me. Thank you David. So you got to check that out.

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Omer Asad & Sandeep Singh, HPE | HPE Discover 2021


 

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave a lot and you're watching the cube. We're here with Omar assad is the vice president, GM of H P S H C I and primary storage and data management business. And Sandeep Singh was the vice president of marketing for HP storage division. Welcome gents. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. Dave, >>it's a pleasure to be here today. >>Hey, so uh, last month you guys, you made a big announcement and and now you're, you know, shining the spotlight on that here at discover Cindy. Maybe you can give us a quick recap, what do we need to know? >>Yeah, Dave. We announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake by transforming HB storage to a cloud native software defined data services business. We unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates data dream of transformation for our customers. Uh and it introduced a and we introduced the data services platform that consists of two game changing innovations are first announcement was data services cloud console. It's a SAS based console that delivers the cut operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud data services. Our second announcement is H P E electra. It's cloud native data infrastructure to power your data edge to cloud. And it's managed natively with data services cloud console to bring that cloud operational model to our customers wherever their data lives. Together with the data services >>platform. >>Hp Green Green Lake brings that cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on premises environment and lays the foundation for our customers to shift from managing storage to managing data. >>Well, I think it lays the foundation for the next decade. You know, when we entered this past decade, we we we we keep we use terms like software led that that sort of morphed into. So the software defined data center containers with kubernetes, let's zoom out for a minute. If we can homer, maybe you could describe the problems that you're trying to address with this announcement. >>Thanks dave. It's always a pleasure talking to you on these topics. So in my role as general manager for primary storage, I speak with the hundreds of customers across the board and I consistently hear that data is at the heart of what our customers are doing and they're looking for a data driven transformative approach to their business. But as they engage on these things, there are two challenges that they consistently faced. The first one is that managing storage at scale Is rife with complexity. So while storage has gotten faster in the last 20 years, managing a single array or maybe two or three arrays has gotten simpler over time. But managing storage at scale when you deploy fleet, so storage as customers continue to gather, store and life cycle of that data. This process is extremely frustrating for customers. Still I. T. Administrators are firefighting, they're unable to innovate for their business because now data spans all the way from edge to corridor cloud. And then with the advent of public cloud there's another dimension of multi cloud that has been added to their data sprawl. And then secondly what what we what we consistently hear is that idea administrators need to shift from managing storage to managing data. What this basically means is that I. T. Has a desire to mobilize, protect and provision data seamlessly across its lifecycle and across the locations that it is stored at. This ensures that I. D. Leaders uh and also people within the organization understand the context of the data that they store and they operate upon. Yet data management is an extremely big challenge and it is a web of fragmented data silos across processes across infrastructure all the way from test and dev to administration uh to production uh to back up to lifecycle data advantage. Uh And so up till now data management was tied up with storage management and this needs to change for our customers especially with the diversity of the application workloads as they're growing and as customers are expanding their footprint across a multi cloud environment, >>just had to almost um response there. We recently conducted a survey that was actually done by E. S. She. Um and that was a survey of IT. decision makers. And it's interesting what it showcased, 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management complexity is impeding their digital transformation. 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them And 94% want to bring the cloud experience on premises. >>You know, I'll chime in. I think as you guys move to the sort of software world and container world affinity to developers homer. You talked about, you know, things like data protection and we talk about security being bolted on all the time. Now. It's designed in it's it's done at sort of the point of creation, not as an afterthought and that's a big change that we see coming. Uh Let's talk about, you know what also needs to change as customers make the move from this idea of managing storage to to managing data or maybe you can take that one. >>That's a that's a very interesting problem. Right. What are the things that have to be true in order for us to move into this new data management model? So, dave one of the things that the public cloud got right is the cloud operational model which sets the standard for agility and a fast pace for our customers in a classic I. T. On prime model. If you ever wanted to stand up an application or if you were thinking about standing up a particular workload, uh you're going to file a series of I. T. Tickets uh And then you are at the mercy of whatever complex processes exist within organization and and depending on what the level of approvals are within a particular organization, standing up a workload can take days, weeks or even months in certain cases. So what cloud did was a rock that level of simplicity for someone that wanted to instead she ate an app. This means that the provision of underlying infrastructure that makes that workload possible needs to be reduced to minutes from days and weeks. But so what we are intending to do over here is to bring the best of both worlds together so that the cloud experience can be experienced everywhere with ease and simplicity and the customers don't need to change their operating model. So it's blending the two together. And that's what we are trying to usher in into this new era where we start to differentiate between data management and storage management as two independent. Yes, >>Great. Thank you for that. Omer. So deep. I wonder if you could share with the audience, you know, the vision that you guys unveiled, What does it look like? How are you making it actually substantive and and real? >>Yeah. David, That's also great question. Um across the board it's time to reimagine data management. Everything that homer shared. Those challenges are leading to customers needing to break down the silos and complexity that plagues these distributed data environments. And our vision is to deliver a new data experience that helps customers unleash the power of data. We call this vision unified data obs Unified Data Ops integrates data centric policies to streamline data management cloud native control to bring the cloud operational model to where customers data labs and a I driven insights to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a new data experience to simplify and bring that agility of cloud to data infrastructure. Streamline data management and help customers innovate faster than ever before. We're making the promise of unified Data Ops Real by transforming H P E storage to a cloud native software defined data services business and introducing a data services platform that expands Hve Green Lake. >>I mean, you know, you talk about the complexity, I see, I look at it as you kind of almost embracing the complexity saying, look, it's gonna keep getting more complex as the cloud expands to the edge on prem Cross cloud, it gets more complex underneath. What you're doing is you're almost embracing that complexity, putting a layer over it and hiding that complexity from from the end customer that and so they can spend their time doing other things over. I wonder if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the data services console, is it sort of another, you know, software layer to manage infrastructure? What exactly is it? >>It's a lot more than that dave and you're you're 100% right. It's basically we're attempting in this release to attack that complexity. Head on. So simply put data services. Cloud console is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational model and cloud operational agility uh to our customers, it unifies data operations through a series of cloud data services that are delivered on top of this console to our customers in a continuous innovation stream. Uh And what we have done is going back to the point that I made earlier separating storage and data management and putting the strong suites of each of those together into the SAS delivered console for our customers. So what we have done is we have separated data and infrastructure management away from physical hardware to provide a comprehensive and a unified approach to managing data and infrastructure wherever it lives from a customer's perspective, it could be at the edge, it could be in a coal. Oh, it could be in their data center or it could be a bunch of data services that are deployed within the public cloud. So now our customers with data services, cloud console can manage the entire life cycle of their data from all the way from deployment, upgrading and optimizing it uh from a single console from anywhere in the world. Uh This console is designed to streamline data management with cloud data services that enable access to data, It allows for policy-based data protection, it allows for an organizational wide search on top of your storage assets. And we deliver basically a 360° visibility to all your data from a single console that the customer can experience from anywhere. So, so if you look at the journey, the way we're deciding to deliver this. So the first in its first incarnation, uh data services, cloud console gives you infrastructure and cloud data services to start to do data management along with that. But this is that foundation that we are placing in front of our customers, the SAS console through which we get touch our customers on a daily basis. And now as our customers get access to the SAAS platform on the back end, we will continue to roll in additional services throughout the years on a true SAS based innovation base for our customers. And and these services can will be will be ranging all the way from data protection to multiple out data management, all the way to visibility all the way to understanding the context of your data as it's stored across your enterprise. And in addition to that, we're offering a consistent, revised, unified API which allows for our customers to build automation against their storage infrastructure without ever worrying about that. As infrastructure changes. Uh the A P I proof points are going to break for them. That is never going to happen because they are going to be programming to a single SAS based aPI interface from now on. >>Right. And that brings in this idea of infrastructures coding because you talk about as a service to talk about Green Lake and and my question is always okay. Tell me what's behind that. And if and if and if and if you're talking about boxes and and widgets, that's a it's a problem. And you're not you're talking about services and A P. I. S and microservices and that's really the future model. And infrastructure is code and ultimately data as code is really part of that. So, All right. So you guys, I know some of your branding folks, you guys give deep thought uh, to this. So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands and deep maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >>Sure. Ultimately delivering the cloud operational model requires cognitive data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from the cloud. And that's why we have also introduced H. P. E. Electra. Omar. Can you perhaps described HB electro even more? >>Absolutely. Thank you. Sandy. Uh, so with with HB Electoral we're launching a new brand of cloud native hardware infrastructure to power our customers data all the way from edge to the core to the cloud. The releases are smaller models for the edge then at the same time having models for the data center and then expanding those services into the public cloud as well. Right. All these hardware devices, Electoral hardware devices are cloud native. Empowered by our Data services. Cloud Council. We're announcing two models with this launch H. P. E. Electra 9000. Uh, this is for our mission critical workloads. It has its history and bases in H P E primera. It comes with 100% availability guarantee. Uh It's the first of its type in the industry. It comes with standard support contract, No special verb is required. And then we're also launching HB electoral 6000. Uh These are based in our history of uh nimble storage systems. Uh These these are for business critical applications, especially for that mid range of the storage market, optimizing price, performance and efficiency. Both of these systems are full envy, any storage powered by our timeless capabilities with data in place upgrades. And then they both deliver a unified infrastructure and data management experience through the data services, cloud console. Uh and and and at the back end, unified ai Ops experience with H P E info site is seamlessly blended in along with the offering for our customers. >>So this is what I was talking about before. It's sort of not your grandfather's storage business anymore. Is this is this is this is something that is part of that, that unified vision, that layer that I talked about. The AP is the program ability. So you're you're reaching into new territory here. Maybe you can give us an example of how the customers experience what that looks like. >>Excellent, loved her Dave. So essentially what we're doing is we're changing the storage experience to a true cloud operational model for our customers. These recent announcements that we just went through along with, indeed they expand the cloud experience that our customers get with storage as a service with HPD Green Lake. So a couple of examples to make this real. So the first of all is simplified deployment. Uh, so I t no longer has to go through complex startup and deployment processes. Now, all you need to do is these systems shipped and delivered to the customer's data center. Operational staff just need to rack and stack and then leave, connect the power cable, connect the network cable. And the job is done from that point onwards, data services console takes over where you can onboard these systems, you can provision these systems if you have a pre existing organization wide security as well as standard profile setup in data services console, we can automatically apply those on your behalf and bring these systems online. From a customer's perspective, they can be anywhere in the world to onboard these systems, they could be driving in a car, they could be sitting on a beach uh And and you know, these systems are automatically on boarded through this cloud operational model which is delivered through the SAAS application for our customers. Another big example. All that I'd like to shed light on is intent based provisioning. Uh So Dave typically provisioning a workload within a data center is an extremely spreadsheet driven trial and error kind of a task. Which system do I land it on? Uh Is my existing sl is going to be affected which systems that loaded, which systems are loaded enough that I put this additional workload on it and the performance doesn't take. All of these decisions are trial and error on a constant basis with cloud data services console along with the electron new systems that are constantly in a loop back information feeding uh Typical analytics to the console. All you need to do is to describe the type of the workload and the intent of the workload in terms of block size S. L. A. That you would like to experience at that point. Data services console consults with intra site at the back end. We run through thousands of data points that are constantly being given to us by your fleet and we come back with a few recommendations. You can accept the recommendation and at that time we go ahead and fully deploy this workload on your behalf or you can specify a particular system and then we will try to enforce the S. L. A. On that system. So it completely eliminates the guesswork and the planning that you have to do in this regard. Uh And last but not the least. Uh you know, one of the most important things is, you know, upgrades has been a huge problem for our customers. Uh And typically oftentimes when you're not in this constant, you know, loop back communication with your customers. It often is a big challenge to identify which release or which bug fix or which update goes on to which particular machine. All of that has been completely taken away from our customers and fully automated. Uh we run thousands of signatures across are installed base. We identify which upgrades need to be curated for which machines in a fleet for a particular customer. And then if it applies to that customer we presented, and if the customer accepts it, we automatically go ahead and upgrade the system and and and last, but not the least from a global management perspective. Now, a customer has an independent data view of their data estate, independent from a storage estate. And data services. Council can blend the two to give a consistent view or you can just look at the fleet view or the data view. >>It's kind of the Holy Grail. I mean I've been in this business a long time and I think I t. People have dreamt about you know this kind of capability for for a long long time. I wonder if we could sort of stay on the customers for a moment here and and talk about what's enabled. Now everybody's talking digital transformation that I joke about the joke. Not funny. The force marched to digital with Covid uh and we really wasn't planned for but the customers really want to drive now that digital transfer some of them are on the back burner and now they're moving to the front burner. What are the outcomes that are that are enabled here? Omar. >>Excellent. So so on on a typical basis for a traditional I. T. Customer, this cloud operational model means that you know information technology staff can move a lot faster and they can be a lot more productive on the things that are directly relevant to their business. They can get up to 99% of the savings back to spend more time on strategic projects or best of all spend time with their families rather than managing and upgrading infrastructure and fleets of infrastructure. Right. For line of business owners, the new experience means that their data infrastructure can be presented can be provision where the self service on demand type of capability. Uh They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Capacity management, performance management, all of that is died in and presented to them wherever they are easy to consume SAS based models and especially for data innovators, whether it's D B A s, uh whether it's data analysts, they can start to consume infrastructure and ultimately data as a code to speed up their app development because again, the context that we're bringing forward is the context of data decoupling it from. Actually, storage management, storage management and data management are now two separate domains that can be presented through a single console to tie the end to end picture for a customer. But at the end of the day, what we have felt is that customers really really want to rely and move forward with the data management and leave infrastructure management to machine oriented task, which we have completely automated on their behalf. >>So I'm sure you've heard you got the memo about, you know, H H P going all in on as a service. Uh it's clear that the companies all in. How does this announcement fit in to that overall mission, Sandeep >>Dave. We believe the future is edge to cloud and our mission is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company and as as HB transforms HP Green Lake is our unified cloud platform. Hp Green Link is how we deliver cloud services and agile cloud experiences to customers, applications and data across the edge to cloud. With the storage announcement that we made recently, we announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake with as a service transformation of the HPV storage business to a cloud native software defined data services business. And this expands storage as a service delivering full cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on prem environment across the board were committed to being a strategic partner for every one of our customers and helping them accelerate their digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's where the puck is going guys. Hey as always great conversation with with our friends from HP storage. Thanks so much for the collaboration and congratulations on the announcements and I know you're not done yet. >>Thanks. Dave. Thanks. Dave. All right. Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for being with us for hp. You discovered 2021. You're watching the cube, the leader digital check coverage. Keep it right there, but right back. >>Mhm. Mhm.

Published Date : Jun 23 2021

SUMMARY :

Great to see you. Great to be here. Hey, so uh, last month you guys, you made a big announcement and and now that delivers the cut operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations Hp Green Green Lake brings that cloud experience to our customers So the software defined data center containers with kubernetes, let's zoom and this needs to change for our customers especially with the diversity of the application 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage to managing data or maybe you can take that one. What are the things that have to be true the vision that you guys unveiled, What does it look like? Um across the board it's time to reimagine saying, look, it's gonna keep getting more complex as the cloud expands to the edge on prem Cross cloud, Uh the A P I proof points are going to break for So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands and deep maybe you can talk about that data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from Uh and and and at the back end, unified ai Ops experience with H of how the customers experience what that looks like. Council can blend the two to give a consistent view or you can just look at the fleet view on the back burner and now they're moving to the front burner. Uh They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Uh it's clear that the companies all in. customers, applications and data across the edge to cloud. on the announcements and I know you're not done yet. It's a pleasure to be here. the leader digital check coverage.

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Omer Asad & Sandeep Singh | HPE Discover 2021


 

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube. We're here with Omar assad is the vice president GM of H P S H C I and primary storage and data management business. And Sandeep Singh was the vice president of marketing for HP storage division. Welcome gents. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. Dave, >>It's a pleasure to be here today. >>Hey, so uh, last month you guys, you made a big announcement and and now you're, you know, shining the spotlight on that here at discover Cindy. Maybe you can give us a quick recap, what do we need to know? >>Yeah, Dave. We announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake by transforming HB storage to a cloud native software defined data services business. We unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates data, dream of transformation for our customers. Uh and it introduced a and we introduced the data services platform that consists of two game changing innovations are first announcement was Data services cloud console. It's a SAS based console that delivers the cut operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud data services. Our 2nd announcement is HPE. Electra. It's cloud native data infrastructure to power your data edge to cloud. And it's managed natively with data services cloud console to bring that cloud operational model to our customers wherever their data lives together with the data services platform. Hp Green Green Lake brings that cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on premises environment and lays the foundation for our customers to shift from managing storage to managing data. >>Well, I think it lays the foundation for the next decade. You know, when we entered this past decade, we we were Ricky bobby's terms like software led that that sort of morphed into. So the software defined data center containers with kubernetes, Let's zoom out for a minute. If we can homer maybe you could describe the problems that you're trying to address with this announcement. >>Thanks dave. It's always a pleasure talking to you on these topics. So in my role as general manager for primary storage, I speak with the hundreds of customers across the board and I consistently hear that data is at the heart of what our customers are doing and they're looking for a data driven transformative approach to their business. But as they engage on these things, there are two challenges that they consistently faced. The first one is that managing storage at scale Is rife with complexity. So while storage has gotten faster in the last 20 years, managing a single array or maybe two or three arrays has gotten simpler over time. But managing storage at scale when you deploy fleet. So storage as customers continue to gather, store and lifecycle that data. This process is extremely frustrating for customers. Still I. T. Administrators are firefighting, they're unable to innovate for their business because now data spans all the way from edge to corridor cloud. And then with the advent of public cloud there's another dimension of multi cloud that has been added to their data sprawl. And then secondly what what we what we consistently hear is that idea administrators need to shift from managing storage to managing data. What this basically means is that I. D. Has a desire to mobilize, protect and provision data seamlessly across its lifecycle and across the locations that it is stored at. Uh This ensures that I. D. Leaders uh and also people within the organization understand the context of the data that they store and they operate upon. Yet data management is an extremely big challenge and it is a web of fragmented data silos across processes across infrastructure all the way from test and dev to administration uh to production uh to back up to lifecycle data management. Uh And so up till now data management was tied up with storage management and this needs to change for our customers especially with the diversity of the application workloads as they're growing and as customers are expanding their footprint across a multi cloud environment >>just to add to almost uh response there. We recently conducted a survey that was actually done by E. S. She. Um and that was a survey of IT. decision makers. And it's interesting what it showcased, 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management complexity is impeding their digital transformation. 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them and 94% want to bring the cloud experience on premises, >>you know, al china. And I think as you guys move to the sort of software world and container world affinity to developers homer, you talked about, you know, things like data protection and we talk about security being bolted on all the time. Now. It's designed in it's it's done at sort of the point of creation, not as an afterthought. And that's a big change that we see coming. Uh But let's talk about, you know, what also needs to change as customers make the move from this idea of managing storage to to managing data or maybe you can take that one. >>That's a that's a that's a very interesting problem. Right. What are the things that have to be true in order for us to move into this new data management model? So, dave one of the things that the public cloud got right is the cloud operational model uh which sets the standard for agility and a fast pace for our customers in a classic I. T. On prime model, if you ever wanted to stand up an application or if you were thinking about standing up a particular workload, uh you're going to file a series of I. T. Tickets and then you're at the mercy of whatever complex processes exist within organization and and depending on what the level of approvals are within a particular organization, standing up a workload can take days, weeks or even months in certain cases. So what cloud did was they brought that level of simplicity for someone that wanted to instead she ate an app. This means that the provisioning of underlying infrastructure that makes that workload possible needs to be reduced to minutes from days and weeks. But so what we are intending to do over here is to bring the best of both worlds together so that the cloud experience can be experienced everywhere with ease and simplicity and the customers don't need to change their operating model. So it's blending the two together. And that's what we are trying to usher in into this new era where we start to differentiate between data management and storage management as two independent things. >>Great, thank you for that. Omer sometimes I wonder if you could share with the audience, you know, the vision that you guys unveiled, What does it look like? How are you making it actually substantive and and real? >>Yeah. Dave. That's also great question. Um across the board it's time to reimagine data management. Everything that homer shared. Those challenges are leading to customers needing to break down the silos and complexity that plagues these distributed data environments. And our vision is to deliver a new data experience that helps customers unleash the power of data. We call this vision unified data jobs, Unified Data Ops integrates data centric policies to streamline data management, cloud native control to bring the cloud operational model to where customers data labs and a I driven insights to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a new data experience to simplify and bring that agility of cloud to data infrastructure. Streamline data management and help customers innovate faster than ever before. We're making the promise of Unified Data Ops Real by transforming Hve storage to a cloud native software defined data services business and introducing a data services platform that expands Hve Green Lake. >>I mean, you know, you talk about the complexity, I see, I look at it as you kind of almost embracing the complexity saying, look, it's gonna keep getting more complex as the cloud expands to the edge on prem Cross cloud, it gets more complex underneath. What you're doing is you're almost embracing that complexity and putting a layer over it and hiding that complexity from from the end customer that and so they can spend their time doing other things over. I wonder if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the data services console, Is it sort of another software layer to manage infrastructure? What exactly is it? >>It's a lot more than that, Dave and you're you're 100% right. It's basically we're attempting in this release to attack that complexity head on. So simply put data services. Cloud console is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational model and cloud operational agility uh to our customers. It unifies data operations through a series of cloud data services that are delivered on top of this console to our customers in a continuous innovation stream. Uh And what we have done is going back to the point that I made earlier separating storage and data management and putting the strong suites of each of those together into the SAS delivered console for our customers. So what we have done is we have separated data and infrastructure management away from physical hardware to provide a comprehensive and a unified approach to managing data and infrastructure wherever it lives. From a customer's perspective, it could be at the edge, it could be in a coal. Oh, it could be in their data center or it could be a bunch of data services that are deployed within the public cloud. So now our customers with data services. Cloud console can manage the entire life cycle of their data from all the way from deployment, upgrading and optimizing it uh from a single console from anywhere in the world. Uh This console is designed to streamline data management with cloud data services that enable access to data. It allows for policy-based data protection, it allows for an organizational wide search on top of your storage assets. And we deliver basically a 360° visibility to all your data from a single console that the customer can experience from anywhere. So, so if you look at the journey the way we're deciding to deliver this. So the first, in its first incarnation, uh Data services, Cloud console gives you infrastructure and cloud data services to start to do data management along with that. But this is that foundation that we are placing in front of our customers, the SAS console, through which we get touch our customers on a daily basis. And now as our customers get access to the SAAS platform on the back end, we will continue to roll in additional services throughout the years on a true SAS based innovation base for our customers. And and these services can will be will be ranging all the way from data protection to multiple out data management, all the way to visibility all the way to understanding the context of your data as it's stored across your enterprise. And in addition to that, we're offering a consistent revised unified Api which allows for our customers to build automation against their storage infrastructure. Without ever worrying about that. As infrastructure changes, uh, the A. P I proof points are going to break for them. That is never going to happen because they are going to be programming to a single SAS based aPI interface from now on. >>Right. And that brings in this idea of infrastructure as code because you talk about as a service to talk about Green Lake and and my question is always okay. Tell me what's behind that. And if and if and if and if you're talking about boxes and and widgets, that's a it's a problem. And you're not, you're talking about services and A P. I. S and microservices and that's really the future model and infrastructure is code and ultimately data as code is really part of that. So, All right. So you guys, I know some of your branding folks, you guys give deep thought to this. So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands and deep maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >>Sure. Ultimately delivering the cloud operational model requires cognitive data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from the cloud. And that's why we have also introduced H. P. E. Electra. Omar, Can you perhaps described HB electro even more. >>Absolutely. Thank you. Sandy. Uh, so with with HB Electoral we're launching a new brand of cloud native hardware infrastructure to power our customers data all the way from edge to the core to the cloud. The releases are smaller models for the edge then at the same time having models for the data center and then expanding those services into the public cloud as well. Right. All these hardware devices, Electoral hardware devices are cloud native and powered by our data services. Cloud Council, we're announcing two models with this launch H. P. E Electoral 9000. Uh, this is for our mission critical workloads. It has its history and bases in H P E. Primera. It comes with 100% availability guarantee. Uh It's the first of its type in the industry. It comes with standard support contract, no special verb is required. And then we're also launching HB Electoral 6000. Uh These are based in our history of uh nimble storage systems. Uh These these are for business critical applications, especially for that mid range of the storage market, optimizing price, performance and efficiency. Both of these systems are full envy any storage powered by our timeless capabilities with data in place upgrades. And then they both deliver a unified infrastructure and data management experience through the data services, cloud console. Uh And and and at the back end unified Ai Ops experience with H P. E. Info site is seamlessly blended in along with the offering for our >>customers. So this is what I was talking about before. It's sort of not your grandfather's storage business anymore. This is this is this is something that is part of that, that unified vision, that layer that I talked about, the A. P. I. Is the program ability. So you're you're reaching into new territory here. Maybe you can give us an example of how the customers experience what that looks like. >>Excellent. Love to Dave. So essentially what we're doing is we're changing the storage experience to a true cloud operational model for our customers. These recent announcements that we just went through along with, indeed they expand the cloud experience that our customers get with storage as a service with HP Green Lake. So a couple of examples to make this real. So the first of all is simplified deployment. Uh So I t no longer has to go through complex startup and deployment processes. Now all you need to do is these systems shipped and delivered to the customer's data center. Operational staff just need to rack and stack and then leave connect the power cable, connect the network cable. And the job is done. From that point onwards, data services console takes over where you can onboard these systems, you can provision these systems if you have a pre existing organization wide security as well as standard profile setup in data services console, we can automatically apply those on your behalf and bring these systems online. From a customer's perspective, they can be anywhere in the world to onboard these systems, they could be driving in a car, they could be sitting on a beach. Uh And and you know, these systems are automatically on boarded through this cloud operational model which is delivered through the SAAS application for our customers. Another big example. All that I'd like to shed light on is intent based provisioning. Uh So Dave typically provisioning a workload within a data center is an extremely spreadsheet driven trial and error kind of a task. Which system do I land it on? Uh Is my existing sl is going to be affected which systems that loaded which systems are loaded enough that I put this additional workload on it and the performance doesn't take. All of these decisions are trial and error on a constant basis with cloud Data services console along with the electron new systems that are constantly in a loop back information feeding uh Typical analytics to the console. All you need to do is to describe the type of the workload and the intent of the workload in terms of block size S. L. A. That you would like to experience at that point. Data services console consults with intra site at the back end. We run through thousands of data points that are constantly being given to us by your fleet and we come back with a few recommendations. You can accept the recommendation and at that time we go ahead and fully deploy this workload on your behalf or you can specify a particular system and then people try to enforce the S. L. A. On that system. So it completely eliminates the guesswork and the planning that you have to do in this regard. Uh And last but not the least. Uh You know, one of the most important things is, you know, upgrades has been a huge problem for our customers. Uh And typically oftentimes when you're not in this constant, you know, loop back communication with your customers. It often is a big challenge to identify which release or which bug fix or which update goes on to which particular machine, all of that has been completely taken away from our customers and fully automated. Uh We run thousands of signatures across are installed base. We identify which upgrades need to be curated for which machines in a fleet for a particular customer. And then if it applies to that customer we presented, and if the customer accepts it, we automatically go ahead and upgrade the system and and and last, but not the least from a global management perspective. Now, a customer has an independent data view of their data estate, independent from a storage estate and data services. Council can blend the two to give a consistent view or you can just look at the fleet view or the data view. >>It's kind of the holy Grail. I mean I've been in this business a long time and I think I. T. People have dreamt about you know this kind of capability for for a long long time. I wonder if we could sort of stay on the customers for a moment here and and talk about what's enabled. Now. Everybody's talking digital transformation. I joke about the joke. Not funny. The force marched to digital with Covid. Uh and we really wasn't planned for but the customers really want to drive now that digital transfer some of them are on the back burner and now they're moving to the front burner. What are the outcomes that are that are enabled here? Omar. >>Excellent. So so on on a typical basis for a traditional I. T. Customer this cloud operational model means that you know information technology staff can move a lot faster and they can be a lot more productive on the things that are directly relevant to their business. They can get up to 99% of the savings back to spend more time on strategic projects or best of all spend time with their families rather than managing and upgrading infrastructure and fleets of infrastructure. Right for line of business owners, the new experience means that their data infrastructure can be presented can be provision where the self service on demand type of capability. Uh They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Capacity management, performance management, all of that is died in and presented to them wherever they are easy to consume. SaS based models and especially for data innovators, whether it's D B A s, whether it's data analysts, they can start to consume infrastructure and ultimately data as a code to speed up their app development because again, the context that we're bringing forward is the context of data decoupling it from. Actually, storage management, storage management and data management are now two separate domains that can be presented through a single console to tie the end to end picture for a customer. But at the end of the day, what we have felt is that customers really, really want to rely and move forward with the data management and leave infrastructure management to machine oriented task, which we have completely automated on their behalf. >>So I'm sure you've heard you got the memo about, you know, H H p going all in on as a service. Uh it is clear that the companies all in. How does this announcement fit in to that overall mission? Cindy >>dave We believe the future is edge to cloud and our mission is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company and as as HB transforms HP Green Lake is our unified cloud platform. Hp Green Link is how we deliver cloud services and agile cloud experiences to customers applications and data across the edge to cloud. With the storage announcement that we made recently, we announced that we're expanding HB Green Lake with as a service transformation of the HPV storage business to a cloud native software defined data services business. And this expands storage as a service, delivering full cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on prem environment across the board were committed to being a strategic partner for every one of our customers and helping them accelerate their digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's where the puck is going guys. Hey as always great conversation with with our friends from HP storage. Thanks so much for the collaboration and congratulations on the announcements and and I know you're not done yet. >>Thanks. Dave. Thanks. Dave. >>Thanks. Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for being with us for hp. You discovered 2021 you're watching the cube, the leader digital check coverage. Keep it right there, but right back. >>Yeah. Yeah.

Published Date : Jun 4 2021

SUMMARY :

Great to see you. Great to be here. Hey, so uh, last month you guys, you made a big announcement and and now you're, that delivers the cut operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations So the software defined data center containers with kubernetes, Let's zoom and this needs to change for our customers especially with the diversity of the application 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage to managing data or maybe you can take that one. What are the things that have to be true you know, the vision that you guys unveiled, What does it look like? Um across the board it's time to reimagine saying, look, it's gonna keep getting more complex as the cloud expands to the edge on prem Cross cloud, Uh This console is designed to streamline data management with cloud So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands and deep maybe you can talk about that a little bit. data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from Uh And and and at the back end unified Ai Ops experience with H that layer that I talked about, the A. P. I. Is the program ability. Uh You know, one of the most important things is, you know, upgrades has been a huge problem The force marched to digital with Covid. Uh They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Uh it is clear that the companies all in. dave We believe the future is edge to cloud and our mission is to be on the announcements and and I know you're not done yet. Dave. the leader digital check coverage.

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Omer and Sandeep, HPE


 

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to The CUBE where we're covering the recent news from Hewlett Packard enterprise, making moves and storage. And with me are Omar Assad, vice president and general manager for Primary Storage, HCI and data management at HPE. And Sandeep Singh, who's the vice president of Storage Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome back to the CUBE Great to see you both. >> David, it's pleasure to be here. >> Always a pleasure talking to you David, thank you so much. >> Oh, it's my pleasure. Hey, so we just watched HPE make a big announcement and I wonder Sandeep if you could give us a quick recap. >> Yeah, of course, Dave. In the world of enterprise storage, there hasn't been a moment like this in decades upon at which everything is changing for data and infrastructure. And it's really coming at the nexus of data cloud and AI that's opening up the opportunity for customers across industries to accelerate their data-driven transformation. Building on that, we just unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates the data driving transformation for customers edge to cloud. And to pay that off, we introduce a new data services platform that consists of two game-changing innovations. First it's a data services cloud console which is a SAS based console that delivers cloud operational agility for customers. And it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud services. Then our second announcement is HPE Electra. HB Electra is a cloud native data infrastructure portfolio to power your data edge to cloud. It's managed natively with data services cloud console and it brings that cloud operational model to customers wherever their data lives. These innovations are really combined with our industry leading AI ops platform which is HPE in foresight, and combine these innovations radically simplify and bring that cloud operational model to customers or data and infrastructure management. And it gives the opportunity for streamlining data management across the life cycle. These innovations are making it possible for organizations across the industries to unleash the power of data. >> That's kind of cool, I mean, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about for all these years is sort of this unified layer across all clouds on prem, AI injected in, I could tell you're excited and it sounds like you you can't wait to get these offerings in the hands of customers. But I wonder if we get back up a little a minute. Omer, maybe you could describe the problem statement that you're addressing with this announcement. What are customers really, what are their pain points? >> Excellent question, Dave. So in my role, as the general manager for data management and storage here at HPE, I get the wonderful opportunity to talk to hundreds of customers in a year. And as time has progressed, as the amount of data under organizations management has continued to increase. What I have noticed is that recently there are three main themes that are continuously emerging and are now bubbling at the top. The first one is storage infrastructure management itself is extremely complex for customers. While there have been lots of leaps and down progress in managing a single array or managing two arrays with a lot of simplification of the UI and maybe some modern UI are present. But as the problem starts to get at scale, as customers acquire more, and more assets to store and manage their data on premise, the management at scale is extremely complex. Yes, storage has gotten faster. Yes, flash has had a profound effect on performance availability and latency access to the data but infrastructure management and storage management as a whole has become a pain for customers and it's a constant theme as storage lifecycle management comes up, storage refresh has come up and deploying and managing storage infrastructure at scale comes up. So that's one of the main problems that I've been seeing as I talk to customers. Now, secondly, a lot of customers are now talking about two different elements. One is storage and storage deployment and life cycle management. And the second is the management of data that is stored on those storage devices. As the amount of data grows the silos continue to grow, a single view of life cycle management of data customers don't get to see it. And lastly, one of the biggest things that we see is a lot of customers are now asking, how can I extract a value from this data under my management because they can't seem to parse through the silos. So there is an incredible amount of productivity lost when it comes to data management as a whole, which is just fragmented into silos and then from a storage management. And when you put these two together and especially add two more elements to it which is hybrid management of data or a multi-cloud management of data, the silos and the sprawl just continues and there is nothing that is stitching together this thing at scale. So these are the three main themes that constantly appear in these discussions. Although in spite of these, a lot of modern enhancements in storage. >> Well, I wonder if I could comment guys. Is I've been following this industry for a number of years and you're absolutely right Omer. I mean, if you look at the amount of money and time and energy that's spent into or put into the data architectures, people are frustrated, they're not getting enough out of it. And I'd note that, the prevailing way in which we've attacked complexity historically is you build a better box. And well, that system was maybe easier to manage than the predecessor systems. All it did is create another silo and then the cloud, despite its inherent simplicity, that was another disconnected siloed. So then we threw siloed management solutions at the problem, and we're left with this collection of point solutions with data sort of trapped inside. So I wonder if you could give us your thoughts on that and do you agree? What data do you have around this problem statement? >> Yeah, Dave that's a great point. And actually ESG just recently conducted a survey of over 250 IT decision makers. And that actually brings one of the perfect validations of the problems that Omer, and you just articulated. What it showed is that 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management, that complexity is impeding their digital transformation. On average, the organizations have over 23 different data management tools which just typifies and is a perfect showcase of the fragmentation and the complexity that exists in that data management. And 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management, that complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them. And actually top five for 67% of the respondents. So it's a great validation across the board. >> Well, it's fresh in their minds too, because pre pandemic there was probably a mixed picture, right? It was probably well there's complacency or we're not moving fast enough, we have other priorities, but they were forced into this. Now they know what the real problem is. It's front and center. I liked that you're putting out there in your announcement, this sort of future state that you're envisioning for customers. And I wonder if we could sort of summarize that and share with our listeners that vision that you unveiled, what does it look like and how are you making it real? >> Yeah, overall, we feel very strongly that it's time for our customers to reimagine data management. And our vision is that customers need to break down the silos and complexity that plagues the distributed data environments. And they need to experience a new data experience across the board. That's going to help them accelerate their data-driven transformation. And we call this vision unified data ops. Unified data ops integrates data centric policies across the board to streamline data management, cloud native control and operations, to bring that agility of cloud and the operational model to wherever data lives. And AI driven insights and intelligence to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a whole new experience to customers to radically simplify and bring the agility of talent to data and data infrastructure. Streamlined data management, and really help customers innovate faster than ever before. And we're making the promise of unified data ops real by transforming the entire HPE storage business to a cloud native software defined data services. And that's through introducing a data services platform that expands HPE GreenLake. >> I mean, the key word I take away there Sandeep is invisible. I mean, as a customer I want you to abstract that complexity away that underlying infrastructure complexity is. I just don't want to see it anymore over. Omer, I wonder if we could start with the first part of the announcement. Maybe you can help us unpack data services, cloud console. I mean, people are immediately going to think it's just another software product to manage infrastructure. But to really innovate, I'm hoping that it's more than that. >> Absolutely, David, it's a lot more than that. What did we have done fundamentally at the root of the problem is we have taken the data and infrastructure control away from the hardware and through that, we provided a unified approach to manage the data wherever it lives. It's a full blown SAS console, which our customers get onto. And from there they can deploy appliances, manage appliances, lifecycle appliances and then they're not only stop at that, but then go ahead and start to get context around their data. But all of that is available through a SAS platform, a SAS console. 'Cause as every customer onboard themselves and their equipment and their storage infrastructure onto this console, then they can go ahead and define role-based access for different parts of their organization. They can also apply role-based access to HPE GreenLake management personnel, so they can come in and do and perform all the operations for the customers. We at the same console, by just being another access control methodology in that. And then in addition to that, data mobility is extremely important to our customers. How do you make data available in different hyperscaler clouds? If the customer's digital transformation requires that. So again, from that single cloud console, from that single data console, which we are naming here as data services console, customers are able to curate the data, maneuver the data, pre-position the data into different hyperscalers. But the beautiful thing is that the entire view of the storage infrastructure, the data with its that is stored on top of that access control methodologies and management framework is operational from a single SAS console which the customer can decide to give access to whichever management entity or authority comes into help them. And then what this leads us into is then combining these things into a northbound API. So anybody that wants to streamline operational manageability can then use these APIs to program against a single API which will then control the entire infrastructure on behalf of the customer. So if somebody, they, what this is, is it is bringing that cloud operational model that was so desired by each one of our customers into their data centers. And this is what I call an in-place transformation of a management experience for our customer by making them seamlessly available on a cloud operational model for their infrastructure. >> Yeah, and you've turned that into essentially an API with a lot of automation, that's great. So, okay. So that's kind of how you're trying to change the game here. You're charting new territory. You've talked to hundreds and hundreds of customers every year. I wonder if you could paint a picture from the customer perspective. How does their experience actually change? >> Wonderful, Dave. This allows me to break it down into bits and bites further for you. And I love that, right? So the way you look at it is, recently, the storage management from an, as we talked about earlier from an array perspective or maybe two arrays perspective has been simplified. I mean, it's a solved problem. But when you start to imagine deploying hundreds of arrays and these are large customers, they have massive amounts of data assets, storage management hasn't scaled along as the infrastructure scales. But if you look at the consumer world, you can have hundreds of devices, but the ownership model is completely set. So the inspiration for solving this problem for us actually lied, was inspired from consumerization of IT. And that's a big trend over here. So now we're changing the customer's ownership model, the customer's deployment model and the customer's data management model into a true cloud first model. So let me give some of the examples of that, right? So first of all, let's talk about deployment. So previously deployment has been a massive challenge for our customers. What does deployment in this new data services console world looks like? Devices show up, you rack them up and then you plug in the power cable, you plug in the network cable, and then you walk out of the data center. Data center administrator or the storage administrator, they will be on their iPad, on their data services console or iPhone or whatever the device of their choices, and from that console, from that point on, the device will be registered, onboarded. Its initial state will be given to it from the cloud. And if the customer has some predefined states for their previous deployment model already saved with the data console, they don't even need to do that. We'll just take that and apply that state and induct the device into the fleet. That's just one example. It's extremely simple. Plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and the data center operational manager just walks out. After that you could be on the beach, you could be at your home, you could be driving in a car and this don't, I advise people not to fiddle with their I-phones when they're driving in a car, but still you could do it if you want to. So that's just one part from a deployment methodology perspective. Now, the second thing that Sandeep and I often bounce ideas bond is is it is provisioning of a workload. It's like a science these days. And is this array going to be able to absorb my workload? Is the latency going to go South? Does this workload latency profile match this particular piece of device in my data center? All of this is extremely manual. And it literally takes, I mean, if you talk to any of the customers or even analysts, deploying a workload is a massive challenge. It's a guesswork that you have to model and basically see how it works out. I think based on HPE info site, we're collecting hundreds and millions of data points from all these devices. So now to harness that and present that back to a customer in a very simple manner so that we can model on their behalf to the data services console, which is now workload of it. you just describe your workload. Hey, I'm going to need these many IOPS. And by the way, this happens to be my application. And that's it. On the backend, because we're managing your infrastructure, the cloud console understands your entire fleet. We are seeing the statistics and the telemetric coming off of your systems. And because now you've described the workload for us we can do that matching for you. And what intent based provisioning does is, describe your workloads in two or three clicks or maybe two or three API construct formats and we'll do the provisioning, the deployment and bringing it up for you on your behalf on the right pieces of infrastructure that matched it. And if you don't like our choices, you can manually change it as well. But from a provisioning perspective, a thing that took days can now come down to a couple of minutes of the description. And lastly then, global data management, distributed infrastructure from edge to cloud, invisible upgrades, only upgrading the right amount of infrastructure that needs the upgrade. All of that just comes rolling along with it, right? So those are some of the things that this data services console as a SAS management and scale allows you to do. >> And actually, if I can just jump in and add a little bit. What Omer described, especially with intent based provisioning, that's really bringing a paradigm shift to provisioning. It's shifting it from a long centric to app centric provisioning. And when you combine it with identity management and role-based access, what it means is that you're enabling self-service on demand provisioning of the underlying data infrastructure to accelerate the app workload deployment. And you're eliminating guesswork and providing the ability to be able to optimize service level objectives. >> Yeah, it sounds like you've really nailed in an elegant way that provisioning challenge. I've been saying for years if your primary expertise is deploying logical unit numbers you better find some other skills because the day is coming that that's just going to get automated away. So that's cool. There's another issue that I'm sure you've thought about, but I wonder if you could address. I mean, you've got the definition of cloud is changing, the cloud is expanding to on prem expand. The cloud is going out to the edge, it's going across clouds. And so security becomes a big issue that threat surface is expanding. The operating model is changing. So how are you thinking about addressing those security concerns? >> Excellent question, Dave. So most of the organizations that we've talked to... In today's modern world, almost every customer that I've talked to has deployed either some sort of a cloud console where they're either one of the customers for the hyperscalers or buy in for SAS based applications are pervasive across the customer base. And as you know, we were the first ones to introduce the automatic telemeter management through HPE info site. That's one of the largest storage SAS services in production today that we operate on behalf of our customers, which has, Dave, about 85% connectivity rate. So from that perspective, keeping customers data secure, keeping customers telemetry information secure, we're no stranger to that. Again, we follow all security protocols that any cloud operational SAS service would do so. Reverse tunneling, the firewall compliancy security audit logs that are published to our customers and published to customers chief information security officers. So all of those, what I call crossing the T's and dotted the I's, we do that with security expert and security policies for which each of our customers has a different set of rules. And we have a property engagement model that we go through that particular audit process for our customers. Then secondly, Dave, the data services cloud console is actually built on a fundamental cloud deployment technology that is not, sort of new. Aruba central, which is an Aruba management console which is also an HPE company it's been deployed, it's managing millions of access points in a SAS framework for our customers. So the fundamental building blocks of the data storage console from a basic enablement perspective come from the Aruba central console. And what we've taken is we've taken those generic cloud-based SAS services and then built data and storage centric SAS services on top of that and made them available to our customers. >> Yeah, I really like the Aruba. You picked that up several years ago . And it's same thing with, with info site, the way that you bring it to other parts of the portfolio. Those are really good signs to watch of successful acquisitions. All right, there's a lot here. I want to talk about the second part of the announcement. I know your branding team, you guys are serious about branding. That new product brand, maybe you could talk about that. >> So again, so delivering the cloud operational model is just the first piece, right? And now the second part of the announcement is delivering the cloud native hardware infrastructure which is extremely performance to go along with this cloud operational model. So what we have done Dave, in this announcement is we've announced HPE Electra. This is our new brand for our cloud native infrastructure to power your data and its appliances from core to the edge, to the cloud. And what it does is it takes the cloud operational model and this hardware is powered by that. It's completely wrapped around that. And so HPE Electra is available in two models right now, the HB electron 9,000, which is available for mission critical workloads, for those high intensity workloads with a hundred percent availability guarantee where no failure is ever an option. And then it's also available as HPE Electra 6,000, which is available for general purpose, business critical workloads, generally trying to address that mid range of the storage market. And both of these systems are full 100% NBME front and back. And they're powered by the same unified cloud management operational experience that the data cloud console provides. And what it does is it allows our customers to simplify the deployment model. It simplifies their management model and really, really allows them to focus on the context, the data and the app diversity, whereas data mobility, data connectivity, data management in a multi-cloud world is then completely obstructed from them. >> [Sandeep And Dave-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Just to jump in. HPE Electra combined with data services cloud console is delivering a cloud experience that makes deploying and scaling the application workloads as simple as flipping a switch. >> It really does. It really does. And I'm very comfortable in saying this, like HPE in foresight, we were the first in the industry to bring AI based elementary and support enabled metrics to work. And then here with data services console and the hardware that goes with it, we're just completely transforming the storage ownership and a storage management model. And for our customers, it's a seamless, non-disruptive upgrade with fully data in place upgrade. And they transform to a cloud operational model where they can manage their infrastructure better where they are through a complete consumer grade SAS console, is again the first of its kind, when you look at storage management and storage management at scale. >> And I like how you're emphasizing that management layer, but underneath you've got all the modern hardware technologies too which is important, because it's a performance it's got to be, a good price performance. So now can we bring this back again to the customers? What are the outcomes that this is going to enable for them? >> So I think Dave, the first and the foremost thing is as they scale their storage infrastructures, they don't have to think. It's really as simple as yeah, just send it to the data center, plug in the power cable, plug in the network cable and up it comes. And from that point onwards, the life cycle and the device management aspect are completely abstracted by the data services console. All they have to focus is I just have new capacity available to me and when I have an application, the system will figure it out for me where they need to deploy. So no more needing the guesswork, the Excel sheets of capacity management, the charge back models, none of that stuff is needed. And for customers that are looking to transform their applications, customers looking to refactor their applications into a hyperscaler model, or maybe transform from VM to containers, all they need to think about and focus is on that. The data will just follow these workloads from that perspective. >> And David, just to almost response here. As I speak with customers, one of the things I'm hearing from IT is that line of business really wants IT to deliver that agility of cloud. Yet IT also has to deliver all of the enterprise reliability, availability, all of the data services. And what's fantastic here is that through this cloud operational model, IT can deliver that agility, that line of business owners are looking for. At the same time they're been under pressure to do a lot more with less. And through this agility, IT is able to get time back, be able to focus more on the strategic projects, at the same time, be able to get time back to spend more time with our families. That's incredibly important. >> Well, I love the sort of mindset shift I'm seeing from HPE. We're not talking about how much the box weighs, we're talking about the customer experience. And I wonder, you know, that kind of leads me, Sandeep to how this kind of fits in to this new. Really to me, I'm seeing the transformation before our eyes but how does it fit into HPE's overall mission? >> Well Dave, our mission overall is to be the edge to cloud platform as a service company with HPE GreenLake, being the key to delivering that cloud experience. And as Omer put it, be able to deliver that cloud experience wherever the customer data lives. And today we're advancing HPE GreenLake as a service transformation of the HPE storage business to a software defined cloud data services business overall. And for our customers, this translates to our operational and ownership experience that unleashes their agility, their data and their innovation. So we're super excited. >> Guys, I can tell you're excited. Thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and summarizing the announcements, congratulations and best of luck to both of you and to HPE and your customers. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a pleasure. >> Thanks, Dave. (upbeat music)

Published Date : Apr 20 2021

SUMMARY :

Great to see you both. Always a pleasure talking to you David, and I wonder Sandeep if you across the industries to I mean, a lot of the stuff But as the problem starts to get at scale, And I'd note that, the prevailing way And 95% of the respondents indicated of summarize that and share across the board to I mean, the key word that the entire view of from the customer perspective. of infrastructure that needs the upgrade. the ability to be able to the cloud is expanding to on prem expand. So most of the organizations the way that you bring it to other parts And now the second part and scaling the application workloads in the industry to bring What are the outcomes that this and the foremost thing is at the same time, be able to get time back Well, I love the sort of mindset shift being the key to delivering of luck to both of you It was a pleasure. (upbeat music)

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F1 Racing at the Edge of Real-Time Data: Omer Asad, HPE & Matt Cadieux, Red Bull Racing


 

>>Edge computing is predict, projected to be a multi-trillion dollar business. You know, it's hard to really pinpoint the size of this market. Let alone fathom the potential of bringing software, compute, storage, AI, and automation to the edge and connecting all that to clouds and on-prem systems. But what, you know, what is the edge? Is it factories? Is it oil rigs, airplanes, windmills, shipping containers, buildings, homes, race cars. Well, yes and so much more. And what about the data for decades? We've talked about the data explosion. I mean, it's mind boggling, but guess what, we're gonna look back in 10 years and laugh. What we thought was a lot of data in 2020, perhaps the best way to think about edge is not as a place, but when is the most logical opportunity to process the data and maybe it's the first opportunity to do so where it can be decrypted and analyzed at very low latencies that that defines the edge. And so by locating compute as close as possible to the sources of data, to reduce latency and maximize your ability to get insights and return them to users quickly, maybe that's where the value lies. Hello everyone. And welcome to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and with me to noodle on these topics is Omar Assad, VP, and GM of primary storage and data management services at HPE. Hello, Omer. Welcome to the program. >>Hey Steve. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >>Yeah. Great to see you again. So how do you see the edge in the broader market shaping up? >>Uh, David? I think that's a super important, important question. I think your ideas are quite aligned with how we think about it. Uh, I personally think, you know, as enterprises are accelerating their sort of digitization and asset collection and data collection, uh, they're typically, especially in a distributed enterprise, they're trying to get to their customers. They're trying to minimize the latency to their customers. So especially if you look across industries manufacturing, which is distributed factories all over the place, they are going through a lot of factory transformations where they're digitizing their factories. That means a lot more data is being now being generated within their factories. A lot of robot automation is going on that requires a lot of compute power to go out to those particular factories, which is going to generate their data out there. We've got insurance companies, banks that are creating and interviewing and gathering more customers out at the edge for that. >>They need a lot more distributed processing out at the edge. What this is requiring is what we've seen is across analysts. A common consensus is that more than 50% of an enterprise is data, especially if they operate globally around the world is going to be generated out at the edge. What does that mean? More data is new data is generated at the edge, but needs to be stored. It needs to be processed data. What is not required needs to be thrown away or classified as not important. And then it needs to be moved for Dr. Purposes either to a central data center or just to another site. So overall in order to give the best possible experience for manufacturing, retail, uh, you know, especially in distributed enterprises, people are generating more and more data centric assets out at the edge. And that's what we see in the industry. >>Yeah. We're definitely aligned on that. There's some great points. And so now, okay. You think about all this diversity, what's the right architecture for these deploying multi-site deployments, robo edge. How do you look at that? >>Oh, excellent question. So now it's sort of, you know, obviously you want every customer that we talk to wants SimpliVity, uh, in, in, and, and, and, and no pun intended because SimpliVity is reasoned with a simplistic edge centric architecture, right? So because let's, let's take a few examples. You've got large global retailers, uh, they have hundreds of global retail stores around the world that is generating data that is producing data. Then you've got insurance companies, then you've got banks. So when you look at a distributed enterprise, how do you deploy in a very simple and easy to deploy manner, easy to lifecycle, easy to mobilize and easy to lifecycle equipment out at the edge. What are some of the challenges that these customers deal with these customers? You don't want to send a lot of ID staff out there because that adds costs. You don't want to have islands of data and islands of storage and promote sites, because that adds a lot of States outside of the data center that needs to be protected. >>And then last but not the least, how do you push lifecycle based applications, new applications out at the edge in a very simple to deploy better. And how do you protect all this data at the edge? So the right architecture in my opinion, needs to be extremely simple to deploy. So storage, compute and networking, uh, out towards the edge in a hyperconverged environment. So that's, we agree upon that. It's a very simple to deploy model, but then comes, how do you deploy applications on top of that? How do you manage these applications on top of that? How do you back up these applications back towards the data center, all of this keeping in mind that it has to be as zero touch as possible. We at HBS believe that it needs to be extremely simple. Just give me two cables, a network cable, a power cable, tied it up, connected to the network, push it state from the data center and back up at state from the ed back into the data center. Extremely simple. >>It's gotta be simple because you've got so many challenges. You've got physics that you have to deal your latency to deal with. You got RPO and RTO. What happens if something goes wrong, you've gotta be able to recover quickly. So, so that's great. Thank you for that. Now you guys have hard news. W what is new from HPE in this space >>From a, from a, from a, from a deployment perspective, you know, HPE SimpliVity is just gaining like it's exploding, like crazy, especially as distributed enterprises adopt it as it's standardized edge architecture, right? It's an HCI box has got stories, computer networking, all in one. But now what we have done is not only you can deploy applications all from your standard V-Center interface, from a data center, what have you have now added is the ability to backup to the cloud, right? From the edge. You can also back up all the way back to your core data center. All of the backup policies are fully automated and implemented in the, in the distributed file system. That is the heart and soul of, of the SimpliVity installation. In addition to that, the customers now do not have to buy any third-party software into backup is fully integrated in the architecture and it's van efficient. >>In addition to that, now you can backup straight to the client. You can backup to a central, uh, high-end backup repository, which is in your data center. And last but not least, we have a lot of customers that are pushing the limit in their application transformation. So not only do we previously were, were one-on-one them leaving VMware deployments out at the edge sites. Now revolver also added both stateful and stateless container orchestration, as well as data protection capabilities for containerized applications out at the edge. So we have a lot, we have a lot of customers that are now deploying containers, rapid manufacturing containers to process data out at remote sites. And that allows us to not only protect those stateful applications, but back them up, back into the central data center. >>I saw in that chart, it was a light on no egress fees. That's a pain point for a lot of CEOs that I talked to. They grit their teeth at those entities. So, so you can't comment on that or >>Excellent, excellent question. I'm so glad you brought that up and sort of at that point, uh, uh, pick that up. So, uh, along with SimpliVity, you know, we have the whole green Lake as a service offering as well. Right? So what that means, Dave, is that we can literally provide our customers edge as a service. And when you compliment that with, with Aruba wired wireless infrastructure, that goes at the edge, the hyperconverged infrastructure, as part of SimpliVity, that goes at the edge, you know, one of the things that was missing with cloud backups is the every time you backup to the cloud, which is a great thing, by the way, anytime you restore from the cloud, there is that breastfeed, right? So as a result of that, as part of the GreenLake offering, we have cloud backup service natively now offered as part of HPE, which is included in your HPE SimpliVity edge as a service offering. So now not only can you backup into the cloud from your edge sites, but you can also restore back without any egress fees from HBS data protection service. Either you can restore it back onto your data center, you can restore it back towards the edge site and because the infrastructure is so easy to deploy centrally lifecycle manage, it's very mobile. So if you want to deploy and recover to a different site, you could also do that. >>Nice. Hey, uh, can you, Omar, can you double click a little bit on some of the use cases that customers are choosing SimpliVity for, particularly at the edge, and maybe talk about why they're choosing HPE? >>What are the major use cases that we see? Dave is obviously, uh, easy to deploy and easy to manage in a standardized form factor, right? A lot of these customers, like for example, we have large retailer across the us with hundreds of stores across us. Right now you cannot send service staff to each of these stores. These data centers are their data center is essentially just a closet for these guys, right? So now how do you have a standardized deployment? So standardized deployment from the data center, which you can literally push out and you can connect a network cable and a power cable, and you're up and running, and then automated backup elimination of backup and state and BR from the edge sites and into the data center. So that's one of the big use cases to rapidly deploy new stores, bring them up in a standardized configuration, both from a hardware and a software perspective, and the ability to backup and recover that instantly. >>That's one large use case. The second use case that we see actually refers to a comment that you made in your opener. Dave was where a lot of these customers are generating a lot of the data at the edge. This is robotics automation that is going to up in manufacturing sites. These is racing teams that are out at the edge of doing post-processing of their cars data. Uh, at the same time, there is disaster recovery use cases where you have, uh, you know, campsites and local, uh, you know, uh, agencies that go out there for humanity's benefit. And they move from one site to the other. It's a very, very mobile architecture that they need. So those, those are just a few cases where we were deployed. There was a lot of data collection, and there's a lot of mobility involved in these environments. So you need to be quick to set up quick, to up quick, to recover, and essentially you're up to your next, next move. >>You seem pretty pumped up about this, uh, this new innovation and why not. >>It is, it is, uh, you know, especially because, you know, it is, it has been taught through with edge in mind and edge has to be mobile. It has to be simple. And especially as, you know, we have lived through this pandemic, which, which I hope we see the tail end of it in at least 2021, or at least 2022. They, you know, one of the most common use cases that we saw, and this was an accidental discovery. A lot of the retail sites could not go out to service their stores because, you know, mobility is limited in these, in these strange times that we live in. So from a central center, you're able to deploy applications, you're able to recover applications. And, and a lot of our customers said, Hey, I don't have enough space in my data center to back up. Do you have another option? So then we rolled out this update release to SimpliVity verse from the edge site. You can now directly back up to our backup service, which is offered on a consumption basis to the customers, and they can recover that anywhere they want. >>Fantastic Omer, thanks so much for coming on the program today. >>It's a pleasure, Dave. Thank you. >>All right. Awesome to see you. Now, let's hear from red bull racing and HPE customer, that's actually using SimpliVity at the edge. Countdown really begins when the checkered flag drops on a Sunday. It's always about this race to manufacture >>The next designs to make it more adapt to the next circuit to run those. Of course, if we can't manufacture the next component in time, all that will be wasted. >>Okay. We're back with Matt kudu, who is the CIO of red bull racing? Matt, it's good to see you again. >>Great to say, >>Hey, we're going to dig into a real-world example of using data at the edge and in near real time to gain insights that really lead to competitive advantage. But, but first Matt, tell us a little bit about red bull racing and your role there. >>Sure. So I'm the CIO at red bull racing and that red bull race. And we're based in Milton Keynes in the UK. And the main job job for us is to design a race car, to manufacture the race car, and then to race it around the world. So as CIO, we need to develop the ITT group needs to develop the applications is the design, manufacturing racing. We also need to supply all the underlying infrastructure and also manage security. So it's really interesting environment. That's all about speed. So this season we have 23 races and we need to tear the car apart and rebuild it to a unique configuration for every individual race. And we're also designing and making components targeted for races. So 20 a movable deadlines, um, this big evolving prototype to manage with our car. Um, but we're also improving all of our tools and methods and software that we use to design and make and race the car. >>So we have a big can do attitude of the company around continuous improvement. And the expectations are that we continuously make the car faster. That we're, that we're winning races, that we improve our methods in the factory and our tools. And, um, so for, I take it's really unique and that we can be part of that journey and provide a better service. It's also a big challenge to provide that service and to give the business the agility, agility, and needs. So my job is, is really to make sure we have the right staff, the right partners, the right technical platforms. So we can live up to expectations >>That tear down and rebuild for 23 races. Is that because each track has its own unique signature that you have to tune to, or are there other factors involved there? >>Yeah, exactly. Every track has a different shape. Some have lots of strengths. Some have lots of curves and lots are in between. Um, the track surface is very different and the impact that has some tires, um, the temperature and the climate is very different. Some are hilly, some, a big curves that affect the dynamics of the power. So all that in order to win, you need to micromanage everything and optimize it for any given race track. >>Talk about some of the key drivers in your business and some of the key apps that give you a competitive advantage to help you win races. >>Yeah. So in our business, everything is all about speed. So the car obviously needs to be fast, but also all of our business operations needed to be fast. We need to be able to design a car and it's all done in the virtual world, but the, the virtual simulations and designs need to correlate to what happens in the real world. So all of that requires a lot of expertise to develop the simulation is the algorithms and have all the underlying infrastructure that runs it quickly and reliably. Um, in manufacturing, um, we have cost caps and financial controls by regulation. We need to be super efficient and control material and resources. So ERP and MES systems are running and helping us do that. And at the race track itself in speed, we have hundreds of decisions to make on a Friday and Saturday as we're fine tuning the final configuration of the car. And here again, we rely on simulations and analytics to help do that. And then during the race, we have split seconds, literally seconds to alter our race strategy if an event happens. So if there's an accident, um, and the safety car comes out, or the weather changes, we revise our tactics and we're running Monte Carlo for example. And he is an experienced engineers with simulations to make a data-driven decision and hopefully a better one and faster than our competitors, all of that needs it. Um, so work at a very high level. >>It's interesting. I mean, as a lay person, historically we know when I think about technology and car racing, of course, I think about the mechanical aspects of a self-propelled vehicle, the electronics and the light, but not necessarily the data, but the data's always been there. Hasn't it? I mean, maybe in the form of like tribal knowledge, if somebody who knows the track and where the Hills are and experience and gut feel, but today you're digitizing it and you're, you're processing it and close to real time. >>It's amazing. I think exactly right. Yeah. The car's instrumented with sensors, we post-process at Virgin, um, video, um, image analysis, and we're looking at our car, our competitor's car. So there's a huge amount of, um, very complicated models that we're using to optimize our performance and to continuously improve our car. Yeah. The data and the applications that can leverage it are really key. Um, and that's a critical success factor for us. >>So let's talk about your data center at the track, if you will. I mean, if I can call it that paint a picture for us, what does that look like? >>So we have to send, um, a lot of equipment to the track at the edge. Um, and even though we have really a great wide area network linked back to the factory and there's cloud resources, a lot of the trucks are very old. You don't have hardened infrastructure, don't have ducks that protect cabling, for example, and you could lose connectivity to remote locations. So the applications we need to operate the car and to make really critical decisions, all that needs to be at the edge where the car operates. So historically we had three racks of equipment, like a safe infrastructure, um, and it was really hard to manage, um, to make changes. It was too flexible. Um, there were multiple panes of glass, um, and, um, and it was too slow. It didn't run her applications quickly. Um, it was also too heavy and took up too much space when you're cramped into a garage with lots of environmental constraints. >>So we, um, we'd, we'd introduced hyperconvergence into the factory and seen a lot of great benefits. And when we came time to refresh our infrastructure at the track, we stepped back and said, there's a lot smarter way of operating. We can get rid of all the slow and flexible, expensive legacy and introduce hyperconvergence. And we saw really excellent benefits for doing that. Um, we saw a three X speed up for a lot of our applications. So I'm here where we're post-processing data, and we have to make decisions about race strategy. Time is of the essence in a three X reduction in processing time really matters. Um, we also, um, were able to go from three racks of equipment down to two racks of equipment and the storage efficiency of the HPE SimpliVity platform with 20 to one ratios allowed us to eliminate a rack. And that actually saved a hundred thousand dollars a year in freight costs by shipping less equipment, um, things like backup, um, mistakes happen. >>Sometimes the user makes a mistake. So for example, a race engineer could load the wrong data map into one of our simulations. And we could restore that VDI through SimpliVity backup at 90 seconds. And this makes sure it enables engineers to focus on the car to make better decisions without having downtime. And we sent them to, I take guys to every race they're managing 60 users, a really diverse environment, juggling a lot of balls and having a simple management platform like HPE SimpliVity gives us, allows them to be very effective and to work quickly. So all of those benefits were a huge step forward relative to the legacy infrastructure that we used to run at the edge. >>Yeah. So you had the nice Petri dish and the factory. So it sounds like your, your goals, obviously your number one KPI is speed to help shave seconds time, but also costs just the simplicity of setting up the infrastructure. >>Yeah. It's speed. Speed, speed. So we want applications absolutely fly, you know, get to actionable results quicker, um, get answers from our simulations quicker. The other area that speed's really critical is, um, our applications are also evolving prototypes, and we're always, the models are getting bigger. The simulations are getting bigger and they need more and more resource and being able to spin up resource and provision things without being a bottleneck is a big challenge in SimpliVity. It gives us the means of doing that. >>So did you consider any other options or was it because you had the factory knowledge? It was HCI was, you know, very clearly the option. What did you look at? >>Yeah, so, um, we have over five years of experience in the factory and we eliminated all of our legacy, um, um, infrastructure five years ago. And the benefits I've described, um, at the track, we saw that in the factory, um, at the track we have a three-year operational life cycle for our equipment. When into 2017 was the last year we had legacy as we were building for 2018. It was obvious that hyper-converged was the right technology to introduce. And we'd had years of experience in the factory already. And the benefits that we see with hyper-converged actually mattered even more at the edge because our operations are so much more pressurized time has even more of the essence. And so speeding everything up at the really pointy end of our business was really critical. It was an obvious choice. >>Why, why SimpliVity? What why'd you choose HPE SimpliVity? >>Yeah. So when we first heard about hyperconverged way back in the, in the factory, um, we had, um, a legacy infrastructure, overly complicated, too slow, too inflexible, too expensive. And we stepped back and said, there has to be a smarter way of operating. We went out and challenged our technology partners. We learned about hyperconvergence within enough, the hype, um, was real or not. So we underwent some PLCs and benchmarking and, and the, the PLCs were really impressive. And, and all these, you know, speed and agility benefits, we saw an HP for our use cases was the clear winner in the benchmarks. So based on that, we made an initial investment in the factory. Uh, we moved about 150 VMs in the 150 VDI into it. Um, and then as, as we've seen all the benefits we've successfully invested, and we now have, um, an estate to the factory of about 800 VMs and about 400 VDI. So it's been a great platform and it's allowed us to really push boundaries and, and give the business, um, the service that expects. >>So w was that with the time in which you were able to go from data to insight to recommendation or, or edict, uh, was that compressed, you kind of indicated that, but >>So we, we all telemetry from the car and we post-process it, and that reprocessing time really it's very time consuming. And, um, you know, we went from nine, eight minutes for some of the simulations down to just two minutes. So we saw big, big reductions in time and all, ultimately that meant an engineer could understand what the car was during a practice session, recommend a tweak to the configuration or setup of it, and just get more actionable insight quicker. And it ultimately helps get a better car quicker. >>Such a great example. How are you guys feeling about the season, Matt? What's the team's sentiment? >>Yeah, I think we're optimistic. Um, we w we, um, uh, we have a new driver >>Lineup. Uh, we have, um, max for stopping his carries on with the team and Sergio joins the team. So we're really excited about this year and, uh, we want to go and win races. Great, Matt, good luck this season and going forward and thanks so much for coming back in the cube. Really appreciate it. And it's my pleasure. Great talking to you again. Okay. Now we're going to bring back Omer for quick summary. So keep it real >>Without having solutions from HB, we can't drive those five senses, CFD aerodynamics that would undermine the simulations being software defined. We can bring new apps into play. If we can bring new them's storage, networking, all of that can be highly advises is a hugely beneficial partnership for us. We're able to be at the cutting edge of technology in a highly stressed environment. That is no bigger challenge than the formula. >>Okay. We're back with Omar. Hey, what did you think about that interview with Matt? >>Great. Uh, I have to tell you I'm a big formula one fan, and they are one of my favorite customers. Uh, so, you know, obviously, uh, one of the biggest use cases as you saw for red bull racing is Trackside deployments. There are now 22 races in a season. These guys are jumping from one city to the next, they've got to pack up, move to the next city, set up, set up the infrastructure very, very quickly and average formula. One car is running the thousand plus sensors on that is generating a ton of data on track side that needs to be collected very quickly. It needs to be processed very quickly, and then sometimes believe it or not, snapshots of this data needs to be sent to the red bull back factory back at the data center. What does this all need? It needs reliability. >>It needs compute power in a very short form factor. And it needs agility quick to set up quick, to go quick, to recover. And then in post processing, they need to have CPU density so they can pack more VMs out at the edge to be able to do that processing now. And we accomplished that for, for the red bull racing guys in basically two are you have two SimpliVity nodes that are running track side and moving with them from one, one race to the next race, to the next race. And every time those SimpliVity nodes connect up to the data center collector to a satellite, they're backing up back to their data center. They're sending snapshots of data back to the data center, essentially making their job a whole lot easier, where they can focus on racing and not on troubleshooting virtual machines, >>Red bull racing and HPE SimpliVity. Great example. It's agile, it's it's cost efficient, and it shows a real impact. Thank you very much. I really appreciate those summary comments. Thank you, Dave. Really appreciate it. All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Volante. >>You.

Published Date : Mar 30 2021

SUMMARY :

as close as possible to the sources of data, to reduce latency and maximize your ability to get Pleasure to be here. So how do you see the edge in the broader market shaping up? A lot of robot automation is going on that requires a lot of compute power to go out to More data is new data is generated at the edge, but needs to be stored. How do you look at that? a lot of States outside of the data center that needs to be protected. We at HBS believe that it needs to be extremely simple. You've got physics that you have to deal your latency to deal with. In addition to that, the customers now do not have to buy any third-party In addition to that, now you can backup straight to the client. So, so you can't comment on that or So as a result of that, as part of the GreenLake offering, we have cloud backup service natively are choosing SimpliVity for, particularly at the edge, and maybe talk about why from the data center, which you can literally push out and you can connect a network cable at the same time, there is disaster recovery use cases where you have, uh, out to service their stores because, you know, mobility is limited in these, in these strange times that we always about this race to manufacture The next designs to make it more adapt to the next circuit to run those. it's good to see you again. insights that really lead to competitive advantage. So this season we have 23 races and we So my job is, is really to make sure we have the right staff, that you have to tune to, or are there other factors involved there? So all that in order to win, you need to micromanage everything and optimize it for Talk about some of the key drivers in your business and some of the key apps that So all of that requires a lot of expertise to develop the simulation is the algorithms I mean, maybe in the form of like tribal So there's a huge amount of, um, very complicated models that So let's talk about your data center at the track, if you will. So the applications we need to operate the car and to make really Time is of the essence in a three X reduction in processing So for example, a race engineer could load the wrong but also costs just the simplicity of setting up the infrastructure. So we want applications absolutely fly, So did you consider any other options or was it because you had the factory knowledge? And the benefits that we see with hyper-converged actually mattered even more at the edge And, and all these, you know, speed and agility benefits, we saw an HP So we saw big, big reductions in time and all, How are you guys feeling about the season, Matt? we have a new driver Great talking to you again. We're able to be at Hey, what did you think about that interview with Matt? and then sometimes believe it or not, snapshots of this data needs to be sent to the red bull And we accomplished that for, for the red bull racing guys in And thank you for watching.

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Matt Cadieux, CIO Red Bull Racing v2


 

(mellow music) >> Okay, we're back with Matt Cadieux who is the CIO Red Bull Racing. Matt, it's good to see you again. >> Yeah, great to see you, Dave. >> Hey, we're going to dig into a real world example of using data at the edge and in near real-time to gain insights that really lead to competitive advantage. But first Matt, tell us a little bit about Red Bull Racing and your role there. >> Sure, so I'm the CIO at Red Bull Racing. And at Red Bull Racing we're based in Milton Keynes in the UK. And the main job for us is to design a race car, to manufacture the race car, and then to race it around the world. So as CIO, we need to develop, the IT team needs to develop the applications used for the design, manufacturing, and racing. We also need to supply all the underlying infrastructure, and also manage security. So it's a really interesting environment that's all about speed. So this season we have 23 races, and we need to tear the car apart, and rebuild it to a unique configuration for every individual race. And we're also designing and making components targeted for races. So 23 immovable deadlines, this big evolving prototype to manage with our car. But we're also improving all of our tools and methods and software that we use to design and make and race the car. So we have a big can-do attitude in the company, around continuous improvement. And the expectations are that we continue to make the car faster, that we're winning races, that we improve our methods in the factory and our tools. And so for IT it's really unique and that we can be part of that journey and provide a better service. It's also a big challenge to provide that service and to give the business the agility it needs. So my job is really to make sure we have the right staff, the right partners, the right technical platforms, so we can live up to expectations. >> And Matt that tear down and rebuild for 23 races. Is that because each track has its own unique signature that you have to tune to or are there other factors involved there? >> Yeah, exactly. Every track has a different shape. Some have lots of straight, some have lots of curves and lots are in between. The track's surface is very different and the impact that has on tires, the temperature and the climate is very different. Some are hilly, some are big curves that affect the dynamics of the car. So all that in order to win, you need to micromanage everything and optimize it for any given race track. >> And, you know, COVID has, of course, been brutal for sports. What's the status of your season? >> So this season we knew that COVID was here and we're doing 23 races knowing we have COVID to manage. And as a premium sporting team we've formed bubbles, we've put health and safety and social distancing into our environment. And we're able to operate by doing things in a safe manner. We have some special exhibitions in the UK. So for example, when people return from overseas that they do not have to quarantine for two weeks but they get tested multiple times a week and we know they're safe. So we're racing, we're dealing with all the hassle that COVID gives us. And we are really hoping for a return to normality sooner instead of later where we can get fans back at the track and really go racing and have the spectacle where everyone enjoys it. >> Yeah, that's awesome. So important for the fans but also all the employees around that ecosystem. Talk about some of the key drivers in your business and some of the key apps that give you competitive advantage to help you win races. >> Yeah, so in our business everything is all about speed. So the car obviously needs to be fast but also all of our business operations need to be fast. We need to be able to design our car and it's all done in the virtual world but the virtual simulations and designs need to correlate to what happens in the real world. So all of that requires a lot of expertise to develop the simulations, the algorithms, and have all the underlying infrastructure that runs it quickly and reliably. In manufacturing, we have cost caps and financial controls by regulation. We need to be super efficient and control material and resources. So ERP and MES systems are running, helping us do that. And at the race track itself in speed, we have hundreds of decisions to make on a Friday and Saturday as we're fine tuning the final configuration of the car. And here again, we rely on simulations and analytics to help do that. And then during the race, we have split seconds, literally seconds to alter our race strategy if an event happens. So if there's an accident and the safety car comes out or the weather changes, we revise our tactics. And we're running Monte Carlo for example. And using experienced engineers with simulations to make a data-driven decision and hopefully a better one and faster than our competitors. All of that needs IT to work at a very high level. >> You know it's interesting, I mean, as a lay person, historically when I think about technology and car racing, of course, I think about the mechanical aspects of a self-propelled vehicle, the electronics and the like, but not necessarily the data. But the data's always been there, hasn't it? I mean, maybe in the form of like tribal knowledge, if it's somebody who knows the track and where the hills are and experience and gut feel. But today you're digitizing it and you're processing it in close to real-time. It's amazing. >> Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, the car is instrumented with sensors, we post-process, we're doing video, image analysis and we're looking at our car, our competitor's car. So there's a huge amount of very complicated models that we're using to optimize our performance and to continuously improve our car. Yeah, the data and the applications that leverage it are really key. And that's a critical success factor for us. >> So let's talk about your data center at the track, if you will, I mean, if I can call it that. Paint a picture for us. >> Sure. What does that look like? >> So we have to send a lot of equipment to the track, at the edge. And even though we have really a great lateral network link back to the factory and there's cloud resources, a lot of the tracks are very old. You don't have hardened infrastructure, you don't have docks that protect cabling, for example, and you can lose connectivity to remote locations. So the applications we need to operate the car and to make really critical decisions, all that needs to be at the edge where the car operates. So historically we had three racks of equipment, legacy infrastructure and it was really hard to manage, to make changes, it was too inflexible. There were multiple panes of glass, and it was too slow. It didn't run our applications quickly. It was also too heavy and took up too much space when you're cramped into a garage with lots of environmental constraints. So we'd introduced hyper-convergence into the factory and seen a lot of great benefits. And when we came time to refresh our infrastructure at the track, we stepped back and said there's a lot smarter way of operating. We can get rid of all this slow and inflexible expensive legacy and introduce hyper-convergence. And we saw really excellent benefits for doing that. We saw a three X speed up for a lot of our applications. So here where we're post-processing data, and we have to make decisions about race strategy, time is of the essence and a three X reduction in processing time really matters. We also were able to go from three racks of equipment down to two racks of equipment and the storage efficiency of the HPE SimpliVity platform with 20 to one ratios allowed us to eliminate a rack. And that actually saved a $100,000 a year in freight costs by shipping less equipment. Things like backup, mistakes happen. Sometimes a user makes a mistake. So for example a race engineer could load the wrong data map into one of our simulations. And we could restore that DDI through SimpliVity backup in 90 seconds. And this makes sure, enables engineers to focus on the car, to make better decisions without having downtime. And we send two IT guys to every race. They're managing 60 users, a really diverse environment, juggling a lot of balls and having a simple management platform like HP SimpliVity gives us, allows them to be very effective and to work quickly. So all of those benefits were a huge step forward relative to the legacy infrastructure that we used to run at the edge. >> Yes, so you had the nice Petri dish in the factory, so it sounds like your goals obviously, number one KPI is speed to help shave seconds off the time, but also cost. >> That's right. Just the simplicity of setting up the infrastructure is key. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. >> It's speed, speed, speed. So we want applications that absolutely fly, you know gets actionable results quicker, get answers from our simulations quicker. The other area that speed's really critical is our applications are also evolving prototypes and we're always, the models are getting bigger, the simulations are getting bigger, and they need more and more resource. And being able to spin up resource and provision things without being a bottleneck is a big challenge. And SimpliVity gives us the means of doing that. >> So did you consider any other options or was it because you had the factory knowledge, HCI was, you know, very clearly the option? What did you look at? >> Yeah, so we have over five years of experience in the factory and we eliminated all of our legacy infrastructure five years ago. And the benefits I've described at the track we saw that in the factory. At the track, we have a three-year operational life cycle for our equipment. 2017 was the last year we had legacy. As we were building for 2018, it was obvious that hyper-converged was the right technology to introduce. And we'd had years of experience in the factory already. And the benefits that we see with hyper-converged actually mattered even more at the edge because our operations are so much more pressurized. Time is even more of the essence. And so speeding everything up at the really pointy end of our business was really critical. It was an obvious choice. >> So why SimpliVity? Why do you choose HPE SimpliVity? >> Yeah, so when we first heard about hyper-converged, way back in the factory. We had a legacy infrastructure, overly complicated, too slow, too inflexible, too expensive. And we stepped back and said there has to be a smarter way of operating. We went out and challenged our technology partners. We learned about hyper-convergence. We didn't know if the hype was real or not. So we underwent some PLCs and benchmarking and the PLCs were really impressive. And all these, you know, speed and agility benefits we saw and HPE for our use cases was the clear winner in the benchmarks. So based on that we made an initial investment in the factory. We moved about 150 VMs and 150 VDIs into it. And then as we've seen all the benefits we've successfully invested, and we now have an estate in the factory of about 800 VMs and about 400 VDIs. So it's been a great platform and it's allowed us to really push boundaries and give the business the service it expects. >> Well that's a fun story. So just coming back to the metrics for a minute. So you're running Monte Carlo simulations in real-time and sort of near real-time. >> Yeah. And so essentially that's, if I understand it, that's what-ifs and it's the probability of the outcome. And then somebody's got to make, >> Exactly. then a human's got to say, okay, do this, right. And so was that, >> Yeah. with the time in which you were able to go from data to insight to recommendation or edict was that compressed? You kind of indicated that, but. >> Yeah, that was accelerated. And so in that use case, what we're trying to do is predict the future and you're saying well, and before any event happens, you're doing what-ifs. Then if it were to happen, what would you probabilistically do? So, you know, so that simulation we've been running for a while but it gets better and better as we get more knowledge. And so that we were able to accelerate that with SimpliVity. But there's other use cases too. So we offload telemetry from the car and we post-process it. And that reprocessing time really is very time consuming. And, you know, we went from nine, eight minutes for some of the simulations down to just two minutes. So we saw big, big reductions in time. And ultimately that meant an engineer could understand what the car was doing in a practice session, recommend a tweak to the configuration or setup of it, and just get more actionable insight quicker. And it ultimately helps get a better car quicker. >> Such a great example. How are you guys feeling about the season, Matt? What's the team's, the sentiment? >> Yeah, I think we're optimistic. We with thinking our simulations that we have a great car. We have a new driver lineup. We have Max Verstappen who carries on with the team and Sergio Perez joins the team. So we're really excited about this year and we want to go and win races. And I think with COVID people are just itching also to get back to a little degree of normality, and, you know, and going racing again, even though there's no fans, it gets us into a degree of normality. >> That's great, Matt, good luck this season and going forward and thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> It's my pleasure. Great talking to you again. >> Okay, now we're going to bring back Omar for a quick summary. So keep it right there. (mellow music)

Published Date : Mar 4 2021

SUMMARY :

Matt, it's good to see you again. and in near real-time and that we can be part of that journey And Matt that tear down and the impact that has on tires, What's the status of your season? and have the spectacle and some of the key apps So the car obviously needs to be fast the electronics and the like, and to continuously improve our car. data center at the track, What does that look like? So the applications we Petri dish in the factory, Just the simplicity of And being able to spin up And the benefits that we and the PLCs were really impressive. So just coming back to probability of the outcome. And so was that, from data to insight to recommendation And so that we were able to What's the team's, the sentiment? and Sergio Perez joins the team. and going forward and thanks so much Great talking to you again. So keep it right there.

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Computer Science & Space Exploration | Exascale Day


 

>>from around the globe. It's the Q. With digital coverage >>of exa scale day made possible by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're back at the celebration of Exa Scale Day. This is Dave Volant, and I'm pleased to welcome to great guests Brian Dance Berries Here. Here's what The ISS Program Science office at the Johnson Space Center. And Dr Mark Fernandez is back. He's the Americas HPC technology officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome. >>Thank you. Yeah, >>well, thanks for coming on. And, Mark, Good to see you again. And, Brian, I wonder if we could start with you and talk a little bit about your role. A T. I s s program Science office as a scientist. What's happening these days? What are you working on? >>Well, it's been my privilege the last few years to be working in the, uh, research integration area of of the space station office. And that's where we're looking at all of the different sponsors NASA, the other international partners, all the sponsors within NASA, and, uh, prioritizing what research gets to go up to station. What research gets conducted in that regard. And to give you a feel for the magnitude of the task, but we're coming up now on November 2nd for the 20th anniversary of continuous human presence on station. So we've been a space faring society now for coming up on 20 years, and I would like to point out because, you know, as an old guy myself, it impresses me. That's, you know, that's 25% of the US population. Everybody under the age of 20 has never had a moment when they were alive and we didn't have people living and working in space. So Okay, I got off on a tangent there. We'll move on in that 20 years we've done 3000 experiments on station and the station has really made ah, miraculously sort of evolution from, ah, basic platform, what is now really fully functioning national lab up there with, um, commercially run research facilities all the time. I think you can think of it as the world's largest satellite bus. We have, you know, four or five instruments looking down, measuring all kinds of things in the atmosphere during Earth observation data, looking out, doing astrophysics, research, measuring cosmic rays, X ray observatory, all kinds of things, plus inside the station you've got racks and racks of experiments going on typically scores, you know, if not more than 50 experiments going on at any one time. So, you know, the topic of this event is really important. Doesn't NASA, you know, data transmission Up and down, all of the cameras going on on on station the experiments. Um, you know, one of one of those astrophysics observatory's you know, it has collected over 15 billion um uh, impact data of cosmic rays. And so the massive amounts of data that that needs to be collected and transferred for all of these experiments to go on really hits to the core. And I'm glad I'm able toe be here and and speak with you today on this. This topic. >>Well, thank you for that, Bryan. A baby boomer, right? Grew up with the national pride of the moon landing. And of course, we've we've seen we saw the space shuttle. We've seen international collaboration, and it's just always been something, you know, part of our lives. So thank you for the great work that you guys were doing their mark. You and I had a great discussion about exa scale and kind of what it means for society and some of the innovations that we could maybe expect over the coming years. Now I wonder if you could talk about some of the collaboration between what you guys were doing and Brian's team. >>Uh, yeah, so yes, indeed. Thank you for having me early. Appreciate it. That was a great introduction. Brian, Uh, I'm the principal investigator on Space Born computer, too. And as the two implies, where there was one before it. And so we worked with Bryant and his team extensively over the past few years again high performance computing on board the International Space Station. Brian mentioned the thousands of experiments that have been done to date and that there are currently 50 orm or going on at any one time. And those experiments collect data. And up until recently, you've had to transmit that data down to Earth for processing. And that's a significant amount of bandwidth. Yeah, so with baseball and computer to we're inviting hello developers and others to take advantage of that onboard computational capability you mentioned exa scale. We plan to get the extra scale next year. We're currently in the era that's called PETA scale on. We've been in the past scale era since 2000 and seven, so it's taken us a while to make it that next lead. Well, 10 years after Earth had a PETA scale system in 2017 were able to put ah teraflop system on the International space station to prove that we could do a trillion calculations a second in space. That's where the data is originating. That's where it might be best to process it. So we want to be able to take those capabilities with us. And with H. P. E. Acting as a wonderful partner with Brian and NASA and the space station, we think we're able to do that for many of these experiments. >>It's mind boggling you were talking about. I was talking about the moon landing earlier and the limited power of computing power. Now we've got, you know, water, cool supercomputers in space. I'm interested. I'd love to explore this notion of private industry developing space capable computers. I think it's an interesting model where you have computer companies can repurpose technology that they're selling obviously greater scale for space exploration and apply that supercomputing technology instead of having government fund, proprietary purpose built systems that air. Essentially, you use case, if you will. So, Brian, what are the benefits of that model? The perhaps you wouldn't achieve with governments or maybe contractors, you know, kind of building these proprietary systems. >>Well, first of all, you know, any any tool, your using any, any new technology that has, you know, multiple users is going to mature quicker. You're gonna have, you know, greater features, greater capabilities, you know, not even talking about computers. Anything you're doing. So moving from, you know, governor government is a single, um, you know, user to off the shelf type products gives you that opportunity to have things that have been proven, have the technology is fully matured. Now, what had to happen is we had to mature the space station so that we had a platform where we could test these things and make sure they're gonna work in the high radiation environments, you know, And they're gonna be reliable, because first, you've got to make sure that that safety and reliability or taken care of so that that's that's why in the space program you're gonna you're gonna be behind the times in terms of the computing power of the equipment up there because, first of all and foremost, you needed to make sure that it was reliable and say, Now, my undergraduate degree was in aerospace engineering and what we care about is aerospace engineers is how heavy is it, how big and bulky is it because you know it z expensive? You know, every pound I once visited Gulfstream Aerospace, and they would pay their employees $1000 that they could come up with a way saving £1 in building that aircraft. That means you have more capacity for flying. It's on the orders of magnitude. More important to do that when you're taking payloads to space. So you know, particularly with space born computer, the opportunity there to use software and and check the reliability that way, Uh, without having to make the computer, you know, radiation resistance, if you will, with heavy, you know, bulky, um, packaging to protect it from that radiation is a really important thing, and it's gonna be a huge advantage moving forward as we go to the moon and on to Mars. >>Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, your point about cots commercial off the shelf technology. I mean, that's something that obviously governments have wanted to leverage for a long, long time for many, many decades. But but But Mark the issue was always the is. Brian was just saying the very stringent and difficult requirements of space. Well, you're obviously with space Born one. You got to the point where you had visibility of the economics made sense. It made commercial sense for companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And now we've sort of closed that gap to the point where you're sort of now on that innovation curve. What if you could talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah, absolutely. Brian has some excellent points, you know, he said, anything we do today and requires computers, and that's absolutely correct. So I tell people that when you go to the moon and when you go to the Mars, you probably want to go with the iPhone 10 or 11 and not a flip phone. So before space born was sent up, you went with 2000 early two thousands computing technology there which, like you said many of the people born today weren't even around when the space station began and has been occupied so they don't even know how to program or use that type of computing. Power was based on one. We sent the exact same products that we were shipping to customers today, so they are current state of the art, and we had a mandate. Don't touch the hardware, have all the protection that you can via software. So that's what we've done. We've got several philosophical ways to do that. We've implemented those in software. They've been successful improving in the space for one, and now it's space born to. We're going to begin the experiments so that the rest of the community so that the rest of the community can figure out that it is economically viable, and it will accelerate their research and progress in space. I'm most excited about that. Every venture into space as Brian mentioned will require some computational capability, and HP has figured out that the economics air there we need to bring the customers through space ball into in order for them to learn that we are reliable but current state of the art, and that we could benefit them and all of humanity. >>Guys, I wanna ask you kind of a two part question. And, Brian, I'll start with you and it z somewhat philosophical. Uh, I mean, my understanding was and I want to say this was probably around the time of the Bush administration w two on and maybe certainly before that, but as technology progress, there was a debate about all right, Should we put our resource is on moon because of the proximity to Earth? Or should we, you know, go where no man has gone before and or woman and get to Mars? Where What's the thinking today, Brian? On that? That balance between Moon and Mars? >>Well, you know, our plans today are are to get back to the moon by 2024. That's the Artemus program. Uh, it's exciting. It makes sense from, you know, an engineering standpoint. You take, you know, you take baby steps as you continue to move forward. And so you have that opportunity, um, to to learn while you're still, you know, relatively close to home. You can get there in days, not months. If you're going to Mars, for example, toe have everything line up properly. You're looking at a multi year mission you know, it may take you nine months to get there. Then you have to wait for the Earth and Mars to get back in the right position to come back on that same kind of trajectory. So you have toe be there for more than a year before you can turn around and come back. So, you know, he was talking about the computing power. You know, right now that the beautiful thing about the space station is, it's right there. It's it's orbiting above us. It's only 250 miles away. Uh, so you can test out all of these technologies. You can rely on the ground to keep track of systems. There's not that much of a delay in terms of telemetry coming back. But as you get to the moon and then definitely is, you get get out to Mars. You know, there are enough minutes delay out there that you've got to take the computing power with you. You've got to take everything you need to be able to make those decisions you need to make because there's not time to, um, you know, get that information back on the ground, get back get it back to Earth, have people analyze the situation and then tell you what the next step is to do. That may be too late. So you've got to think the computing power with you. >>So extra scale bring some new possibilities. Both both for, you know, the moon and Mars. I know Space Born one did some simulations relative. Tomorrow we'll talk about that. But But, Brian, what are the things that you hope to get out of excess scale computing that maybe you couldn't do with previous generations? >>Well, you know, you know, market on a key point. You know, bandwidth up and down is, of course, always a limitation. In the more computing data analysis you can do on site, the more efficient you could be with parsing out that that bandwidth and to give you ah, feel for just that kind of think about those those observatory's earth observing and an astronomical I was talking about collecting data. Think about the hours of video that are being recorded daily as the astronauts work on various things to document what they're doing. They many of the biological experiments, one of the key key pieces of data that's coming back. Is that video of the the microbes growing or the plants growing or whatever fluid physics experiments going on? We do a lot of colloids research, which is suspended particles inside ah liquid. And that, of course, high speed video. Is he Thio doing that kind of research? Right now? We've got something called the I s s experience going on in there, which is basically recording and will eventually put out a syriza of basically a movie on virtual reality recording. That kind of data is so huge when you have a 360 degree camera up there recording all of that data, great virtual reality, they There's still a lot of times bringing that back on higher hard drives when the space six vehicles come back to the Earth. That's a lot of data going on. We recorded videos all the time, tremendous amount of bandwidth going on. And as you get to the moon and as you get further out, you can a man imagine how much more limiting that bandwidth it. >>Yeah, We used to joke in the old mainframe days that the fastest way to get data from point a to Point B was called C Tam, the Chevy truck access method. Just load >>up a >>truck, whatever it was, tapes or hard drive. So eso and mark, of course space born to was coming on. Spaceport one really was a pilot, but it proved that the commercial computers could actually work for long durations in space, and the economics were feasible. Thinking about, you know, future missions and space born to What are you hoping to accomplish? >>I'm hoping to bring. I'm hoping to bring that success from space born one to the rest of the community with space born to so that they can realize they can do. They're processing at the edge. The purpose of exploration is insight, not data collection. So all of these experiments begin with data collection. Whether that's videos or samples are mold growing, etcetera, collecting that data, we must process it to turn it into information and insight. And the faster we can do that, the faster we get. Our results and the better things are. I often talk Thio College in high school and sometimes grammar school students about this need to process at the edge and how the communication issues can prevent you from doing that. For example, many of us remember the communications with the moon. The moon is about 250,000 miles away, if I remember correctly, and the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second. So even if the speed of light it takes more than a second for the communications to get to the moon and back. So I can remember being stressed out when Houston will to make a statement. And we were wondering if the astronauts could answer Well, they answered as soon as possible. But that 1 to 2 second delay that was natural was what drove us crazy, which made us nervous. We were worried about them in the success of the mission. So Mars is millions of miles away. So flip it around. If you're a Mars explorer and you look out the window and there's a big red cloud coming at you that looks like a tornado and you might want to do some Mars dust storm modeling right then and there to figure out what's the safest thing to do. You don't have the time literally get that back to earth have been processing and get you the answer back. You've got to take those computational capabilities with you. And we're hoping that of these 52 thousands of experiments that are on board, the SS can show that in order to better accomplish their missions on the moon. And Omar, >>I'm so glad you brought that up because I was gonna ask you guys in the commercial world everybody talks about real time. Of course, we talk about the real time edge and AI influencing and and the time value of data I was gonna ask, you know, the real time, Nous, How do you handle that? I think Mark, you just answered that. But at the same time, people will say, you know, the commercial would like, for instance, in advertising. You know, the joke the best. It's not kind of a joke, but the best minds of our generation tryingto get people to click on ads. And it's somewhat true, unfortunately, but at any rate, the value of data diminishes over time. I would imagine in space exploration where where you're dealing and things like light years, that actually there's quite a bit of value in the historical data. But, Mark, you just You just gave a great example of where you need real time, compute capabilities on the ground. But but But, Brian, I wonder if I could ask you the value of this historic historical data, as you just described collecting so much data. Are you? Do you see that the value of that data actually persists over time, you could go back with better modeling and better a i and computing and actually learn from all that data. What are your thoughts on that, Brian? >>Definitely. I think the answer is yes to that. And, you know, as part of the evolution from from basically a platform to a station, we're also learning to make use of the experiments in the data that we have there. NASA has set up. Um, you know, unopened data access sites for some of our physical science experiments that taking place there and and gene lab for looking at some of the biological genomic experiments that have gone on. And I've seen papers already beginning to be generated not from the original experimenters and principal investigators, but from that data set that has been collected. And, you know, when you're sending something up to space and it to the space station and volume for cargo is so limited, you want to get the most you can out of that. So you you want to be is efficient as possible. And one of the ways you do that is you collect. You take these earth observing, uh, instruments. Then you take that data. And, sure, the principal investigators air using it for the key thing that they designed it for. But if that data is available, others will come along and make use of it in different ways. >>Yeah, So I wanna remind the audience and these these these air supercomputers, the space born computers, they're they're solar powered, obviously, and and they're mounted overhead, right? Is that is that correct? >>Yeah. Yes. Space borne computer was mounted in the overhead. I jokingly say that as soon as someone could figure out how to get a data center in orbit, they will have a 50 per cent denser data station that we could have down here instead of two robes side by side. You can also have one overhead on. The power is free. If you can drive it off a solar, and the cooling is free because it's pretty cold out there in space, so it's gonna be very efficient. Uh, space borne computer is the most energy efficient computer in existence. Uh, free electricity and free cooling. And now we're offering free cycles through all the experimenters on goal >>Eso Space born one exceeded its mission timeframe. You were able to run as it was mentioned before some simulations for future Mars missions. And, um and you talked a little bit about what you want to get out of, uh, space born to. I mean, are there other, like, wish list items, bucket bucket list items that people are talking about? >>Yeah, two of them. And these air kind of hypothetical. And Brian kind of alluded to them. Uh, one is having the data on board. So an example that halo developers talk to us about is Hey, I'm on Mars and I see this mold growing on my potatoes. That's not good. So let me let me sample that mold, do a gene sequencing, and then I've got stored all the historical data on space borne computer of all the bad molds out there and let me do a comparison right then and there before I have dinner with my fried potato. So that's that's one. That's very interesting. A second one closely related to it is we have offered up the storage on space borne computer to for all of your raw data that we process. So, Mr Scientist, if if you need the raw data and you need it now, of course, you can have it sent down. But if you don't let us just hold it there as long as they have space. And when we returned to Earth like you mentioned, Patrick will ship that solid state disk back to them so they could have a new person, but again, reserving that network bandwidth, uh, keeping all that raw data available for the entire duration of the mission so that it may have value later on. >>Great. Thank you for that. I want to end on just sort of talking about come back to the collaboration between I S s National Labs and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and you've got your inviting project ideas using space Bourne to during the upcoming mission. Maybe you could talk about what that's about, and we have A We have a graphic we're gonna put up on DSM information that you can you can access. But please, mark share with us what you're planning there. >>So again, the collaboration has been outstanding. There. There's been a mention off How much savings is, uh, if you can reduce the weight by a pound. Well, our partners ice s national lab and NASA have taken on that cost of delivering baseball in computer to the international space station as part of their collaboration and powering and cooling us and giving us the technical support in return on our side, we're offering up space borne computer to for all the onboard experiments and all those that think they might be wanting doing experiments on space born on the S s in the future to take advantage of that. So we're very, very excited about that. >>Yeah, and you could go toe just email space born at hp dot com on just float some ideas. I'm sure at some point there'll be a website so you can email them or you can email me david dot volonte at at silicon angle dot com and I'll shoot you that that email one or that website once we get it. But, Brian, I wanna end with you. You've been so gracious with your time. Uh, yeah. Give us your final thoughts on on exa scale. Maybe how you're celebrating exa scale day? I was joking with Mark. Maybe we got a special exa scale drink for 10. 18 but, uh, what's your final thoughts, Brian? >>Uh, I'm going to digress just a little bit. I think I think I have a unique perspective to celebrate eggs a scale day because as an undergraduate student, I was interning at Langley Research Center in the wind tunnels and the wind tunnel. I was then, um, they they were very excited that they had a new state of the art giant room size computer to take that data we way worked on unsteady, um, aerodynamic forces. So you need a lot of computation, and you need to be ableto take data at a high bandwidth. To be able to do that, they'd always, you know, run their their wind tunnel for four or five hours. Almost the whole shift. Like that data and maybe a week later, been ableto look at the data to decide if they got what they were looking for? Well, at the time in the in the early eighties, this is definitely the before times that I got there. They had they had that computer in place. Yes, it was a punchcard computer. It was the one time in my life I got to put my hands on the punch cards and was told not to drop them there. Any trouble if I did that. But I was able thio immediately after, uh, actually, during their run, take that data, reduce it down, grabbed my colored pencils and graph paper and graph out coefficient lift coefficient of drag. Other things that they were measuring. Take it back to them. And they were so excited to have data two hours after they had taken it analyzed and looked at it just pickled them. Think that they could make decisions now on what they wanted to do for their next run. Well, we've come a long way since then. You know, extra scale day really, really emphasizes that point, you know? So it really brings it home to me. Yeah. >>Please, no, please carry on. >>Well, I was just gonna say, you know, you talked about the opportunities that that space borne computer provides and and Mark mentioned our colleagues at the I S s national lab. You know, um, the space station has been declared a national laboratory, and so about half of the, uh, capabilities we have for doing research is a portion to the national lab so that commercial entities so that HP can can do these sorts of projects and universities can access station and and other government agencies. And then NASA can focus in on those things we want to do purely to push our exploration programs. So the opportunities to take advantage of that are there marks opening up the door for a lot of opportunities. But others can just Google S s national laboratory and find some information on how to get in the way. Mark did originally using s national lab to maybe get a good experiment up there. >>Well, it's just astounding to see the progress that this industry is made when you go back and look, you know, the early days of supercomputing to imagine that they actually can be space born is just tremendous. Not only the impacts that it can have on Space six exploration, but also society in general. Mark Wayne talked about that. Guys, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and celebrating Exa scale day and helping expand the community. Great work. And, uh, thank you very much for all that you guys dio >>Thank you very much for having me on and everybody out there. Let's get the XO scale as quick as we can. Appreciate everything you all are >>doing. Let's do it. >>I've got a I've got a similar story. Humanity saw the first trillion calculations per second. Like I said in 1997. And it was over 100 racks of computer equipment. Well, space borne one is less than fourth of Iraq in only 20 years. So I'm gonna be celebrating exa scale day in anticipation off exa scale computers on earth and soon following within the national lab that exists in 20 plus years And being on Mars. >>That's awesome. That mark. Thank you for that. And and thank you for watching everybody. We're celebrating Exa scale day with the community. The supercomputing community on the Cube Right back

Published Date : Oct 16 2020

SUMMARY :

It's the Q. With digital coverage We're back at the celebration of Exa Scale Day. Thank you. And, Mark, Good to see you again. And to give you a feel for the magnitude of the task, of the collaboration between what you guys were doing and Brian's team. developers and others to take advantage of that onboard computational capability you with governments or maybe contractors, you know, kind of building these proprietary off the shelf type products gives you that opportunity to have things that have been proven, have the technology You got to the point where you had visibility of the economics made sense. So I tell people that when you go to the moon Or should we, you know, go where no man has gone before and or woman and You've got to take everything you need to be able to make those decisions you need to make because there's not time to, for, you know, the moon and Mars. the more efficient you could be with parsing out that that bandwidth and to give you ah, B was called C Tam, the Chevy truck access method. future missions and space born to What are you hoping to accomplish? get that back to earth have been processing and get you the answer back. the time value of data I was gonna ask, you know, the real time, And one of the ways you do that is you collect. If you can drive it off a solar, and the cooling is free because it's pretty cold about what you want to get out of, uh, space born to. So, Mr Scientist, if if you need the raw data and you need it now, that's about, and we have A We have a graphic we're gonna put up on DSM information that you can is, uh, if you can reduce the weight by a pound. so you can email them or you can email me david dot volonte at at silicon angle dot com and I'll shoot you that state of the art giant room size computer to take that data we way Well, I was just gonna say, you know, you talked about the opportunities that that space borne computer provides And, uh, thank you very much for all that you guys dio Thank you very much for having me on and everybody out there. Let's do it. Humanity saw the first trillion calculations And and thank you for watching everybody.

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Mark Lohmeyer, VMware and David Brown, AWS | VMworld 2020


 

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome to the Cubes coverage of VMRO 2020 Virtual this The Cube Virtual I'm John for your host, covering all the action for VM World not in person. This year it's virtual, so we're bringing you the virtual interviews remotely. We've got two great guest here. Marc Lemire, senior vice president general manager of the Cloud Services business unit at VM Ware and David Brown is the vice president for two at AWS Amazon Web services. Both Cube alumni's great to see you guys remotely Thanks. Coming on eso i first vm worlds not face to face. Usually it's great event reinvents Also gonna be virtual again. It's, you know, we're gonna get the content out there, but people still gotta know the news is gonna know what's going on. Um, I remember three years ago, I interviewed Pat Kelsey and Andy Jassy in San Francisco on the big announcement of AWS and VM Ware Uh, vm ware on a W s. Really? Since then, what a great partnership Not only has VM where have cleaned up their clarity around cloud. But the business performance mark has been phenomenal. Congratulations. All the data that we're reporting shows customers are leaning into it heavily Great adoption and super happy success. A US congratulations as well for great partnership. Mark three years, Uh, with the industry defining partnership. Ah, lot of people were skeptical. We're on the right side of history, I gotta say, we called >>it. That's right. It's an update. Yeah, No, look, we're super excited. Like you said, It's the third year anniversary of this game changing partnership and look, the relationship could not be stronger right across engineering the product teams to go to market teams really getting stronger and deeper every day. And at the end of the day, you know, of course, what it's about is innovating on behalf of our customers, delivering compelling new capabilities that allow them thio, migrate and modernize. And, you know, look, we're just really pleased with the partnership, right? And I think, as a result of that depth of joint engineering, building and delivering the service together, you know, we're proud to be able to say that it addresses are preferred public cloud partner for the Starbase workloads. >>You know, I remember at the time David talking to Terry Wise Ah, native West Side and Andy, of course on Ragu the architect for this vision of the partnership. And this changed how vm Ware has been doing partnerships on. I want to talk about that because I think that's a great use case of what I call the new cloud native reality that everyone's living in. But before we get there, Mark, there's some news tied around AWS and VM. Where could you take a minute to, uh, share the news around what's going on with VM World 10 0 You got connect. You got all kinds of enhancements. Just the update on the news. >>Yeah, sure. So you know, we continue Thio, listen closely to our customers and continue to deliver them new value, new capabilities and a few things we're gonna highlight at being world. The first is we've heard from many customers, you know, they love the ability to rapidly migrate their visa service workloads to the AWS Cloud and VMC on AWS is really a game changer. From that perspective on dso that continues to be really, really compelling use case for many customers. But what they've also said to us is, Look, it's not just about migrating to the cloud. It's also about migrating and then modernizing. And so, together with AWS, we have really brought together the richest set of tools for our customers to enable them to modernize those applications. Of course, we've talked about before. Customers have access to the full rich set of AWS services on Ben within VM or called on AWS. We're now announcing support for native kubernetes capabilities within VM Ware Cloud in eight of us taking advantage of the VM Ware Tansy Communities, good service. So we're really excited about bringing that that service in particular to our joint customers and then three other kind of key innovation that we're going to be talking about is around networking, right? And as our customer environments get larger and larger and they're looking to create a fairly sophisticated apologies between their on Prem Data Center between multiple VMC and AWS instances and between perhaps multiple native aws vpc s, we've done a lot of work together to really simplify the way that customers can connect all those environments together. Onda, maybe Dave wants toe talk a little about that. >>It did chime in. What's What's the news on your end to? What's the relationship and an update from the Amazon side for VM World? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the partnership has just been incredible working with being where Right, Right? Right from four years ago, when we first started with the idea of what could be a W s and beyond where do together. I think we've seen really deep engineering engagement, but also leadership engagement on support from leadership on both sides was really set. Set us up for the partnership that we have today, which has been phenomenal. You know, Mark was just talking about the transit connect feature that beyond whereas adopting and what you really seen, there is years of innovation on the networking side of the sea to where we've really understood deeply what customers need from a network. Understood the fact that they're trying to recreate some of those large networked apologies that they're doing on premise on, then trying to support them in a cloud way of supporting them in a cloud about, like, way. And so, you know, transit gateways to service under the hood that we released about two years ago. It reinvent. And so what we've been doing with being where he's working out. What is Transit Gateway mean within the VM Ware environment? And so really bringing customers that that rich connectivity that they need? You know, whether it's between the BBC's between the VM Ware environments, even back to on Prem or between regions on DSO. That's what transit connect now on being where it's gonna be utilizing and bringing to customers we're pretty excited about. You know what that means for our customers? >>You know, one of the trends I see coming out all the announcements. David, I want to get your thoughts on it because we talked briefly a few months ago, uh, for your summit virtual. But I want you to kind of put it in context of VM Ware because you're seeing virtualization of physical things. You know, Nick's with Project Monterey and all that stuff with within video and software. You see to you guys have seen this vision not just compute, but you talk about networking. You know, you have the really the first time this convergence of physical own software virtual and This is not new to you guys. I know this is the premise of Amazon Cloud. First, you have the building blocks as three NBC too. But now a slew of other services. But this trend is gonna continue. Certainly with covert and work at home, there's mawr need firm or compute more different kinds of compute. You got the physical layer from the network of the devices. This isn't gonna go away. I mean, I would just need some interviews about Space Force, and they're talking about software to find, um, devices you can't do break fix in the space. So you know all this is gonna be done with software and this idea of the physical virtual coming together I mean, I know I love the Virtual Cube were not in person, which we were. But this virtualization trend around the hardware this is this'll is all about the sea, but the sea spinning for years. How does that relate >>to be inward customer? So, I mean, I think the VM ware customers experience which realization right long before ec2 was around as well. When being we're back in the day with being workstation, uh, it's it's kind of central to what they've been able to do, you know, being able to virtualized environments, being able to stand up environments ready very quickly on a physical machine is what the English board for the customer, Easy to started in a similar place. You know, the strength of the C two is being able to get a B m in a few minutes. Andi, you know, we've just grown the what we can support in a virtualized world. So you think about where we started with very simple machines, you know, today is supporting things like HPC and and advanced. You know, accelerators like GP use. And if p g A s and so we've already pushed the virtual world now, interestingly enough, you know, Vienna is obviously doing the same thing with their hyper visor. You know, many, many happy customers there. The really interesting thing it was through the innovation that we were doing on the easy to side to work out. How do we really get the most out of virtualization? Historically, virtualization is being played with things like jitter and just performance. You couldn't really get the network performance there with CPU would stall and those are sort of the old issues. The cloud in the innovation we've been doing is largely gotten rid of those. And so it's actually almost the the the ability to remove the virtualization from easy to. That really was the ingredient that enabled us to allow VM Ware to run on this. And so that's where it all started. Back in late 2016 we started to work with my team saying, You know, we've actually built the ability through our nitro system, um, to not require our virtualization layer. And then we could replace that virtualization with the VM Ware virtualization layer and that that set us up for what we have today, right? That that made VM ware on AWS a reality that gave the VM Ware customer you know, the full VM ware virtualization support, which is what the applications have been. Both Paul, that's what they've really come. Thio love. I don't want to change all of that when they moved to the cloud and so being able to move those workloads to the cloud for being where you know on on AWS and and get the benefit of great hardware design together with the great opera visor from being where obviously, it's a virtual the end of the day with a lot of innovation that we need to make him that >>mark. I wanna get your thoughts on this because I remember when we again years ago when we covered it again on the right side of history of the prediction, we said It's gonna be a great thing, afraid of us. And the end where some of the other commentary was at that time was Oh, my God. VM was lost at the capitulated Amazon is gonna suck all the thousands and thousands of VM where customers into the cloud and they're gonna eat him up in Vienna. Where is gonna be sitting there? Uh, you know, inside of the road. Okay. Not the case. Your business performance has been exceptional. Okay? The customers have been resonating with the offering. It's been a win win. Can you talk about the business momentum and how this continues to go? Because again, everyone got it wrong on that side. This has been exactly how you guys had heated up. I mean, a little bit here, and they're not exactly, But from a business perspective, it hit the mark. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah. No. Look, we've been incredibly pleased that the customer adoption that we've seen for the service, um, in fact, you know, the total workload count on the service has increased by over 140% versus this time last year, right? So clearly, customers are adopting the service at a large scale on growing rapidly. But I think you sort of feel that killed that back a little bit, right? It's It's really driven by three use cases and the value that we're able to deliver the customers right? And so if you're a customer, that's gotta be severe based workload in your own data center, and you want to move to the AWS Cloud. You know the fastest, lowest cost lowest Chris Way to move that workload is using VM Ware Cloud on AWS, right? And so it's that use case. It's powering a lot of that consumption. Another interesting use case that Xdrive in a lot of demand and that we continue to invest and expand is disaster recovery, right? So there's some customers that still want to run some more clothes in their own data centers, but they'd like to build leverage the public cloud as a target for disaster recovery. And you think about it you're talking about, you know, Cloud delivered as a service and the elasticity and all of those benefits. Those really playoff strongly in the d r use case where you Onley really want to spend up that capacity in the scenario where you actually need it, right in the case of a natural disaster. And so VM were recently acquired a company called Atrium and we're using that technology to enable a new service we call VM Ware. Cloud D are on top of the VMC on AWS offering, and this is a really powerful capability because it allows our customers to significantly reduce the cost of disaster recovery by taking advantage of AWS is low cost s three storage, combined with some unique capabilities in the day trip service that allows us to store the V M. D. K. Is very cost effectively on the next three storage. And then, in the case of a disaster, we can spin up those hosts. You know, they've talked about the nitro host. I've been spin up those bare metal host with the being more hyper visor on it and automatically restart those workloads without requiring any. VM conversion is because, of course, it's all all these fear based, right? So you know, it's so we're really pleased with the business performance, but you know, sort of behind that, of course, is the value that we can deliver to our joint customers together. >>You know, the integration thing is interesting again. I think the success is that there's a partnership at the highest levels and trickles down into engineering. David, talk about what's next for AWS because, you know, after cloud, you've got cloud native integrations. They're gonna be needed across more partners and more customers. Um, but they don't wanna do the heavy lifting, right? So So if I'm a customer like, hey, you know what? I just want Mawr Cloud scale. I want more cloud capabilities, but I don't want to do all this integration. How does how does Amazon view that conversation? Because again, that's one of the things that every interview, every reinvent every time I talk to Andy and the team. It's undifferentiated, heavy lifting what our customers asking for free from from you guys. VM, where customers and What's the What's your thoughts on this? What do you guys thinking about right now? >>Absolutely. I think market head on a couple of key points there as well or at the customer in this case, off. I have a workload today that I run in my data center or running a cola facility, whatever it might be. And I run it for many years, Um, in many cases working with customers in industries like healthcare and finance. You know, where they've actually had these thes applications qualified or certified? I'm to actually one on that hardware. And so, you know, requiring them to move to a different hyper visor is obviously a ready they'd lift and may slow down the ultimate migration to the cloud. Um And so having vm ware cloud on AWS and the ability to say to those customers, you know, just bring your application and you'll workload and and honestly the benefit of the entire ecosystem that VM Ware provides and come and enjoy that on AWS and burst into aws eso that's just been enormously beneficial for our in customer, For AWS is probably aware. I think that's the thing that really makes the partnership incredibly strong. And from there, you know, these customers can pivot. And so one of the things that we've been doing together with Vienna, where is ongoing innovation? Right. So we recently just launched, um, support for our I three n uh storage instance type, which offers up to 50% discount storage per gig with VM ware. And there's a lot that went into that behind the scenes to make sure that that instance type is perfectly tuned for what VM were needed for their end customer. We're very excited to get that out. There are many, many customers so excited about the benefit that that brings to them, right? So they're getting all the benefit of AWS innovation while they keep the benefits that they've been enjoying on the VM Ware side. Um, and you know, that speaks to the largest sort of approach that AWS has taken in in several industries across several industries. Right being where, I think is probably the best example of that. But if you look at many other areas like our networking products, customers will often come to us and say, you know, I love using a certain type of load balance. So I love using this firewall. Um, you know, within my environment. And we have great partnerships of all those companies to say if your customer, while joint customer, wants to use whatever appliance, whatever application, you know, we have a full market place full of thousands of applications that are all certified to run on us. We want to make sure we can meet those customers where they are and simplify the immigration story for them as much as we can. >>All right, So I gotta put you guys on the spot. Mark will start with you, but you can't get the same answer. Um, to the same question. The question is, what are the customers most happy with with the partnership from a feature perspective? What's the one? What? What would you say, Mark, um is the big Ah ha. This really is amazing. I'm so happy because of this feature capability. >>Yeah, yeah, I mean, a little bit back to the discussion we're having before, but I think you know the killer use case Really for the service today is that cloud migration use case I was talking about before. And if you think about what it might have taken them previously. Right? Uh, you know, expensive time consuming. Um, you know, it requires changes to their environment. In some cases, with with VM or cloud on AWS, we could take the cloud migration that would previously been taken them perhaps years, millions or tens of millions of dollars. And we can shrink that down toe literally months, right. We have some customers like m i t. That migrated hundreds of applications literally over a weekend. Right. And we're able to do that because it's the same core enterprise Class V, and where capabilities of the customers already optimized their application to run on in their own data centers that now we've enabled on AWS as a cloud service so that that cloud migration use case kind of combined with the fact that we're, um that were delivered to them as a service in the AWS cloud. I think is, uh, you know, one of the one of the use cases that a lot of customers find extremely attractive. >>Alright, David, your turn from an M. A w s perspective. What are people happy with you for on this partnership? What praises? Are you getting some your way When someone says, Hey, man, this partners has been great. Amazon really is awesome for this. What would you say to that? >>Eso, you know, watch book about the migration I was going to choose sort of, You know, once they're in aws, um, the benefits of the power brakes writes the ability to scale on the mind. E think one of the great things about the record in AWS that VM Ware did is already built it as a cloud native service. And so, you know, the customers are able to provision additional capacity very easily. We have that capacity available on AWS, and so they're able to meet any sort of unexpected demand of scale. Um, and then together with the breadth of services that we have on a diverse is Well, you know, you and we've we thought very carefully about how being were customer would want to consume those and to make sure that the whole system set up to allow that to happen. And so allowing them to to broaden what they're using over time, is there. Engineers and teams find other services that allow them to innovate faster and, you know, bold more interesting applications so that it integrates incredibly well between AWS and VMware and customers benefit from that. >>I wanna ask you guys, um, or in the industry side, um, to comment on cloud native, um, mainly because one we cover it into it's kind of important trend. Um, recently, snowflake went public with the largest i p on the history of the of Wall Street, and it's an enterprise company. Okay, Um, and I was using that as an example because actually being where was the second most popular, uh, Hypo happens to be another enterprise company if and I was commenting on this, and I want to get your reaction to it And that is, is that if you look at the mega trend that's going on now, of all the things people talk about, it's the cloud native That's the most interesting, because this is all the value. If you look at the modern applications all the way down to the networking, everything in between. It's all about cloud native, And it's not just about cloud public cloud. It's not about It's an operating model when we talk about that. But Cloud native is the big wave that people are on. And if you're on it, your modern. This is not just hand waving. It's legit. I mean, you're seeing benefits of it. You're seeing speed, time to value all the things that people talk about, it, the events. Could you guys comment on why Cloud native is so important today and why customers and developers should be really thinking through what that is for them. Um, David will start with you. >>Absolutely. So for us part native really means, you know, have you built your application in a way that takes advantage of the benefits of the cloud? And so are you able to scare the application horizontally? Are you able, Thio? You know, building away That's redundant Across multiple data centers. Are you able to utilize services that are provided by, you know, aws, the cloud provider Thio to not have your teams build that And so what it ultimately means is you're able to spend more time focused on on building stuff that really matters. You know, if your application So you mentioned Snowflake, you know there are a great AWS customer work very closely with them and and they're able Thio, have us around a lot of the infrastructure, all the infrastructure for them in the power. And they can really focus on building an absolutely incredible data, whereas in solution for their end customer and we innovate very closely with them. And so that's really what it means, you know. And I think organizations that have gotten themselves there ready get a lot of benefit. They're able to innovate faster. They're able Thio deliver more to the end customer. You know, we spent a lot of time with companies that you wouldn't say a cloud native today and as a cloud provider, azi exciting as it is to support the cloud native customer, it's also incredibly important that we find a way to support the company. That's on a journey towards adopting the cloud, right? They've got a long history. Maybe they've been around for many, many, many years. Andi, I've got a large application stack that they need to move. And so that's where our migration programs really support customers. You need to bring non card native applications and then we're able to work with them over time to make them, you know, more cloud native and get a lot of those benefits. And so it's a journey that I think many of companies on. Some started there, and some have a way to get their differently. Has a lot of benefit. >>Isn't Snowflake really in Just a example of value creation? I mean, it's not about that. They're on Amazon. You're happy about that. But it shows that you don't have to go a certain way. If you create value, speed, scale speaks for itself. So that's just that could be an enterprise. That could be startup. That could be the Cube. It could be anybody, right? I mean, don't you see it that way? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, they had a great use case that a customer need. It's in a really interesting area, obviously dealing with big data. And so I think you know, there's there's really no limit there, >>Mark. You guys are in the modern app. That's what you're hearing. It's one of the things that people gonna wanna come out of co vid. They're gonna wanna have a growth strategy. Cloud native. Why is it important? And what's your take on this? What's your reaction to the cloud native being the big wave? >>Yeah, I mean, I think. I think Dave said it. You know very well. I mean, when I talked to customers, you know, regardless of where they are in that journey, they all have some form of digital transformation agenda. Right? And at the end of the day, they wanna deliver better services to their end customers because they know that's what different is going to differentiate them. Or they want a better empower their employees, right? And as part of trying to deliver that value to their customers, their employees, you know, they want to focus their time and energy on the things that really differentiate them. Right? And, you know, for many of them that that means, you know, they don't wanna have to worry about, you know, upgrading some infrastructure software, right? That's not that's not delivering value to their to their customers. And so, you know, I think as they go down that journey, you know, we're really pleased to be ableto partner. What they did you ask to be able to create these, uh, you know, these powerful platforms together between VM ware and AWS that really deliver a lot of value to customers and allow them to focus on what's important their business, right? And, you know, by bringing together those enterprise class VM, or capabilities that hundreds of thousands of customers trust for their most mission critical workloads. Combining that with eyes, they have talked about the possibility of agility, the scalability of the dust cloud and then sort of, you know, not just those existing workloads, but also enabling a rich set of new services those customers can take advantage of to modernize. You know, whether it's VM Ware services like I talked about before with our native kubernetes capability built into BMC or whether it's the you know, hundreds and growing portfolio abated bus services, you know, giving them all, giving them the power of that full toolkit as a service so they can focus on building value on top. I mean, that's e think, really they want an equation. But that's why so many customers are moving down that path together with us. >>Well, congratulations. I want to say to you because David Lynch has been digging into the buyer behavior data, looking at the what the budget projections gonna be and VM ware on AWS has been strongly performing, and it's doing really well. Congratulations. And David. Great to have you back on. And you got reinvent less than 60 days away. Can you give us a little taste, teaser and taste of what you got going on? I know you can't reveal, but what kind of generally we're gonna be seeing at reinvent, uh, with E c two and your team >>absolutely reinvents a little different this year. It's It's obviously virtual on, so we're pretty excited about that. We think it will bring a new flavor. And so there's a lot of planning going on both in terms of product delivery. It was a It was a great time of year for us as we finish up a lot about big releases aimed at reinvent, then obviously working on content and presentations. And so, you know, a lot of interesting stuff for customers to think about is that >>they're not revealing anything. You just you know. Okay, you're gonna have some announcements. I'm sure you see two. That's a big announcements. Exactly. Hiding the ball, as they say. David Brown, vice president of Easy to it. Amazon Web services. AWS, Markle, Omar s v P. And GM. A cloud Service business unit at VM Ware. Um, great partnership. Congratulations. We'll be following it. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thank >>you very much. >>Okay, I'm John. For with the Cube. We're here in Palo Alto. Remote for the Cube. Virtual for VM World 2020. Virtual couldn't be face to face. We're doing our best with our cube virtual to get you the content. Thanks for watching.

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so we're bringing you the virtual interviews remotely. And at the end of the day, you know, of course, what it's about is innovating on behalf of our customers, You know, I remember at the time David talking to Terry Wise Ah, native West Side and Andy, The first is we've heard from many customers, you know, What's What's the news on your end to? And so, you know, transit gateways to service under the hood and they're talking about software to find, um, devices you can't do break fix in the space. that gave the VM Ware customer you know, the full VM ware virtualization support, Uh, you know, inside of the road. for the service, um, in fact, you know, the total workload count on the service you know, after cloud, you've got cloud native integrations. And so, you know, requiring them to move to a different hyper visor is All right, So I gotta put you guys on the spot. I think is, uh, you know, one of the one of the use cases that a lot of customers find extremely attractive. What are people happy with you for Um, and then together with the breadth of services that we have on a diverse is Well, you know, you and we've we thought very carefully is that if you look at the mega trend that's going on now, of all the things people talk about, services that are provided by, you know, aws, the cloud provider Thio to not have your teams But it shows that you don't have And so I think you know, there's there's really no limit there, It's one of the things that people gonna wanna come out of co the scalability of the dust cloud and then sort of, you know, not just those existing workloads, I want to say to you because David Lynch has been digging into the buyer behavior data, And so, you know, You just you know. We're doing our best with our cube virtual to get you the content.

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Derek Manky and Aamir Lakhani, FortiGuard Labs | CUBE Conversation, August 2020


 

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation, >>Everyone. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John for host of the Cube here in the Cubes Palo Alto studios during the co vid crisis. Square Quarantine with our crew, but we got the remote interviews. Got great to get great guests here from 44 to guard Fortinet, 40 Guard Labs, Derek Manky chief Security Insights and Global Threat alliances. At 14 it's 40 guard labs and, um, are Lakhani. Who's the lead researcher for the Guard Labs. Guys, great to see you. Derek. Good to see you again. Um, are you meet you? >>Hey, it's it's it's been a while and that it happened so fast, >>it just seems, are say it was just the other day. Derek, we've done a couple interviews in between. A lot of flow coming out of Florida net for the guards. A lot of action, certainly with co vid everyone's pulled back home. The bad actors taking advantage of the situation. The surface areas increased really is the perfect storm for security. Uh, in terms of action, bad actors are at all time high new threats here is going on. Take us through what you guys were doing. What's your team makeup look like? What are some of the roles and you guys were seeing on your team? And how's that transcend to the market? >>Yeah, sure, Absolutely. So you're right. I mean, like, you know, like I was saying earlier this this is all this always happens fast and furious. We couldn't do this without, you know, a world class team at 40 guard labs eso we've grown our team now to over 235 globally. There's different rules within the team. You know, if we look 20 years ago, the rules used to be just very pigeonholed into, say, anti virus analysis. Right now we have Thio account for when we're looking at threats. We have to look at that growing attack surface. We have to look at where these threats coming from. How frequently are they hitting? What verticals are they hitting? You know what regions? What are the particular techniques? Tactics, procedures, You know, we have threat. This is the world of threat Intelligence, Of course. Contextualizing that information and it takes different skill sets on the back end, and a lot of people don't really realize the behind the scenes. You know what's happening on bears. A lot of magic happen not only from what we talked about before in our last conversation from artificial intelligence and machine learning, that we do a 40 yard labs and automation, but the people. And so today we want to focus on the people on and talk about you know how on the back ends, we approach a particular threat. We're going to talk to the world, a ransom and ransomware. Look at how we dissect threats. How correlate that how we use tools in terms of threat hunting as an example, And then how we actually take that to that last mile and and make it actionable so that, you know, customers are protected. How we share that information with Keith, right until sharing partners. But again it comes down to the people. We never have enough people in the industry. There's a big shortages, we know, but it it's a really key critical element, and we've been building these training programs for over a decade within 40 guard lab. So you know, you know, John, this this to me is why, exactly why, I always say, and I'm sure Americans share this to that. There's never a dull day in the office. I know we hear that all the time, but I think today you know, all the viewers really get a new idea of why that is, because this is very dynamic. And on the back end, there's a lot of things that doing together our hands dirty with this, >>you know, the old expression started playing Silicon Valley is if you're in the arena, that's where the action and it's different than sitting in the stands watching the game. You guys are certainly in that arena. And, you know, we've talked and we cover your your threat report that comes out, Um, frequently. But for the folks that aren't in the weeds on all the nuances of security, can you kind of give the 101 ransomware. What's going on? What's the state of the ransomware situation? Um, set the stage because that's still continues to be a threat. I don't go a week, but I don't read a story about another ransomware and then it leaks out. Yeah, they paid 10 million in Bitcoin or something like I mean, this Israel. That's a real ongoing threat. What is it, >>quite a bit? Yeah, eso I'll give sort of the one on one and then maybe capacity toe mark, who's on the front lines dealing with this every day. You know, if we look at the world of I mean, first of all, the concept to ransom, obviously you have people that that has gone extended way, way before, you know, cybersecurity. Right? Um, in the world of physical crime s Oh, of course. You know the world's first ransom, where viruses actually called PC cyborg. This is in 1989. The ransom payment was demanded to appeal box from leave. It was Panama City at the time not to effective on floppy disk. Very small audience. Not a big attack surface. I didn't hear much about it for years. Um, you know, in really it was around 2000 and 10. We started to see ransomware becoming prolific, and what they did was somewhat cybercriminals. Did was shift on success from ah, fake antivirus software model, which was, you know, popping up a whole bunch of, you know said your computer is infected with 50 or 60 viruses. Chaos will give you an anti virus solution, Which was, of course, fake. You know, people started catching on. You know, the giggles up people caught onto that. So they weren't making a lot of money selling this project software. Uh, enter Ransomware. And this is where ransomware really started to take hold because it wasn't optional to pay for the software. It was mandatory almost for a lot of people because they were losing their data. They couldn't reverse engineer the current. Uh, the encryption kind of decrypt it with any universal tool. Ransomware today is very rigid. We just released our threat report for the first half of 2020. And we saw we've seen things like master boot record nbr around somewhere. This is persistent. It sits before your operating system when you boot up your computer. So it's hard to get rid of, um, very strong. Um, you know, public by the key cryptography that's being so each victim is infected with the different key is an example. The list goes on, and you know I'll save that for for the demo today. But that's basically it's It's very it's prolific and we're seeing shit. Not only just ransomware attacks for data, we're now starting to see ransom for extortion, for targeted ransom cases that we're going after, you know, critical business. Essentially, it's like a D O s holding revenue streams around too. So the ransom demands were getting higher because of this is Well, it's complicated. >>Yeah, I was mentioning, Omar, I want you to weigh in. I mean, 10 million is a lot we reported earlier this month. Garment was the company that was act I t guy completely locked down. They pay 10 million. Um, garment makes all those devices and a Z. We know this is impacting That's real numbers. So I mean, it's another little ones, but for the most part, it's new. It's, you know, pain in the butt Thio full on business disruption and extortion. Can you explain how it all works before I got it? Before we go to the demo, >>you know, you're you're absolutely right. It is a big number, and a lot of organizations are willing to pay that number to get their data back. Essentially their organization and their business is at a complete standstill. When they don't pay, all their files are inaccessible to them. Ransomware in general, what does end up from a very basic or review is it basically makes your files not available to you. They're encrypted. They have a essentially a pass code on them that you have to have the correct pass code to decode them. Ah, lot of times that's in the form of a program or actually a physical password you have type in. But you don't get that access to get your files back unless you pay the ransom. Ah, lot of corporations these days, they are not only paying the ransom, they're actually negotiating with the criminals as well. They're trying to say, Oh, you want 10 million? How about four million? Sometimes that it goes on as well, but it's Ah, it's something that organizations know that if they don't have the proper backups and the Attackers are getting smart, they're trying to go after the backups as well. They're trying to go after your duplicate files, so sometimes you don't have a choice, and organizations will will pay the ransom >>and it's you know they're smart. There's a business they know the probability of buy versus build or pay versus rebuild, so they kind of know where to attack. They know the tactics. The name is vulnerable. It's not like just some kitty script thing going on. This is riel system fistic ated stuff. It's and it's and this highly targeted. Can you talk about some use cases there and what's goes on with that kind of attack? >>Absolutely. The cybercriminals are doing reconnaissance. They're trying to find out as much as they can about their victims. And what happens is they're trying to make sure that they can motivate their victims in the fastest way possible to pay the ransom as well. Eh? So there's a lot of attacks going on. We usually we're finding now is ransomware is sometimes the last stage of an attack, so an attacker may go into on organization. They may already be taking data out of that organization. They may be stealing customer data P I, which is personal, identifiable information such as Social Security numbers or or driver's licenses or credit card information. Once they've done their entire attack, once they've gone, everything they can Ah, lot of times their end stage. There last attack is ransomware, and they encrypt all the files on the system and try and try and motivate the victim to pay as fast as possible and as much as possible as well. >>You know, it's interesting. I thought of my buddy today. It's like casing the joint. They check it out. They do their re kon reconnaissance. They go in, identify what's the move that's move to make. How to extract the most out of the victim in this case, Target. Um, and it really I mean, it's just go on a tangent, you know? Why don't we have the right to bear our own arms? Why can't we fight back? I mean, the end of the day, Derek, this is like, Who's protecting me? I mean, >>e do >>what? To protect my own, build my own army, or does the government help us? I mean, that's at some point, I got a right to bear my own arms here, right? I mean, this is the whole security paradigm. >>Yeah, so I mean, there's a couple of things, right? So first of all, this is exactly why we do a lot of that. I was mentioning the skills shortage and cyber cyber security professionals. Example. This is why we do a lot of the heavy lifting on the back end. Obviously, from a defensive standpoint, you obviously have the red team blue team aspect. How do you first, Um, no. There is what is to fight back by being defensive as well, too, and also by, you know, in the world that threat intelligence. One of the ways that we're fighting back is not necessarily by going and hacking the bad guys, because that's illegal in jurisdictions, right? But how we can actually find out who these people are, hit them where it hurts. Freeze assets go after money laundering that works. You follow the cash transactions where it's happening. This is where we actually work with key law enforcement partners such as Inter Pool is an example. This is the world, the threat intelligence. That's why we're doing a lot of that intelligence work on the back end. So there's other ways toe actually go on the offense without necessarily weaponizing it per se right like he's using, you know, bearing your own arms, Aziz said. There's different forms that people may not be aware of with that and that actually gets into the world of, you know, if you see attacks happening on your system, how you how you can use security tools and collaborate with threat intelligence? >>Yeah, I think that I think that's the key. I think the key is these new sharing technologies around collective intelligence is gonna be, ah, great way to kind of have more of an offensive collective strike. But I think fortifying the defense is critical. I mean, that's there's no other way to do that. >>Absolutely. I mean the you know, we say that's almost every week, but it's in simplicity. Our goal is always to make it more expensive for the cyber criminal to operate. And there's many ways to do that right you could be could be a pain to them by by having a very rigid, hard and defense. That means that if if it's too much effort on their end, I mean, they have roos and their in their sense, right, too much effort on there, and they're gonna go knocking somewhere else. Um, there's also, you know, a zay said things like disruption, so ripping infrastructure offline that cripples them. Yeah, it's wack a mole they're going to set up somewhere else. But then also going after people themselves, Um, again, the cash networks, these sorts of things. So it's sort of a holistic approach between anything. >>Hey, it's an arms race. Better ai better cloud scale always helps. You know, it's a ratchet game. Okay, tomorrow I want to get into this video. It's of ransomware four minute video. I'd like you to take us through you to lead you to read. Researcher, >>take us >>through this video and, uh, explain what we're looking at. Let's roll the video. >>All right? Sure s. So what we have here is we have the victims. That's top over here. We have a couple of things on this. Victims that stop. We have ah, batch file, which is essentially going to run the ransom where we have the payload, which is the code behind the ransomware. And then we have files in this folder, and this is where you typically find user files and, ah, really world case. This would be like Microsoft Microsoft Word documents or your Power point presentations. Over here, we just have a couple of text files that we've set up we're going to go ahead and run the ransomware and sometimes Attackers. What they do is they disguise this like they make it look like a like, important word document. They make it look like something else. But once you run, the ransomware usually get a ransom message. And in this case, the ransom message says your files are encrypted. Uh, please pay this money to this Bitcoin address. That obviously is not a real Bitcoin address that usually they look a little more complicated. But this is our fake Bitcoin address, but you'll see that the files now are encrypted. You cannot access them. They've been changed. And unless you pay the ransom, you don't get the files. Now, as the researchers, we see files like this all the time. We see ransomware all the all the time. So we use a variety of tools, internal tools, custom tools as well as open source tools. And what you're seeing here is open source tool is called the cuckoo sandbox, and it shows us the behavior of the ransomware. What exactly is a ransom we're doing in this case? You can see just clicking on that file launched a couple of different things that launched basically a command execute herbal, a power shell. It launched our windows shell and then it did things on the file. It basically had registry keys. It had network connections. It changed the disk. So this kind of gives us behind the scenes. Look at all the processes that's happening on the ransomware and just that one file itself. Like I said, there's multiple different things now what we want to do As researchers, we want to categorize this ransomware into families. We wanna try and determine the actors behind that. So we dump everything we know in the ransomware in the central databases. And then we mind these databases. What we're doing here is we're actually using another tool called malt ego and, uh, use custom tools as well as commercial and open source tools. But but this is a open source and commercial tool. But what we're doing is we're basically taking the ransomware and we're asking malty, go to look through our database and say, like, do you see any like files? Or do you see any types of incidences that have similar characteristics? Because what we want to do is we want to see the relationship between this one ransomware and anything else we may have in our system because that helps us identify maybe where the ransom that's connecting to where it's going thio other processes that may be doing. In this case, we can see multiple I P addresses that are connected to it so we can possibly see multiple infections weaken block different external websites. If we can identify a command and control system, we can categorize this to a family. And sometimes we can even categorize this to a threat actor that has claimed responsibility for it. Eso It's essentially visualizing all the connections and the relationship between one file and everything else we have in our database in this example. Off course, we put this in multiple ways. We can save these as reports as pdf type reports or, you know, usually HTML or other searchable data that we have back in our systems. And then the cool thing about this is this is available to all our products, all our researchers, all our specialty teams. So when we're researching botnets when we're researching file based attacks when we're researching, um, you know, I P reputation We have a lot of different IOC's or indicators of compromise that we can correlate where attacks goes through and maybe even detective new types of attacks as well. >>So the bottom line is you got the tools using combination of open source and commercial products. Toe look at the patterns of all ransomware across your observation space. Is that right? >>Exactly. I should you like a very simple demo. It's not only open source and commercial, but a lot of it is our own custom developed products as well. And when we find something that works, that logic that that technique, we make sure it's built into our own products as well. So our own customers have the ability to detect the same type of threats that we're detecting as well. At four of our labs intelligence that we acquire that product, that product of intelligence, it's consumed directly by our projects. >>Also take me through what, what's actually going on? What it means for the customers. So border guard labs. You're looking at all the ransom where you see in the patterns Are you guys proactively looking? Is is that you guys were researching you Look at something pops on the radar. I mean, take us through What is what What goes on? And then how does that translate into a customer notification or impact? >>So So, yeah, if you look at a typical life cycle of these attacks, there's always proactive and reactive. That's just the way it is in the industry, right? So of course we try to be a wear Some of the solutions we talked about before. And if you look at an incoming threat, first of all, you need visibility. You can't protect or analyze anything that you can't see. So you got to get your hands on visibility. We call these I, O. C s indicators a compromise. So this is usually something like, um, actual execute herbal file, like the virus from the malware itself. It could be other things that are related to it, like websites that could be hosting the malware as an example. So once we have that seed, we call it a seed. We could do threat hunting from there, so we can analyze that right? If it's ah piece of malware or a botnet weaken do analysis on that and discover more malicious things that this is doing. Then we go investigate those malicious things and we really you know, it's similar to the world of C. S. I write have these different gods that they're connecting. We're doing that at hyper scale on DWI. Use that through these tools that Omar was talking. So it's really a life cycle of getting, you know, the malware incoming seeing it first, um, analyzing it on, then doing action on that. Right? So it's sort of a three step process, and the action comes down to what tomorrow is saying water following that to our customers so that they're protected. But then in tandem with that, we're also going further. And I'm sharing it, if if applicable to, say, law enforcement partners, other threat Intel sharing partners to And, um, there's not just humans doing that, right? So the proactive peace again, This is where it comes to artificial intelligence machine learning. Um, there's a lot of cases where we're automatically doing that analysis without humans. So we have a I systems that are analyzing and actually creating protection on its own. Two. So it Zack white interest technology. >>A decision. At the end of the day, you want to protect your customers. And so this renders out if I'm afford a net customer across the portfolio. The goal here is to protect them from ransomware. Right? That's the end of game. >>Yeah, And that's a very important thing when you start talking these big dollar amounts that were talking earlier comes Thio the damages that air down from estimates. >>E not only is a good insurance, it's just good to have that fortification. Alright, So dark. I gotta ask you about the term the last mile because, you know, we were before we came on camera. You know, I'm band with junkie, always want more bandwidth. So the last mile used to be a term for last mile to the home where there was telephone lines. Now it's fiber and by five. But what does that mean to you guys and security is that Does that mean something specific? >>Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. The easiest way to describe that is actionable, right? So one of the challenges in the industry is we live in a very noisy industry when it comes thio cybersecurity. What I mean by that is because of that growing attacks for fists on do you know, you have these different attack vectors. You have attacks not only coming in from email, but websites from, you know, DDOS attacks. There's there's a lot of volume that's just going to continue to grow is the world of I G N O T. S O. What ends up happening is when you look at a lot of security operation centers for customers as an example, um, there are it's very noisy. It's, um you can guarantee that every day you're going to see some sort of probe, some sort of attack activity that's happening. And so what that means is you get a lot of protection events, a lot of logs, and when you have this worldwide shortage of security professionals, you don't have enough people to process those logs and actually started to say, Hey, this looks like an attack. I'm gonna go investigate it and block it. So this is where the last mile comes in because ah, lot of the times that you know these logs, they light up like Christmas. And I mean, there's a lot of events that are happening. How do you prioritize that? How do you automatically add action? Because The reality is, if it's just humans, doing it on that last mile is often going back to your bandwidth terms. There's too much too much lately. See right, So how do you reduce that late and see? That's where the automation the AI machine learning comes in. Thio solve that last mile problem toe automatically either protection. Especially important because you have to be quicker than the attacker. It's an arms race like E. >>I think what you guys do with four to Guard Labs is super important. Not like the industry, but for society at large, as you have kind of all this, you know, shadow, cloak and dagger kind of attacks systems, whether it's National Security international or just for, you know, mafias and racketeering and the bad guys. Can you guys take a minute and explain the role of 40 guards specifically and and why you guys exist? I mean, obviously there's a commercial reason you both on the four net that you know trickles down into the products. That's all good for the customers. I get that, but there's more to the fore to guard than just that. You guys talk about this trend and security business because it is very clear that there's a you know, uh, collective sharing culture developing rapidly for societal benefit. Can you take them into something that, >>Yeah, sure, I'll get my thoughts. Are you gonna that? So I'm going to that Teoh from my point of view, I mean, there's various functions, So we've just talked about that last mile problem. That's the commercial aspect we create through 40 yard labs, 40 yards, services that are dynamic and updated to security products because you need intelligence products to be ableto protect against intelligence attacks. That's just the defense again, going back to How can we take that further? I mean, we're not law enforcement ourselves. We know a lot about the bad guys and the actors because of the intelligence work that you do. But we can't go in and prosecute. We can share knowledge and we can train prosecutors, right? This is a big challenge in the industry. A lot of prosecutors don't know how to take cybersecurity courses to court, and because of that, a lot of these cybercriminals rain free. That's been a big challenge in the industry. So, you know, this has been close to my heart over 10 years, I've been building a lot of these key relationships between private public sector as an example, but also private sector things like Cyber Threat Alliance, where a founding member of the Cyber Threat Alliance, if over 28 members and that alliance. And it's about sharing intelligence to level that playing field because Attackers room freely. What I mean by that is there's no jurisdictions for them. Cybercrime has no borders. Um, they could do a million things, uh, wrong and they don't care. We do a million things right. One thing wrong, and it's a challenge. So there's this big collaboration that's a big part of 40 guard. Why exists to is to make the industry better. Thio, you know, work on protocols and automation and and really fight fight this together. Well, remaining competitors. I mean, we have competitors out there, of course, on DSO it comes down to that last mile problem. John is like we can share intelligence within the industry, but it's on Lee. Intelligence is just intelligence. How do you make it useful and actionable? That's where it comes down to technology integration. And, >>um, are what's your take on this, uh, societal benefit because, you know, I've been saying since the Sony hack years ago that, you know, when you have nation states that if they put troops on our soil, the government would respond. Um, but yet virtually they're here, and the private sector's defend for themselves. No support. So I think this private public partnership thing is very relevant. I think is ground zero of the future build out of policy because, you know, we pay for freedom. Why don't we have cyber freedom is if we're gonna run a business. Where's our help from the government? Pay taxes. So again, if a military showed up, you're not gonna see, you know, cos fighting the foreign enemy, right? So, again, this is a whole new change over it >>really is. You have to remember that cyberattacks puts everyone on even playing field, right? I mean, you know, now don't have to have a country that has invested a lot in weapons development or nuclear weapons or anything like that, right? Anyone can basically come up to speed on cyber weapons as long as they have an Internet connection. So it evens the playing field, which makes it dangerous, I guess, for our enemies, you know, But absolutely that I think a lot of us, You know, from a personal standpoint, a lot of us have seen researchers have seen organizations fail through cyber attacks. We've seen the frustration we've seen. Like, you know, besides organization, we've seen people like, just like grandma's loser pictures of their, you know, other loved ones because they can being attacked by ransom, where I think we take it very personally when people like innocent people get attacked and we make it our mission to make sure we can do everything we can to protect them. But But I will add that the least here in the U. S. The federal government actually has a lot of partnerships and ah, lot of programs to help organizations with cyber attacks. Three us cert is always continuously updating, you know, organizations about the latest attacks. Infra Guard is another organization run by the FBI, and a lot of companies like Fortinet and even a lot of other security companies participate in these organizations so everyone can come up to speed and everyone share information. So we all have a fighting chance. >>It's a whole new wave paradigm. You guys on the cutting edge, Derek? Always great to see a mark. Great to meet you remotely looking forward to meeting in person when the world comes back to normal as usual. Thanks for the great insights. Appreciate it. >>All right. Thank God. Pleasure is always >>okay. Q conversation here. I'm John for a host of the Cube. Great insightful conversation around security Ransomware with a great demo. Check it out from Derek and, um, are from 14 guard labs. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching.

Published Date : Sep 4 2020

SUMMARY :

from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. I'm John for host of the Cube here in the Cubes Palo Alto studios during What are some of the roles and you guys were seeing on your team? I know we hear that all the time, but I think today you know, all the viewers really get a new idea you know, the old expression started playing Silicon Valley is if you're in the arena, that's where the action and it's different You know, if we look at the world of I mean, first of all, the concept to ransom, obviously you have people that that has gone It's, you know, pain in the butt Thio full on business disruption and lot of times that's in the form of a program or actually a physical password you have type and it's you know they're smart. in the fastest way possible to pay the ransom as well. I mean, the end of the day, To protect my own, build my own army, or does the government help us? the world of, you know, if you see attacks happening on your system, how you how you can use security I mean, that's there's no other way to do that. I mean the you know, we say that's almost every week, I'd like you to take us through you to lead you to read. Let's roll the video. and this is where you typically find user files and, ah, So the bottom line is you got the tools using combination of open source and commercial So our own customers have the ability to detect the same type of threats that we're detecting as well. You're looking at all the ransom where you see in the patterns Are you guys proactively looking? Then we go investigate those malicious things and we really you know, it's similar to the world of C. At the end of the day, you want to protect your customers. Yeah, And that's a very important thing when you start talking these big dollar amounts that were talking earlier comes I gotta ask you about the term the last mile because, you know, we were before we came on camera. ah, lot of the times that you know these logs, they light up like Christmas. I mean, obviously there's a commercial reason you both on the four net that you know because of the intelligence work that you do. I've been saying since the Sony hack years ago that, you know, when you have nation states that if they put troops I mean, you know, now don't have to have a country that has invested a lot in weapons Great to meet you remotely looking forward to meeting in person when the world comes back to normal I'm John for a host of the Cube.

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Omer Asad, HPE | HPE Discover 2020


 

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube's coverage of HP. Discover the virtual experience. Gonna be digging into some primary storage. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guest. Former Assad. He's the vice president and general manager for both primary storage and data services with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Omar, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks to happy to be here. Thanks for the invite. All >>right, so So why did you start out? Frame out for us? Kind of Ah, where primary storage fits in in the portfolio in your charter >>there. Thanks. Yeah. So primary storage is a combination off hp, primera, HP, nimble and all the associative software and data management services that go along with it. We are part of the broader HP storage umbrella. In addition to that, we have the HB h C I business and the HP complete partnerships that partner with our go to market partners and bring total intentions for our customers. From my perspective on the general manager for Primary nimble and all the data management services that come along with it. So that's what people. The primary storage portfolio mainly centered around block services for our for our customers. >>Excellent. Well, Omer, you know, you've been in the storage industry for quite a while. We always know that the only constant in our industry is that things are always changing. However, here in 2020 it's a little bit more unusual than normal. Give us a little bit of insight as to you know, how your customers responding, how HPE is helping them during the current global pandemic. >>Obviously, you know, across the industry across the world, it's a very difficult time, you know, definitely where customers are facing some challenges from our perspective. You know, one of the biggest things that we noticed was in these unprecedented safety is the paramount eso concern for each one of your customers and for HP ways in our fellow sort of workers around the globe, the access to the data center has costs, um, some challenges for our customers, obviously for capacity expansion purposes, for scaling up work from home needs. You can do all of them. But for all of our customers, you know, as the pandemic kid in the shelter in place. Global policies came across the access to it. Did the data center became a big problems? Well, right, so just, you know, a lot of vendors that make changes to it. After these solutions off an HP perspective, we added a couple of policies, like 90 days payment difference. In addition to that, a bunch of financing capabilities to allow our customers to focus on that cash flow help on not to worry about some of the purchase decisions, but it comes from a storage perspective now. In addition to that, HP was also fortunate enough to have to cloud storage services. We have data protection online services. They have block storage online services. These are just sort of cloud based services that are available in conjunction with our portfolio to our customers. So one of the unique ways that we were able to help our customers is for without accessing their data center, they were able to slip a lot of their own from storage and former Peter snapshots or data migrations into our cloud storage subscriptions, which we expect extended to our customers and they were able to expand, and we're just in time capacity to scale up there in data center needs without actually accessing the business. So some down perspective. It was very profound experience that we had in order to sort of keep our customers operations running while we were shipping at psychopathy an expansion capacity for them as they scale sort of work from home operation. Like VD. I database scale up as as they adapted to these sort of uncertain times. >>Well, excellent. Absolutely. A spotlight has been shown on you can the products and services with liver for what we needed. That flexibility that you mentioned so critically important. Great to see things like the financial pieces to to make sure you can help companies in these uncertain times here at Discover. So, of course, let's tee up and not keep things waiting any longer. Uh, what's new? Ah, for your piece. Polio. >>So there are a couple of the new announcements that we're bringing to the market over here, right? And one of the biggest ones that I'm most excited by is obviously autonomous operations and ai ops that we're now extending, uh, for our customers for actually taking action. So what that means is, we were sort of the first to market with AI ops, which is our info side technology that was built off the top three nimble storage acquisition that happened within HP. Then we sort of extended that to, uh, to be primarily, we extended that to HP three par on then Also, we're now extending that to be simplicity so that the enormity of the size off this AI operation on automation that it just continues to grow right from. From from a primary perspective, especially, we're now bringing intelligent and intelligence autonomous operations on two primary as well, which basically means all the models and all the AI engines that we have trained for analytics for helping our customers. Our 13 workloads for providing proactive support and pro active recommendations to impose a couple of those models are now ported into our tiers of the portfolio. That is HP primarily so not only can we make recommendations in primary, but now we have also made the Kent. If the customer allows us to go ahead and actually implement those decisions, eso, Primerica and automatically adjusts without having the user intervene because in tier zero applications, the time to intervene is very, very no food non existent. So given certain set of parameters and given a certain set of policies. Http Primary. I can now execute the recommendations autonomously and make real time changes, the workloads and profiled in US policies to keep our customers Boeing rather than just a recommendation. Again, this is the first of its class for AI, and autonomous applications with intelligence is not only in recommendations but now also going ahead and executing. That's decisions from a primary storage perspective. >>O Mara with the things that you were just talking about, this bring us inside. You know what's changing inside the customers that you're working with, you know, traditionally, storage. You know, you had a storage administrator, people thinking about you know, the speeds and feeds and all the knobs that they can turn with storage. When you start talking about autonomous and AI functions coming in, I have to expect there's different requirements from the customer and there's different people engage with it s o, you know, bring us inside what you're seeing at the customer side. >>It's actually interesting you here you could explode on, right, So from a customer perspective, it's always you know the the do more with less right that is happening on the training side that is happening on the customer persona side. So, you know, simplifying the portfolio. Is it absolutely one of the biggest, therefore, customers? They're the general push the words the I t generalist back there. Management perspective. From a perspective, there's a lot of simple City that is desired. So one of the biggest things that we have changed with 18 primarily is that if the industry's first tier zero platform, it gives 100% availability guarantee s so it really simplifies from a responsibility perspective from a customer's perspective, where we picked up most of the risk by giving the customers 100% availability guarantee. It's the industry's first year zero platform that is self upgradable, self installing and now also self autonomously executing operations on the customer's behalf. So again, from a monitoring perspective, from from an installation perspective from a day to day operational cost perspective, it's really, really ties into that. Do more with less team from a customer's perspective, right? And then the maximum from an AI ops perspective. You know, Prospect Analytics. We were the 1st 1 to bring that to the market. Now we've extended up to it across the portfolio on and then some recommendations. Perspective. Not only there are these proactive recommendations, but then also, if the customer allows us, we will go ahead and execute those recommendations in order to 24 by seven mission critical operations continuously running and continuously adapting to changing conditions from a customer perspective and then on the customer side. Again, there's a lot more simple a city that has been enforced into the environment because again yourself installed so complete, self automate, self autonomous, sort of storage operations happy introduced in tier zero environment. And I think that's the biggest breakthrough in bringing that simplicity in the Tier zero. >>Excellent. You also you mentioned that one of the things that companies air leveraging now when they need to be working remote is the remote backup capability. Bring us the latest as to what he's doing when it comes to a cloud backup. >>So against what you raised, an important point right? One of the biggest things that this pandemic has so far made the ICTY operational staff realized that although there could be an outage, but there could be an outage of the kind where the systems might be running. But you won't have access to the data center, right? This shelter in place has been huge learning lesson for for operation teams. Right, So one of the things that we have now introduced, you know HP was with nimble storage earlier was one of the first technologies to have a cloud storage block. Services available to our customers now have expanded that portfolio, and now we have cloud volumes also available. So when you buy HD primera as your peers zero offering or if you buy a 80 nimble storage as your mid range Tier one offering with both, we now include http cloud volumes of backup services. So not only do you have access to on Prem storage, but you have access to backup capabilities, which are not managed by HP for our customers as well. And then, in addition to that, the mobility technology that sources Depot that transfers these backups into an HP and managed back up service is also included with the piece of software and then, in addition to that, we have also made Hve cloud backup available to our highest partner. So whether you were seen whether you're calm vault, we have source site plug ins available so our customers water on our partner ecosystem and also take advantage of that. One of the biggest changes that you know, as you know, Reid rate at this point, it is included with our portfolio is included from a software perspective. No particular physical changes need to be made at the data center, and customers can take advantage of that. You know, as soon as they start consuming the the primera or nimble boxes along along with the rest of the portfolio. >>Yeah, you know, back up to the cloud was one of the earliest cloud storage solutions that we saw there. It's good to hear you say that you you've got kind of integrations with partners and with your portfolio, anything else that you point out that really differentiates what HP is doing compared to other cloud providers or other software solutions out >>there. So to do things right, So from from a data protection perspective, this entire software portfolio is sort of bundled in when, when you when you look at HP primera or when you look at HP nimble like one of the biggest different shading factors is that the entire encapsulation off a solution from a workload perspective is Write your application autonomous support. So whether you're running sequel Oracle DB next gen applications. The awareness of these workloads is present inside of info site, and it is also present inside of the boxes. And then he regards to that their lifecycle management. Uh, there, you know, data visibility's recovery capabilities there Diyar capabilities that entire equal system and and what what it takes to make a little work. It's also built into HD primarily and being nimble environments and proactive support off visibility and lifecycle. Operational support of these workloads that the wave missed from an intelligence perspective is built in with people set right. So one of the largest single or the most critical difference is that it's not a piecemeal solutions. The entire ecosystem portfolio from a protection lifecycle management. We are just a death is completely talk to and incorporated. When you buy any particular aspect of the V block storage. >>Excellent. Well, when we talk about primary storage, one of the big impacts on that market has been that the wave of hyper converged infrastructure. You know, I've had conversations. Everything from your Green Lake offering is how to have a managed service with many options with h c. I underneath that, of course, HP purchase simplicity. Help us understand. You know where you think HD I fits today and how that relates toe overall, your section of the market >>Absolutely right. So AI has had a profound impact in simplifying the consumption of the data center. Right? 80 I, according to me, is an experience. It's an infrastructure consumption experience. Ah, storage, networking. Compute or abstracted out, and you start to consume that as Watson Machine Instances to simplify your operations. Right? So from an HP perspective, 80 simplicity is one for our largest offerings in the portfolio for, you know, for smaller data centers. For for the Generalists, for the Edge Cases HP Simplicity Simplicity is one of the preferred choices that the customers built right now. In addition to that, we've also introduced DHC I, which is this ability aggregated 80. Either this aggregated 80 a sort of on the name it is, it is sort of a conversation starter that that's why we love it. But again, in keeping to do the nature off. You know, it's the eyes of consumption. Once you Once you put the infrastructure in the closet and you shut the closet door, you should not be able to sort of tell whether it's a single box that's running the entire portfolio. Are this aggregated storage, networking and compute instances that are running the portfolio? From our perspective, you know the flexibility that the customer has from a consumption model. So storage, networking and compute in a single model in a single chassis, if that is simply for for the customer. But then if the compute and the networking and the storage needs need to still independently but yet maintain the same simplicity off the consumption infrastructure, we offer that use case as well. And that's where DHC I based on HP Nimble storage with HP Prime servers and Aruba EMC switches all consumed as a single software comes into play, so all the flexibility are in worse. But the simplicity of hyper converged is consolidated, and then, from a from a financial perspective, the customers can buy on cap backs, and all PACs basically relate or not be like it's up to the customer But again, then the focuses focuses one on the hardware. Stupid focuses on what the software consumption layers are. And then from a flexibility perspective, yet being able to scale storage and networking independently should the customer want that flexibility? >>Yeah. You know, without getting into too much of the naming conventions we actually, we keep on the research arm. We had put out what we call server san, and it was looking at the architectures that the hyper scale environments were doing, which was even different. Really? You bake, you know, the scalability that you need into the apple Asian, Um, and therefore, some of the underlying software which in scale you do different agency. I dhc I You know any other prefix in there? We like to have an umbrella rather than, you know, just a bucket that you put things in with rigid environment. Okay, so, uh, I guess the final takeaways, you know, any other key things that you want point out from HP Discover, You know, any sessions, papers like that people make that they take away from this week's event. >>They obviously autonomous operations with info site models being actually executed on on Prem storage is one of the biggest takeaways. In addition to that, we brought, you know, mission critical VR to all three par both primary and nimble storage platforms. A swell so three market VR where cloud storage is also integrated as part of that VR story. So you can have synchronous replication between two sites and then a bunker site, whether that be 1/3 autonomous data center or it can >>be it be >>cloud story off as part of that that here, in addition to that, we introduced all the Emmy primera on and be introduced storage class memory on the nimble storage architectures as well. So obviously further pushing the envelope, Sof hp primarily of porn or massively, Pablo, all in the in the system and then nimble storage, which is our cash, accelerated our connector. Now, as another tier of storage class memory. So we give you the performance of storage class memory. At the price of all flash arrays are some of the biggest capabilities that we're putting forward. And then lastly, you know, in regards to started automation, you know, we've all support on it be primary, uh, you know, be able. Was legacy already supported on It's the Nimble. It's combining Primera Nimble 34 over there gives it one of the largest adoption and promoters of vehicles out there with the largest people in small. Based on the last but not believe we're now introducing, you know, Google and costs. And we will see a size based dinner. Uh, started automation drivers for both HP nimble as well as for you know, uh, HP primary. So kubernetes CS i compliant container set of implementation drivers have now implemented in both the platforms that are available for general use for our customers that prefer to run bare metal or container based workloads or for their production. >>Alright, well, Omar, no shortage of updates that you give our audience to be able to dig in and find out the latest on your portfolio. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Absolutely pleasure to be here. Thanks so much. >>Alright, stay with us for lots more coverage. HP, discover virtual experience on stew minimum. Thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Published Date : Jun 23 2020

SUMMARY :

Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP Discover the virtual experience. Thanks for the invite. all the data management services that come along with it. We always know that the only constant in our industry is that things are always changing. You know, one of the biggest things that we noticed That flexibility that you mentioned simplicity so that the enormity of the size off this AI operation on automation from the customer and there's different people engage with it s o, you know, bring us inside what you're seeing So one of the biggest things that we have changed with 18 You also you mentioned that one of the things that companies air leveraging now when One of the biggest changes that you know, as you know, Reid rate at this point, It's good to hear you say that you you've got kind of integrations with partners So one of the largest single or the most critical difference that the wave of hyper converged infrastructure. the networking and the storage needs need to still independently but yet We like to have an umbrella rather than, you know, just a bucket that you put things in we brought, you know, mission critical VR to all three par both primary So we give you the performance of storage class memory. Alright, well, Omar, no shortage of updates that you give our audience to be able to dig in and find out the latest Absolutely pleasure to be here. Thank you for watching the Cube.

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Ritika Gunnar, IBM | IBM Data and AI Forum


 

>>Live from Miami, Florida. It's the cube covering IBM's data and AI forum brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to downtown Miami. Everybody. We're here at the Intercontinental hotel covering the IBM data AI form hashtag data AI forum. My name is Dave Volante and you're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Ritika gunner is here. She's the vice president of data and AI expert labs and learning at IBM. Ritika, great to have you on. Again, always a pleasure to be here. Dave. I love interviewing you because you're a woman executive that said a lot of different roles at IBM. Um, you know, you've, we've talked about the AI ladder. You're climbing the IBM ladder and so it's, it's, it's, it's awesome to see and I love this topic. It's a topic that's near and dear to the cubes heart, not only women in tech, but women in AI. So great to have you. Thank you. So what's going on with the women in AI program? We're going to, we're going to cover that, but let me start with women in tech. It's an age old problem that we've talked about depending on, you know, what statistic you look at. 15% 17% of, uh, of, of, of the industry comprises women. We do a lot of events. You can see it. Um, let's start there. >>Well, obviously the diversity is not yet there, right? So we talk about women in technology, um, and we just don't have the representation that we need to be able to have. Now when it comes to like artificial intelligence, I think the statistic is 10 to 15% of the workforce today in AI is female. When you think about things like bias and ethicacy, having the diversity in terms of having male and female representation be equal is absolutely essential so that you're creating fair AI, unbiased AI, you're creating trust and transparency, set of capabilities that really have the diversity in backgrounds. >>Well, you work for a company that is as chairman and CEO, that's, that's a, that's a woman. I mean IBM generally, you know, we could see this stuff on the cube because IBM puts women on a, we get a lot of women customers that, that come on >>and not just because we're female, because we're capable. >>Yeah. Well of course. Right. It's just because you're in roles where you're spokespeople and it's natural for spokespeople to come on a forum like this. But, but I have to ask you, with somebody inside of IBM, a company that I could say the test to relative to most, that's pretty well. Do you feel that way or do you feel like even a company like IBM has a long way to go? >>Oh, um, I personally don't feel that way and I've never felt that to be an issue. And if you look at my peers, um, my um, lead for artificial intelligence, Beth Smith, who, you know, a female, a lot of my peers under Rob Thomas, all female. So I have not felt that way in terms of the leadership team that I have. Um, but there is a gap that exists, not necessarily within IBM, but in the community as a whole. And I think it goes back to you want to, you know, when you think about data science and artificial intelligence, you want to be able to see yourself in the community. And while there's only 10 to 15% of females in AI today, that's why IBM has created programs such as women AI that we started in June because we want strong female leaders to be able to see that there are, is great representation of very technical capable females in artificial intelligence that are doing amazing things to be able to transform their organizations and their business model. >>So tell me more about this program. I understand why you started it started in June. What does it entail and what's the evolution of this? >>So we started it in June and the idea was to be able to get some strong female leaders and multiple different organizations that are using AI to be able to change their companies and their business models and really highlight not just the journey that they took, but the types of transformations that they're doing and their organizations. We're going to have one of those events tonight as well, where we have leaders from Harley Davidson in Miami Dade County coming to really talk about not only what was their journey, but what actually brought them to artificial intelligence and what they're doing. And I think Dave, the reason that's so important is you want to be able to understand that those journeys are absolutely approachable. They're doable by any females that are out there. >>Talk about inherent bias. The humans are biased and if you're developing models that are using AI, there's going to be inherent bias in those models. So talk about how to address that and why is it important for more diversity to be injected into those models? >>Well, I think a great example is if you took the data sets that existed even a decade ago, um, for the past 50 years and you created a model that was to be able to predict whether to give loans to certain candidates or not, all things being equal, what would you find more males get these loans than females? The inherent data that exists has bias in it. Even from the history based on what we've had yet, that's not the way we want to be able to do things today. You want to be able to identify that bias and say all things being equal, it is absolutely important that regardless of whether you are a male or a female, you want to be able to give that loan to that person if they have all the other qualities that are there. And that's why being able to not only detect these things but have the diversity and the kinds of backgrounds of people who are building AI who are deploying this AI is absolutely critical. >>So for the past decade, and certainly in the past few years, there's been a light shined on this topic. I think, you know, we were at the Grace Hopper conference when Satya Nadella stuck his foot in his mouth and it said, Hey, it's bad karma for you know, if you feel like you're underpaid to go complain. And the women in the audience like, dude, no way. And he, he did the right thing. He goes, you know what, you're right. You know, any, any backtrack on that? And that was sort of another inflection point. But you talk about the women in, in AI program. I was at a CDO event one time. It was I and I, an IBM or had started the data divas breakfast and I asked, can I go? They go, yeah, you can be the day to dude. Um, which was, so you're seeing a lot of initiatives like this. My question is, are they having the impact that you would expect and that you want to have? >>I think they absolutely are. Again, I mean, I'll go back to, um, I'll give you a little bit of a story. Um, you know, people want to be able to relate and see that they can see themselves in these females leaders. And so we've seen cases now through our events, like at IBM we have a program called grow, which is really about helping our female lead female. Um, technical leaders really understand that they can grow, they can be nurtured, and they have development programs to help them accelerate where they need to be on their technical programs. We've absolutely seen a huge impact from that from a technology perspective. In terms of more females staying in technology wanting to go in the, in those career paths as another story. I'll, I'll give you kind of another kind of point of view. Um, Dave and that is like when you look at where it starts, it starts a lot earlier. >>So I have a young daughter who a year, year and a half ago when I was doing a lot of stuff with Watson, she would ask me, you know, not only what Watson's doing, but she would say, what does that mean for me mom? Like what's my job going to be? And if you think about the changes in technology and cultural shifts, technology and artificial intelligence is going to impact every job, every industry, every role that there is out there. So much so that I believe her job hasn't been invented yet. And so when you think about what's absolutely critical, not only today's youth, but every person out there needs to have a foundational understanding, not only in the three RS that you and I know from when we grew up have reading, writing and arithmetic, we need to have a foundational understanding of what it means to code. And you know, having people feel confident, having young females feel confident that they can not only do that, that they can be technical, that they can understand how artificial intelligence is really gonna impact society. And the world is absolutely critical. And so these types of programs that shed light on that, that help bridge that confidence is game changing. >>Well, you got kids, I >>got kids, I have daughters, you have daughter. Are they receptive to that? So, um, you know, I think they are, but they need to be able to see themselves. So the first time I sent my daughter to a coding camp, she came back and said, not for me mom. I said, why? Because she's like, all the boys, they're coding in their Minecraft area. Not something I can relate to. You need to be able to relate and see something, develop that passion, and then mix yourself in that diverse background where you can see the diversity of backgrounds. When you don't have that diversity and when you can't really see how to progress yourself, it becomes a blocker. So as she started going to grow star programs, which was something in Austin where young girls coded together, it became something that she's really passionate about and now she's Python programming. So that's just an example of yes, you need to be able to have these types of skills. It needs to start early and you need to have types of programs that help enhance that journey. >>Yeah, and I think you're right. I think that that is having an impact. My girls who code obviously as a some does some amazing work. My daughters aren't into it. I try to send them to coder camp too and they don't do it. But here's my theory on that is that coding is changing and, and especially with artificial intelligence and cognitive, we're a software replacing human skills. Creativity is going to become much, much more important. My daughters are way more creative than my sons. I shouldn't say that, but >>I think you just admitted that >>they, but, but in a way they are. I mean they've got amazing creativity, certainly more than I am. And so I see that as a key component of how coding gets done in the future, taking different perspectives and then actually codifying them. Your, your thoughts on that. >>Well there is an element of understanding like the outcomes that you want to generate and the outcomes really is all about technology. How can you imagine the art of the possible with technology? Because technology alone, we all know not useful enough. So understanding what you do with it, just as important. And this is why a lot of people who are really good in artificial intelligence actually come from backgrounds that are philosophy, sociology, economy. Because if you have the culture of curiosity and the ability to be able to learn, you can take the technology aspects, you can take those other aspects and blend them together. So understanding the problem to be solved and really marrying that with the technological aspects of what AI can do. That's how you get outcomes. >>And so we've, we've obviously talking in detail about women in AI and women in tech, but it's, there's data that shows that diversity drives value in so many different ways. And it's not just women, it's people of color, it's people of different economic backgrounds, >>underrepresented minorities. Absolutely. And I think the biggest thing that you can do in an organization is have teams that have that diverse background, whether it be from where they see the underrepresented, where they come from, because those differences in thought are the things that create new ideas that really innovate, that drive, those business transformations that drive the changes in the way that we do things. And so having that difference of opinion, having healthy ways to bring change and to have conflict, absolutely essential for progress to happen. >>So how did you get into the tech business? What was your background? >>So my background was actually, um, a lot in math and science. And both of my parents were engineers. And I have always had this unwavering, um, need to be able to marry business and the technology side and really figure out how you can create the art of the possible. So for me it was actually the creativity piece of it where you could create something from nothing that really drove me to computer science. >>Okay. So, so you're your math, uh, engineer and you ended up in CS, is that right? >>Science. Yeah. >>Okay. So you were coded. Did you ever work as a programmer? >>Absolutely. My, my first years at IBM were all about coding. Um, and so I've always had a career where I've coded and then I've gone to the field and done field work. I've come back and done development and development management, gone back to the field and kind of seen how that was actually working. So personally for me, being able to create and work with clients to understand how they drive value and having that back and forth has been a really delightful part. And the thing that drives me, >>you know, that's actually not an uncommon path for IBM. Ours, predominantly male IBM, or is in the 50 sixties and seventies and even eighties. Who took that path? They started out programming. Um, I just think, trying to think of some examples. I know Omar para, who was the CIO of Aetna international, he started out coding at IBM. Joe Tucci was a programmer at IBM. He became CEO of EMC. It was a very common path for people and you took the same path. That's kind of interesting. Why do you think, um, so many women who maybe maybe start in computer science and coding don't continue on that path? And what was it that sort of allowed you to break through that barrier? >>No, I'm not sure why most women don't stay with it. But for me, I think, um, you know, I, I think that every organization today is going to have to be technical in nature. I mean, just think about it for a moment. Technology impacts every part of every type of organization and the kinds of transformation that happens. So being more technical as leaders and really understanding the technology that allows the kinds of innovations and business for informations is absolutely essential to be able to see progress in a lot of what we're doing. So I think that even general CXOs that you see today have to be more technically acute to be able to do their jobs really well and marry those business outcomes with what it fundamentally means to have the right technology backbone. >>Do you think a woman in the white house would make a difference for young people? I mean, part of me says, yeah, of course it would. Then I say, okay, well some examples you can think about Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Angela Merkel, and in Germany it's still largely male dominated cultures, but I dunno, what do you think? Maybe maybe that in the United States would be sort of the, >>I'm not a political expert, so I wouldn't claim to answer that, but I do think more women in technology, leadership role, CXO leadership roles is absolutely what we need. So, you know, politics aside more women in leadership roles. Absolutely. >>Well, it's not politics is gender. I mean, I'm independent, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, right? Absolutely. Oh yeah. Well, companies, politics. I mean you certainly see women leaders in a, in Congress and, and the like. Um, okay. Uh, last question. So you've got a program going on here. You have a, you have a panel that you're running. Tell us more about. >>Well this afternoon we'll be continuing that from women leaders in AI and we're going to do a panel with a few of our clients that really have transformed their organizations using data and artificial intelligence and they'll talk about like their backgrounds in history. So what does it actually mean to come from? One of, one of the panelists actually from Miami Dade has always come from a technical background and the other panelists really etched in from a non technical background because she had a passion for data and she had a passion for the technology systems. So we're going to go through, um, how these females actually came through to the journey, where they are right now, what they're actually doing with artificial intelligence in their organizations and what the future holds for them. >>I lied. I said, last question. What is, what is success for you? Cause I, I would love to help you achieve that. That objective isn't, is it some metric? Is it awareness? How do you know it when you see it? >>Well, I think it's a journey. Success is not an endpoint. And so for me, I think the biggest thing I've been able to do at IBM is really help organizations help businesses and people progress what they do with technology. There's nothing more gratifying than like when you can see other organizations and then what they can do, not just with your technology, but what you can bring in terms of expertise to make them successful, what you can do to help shape their culture and really transform. To me, that's probably the most gratifying thing. And as long as I can continue to do that and be able to get more acknowledgement of what it means to have the right diversity ingredients to do that, that success >>well Retika congratulations on your success. I mean, you've been an inspiration to a number of people. I remember when I first saw you, you were working in group and you're up on stage and say, wow, this person really knows her stuff. And then you've had a variety of different roles and I'm sure that success is going to continue. So thanks very much for coming on the cube. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break, we're here covering the IBM data in a AI form from Miami right back.

Published Date : Oct 22 2019

SUMMARY :

IBM's data and AI forum brought to you by IBM. Ritika, great to have you on. When you think about things like bias and ethicacy, having the diversity in I mean IBM generally, you know, we could see this stuff on the cube because Do you feel that way or do you feel like even a company like IBM has a long way to And I think it goes back to you want to, I understand why you started it started in June. And I think Dave, the reason that's so important is you want to be able to understand that those journeys are So talk about how to address that and why is it important for more it is absolutely important that regardless of whether you are a male or a female, and that you want to have? Um, Dave and that is like when you look at where it starts, out there needs to have a foundational understanding, not only in the three RS that you and I know from when It needs to start early and you I think that that is having an impact. And so I see that as a key component of how coding gets done in the future, So understanding what you And so we've, we've obviously talking in detail about women in AI and women And so having that figure out how you can create the art of the possible. is that right? Yeah. Did you ever work as a programmer? So personally for me, being able to create And what was it that sort of allowed you to break through that barrier? that you see today have to be more technically acute to be able to do their jobs really Then I say, okay, well some examples you can think about Margaret Thatcher in the UK, So, you know, politics aside more women in leadership roles. I mean you certainly see women leaders in a, in Congress and, how these females actually came through to the journey, where they are right now, How do you know it when you see but what you can bring in terms of expertise to make them successful, what you can do to help shape their that success is going to continue.

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Part 1: Andre Pienaar, C5 Capital | Exclusive CUBE Conversation, December 2018


 

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

Published Date : Dec 16 2018

SUMMARY :

head of the NSA you know get to just

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Red Hat Summit 2018 | Day 2 | AM Keynote


 

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that will be successful in the 21st century [Music] being open is really important because it comes with a lot of trust the open-source community now has matured so much and that contribution from the community is really driving innovation [Music] but what's really exciting is the change that we've seen in our teams not only the way they collaborate but the way they operate in the way they work [Music] I think idea is everything ideas can change the way you see things open-source is more than a license it's actually a way of operating [Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome Red Hat president and chief executive officer Jim Whitehurst [Music] all right well welcome to day two at the Red Hat summit I'm amazed to see this many people here at 8:30 in the morning given the number of people I saw pretty late last night out and about so thank you for being here and have to give a shout out speaking of power participation that DJ is was Mike Walker who is our global director of open innovation labs so really enjoyed that this morning was great to have him doing that so hey so day one yesterday we had some phenomenal announcements both around Red Hat products and things that we're doing as well as some great partner announcements which we found exciting I hope they were interesting to you and I hope you had a chance to learn a little more about that and enjoy the breakout sessions that we had yesterday so yesterday was a lot about the what with these announcements and partnerships today I wanted to spin this morning talking a little bit more about the how right how do we actually survive and thrive in this digitally transformed world and to some extent the easy parts identifying the problem we all know that we have to be able to move more quickly we all know that we have to be able to react to change faster and we all know that we need to innovate more effectively all right so the problem is easy but how do you actually go about solving that right the problem is that's not a product that you can buy off the shelf right it is a capability that you have to build and certainly it's technology enabled but it's also depends on process culture a whole bunch of things to figure out how we actually do that and the answer is likely to be different in different organizations with different objective functions and different starting points right so this is a challenge that we all need to feel our way to an answer on and so I want to spend some time today talking about what we've seen in the market and how people are working to address that and it's one of the reasons that the summit this year the theme is ideas worth it lorring to take us back on a little history lesson so two years ago here at Moscone the theme of the summit was the power of participation and then I talked a lot about the power of groups of people working together and participating are able to solve problems much more quickly and much more effectively than individuals or even individual organizations working by themselves and some of the largest problems that we face in technology but more broadly in the world will ultimately only be solved if we effectively participate and work together then last year the theme of the summit was the impact of the individual and we took this concept of participation a bit further and we talked about how participation has to be active right it's a this isn't something where you can be passive that you can sit back you have to be involved because the problem in a more participative type community is that there is no road map right you can't sit back and wait for an edict on high or some central planning or some central authority to tell you what to do you have to take initiative you have to get involved right this is a active participation sport now one of the things that I talked about as part of that was that planning was dead and it was kind of a key my I think my keynote was actually titled planning is dead and the concept was that in a world that's less knowable when we're solving problems in a more organic bottom-up way our ability to effectively plan into the future it's much less than it was in the past and this idea that you're gonna be able to plan for success and then build to it it really is being replaced by a more bottom-up participative approach now aside from my whole strategic planning team kind of being up in arms saying what are you saying planning is dead I have multiple times had people say to me well I get that point but I still need to prepare for the future how do I prepare my organization for the future isn't that planning and so I wanted to spend a couple minutes talk a little more detail about what I meant by that but importantly taking our own advice we spent a lot of time this past year looking around at what our customers are doing because what a better place to learn then from large companies and small companies around the world information technology organizations having to work to solve these problems for their organizations and so our ability to learn from each other take the power of participation an individual initiative that people and organizations have taken there are just so many great learnings this year that I want to get a chance to share I also thought rather than listening to me do that that we could actually highlight some of the people who are doing this and so I do want to spend about five minutes kind of contextualizing what we're going to go through over the next hour or so and some of the lessons learned but then we want to share some real-world stories of how organizations are attacking some of these problems under this how do we be successful in a world of constant change in uncertainty so just going back a little bit more to last year talking about planning was dead when I said planning it's kind of a planning writ large and so that's if you think about the way traditional organizations work to solve problems and ultimately execute you start off planning so what's a position you want to get to in X years and whether that's a competitive strategy in a position of competitive advantage or a certain position you want an organizational function to reach you kind of lay out a plan to get there you then typically a senior leaders or a planning team prescribes the sets of activities and the organization structure and the other components required to get there and then ultimately execution is about driving compliance against that plan and you look at you say well that's all logical right we plan for something we then figure out how we're gonna get there we go execute to get there and you know in a traditional world that was easy and still some of this makes sense I don't say throw out all of this but you have to recognize in a more uncertain volatile world where you can be blindsided by orthogonal competitors coming in and you the term uber eyes you have to recognize that you can't always plan or know what the future is and so if you don't well then what replaces the traditional model or certainly how do you augment the traditional model to be successful in a world that you knows ambiguous well what we've heard from customers and what you'll see examples of this through the course of this morning planning is can be replaced by configuring so you can configure for a constant rate of change without necessarily having to know what that change is this idea of prescription of here's the activities people need to perform and let's lay these out very very crisply job descriptions what organizations are going to do can be replaced by a greater degree of enablement right so this idea of how do you enable people with the knowledge and things that they need to be able to make the right decisions and then ultimately this idea of execution as compliance can be replaced by a greater level of engagement of people across the organization to ultimately be able to react at a faster speed to the changes that happen so just double clicking in each of those for a couple minutes so what I mean by configure for constant change so again we don't know exactly what the change is going to be but we know it's going to happen and last year I talked a little bit about a process solution to that problem I called it that you have to try learn modify and what that model try learn modify was for anybody in the app dev space it was basically taking the principles of agile and DevOps and applying those more broadly to business processes in technology organizations and ultimately organizations broadly this idea of you don't have to know what your ultimate destination is but you can try and experiment you can learn from those things and you can move forward and so that I do think in technology organizations we've seen tremendous progress even over the last year as organizations are adopting agile endeavor and so that still continues to be I think a great way for people to to configure their processes for change but this year we've seen some great examples of organizations taking a different tack to that problem and that's literally building modularity into their structures themselves right actually building the idea that change is going to happen into how you're laying out your technology architectures right we've all seen the reverse of that when you build these optimized systems for you know kind of one environment you kind of flip over two years later what was the optimized system it's now called a legacy system that needs to be migrated that's an optimized system that now has to be moved to a new environment because the world has changed so again you'll see a great example of that in a few minutes here on stage next this concept of enabled double-clicking on that a little bit so much of what we've done in technology over the past few years has been around automation how do we actually replace things that people were doing with technology or augmenting what people are doing with technology and that's incredibly important and that's work that can continue to go forward it needs to happen it's not really what I'm talking about here though enablement in this case it's much more around how do you make sure individuals are getting the context they need how are you making sure that they're getting the information they need how are you making sure they're getting the tools they need to make decisions on the spot so it's less about automating what people are doing and more about how can you better enable people with tools and technology now from a leadership perspective that's around making sure people understand the strategy of the company the context in which they're working in making sure you've set the appropriate values etc etc from a technology perspective that's ensuring that you're building the right systems that allow the right information the right tools at the right time to the right people now to some extent even that might not be hard but when the world is constantly changing that gets to be even harder and I think that's one of the reasons we see a lot of traction and open source to solve these problems to use flexible systems to help enterprises be able to enable their people not just in it today but to be flexible going forward and again we'll see some great examples of that and finally engagement so again if execution can't be around driving compliance to a plan because you no longer have this kind of Cris plan well what do leaders do how do organizations operate and so you know I'll broadly use the term engagement several of our customers have used this term and this is really saying well how do you engage your people in real-time to make the right decisions how do you accelerate a pace of cadence how do you operate at a different speed so you can react to change and take advantage of opportunities as they arise and everywhere we look IT is a key enabler of this right in the past IT was often seen as an inhibitor to this because the IT systems move slower than the business might want to move but we are seeing with some of these new technologies that literally IT is becoming the enabler and driving the pace of change back on to the business and you'll again see some great examples of that as well so again rather than listen to me sit here and theoretically talk about these things or refer to what we've seen others doing I thought it'd be much more interesting to bring some of our partners and our customers up here to specifically talk about what they're doing so I'm really excited to have a great group of customers who have agreed to stand in front of 7,500 people or however many here this morning and talk a little bit more about what they're doing so really excited to have them here and really appreciate all them agreeing to be a part of this and so to start I want to start with tee systems we have the CEO of tee systems here and I think this is a great story because they're really two parts to it right because he has two perspectives one is as the CEO of a global company itself having to navigate its way through digital disruption and as a global cloud service provider obviously helping its customers through this same type of change so I'm really thrilled to have a del hasta li join me on stage to talk a little bit about T systems and what they're doing and what we're doing jointly together so Adelle [Music] Jim took to see you Adele thank you for being here you for having me please join me I love to DJ when that fantastic we may have to hire him no more events for events where's well employed he's well employed though here that team do not give him mics activation it's great to have you here really do appreciate it well you're the CEO of a large organization that's going through this disruption in the same way we are I'd love to hear a little bit how for your company you're thinking about you know navigating this change that we're going through great well you know key systems as an ICT service provider we've been around for decades I'm not different to many of our clients we had to change the whole disruption of the cloud and digitization and new skills and new capability and agility it's something we had to face as well so over the last five years and especially in the last three years we invested heavily invested over a billion euros in building new capabilities building new offerings new infrastructures to support our clients so to be very disruptive for us as well and so and then with your customers themselves they're going through this set of change and you're working to help them how are you working to help enable your your customers as they're going through this change well you know all of them you know in this journey of changing the way they run their business leveraging IT much more to drive business results digitization and they're all looking for new skills new ideas they're looking for platforms that take them away from traditional waterfall development that takes a year or a year and a half before they see any results to processes and ways of bringing applications in a week in a month etcetera so it's it's we are part of that journey with them helping them for that and speaking of that I know we're working together and to help our joint customers with that can you talk a little bit more about what we're doing together sure well you know our relationship goes back years and years with with the Enterprise Linux but over the last few years we've invested heavily in OpenShift and OpenStack to build peope as layers to build you know flexible infrastructure for our clients and we've been working with you we tested many different technology in the marketplace and been more successful with Red Hat and the stack there and I'll give you an applique an example several large European car manufacturers who have connected cars now as a given have been accelerating the applications that needed to be in the car and in the past it took them years if not you know scores to get an application into the car and today we're using open shift as the past layer to develop to enable these DevOps for these companies and they bring applications in less than a month and it's a huge change in the dynamics of the competitiveness in the marketplace and we rely on your team and in helping us drive that capability to our clients yeah do you find it fascinating so many of the stories that you hear and that we've talked about with with our customers is this need for speed and this ability to accelerate and enable a greater degree of innovation by simply accelerating what what we're seeing with our customers absolutely with that plus you know the speed is important agility is really critical but doing it securely doing it doing it in a way that is not gonna destabilize the you know the broader ecosystem is really critical and things like GDP are which is a new security standard in Europe is something that a lot of our customers worry about they need help with and we're one of the partners that know what that really is all about and how to navigate within that and use not prevent them from using the new technologies yeah I will say it isn't just the speed of the external but the security and the regulation especially GDR we have spent an hour on that with our board this week there you go he said well thank you so much for being here really to appreciate the work that we're doing together and look forward to continued same here thank you thank you [Applause] we've had a great partnership with tea systems over the years and we've really taken it to the next level and what's really exciting about that is you know we've moved beyond just helping kind of host systems for our customers we really are jointly enabling their success and it's really exciting and we're really excited about what we're able to to jointly accomplish so next i'm really excited that we have our innovation award winners here and we'll have on stage with us our innovation award winners this year our BBVA dnm IAG lasat Lufthansa Technik and UPS and yet they're all working in one for specific technology initiatives that they're doing that really really stand out and are really really exciting you'll have a chance to learn a lot more about those through the course of the event over the next couple of days but in this context what I found fascinating is they were each addressing a different point of this configure enable engage and I thought it would be really great for you all to hear about how they're experimenting and working to solve these problems you know real-time large organizations you know happening now let's start with the video to see what they think about when they think about innovation I define innovation is something that's changing the model changing the way of thinking not just a step change improvement not just making something better but actually taking a look at what already exists and then putting them together in new and exciting lives innovation is about to build something nobody has done before historically we had a statement that business drives technology we flip that equation around an IT is now demonstrating to the business at power of technology innovation desde el punto de vista de la tecnología supone salir de plataform as proprietary as ADA Madero cloud basado an open source it's a possibility the open source que no parameter no sir Kamala and I think way that for me open-source stands for flexibility speed security the community and that contribution from the community is really driving innovation innovation at a pace that I don't think our one individual organization could actually do ourselves right so first I'd like to talk with BBVA I love this story because as you know Financial Services is going through a massive set of transformations and BBVA really is at the leading edge of thinking about how to deploy a hybrid cloud strategy and kind of modular layered architecture to be successful regardless of what happens in the future so with that I'd like to welcome on stage Jose Maria Rosetta from BBVA [Music] thank you for being here and congratulations on your innovation award it's been a pleasure to be here with you it's great to have you hi everybody so Josemaria for those who might not be familiar with BBVA can you give us a little bit of background on your company yeah a brief description BBVA is is a bank as a financial institution with diversified business model and that provides well financial services to more than 73 million of customers in more than 20 countries great and I know we've worked with you for a long time so we appreciate that the partnership with you so I thought I'd start with a really easy question for you how will blockchain you know impact financial services in the next five years I've gotten no idea but if someone knows the answer I've got a job for him for him up a pretty good job indeed you know oh all right well let me go a little easier then so how will the global payments industry change in the next you know four or five years five years well I think you need a a Weezer well I tried to make my best prediction means that in five years just probably will be five years older good answer I like that I always abstract up I hope so I hope so yah-yah-yah hope so good point so you know immediately that's the obvious question you have a massive technology infrastructure is a global bank how do you prepare yourself to enable the organization to be successful when you really don't know what the future is gonna be well global banks and wealth BBBS a global gam Bank a certain component foundations you know today I would like to talk about risk and efficiency so World Bank's deal with risk with the market great the operational reputational risk and so on so risk control is part of all or DNA you know and when you've got millions of customers you know efficiency efficiency is a must so I think there's no problem with all these foundations they problem the problem analyze the problems appears when when banks translate these foundations is valued into technology so risk control or risk management avoid risk usually means by the most expensive proprietary technology in the market you know from one of the biggest software companies in the world you know so probably all of you there are so those people in the room were glad to hear you say that yeah probably my guess the name of those companies around San Francisco most of them and efficiency usually means a savory business unit as every department or country has his own specific needs by a specific solution for them so imagine yourself working in a data center full of silos with many different Hardware operating systems different languages and complex interfaces to communicate among them you know not always documented what really never documented so your life your life in is not easy you know in this scenario are well there's no room for innovation so what's been or or strategy be BES ready to move forward in this new digital world well we've chosen a different approach which is quite simple is to replace all local proprietary system by a global platform based on on open source with three main goals you know the first one is reduce the average transaction cost to one-third the second one is increase or developers productivity five times you know and the third is enable or delete the business be able to deliver solutions of three times faster so you're not quite easy Wow and everything with the same reliability as on security standards as we've got today Wow that is an extraordinary set of objectives and I will say their world on the path of making that successful which is just amazing yeah okay this is a long journey sometimes a tough journey you know to be honest so we decided to partnership with the with the best companies in there in the world and world record we think rate cut is one of these companies so we think or your values and your knowledge is critical for BBVA and well as I mentioned before our collaboration started some time ago you know and just an example in today in BBVA a Spain being one of the biggest banks in in the country you know and using red hat technology of course our firm and fronting architecture you know for mobile and internet channels runs the ninety five percent of our customers request this is approximately 3,000 requests per second and our back in architecture execute 70 millions of business transactions a day this is almost a 50% of total online transactions executed in the country so it's all running yes running I hope so you check for you came on stage it's I'll be flying you know okay good there's no wood up here to knock on it's been a really great partnership it's been a pleasure yeah thank you so much for being here thank you thank you [Applause] I do love that story because again so much of what we talk about when we when we talk about preparing for digital is a processed solution and again things like agile and DevOps and modular izing components of work but this idea of thinking about platforms broadly and how they can run anywhere and actually delivering it delivering at a scale it's just a phenomenal project and experience and in the progress they've made it's a great team so next up we have two organizations that have done an exceptional job of enabling their people with the right information and the tools they need to be successful you know in both of these cases these are organizations who are under constant change and so leveraging the power of open-source to help them build these tools to enable and you'll see it the size and the scale of these in two very very different contexts it's great to see and so I'd like to welcome on stage Oh smart alza' with dnm and David Abraham's with IAG [Music] Oh smart welcome thank you so much for being here Dave great to see you thank you appreciate you being here and congratulations to you both on winning the Innovation Awards thank you so Omar I really found your story fascinating and how you're able to enable your people with data which is just significantly accelerated the pace with which they can make decisions and accelerate your ability to to act could you tell us a little more about the project and then what you're doing Jim and Tina when the muchisimas gracias por ever say interesado pono true projecto [Music] encargado registry controller las entradas a leda's persona por la Frontera argentina yo sé de dos siento treinta siete puestos de contrôle tienen lo largo de la Frontera tanto area the restreamer it EEMA e if looool in dilute ammonia shame or cinta me Jonas the tránsito sacra he trod on in another Fronteras dingus idea idea de la Magneto la cual estamos hablando la Frontera cantina tienen extension the kin same in kilo metros esto es el gada mint a maje or allege Estancia kaeun a poor carretera a la co de mexico con el akka a direction emulation s 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calidad de vida de atras de mettre personas SI y meet our que el delito perform a trois Natura from Dana's Argentine sigue siendo en favor de esto SI temes uno de los países mess Alberto's Allah immigration en Latin America yah hora con una plataforma mas segunda first of all I want to thank you for the interest is played for our project the National migration administration or diem records the entry and exit of people on the Argentine territory it grants residents permits to foreigners who wish to live in our country through 237 entry points land air border sea and river ways Jim dnm registered over 80 million transits throughout last year Argentine borders cover about 15,000 kilometers just our just to give you an idea of the magnitude of our borders this is greater than the distance on a highway between Mexico City and Alaska our department applies the mechanisms that prevent the entry and residents of people involved in crimes like terrorism trafficking of persons weapons drugs and others in 2016 we shifted to a more preventive and predictive paradigm that is how Sam's the system for migration analysis was created with red hats great assistance and support this allowed us to tackle the challenge of integrating multiple and varied issues legal issues police databases national and international security organizations like Interpol API advanced passenger information and PNR passenger name record this involved starting private cloud with OpenShift Rev data virtualization cloud forms and fuse that were the basis to develop Sam and implementing machine learning models and artificial intelligence our analysts consulted a number of systems and other manual files before 2016 4 days for each person entering or leaving the country so this has allowed us to optimize our decisions making them in real time each time Sam is consulted it processes patterns of over two billion data entries Sam's aim is to improve the quality of life of our citizens and visitors making sure that crime doesn't pierce our borders in an environment of analytic evolution and constant improvement in essence Sam contributes toward Argentina being one of the leaders in Latin America in terms of immigration with our new system great thank you and and so Dave tell us a little more about the insurance industry and the challenges in the EU face yeah sure so you know in the insurance industry it's a it's been a bit sort of insulated from a lot of major change in disruption just purely from the fact that it's highly regulated and the cost of so that the barrier to entry is quite high in fact if you think about insurance you know you have to have capital reserves to protect against those major events like floods bush fires and so on but the whole thing is a lot of change there's come in a really rapid pace I'm also in the areas of customer expectations you know customers and now looking and expecting for the same levels of flexibility and convenience that they would experience with more modern and new startups they're expecting out of the older institutions like banks and insurance companies like us so definitely expecting the industry to to be a lot more adaptable and to better meet their needs I think the other aspect of it really is in the data the data area where I think that the donor is now creating a much more significant connection between organizations in a car summers especially when you think about the level of devices that are now enabled and the sheer growth of data that's that that's growing at exponential rates so so that the impact then is that the systems that we used to rely on are the technology we used to rely on to be able to handle that kind of growth no longer keeps up and is able to to you know build for the future so we need to sort of change that so what I G's really doing is transform transforming the organization to become a lot more efficient focus more on customers and and really set ourselves up to be agile and adaptive and so ya know as part of your Innovation Award that the specific set of projects you tied a huge amount of different disparate systems together and with M&A and other you have a lot to do there to you tell us a little more about kind of how you're able to better respond to customer needs by being able to do that yeah no you're right so we've we've we're nearly a hundred year old company that's grown from lots of merger and acquisition and just as a result of that that means that data's been sort of spread out and fragmented across multiple brands and multiple products and so the number one sort of issue and problem that we were hearing was that it was too hard to get access to data and it's highly complicated which is not great from a company from our perspective really because because we are a data company right that's what we do we we collect data about people what they what's important to them what they value and the environment in which they live so that we can understand that risk and better manage and protect those people so what we're doing is we're trying to make and what we have been doing is making data more open and accessible and and by that I mean making data more of easily available for people to use it to make decisions in their day-to-day activity and to do that what we've done is built a single data platform across the group that unifies the data into a single source of truth that we can then build on top of that single views of customers for example that puts the right information into the into the hands of the people that need it the most and so now why does open source play such a big part in doing that I know there are a lot of different solutions that could get you there sure well firstly I think I've been sauce has been k2 these and really it's been key because we've basically started started from scratch to build this this new next-generation data platform based on entirely open-source you know using great components like Kafka and Postgres and airflow and and and and and then fundamentally building on top of red Red Hat OpenStack right to power all that and they give us the flexibility that we need to be able to make things happen much faster for example we were just talking to the pivotal guys earlier this week here and some of the stuff that we're doing they're they're things quite interesting innovative writes even sort of maybe first in the world where we've taken the older sort of appliance and dedicated sort of massive parallel processing unit and ported that over onto red Red Hat OpenStack right which is now giving us a lot more flexibility for scale in a much more efficient way but you're right though that we've come from in the past a more traditional approach to to using vendor based technology right which was good back then when you know technology solutions could last for around 10 years or so on and and that was fine but now that we need to move much faster we've had to rethink that and and so our focus has been on using you know more commoditized open source technology built by communities to give us that adaptability and sort of remove the locking in there any entrenchment of technology so that's really helped us but but I think that the last point that's been really critical to us is is answering that that concern and question about ongoing support and maintenance right so you know in a regular environment the regulator is really concerned about anything that could fundamentally impact business operation and and so the question is always about what happens when something goes wrong who's going to be there to support you which is where the value of the the partnership we have with Red Hat has really come into its own right and what what it's done is is it's actually giving us the best of both worlds a means that we can we can leverage and use and and and you know take some of the technology that's being developed by great communities in the open source way but also partner with a trusted partner in red had to say you know they're going to stand behind that community and provide that support when we needed the most so that's been the kind of the real value out of that partnership okay well I appreciate I love the story it's how do you move quickly leverage the power community but do it in a safe secure way and I love the idea of your literally empowering people with machine learning and AI at the moment when they need it it's just an incredible story so thank you so much for being here appreciate it thank you [Applause] you know again you see in these the the importance of enabling people with data and in an old-world was so much data was created with a system in mind versus data is a separate asset that needs to be available real time to anyone is a theme we hear over and over and over again and so you know really looking at open source solutions that allow that flexibility and keep data from getting locked into proprietary silos you know is a theme that we've I've heard over and over over the past year with many of our customers so I love logistics I'm a geek that way I come from that background in the past and I know that running large complex operations requires flawless execution and that requires great data and we have two great examples today around how to engage own organizations in new and more effective ways in the case of lufthansa technik literally IT became the business so it wasn't enabling the business it became the business offering and importantly went from idea to delivery to customers in a hundred days and so this theme of speed and the importance of speed it's a it's a great story you'll hear more about and then also at UPS UPS again I talked a little earlier about IT used to be kind of the long pole in the tent the thing that was slow moving because of the technology but UPS is showing that IT can actually drive the business and the cadence of business even faster by demonstrating the power and potential of technology to engage in this case hundreds of thousands of people to make decisions real-time in the face of obviously constant change around weather mechanicals and all the different things that can happen in a large logistics operation like that so I'd like to welcome on stage to be us more from Lufthansa Technik and Nick Castillo from ups to be us welcome thank you for being here Nick thank you thank you Jim and congratulations on your Innovation Awards oh thank you it's a great honor so to be us let's start with you can you tell us a little bit more about what a viet are is yeah avatars are a digital platform offering features like aircraft condition analytics reliability management and predictive maintenance and it helps airlines worldwide to digitize and improve their operations so all of the features work and can be used separately or generate even more where you burn combined and finally we decided to set up a viet as an open platform that means that we avoid the whole aviation industry to join the community and develop ideas on our platform and to be as one of things i found really fascinating about this is that you had a mandate to do this at a hundred days and you ultimately delivered on it you tell us a little bit about that i mean nothing in aviation moves that fast yeah that's been a big challenge so in the beginning of our story the Lufthansa bot asked us to develop somehow digital to win of an aircraft within just hundred days and to deliver something of value within 100 days means you cannot spend much time and producing specifications in terms of paper etc so for us it was pretty clear that we should go for an angel approach and immediately start and developing ideas so we put the best experts we know just in one room and let them start to work and on day 2 I think we already had the first scribbles for the UI on day 5 we wrote the first lines of code and we were able to do that because it has been a major advantage for us to already have four technologies taken place it's based on open source and especially rated solutions because we did not have to waste any time setting up the infrastructure and since we wanted to get feedback very fast we were certainly visited an airline from the Lufthansa group already on day 30 and showed them the first results and got a lot of feedback and because from the very beginning customer centricity has been an important aspect for us and changing the direction based on customer feedback has become quite normal for us over time yeah it's an interesting story not only engaging the people internally but be able to engage with a with that with a launch customer like that and get feedback along the way as it's great thing how is it going overall since launch yeah since the launch last year in April we generated much interest in the industry as well from Airlines as from competitors and in the following month we focused on a few Airlines which had been open minded and already advanced in digital activities and we've got a lot of feedback by working with them and we're able to improve our products by developing new features for example we learned that data integration can become quite complex in the industry and therefore we developed a new feature called quick boarding allowing Airlines to integrate into the via table platform within one day using a self-service so and currently we're heading for the next steps beyond predictive maintenance working on process automation and prescriptive prescriptive maintenance because we believe prediction without fulfillment still isn't enough it really is a great example of even once you're out there quickly continuing to innovate change react it's great to see so Nick I mean we all know ups I'm still always blown away by the size and scale of the company and the logistics operations that you run you tell us a little more about the project and what we're doing together yeah sure Jim and you know first of all I think I didn't get the sportcoat memo I think I'm the first one up here today with a sport coat but you know first on you know on behalf of the 430,000 ups was around the world and our just world-class talented team of 5,000 IT professionals I have to tell you we're humbled to be one of this year's red hat Innovation Award recipients so we really appreciate that you know as a global logistics provider we deliver about 20 million packages each day and we've got a portfolio of technologies both operational and customer tech and another customer facing side the power what we call the UPS smart logistics network and I gotta tell you innovations in our DNA technology is at the core of everything we do you know from the ever familiar first and industry mobile platform that a lot of you see when you get delivered a package which we call the diad which believe it or not we delivered in 1992 my choice a data-driven solution that drives over 40 million of our my choice customers I'm whatever you know what this is great he loves logistics he's a my choice customer you could be one too by the way there's a free app in the App Store but it provides unmatched visibility and really controls that last mile delivery experience so now today we're gonna talk about the solution that we're recognized for which is called site which is part of a much greater platform that we call edge which is transforming how our package delivery teams operate providing them real-time insights into our operations you know this allows them to make decisions based on data from 32 disparate data sources and these insights help us to optimize our operations but more importantly they help us improve the delivery experience for our customers just like you Jim you know on the on the back end is Big Data and it's on a large scale our systems are crunching billions of events to render those insights on an easy-to-use mobile platform in real time I got to tell you placing that information in our operators hands makes ups agile and being agile being able to react to changing conditions as you know is the name of the game in logistics now we built edge in our private cloud where Red Hat technologies play a very important role as part of our overage overarching cloud strategy and our migration to agile and DevOps so it's it's amazing it's amazing the size and scale so so you have this technology vision around engaging people in a more effect way those are my word not yours but but I'd be at that's how it certainly feels and so tell us a little more about how that enables the hundreds of thousands people to make better decisions every day yep so you know we're a people company and the edge platform is really the latest in a series of solutions to really empower our people and really power that smart logistics network you know we've been deploying technology believe it or not since we founded the company in 1907 we'll be a hundred and eleven years old this August it's just a phenomenal story now prior to edge and specifically the syphon ishutin firm ation from a number of disparate systems and reports they then need to manually look across these various data sources and and frankly it was inefficient and prone to inaccuracy and it wasn't really real-time at all now edge consumes data as I mentioned earlier from 32 disparate systems it allows our operators to make decisions on staffing equipment the flow of packages through the buildings in real time the ability to give our people on the ground the most up-to-date data allows them to make informed decisions now that's incredibly empowering because not only are they influencing their local operations but frankly they're influencing the entire global network it's truly extraordinary and so why open source and open shift in particular as part of that solution yeah you know so as I mentioned Red Hat and Red Hat technology you know specifically open shift there's really core to our cloud strategy and to our DevOps strategy the tools and environments that we've partnered with Red Hat to put in place truly are foundational and they've fundamentally changed the way we develop and deploy our systems you know I heard Jose talk earlier you know we had complex solutions that used to take 12 to 18 months to develop and deliver to market today we deliver those same solutions same level of complexity in months and even weeks now openshift enables us to container raise our workloads that run in our private cloud during normal operating periods but as we scale our business during our holiday peak season which is a very sure window about five weeks during the year last year as a matter of fact we delivered seven hundred and sixty-two million packages in that small window and our transactions our systems they just spiked dramatically during that period we think that having open shift will allow us in those peak periods to seamlessly move workloads to the public cloud so we can take advantage of burst capacity economically when needed and I have to tell you having this flexibility I think is key because you know ultimately it's going to allow us to react quickly to customer demands when needed dial back capacity when we don't need that capacity and I have to say it's a really great story of UPS and red hat working you together it really is a great story is just amazing again the size and scope but both stories here a lot speed speed speed getting to market quickly being able to try things it's great lessons learned for all of us the importance of being able to operate at a fundamentally different clock speed so thank you all for being here very much appreciated congratulate thank you [Applause] [Music] alright so while it's great to hear from our Innovation Award winners and it should be no surprise that they're leading and experimenting in some really interesting areas its scale so I hope that you got a chance to learn something from these interviews you'll have an opportunity to learn more about them you'll also have an opportunity to vote on the innovator of the year you can do that on the Red Hat summit mobile app or on the Red Hat Innovation Awards homepage you can learn even more about their stories and you'll have a chance to vote and I'll be back tomorrow to announce the the summit winner so next I like to spend a few minutes on talking about how Red Hat is working to catalyze our customers efforts Marko bill Peter our senior vice president of customer experience and engagement and John Alessio our vice president of global services will both describe areas in how we are working to configure our own organization to effectively engage with our customers to use open source to help drive their success so with that I'd like to welcome marquel on stage [Music] good morning good morning thank you Jim so I want to spend a few minutes to talk about how we are configured how we are configured towards your success how we enable internally as well to work towards your success and actually engage as well you know Paul yesterday talked about the open source culture and our open source development net model you know there's a lot of attributes that we have like transparency meritocracy collaboration those are the key of our culture they made RedHat what it is today and what it will be in the future but we also added our passion for customer success to that let me tell you this is kind of the configuration from a cultural perspective let me tell you a little bit on what that means so if you heard the name my organization is customer experience and engagement right in the past we talked a lot about support it's an important part of the Red Hat right and how we are configured we are configured probably very uniquely in the industry we put support together we have product security in there we add a documentation we add a quality engineering into an organization you think there's like wow why are they doing it we're also running actually the IT team for actually the product teams why are we doing that now you can imagine right we want to go through what you see as well right and I'll give you a few examples on how what's coming out of this configuration we invest more and more in testing integration and use cases which you are applying so you can see it between the support team experiencing a lot what you do and actually changing our test structure that makes a lot of sense we are investing more and more testing outside the boundaries so not exactly how things must fall by product management or engineering but also how does it really run in an environment that you operate we run complex setups internally right taking openshift putting in OpenStack using software-defined storage underneath managing it with cloud forms managing it if inside we do that we want to see how that works right we are reshaping documentation console to kind of help you better instead of just documenting features and knobs as in how can how do you want to achieve things now part of this is the configuration that are the big part of the configuration is the voice of the customer to listen to what you say I've been here at Red Hat a few years and one of my passion has always been really hearing from customers how they do it I travel constantly in the world and meet with customers because I want to know what is really going on we use channels like support we use channels like getting from salespeople the interaction from customers we do surveys we do you know we interact with our people to really hear what you do what we also do what maybe not many know and it's also very unique in the industry we have a webpage called you asked reacted we show very transparently you told us this is an area for improvement and it's not just in support it's across the company right build us a better web store build us this we're very transparent about Hades improvements we want to do with you now if you want to be part of the process today go to the feedback zone on the next floor down and talk to my team I might be there as well hit me up we want to hear the feedback this is how we talk about configuration of the organization how we are configured let me go to let me go to another part which is innovation innovation every day and that in my opinion the enable section right we gotta constantly innovate ourselves how do we work with you how do we actually provide better value how do we provide faster responses in support this is what we would I say is is our you know commitment to innovation which is the enabling that Jim talked about and I give you a few examples which I'm really happy and it kind of shows the open source culture at Red Hat our commitment is for innovation I'll give you good example right if you have a few thousand engineers and you empower them you kind of set the business framework as hey this is an area we got to do something you get a lot of good IDs you get a lot of IDs and you got a shape an inter an area that hey this is really something that brings now a few years ago we kind of said or I say is like based on a lot of feedback is we got to get more and more proactive if you customers and so I shaped my team and and I shaped it around how can we be more proactive it started very simple as in like from kbase articles or knowledgebase articles in getting started guys then we started a a tool that we put out called labs you've probably seen them if you're on the technical side really taking small applications out for you to kind of validate is this configured correctly stat configure there was the start then out of that the ideas came and they took different turns and one of the turns that we came out was right at insights that we launched a few years ago and did you see the demo yesterday that in Paul's keynote that they showed how something was broken with one the data centers how it was applied to fix and how has changed this is how innovation really came from the ground up from the support side and turned into something really a being a cornerstone of our strategy and we're keeping it married from the day to day work right you don't want to separate this you want to actually keep that the data that's coming from the support goes in that because that's the power that we saw yesterday in the demo now innovation doesn't stop when you set the challenge so we did the labs we did the insights we just launched a solution engine called solution engine another thing that came out of that challenge is in how do we break complex issues down that it's easier for you to find a solution quicker it's one example but we're also experimenting with AI so insights uses AI as you probably heard yesterday we also use it internally to actually drive faster resolution we did in one case with a a our I bought basically that we get to 25% faster resolution on challenges that you have the beauty for you obviously it's well this is much faster 10% of all our support cases today are supported and assisted by an AI now I'll give you another example of just trying to tell you the innovation that comes out if you configure and enable the team correctly kbase articles are knowledgebase articles we q8 thousands and thousands every year and then I get feedback as and while they're good but they're in English as you can tell my English is perfect so it's not no issue for that but for many of you is maybe like even here even I read it in Japanese so we actually did machine translation because it's too many that we can do manually the using machine translation I can tell it's a funny example two weeks ago I tried it I tried something from English to German I looked at it the German looked really bad I went back but the English was bad so it really translates one to one actually what it does but it's really cool this is innovation that you can apply and the team actually worked on this and really proud on that now the real innovation there is not these tools the real innovation is that you can actually shape it in a way that the innovation comes that you empower the people that's the configure and enable and what I think is all it's important this don't reinvent the plumbing don't start from scratch use systems like containers on open shift to actually build the innovation in a smaller way without reinventing the plumbing you save a lot of issues on security a lot of issues on reinventing the wheel focus on that that's what we do as well if you want to hear more details again go in the second floor now let's talk about the engage that Jim mentioned before what I translate that engage is actually engaging you as a customer towards your success now what does commitment to success really mean and I want to reflect on that on a traditional IT company shows up with you talk the salesperson solution architect works with you consulting implements solution it comes over to support and trust me in a very traditional way the support guy has no clue what actually was sold early on it's what happens right and this is actually I think that red had better that we're not so silent we don't show our internal silos or internal organization that much today we engage in a way it doesn't matter from which team it comes we have a better flow than that you deserve how the sausage is made but we can never forget what was your business objective early on now how is Red Hat different in this and we are very strong in my opinion you might disagree but we are very strong in a virtual accounting right really putting you in the middle and actually having a solution architect work directly with support or consulting involved and driving that together you can also help us in actually really embracing that model if that's also other partners or system integrators integrate put yourself in the middle be around that's how we want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the original business problem trust me reducing the hierarchy or getting rid of hierarchy and bureaucracy goes a long way now this is how we configured this is how we engage and this is how we are committed to your success with that I'm going to introduce you to John Alessio that talks more about some of the innovation done with customers thank you [Music] good morning I'm John Alessio I'm the vice president of Global Services and I'm delighted to be with you here today I'd like to talk to you about a couple of things as it relates to what we've been doing since the last summit in the services organization at the core of everything we did it's very similar to what Marco talked to you about our number one priority is driving our customer success with red hat technology and as you see here on the screen we have a number of different offerings and capabilities all the way from training certification open innovation labs consulting really pairing those capabilities together with what you just heard from Marco in the support or cee organization really that's the journey you all go through from the beginning of discovering what your business challenge is all the way through designing those solutions and deploying them with red hat now the highlight like to highlight a few things of what we've been up to over the last year so if I start with the training and certification team they've been very busy over the last year really updating enhancing our curriculum if you haven't stopped by the booth there's a preview for new capability around our learning community which is a new way of learning and really driving that enable meant in the community because 70% of what you need to know you learned from your peers and so it's a very key part of our learning strategy and in fact we take customer satisfaction with our training and certification business very seriously we survey all of our students coming out of training 93% of our students tell us they're better prepared because of red hat training and certification after Weeds they've completed the course we've updated the courses and we've trained well over a hundred and fifty thousand people over the last two years so it's a very very key part of our strategy and that combined with innovation labs and the consulting operation really drive that overall journey now we've been equally busy in enhancing the system of enablement and support for our business partners another very very key initiative is building out the ecosystem we've enhanced our open platform which is online partner enablement network we've added new capability and in fact much of the training and enablement that we do for our internal consultants our deal is delivered through the open platform now what I'm really impressed with and thankful for our partners is how they are consuming and leveraging this material we train and enable for sales for pre-sales and for delivery and we're up over 70% year in year in our partners that are enabled on RedHat technology let's give our business partners a round of applause now one of our offerings Red Hat open innovation labs I'd like to talk a bit more about and take you through a case study open innovation labs was created two years ago it's really there to help you on your journey in adopting open source technology it's an immersive experience where your team will work side-by-side with Red Hatters to really propel your journey forward in adopting open source technology and in fact we've been very busy since the summit in Boston as you'll see coming up on the screen we've completed dozens of engagements leveraging our methods tools and processes for open innovation labs as you can see we've worked with large and small accounts in fact if you remember summit last year we had a European customer easier AG on stage which was a startup and we worked with them at the very beginning of their business to create capabilities in a very short four-week engagement but over the last year we've also worked with very large customers such as Optim and Delta Airlines here in North America as well as Motability operations in the European arena one of the accounts I want to spend a little bit more time on is Heritage Bank heritage Bank is a community owned bank in Toowoomba Australia their challenge was not just on creating new innovative technology but their challenge was also around cultural transformation how to get people to work together across the silos within their organization we worked with them at all levels of the organization to create a new capability the first engagement went so well that they asked us to come in into a second engagement so I'd like to do now is run a video with Peter lock the chief executive officer of Heritage Bank so he can take you through their experience Heritage Bank is one of the country's oldest financial institutions we have to be smarter we have to be more innovative we have to be more agile we had to change we had to find people to help us make that change the Red Hat lab is the only one that truly helps drive that change with a business problem the change within the team is very visible from the start to now we've gone from being separated to very single goal minded seeing people that I only ever seen before in their cubicles in the room made me smile programmers in their thinking I'm now understanding how the whole process fits together the productivity of IT will change and that is good for our business that's really the value that were looking for the Red Hat innovation labs for us were a really great experience I'm not interested in running an organization I'm interested in making a great organization to say I was pleasantly surprised by it is an understatement I was delighted I love the quote I was delighted makes my heart warm every time I see that video you know since we were at summit for those of you who are with us in Boston some of you went on our hardhat tours we've opened three physical facilities here at Red Hat where we can conduct red head open Innovation Lab engagements Singapore London and Boston were all opened within the last physical year and in fact our site in Boston is paired with our world-class executive briefing center as well so if you haven't been there please do check it out I'd like to now talk to you a bit about a very special engagement that we just recently completed we just recently completed an engagement with UNICEF the United Nations Children's Fund and the the purpose behind this engagement was really to help UNICEF create an open-source platform that marries big data with social good the idea is UNICEF needs to be better prepared to respond to emergency situations and as you can imagine emergency situations are by nature unpredictable you can't really plan for them they can happen anytime anywhere and so we worked with them on a project that we called school mapping and the idea was to provide more insights so that when emergency situations arise UNICEF could do a much better job in helping the children in the region and so we leveraged our Red Hat open innovation lab methods tools processes that you've heard about just like we did at Heritage Bank and the other accounts I mentioned but then we also leveraged Red Hat software technologies so we leveraged OpenShift container platform we leveraged ansible automation we helped the client with a more agile development approach so they could have releases much more frequently and continue to update this over time we created a continuous integration continuous deployment pipeline we worked on containers and container in the application etc with that we've been able to provide a platform that is going to allow for their growth to better respond to these emergency situations let's watch a short video on UNICEF mission of UNICEF innovation is to apply technology to the world's most pressing problems facing children data is changing the landscape of what we do at UNICEF this means that we can figure out what's happening now on the ground who it's happening to and actually respond to it in much more of a real-time manner than we used to be able to do we love working with open source communities because of their commitment that we should be doing good for the world we're actually with red hat building a sandbox where universities or other researchers or data scientists can connect and help us with our work if you want to use data for social good there's so many groups out there that really need your help and there's so many ways to get involved [Music] so let's give a very very warm red hat summit welcome to Erica kochi co-founder of unicef innovation well Erica first of all welcome to Red Hat summit thanks for having me here it's our pleasure and thank you for joining us so Erica I've just talked a bit about kind of what we've been up to and Red Hat services over the last year we talked a bit about our open innovation labs and we did this project the school mapping project together our two teams and I thought the audience might find it interesting from your point of view on why the approach we use in innovation labs was such a good fit for the school mapping project yeah it was a great fit for for two reasons the first is values everything that we do at UNICEF innovation we use open source technology and that's for a couple of reasons because we can take it from one place and very easily move it to other countries around the world we work in 190 countries so that's really important for us not to be able to scale things also because it makes sense we can get we can get more communities involved in this and look not just try to do everything by ourselves but look much open much more openly towards the open source communities out there to help us with our work we can't do it alone yeah and then the second thing is methodology you know the labs are really looking at taking this agile approach to prototyping things trying things failing trying again and that's really necessary when you're developing something new and trying to do something new like mapping every school in the world yeah very challenging work think about it 190 countries Wow and so the open source platform really works well and then the the rapid prototyping was really a good fit so I think the audience might find it interesting on how this application and this platform will help children in Latin America so in a lot of countries in Latin America and many countries throughout the world that UNICEF works in are coming out of either decades of conflict or are are subject to natural disasters and not great infrastructure so it's really important to a for us to know where schools are where communities are well where help is needed what's connected what's not and using a overlay of various sources of data from poverty mapping to satellite imagery to other sources we can really figure out what's happening where resources are where they aren't and so we can plan better to respond to emergencies and to and to really invest in areas that are needed that need that investment excellent excellent it's quite powerful what we were able to do in a relatively short eight or nine week engagement that our two teams did together now many of your colleagues in the audience are using open source today looking to expand their use of open source and I thought you might have some recommendations for them on how they kind of go through that journey and expanding their use of open source since your experience at that yeah for us it was it was very much based on what's this gonna cost we have limited resources and what's how is this gonna spread as quickly as possible mm-hmm and so we really asked ourselves those two questions you know about 10 years ago and what we realized is if we are going to be recommending technologies that governments are going to be using it really needs to be open source they need to have control over it yeah and they need to be working with communities not developing it themselves yeah excellent excellent so I got really inspired with what we were doing here in this project it's one of those you know every customer project is really interesting to me this one kind of pulls a little bit at your heartstrings on what the real impact could be here and so I know some of our colleagues here in the audience may want to get involved how can they get involved well there's many ways to get involved with the other UNICEF or other groups out there you can search for our work on github and there are tasks that you can do right now if and if you're looking for to do she's got work for you and if you want sort of a more a longer engagement or a bigger engagement you can check out our website UNICEF stories org and you can look at the areas you might be interested in and contact us we're always open to collaboration excellent well Erica thank you for being with us here today thank you for the great project we worked on together and have a great summer thank you for being give her a round of applause all right well I hope that's been helpful to you to give you a bit of an update on what we've been focused on in global services the message I'll leave with you is our top priority is customer success as you heard through the story from UNICEF from Heritage Bank and others we can help you innovate where you are today I hope you have a great summit and I'll call out Jim Whitehurst thank you John and thank you Erica that's really an inspiring story we have so many great examples of how individuals and organizations are stepping up to transform in the face of digital disruption I'd like to spend my last few minutes with one real-world example that brings a lot of this together and truly with life-saving impact how many times do you think you can solve a problem which is going to allow a clinician to now save the life I think the challenge all of his physicians are dealing with is data overload I probably look at over 100,000 images in a day and that's just gonna get worse what if it was possible for some computer program to look at these images with them and automatically flag images that might deserve better attention Chris on the surface seems pretty simple but underneath Chris has a lot going on in the past year I've seen Chris Foreman community and a space usually dominated by proprietary software I think Chris can change medicine as we know it today [Music] all right with that I'd like to invite on stage dr. Ellen grant from Boston Children's Hospital dr. grant welcome thank you for being here so dr. grant tell me who is Chris Chris does a lot of work for us and I think Chris is making me or has definitely the potential to make me a better doctor Chris helps us take data from our archives in the hospital and port it to wrap the fastback ends like the mass up and cloud to do rapid data processing and provide it back to me in any format on a desktop an iPad or an iPhone so it it basically brings high-end data analysis right to me at the bedside and that's been a barrier that I struggled with years ago to try to break down so that's where we started with Chris is to to break that barrier between research that occurred on a timeline of days to weeks to months to clinical practice which occurs in the timeline of seconds to minutes well one of things I found really fascinating about this story RedHat in case you can't tell we're really passionate about user driven innovation is this is an example of user driven innovation not directly at a technology company but in medicine excuse me can you tell us just a little bit about the genesis of Chris and how I got started yeah Chris got started when I was running a clinical division and I was very frustrated with not having the latest image analysis tools at my fingertips while I was on clinical practice and I would have to on the research so I could go over and you know do line code and do the data analysis but if I'm always over in clinical I kept forgetting how to do those things and I wanted to have all those innovations that my fingertips and not have to remember all the computer science because I'm a physician not like a better scientist so I wanted to build a platform that gave me easy access to that back-end without having to remember all the details and so that's what Chris does for us is brings allowed me to go into the PAC's grab a dataset send it to a computer and back in to do the analysis and bring it back to me without having to worry about where it was or how it got there that's all involved in the in the platform Chris and why not just go to a vendor and ask them to write a piece of software for you to do that yeah we thought about that and we do a lot of technical innovations and we always work with the experts so we wanted to work with if I'm going to be able to say an optical device I'm going to work with the optical engineers or an EM our system I'm going to work with em our engineers so we wanted to work with people who really knew or the plumbers so to speak of the software in industry so we ended up working with the massive point cloud for the platform and the distributed systems in Red Hat as the infrastructure that's starting to support Chris and that's been actually a really incredible journey for us because medical ready medical softwares not typically been a community process and that's something that working with dan from Red Hat we learned a lot about how to participate in an open community and I think our team has grown a lot as a result of that collaboration and I know you we've talked about in the past that getting this data locked into a proprietary system you may not be able to get out there's a real issue can you talk about the importance of open and how that's worked in the process yeah and I think for the medical community and I find this resonates with other physicians as well too is that it's medical data we want to continue to own and we feel very awkward about giving it to industry so we would rather have our data sitting in an open cloud like the mass open cloud where we can have a data consortium that oversees the data governance so that we're not giving our data way to somebody else but have a platform that we can still keep a control of our own data and I think it's going to be the future because we're running of a space in the hospital we generate so much data and it's just going to get worse as I was mentioning and all the systems run faster we get new devices so the amount of data that we have to filter through is just astronomically increasing so we need to have resources to store and compute on such large databases and so thinking about where this could go I mean this is a classic feels like an open-source project it started really really small with a originally modest set of goals and it's just kind of continue to grow and grow and grow it's a lot like if yes leanest torval Linux would be in 1995 you probably wouldn't think it would be where it is now so if you dream with me a little bit where do you think this could possibly go in the next five years ten years what I hope it'll do is allow us to break down the silos within the hospital because to do the best job at what we physicians do not only do we have to talk and collaborate together as individuals we have to take the data each each community develops and be able to bring it together so in other words I need to be able to bring in information from vital monitors from mr scans from optical devices from genetic tests electronic health record and be able to analyze on all that data combined so ideally this would be a platform that breaks down those information barriers in a hospital and also allows us to collaborate across multiple institutions because many disorders you only see a few in each hospital so we really have to work as teams in the medical community to combine our data together and also I'm hoping that and we even have discussions with people in the developing world because they have systems to generate or to got to create data or say for example an M R system they can't create data but they don't have the resources to analyze on it so this would be a portable for them to participate in this growing data analysis world without having to have the infrastructure there and be a portal into our back-end and we could provide the infrastructure to do the data analysis it really is truly amazing to see how it's just continued to grow and grow and expand it really is it's a phenomenal story thank you so much for being here appreciate it thank you [Applause] I really do love that story it's a great example of user driven innovation you know in a different industry than in technology and you know recognizing that a clinicians need for real-time information is very different than a researchers need you know in projects that can last weeks and months and so rather than trying to get an industry to pivot and change it's a great opportunity to use a user driven approach to directly meet those needs so we still have a long way to go we have two more days of the summit and as I said yesterday you know we're not here to give you all the answers we're here to convene the conversation so I hope you will have an opportunity today and tomorrow to meet some new people to share some ideas we're really really excited about what we can all do when we work together so I hope you found today valuable we still have a lot more happening on the main stage as well this afternoon please join us back for the general session it's a really amazing lineup you'll hear from the women and opensource Award winners you'll also hear more about our collab program which is really cool it's getting middle school girls interested in open sourcing coding and so you'll have an opportunity to see some people involved in that you'll also hear from the open source Story speakers and you'll including in that you will see a demo done by a technologist who happens to be 11 years old so really cool you don't want to miss that so I look forward to seeing you then this afternoon thank you [Applause]

Published Date : May 10 2018

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Jeremy Almond, PayStand | CUBE Conversation, Feb 2018


 

(orchestral music) >> Welcome to the special Cube Conversation here at Palo Alto studios, at the Cube office yeah I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and also co-host the Cube. Our next guest is Jeremy Almond is the CEO of Paystand, hot startup doin' some really new things in and around blockchain, decentralize, and really targeting the B2B space on a really compelling and interesting topic that a lot of people are interested in. Jeremy welcome to this Cube conversation. >> Awesome, thank you John. >> Hey so talk a little about the company, set the table for us, PayStand, what you guys are doing, why you were founded, and what's the disruptive enabler that you guys are taking, and what's the angle of your business? >> Yeah sure so, PayStand like you mentioned, is a B2B software platform, specifically focused on payment. So, you can imagine what Paypal or Venmo does from the consumer level, we do for complicated commercial transactions between accounts receivable and accounts payable departments that normally would be paying with paper checks in manual process. >> So basically accounting, ledger, I'm kind of guessing. Nice bit for blockchain. >> Correct, yeah, yeah. So, what we do is we apply blockchain technology to help a company speed up their time to cash, automate their business process and dramatically lower their transaction cost. >> I'll get your thoughts on this. I interviewed Don Tapscott at an event and we were riffing on this notion of the nature of the firm, right? People would come to an office, you'd have accounting, all these things that you'd have to put in place as systems. Now with this decentralized world we're living in, internet and with blockchain in particular, and a cryptocurrency market that's pretty frothy. But, you look at blockchain and you separate those two for a minute. You really can look at ways to change how work is organized. How do you guys view that, I mean, It's obviously a new, big wave coming. Then you've got businesses who are just trying to operate and make money, right? So, keep the lights on, but they also have to start rethinking about the future. So, what is this block wave, blockchain wave coming? How do you talk about that? Is it that disruptive? I mean, certainly centralized databases aren't going a away any time soon, but it's coming. What's your thoughts and reaction to that? >> It's coming. You know, I think it's... It will effect the enterprise, which is where we spend our time and space. In a lot of ways like cloud did. So, I've spent probably 15 years doing unsexy B2B tech in some way shape or form. And what we've seen is digital transformation in the enterprise has happened in a few key areas. CRM is now in the cloud. You have companies like Salesforce that have become significant. ERP is now in the cloud, you're financial software is now automated. Kind of ironically the last mile piece, the part that lubricates the business, the core of the business, the money movement piece, is actually still really, really manual. So, you have humans that sit around and they take an invoice and then a paper check and then they move it. And that process is very, very inefficient. And so, having a more automatic, smart financial system can improve the business's life in really significant ways. >> Also, you know, one of the things we've been commenting on opining here on the Cube is, I made a statement a couple weeks ago, OMAR tech, marketing technology, Wave, all those logos on those landscape slides, didn't really pan out cause the cloud kind of changed that. It's panning out, but not the way people thought. FinTech, financial tech, is also certainly important. Banks of safe trading, you see that. What is the inhibitor for these new trends? Because you mentioned moving paper around. I mean it's money, they probably don't want to mess with an operational system that's a quarter of their business. Is it fear? Is it tech? Both? What's your view on why it's taking so long? Or is it moving along at a speed you think is going to... Being adopted? >> Yeah, it's actually kind of a unique point in time right now. I think in one hand, financial services in general, part of their job is to manage risk. And so, they're going to be a lagging, in some ways, industry. And so, digital transformation, the internet has opened up and democratized media. It's opened up so many other areas. Blockchain, now, is the entry point for digital transformation of financial services. And so, the time is probably right now. We've been in the space. We started the company in 2014. I'd seen over the last three years, hearing banks, other large institutions, large enterprises go from skepticism to curiosity. >> What's the technology stack look like? Obviously, four years is like decades in the blockchain world. Obviously, people are running as fast as they can. It's kind of a moving train, at many levels, business model side, as well as the tech stack. And this is really the opportunity a lot of these systems-- I mean some of the e-commerce systems are 20 year old tech stacks, some are even older. Just going back four years since you were founded, what's the big moving glacier, if you will, of change and how are you guys managing that? And how should people think about managing the risk of the tech stack? >> Yeah, I mean, I think on the blockchain specific side, in the early days a lot of it was about currency and actual payment. I think what we're seeing now is the opportunity for blockchain, particularly in the enterprise, to actually dramatically improve their operations side. So, Ethereum, private blockchains, actually have the ability to, not just decentralize how money movement or networks operate, but how an internal system operates. I'll give you an example, we used the blockchain to-- A private blockchain to actually control approval work flow. So when a payment goes out, often times you need your accounts payable person to send a payment out, but the controller or the treasury or someone else has to sign off on it. So that signature, you need it to be valid, trusted, the identity around it, right? And you want an audit record. And so blockchains a really, really good use case for something like that. That's not pure play payments, it's not pure play settlement, it doesn't require a million people to get on. It just can operate in the business in a really critical function in a better way than the current technology does. >> It's interesting. I love these new technology opportunities, cause there's always going to be a tipping point and the famous Steve Jobs quote is, "Hey, if I was asked to build a better phone "in 2005 I would've built an excellent, better Blackberry" But then he built the Iphone, so he thought differently. No one was really asking for the Iphone. So, the question I get a lot from skeptics in blockchain is, no one's really asking for blockchain. So, again, this is kind of like, you could always say, I'm building a better centralized database system in a distributive computing environment. Okay, we've done that. >> Yeah >> Are people asking for blockchain? Or are they just asking for it in a different way? What's your thoughts to that? >> Yeah, I would say that there's a big picture question of are people ask for it? And I'd say, society is actually asking for it. Part of my personal story is, my family, blue collar family, my mother's side immigrated here, her generation. My brick layer father, they spent their entire lives getting their first home. 800 square foot home, it was nothing special, but it was their American dream. In 2008, in the financial crisis, they lost that house. And so I think society said financial services and core parts of our economy actually could-- we could do better. And I think the magic thing about technology is we get to imagine the world not as it is, but as it ought to be. So, one, I think society is actually asking for can the core parts of our economy actually do better? Can we dream up something better? I think that's the purest part of what the folks in the blockchain movement are trying to do. That's at a very high level. And then I think practically, right, for businesses like we operate day in and day out, if there's technology that allows them to be able to operate their business more efficiently, drop their costs and grow faster, how would that work? It's in some ways like cloud. How does cloud work? I think now we're really getting into the deep mess of it. But cloud was transformative to the business. VOIP was transformative to some businesses. Inbound marketing was transformative to some businesses. Blockchain is the same kind of concept. >> And cloud too, there's a lot of naysayers. I remember I use the first EC2 instances of Amazon, when it came out being an entrepreneur I don't have to have provision servers. This is amazing. And I can put credit card down and pay a few bucks? And then even still, up until three or four years ago, they were dismissed as relevant. And, again, the rest is history. Look what they've done. So, there's always going to be those naysayers. But, to the point about cloud and blockchain, and say even crypto, this is a wave and we are very bullish on this movement because we see the waves coming way out there and it's huge. And this is probably bigger than the other waves combined, in our opinion. So, you mentioned societal change. This is a big deal. You're seeing regulations right now in GDPR, in Europe. Trying to govern an old database market, that's even in an own problem. It's a mess database wise. But it makes sense from a society standpoint. People want to pull their data out. This is a trend. You've got societal forces and then technical legacy. This could be an opportunity for a blockchain to saying, hey optimize for the new wave, don't try to retrofit, say, an old wave. What's your thoughts? >> Correct. Yeah, I think there's a number of areas, even in the data side with society. Take an Enron scandal that happened a decade plus ago. Out of that came regulation called Sarbanes-Oxley. And Sarbanes-Oxley's concept is to ensure that companies publicly account for their records in the proper way. That there's an audit trail. That they don't, sort of, pick their financial systems and misrepresent them. The blockchain, because it's a source of truth that's immutable, meaning it can't be changed, is a great way to have more efficiency in that process. Today, there's a whole industry that's popped up just for Sarbanes-Oxley, just to regulate the financial system, just to ensure that the books actually say what their supposed to say. That's kind of the definition of what a smart contract can and should do. >> This is though, really an opportunity for entrepreneurs when you think about it. A lot of alpha entrepreneurs are really lickin' their chops on blockchain, because they can see how it could disrupt industries. And this is really, again, I showed you some things we're working on and what we're thinking about with SiliconANGLE about media and data. But it brings up things that we, obviously, see every day in the press. The election, weaponizing content for bed, things-- Facebooks having a challenge right now in how they optimize their data for their own self service reasons. This is a problem. This is a revolution. People are kind of tired. So, what's your view of the role of data to the human? Obviously the cliche, oh the users are in charge, they should own their own data. Okay, I get that, but how do you see that vision playing out? Not just from Facebook, that's just a social network example. But how does data impact a user going forward in your vision? Because they could really change from the outside in. >> Yeah, I think part of what's critical with data is two things. One, identity really matters. How do you manage identity? So, I think there's a number of really fascinating blockchain companies that are specifically focused on the identity question. And that's true around the social media side. It's true around, how do I actually manage where I move identity around? So, I think that's one side that's really, really critical to solve. I don't know that we've got a crystal ball yet on what it will ultimately look like. But the blockchain model for identity allows us to rethink the fabrics of what privacy is, what permission looks like and what trust looks like with people I want to engage with and with people I don't want to engage with. >> That's interesting. You talk about the blockchain culture being more societal and mission driven, my word, but you're kind of implying that. I remember when the cloud came out. It was, the network guys were in charge and the app guys had to feed off the network requirements. And then that seat changed, flipped around. The app guys are in charge, data is driving requirements for the network. Question for you is do you see a day soon where societal requirements will dictate technology? You're seeing that pattern kind of emerging now, kind of not yet been fully thought through in public commentary. We see the pressure points potentially impacting tech design. >> Yeah, I think there's actually a good tug of war balance. So, entrepreneurs naturally are going to run as fast as they can to see innovation. Hopefully with means of improving society. And then you have regulators and you have government agencies who are looking and saying okay, you might be thinking about one myopic view and we need to make sure we're looking at the good of society. And so, I think that tug of war you saw with the internet, where how much do we regulate the internet? And I think the balance was mostly healthy. And we're sort of seeing that through today with blockchain as well. Where things like ICOs have good and bad implications. The regulators have been watching it relatively closely. But they also haven't completely came down and clamped down on it. Even this week there's... There was a relative balance in the discussions that came out. >> The SECs done a great job. >> Correct. >> They've whipped a few people into shape, sent the signal, but they weren't foreclosing any innovation. >> That's correct. >> And ICOs certainly had some scams. What's the good sides of ICOs? Obviously the scams are out there. What's the good sides? The fundraising, democratization? What's your take on the ICO, initially coin offering opportunity? >> Yeah, I think in some ways democratization has become such a buzz word it's lost it's meaning. But if you think about what it really is it's so powerful, because it's this concept that we distribute power and control to the hands of many. And so, I think there are a lot of public, good technologies that actually can use that concept. The internet is a public good. You could agree Wikipedia is a public good. And so, utility type tokens actually are valuable, because they can have a dual nature to them. I think the other thing, that I'm particularly interested in watching how ICOs evolve, is-- I think there's some danger in ICOs coming in, in the early stage market. Because early stage companies tend to be... They're so nascent that they need guidance. And I actually, I might be contradictory here to most people in the blockchain space, but I actually think early stage investors have a lot of value in that space. And so, I am actually fascinated about what happens in later stage rounds and what do ICOs become there. So, I think utility and later stage rounds are actually two fascinating areas of ICOs. >> Jeremy, that's a great point. I would also say that the trend that we're seeing is: there's an early stage component that needs mentoring and needs some nurturing, I would agree with that. That's a classic VC-- Maybe some token economics in there, but again different playbook. The tokenization of business is really interesting, cause now you have token economics being applied to a pre-existing proven business with a disruptive nature on the other side. >> Correct. >> Is super interesting. So, I have to ask you. Are we going to have a chief economic officer as a new role soon? Or is that going to be-- Cause it made me think about token economics it's about opening up and changing the distribution, or data and wealth, you could argue both are the same. But how do you view that? Because that's a trend were seeing. The tokenization of a business to disrupt an industry incumbent, set of incumbents. >> Correct, yeah. And I think it's really, really early days in what... You have really early stage companies that are thinking about tokenizing their business before they exist. And then you have other companies which are maybe past the innovation curve and their trying to apply tokens to their business. >> A pivot of an old, existing business. >> Yeah, so we've seen these, right? Public companies that have added blockchain to their name. I think the fascinating thing will become where fast growing, real businesses where there's a there, there. They've crossed the chasm. Go, okay, how do we apply tokenization to our company? And how do we think about it, from both a commercial economic part of the business and then how do we think about it from tokenizing the business? We haven't seen many cases yet, but I actually think that's one of the next waves we'll see. >> Great. Great insight. I got to ask you, on a personal level, you're doing some talking, obviously your the founder of the company, CEO, what's goin' on? What are you talking about these days? What are you passionate about? I know your talking to some folks at University of Santa Barbara. You mentioned going to teach down there. What are you talking about? What are you sharing publicly? What's on your mind these days? >> Yeah, I think I'm personally deeply motivated every day by waking up and going. The financial service industry can go through a massive transformation. And I think there's a lot of really good companies doing that at the consumer level. And so, I think our space, we have a unique place and time to be working at the commercial level. So, the commercial level effects big parts of our economic infrastructures in ways that we don't think about. The Equifax breach was a pretty big deal to people, right? The financial crisis was a big deal to people. So, how do we imagine those kinds of industries? Supply chain, title, logistics. And how do we think about those industries democratizing them with blockchain? Those, to me, are the unsung heroes of what blockchain will ultimately help transform society. >> That's interesting. You said you were kind of humble when you came on earlier. I'm in boring areas of B2B, but I got to say, to see your point about cloud earlier. There's a calm before the storm, these boring areas that are, say, calm, are really the grounds where you see disruption. I think that's an area-- Not just high frequency trading, that's going to be always an issue, but in terms of real financial plumbing. Perfect for a ledger, perfect for those things. Okay, explain-- Take a plug for your company. How are people using you guys? What's the value proposition? What are some of the things you guys are involved in? How does someone engage with you guys? Give the plug for Paystand. >> Yeah, so at Paystand we tend to work with companies where there are high volumes of paper checks in the process. So if you have a hundred thousand dollar invoice that goes out, for example, with a company you've been working out with for a decade. And you have a contract that says it's a net 60 contract. The challenge is, it's paper check. You want to move it digitally. What do you move it digitally to? And the reality is, the consumer payment companies that are focused on credit cards are not really an ideal solution for that because their business model is a percentage business model. And there's nothing wrong with a percentage business model that charges a company two or three percent if I'm swiping for a five dollar cup of coffee. If it's a hundred thousand dollar payment that I owe someone that I know and I have a contract terms. I'm not going to pay the bank 3,000 dollars to move ones and zeros from this bank database to this bank database. So, what we do with our network is we make that money movement fast, instant, automatic, verified, validated with control, in a way that we can automate the process. >> It's so funny. What jumps into my mind is punchcards to computers, tape to duck storage. This is interesting. So, paper checks, probably big, I don't know what the numbers are, you might have them handy. People are doing paper checks. So, you're doing a system around paper checks, did I get that right? >> Yeah, so we digitized what would have been a paper check. Today, over 50 % of all commercial payments are still done in paper checks. So, they're gone in our digital world. You and I, we Venmo each other. But when the business goes to write a check, when they get an invoice they send out a check. And so we digitized the whole process. The moment that the invoice is ready to go to the moment it gets in the bank. It all becomes digital space. >> And the alternative is what? I got to go check when it was mailed, was it received, was it cashed, did it get put into the accounting system? And that's kind of, that's the manual-- >> That's the manual. So, they'll spend a week tracking down the payment. From the moment the controller says okay to pay, to the time it sits in their bank account. That's humans, time, money. >> And an old antiquated system that doesn't change because of what? >> Well it's legacy infrastructure in one way. But in another, even the banking infrastructure-- Most of the banking infrastructure that are for commercial payments was designed in the 60s and 70s. And last time I checked, the 60s and 70s was before the internet today. So, they weren't really designed for digital real time payments. And they weren't designed for commercially used cases like today. >> Is fraud a factor or is that not a factor? Or is that not a part of it? Or yes? >> Yeah, I think a key thing with what we do, enterprise payments, is security is really, really important. We take it very, very seriously. And this is, again, one of the down sides to the legacy commercial infrastructure is when you have a check, you have this checking and routing number on it. Anybody takes that, in theory, that's all that identifies you and your company and your account. Money can actually be moved and ran against in that case. With a network like ours, we can validate that you are who you say you are, you have the money in your account, it moved when it should and you've actually authorized it. These are all things that we should know, but we just don't. >> And you put the data around it. You take that payload, aka check, put it into the system. So, when does a company want-- Should be calling you? Is it like, I'm overloaded with paper. I want a new system. I'm doing a refresh. When do people call Paystand? What's the signals that would give your buyer some indicator of time to call Paystand? >> Yeah, so generally it's after-- It's when they have high volumes of checks and they're growing. And, or, that they've basically taken their ERP and they've done an ERP cloud migration. So, now they've got their general ledger and that financial system is not in a shoebox anymore, it's in a critical, core ERP system. And so, what they're finding is they bought digital transformation for financial services and their accountant only sort of has half the solution. And so they come in and they use us to close the last mile. >> Okay, so I'm going to put my naysayer hat on and ask you the question. I love it, but what's this blockchain thing? I'm an accounting guy. Look at one computer class or whatever, I get blockchain. How do you stay up to date? How do you ensure that I'm going to have a system that's going to be working? I know that blockchain standards are changing. How do you guys mitigate that? How do you handle that question? >> Yeah, I think the critical thing for our customers is for us, our customers, money moves in dollars. It leaves their bank account and goes into their supplier's bank account. The supplier's bank account goes into their customer's bank account. Their financial system does not change. We're actually very, very sensitive to that. We think about this very different than a consumers solution. Which is, consumer solutions almost have a critical mass question. They need everybody to get into the system for it to work. For commercial, you don't actually want to change the business process of your partners. It's really important, they've been doing this. So, we are very thoughtful about our software. It doesn't change business process. It doesn't require you to enter into come kind of new economy or new currency. You simply do what your always doing with the systems you're already using. And we just digitize the process to make them faster, cheaper and automated. >> Awesome. Talk about your goals for the year with Paystand. Where you guys at company wise? Funding? Goals? Hiring? What's going on? Give a quick final word on the company. >> Yeah, I think we're blessed right now. I would say we're one of, if not the fastest B2B payment companies, fastest growing B2B payment companies today. I think we have a long way to go. I would call this inning two for us. We ultimately-- I think much more about what does ten years look like than twelve months look like because this is the beginning of the commercial financial service way. And so, I think we ultimately believe that digital transformation is going to reinvent our industry. And if we can go lead the way we'll be very happy. And for us that just means continue growing, continue serving our customers, continue hiring. I think if we do all that... Right place, right time. >> Awesome. Final question for you. The folks out there watching, your an expert in the industry, again, FinTech as well as computer engineering. If my sister, who is not savvy, says Jeremy what is blockchain? How would you describe blockchain to someone who's interested and needs to know the importance definition and the importance of blockchain? >> Okay, so blockchain to me is basically a way to be able to take information like you might have on your techbook or you might have in a spreadsheet and use it where anybody can access it in a way that's actually easily controllable, visible, secure and automated. That doesn't sound very sexy, but the important thing is how we keep records effects all of society. We have records of who owns our houses. We have records of how much money we have in our account. We have records of who did we vote on. Those records are the foundation for our society. Currently, companies own those records. Companies are fallible And so, what blockchain does, is it allows us to make a more infallible system to keep access to those records you and I care about. >> And this is an infrastructure opportunity, not so much cryptocurrency, kind of a distinction between those two, right? >> That's right. I would say, cryptocurrency and money is like the first pillar app on top of blockchain. >> Jeremy Almond, CEO, founder of Paystand, hot company doing something really good in a growing, changing market called checks, paper checks. And if you have um', grow um', digitize them. Great entry strategy for blockchain. Thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. Thanks for joining us here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier in the Cube studios For Cube conversation, thanks for watching. (orchastral music)

Published Date : Feb 8 2018

SUMMARY :

is the CEO of Paystand, hot startup So, you can imagine what Paypal I'm kind of guessing. to help a company speed up their time to cash, of the nature of the firm, right? ERP is now in the cloud, you're financial software What is the inhibitor for these new trends? And so, the time is probably right now. I mean some of the e-commerce systems in the early days a lot of it was about currency and the famous Steve Jobs quote is, And I think the magic thing about technology I don't have to have provision servers. And Sarbanes-Oxley's concept is to ensure that I showed you some things we're working on But the blockchain model for identity and the app guys had to feed off the network requirements. And I think the balance was mostly healthy. but they weren't foreclosing any innovation. What's the good sides of ICOs? And so, I think there are a lot of public, cause now you have token economics Or is that going to be-- And then you have other companies And how do we think about it, I got to ask you, on a personal level, And so, I think our space, we have a unique What are some of the things you guys are involved in? And the reality is, the consumer payment companies I don't know what the numbers are, The moment that the invoice is ready to go From the moment the controller says okay to pay, But in another, even the banking infrastructure-- is when you have a check, you have this You take that payload, aka check, put it into the system. And so they come in and they use us to close the last mile. and ask you the question. And we just digitize the process Where you guys at company wise? And so, I think we ultimately believe in the industry, again, FinTech but the important thing is how we keep records is like the first pillar app on top of blockchain. And if you have um', grow um', digitize them.

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SiliconANGLEORGANIZATION

0.9+

MonDATE

0.89+

threeQUANTITY

0.89+

decadesQUANTITY

0.88+

first pillarQUANTITY

0.88+