>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas, baby. This is the Cube live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tens of thousands of people. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, we've had some great conversations. This is day one of four days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. We've been talking data. Every company is a data company. Data protection, data resiliency, absolutely table stakes for organizations to, >>And I think ecosystem is the other big theme. And that really came to life last year. You know, we came out of the pandemic and it was like, wow, we are entering a new era. People no longer was the ecosystem worried about it, AWS competing with them. They were more worried about innovating and building on top of AWS and building their own value. And that's really, I think, the theme of the 2020s within the ecosystem. >>And we're gonna be talking about building on top of aws. Two guests join us, two alumni join us. Stephen Manley is here, the CTO of Druva. Welcome back. Jason crat as well is here. CIO and CTO of Summit Carbon Solutions. Guys, great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. >>Let's start with you giving the audience an understanding of the company. What do you guys do? What do you deliver value for customers? All that good >>Stuff. Yeah, no, for sure. So Summit Carbon is the world's largest carbon capture and sequestration company capturing close to 15 million tons of carbon every year. So it doesn't go into the atmosphere. >>Wow, fantastic. Steven, the, the risk landscape today is crazy, right? There's, there's been massive changes. We've talked about this many times. What are some of the things, you know, ransomware is a, is, I know as you say, this is a, it's not a, if it's gonna happen, it's when it's how frequent, it's what's gonna be the damage. What are some of the challenges and concerns that you're hearing from customers out there today? >>Yeah, you know, it really comes down to three things. And, and everybody is, is terrified of ransomware and justifiably so. So, so the first thing that comes up is, how do I keep up? Because I have so much data in so many places, and the threats are evolving so quickly. I don't have enough money, I don't have enough people, I don't have enough skilled resources to be able to keep up. The second thing, and this ties in with what Dave said, is, is ecosystem. You know, it used to be that your, your backup was siloed, right? They'd sit in the basement and, and you wouldn't see, see them. But now they're saying, I've gotta work with my security team. So rather than hoping the security team stays away from me, how do I integrate with them? How do I tie together? And then the third one, which is on everybody's mind, is when that attack happens, and like you said, it's win and, and the bell rings and they come to me and they say, all right, it's time for you to recover. It's time for, for all this investment we've put in. Am I gonna be ready? Am I going to be able to execute? Because a ransom or recovery is so different than any other recovery they've ever done. So it's those three things that really are top of mind for >>How, so what is the, what are the key differences, if you could summarize? I mean, I >>Know it's so, so the first one is you can't trust the environment you're restoring into. Even with a disaster, it would finish and you'd say, okay, I'm gonna get my data center set up again and I'm gonna get things working. You know, when I try to recover, I don't know if everything's clean yet. I'm trying to recover while I'm still going through incident response. So that's one big difference. A second big difference is I'm not sure if the thing I'm recovering is good, I've gotta scan it. I've gotta make sure what's inside it is, is, is alright. And then the third thing is what we're seeing is the targets are usually not necessarily the crown jewels because those tend to be more protected. And so they're running into this, I need to recover a massive amount of what we might call tier two, tier three apps that I wasn't ready for because I've always been prepared for that tier one disaster. And so, so those three things they go, it's stuff I'm not prepared or covering. It's a flow. I'm not used to having to check things and I'm not sure where I'm gonna recover too when the, when the time comes. >>Yeah, just go ahead. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think for me, the biggest concern is the blind spots of where did I actually back it up or not. You know, what did I get it? Cuz you, we always protect our e r p, we always protect these sort of classes of tiers of systems, but then it's like, oh, that user's email box didn't get it. Oh, that, you know, that one drive didn't get it. You know, or, or, or whatever it is. You know, the infrastructure behind it all. I forgot to back that up. That to me the blind spots are the scariest part of a ransomware attack. >>And, and if you think about it, some of the most high profile attacks, you know, on the, on the colonial pipeline, they didn't go after the core assets. They went after billing. That's right. But billing brought everything down so they're smart enough to say, right, I'm not gonna take the, the castle head on. Is there is they're that. Exactly. >>And so how do you, I get, I mean you can air gap and do things like that in terms of protecting the, the, the data, the corrupt data. How do you protect the corrupt environment? Like that's, that's a really challenging issue. Is >>It? I don't know. I mean, I'll, I'll you can go second here. I think that what's interesting to me about is that's what cloud's for. You can build as many environments as you want. You only pay for what you use, right? And so you have an opportunity to just reconstruct it. That's why things, everything is code matters. That's why having a cloud partner like Druva matters. So you can just go restore wherever you need to in a totally clean environment. >>So the answer is you gotta do it in the cloud. Yeah. What if it's on prem? >>So if it's on prem, what we see people do is, and, and, and this is where testing and, and where cloud can still be an asset, is you can look and say a lot of those assets I'm running in the data center, I could still recover in the cloud. And so you can go through DR testing and you can start to define what's in your on-prem so that you could make it, you know, so you can make it cloud recoverable. Now, a lot of the people that do that then say, well actually why am I even running this on prem anymore in the first place? I should just move this to the cloud now. But, but, but there are people in that interim step. But, but, but it's really important because you, you're gonna need a clean environment to play in. And it's so hard to have a clean environment set up in a data center cuz it basically means I'm not touching this, I'm just paying for something to sit idle. Whereas cloud, I can spin that up, right? Get a, a cloud foundation suite and, and just again, infrastructures code, spin things up, test it, spin it down. It doesn't cost me money on a daily basis. >>Jason, talk a little bit about how you are using Druva. Why Druva and give us a kind of a landscape of your IT environment with Druva. >>Yeah. You know, so when we first started, you know, we did have a competitor solution and, and, and it was only backing up, you know, we were a startup. It was only backing up our email. And so as you pointed out, the ecosystem really matters because we grew out of email pretty quick as a startup. And we had to have real use cases to protect and the legacy product just wouldn't support us. And so our whole direction, or my direction to my team is back it up wherever it is, you know, go get it. And so we needed somebody in the field, literally in the middle of Nebraska or Iowa to have their laptop backed up. We needed our infrastructure, our data center backed up and we needed our, our SaaS solutions backed up. We needed it all. And so we needed a partner like Druva to help us go get it wherever it's at. >>Talk about the value in, with Druva being cloud native. >>Yeah. To us it's a big deal, right? There's all sorts of products you could go by to go just do endpoint laptop protection or just do SAS backups. For us, the value is in learning one tool and mastering it and then taking it to wherever the data is. To me, we see a lot of value for that because we can have one team focus on one product, get good at it, and drive the value. >>That consolidation theme is big right now, you know, the economic headwinds and so forth. What was the catalyst for you? Was it, is that something you started, you know, years ago? Just it's good practice to do that? What's, >>Well, no, I mean luckily I'm in a very good position as a startup to do define it, you know, but I've been in those legacy organizations where we've got a lot of tech debt and then how do you consolidate your portfolio so that you can gain more value, right? Cause you only get one budget a year, right? And so I'm lucky in, in the learnings I've had in other enterprises to deal with this head on right now as we grow, don't add tech debt, put it in right. Today. >>Talk to us a little bit about the SaaS applications that you're backing up. You know, we, we talk a lot with customers, the shared, the shared responsibility model that a lot of customers aren't aware of. Where are you using that competing solution to protect SaaS applications before driven and talk about Yeah. The, the value in that going, the data protection is our responsibility and not the SA vendor. >>No, absolutely. I mean, and it is funny to go to, you know, it's like Office 365 applications and go to our, our CFO and a leadership and be like, no, we really gotta back it up to a third party. And they're like, but why? >>It's >>In the cloud, right? And so there's a lot of instruction I have to provide to my peers and, and, and my users to help them understand why these things matter. And, and, and it works out really well because we can show value really quick when anything happens. And now we get, I mean, even in SharePoint, people will come to us to restore things when they're fully empowered to do it. But my team's faster. And so we can just get it done for them. And so it's an extra from me, it's an extra SLA or never service level I can provide to my internal customers that, that gives them more faith and trust in my organization. >>How, how are the SEC op teams and the data protection teams, the backup teams, how are they coming together? Is is, is data protection backup just morphing into security? Is it more of an adjacency? What's that dynamic like? >>So I'd say right now, and, and I'll be curious to hear Jason's organization, but certainly what we see broadly is, you know, the, the teams are starting to work together, but I wouldn't say they're merging, right? Because, you know, you think of it in a couple of ways. The first is you've got a production environment and that needs to be secured. And then you've got a protection environment. And that protection environment also has to be secured. So the first conversation for a lot of backup teams is, alright, I need to actually work with the security team to make sure that, that my, my my backup environment, it's air gapped, it's encrypted, it's secured. Then I think the, the then I think you start to see people come together, especially as they go through, say, tabletop exercises for ransomware recovery, where it's, alright, where, where can the backup team add value here? >>Because certainly recovery, that's the basics. But as there log information you can provide, are there detection pieces that you can offer? So, so I think, you know, you start to see a partnership, but, but the reality is, you know, the, the two are still separate, right? Because, you know, my job as a a protection resiliency company is I wanna make sure that when you need your data, it's gonna be there for you. And I certainly want to, to to follow best secure practices and I wanna offer value to the security team, but there's a whole lot of the security ecosystem that I want to plug into. I'm not trying to replace them again. I want to be part of that broader ecosystem. >>So how, how do you guys approach it? Yeah, >>That's interesting. Yeah. So in my organization, we, we are one team and, and not to be too cheesy or you know, whatever, but as Amazon would say, security is job one. And so we treat it as if this is it. And so we never push something into production until we are ready. And ready to us means it's got a security package on it, it's backed up, the users have tested it, we are ready to go. It's not that we're ready just be to provide the service or the thing. It's that we are actually ready to productionize this. And so it's ready for production data and that slows us down in some cases. But that's where DevOps and this idea of just merging everything together into a central, how do we get this done together, has worked out really well for us. So, >>So it's really the DevOps team's responsibility. It's not a separate data protection function. >>Nope. Nope. We have specialists of course, right? Yeah, yeah. Because you need the extra level, the CISSPs and those people Yeah, yeah. To really know what they're doing, but they're just part of the team. Yeah. >>Talk about some of the business outcomes that you're achieving with Druva so far. >>Yeah. The business outcomes for me are, you know, I meet my SLAs that's promising. I can communicate that I feel more secure in the cloud and, and all of my workloads because I can restore it. And, and that to me helps everybody in my organization sleep well, sleep better. We are, we transport a lot of the carbon in a pipeline like Colonial. And so to us, we are, we are potential victims of, of a pipe, a non pipeline group, right? Attacking us, but it's carbon, you know, we're trying to get it outta atmosphere. And so by protecting it, no matter where it is, as long as we've got internet access, we can back it up. That provides tons of value to my team because we have hundreds of people in the field working for us every day who collect data and generate it. >>What would you say to a customer who's maybe on the fence looking at different technologies, why dva? >>You know, I think, you know, do the research in my mind, it'll win if you just do the research, right? I mean, there might be vendors that'll buy you nice dinners or whatever, and those are, those are nice things, but the, the reality is you have to protect your data no matter where it is. If it's in a SaaS application, if it's in a cloud provider, if it's infrastructure, wherever it is, you need it. And if you just go look at the facts, there it is, right? And so I, I'd say be objective. Look at the facts, it'll prove itself. >>Look at the data. There you go. Steven Druva recently announced a data resiliency guarantee with a big whopping financial sum. Talk to us a little bit about that, the value in it for your customers and for prospects, >>Right? So, so basically there's, there's really two parts to this guarantee. The first is, you know, across five different SLAs, and I'll talk about those, you know, if we violate those, the customers can get a payout of up to 10 million, right? So again, putting, putting our money where our mouth is in a pretty large amount. But, but for me, the exciting part, and this is, this is where Jason went, is it's about the SLAs, right? You know, one of Drew's goals is to say, look, we do the job for you, we do the service for you so you can offer that service to your company. And so the SLAs aren't just about ransomware, some of them certainly are, you know, that, that you're going to be able to recover your data in the event of a ransomware attack, that your data won't get exfiltrated as part of a ransomware attack. >>But also things like backup success rates, because as much as recovery matters a lot more than backup, you do need a backup if you're gonna be able to get that recovery done. There's also an SLA to say that, you know, if 10 years down the road you need to recover your data, it's still recoverable, right? So, so that kind of durability piece. And then of course the availability of the service because what's the point of a service if it's not there for you when you need it? And so, so having that breadth of coverage, I think really reflects who Druva is, which is we're doing this job for you, right? We want to make this this service available so you can focus on offering other value inside your business. And >>The insurance underwriters, if they threw holy water on >>That, they, they, they were okay with it. The legal people blessed it, you know, it, you know, the CEO signed off on it, the board of directors. So, you know, it, and it, it's all there in print, it's all there on the web. If you wanna look, you know, make sure, one of the things we wanted to be very clear on is that this isn't just a marketing gimmick that we're, we're putting, that we're putting substance behind it because a lot of these were already in our contracts anyway, because as a SAS vendor, you're signing up for service level agreements anyway. >>Yeah. But most of the service level agreements and SaaS vendors are crap. They're like, you know, hey, you know, if something bad happens, you know, we'll, we'll give you a credit, >>Right? >>For, you know, for when you were down. I mean, it's not, you never get into business impact. I mean, even aws, sorry, I mean, it's true. We're a customer. I read define print, I know what I'm signing up for. But, so that's, >>We read it a lot and we will not, we don't really care about the credits at all. We care about is it their force? Is it a partner? We trust, we fight that every day in our SLAs with our vendors >>In the end, right? I mean this, we are the last line of defense. We are the thing that keeps the business up and running. So if your business, you know, can't get to his data and can't operate, me coming to you and saying, Dave, I've got some credits for you after you, you know, after you declare bankruptcy, it'll be great. Yeah, that's not a win. >>It's no value, >>Not helpful. The goal's gotta be, your business is up and running cuz that's when we're both successful. So, so, so, you know, we view this as we're in it together, right? We wanna make sure your business succeeds. Again, it's not about slight of hand, it's not about, you know, just, just putting fine print in the contract. It's about standing up and delivering. Because if you can't do that, why are we here? Right? The number one thing we hear from our customers is Dr. Just works. And that's the thing I think I'm most proud of is Druva just works. >>So, speaking of Juva, just working, if there's a billboard in Santa Clara near the new offices about Druva, what's, what's the bumper sticker? What's the tagline? >>I, I, I think, I think that's it. I think Druva just works. Keeps your data safe. Simple as that. Safe and secure. Druva works to keep your data safe and secure. >>Saved me. >>Yeah. >>Truva just works. Guys, thanks so much for joining. David, me on the program. Great to have you back on the cube. Thank you. Talking about how you're working together, what Druva is doing to really putting, its its best foot forward. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thanks guys. It's great to see you guys. Likewise >>The show for our guests and Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey guys and girls, welcome back to Motor City, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier on the Cube's third day of coverage of Coon Cloud Native Con North America. John, we've had some great conversations over the last two and a half days. We've been talking about identity and security management as a critical need for enterprises within the cloud native space. We're gonna have another quick conversation >>On that. Yeah, we got a great segment coming up from someone who's been in the industry, a long time expert, running a great company. Now it's gonna be one of those pieces that fits into what we call super cloud. Others are calling cloud operating system. Some are calling just Cloud 2.0, 3.0. But there's definitely a major trend happening around how cloud is going Next generation. We've been covering it. So this segment should be >>Great. Let's unpack those trends. One of our alumni is back with us, O Rika Zi, co-founder and CEO of Aerio. Omri. Great to have you back on the >>Cube. Thank you. Great to be here. >>So identity move to the cloud, Access authorization did not talk to us about why you found it assertive, what you guys are doing and how you're flipping that script. >>Yeah, so back 15 years ago, I helped start Azure at Microsoft. You know, one of the first few folks that you know, really focused on enterprise services within the Azure family. And at the time I was working for the guy who ran all of Windows server and you know, active directory. He called it the linchpin workload for the Windows Server franchise, like big words. But what he meant was we had 95% market share and all of these new SAS applications like ServiceNow and you know, Workday and salesforce.com, they had to invent login and they had to invent access control. And so we were like, well, we're gonna lose it unless we figure out how to replace active directory. And that's how Azure Active Directory was born. And the first thing that we had to do as an industry was fix identity, right? Yeah. So, you know, we worked on things like oof Two and Open, Id Connect and SAML and Jot as an industry and now 15 years later, no one has to go build login if you don't want to, right? You have companies like Odd Zero and Okta and one login Ping ID that solve that problem solve single sign-on, on the web. But access Control hasn't really moved forward at all in the last 15 years. And so my co-founder and I who were both involved in the early beginnings of Azure Active directory, wanted to go back to that problem. And that problem is even bigger than identity and it's far from >>Solved. Yeah, this is huge. I think, you know, self-service has been a developer thing that's, everyone knows developer productivity, we've all experienced click sign in with your LinkedIn or Twitter or Google or Apple handle. So that's single sign on check. Now the security conversation kicks in. If you look at with this no perimeter and cloud, now you've got multi-cloud or super cloud on the horizon. You've got all kinds of opportunities to innovate on the security paradigm. I think this is kind of where I'm hearing the most conversation around access control as well as operationally eliminating a lot of potential problems. So there's one clean up the siloed or fragmented access and two streamlined for security. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? And if not, where, where am I missing that? >>Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the life of an IT pro, you know, back in the two thousands they had, you know, l d or active directory, they add in one place to configure groups and they'd map users to groups. And groups typically corresponded to roles and business applications. And it was clunky, but life was pretty simple. And now they live in dozens or hundreds of different admin consoles. So misconfigurations are rampant and over provisioning is a real problem. If you look at zero trust and the principle of lease privilege, you know, all these applications have these course grained permissions. And so when you have a breach, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when you wanna limit the blast radius of you know what happened, and you can't do that unless you have fine grained access control. So all those, you know, all those reasons together are forcing us as an industry to come to terms with the fact that we really need to revisit access control and bring it to the age of cloud. >>You guys recently, just this week I saw the blog on Topaz. Congratulations. Thank you. Talk to us about what that is and some of the gaps that's gonna help sarto to fill for what's out there in the marketplace. >>Yeah, so right now there really isn't a way to go build fine grains policy based real time access control based on open source, right? We have the open policy agent, which is a great decision engine, but really optimized for infrastructure scenarios like Kubernetes admission control. And then on the other hand, you have this new, you know, generation of access control ideas. This model called relationship based access control that was popularized by Google Zanzibar system. So Zanzibar is how they do access control for Google Docs and Google Drive. If you've ever kind of looked at a Google Doc and you know you're a viewer or an owner or a commenter, Zanzibar is the system behind it. And so what we've done is we've married these two things together. We have a policy based system, OPPA based system, and at the same time we've brought together a directory, an embedded directory in Topaz that allows you to answer questions like, does this user have this permission on this object? And bringing it all together, making it open sources a real game changer from our perspective, real >>Game changer. That's good to hear. What are some of the key use cases that it's gonna help your customers address? >>So a lot of our customers really like the idea of policy based access management, but they don't know how to bring data to that decision engine. And so we basically have a, you know, a, a very opinionated way of how to model that data. So you import data out of your identity providers. So you connect us to Okta or oze or Azure, Azure Active directory. And so now you have the user data, you can define groups and then you can define, you know, your object hierarchy, your domain model. So let's say you have an applicant tracking system, you have nouns like job, you know, know job descriptions or candidates. And so you wanna model these things and you want to be able to say who has access to, you know, the candidates for this job, for example. Those are the kinds of rules that people can express really easily in Topaz and in assertive. >>What are some of the challenges that are happening right now that dissolve? What, what are you looking at to solve? Is it complexity, sprawl, logic problems? What's the main problem set you guys >>See? Yeah, so as organizations grow and they have more and more microservices, each one of these microservices does authorization differently. And so it's impossible to reason about the full surface area of, you know, permissions in your application. And more and more of these organizations are saying, You know what, we need a standard layer for this. So it's not just Google with Zanzibar, it's Intuit with Oddy, it's Carta with their own oddy system, it's Netflix, you know, it's Airbnb with heed. All of them are now talking about how they solve access control extracted into its own service to basically manage complexity and regain agility. The other thing is all about, you know, time to market and, and tco. >>So, so how do you work with those services? Do you replace them, you unify them? What is the approach that you're taking? >>So basically these organizations are saying, you know what? We want one access control service. We want all of our microservices to call that thing instead of having to roll out our own. And so we, you know, give you the guts for that service, right? Topaz is basically the way that you're gonna go implement an access control service without having to go build it the same way that you know, large companies like Airbnb or Google or, or a car to >>Have. What's the competition look like for you guys? I'm not really seeing a lot of competition out there. Are there competitors? Are there different approaches? What makes you different? >>Yeah, so I would say that, you know, the biggest competitor is roll your own. So a lot of these companies that find us, they say, We're sick and tired of investing 2, 3, 4 engineers, five engineers on this thing. You know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. We have to maintain this thing and so we can, we can use your solution at a fraction of the cost a, a fifth, a 10th of what it would cost us to maintain it locally. There are others like Sty for example, you know, they are in the space, but more in on the infrastructure side. So they solve the problem of Kubernetes submission control or things like that. So >>Rolling your own, there's a couple problems there. One is do they get all the corner cases who built a they still, it's a company. Exactly. It's heavy lifting, it's undifferentiated, you just gotta check the box. So probably will be not optimized. >>That's right. As Bezo says, only focus on the things that make your beer taste better. And access control is one of those things. It's part of your security, you know, posture, it's a critical thing to get right, but you know, I wanna work on access control, said no developer ever, right? So it's kind of like this boring, you know, like back office thing that you need to do. And so we give you the mechanisms to be able to build it securely and robustly. >>Do you have a, a customer story example that is one of your go-tos that really highlights how you're improving developer productivity? >>Yeah, so we have a couple of them actually. So there's the largest third party B2B marketplace in the us. Free retail. Instead of building their own, they actually brought in aer. And what they wanted to do with AER was be the authorization layer for both their externally facing applications as well as their internal apps. So basically every one of their applications now hooks up to AER to do authorization. They define users and groups and roles and permissions in one place and then every application can actually plug into that instead of having to roll out their own. >>I'd like to switch gears if you don't mind. I get first of all, great update on the company and progress. I'd like to get your thoughts on the cloud computing market. Obviously you were your legendary position, Azure, I mean look at the, look at the progress over the past few years. Just been spectacular from Microsoft and you set the table there. Amazon web service is still, you know, thundering away even though earnings came out, the market's kind of soft still. You know, you see the cloud hyperscalers just continuing to differentiate from software to chips. Yep. Across the board. So the hyperscalers kicking ass taking names, doing great Microsoft right up there. What's the future? Cuz you now have the conversation where, okay, we're calling it super cloud, somebody calling multi-cloud, somebody calling it distributed computing, whatever you wanna call it. The old is now new again, it just looks different as cloud becomes now the next computer industry, >>You got an operating system, you got applications, you got hardware, I mean it's all kind of playing out just on a massive global scale, but you got regions, you got all kinds of connected systems edge. What's your vision on how this plays out? Because things are starting to fall into place. Web assembly to me just points to, you know, app servers are coming back, middleware, Kubernetes containers, VMs are gonna still be there. So you got the progression. What's your, what's your take on this? How would you share, share your thoughts to a friend or the industry, the audience? So what's going on? What's, what's happening right now? What's, what's going on? >>Yeah, it's funny because you know, I remember doing this quite a few years ago with you probably in, you know, 2015 and we were talking about, back then we called it hybrid cloud, right? And it was a vision, but it is actually what's going on. It just took longer for it to get here, right? So back then, you know, the big debate was public cloud or private cloud and you know, back when we were, you know, talking about these ideas, you know, we said, well you know, some applications will always stay on-prem and some applications will move to the cloud. I was just talking to a big bank and they basically said, look, our stated objective now is to move everything we can to the public cloud and we still have a large private cloud investment that will never go away. And so now we have essentially this big operating system that can, you know, abstract all of this stuff. So we have developer platforms that can, you know, sit on top of all these different pieces of infrastructure and you know, kind of based on policy decide where these applications are gonna be scheduled. So, you know, the >>Operating schedule shows like an operating system function. >>Exactly. I mean like we now, we used to have schedulers for one CPU or you know, one box, then we had schedulers for, you know, kind of like a whole cluster and now we have schedulers across the world. >>Yeah. My final question before we kind of get run outta time is what's your thoughts on web assembly? Cuz that's getting a lot of hype here again to kind of look at this next evolution again that's lighter weight kind of feels like an app server kind of direction. What's your, what's your, it's hyped up now, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, it's interesting. I mean back, you know, what's, what's old is new again, right? So, you know, I remember back in the late nineties we got really excited about, you know, JVMs and you know, this notion of right once run anywhere and yeah, you know, I would say that web assembly provides a pretty exciting, you know, window into that where you can take the, you know, sandboxing technology from the JavaScript world, from the browser essentially. And you can, you know, compile an application down to web assembly and have it real, really truly portable. So, you know, we see for example, policies in our world, you know, with opa, one of the hottest things is to take these policies and can compile them to web assemblies so you can actually execute them at the edge, you know, wherever it is that you have a web assembly runtime. >>And so, you know, I was just talking to Scott over at Docker and you know, they're excited about kind of bringing Docker packaging, OCI packaging to web assemblies. So we're gonna see a convergence of all these technologies right now. They're kind of each, each of our, each of them are in a silo, but you know, like we'll see a lot of the patterns, like for example, OCI is gonna become the packaging format for web assemblies as it is becoming the packaging format for policies. So we did the same thing. We basically said, you know what, we want these policies to be packaged as OCI assembly so that you can sign them with cosign and bring the entire ecosystem of tools to bear on OCI packages. So convergence is I think what >>We're, and love, I love your attitude too because it's the open source community and the developers who are actually voting on the quote defacto standard. Yes. You know, if it doesn't work, right, know people know about it. Exactly. It's actually a great new production system. >>So great momentum going on to the press released earlier this week, clearly filling the gaps there that, that you and your, your co-founder saw a long time ago. What's next for the assertive business? Are you hiring? What's going on there? >>Yeah, we are really excited about launching commercially at the end of this year. So one of the things that we were, we wanted to do that we had a promise around and we delivered on our promise was open sourcing our edge authorizer. That was a huge thing for us. And we've now completed, you know, pretty much all the big pieces for AER and now it's time to commercially launch launch. We already have customers in production, you know, design partners, and you know, next year is gonna be the year to really drive commercialization. >>All right. We will be watching this space ery. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the keep. Great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. >>Our pleasure as well For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live. Michelle floor of Con Cloud Native Con 22. This is day three of our coverage. We will be back with more coverage after a short break. See that.

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Detroit guys and girls. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We've been on the floor at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America for about two days now. We've been breaking news, we would have a great conversations, John. We love talking with CUBE alumni whose companies are just taking off. And we get to do that next again. >> Well, this next segment's awesome. We have former CUBE host, Brian Gracely, here who's an executive in this company. And then the entrepreneur who we're going to talk with. She was on theCUBE when it just started now they're extremely successful. It's going to be a great conversation. >> It is, Idit Levine is here, the founder and CEO of solo.io. And as John mentioned, Brian Gracely. You know Brian. He's the VP of Product Marketing and Product Strategy now at solo.io. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, great to have you here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Idit: Thank so much for having us. >> Talk about what's going on. This is a rocket ship that you're riding. I was looking at your webpage, you have some amazing customers. T-Mobile, BMW, Amex, for a marketing guy it must be like, this is just- >> Brian: Yeah, you can't beat it. >> Kid in a candy store. >> Brian: Can't beat it. >> You can't beat it. >> For giant companies like that, giant brands, global, to trust a company of our size it's trust, it's great engineering, it's trust, it's fantastic. >> Idit, talk about the fast trajectory of this company and how you've been able to garner trust with such mass organizations in such a short time period. >> Yes, I think that mainly is just being the best. Honestly, that's the best approach I can say. The team that we build, honestly, and this is a great example of one of them, right? And we're basically getting the best people in the industry. So that's helpful a lot. We are very, very active on the open source community. So basically it building it, anyway, and by doing this they see us everywhere. They see our success. You're starting with a few customers, they're extremely successful and then you're just creating this amazing partnership with them. So we have a very, very unique way we're working with them. >> So hard work, good code. >> Yes. >> Smart people, experience. >> That's all you need. >> It's simple, why doesn't everyone do it? >> It's really easy. (all laughing) >> All good, congratulations. It's been fun to watch you guys grow. Brian, great to see you kicking butt in this great company. I got to ask about the landscape because I love the ServiceMeshCon you guys had on a co-located event on day zero here as part of that program, pretty packed house. >> Brian: Yep. >> A lot of great feedback. This whole ServiceMesh and where it fits in. You got Kubernetes. What's the update? Because everything's kind of coming together- >> Brian: Right. >> It's like jello in the refrigerator it kind of comes together at the same time. Where are we? >> I think the easiest way to think about it is, and it kind of mirrors this event perfectly. So the last four or five years, all about Kubernetes, built Kubernetes. So every one of our customers are the ones who have said, look, for the last two or three years, we've been building Kubernetes, we've had a certain amount of success with it, they're building applications faster, they're deploying and then that success leads to new challenges, right? So we sort of call that first Kubernetes part sort of CloudNative 1.0, this and this show is really CloudNative 2.0. What happens after Kubernetes service mesh? Is that what happens after Kubernetes? And for us, Istio now being part of the CNCF, huge, standardized, people are excited about it. And then we think we are the best at doing Istio from a service mesh perspective. So it's kind of perfect, perfect equation. >> Well, I'll turn it on, listen to your great Cloud cast podcast, plug there for you. You always say what is it and what isn't it? >> Brian: Yeah. >> What is your product and what isn't it? >> Yeah, so our product is, from a purely product perspective it's service mesh and API gateway. We integrate them in a way that nobody else does. So we make it easier to deploy, easier to manage, easier to secure. I mean, those two things ultimately are, if it's an internal API or it's an external API, we secure it, we route it, we can observe it. So if anybody's, you're building modern applications, you need this stuff in order to be able to go to market, deploy at scale all those sort of things. >> Idit, talk about some of your customer conversations. What are the big barriers that they've had, or the challenges, that solo.io comes in and just wipes off the table? >> Yeah, so I think that a lot of them, as Brian described it, very, rarely they had a success with Kubernetes, maybe a few clusters, but then they basically started to on-ramp more application on those clusters. They need more cluster maybe they want multi-class, multi-cloud. And they mainly wanted to enable the team, right? This is why we all here, right? What we wanted to eventually is to take a piece of the infrastructure and delegate it to our customers which is basically the application team. So I think that that's where they started to see the problem because it's one thing to take some open source project and deploy it very little bit but the scale, it's all about the scale. How do you enable all those millions of developers basically working on your platform? How do you scale multi-cloud? What's going on if one of them is down, how do you fill over? So that's exactly the problem that they have >> Lisa: Which is critical for- >> As bad as COVID was as a global thing, it was an amazing enabler for us because so many companies had to say... If you're a retail company, your front door was closed, but you still wanted to do business. So you had to figure out, how do I do mobile? How do I be agile? If you were a company that was dealing with like used cars your number of hits were through the roof because regular cars weren't available. So we have all these examples of companies who literally overnight, COVID was their digital transformation enabler. >> Lisa: Yes. Yes. >> And the scale that they had to deal with, the agility they had to deal with, and we sort of fit perfectly in that. They re-looked at what's our infrastructure look like? What's our security look like? We just happened to be right place in the right time. >> And they had skillset issues- >> Skillsets. >> Yeah. >> And the remote work- >> Right, right. >> Combined with- >> Exactly. >> Modern upgrade gun-to-the-head, almost, kind of mentality. >> And we're really an interesting company. Most of the interactions we do with customers is through Slack, obviously it was remote. We would probably be a great Slack case study in terms of how to do business because our customers engage with us, with engineers all over the world, they look like one team. But we can get them up and running in a POC, in a demo, get them through their things really, really fast. It's almost like going to the public cloud, but at whatever complexity they want. >> John: Nice workflow. >> So a lot of momentum for you guys silver linings during COVID, which is awesome we do hear a lot of those stories of positive things, the acceleration of digital transformation, and how much, as consumers, we've all benefited from that. Do you have one example, Brian, as the VP of product marketing, of a customer that you really think in the last two years just is solo.io's value proposition on a platter? >> I'll give you one that I think everybody can understand. So most people, at least in the United States, you've heard of Chick-fil-A, retail, everybody likes the chicken. 2,600 stores in the US, they all shut down and their business model, it's good food but great personal customer experience. That customer experience went away literally overnight. So they went from barely anybody using the mobile application, and hence APIs in the backend, half their business now goes through that to the point where, A, they shifted their business, they shifted their customer experience, and they physically rebuilt 2,600 stores. They have two drive-throughs now that instead of one, because now they have an entire one dedicated to that mobile experience. So something like that happening overnight, you could never do the ROI for it, but it's changed who they are. >> Lisa: Absolutely transformative. >> So, things like that, that's an example I think everybody can kind of relate to. Stuff like that happened. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's also what's special is, honestly, you're probably using a product every day. You just don't know that, right? When you're swiping your credit card or when you are ordering food, or when you using your phone, honestly the amount of customer they were having, the space, it's like so, every industry- >> John: How many customers do you have? >> I think close to 200 right now. >> Brian: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> How many employees, can you gimme some stats? Funding, employees? What's the latest statistics? >> We recently found a year ago $135 million for a billion dollar valuation. >> Nice. >> So we are a unicorn. I think when you took it we were around like 50 ish people. Right now we probably around 180, and we are growing, we probably be 200 really, really quick. And I think that what's really, really special as I said the interaction that we're doing with our customers, we're basically extending their team. So for each customer is basically a Slack channel. And then there is a lot of people, we are totally global. So we have people in APAC, in Australia, New Zealand, in Singapore we have in AMEA, in UK and in Spain and Paris, and other places, and of course all over US. >> So your use case on how to run a startup, scale up, during the pandemic, complete clean sheet of paper. >> Idit: We had to. >> And what happens, you got Slack channels as your customer service collaboration slash productivity. What else did you guys do differently that you could point to that's, I would call, a modern technique for an entrepreneurial scale? >> So I think that there's a few things that we are doing different. So first of all, in Solo, honestly, there is a few things that differentiated from, in my opinion, most of the companies here. Number one is look, you see this, this is a lot, a lot of new technology and one of the things that the customer is nervous the most is choosing the wrong one because we saw what happened, right? I don't know the orchestration world, right? >> John: So choosing and also integrating multiple things at the same time. >> Idit: Exactly. >> It's hard. >> And this is, I think, where Solo is expeditious coming to place. So I mean we have one team that is dedicated like open source contribution and working with all the open source community and I think we're really good at picking the right product and basically we're usually right, which is great. So if you're looking at Kubernetes, we went there for the beginning. If you're looking at something like service mesh Istio, we were all envoy proxy and out of process. So I think that by choosing these things, and now Cilium is something that we're also focusing on. I think that by using the right technology, first of all you know that it's very expensive to migrate from one to the other if you get it wrong. So I think that's one thing that is always really good at. But then once we actually getting those portal we basically very good at going and leading those community. So we are basically bringing the customers to the community itself. So we are leading this by being in the TOC members, right? The Technical Oversight Committee. And we are leading by actually contributing a lot. So if the customer needs something immediately, we will patch it for him and walk upstream. So that's kind of like the second thing. And the third one is innovation. And that's really important to us. So we pushing the boundaries. Ambient, that we announced a month ago with Google- >> And STO, the book that's out. >> Yes, the Ambient, it's basically a modern STO which is the future of SDL. We worked on it with Google and their NDA and we were listed last month. This is exactly an example of us basically saying we can do it better. We learn from our customers, which is huge. And now we know that we can do better. So this is the third thing, and the last one is the partnership. I mean honestly we are the extension team of the customer. We are there on Slack if they need something. Honestly, there is a reason why our renewal rate is 98.9 and our net extension is 135%. I mean customers are very, very happy. >> You deploy it, you make it right. >> Idit: Exactly, exactly. >> The other thing we did, and again this was during COVID, we didn't want to be a shell-for company. We didn't want to drop stuff off and you didn't know what to do with it. We trained nearly 10,000 people. We have something called Solo Academy, which is free, online workshops, they run all the time, people can come and get hands on training. So we're building an army of people that are those specialists that have that skill set. So we don't have to walk into shops and go like, well okay, I hope six months from now you guys can figure this stuff out. They're like, they've been doing that. >> And if their friends sees their friend, sees their friend. >> The other thing, and I got to figure out as a marketing person how to do this, we have more than a few handfuls of people that they've got promoted, they got promoted, they got promoted. We keep seeing people who deploy our technologies, who, because of this stuff they're doing- >> John: That's a good sign. They're doing it at at scale, >> John: That promoter score. >> They keep getting promoted. >> Yeah, that's amazing. >> That's a powerful sort of side benefit. >> Absolutely, that's a great thing to have for marketing. Last question before we ran out of time. You and I, Idit, were talking before we went live, your sessions here are overflowing. What's your overall sentiment of KubeCon 2022 and what feedback have you gotten from all the customers bursting at the seam to come talk to you guys? >> I think first of all, there was the pre-event which we had and it was a lot of fun. We talked to a lot of customer, most of them is 500, global successful company. So I think that people definitely... I will say that much. We definitely have the market feed, people interested in this. Brian described very well what we see here which is people try to figure out the CloudNative 2.0. So that's number one. The second thing is that there is a consolidation, which I like, I mean STO becoming right now a CNCF project I think it's a huge, huge thing for all the community. I mean, we're talking about all the big tweak cloud, we partner with them. I mean I think this is a big sign of we agree which I think is extremely important in this community. >> Congratulations on all your success. >> Thank you so much. >> And where can customers go to get their hands on this, solo.io? >> Solo.io? Yeah, absolutely. >> Awesome guys, this has been great. Congratulations on the momentum. >> Thank you. >> The rocket ship that you're riding. We know you got to get to the airport we're going to let you go. But we appreciate your insights and your time so much, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> A pleasure. >> Thanks. >> For our guests and John Furrier, This is Lisa Martin live in Detroit, had to think about that for a second, at KubeCon 2022 CloudNativeCon. We'll be right back with our final guests of the day and then the show wraps, so stick around. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this CUBE conversation where we're going to go deep into system performance. We're here with an expert. Kim Leyenaar is the Principal Performance Architect at Broadcom. Kim. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks so much too. >> So you have a deep background in performance, performance assessment, benchmarking, modeling. Tell us a little bit about your background, your role. >> Thanks. So I've been a storage performance engineer and architect for about 22 years. And I'm specifically been for abroad with Broadcom for I think next month is going to be my 14 year mark. So what I do there is initially I built and I manage their international performance team, but about six years ago I moved back into architecture, and what my roles right now are is I generate performance projections for all of our next generation products. And then I also work on marketing material and I interface with a lot of the customers and debugging customer issues, and looking at how our customers are actually using our storage. >> Great. Now we have a graphic that we want to share. It talks to how storage has evolved over the past decade. So my question is what changes have you seen in storage and how has that impacted the way you approach benchmarking. In this graphic we got sort of big four items that impact performance, memory processor, IO pathways, and the storage media itself, but walk us through this data if you would. >> Sure. So what I put together is a little bit of what we've seen over the past 15 to 20 years. So I've been doing this for about 22 years and kind of going back and focusing a little bit on the storage, we looked back at hard disk, they ruled for. And nearly they had almost 50 years of ruling. And our first hard drive that came out back in the 1950s was only capable of five megabytes in capacity. and one and a half iOS per second. It had almost a full second in terms of seat time. So we've come a long way since then. But when I first came on, we were looking at Ultra 320 SCSI. And one of the biggest memories that I have of that was my office is located close to our tech support. And I could hear the first question was always, what's your termination like? And so we had some challenges with SCSI, and then we moved on into SAS and data protocols. And we continued to move on. But right now, back in the early 2000s when I came on board, the best drives really could do maybe 400 iOS per second. Maybe two 250 megabytes per second, with millisecond response times. And so when I was benchmarking way back when it was always like, well, IOPS are IOPS. We were always faster than what the drives to do. And that was just how it was. The drives were always the bottleneck in the system. And so things started changing though by the early 2000s, mid 2000s. We started seeing different technologies come out. We started seeing that virtualization and multi-tenant infrastructures becoming really popular. And then we had cloud computing that was well on the horizon. And so at this point, we're like, well, wait a minute, we really can't make processors that much faster. And so everybody got excited to include (indistinct) and the home came out but, they had two cores per processor and four cores per processor. And so we saw a little time period where actually the processing capability kind of pulled ahead of everybody else. And memory was falling behind. We had good old DVR, 2, 6, 67. It was new with the time, but we only had maybe one or two memory channels per processor. And then in 2007 we saw disk capacity hit one terabyte. And we started seeing a little bit of an imbalance because we were seeing these drives are getting massive, but their performance per drive was not really kind of keeping up. So now we see a revolution around 2010. And my co-worker and I at the time, we have these little USB discs, if you recall, we would put them in. They were so fast. We were joking at the time. "Hey, you know what, wonder if we could make a raid array out of these little USB disks?" They were just so fast. The idea was actually kind of crazy until we started seeing it actually happen. So in 2010 SSD started revolutionizing storage. And the first SSDs that we really worked with these plaint LS-300 and they were amazing because they were so over-provisioned that they had almost the same reader, right performance. But to go from a drive that could do maybe 400 IOS per second to a drive like 40,000 plus iOS per second, really changed our thought process about how our storage controller could actually try and keep up with the rest of the system. So we started falling behind. That was a big challenge for us. And then in 2014, NVMe came around as well. So now we've got these drives, they're 30 terabytes. They can do one and a half million iOS per second, and over 6,000 megabytes per second. But they were expensive. So people start relegating SSDs more towards tiered storage or cash. And as the prices of these drives kind of came down, they became a lot more mainstream. And then the memory channels started picking up. And they started doubling every few years. And we're looking now at DVR 5 4800. And now we're looking at cores that used to go from two to four cores per processor up to 48 with some of the latest different processes that are out there. So our ability to consume the computing and the storage resources, it's astounding, you know, it's like that whole saying, 'build it and they will come.' Because I'm always amazed, I'm like, how are we going to possibly utilize all this memory bandwidth? How are we going to utilize all these cores? But we do. And the trick to this is having just a balanced infrastructure. It's really critical. Because if you have a performance mismatch between your server and your storage, you really lose a lot of productivity and it does impact your revenue. >> So that's such a key point. Pardon, begin that slide up again with the four points. And that last point that you made Kim about balance. And so here you have these, electronic speeds with memory and IO, and then you've got the spinning disc, this mechanical disc. You mentioned that SSD kind of changed the game, but it used to be, when I looked at benchmarks, it was always the D stage bandwidth of the cash out to the spinning disc was always the bottleneck. And, you go back to the days of you it's symmetrics, right? The huge backend disk bandwidth was how they dealt with that. But, and then you had things the oxymoron of the day was high spin speed disks of a high performance disk. Compared to memories. And, so the next chart that we have is show some really amazing performance increases over the years. And so you see these bars on the left-hand side, it looks at historical performance for 4k random IOPS. And on the right-hand side, it's the storage controller performance for sequential bandwidth from 2008 to 2022. That's 22 is that yellow line. It's astounding the increases. I wonder if you could tell us what we're looking at here, when did SSD come in and how did that affect your thinking? (laughs) >> So I remember back in 2007, we were kind of on the precipice of SSDs. We saw it, the writing was on the wall. We had our first three gig SAS and SATA capable HPAs that had come out. And it was a shock because we were like, wow, we're going to really quickly become the bottleneck once this becomes more mainstream. And you're so right though about people work in, building these massive hard drive based back ends in order to handle kind of that tiered architecture that we were seeing that back in the early 2010s kind of when the pricing was just so sky high. And I remember looking at our SAS controllers, our very first one, and that was when I first came in at 2007. We had just launched our first SAS controller. We're so proud of ourselves. And I started going how many IOPS can this thing, even handled? We couldn't even attach enough drives to figure it out. So what we would do is we'd do these little tricks where we would do a five 12 byte read, and we would do it on a 4k boundary, so that it was actually reading sequentially from the disc, but we were handling these discrete IOPS. So we were like, oh, we can do around 35,000. Well, that's just not going to hit it anymore. Bandwidth wise we were doing great. Really our limitation and our bottleneck on bandwidth was always either the host or the backend. So, our controllers are there basically, there were three bottlenecks for our storage controllers. The first one is the bottleneck from the host to the controller. So that is typically a PCIe connection. And then there's another bottleneck on the controller to the disc. And that's really the number of ports that we have. And then the third one is the discs themselves. So in typical storage, that's what we look at. And we say, well, how do we improve this? So some of these are just kind of evolutionary, such as PCIE generations. And we're going to talk a little bit about that, but some of them are really revolutionary, and those are some of the things that we've been doing over the last five or six years to try and make sure that we are no longer the bottleneck. And we can enable these really, really fast drives. >> So can I ask a question? I'm sorry to interrupted but on these blue bars here. So these all spinning disks, I presume, out years they're not. Like when did flash come in to these blue bars? is that..you said 27 you started looking at it, but on these benchmarks, is it all spinning disc? Is it all flash? How should we interpret that? >> No, no. Initially they were actually all hard drives. And the way that we would identify, the max iOS would be by doing very small sequential reads to these hard drives. We just didn't have SSDs at that point. And then somewhere around 2010 is where we.. it was very early in that chart, we were able to start incorporating SSD technology into our benchmarking. And so what you're looking at here is really the max that our controller is capable of. So we would throw as many drives as we could and do what we needed to do in order to just make sure our controller was the bottleneck and what can we expose. >> So the drive then when SSD came in was no longer the bottleneck. So you guys had to sort of invent and rethink sort of how, what your innovation and your technology, because, I mean, these are astounding increases in performance. I mean, I think in the left-hand side, we've built this out pad, you got 170 X increase for the 4k random IOPS, and you've got a 20 X increase for the sequential bandwidth. How were you able to achieve that level of performance over time? >> Well, in terms of the sequential bandwidth, really those come naturally by increases in the PCIe or the SAS generation. So we just make sure we stay out of the way, and we enable that bandwidth. But the IOPS that's where it got really, really tricky. So we had to start thinking about different things. So, first of all, we started optimizing all of our pathways, all of our IO management, we increased the processing capabilities on our IO controllers. We added more on-chip memory. We started putting in IO accelerators, these hardware accelerators. We put in SAS poor kind of enhancements. We even went and improved our driver to make sure that our driver was as thin as possible. So we can make sure that we can enable all the IOPS on systems. But a big thing happening a few couple of generations ago was we started introducing something called tri capable controllers, which means that you could attach NVMe. You could attach SAS or you could attach SATA. So you could have this really amazing deployment of storage infrastructure based around your customized needs and your cost requirements by using one controller. >> Yeah. So anybody who's ever been to a trade show where they were displaying a glass case with a Winchester disc drive, for example, you see it's spinning and its actuators is moving, wow, that's so fast. Well, no. That's like a tourist slower. It's like a snail compared to the system's speed. So it's, in a way life was easy back in those days, because when you did a right to a disk, you had plenty of time to do stuff, right. And now it's changed. And so I want to talk about Gen3 versus Gen4, and how all this relates to what's new in Gen4 and the impacts of PCIe here, you have a chart here that you've shared with us that talks to that. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that, Kim. >> Sure. But first, you said something that kind of hit my funny bone there. And I remember I made a visit once about 15 or 20 years ago to IBM. And this gentleman actually had one of those old ones in his office and he referred to them as disk files. And he never until the day he retired, he'd never stopped calling them disc files. And it's kind of funny to be a part of that history. >> Yeah. DASD. They used to call it. (both laughing) >> SD, DASD. I used to get all kinds of, you know, you don't know what it was like back then, but yeah. But now nowadays we've got it quite easily enabled because back then, we had, SD DASD and all that. And then, ATA and then SCSI, well now we've got PCIe. And what's fabulous about PCIe is that it just has the generations are already planned out. It's incredible. You know, we're looking at right now, Gen3 moving to Gen4, and that's a lot about what we're going to be talking about. And that's what we're trying to test out. What is Gen4 PCIe when to bias? And it really is. It's fantastic. And PCIe came around about 18 years ago and Broadcom is, and we do participate and contribute to the PCIe SIG, which is, who develops the standards for PCIe, but the host in both our host interface in our NVMe desk and utilize the standards. So this is really, really a big deal, really critical for us. But if you take a look here, you can see that in terms of the capabilities of it, it's really is buying us a lot. So most of our drives right now NVMe drives tend to be by four. And a lot of people will connect them. And what that means is four lanes of NVMe and a lot of people that will connect them either at by one or by two kind of depending on what their storage infrastructure will allow. But the majority of them you could buy, or there are so, as you can see right now, we've gone from eight gig transfers per second to 16 gig of transfers per second. What that means is for a by four, we're going from one drive being able to do 4,000 to do an almost 8,000 megabytes per second. And in terms of those 4k IOPS that really evade us, they were really really tough sometimes to squeeze out of these drives, but now we're got 1 million, all we have to 2 million, it's just, it's insane. You know, just the increase in performance. And there's a lot of other standards that are going to be sitting on top of PCIe. So it's not going away anytime soon. We've got to open standards like CXL and things like that, but we also have graphics cards. You've got all of your hosts connections, they're also sitting on PCIe. So it's fantastic. It's backwards, it's orbits compatible, and it really is going to be our future. >> So this is all well and good. And I think I really believe that a lot of times in our industry, the challenges in the plumbing are underappreciated. But let's make it real for the audience because we have all these new workloads coming out, AI, heavily data oriented. So I want to get your thoughts on what types of workloads are going to benefit from Gen4 performance increases. In other words, what does it mean for application performance? You shared a chart that lists some of the key workloads, and I wonder if we could go through those. >> Yeah, yeah. I could have a large list of different workloads that are able to consume large amounts of data, whether or not it's in small or large kind of bytes of data. But as you know right now, and I said earlier, our ability to consume these compute and storage resources is amazing. So you build it and we'll use it. And the world's data we're expected to grow 61% to 175 zettabytes by the year 2025, according to IDC. So that's just a lot of data to manage. It's a lot of data to have, and it's something that's sitting around, but to be useful, you have to actually be able to access it. And that's kind of where we come in. So who is accessing it? What kind of applications? I spend a lot of time trying to understand that. And recently I attended a virtual conference SDC and what I like to do when I attend these conferences is to try to figure out what the buzz words are. What's everybody talking about? Because every year it's a little bit different, but this year was edge, edge everything. And so I kind of put edge on there first in, even you can ask anybody what's edge computing and it's going to mean a lot of different things, but basically it's all the computing outside of the cloud. That's happening typically at the edge of the network. So it tends to encompass a lot of real time processing on those instant data. So in the data is usually coming from either users or different sensors. It's that last mile. It's where we kind of put a lot of our content caching. And, I uncovered some interesting stuff when I was attending this virtual conference and they say only about 25% of all the usable data actually even reach the data center. The rest is ephemeral and it's localized, locally and in real time. So what it does is in the goal of edge computing is to try and reduce the bandwidth costs for these kinds of IOT devices that go over a long distance. But the reality is the growth of real-time applications that require these kinds of local processing are going to drive this technology forward over the coming years. So Dave, your toaster and your dishwasher they're, IOT edge devices probably in the next year, if they're not already. So edge is a really big one and consumes a lot of the data. >> The buzzword does your now is met the metaverse, it's almost like the movie, the matrix is going to come in real time. But the fact is it's all this data, a lot of videos, some of the ones that I would call out here, you mentioned facial recognition, real-time analytics. A lot of the edge is going to be real-time inferencing, applying AI. And these are just a massive, massive data sets that you again, you and of course your customers are enabling. >> When we first came out with our very first Gen3 product, our marketing team actually asked me, "Hey, how can we show users how they can consume this?" So I actually set up a head to environment. I decided I'm going to learn how to do this. I set up this massive environment with Hadoop, and at the time they called big data, the 3V's, I don't know if you remember these big 3Vs, the volume, velocity and variety. Well Dave, did you know, there are now 10 Vs? So besides those three, we got velocity, we got valued, we got variability, validity, vulnerability, volatility, visualization. So I'm thinking we need just to add another beat of that. >> Yeah. (both laughing) Well, that's interesting. You mentioned that, and that sort of came out of the big data world, a dupe world, which was very centralized. You're seeing the cloud is expanding, the world's getting, you know, data is by its very nature decentralized. And so you've got to have the ability to do an analysis in place. A lot of the edge analytics are going to be done in real time. Yes, sure. Some of it's going to go back in the cloud for detailed modeling, but we are the next decade Kim, ain't going to be like the last I often say. (laughing) I'll give you the last word. I mean, how do you see this sort of evolving, who's going to be adopting this stuff. Give us a sort of a timeframe for this kind of rollout in your world. >> In terms of the timeframe. I mean really nobody knows, but we feel like Gen5, that it's coming out next year. It may not be a full rollout, but we're going to start seeing Gen5 devices and Gen5 infrastructure is being built out over the next year. And then follow very, very, very quickly by Gen6. And so what we're seeing though is, we're starting to see these graphics processors, These GPU's, and I'm coming out as well, that are going to be connecting, using PCIe interfaces as well. So being able to access lots and lots and lots of data locally is going to be a really, really big deal and order because worldwide, all of our companies they're using business analytics. Data is money. And the person that actually can improve their operational efficiency, bolster those sales and increase your customer satisfaction. Those are the companies that are going on to win. And those are the companies that are going to be able to effectively store, retrieve and analyze all the data that they're collecting over the years. And that requires an abundance of data. >> Data is money and it's interesting. It kind of all goes back to when Steve jobs decided to put flash inside of an iPhone and the industry exploded, consumer economics kicked in 5G now edge AI, a lot of the things you talked about, GPU's the neural processing unit. It's all going to be coming together in this decade. Very exciting. Kim, thanks so much for sharing this data and your perspectives. I'd love to have you back when you got some new perspectives, new benchmark data. Let's do that. Okay. >> I look forward to it. Thanks so much. >> You're very welcome. And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The Cloud essentially turned the data center into an API and ushered in the era of programmable infrastructure, no longer do we think about deploying infrastructure in rigid silos with a hardened, outer shell, rather infrastructure has to facilitate digital business strategies. And what this means is putting data at the core of your organization, irrespective of its physical location. It also means infrastructure generally and storage specifically must be accessed as sets of services that can be discovered, deployed, managed, secured, and governed in a DevOps model or OpsDev, if you prefer. Now, this has specific implications as to how vendor product strategies will evolve and how they'll meet modern data requirements. Welcome to this Cube conversation, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. And with me to discuss these sea changes is Ajay Singh, the Chief Product Officer of Pure Storage, Ajay welcome. >> Thank you, David, gald to be on. >> Yeah, great to have you, so let's talk about your role at Pure. I think you're the first CPO, what's the vision there? >> That's right, I just joined up Pure about eight months ago from VMware as the chief product officer and you're right, I'm the first our chief product officer at Pure. And at VMware I ran the Cloud management business unit, which was a lot about automation and infrastructure as code. And it's just great to join Pure, which has a phenomenal all flash product set. I kind of call it the iPhone or flash story super easy to use. And how do we take that same ease of use, which is a heart of a Cloud operating principle, and how do we actually take it up to really deliver a modern data experience, which includes infrastructure and storage as code, but then even more beyond that and how do you do modern operations and then modern data services. So super excited to be at Pure. And the vision, if you may, at the end of the day, is to provide, leveraging this moderate experience, a connected and effortless experience data experience, which allows customers to ultimately focus on what matters for them, their business, and by really leveraging and managing and winning with their data, because ultimately data is the new oil, if you may, and if you can mine it, get insights from it and really drive a competitive edge in the digital transformation in your head, and that's what be intended to help our customers to. >> So you joined earlier this year kind of, I guess, middle of the pandemic really I'm interested in kind of your first 100 days, what that was like, what key milestones you set and now you're into your second a 100 plus days. How's that all going? What can you share with us in and that's interesting timing because the effects of the pandemic you came in in a kind of post that, so you had experience from VMware and then you had to apply that to the product organization. So tell us about that sort of first a 100 days and the sort of mission now. >> Absolutely, so as we talked about the vision, around the modern data experience, kind of have three components to it, modernizing the infrastructure and really it's kudos to the team out of the work we've been doing, a ton of work in modernizing the infrastructure, I'll briefly talk to that, then modernizing the data, much more than modernizing the operations. I'll talk to that as well. And then of course, down the pike, modernizing data services. So if you think about it from modernizing the infrastructure, if you think about Pure for a minute, Pure is the first company that took flash to mainstream, essentially bringing what we call consumer simplicity to enterprise storage. The manual for the products with the front and back of a business card, that's it, you plug it in, boom, it's up and running, and then you get proactive AI driven support, right? So that was kind of the heart of Pure. Now you think about Pure again, what's unique about Pure has been a lot of our competition, has dealt with flash at the SSD level, hey, because guess what? All this software was built for hard drive. And so if I can treat NAND as a solid state drive SSD, then my software would easily work on it. But with Pure, because we started with flash, we released went straight to the NAND level, and as opposed to kind of the SSD layer, and what that does is it gives you greater efficiency, greater reliability and create a performance compared to an SSD, because you can optimize at the chip level as opposed to at the SSD module level. That's one big advantage that Pure has going for itself. And if you look at the physics, in the industry for a minute, there's recent data put out by Wikibon early this year, effectively showing that by the year 2026, flash on a dollar per terabyte basis, just the economics of the semiconductor versus the hard disk is going to be cheaper than hard disk. So this big inflection point is slowly but surely coming that's going to disrupt the hardest industry, already the high end has been taken over by flash, but hybrid is next and then even the long tail is coming up over there. And so to end to that extent our lead, if you may, the introduction of QLC NAND, QLC NAND powerful competition is barely introducing, we've been at it for a while. We just recently this year in my first a 100 days, we introduced the flasher AC, C40 and C60 drives, which really start to open up our ability to go after the hybrid story market in a big way. It opens up a big new market for us. So great work there by the team,. Also at the heart of it. If you think about it in the NAND side, we have our flash array, which is a scale-up latency centric architecture and FlashBlade which is a scale-out throughput architecture, all operating with NAND. And what that does is it allows us to cover both structured data, unstructured data, tier one apps and tier two apps. So pretty broad data coverage in that journey to the all flash data center, slowly but surely we're heading over there to the all flash data center based on demand economics that we just talked about, and we've done a bunch of releases. And then the team has done a bunch of things around introducing and NVME or fabric, the kind of thing that you expect them to do. A lot of recognition in the industry for the team or from the likes of TrustRadius, Gartner, named FlashRay, the Carton Peer Insights, the customer choice award and primary storage in the MQ. We were the leader. So a lot of kudos and recognition coming to the team as a result, Flash Blade just hit a billion dollars in cumulative revenue, kind of a leader by far in kind of the unstructured data, fast file an object marketplace. And then of course, all the work we're doing around what we say, ESG, environmental, social and governance, around reducing carbon footprint, reducing waste, our whole notion of evergreen and non-disruptive upgrades. We also kind of did a lot of work in that where we actually announced that over 2,700 customers have actually done non-disruptive upgrades over the technology. >> Yeah a lot to unpack there. And a lot of this sometimes you people say, oh, it's the plumbing, but the plumbing is actually very important too. 'Cause we're in a major inflection point, when we went from spinning disk to NAND. And it's all about volumes, you're seeing this all over the industry now, you see your old boss, Pat Gelsinger, is dealing with this at Intel. And it's all about consumer volumes in my view anyway, because thanks to Steve Jobs, NAND volumes are enormous and what two hard disk drive makers left in the planet. I don't know, maybe there's two and a half, but so those volumes drive costs down. And so you're on that curve and you can debate as to when it's going to happen, but it's not an if it's a when. Let me, shift gears a little bit. Because Cloud, as I was saying, it's ushered in this API economy, this as a service model, a lot of infrastructure companies have responded. How are you thinking at Pure about the as a service model for your customers? What's the strategy? How is it evolving and how does it differentiate from the competition? >> Absolutely, a great question. It's kind of segues into the second part of the moderate experience, which is how do you modernize the operations? And that's where automation as a service, because ultimately, the Cloud has validated and the address of this model, right? People are looking for outcomes. They care less about how you get there. They just want the outcome. And the as a service model actually delivers these outcomes. And this whole notion of infrastructure as code is kind of the start of it. Imagine if my infrastructure for a developer is just a line of code, in a Git repository in a program that goes through a CICD process and automatically kind of is configured and set up, fits in with the Terraform, the Ansibles, all that different automation frameworks. And so what we've done is we've gone down the path of really building out what I think is modern operations with this ability to have storage as code, disability, in addition modern operations is not just storage scored, but also we've got recently introduced some comprehensive ransomware protection, that's part of modern operations. There's all the threat you hear in the news or ransomware. We introduced what we call safe mode snapshots that allow you to recover in literally seconds. When you have a ransomware attack, we also have in the modern operations Pure one, which is maybe the leader in AI driven support to prevent downtime. We actually call you 80% of the time and fix the problems without you knowing about it. That's what modern operations is all about. And then also Martin operations says, okay, you've got flash on your on-prem side, but even maybe using flash in the public Cloud, how can I have seamless multi-Cloud experience in our Cloud block store we've introduced around Amazon, AWS and Azure allows one to do that. And then finally, for modern applications, if you think about it, this whole notion of infrastructure's code, as a service, software driven storage, the Kubernetes infrastructure enables one to really deliver a great automation framework that enables to reduce the labor required to manage the storage infrastructure and deliver it as code. And we have, kudos to Charlie and the Pure storage team before my time with the acquisition of Portworx, Portworx today is truly delivers true storage as code orchestrated entirely through Kubernetes and in a multi-Cloud hybrid situation. So it can run on EKS, GKE, OpenShift rancher, Tansu, recently announced as the leader by giggle home for enterprise Kubernetes storage. We were really proud about that asset. And then finally, the last piece are Pure as a service. That's also all outcome oriented, SLS. What matters is you sign up for SLS, and then you get those SLS, very different from our competition, right? Our competition tends to be a lot more around financial engineering, hey, you can buy it OPEX versus CapEx. And, but you get the same thing with a lot of professional services, we've really got, I'd say a couple of years and lead on, actually delivering and managing with SRE engineers for the SLA. So a lot of great work there. We recently also introduced Cisco FlashStack, again, flash stack as a service, again, as a service, a validation of that. And then finally, we also recently did a announcement with Aquaponics, with their bare metal as a service where we are a key part of their bare metal as a service offering, again, pushing the kind of the added service strategy. So yes, big for us, that's where the buck is skating, half the enterprises, even on prem, wanting to consume things in the Cloud operating model. And so that's where we're putting it lot. >> I see, so your contention is, it's not just this CapEx to OPEX, that's kind of the, during the economic downturn of 2007, 2008, the economic crisis, that was the big thing for CFOs. So that's kind of yesterday's news. What you're saying is you're creating a Cloud, like operating model, as I was saying upfront, irrespective of physical location. And I see that as your challenge, the industry's challenge, be, if I'm going to effect the digital transformation, I don't want to deal with the Cloud primitives. I want you to hide the underlying complexity of that Cloud. I want to deal with higher level problems, but so that brings me to digital transformation, which is kind of the now initiative, or I even sometimes call it the mandate. There's not a one size fits all for digital transformation, but I'm interested in your thoughts on the must take steps, universal steps that everybody needs to think about in a digital transformation journey. >> Yeah, so ultimately the digital transformation is all about how companies are gain a competitive edge in this new digital world or that the company are, and the competition are changing the game on, right? So you want to make sure that you can rapidly try new things, fail fast, innovate and invest, but speed is of the essence, agility and the Cloud operating model enables that agility. And so what we're also doing is not only are we driving agility in a multicloud kind of data, infrastructure, data operation fashion, but we also taking it a step further. We were also on the journey to deliver modern data services. Imagine on a Pure on-prem infrastructure, along with your different public Clouds that you're working on with the Kubernetes infrastructures, you could, with a few clicks run Kakfa as a service, TensorFlow as a service, Mongo as a service. So me as a technology team can truly become a service provider and not just an on-prem service provider, but a multi-Cloud service provider. Such that these services can be used to analyze the data that you have, not only your data, your partner data, third party public data, and how you can marry those different data sets, analyze it to deliver new insights that ultimately give you a competitive edge in the digital transformation. So you can see data plays a big role there. The data is what generates those insights. Your ability to match that data with partner data, public data, your data, the analysis on it services ready to go, as you get the digital, as you can do the insights. You can really start to separate yourself from your competition and get on the leaderboard a decade from now when this digital transformation settles down. >> All right, so bring us home, Ajay, summarize what does a modern data strategy look like and how does it fit into a digital business or a digital organization? >> So look, at the end of the day, data and analysis, both of them play a big role in the digital transformation. And it really comes down to how do I leverage this data, my data, partner data, public data, to really get that edge. And that links back to a vision. How do we provide that connected and effortless, modern data experience that allows our customers to focus on their business? How do I get the edge in the digital transformation? But easily leveraging, managing and winning with their data. And that's the heart of where Pure is headed. >> Ajay Singh, thanks so much for coming inside theCube and sharing your vision. >> Thank you, Dave, it was a real pleasure. >> And thank you for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks Adam in the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action. The keynotes are going on in the background, it's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante is on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City, with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and kicking it up day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me. It's very exciting. I love what you guys have got over here, very fun. >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is. And also the Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> Know, I mean the atmosphere is absolutely palpable, isn't it? You can just feel as people walk in and see what the future looks like to the Telecoms industry, it's very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage. We've been really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. Actually the keynote is going on, we're going to have DR, maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that up. But let's check out this videotape of, this is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel and we'll be right back, we'll talk about it. (upbeat music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson's space at MWC21. And for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is the unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston or DR as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona. I'm here for MWC21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors and 70 demos to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience, we're going to talk about what's in store for the new network and the future of work. I'm really excited to create a community and invite awesome telco executives to see this new future. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get go we plan this amazing experience that we call, Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs and awesome vendors talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live, is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud hosted by John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests, focused on telco and the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco. And 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, I'm on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested a hundred million dollars in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market, this week at MWC. The first is a planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement coupling dual network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing, is a planetary scale BSS system built on top of the TM forum, open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show for. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco. I'm super excited to bring to you, the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona and virtually around the world. (upbeat music) >> Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks. Just roll on that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel. I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star and I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there. I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, really isn't. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world. She's innovative, she's exciting and if we've learned anything over the last 18 months is that we need to in this industry to grow and for the future of the industry. So, it's so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration. >> And I love the fact that she's so, takes a tiger by the tail, because the telco industry is being disrupted. She's just driving the bus here and I remember I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon web services, she was running the public sector and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player. And she was exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, whoa, what's going on here? >> And of course, it's always the way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time people thinking what's going, we don't like change, why are we being shaken up. But actually afterwards, in retrospect, they think, oh, okay, I see why that happened and we needed it. So really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here in theCUBE. Obviously the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you miss some of the action, this is, I'll see the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a Hybrid event. A lot of virtual action going on. So you got theCUBE virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites, but in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, what was happening around the show? Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're the main floor out here with Chloe Richardson, who is emceeing, hosting and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean, so far day one, I was watching your presentations and inspire site chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, I know for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage. And his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing and in 10 years it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So really interesting. I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great, everyone's excited, there's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content. It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. Really exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event. So since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry cause of COVID and people are glad to be here, but a lot of stuff's changed. >> Yeah, it's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed, digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years, we know that, but what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years? >> Oh man, that's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks and telecom, which is basically radios and wireless and then mobile. It's very global, a lot of networks, but now it's evolving and many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe because what's all the technology from the cloud players and from the chips, are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So if you look at the chips, the hardware, it's less about the speeds and feeds. It's more about the consumer experience. You got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I'm like, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app, driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, if you order it you pick it up. So that's kind of can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. so a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry that is the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is that anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well I think the incumbents are going to lose their position. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. >> For sure. >> And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the company that's not, that you don't see. And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this. You saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. She just walked out there and she's not afraid. >> No. Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up and you can see as soon as she worked out. That is what she intends to do. >> I love her mojo, she's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Yep. >> I mean, even when apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash. When Steve Jobs brought back apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company. The iPad was a similar moment, then the iPhone and just the rest is history. That kind of disruption's coming. You're going to see that here. >> Yeah. Oh, it's exciting though isn't it? To be future ready rather than future proof but actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about why, as you're in MWS and Google Cloud? Why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot, hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity and it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. >> Okay. >> It's almost like global warming now. The icebergs are melting and it's going to just change and because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing. It's not like a better phone, it's a commercial app opportunity cause it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts or football games or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out, can't upload their pictures on Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them in the network. That's where 5G solves the problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth and that's going to bring the edge to life and that's money. So when you got money and greed and power changing hands, it's every, it's on the table and the wheel's spinning, and it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know. >> Yeah, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved. And I suppose it circles back to the fact that, DR is really leading the charge and they're probably thinking, okay, what's going on here? This is different, we want something new. You didn't know it's an open run or something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here constantly. I've mentioned open run. What is it all about John? Because why all the bars, if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we getting excited about it? >> That's a great thing. 5G certainly is Google Drive the main trend for sure. OpenRent is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation has been the driver for most of the open source software. So they're trying to bring software and open architectures to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware and around infrastructure because we need more infrastructure. We need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices that could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology and you want to minimize the licensing and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What if we look at, so on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Philippe Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud and within telco. So you just mentioned that. Open mind, it's all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easy, more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it a risk? >> I think that's going to increase the value of security and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in sense that could be explored by hackers, but it can be open to also protect. And I think we've seen open source and cloud in particular be more secure because everyone said, "Cloud is not secure, open source is not secure." And as it turns out when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security and threats. But actually I was speaking to some leaders in across various industries and particularly in tech. And they were saying, "Actually there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open source environment. We are able to track them and measure them and defend more efficiently. So actually they're being battered away, but the number is probably the same as it always was. We just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so do the threats. So on a net basis it's more because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look at it, there's money involved, they're organized, there's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank or ransomwares at an all time high. So this is like a big problem and it's beyond the government, it's our individual freedom. So security its huge and I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's again about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time but without collaboration that the industries aren't going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I just say in security, don't download that PDF if you don't know who came from. The fishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here on Mobile World Live, we're going to show this next segment and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience Chloe, for people who aren't here, right? >> Yeah. >> To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona and all the actions. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDr, but you can call me DR. Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time, let's do it. Holy shit. It sure is a great time to be a tech company. I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, DoorDash or Uber, life's pretty great. Just look at these stock prices over the past five years with their shareholder value going up into the right. Totally amazing. But where's telco? There I add our stocks to this awesome chart. Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, Tim, America Movil and Zain group. Huh, not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up. Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T and to Apple because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth, the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people. I get it, you have the security blanket, you're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street, to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things, but because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far you haven't had to. Every telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best, just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS, is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat and it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting, to WeChat, WhatsApp and the other OTT apps, but it is not just texting. The total adjustable market or term of the mobile app disruptors is huge. Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're a network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love. They look at every interaction with the customer and say, "How do we make the customer love this?" Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies, don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive they must make customers love them. So they focus on it in a big way and it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70 and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps and becoming customer centric. Retooling around the customer is a huge change. So let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples and drive big shareholder value just like the tech companies on that chart. Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies and a variety of categories vying for your subscriber's disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services, who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high evaluations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You. Hello. What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAAMs they throw around, you'll be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the CapEx, to build out the network, I say to myself, "Hell yeah, we should totally go do it and do whatever it takes to go get." For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focused started in rideshare, but then leverage its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with a valuable services that helped grow your ARPU, that would be huge. So how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app. A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called Totogi that is going to help carriers build world class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users, it's not the average order value, it's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user, that's the metric that matters. How many of you use that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top up or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences like Apple credit cards, no information required, application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies, like how DoorDash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings because they do simple things like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app rather than force you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. What do we do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder, why you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day. You have something that's 10 times better. You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to your crappy over customized on premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it. The public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network and all the network interactions into customer engagement. This is something the super apps don't have but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focus to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying massive CapEx investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100 million into it. You heard me right, $100 million. Is this what it feels like to be soft bank? I'm investing in Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage the network interactions into super app usage. Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those Telco valuations will go from down here to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts, and I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, click, everyone says, "No way, telcos can't do it." Zero chance, total goose egg. One suggested I build a bonfire with 100 million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well I think those people are dead wrong. I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing, the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because the Totogi takes the value of the network and the power of the public cloud to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focus guys like the other telcos, instead you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors. They know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf and make the customers want to choose you, you need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We will have to give up the security blanket of the network and change. Instead of NPS of the thirties, it needs to be in the 70s. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible. I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time and I can't wait to see you there. >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier, Chloe Richardson filling it for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her and while with major action, major pump me up, punch in the face, wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here. She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is John, there's trillions of dollars on the table and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> There's not going to be, it's going to be a fight, who will win. >> Who will win but also who will build the next big thing? >> Someone needs to die in the media conversation, it's always a fight, something's dead, something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. I think what's happened is, telco's already acknowledged that they need to change in the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple, they've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm, you've got all these new things. So the chips are getting faster and the software's more open source and I'm telling you, cloud is just going to drive that bus right down clouds street and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peeping on the board as it drives down. John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written. And one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me. What does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets and growing markets things behave differently and certainly economics and the people and the makeup and the mindset. >> Okay. >> So the telco has been kind of this mature market. It's been changing and growing but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit, you know, install a lot of cable. You got to get the rents out of that infrastructure and that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market, and it's about building, not just operating and you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together, builders being software developers, new technology and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. >> Okay. >> Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking, but in a growth market, it's turbulent and ride might not be quiet, first class ticket to paradise, but it's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer and the parallels? >> Yeah. I mean, the mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, re platform with the cloud and then refactor your business. If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over or go out of business. And that's what the telco with all these assets, they're going to get bought roll into a SPAC, special purpose acquisition company was a super hot in the United States. A lot of roll ups going on with Private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor or re platform, then refactor, they're going to be toast and they're going to get rolled up and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad. People process technology, and we think process and technology really take the forefront here but like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations establishments? How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about often? >> Yeah. I mean, education is huge and this highlights the change that telcos now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around and mobile was there, but once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So you start to see people now aware of the value and if you look at the, during the COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses and everyone was, survive because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there and some teleconferences that didn't go well but for the most part we survived and they really saved everybody, my goodness. So they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education, people care about that stuff. So now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why The Edge has checked trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, oh, there's no jobs or I can't work, that's a bunch of BS because you can just get online, get on YouTube and just get a degree. You can get a degree, you can get an Amazon job, it pays a hundred thousand dollars a year, American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds and be unemployed six months and then be employed. So negative unemployment means there's more jobs than people to fill them qualify. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in some of the things there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity and there's such a skill shortage, there is nobody around to fill it. So it's an interesting problem to have isn't it? Cause it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades and obviously telco is in the same space. What can we do about it? Do you think it will actually bring people in? >> I think it's going to take leadership and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university, they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there, but to me it's the relationships, the mentorship. You starting to see women in tech and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear course where nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate or degree and accreditation no problem, but communities are out there. So that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that and I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills, you can get that online. So why even go to school? So people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also even transferring, I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't there? So we could easily be talking to people from other industries and bringing them into telco and saying, look, bring what you know from your retail background or your healthcare background and help us at telco to again, drive forward, just like DR is saying it's all about the next big thing. >> Danielle, I was also driving a lot of change and if you think about the jobs and a pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to a school like that and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now, the jobs that are available, weren't around five years ago. So there's no like pedigree or track record, there's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now is, from a job standpoint is, people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy league or the big degree or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emergent and make things happen, entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas. >> It's interesting you mentioned that John, because we can have more than five years experience in this space, we know that but in telco there is a problem and maybe it's, again it's a flipped problem where, telco recruiters or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> Well, I mean, I think that's just, I mean, I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening one, but two, I think, you know, you've got to be like a chip engineer, you can't learn that online, but if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely parts, you can specialize, space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on, obviously Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And, you know, Danielle Royston always says, who's going to happen first, Mars, colony, or telco adopting public cloud? Some people think Mars will happen first but. >> What do you think John? >> I think telco's going to get cloud. I mean, first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important because it's an architectural beachhead. >> Yeah. >> And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. >> Of course. >> So the inside baseball and the inside money and all the investors are focusing on the edge because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows it's a public secret and it's fun to watch, everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah, know, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So it's an interesting flip and I wonder if with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development its efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times John. >> Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So it's, we're the hybrid cube, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. >> Yeah. >> That is critical dynamic, and you seeing it. Like virtual reality for instance, now you seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. >> Exactly. >> You got, like Roblox went public recently. >> Yeah. >> Metaverse is a good time to be in that business because experiential human relations are coming. So I think that's going to be powered by 5G, you know, gamers. So all good stuff, Chloe, great to be with you here in theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam and the team, we're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City and this is theCUBE, from Cloud City back to you, Adam in the studio.

(upbeat music) >> 2020 was the most unpredictable year of our lives, a forced shutdown of global economies left everyone have the conclusion that the tech industry spending would decline and of course it did, but you'd hardly know it if you watch the stock market and the momentum of several well-positioned companies. Those firms that had products and services that catered to the pivot to work from home, SAS based solutions were focused on business resiliency and cloud saw huge growth. The forced match to digital turned a buzzword into reality overnight, where if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. And one of the companies participating in that growth trend was Veeam. Veeam virtual is scheduled to take place on May 25th and 26th. And it's one of our favorite physical events and the Cube will be there again as a virtual participant. One of our traditions prior to VeeamON has always been to bring in an executive into the Cube and talk not only about what to expect at the show, but what's happening in the market. And with me is many times Cube alum Danny Allan is the chief technology officer at Veeam. Danny welcome is always great to see you. >> I am delighted to be here again. Disappointed it's virtual, but excited to talk with you. >> Yeah, me too. You know, it's coming. It's getting jabbed but you know, you look at the surprises here. I mean, look at the chip shortage, you know everybody thought, Oh, well stop ordering chips. I mean furniture, et cetera, cars. And it's just kind of crazy. What was your expectation going into the pandemic and what did you actually see looking back? >> Well, it's funny, you never know what's going to happen. And for the first few weeks I would say there's a lot of disruption because all of a sudden you have people who've been going into an office for a long time, working from home and you know, from an R&D perspective at Veeam those people weren't used to working from home. So there's a lot of uncertainty I'll say for the first three or four weeks but what very quickly picked up was the opportunity. I'll say to focus more specifically on delivering things for our customers. And one of the things obviously that just exploded was use of digital technologies like Slack and Microsoft teams. And as you say, Veeam was well positioned to help customers as they move towards this new normal, as they say. >> So what were some of the growth vectors that you guys saw specifically that were helping your customers going to get get through this time? >> Yeah well, people always associate Veeam with knowing data protection for the virtual environment but two things really stood out last year as our emerging markets. One was Office365, and I think that's due to the uptake of Microsoft teams. I mean, if you look at the Microsoft results, you can see that people are doing SaaS. And we were very well positioned to take advantage of that. Help customers move towards collaborating online. So that was a huge growth vector for us. And the second one was cloud. We had more data moving to cloud than ever before in Veeam history. And that continues on into 2021. >> You guys, well, yeah, let's talk more about that set SAS piece of your business. You were very early on in terms of SAS data protection. You kind of had to educate the market. People are like, well, why do I need to back up my SAS doesn't the cloud provider do that? And then you sort of you had to educate, so it was you were early and but it's really paid off. Maybe talk about how that trend has benefited some of your customers. >> Yeah. So if you go back four years, we didn't even have data protection for Office365. And over the last four years, we've emerged into the market leader the largest in protection for Office365. And as you say, it was about education. Early on people knew that they needed to protect exchange when they ran it on premises. And when they first went to the cloud there was this expectation of, Hey Microsoft or my provider will do that for me. And very quickly they realized that's not the case and there's still the same threats. It might not be hardware failure, but certainly misconfiguration or deleted items or ransomware in 2021, sorry, 2020 was massive. And so we do data protection for Exchange, for SharePoint online, for one drive, and most recently for Microsoft teams. And so that data protection obviously helps organizations as they adopt Office365 and SaaS technologies. >> I sent him my last breaking analysis. When you look at the ETR data, Veeam has been really steady. You know, some competitors spike up and come down, others, you know, maybe aren't doing so well or the larger established players don't have as much momentum. It just seems like Veeam even though you cross the billion dollar revenue mark, you've been able to keep that spending momentum up. And I think it's, I would observe it's a function of your ability to identify that the waves and ride those waves and anticipate them. We just talked about SAS, talked about virtualization. You were there cloud, we'll talk about that more as well, plus your execution. It seems like since the acquisition by insight you guys have continued to execute. I wonder if you could help the audience understand how do you think about the phases that Veeam has gone through in its ascendancy and where you're headed? >> Yeah. And so I look at it as three things, it's having the right product, but it's not just enough to have the right product, the right product it's the right timing and it's the right execution. So if you think about where Veeam started, it was all in data protection for vSphere, for the hypervisor. And that was right at the time when VMware was taking off and the modernized data center was being virtualized. And so that helped us grow, I'll say into a $600 million company, but then about four years ago, we see the ascendancy of SaaS and specifically Office365. And so, you know, we weren't first to market but I would argue the timing with the best product, with the right execution has turned that into a massive a very significant contribution to our bottom line. And then actually the third wave through 2020 is the adoption of cloud. We moved last year, 242 petabytes into cloud storage and already in the first quarter of 2021, we've moved to 100 petabytes. So there's this massive adoption or migration of data into the cloud. And Veeam has been positioned with the right product, at the right time, with the right execution, to take advantage of that. >> So I wonder if you could help us quantify that IDC data you know, the IDC did a good job quantifying the market. Maybe you could share with us sort of your position there, maybe some of the growth that we're seeing. Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah. We have some very exciting results from the recent IDC report. So in the second half of 2020, we saw 17.9% year over year growth in our revenue. That was actually triple the closest competitor. And our sequential growth was over 21%. So massive growth and all of that is in the second half of the year, 563 million in revenue. So over a billion dollar company. So these aren't just, you know, 20% growth on small numbers. This is on a very significant number. And we see that continuing forward, we'll be announcing some things I'm sure at VMR coming up in a few weeks here, but that trend continues. And again, it's the right product, right time, with the right execution. >> Cloud continues to roll on. You're seeing, you know, solid weather. If you add them all up the big four 30 plus percent growth you're seeing Azure, even higher growth. You know, AWS is huge, Google growing, Google cloud, probably in the 60 to 70% range. So cloud still hot, it's kind of gone mainstream but there's still feels like there's a long way to go there. What's happening in cloud? You guys, again, leaning in, riding that wave. What can you tell us? >> We are leaning in, you're going to see some things coming up at Veeam related to that. But two things I would say, one is we're in the marketplace of all three of the major hyperscalers. So there's a Veeam backup for AWS, Veeam backup for Azure, and a Veeam backup for GCP. And not only is there products that are purpose-built for those clouds in the marketplace, all three of them have integrations to the core Veeam platform. And so this isn't just standalone products while it is in the marketplace, it's integrated into the full strategy around modern data protection for the organizations. And so I am thrilled about some of the things that we're going to be showing in there but we're leaning in very closely with those. We think we're in early days, like I say maybe first, second year, and it will be the next decade as they truly emerge into their dominant position. But even more than cloud if you asked me what I get excited about looking forward certainly cloud adoption is massive, but Kubernetes, that's what's enabling some of the models of both on-prem and cloud hosted. And we're clearly doing some things there as well. >> So I'm glad you brought that up because I think the first time I ever sort of stumbled into a company that was actually doing data protection for containers was out of a VeeamON event. It was one of your exhibitors. And I was like, Hmm, that's an interesting name. And yeah, of course he ended up buying the company. But so, you know, it's funny, right? Because containers have been around forever. And then when you started to see Kubernetes come to for, containers are really ephemeral they really didn't, you know, they weren't persistent but they didn't have state, but that's changing. I wonder if you could give us your perspective as to how you're thinking about that whole space. >> I truly believe that the third big wave of technology transformation, the first was around physical systems and mainframes and things. And then we went into the virtualized era. I think that the third world is not the cloud. I actually think it is containers. Now why containers? Because as you mentioned, Dave, they're a femoral, they're designed for the world of consumption. Everything else is designed for you, install it. And then you build to the high watermark. The whole thing about containers is that they're a femoral and they're built for the consumption model. The other thing about containers is that they're highly portable. So you can run it on premises with OpenShift but then you can move it to GKE or HKS or EKS or any of the big cloud platforms. So it definitely aligns with organization's desire to modernize and to choose the infrastructure of best choice. Now, at the same time, the reason why they haven't taken off I would argue as quickly as they could have is because they've been really complex, in early days the complexity of containers was very difficult, but the model, the platform or ecosystem is evolving, they are becoming more simple. And what is happening is IT operations teams are now considering the developer, their customer and they're building self-service models for the developers to be more productive. So I think of this as platform apps and certainly backup and security is a part of this but it is moving and we're seeing traction actually faster than it would have predicted in early 2020. >> Yeah. We've been putting forth this vision of a layer that abstracts the complexity of the underlying clouds whether it's on prem, across clouds, eventually the edge and containers are linchpin to enabling that. Let's talk about VeeamON 2021. Show us a little leg, give us a preview. >> So we always come with the excitement and we always come with showing a sneak peek of what's to come. So certainly we're going to celebrate some of the big successes. We brought version 11 to market earlier this year that had security capabilities around ransomware type, continuous data protection it at a whole lot of things. So we're going to celebrate some of the products have already recently launched but we're also going to give a sneak peek of what's coming over 2021. Now, if you ask me what that is, we talk an awful lot about cloud. So you should expect to see things around Veeam backup for AWS and Azure and GCP. You should expect to see things around our Kubernetes data protection with our casting Cape 10 product, you should expect to see evolution of capabilities with our SaaS data protection with Office365. So we're going to give a sneak peek of lots of things to come. And as always, we bring lots of innovation to the market. It's not just another checkbox theme has always said, how can we do it differently? How can we do a better? And then we're going to show that to our customers at VeeamON. >> Well, we're always super excited to participate in the Veeam community. We've always had a lot of fun. They're great events. Yes, it's virtual, but you guys always have an interesting spin on things and make it fun. It's May 25th and 26th. It starts at 9:00 AM Eastern time. You go to Veeam V-E-E-A-M.com and sign up, make sure you do that and check out all the content. The Cube of course will be there. I will be interviewing executives, customers, partners. There's tons of content for practitioners. And, you know, as always you guys got the great demos and always a few surprises. So Danny, really looking forward to that and really appreciate your time and the Cube today. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. Again, May 25th and 26th 9:00 AM. Eastern time, go to veeam.com and sign up. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE, our coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience continues. I have a long-time guest coming back, joining me in the next segment here. Jon Siegal is back, the Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Jon, it's good to see you, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, always great to be on. >> We last spoke about six months ago and here we are still at home. >> I know. >> But there has been no slowdown whatsoever in the last year. We were talking to you a lot about Edge last time but we're going to talk about PowerStore today. It's just coming up on its one year anniversary. You launched it right when the pandemic happened. >> That's right. >> Talk to me about what's happened in the last year with respect to PowerStore. Adoption, momentum, what's going on? >> Yeah, great, listen, what a year it's been, right? But certainly for PowerStore especially, I mean, customers and partners around the world have really embraced PowerStore, specifically really it's modern architecture. What many people may not know is this is actually the fastest ramping new architecture we've had in all of Dell's history, which is quite a history of course. And we saw 4 X quarter over quarter growth in the most recent quarter. And you know, in terms of shipments, we've shipped well over 400 petabytes of PowerStore, you know, so special thanks to lots of our customers around the world and industries like education, gaming, transportation, retail. More than 60 countries, I think 62 countries now. They include customers like Columbia Southern University, Habib Bank, Real Page, the University of Pisa and Ultra Leap, just to name a few. And to give you a sense of how truly game changing it's been in the market is that approximately 20% of the customers with PowerStore are new to Dell, new to Dell Technologies. And we've tripled the number of wins against some of our key competitors in just the last quarter as well. So look, it's been quite a year, like you said and we're not stopping there. >> Yeah, you must have to wear a neck brace from that whiplash of moving so quickly. (both laughing) But that's actually a good problem to have. >> It is. >> And curious about, is it 20% of the PowerStore customers are net new to Dell? >> Yeah. >> Interesting that you've captured that much in a very turbulent year. Any industries in particular that you see as really being transformed by the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think just like we're bringing a disruptive technology to market, there's a lot of industries out there that are disrupting themselves as well, right, and how they transform, particularly with, you know, in this new era during the pandemic. I think, I can give you a great example. One of the new capabilities of PowerStore is AppsON just for those that aren't familiar. AppsON is the ability for PowerStore to run apps directly on the appliance, good name, right? And it's thanks to a built-in VMware ESXi hypervisor. And where we've seen really good traction with AppsON, is in storage intensive applications at the edge. And that brings me to my example. And this one's in retail. And you know, of course just like every industry I think it's been up-ended in the past year. There's a large supermarket chain in northern China that is new to Dell. During the pandemic they needed to fast-track the development of a smart autonomous retail system in all their stores, so that their customers could make their purchases via smartphone app. And again, just limiting the essentially the person to person interaction during the pandemic and this required a significant increase in transaction processing to get to the store locations that they didn't have equipment for before, as well as support for big data analytics applications to understand the customer behavior that's going on in real-time. So the net result is they chose PowerStore. They were new to Dell and they deployed it in their stores and delivered a seamless shopping experience via smartphone apps. The whole shopping experience was completely revolutionized. And I think this is really a great example of again, how the innovations that are in PowerStore are enabling our customers to really rethink how they're transacting business. >> Well, enabling the supermarkets to be the edge but also in China where everything started, so much, the market dynamics are still going on, but how quickly were they able to get PowerStore up and running and facilitate that seamless smartphone shopping experience? >> It was only weeks, only weeks, weeks from beginning to getting them up to speed. I mean, we've had great coverage, great support. And again, they embraced, I mean, they happened to leverage the AppsON capabilities, so they were able to run some of their applications directly on the appliance and they were able to get that up and running very quickly. And they were already a VMware customer as well. So they were already familiar with some of the tools and the integration of the VMware. And again, that's also been a sweetspot for this particular offer. >> Okay, got it. So a lot in it's first year. You said 4 X growth, over 60 countries, 400 petabytes plus shipped, a lot of new net new customers. What is new? What are you announcing that's new and that's going to take that up even a higher level? >> That's right. We're always going to up the ante, right? We're always going to, we can't rest on our laurels for too long. Look, we're very excited to share what's new for PowerStore. And that is one of the reasons we're here of course. I can break it down into two key highlights. First is a major software update that brings more enterprise innovation, more speed, more automation in particular to both new and existing customers. And we're also excited to announce a new lower cost entry model for the PowerStore family called the PowerStore 500. And this offers an incredible amount of enterprise class storage capabilities, much of which I have talked about and will talk more about today, for the price. And the price itself is what's going to surprise some folks. It starts as low as 28,000 US street price which is pretty significant, you know, in terms of a game changer, we think, in this industry. >> So let's talk about the software update first. You've got PowerStore 2.0, happy birthday to your customers who are going to take advantage of this. >> That's right. >> Kind of talk me through what some of the technological advancements are that your customers are going to be able to leverage? >> That's a great point. Yeah, so from a software perspective I like how you said that, happy birthday, yeah so all of our, just to be clear from a software update perspective, all of our existing customers are going to get this as a simple free non-disruptive update. And this is a commitment we've had to our customers for some time. And really it's the mantra if you will, of PowerStore, which is all about ensuring that our customers can encounter our very flexible platform that will keep giving them the latest and greatest. So really a couple of things I want to highlight from PowerStore that are brand new. One is we're giving a speed boost to the entire PowerStore lineup. Customers now, existing customers, you get up to 25% faster, mixed workload performance which is incredible, right off the bat. Secondly, we're enabling our customers to take full advantage of NVME now across the data center with the option of running NVME over fiber channel. And this again requires just a simple software update and no additional hardware if they already have 32 gig capable switches and HBAs on-prem. We've also made our unique AppsON feature, which I just talked about in the China example, we've made that more powerful and with scale out. This means more aggregate power, more aggregate capacity and it makes it even more ideal now for storage intensive apps to run at the edge with PowerStore. Another capability that's been very popular with our customers is our data reduction specifically our intelligent Dido which is always on and automated. And now what it does is it enables customers to boost performance while still guaranteeing the four to one data reduction that we have, at the same time. So just to give a quick example, when the system is under extreme IO, duress if you will, it automatically prioritize that IO versus the DDUP itself and provides a 20% turbo boost if you will, of performance boost for the applications running. All this is done automatically, zero management effort, zero impact to the data reduction guarantee of four to one that we already have in place. And then the last highlight I'd like to bring up is, last but not least, is one we're really proud of is the ability for our customers to now take more cost advantage, if you will, cost effective advantage of SCM or storage class memory. PowerStore now differentiates between SCM drives and NVME drives within the same chassis. So they can use SCM as a high-performance layer, if you will with as few as one drive, right? So they don't have to populate the whole chassis, they can use just one SCM drive for cost-effectiveness, for embedded data access. And this actually helps reduce the workload latency by up to 15%. So, another great example on top of NVME that I already mentioned, of how PowerStore is leading the practical adoption of next generation technologies. >> Are you seeing with the lower cost PowerStore 500, is that an opportunity for Dell to expand into the midsize market and an opportunity for those smaller customers to be able to take advantage of this technology? >> Absolutely, yeah. So the PowerStore finder, which we're really excited about introducing does exactly what you just said, Lisa. It is going to allow us to bring PowerStore and the experience of PowerStore to a broad range of businesses, a much broader range of edge use cases as well. And we're really excited about that. It's an incredible amount of enterprise storage class performance, as I mentioned, and functionality for the price that is again, 28,000 starting. And this includes all of the enterprise software capabilities I've been talking about. The ability to cluster, four to one data reduction guarantee, anytime upgrades. And to put this in context, a single 2U appliance, the PowerStore 500 supports up to 2.4 million SQL transactions per minute. I mean, this thing packs a punch, like no other, right? And it's a great fit for stand-alone or edge deployments in virtually every industry, we've mentioned retail already also healthcare, manufacturing, education and more. It's an offering that's really ideal for any solution that requires an optimization of price/performance, small footprint and effortless automation. And I can tell you, it's not just customers that are excited about this, as you can imagine our channel partners, they can't wait to get their hands on this either. >> Was just going to ask you about the channel. >> It is going to help them reach new sets of customers that they never had before. You mentioned midsize, but also in addition to that, it's just going to open it up to all new sets of use cases as well. So I'm really excited to see the creativity from our channel partners and customers and how they adopt and use the PowerStore 500 going forward. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that it's going to open up. We've seen so many new things in the last year and such acceleration. What are some of the new use cases that this is going to help unlock value for? >> Yeah, again, I think it's going to come down a lot to the edge in particular, as well as mid-size, it can run, again, this can run storage, intensive applications. So it's really about coming down to a price point that I think the biggest example will be mid-sized businesses that now, it's now affordable to. That they weren't able to get this enterprise class capabilities in the past more than anything else. Cause it's all the same capabilities that I've mentioned but it allows them to run all types of things. It could be, they could run, new next-generation intensive data, intensive databases. They can run VDI, they can run SQL, it does, essentially more than anything else makes existing use cases more accessible to mid-sized businesses. >> Got it, okay. So, so much momentum going on in the first year. A lot of that you're souping it up with this your new software, we talked about the new mid-size enterprise version PowerStore 500. What else can we expect from PowerStore, the rest of calendar 2021? >> Yeah, I think lots of things. So first of all we're so pleased at the amount of commitment to innovation that we've had over the past year. We're going to continue to work very closely with VMware to drive more and more innovation and enhancements with capabilities like AppsON that I talked about, and VM-ware or (indistinct) which is a key enabler for that. We're also committed to continuing to lead the industry in the adoption of modern technologies. I gave some good examples today of NVME and AppsON and SCM, storage class memory, and customers can expect that continued commitment. Look, we've designed PowerStore from the ground up to be very flexible so that it can be enhanced and improved non-disruptively. And I think we did that with this release. We proved that and no one can predict the future, clearly, it's been a crazy year. And so businesses need storage that's going to be flexible with them and grow with them and evolve with them. And customers can expect that from PowerStore. And we plan on doing just that. >> So customers can, that are interested can go direct to Dell. They can also go through your huge channel, you said, in terms of those customers that are thinking about it maybe adding to the percentage of new customers. What's your advice on them in terms of next steps? >> Yeah, next steps is, you know, I got to say this, we've done, it's crazy, we've done over 20,000 demos of PowerStore in one year, no joke. And you know, it's a new world. And so the next step is to reach out to Dell. We'd love to showcase this through a demo, give them whether it's a remote experience that way or remote proof of concept but yeah, reach out to Dell, your local rep or local channel partner and we'd love to show you what's possible more than anything else and look, we're really proud of what we've accomplished here. Just as impressive as these updates, I must say, is that in many instances, the team that brought this to market, the engineering team, they did this just like we're doing today, right? Over Zoom, remotely, while balancing life and work. So I just also want to thank the team for their commitment to delivering innovation to our customers. It hasn't wavered at all and I want to thank our top notch team. >> Right, an amazing amount of work done. You've had a very busy year and glad that you're well and healthy and been as successful with PowerStore. We can't wait to see in the next year those numbers that you shared even go up even more. Jon, thank you for joining us >> Looking forward to it. and sharing what's new with PowerStore. We appreciate your time. >> Always a pleasure, Lisa. >> Likewise >> Look forward to talking to you soon. >> Yeah >> Take care. >> For Jon Siegal, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, a Digital Experience. (slow upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Overnight COVID completely exposed those companies that were really not ready for the digital age. There was a mad rush to the cloud in an effort to reshape the very notion of business resiliency and enable employees to remain productive so that they continue serve customers. Data protection was at the heart of this shift and cloud data protection has become a fundamental staple of organizations operating models. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm joined by two longtime friends of theCUBE, Rob Emsley is the director of product marketing at Dell Technologies. And Stephen Manley is the Chief Technology Officer at Druva. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks for being here. >> Yeah, great to be here, Dave. >> This is the high point of my day, Dave. >> I'm glad to hear it, Stephen. It's been a while since we... Missing you guys to tell you face to face maybe it'll happen before 22, >> We haven't aged a bit, Dave. >> (laughing) Ditto. Listen, we've been talking for years about this shift to the cloud. In the past 12 months, boy, we've seen the pace of workloads that have moved to the cloud really accelerate. So Rob, maybe you could start it off. How do you see the market and perhaps what are some of the blind spots maybe that people need to think about when they're moving workloads so fast in the cloud? >> Yeah. Good question Dave. I mean, you know, we've spoken a number of times around how our focus has significantly shifted over the last couple of years. I mean, only a couple of years ago, our focus was very much on on-premise data protection, but over the last couple of years, more workloads have shifted to the cloud. Customers have started adopting SaaS applications and all of these environments are creating data that is so critical to these customers to protect, we've definitely found that more and more of our conversations have been centered around what can you do for me when it comes to protecting workloads in the client environment? >> Yeah. Now of course, Stephen, this is kind of your wheelhouse. How are you thinking about the these market shifts? >> Yeah. You know, it's interesting in the data protection market. heck the data market in general, you see these sort of cycles happen. And for a long time, we had a cycle where applications and environments were consolidating a lot. It was all VMs and Oracle and SQL and we seem to be exploding out the other way to this massive sprawl of different types of applications in different places. Like Rob said, we've got Microsoft 365 and you've got Salesforce and you've got workloads running in the cloud. The world looks different. And you add on top of that the new security threats as people moving to the cloud. A number of years ago we talked how ransomware was an emerging threat. We're way past emerging into... there's a ransomware attack every six seconds and everybody wakes up terrified about it. And so we really see the market has shifted I think in terms of what the apps are and also in terms of what the threats and the focus and this that's come into play. >> Right. Well, thanks for that. There's some hard news which we're going to get to, but before we do, Rob, Stephen was mentioning the SaaS apps and we've been sort of watching that space for a while but a lot of people will ask why do I need a separate data protection layer? Doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Don't they replicate it? They're cloud vendors, why do I need to buy yet another backup product? >> Yeah, that's a fairly common misconception, Dave, that both SaaS application vendors and cloud vendors, inherently are providing all of the data protection that you need. The reality is that they're not, you know I think when you think about a lot of the data within those environments, certainly they're focused on providing availability. And availability is absolutely one thing that you can, for the most part, rely on the cloud vendors to deliver to you. But when it comes to actually protecting yourself from accidental deletion. Protecting yourself from cyber threats and cyber crime that may infect your data through malicious acts, that's really where you need to supplement the environment that the cloud providers provide you, with best in class data protection solutions. And this is really where, waywardly looking to introduce new innovations into the market to really, really help customers with that cloud based data protection. >> Yeah. Now you got some news here. Let's kind of dig in, if we could, to the innovations behind that. Maybe Rob, you could kick it off and then, Stephen, we'll bring you in. >> Yeah. So first piece of news that we're really happy to announce is the introduction of a new Dell EMC PowerProtect backup service which is a new cloud data protection solution powered by Druva, hence the reason that Stephen and I are here today. It's designed to deliver additional protection without increasing IT complexity. >> So powered by Druva. what does that mean? Can you add some color to that? >> Absolutely. So, when we really started looking at the expansion of our PowerProtect portfolio, we already have the ability to deliver both on-premises protection and to deliver that same software within the public cloud from a PowerProtect software delivery model. But what we really didn't have within the portfolio is a cloud data protection platform. And we really looked at what was available in the market. We looked at our ability to develop that ourselves. And we decided that the best path for our customers to bring capability to them as soon as we possibly could was to partner with Druva. And we really looked at the capabilities that Druva has been delivering for many years, the capabilities that they have across many dimensions of cloud-based workloads. And we already engaged with them probably about six months ago, first introduced Druva as an option to be resold by ourselves, Salesforce and partners. And then we're pleased to introduce a Dell EMC branded service PowerProtect backup service. >> Okay, so just one more point of clarification, then, Stephen, I want to bring you in. So we're talking about... this includes SaaS apps as well, I'm talking 365, the Google apps which we use extensively, CRM, Salesforce, for example. >> Absolutely. >> What platforms are you actually connecting to and providing protection for? >> Yeah, so the real priority for us was to expand our PowerProtect portfolio to support a variety of SaaS applications. You mentioned, real major ones with respect to Microsoft 365, Google workplace, as well as Salesforce. But the other thing that we also get with PowerProtect backup service is the ability to provide a cloud-based data protection service that supports endpoints such as laptops and desktops but also the ability to support hybrid workloads. So for some customers the ability to use PowerProtect backup service to give them support for virtual machine backups, both VMware and Hyper-V, but also application environments like Oracle and SQL. And lastly, but not least, one of the things that backup service also provides when it comes to virtual machines is not only virtual machines on premises, but also virtual machines within the public cloud, specifically VMware cloud on AWS. >> So, Stephen, I remember I was talking to Jaspreet several years ago, and I've always liked sort of the Druva model but it felt at the time you were like a little ahead of your time, but boy, the market has really come to you. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about the just generally cloud-based data protection and the sort of low down on your platform. >> Yeah, and I think you're right, the market has absolutely swept in this direction. Like we were talking about with applications in so many places and end points in so many places and data centers and remote offices with data sprawled everywhere. We find customers are looking for a solution that can connect to everything. I don't want seven different backup solutions, one for each of those things, I want one centralized solution. And so kind of a data protection as a service becomes really appealing because instead of setting all of these things up on your own, well, it's just built in for you. And then the fact that it's as a service helps with things like the ransomware protection because it's off site in another location under another account. And so we really see customers saying this is appealing because it helps keep my costs down. It helps keep my complexity down. There's fewer moving parts. And one of the nicest things is as I move to the cloud I get that one fixed cost, right? I'm not dealing with the, oh, wow, this bill is not what I was expecting. It just comes in with what I was carrying. And so it really comes down to, as you go to the cloud, you want a platform that's got everything built in, something that, and let's face it, Dell EMC, this has always been the case, that storage of last resort that backup that you can trust, right? You want something with a history, like you said, you've been talking to Jaspreet for awhile, Druva is a company that's got a proven track record that your data is going to be safe and it's going to be recoverable and you're going to want someone that can innovate quickly, right? So that as more new cloud applications arise, we're there to help you protect them as they emerge. >> So talk a little bit more about the timing. I mean, we talked earlier about, okay, COVID really forced this shift to the cloud and you guys clearly have skated to the pocket and you also... You referenced sort of new workloads and I'm just wondering how you see that from a timing standpoint. And at this moment in time why this is such a, you know, the right fit. >> We've seen a lot of customers over the last again 12 months or so, one really accelerate their shift to things like SaaS applications, Microsoft 365, and we're not just talking exchange online and One Drive, but SharePoint online, Microsoft teams, really going all in because they're finding that, as I'm distributed, as I have a remote workforce, my end points became more important again, but also the ability to have collaboration became important. And the more I depend on those tools to collaborate, the more I'm depending on them to replace what used to be in-person meetings where we could have a whiteboard and discuss things. And it's done through collaboration online tools. Well, I need to protect that. Not just because the data's important, but because that's now how my business is running. And so that entire environment is important. And so it's really accelerated people coming and looking for solutions because they've realized how important these environments and this data is. >> So, Stephen, you mentioned that you guys, I mean, obviously you have a track record but you got some vision too. And I want to sort of poke at that a little bit. I mean, essentially is what you're building is an abstraction layer that is essentially my data protection cloud. Is that how we should think about this? And you've referenced pricing, I've seen your pricing, it's clean. It looks to me anyway like a true cloud pricing. Going to dial it up, dial it down, pay as you go, consume it as you wish. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah. I mean, I think if you think about the future of consumption is that so many customers are looking for different choices than what many vendors have provided them in the past. I think the days of of going through a long procurement cycle and working through purchasing in order to get a big capital expense approved it's just not the way that many of our customers are looking to operate now. So I think that one of the things that we're looking at across the portfolio, whether or not it be on premises solutions or cloud-based services, is to provide all of that capability as a service. I think that that will be a real future point of arrival for us as we really rotate to offer that across all of our capabilities, Dave, whether or not it be in the domain of storage, or in the domain of data protection, the concept of everything as a service is really something which is going to become more of the norm versus the exception. >> So what does a customer have to do to be up and running? What's that experience like, is he just going to log on and everything's sort of there to them, what do they see? What's the experience like? >> Yeah, that's one of the great things about PowerProtect backup services, that once the customer has worked through that, their Dell technologies sells a team or the Dell technologies partner, they effectively get an activation code to sign up and set up the credentials with PowerProtect backup service. And once they actually do that, one of the things that they don't have to worry about is the deployment of the infrastructure. The infrastructure is always on ready to go. So all they do is they simply point PowerProtect backup service at the data sources that they wish to protect. That's one of the great advantages around a SaaS based data protection platform and it's one of the things that makes it very easy to get customers up and running with PowerProtect backup service. >> So I'm guessing you have a roadmap, you may be, you may be not, you may be holding out on us in some of the other things that you're doing in this space, but what can you tell us about other things you might be doing or what might be coming? What can we expect? >> Well, I mean, Dave, that one of the things that we always talk about is the power of the portfolio. So, with the addition of PowerProtect backup service, it's not the only news that we're making with respect to client data protection. You know, I mentioned earlier that we have the ability to deploy our on premises solutions in the public cloud with PowerProtect data manager and our PowerProtect virtual appliances, and with this announcement that brings backup service into the portfolio. We're also pleased to expand our support of the public cloud with full support of Google cloud platform, making PowerProtect data manager available in the Google marketplace. And then lastly, but not least, you know our other cloud snapshot manager offering is now also fully integrated with our PowerProtect virtual appliances to allow customers to store AWS snapshots in a debilitative fashion within AWS S3. So that's an excellent capability that we've introduced to reduce the cost of storing AWS infrastructure backups for longer periods of time. So really, we've really continued to double down in bringing new client data protection capabilities to our customers, wherever they may be. >> And nice to have, Stephen, you guys must be stoked to have a partner like Dell, a massive distribution channel. I wonder if you could give us any final thoughts, thoughts on the relationship, how you see the future unfolding. >> Yeah, I mean, and obviously I've got history with Dell and EMC and Rob. And one of the things I think Dell has always been fabulous at is giving customers the flexibility to protect their data when they want, how they want, where they want, with the investment protection that if it shifts over time, they'll be there for them, right. Going all the way back to the data protection suite and all those fantastic things we've done historically. And so it's really, it's great to align with somebody that's got the same kind of value as we do, which is with Druva, it's that same model, right? Wherever you want to protect your data, wherever it is, we're going to be there for you. And so it was great that I think Dell and Druva both saw this demand from our customers. And we said, this is the right match, right? This is how we're going to help people keep their data safe as they start and continue and extend their journeys to the cloud. And so, Dell proposes the PowerProtect backup service powered by Druva. And everybody wins. The Dell's customers are safer. Dell completes this offering, and let's face it, it does help to really accelerate our momentum. So this is and it's a lot of fun just hanging out with the people I used to work with especially it's good seeing them again. >> Well, you guys both have kind of alluded to the portfolio and the optionality that Dell brings to its customers, but Rob, you know, I'll give you the final word. A lot of times optionality brings complexity, but this seems to be a really strong step in the direction of simplifying the world for your customers. But, Rob, we'll give you the last word. >> Yeah, for sure. I mean, we've always said that it's not a one size fits all world. You know, I think that one of the things that this evolution of a PowerProtect portfolio brings is an excellent added option for our customers. Many of the customers, if not, almost all of the customers that we currently sell to, have a requirement for SaaS application protection. Many of them now, especially after the last year, have an added sensitivity to endpoint protection. So those two things alone I think are two things that all Dell technology customers can really take advantage of with the introduction of perhaps that backup service. This is just a continued evolution of our capabilities to bring innovative data protection for multi-cloud workloads. >> That last point is a great point about the end points because you've got remote workers, so exposed, guys, thanks so much for sharing the announcement details, and the relationship, and really good luck with the offering. We'll be watching. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good, brought to you by on shape. >>Hello, everyone, and welcome to Innovation for Good Program, hosted by the Cuban. Brought to You by on Shape, which is a PTC company. My name is Dave Valentin. I'm coming to you from our studios outside of Boston. I'll be directing the conversations today. It's a very exciting, all live program. We're gonna look at how product innovation has evolved and where it's going and how engineers, entrepreneurs and educators are applying cutting edge, cutting edge product development techniques and technology to change our world. You know, the pandemic is, of course, profoundly impacted society and altered how individuals and organizations they're gonna be thinking about an approaching the coming decade. Leading technologists, engineers, product developers and educators have responded to the new challenges that we're facing from creating lifesaving products to helping students learn from home toe how to apply the latest product development techniques and solve the world's hardest problems. And in this program, you'll hear from some of the world's leading experts and practitioners on how product development and continuous innovation has evolved, how it's being applied toe positive positively affect society and importantly where it's going in the coming decades. So let's get started with our first session fueling Tech for good. And with me is John Hirschbeck, who is the president of the Suffers, a service division of PTC, which acquired on shape just over a year ago, where John was the CEO and co founder, and Dana Grayson is here. She is the co founder and general partner at Construct Capital, a new venture capital firm. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, John. >>You're very welcome. Dana. Look, John, let's get into it for first Belated congratulations on the acquisition of Von Shape. That was an awesome seven year journey for your company. Tell our audience a little bit about the story of on shape, but take us back to Day zero. Why did you and your co founders start on shape? Well, >>actually, start before on shaping the You know, David, I've been in this business for almost 40 years. The business of building software tools for product developers and I had been part of some previous products in the industry and companies that had been in their era. Big changes in this market and about, you know, a little Before founding on shape, we started to see the problems product development teams were having with the traditional tools of that era years ago, and we saw the opportunity presented by Cloud Web and Mobile Technology. And we said, Hey, we could use Cloud Web and Mobile to solve the problems of product developers make their Their business is run better. But we have to build an entirely new system, an entirely new company, to do it. And that's what on shapes about. >>Well, so notwithstanding the challenges of co vid and difficulties this year, how is the first year been as, Ah, division of PTC for you guys? How's business? Anything you can share with us? >>Yeah, our first year of PTC has been awesome. It's been, you know, when you get acquired, Dave, you never You know, you have great optimism, but you never know what life will really be like. It's sort of like getting married or something, you know, until you're really doing it, you don't know. And so I'm happy to say that one year into our acquisition, um, PTC on shape is thriving. It's worked out better than I could have imagined a year ago. Along always, I mean sales are up. In Q four, our new sales rate grew 80% vs Excuse me, our fiscal Q four Q three. In the calendar year, it grew 80% compared to the year before. Our educational uses skyrocketing with around 400% growth, most recently year to year of students and teachers and co vid. And we've launched a major cloud platform using the core of on shape technology called Atlas. So, um, just tons of exciting things going on a TTC. >>That's awesome. But thank you for sharing some of those metrics. And of course, you're very humble individual. You know, people should know a little bit more about you mentioned, you know, we founded Solid Works, co founded Solid where I actually found it solid works. You had a great exit in the in the late nineties. But what I really appreciate is, you know, you're an entrepreneur. You've got a passion for the babies that you you helped birth. You stayed with the salt systems for a number of years. The company that quiet, solid works well over a decade. And and, of course, you and I have talked about how you participated in the the M I T. Blackjack team. You know, back in the day, a zai say you're very understated, for somebody was so accomplished. Well, >>that's kind of you, but I tend to I tend Thio always keep my eye more on what's ahead. You know what's next, then? And you know, I look back Sure to enjoy it and learn from it about what I can put to work making new memories, making new successes. >>Love it. Okay, let's bring Dana into the conversation. Hello, Dana. You look you're a fairly early investor in in on shape when you were with any A And and I think it was like it was a serious B, but it was very right close after the A raise. And and you were and still are a big believer in industrial transformation. So take us back. What did you see about on shape back then? That excited you. >>Thanks. Thanks for that. Yeah. I was lucky to be a early investment in shape. You know, the things that actually attracted me. Don shape were largely around John and, uh, the team. They're really setting out to do something, as John says humbly, something totally new, but really building off of their background was a large part of it. Um, but, you know, I was really intrigued by the design collaboration side of the product. Um, I would say that's frankly what originally attracted me to it. What kept me in the room, you know, in terms of the industrial world was seeing just if you start with collaboration around design what that does to the overall industrial product lifecycle accelerating manufacturing just, you know, modernizing all the manufacturing, just starting with design. So I'm really thankful to the on shape guys, because it was one of the first investments I've made that turned me on to the whole sector. And while just such a great pleasure to work with with John and the whole team there. Now see what they're doing inside PTC. >>And you just launched construct capital this year, right in the middle of a pandemic and which is awesome. I love it. And you're focused on early stage investing. Maybe tell us a little bit about construct capital. What your investment thesis is and you know, one of the big waves that you're hoping to ride. >>Sure, it construct it is literally lifting out of any what I was doing there. Um uh, for on shape, I went on to invest in companies such as desktop metal and Tulip, to name a couple of them form labs, another one in and around the manufacturing space. But our thesis that construct is broader than just, you know, manufacturing and industrial. It really incorporates all of what we'd call foundational industries that have let yet to be fully tech enabled or digitized. Manufacturing is a big piece of it. Supply chain, logistics, transportation of mobility or not, or other big pieces of it. And together they really drive, you know, half of the GDP in the US and have been very under invested. And frankly, they haven't attracted really great founders like they're on in droves. And I think that's going to change. We're seeing, um, entrepreneurs coming out of the tech world orthe Agnelli into these industries and then bringing them back into the tech world, which is which is something that needs to happen. So John and team were certainly early pioneers, and I think, you know, frankly, obviously, that voting with my feet that the next set, a really strong companies are going to come out of the space over the next decade. >>I think it's a huge opportunity to digitize the sort of traditionally non digital organizations. But Dana, you focused. I think it's it's accurate to say you're focused on even Mawr early stage investing now. And I want to understand why you feel it's important to be early. I mean, it's obviously riskier and reward e er, but what do you look for in companies and and founders like John >>Mhm, Um, you know, I think they're different styles of investing all the way up to public market investing. I've always been early stage investors, so I like to work with founders and teams when they're, you know, just starting out. Um, I happened to also think that we were just really early in the whole digital transformation of this world. You know, John and team have been, you know, back from solid works, etcetera around the space for a long time. But again, the downstream impact of what they're doing really changes the whole industry. And and so we're pretty early and in digitally transforming that market. Um, so that's another reason why I wanna invest early now, because I do really firmly believe that the next set of strong companies and strong returns for my own investors will be in the spaces. Um, you know, what I look for in Founders are people that really see the world in a different way. And, you know, sometimes some people think of founders or entrepreneurs is being very risk seeking. You know, if you asked John probably and another successful entrepreneurs, they would call themselves sort of risk averse, because by the time they start the company, they really have isolated all the risk out of it and think that they have given their expertise or what they're seeing their just so compelled to go change something, eh? So I look for that type of attitude experience a Z. You can also tell from John. He's fairly humble. So humility and just focus is also really important. Um, that there's a That's a lot of it. Frankly, >>Excellent. Thank you, John. You got such a rich history in the space. Uh, and one of you could sort of connect the dots over time. I mean, when you look back, what were the major forces that you saw in the market in in the early days? Particularly days of on shape on? And how is that evolved? And what are you seeing today? Well, >>I think I touched on it earlier. Actually, could I just reflect on what Dana said about risk taking for just a quick one and say, throughout my life, from blackjack to starting solid works on shape, it's about taking calculated risks. Yes, you try to eliminate the risk Sa's much as you can, but I always say, I don't mind taking a risk that I'm aware of, and I've calculated through as best I can. I don't like taking risks that I don't know I'm taking. That's right. You >>like to bet on >>sure things as much as you sure things, or at least where you feel you. You've done the research and you see them and you know they're there and you know, you, you you keep that in mind in the room, and I think that's great. And Dana did so much for us. Dana, I want to thank you again. For all that, you did it every step of the way, from where we started to to, you know, your journey with us ended formally but continues informally. Now back to you, Dave, I think, question about the opportunity and how it's shaped up. Well, I think I touched on it earlier when I said It's about helping product developers. You know, our customers of the people build the future off manufactured goods. Anything you think of that would be manufacturing factory. You know, the chair you're sitting in machine that made your coffee. You know, the computer you're using, the trucks that drive by on the street, all the covert product research, the equipment being used to make vaccines. All that stuff is designed by someone, and our job is given the tools to do it better. And I could see the problems that those product developers had that we're slowing them down with using the computing systems of the time. When we built solid works, that was almost 30 years ago. If people don't realize that it was in the early >>nineties and you know, we did the >>best we could for the early nineties, but what we did. We didn't anticipate the world of today. And so people were having problems with just installing the systems. Dave, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to install these systems. You need toe speck up a special windows computer, you know, and make sure you've got all the memory and graphics you need and getting to get that set up. You need to make sure the device drivers air, right, install a big piece of software. Ah, license key. I'm not making this up. They're still around. You may not even know what those are. You know, Dennis laughing because, you know, zero cool people do things like this anymore. Um, and it only runs some windows. You want a second user to use it? They need a copy. They need a code. Are they on the same version? It's a nightmare. The teams change, you know? You just say, Well, get everyone on the software. Well, who's everyone? You know, you got a new vendor today? A new customer tomorrow, a new employee. People come on and off the team. The other problem is the data stored in files, thousands of files. This isn't like a spreadsheet or word processor, where there's one file to pass around these air thousands of files to make one, even a simple product. People were tearing their hair out. John, what do we do? I've got copies everywhere. I don't know where the latest version is. We tried like, you know, locking people out so that only one person can change it At the time that works against speed, it works against innovation. We saw what was happening with Cloud Web and mobile. So what's happened in the years since is every one of the forces that product developers experience the need for speed, the need for innovation, the need to be more efficient with their people in their capital. Resource is every one of those trends have been amplified since we started on shape by a lot of forces in the world. And covert is amplified all those the need for agility and remote work cove it is amplified all that the same time, The acceptance of cloud. You know, a few years ago, people were like cloud, you know, how is that gonna work now They're saying to me, You know, increasingly, how would you ever even have done this without the cloud. How do you make solid works work without the cloud? How would that even happen? You know, once people understand what on shapes about >>and we're the >>Onley full SAS solution software >>as a service, >>full SAS solution in our industry. So what's happened in those years? Same problems we saw earlier, but turn up the gain, their bigger problems. And with cloud, we've seen skepticism of years ago turn into acceptance. And now even embracement in the cova driven new normal. >>Yeah. So a lot of friction in the previous environments cloud obviously a huge factor on, I guess. I guess Dana John could see it coming, you know, in the early days of solid works with, you know, had Salesforce, which is kind of the first major independent SAS player. Well, I guess that was late nineties. So his post solid works, but pre in shape and their work day was, you know, pre on shape in the mid two thousands. And and but But, you know, the bet was on the SAS model was right for Crick had and and product development, you know, which maybe the time wasn't a no brainer. Or maybe it was, I don't know, but Dana is there. Is there anything that you would invest in today? That's not Cloud based? >>Um, that's a great question. I mean, I think we still see things all the time in the manufacturing world that are not cloud based. I think you know, the closer you get to the shop floor in the production environment. Um e think John and the PTC folks would agree with this, too, but that it's, you know, there's reliability requirements, performance requirements. There's still this attitude of, you know, don't touch the printing press. So the cloud is still a little bit scary sometimes. And I think hybrid cloud is a real thing for those or on premise. Solutions, in some cases is still a real thing. What what we're more focused on. And, um, despite whether it's on premise or hybrid or or SAS and Cloud is a frictionless go to market model, um, in the companies we invest in so sass and cloud, or really make that easy to adopt for new users, you know, you sign up, started using a product, um, but whether it's hosted in the cloud, whether it's as you can still distribute buying power. And, um, I would I'm just encouraging customers in the customer world and the more industrial environment to entrust some of their lower level engineers with more budget discretionary spending so they can try more products and unlock innovation. >>Right? The unit economics are so compelling. So let's bring it, you know, toe today's you know, situation. John, you decided to exit about a year ago. You know? What did you see in PTC? Other than the obvious money? What was the strategic fit? >>Yeah, Well, David, I wanna be clear. I didn't exit anything. Really? You >>know, I love you and I don't like that term exit. I >>mean, Dana had exit is a shareholder on and so it's not It's not exit for me. It's just a step in the journey. What we saw in PTC was a partner. First of all, that shared our vision from the top down at PTC. Jim Hempleman, the CEO. He had a great vision for for the impact that SAS can make based on cloud technology and really is Dana of highlighted so much. It's not just the technology is how you go to market and the whole business being run and how you support and make the customers successful. So Jim shared a vision for the potential. And really, really, um said Hey, come join us and we can do this bigger, Better, faster. We expanded the vision really to include this Atlas platform for hosting other SAS applications. That P D. C. I mean, David Day arrived at PTC. I met the head of the academic program. He came over to me and I said, You know, and and how many people on your team? I thought he'd say 5 40 people on the PTC academic team. It was amazing to me because, you know, we were we were just near about 100 people were required are total company. We didn't even have a dedicated academic team and we had ah, lot of students signing up, you know, thousands and thousands. Well, now we have hundreds of thousands of students were approaching a million users and that shows you the power of this team that PTC had combined with our product and technology whom you get a big success for us and for the teachers and students to the world. We're giving them great tools. So so many good things were also putting some PTC technology from other parts of PTC back into on shape. One area, a little spoiler, little sneak peek. Working on taking generative design. Dana knows all about generative design. We couldn't acquire that technology were start up, you know, just to too much to do. But PTC owns one of the best in the business. This frustrated technology we're working on putting that into on shaping our customers. Um, will be happy to see it, hopefully in the coming year sometime. >>It's great to see that two way exchange. Now, you both know very well when you start a company, of course, a very exciting time. You know, a lot of baggage, you know, our customers pulling you in a lot of different directions and asking you for specials. You have this kind of clean slate, so to speak in it. I would think in many ways, John, despite you know, your install base, you have a bit of that dynamic occurring today especially, you know, driven by the forced march to digital transformation that cove it caused. So when you sit down with the team PTC and talk strategy. You now have more global resource is you got cohorts selling opportunities. What's the conversation like in terms of where you want to take the division? >>Well, Dave, you actually you sounds like we should have you coming in and talking about strategy because you've got the strategy down. I mean, we're doing everything said global expansion were able to reach across selling. We got some excellent PTC customers that we can reach reach now and they're finding uses for on shape. I think the plan is to, you know, just go, go, go and grow, grow, grow where we're looking for this year, priorities are expand the product. I mentioned the breath of the product with new things PTC did recently. Another technology that they acquired for on shape. We did an acquisition. It was it was small, wasn't widely announced. It, um, in an area related to interfacing with electrical cad systems. So So we're doing We're expanding the breath of on shape. We're going Maura, depth in the areas were already in. We have enormous opportunity to add more features and functions that's in the product. Go to market. You mentioned it global global presence. That's something we were a little light on a year ago. Now we have a team. Dana may not even know what we have. A non shape, dedicated team in Barcelona, based in Barcelona but throughout Europe were doing multiple languages. Um, the academic program just introduced a new product into that space that z even fueling more success and growth there. Um, and of course, continuing to to invest in customer success and this Atlas platform story I keep mentioning, we're going to soon have We're gonna soon have four other major PTC brands shipping products on our Atlas Saas platform. And so we're really excited about that. That's good for the other PTC products. It's also good for on shape because now there's there's. There's other interesting products that are on shape customers can use take advantage of very easily using, say, a common log in conventions about user experience there, used to invest of all they're SAS based, so they that makes it easier to begin with. So that's some of the exciting things going on. I think you'll see PTC, um, expanding our lead in SAS based applications for this sector for our our target, uh, sectors not just in, um, in cat and data management, but another area. PTC's Big and his augmented reality with of euphoria, product line leader and industrial uses of a R. That's a whole other story we should do. A whole nother show augmented reality. But these products are amazing. You can you can help factory workers people on, uh, people who are left out of the digital transformation. Sometimes we're standing from machine >>all day. >>They can't be sitting like we are doing Zoom. They can wear a R headset in our tools, let them create great content. This is an area Dana is invested in other companies. But what I wanted to note is the new releases of our authoring software. For this, our content getting released this month, used through the Atlas platform, the SAS components of on shape for things like revision management and collaboration on duh workflow activity. All that those are tools that we're able to share leverage. We get a lot of synergy. It's just really good. It's really fun to have a good time. That's >>awesome. And then we're gonna be talking to John MacLean later about that. Let's do a little deeper Dive on that. And, Dana, what is your involvement today with with on shape? But you're looking for you know, which of their customers air actually adopting. And they're gonna disrupt their industries. And you get good pipeline from that. How do you collaborate today? >>That sounds like a great idea. Um, Aziz, John will tell you I'm constantly just asking him for advice and impressions of other entrepreneurs and picking his brain on ideas. No formal relationship clearly, but continue to count John and and John and other people in on shaping in the circle of experts that I rely on for their opinions. >>All right, so we have some questions from the crowd here. Uh, one of the questions is for the dream team. You know, John and Dana. What's your next next collective venture? I don't think we're there yet, are we? No. >>I just say, as Dana said, we love talking to her about. You know, Dana, you just returned the compliment. We would try and give you advice and the deals you're looking at, and I'm sort of casually mentoring at least one of your portfolio entrepreneurs, and that's been a lot of fun for May on, hopefully a value to them. But also Dana. We uran important pipeline to us in the world of some new things that are happening that we wouldn't see if you know you've shown us some things that you've said. What do you think of this business? And for us, it's like, Wow, it's cool to see that's going on And that's what's supposed to work in an ecosystem like this. So we we deeply value the ongoing relationship. And no, we're not starting something new. I got a lot of work left to do with what I'm doing and really happy. But we can We can collaborate in this way on other ventures. >>I like this question to somebody asking With the cloud options like on shape, Wilmore students have stem opportunities s Oh, that's a great question. Are you because of sass and cloud? Are you able to reach? You know, more students? Much more cost effectively. >>Yeah, Dave, I'm so glad that that that I was asked about this because Yes, and it's extremely gratified us. Yes, we are because of cloud, because on shape is the only full cloud full SAS system or industry were able to reach. Stem education brings able to be part of bringing step education to students who couldn't get it otherwise. And one of most gratifying gratifying things to me is the emails were getting from teachers, um, that that really, um, on the phone calls that were they really pour their heart out and say We're able to get to students in areas that have very limited compute resource is that don't have an I T staff where they don't know what computer that the students can have at home, and they probably don't even have a computer. We're talking about being able to teach them on a phone to have an android phone a low end android phone. You can do three D modeling on there with on shape. Now you can't do it any other system, but with on shape, you could do it. And so the teacher can say to the students, They have to have Internet access, and I know there's a huge community that doesn't even have Internet access, and we're not able, unfortunately to help that. But if you have Internet and you have even an android phone, we can enable the educator to teach them. And so we have case after case of saving a stem program or expanding it into the students that need it most is the ones we're helping here. So really excited about that. And we're also able to let in addition to the run on run on whatever computing devices they have, we also offer them the tools they need for remote teaching with a much richer experience. Could you teach solid works remotely? Well, maybe if the student ran it had a windows workstation. You know, big, big, high end workstation. Maybe it could, but it would be like the difference between collaborating with on shape and collaborate with solid works. Like the difference between a zoom video call and talking on the landline phone. You know, it's a much richer experience, and that's what you need. And stem teaching stem is hard, So yeah, we're super super. Um, I'm excited about bringing stem to more students because of cloud yond >>we're talking about innovation for good, and then the discussion, John, you just had it. Really? There could be a whole another vector here. We could discuss on diversity, and I wanna end with just pointing out. So, Dana, your new firm, it's a woman led firm, too. Two women leaders, you know, going forward. So that's awesome to see, so really? Yeah, thumbs up on that. Congratulations on getting that off the ground. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, so thank you guys. Really appreciate It was a great discussion. I learned a lot and I'm sure the audience did a swell in a moment. We're gonna talk with on shaped customers to see how they're applying tech for good and some of the products that they're building. So keep it right there. I'm Dave Volonte. You're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader in digital tech event coverage. Stay right there. >>Oh, yeah, it's >>yeah, yeah, around >>the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of PTC company. We're live today really live tv, which is the heritage of the Cube. And now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Furberg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors, which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early, if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, So this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yeah. So you said that I hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um, and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers. They by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities Do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched Well, five years ago, >>it was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operation with at the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined, um, So this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things take time. >>It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow From the beginning, I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem P office building and empty labs. And very quickly we had something running about. It's amazing eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work attire being of the pandemic in March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project, Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down. We could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the order of 100 and 50,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created that testing system that would serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down. >>All right. Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe describe a little bit more about silver sod detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part thio keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by import border crossing places like that. They can help make sure that people aren't smuggling. Shall we say very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you could do things. Like what? A detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's a It's much more than, you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge or I kind of i o t application for what you guys >>do. We do both its's to plowshares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville City schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering and um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outset was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more, more students and stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John Herstek and integrate gration about this is Do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or diverse base? And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career, and sometimes that that funnel is kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible. And we've definitely seen the first of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club that eventually is what led to our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also our eyes a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line and we e in Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids enter the program and be successful, >>that's final. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd, and they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar. I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, so There are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses, with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do. Onda. We also have a lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing. Um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication than would have been done. Previous technologies. Um, you know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston, but another one that was held out of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than they would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the Force march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow. Rafael. What if you could describe the process that you use to better understand diseases? And what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um in a way that foster so the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology, how the human body functions, and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create tissues in the body. On Ben, it has this set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology rated. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientist on. We have a genomics platform that it's all about sequencing DNA and are gonna, um and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and developed technologies to marry computation on microscopy. So, um, the scientists set the agenda and the platforms, we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O. For example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins on is being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus Onda. We're sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. Um, so some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, eso Matt. I mean, you gotta be listening to this and thinking about Okay, So someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like like, like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people they're just don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than you know, the financial angles and it z e. I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order we nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering >>is about >>making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so um, dude, yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining, uh, eventually, you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line by Jeff Hammer Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. I think we're really generally generationally, finally, at the point where young students and engineering a really, you know, a passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that. But I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. Um, but very quickly my engineers started loving it, Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes. That's something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic, especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody ever remembers, what they are, the person left. And now nobody knows which version is the right one. A mess with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home, and they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a person in accounting on shape and then magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way that is absolutely fantastic. >>Feel what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know some of the traditional cloud stuff, and I'm curious as to how, How, whether any of those act manifested really that you had to manage. What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team to learn to use the system like it and buy into it? Because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy, and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some server and on site, but that That's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift, but very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive. Like, I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape, right? Is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, the concern was the learning curve, right? Is like, how is he Will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed. And there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on, they were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on, shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah, >>Great. Thank you for that, Philip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey within shape. >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped silver side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks. Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design. Have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new how we congrats modules from things that we already have put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together, and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing and I really don't want to design in any other platform. After after getting on Lee, a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I'll have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how I used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that daytime, er I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google maps eso we get anywhere, I don't know, but, uh but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month that zip through the roof in, But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program, and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ. 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this. Programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of K 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that That was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um and so one of my dreams And it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say, someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing, on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and you know, March and you said the forced march, the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school issued chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of Academy. There's so much about it. Well, I >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer, I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, But but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software, and so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud. >>Philip. Rafael Anything you Dad, >>I think I mean, yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three d printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think this is a dream for kids. Teoh be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino on all of these electronic things that live kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip, please. >>We had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development in support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a in that's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based, taken important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see. See what your students are going to be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because, yeah, I think that Project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on day. I think it will give the kids a much better flavor. What engineering is really about Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept on they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So, you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform. And I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in the modern era, and so that Z it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is and like platform agnostic abilities, the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, That's super exciting. As far as things that, uh, to go from there, Um, I don't know, >>Other than price. >>You can't say >>I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on P. D. C. S that work with us. Really? Well, so I'm not complaining. There you there, >>right? Yeah. Yeah. No gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update. Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability. In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes. And now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where We're making those changes anyway when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward. Toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you, >>right? I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with convicts, necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I I'm being spoiled, >>you know? That's good. I've been doing this a long time, and I like toe ask that question of practitioners and to me, it It's a signal like when you're nit picking and that's what you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product, and and I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture. But are things like alternative processors. You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now. Then we maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics, obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition, climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good and be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. Who wants toe start? >>Not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics, education is the case. If you wanna. If you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think Stam is key to that. I mean, all of the ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries. Thanks to science and technology, right improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything to add? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody to be able to pull together instead of pulling separately and to be able to spur the ideas on words. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work. Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings, places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shape then is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them on. But it's amazing, right to have somebody, you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine, right? Because, um, you know, they have a three D printer. You can you can just give them the design and say like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also super important. I think for any of these efforts to improve some of the hardest part was in the world for climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, the point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. The answer is education and public policy that really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we could If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. Can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely, like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope. To look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful. And I we don't do this, but I have read quite a bit about how certain places air using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off a person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink. Earlier, strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular >>yet another. The advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, Radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at. Or like Raphael said, I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is AWS re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Uh, certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software product by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting, you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these air the anomalies. You need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that they're going to result in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then the software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. Welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back. >>Okay? Okay. Yeah. Okay. >>From around >>the globe, it's the Cube. Presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, welcome back to innovation. For good. With me is John McElheny, who is one of the co founders of On Shape and is now the VP of strategy at PTC. John, it's good to see you. Thanks for making the time to come on the program. Thanks, Dave. So we heard earlier some of the accomplishments that you've made since the acquisition. How has the acquisition affected your strategy? Maybe you could talk about what resource is PTC brought to the table that allowed you toe sort of rethink or evolve your strategy? What can you share with us? >>Sure. You know, a year ago, when when John and myself met with Jim Pepperman early on is we're we're pondering. Started joining PTC one of things became very clear is that we had a very clear shared vision about how we could take the on shape platform and really extended for, for all of the PTC products, particular sort of their augmented reality as well as their their thing works or the i o. T business and their product. And so from the very beginning there was a clear strategy about taking on shape, extending the platform and really investing, um, pretty significantly in the product development as well as go to market side of things, uh, toe to bring on shape out to not only the PTC based but sort of the broader community at large. So So So PTC has been a terrific, terrific, um, sort of partner as we've we've gonna go on after this market together. Eso We've added a lot of resource and product development side of things. Ah, lot of resource and they go to market and customer success and support. So, really, on many fronts, that's been both. Resource is as well a sort of support at the corporate level from from a strategic standpoint and then in the field, we've had wonderful interactions with many large enterprise customers as well as the PTC channels. So it's been really a great a great year. >>Well, and you think about the challenges of in your business going to SAS, which you guys, you know, took on that journey. You know, 78 years ago. Uh, it's not trivial for a lot of companies to make that transition, especially a company that's been around as long as PTC. So So I'm wondering how much you know, I was just asking you How about what PCP TC brought to the table? E gotta believe you're bringing a lot to the table to in terms of the mindset, uh, even things is, is mundane is not the right word, but things like how you compensate salespeople, how you interact with customers, the notion of a service versus a product. I wonder if you could address >>that. Yeah, it's a it's a really great point. In fact, after we had met Jim last year, John and I one of the things we walked out in the seaport area in Boston, one of things we sort of said is, you know, Jim really gets what we're trying to do here and and part of let me bring you into the thinking early on. Part of what Jim talked about is there's lots of, you know, installed base sort of software that's inside of PTC base. That's helped literally thousands of customers around the world. But the idea of moving to sass and all that it entails both from a technology standpoint but also a cultural standpoint. Like How do you not not just compensate the sales people as an example? But how do you think about customer success? In the past, it might have been that you had professional services that you bring out to a customer, help them deploy your solutions. Well, when you're thinking about a SAS based offering, it's really critical that you get customers successful with it. Otherwise, you may have turned, and you know it will be very expensive in terms of your business long term. So you've got to get customers success with software in the very beginning. So you know, Jim really looked at on shape and he said that John and I, from a cultural standpoint, you know, a lot of times companies get acquired and they've acquired technology in the past that they integrate directly into into PTC and then sort of roll it out through their products, are there just reached channel, he said. In some respects, John John, think about it as we're gonna take PTC and we want to integrate it into on shape because we want you to share with us both on the sales side and customer success on marketing on operations. You know all the things because long term, we believe the world is a SAS world, that the whole industry is gonna move too. So really, it was sort of an inverse in terms of the thought process related to normal transactions >>on That makes a lot of sense to me. You mentioned Sharon turns the silent killer of a SAS company, and you know, there's a lot of discussion, you know, in the entrepreneurial community because you live this, you know what's the best path? I mean today, You see, you know, if you watch Silicon Valley double, double, triple triple, but but there's a lot of people who believe, and I wonder, if you come in there is the best path to, you know, in the X Y axis. If if it's if it's uh, growth on one and retention on the other axis. What's the best way to get to the upper right on? Really? The the best path is probably make sure you've nailed obviously the product market fit, But make sure that you can retain customers and then throw gas on the fire. You see a lot of companies they burn out trying to grow too fast, but they haven't figured out, you know that. But there's too much churn. They haven't figured out those metrics. I mean, obviously on shape. You know, you were sort of a pioneer in here. I gotta believe you've figured out that customer retention before you really, You know, put the pedal to the >>metal. Yeah, and you know, growth growth can mask a lot of things, but getting getting customers, especially the engineering space. Nobody goes and sits there and says, Tomorrow we're gonna go and and, you know, put 100 users on this and and immediately swap out all of our existing tools. These tools are very rich and deep in terms of capability, and they become part of the operational process of how a company designs and builds products. So any time anybody is actually going through the purchasing process. Typically, they will run a try along or they'll run a project where they look at. Kind of What? What is this new solution gonna help them dio. How are we gonna orient ourselves for success? Longer term. So for us, you know, getting new customers and customer acquisition is really critical. But getting those customers to actually deploy the solution to be successful with it. You know, we like to sort of, say, the marketing or the lead generation and even some of the initial sales. That's sort of like the Kindle ing. But the fire really starts when customers deploy it and get successful. The solution because they bring other customers into the fold. And then, of course, if they're successful with it, you know, then in fact, you have negative turn which, ironically, means growth in terms of your inside of your install. Bates. >>Right? And you've seen that with some of the emerging, you know, SAS companies, where you're you're actually you know, when you calculate whatever its net retention or renew ALS, it's actually from a dollar standpoint. It's up in the high nineties or even over 100%. >>So >>and that's a trend we're gonna continue. See, I >>wonder >>if we could sort of go back. Uh, and when you guys were starting on shape, some of the things that you saw that you were trying to strategically leverage and what's changed, you know, today we were talking. I was talking to John earlier about in a way, you kinda you kinda got a blank slate is like doing another startup. >>You're >>not. Obviously you've got installed base and customers to service, but But it's a new beginning for you guys. So one of the things that you saw then you know, cloud and and sas and okay, but that's we've been there, done that. What are you seeing? You know today? >>Well, you know, So So this is a journey, of course, that that on shape on its own has gone through it had I'll sort of say, you know, several iterations, both in terms of of of, you know, how do you How do you get customers? How do you How do you get them successful? How do you grow those customers? And now that we've been part of PTC, the question becomes okay. One, There is certainly a higher level of credibility that helps us in terms of our our megaphone is much bigger than it was when we're standalone company. But on top of that now, figuring out how to work with their channel with their direct sales force, you know, they have, um, for example, you know, very large enterprises. Well, many of those customers are not gonna go in forklift out their existing solution to replace it with with on shape. However, many of them do have challenges in their supply chain and communications with contractors and vendors across the globe. And so, you know, finding our fit inside of those large enterprises as they extend out with their their customers is a very interesting area that we've really been sort of incremental to to PTC. And then, you know, they they have access to lots of other technology, like the i o. T business. And now, of course, the augmented reality business that that we can bring things to bear. For example, in the augmented reality world, they've they've got something called expert capture. And this is essentially imagine, you know, in a are ah, headset that allows you to be ableto to speak to it, but also capture images still images in video. And you could take somebody who's doing their task and capture literally the steps that they're taking its geo location and from their builds steps for new employees to be, we'll learn and understand how todo use that technology to help them do their job better. Well, when they do that, if there is replacement products or variation of of some of the tools that that they built the original design instruction set for they now have another version. Well, they have to manage multiple versions. Well, that's what on shape is really great at doing and so taking our technology and helping their solutions as well. So it's not only expanding our customer footprint, it's expanding the application footprint in terms of how we can help them and help customers. >>So that leads me to the tam discussion and again, as part of your strategist role. How do you think about that? Was just talking to some of your customers earlier about the democratization of cat and engineering? You know, I kind of joked, sort of like citizen engineering, but but so that you know, the demographics are changing the number of users potentially that can access the products because the it's so much more of a facile experience. How are you thinking about the total available market? >>It really is a great question, You know, it used to be when you when you sold boxes of software, it was how many engineers were out there. And that's the size of the market. The fact that matter is now when, When you think about access to that information, that data is simply a pane of glass. Whether it's a computer, whether it's a laptop, UH, a a cell phone or whether it's a tablet, the ability to to use different vehicles, access information and data expands the capabilities and power of a system to allow feedback and iteration. I mean, one of the one of the very interesting things is in technology is when you can take something and really unleash it to a larger audience and builds, you know, purpose built applications. You can start to iterate, get better feedback. You know there's a classic case in the clothing industry where Zara, you know, is a fast sort of turnaround. Agile manufacturer. And there was a great New York Times article written a couple years ago. My wife's a fan of Zara, and I think she justifies any purchases by saying, You know, Zara, you gotta purchase it now. Otherwise it may not be there the next time. Yet you go back to the store. They had some people in a store in New York that had this woman's throw kind of covering Shaw. And they said, Well, it would be great if we could have this little clip here so we can hook it through or something. And they sent a note back toe to the factory in Spain, and literally two weeks later they had, you know, 4000 of these things in store, and they sold out because they had a closed loop and iterative process. And so if we could take information and allow people access in multiple ways through different devices and different screens, that could be very specific information that, you know, we remove a lot of the engineering data book, bring the end user products conceptually to somebody that would have had to wait months to get the actual physical prototype, and we could get feedback well, Weaken have a better chance of making sure whatever product we're building is the right product when it ultimately gets delivered to a customer. So it's really it's a much larger market that has to be thought of rather than just the kind of selling A boxes software to an engineer. >>That's a great story. And again, it's gonna be exciting for you guys to see that with. The added resource is that you have a PTC, Um, so let's talk. I promise people we wanna talk about Atlas. Let's talk about the platform. A little bit of Atlas was announced last year. Atlas. For those who don't know it's a SAS space platform, it purports to go beyond product lifecycle management and you You're talking cloud like agility and scale to CAD and product design. But John, you could do a better job than I. What do >>we need to know about Atlas? Well, I think Atlas is a great description because it really is metaphorically sort of holding up all of the PTC applications themselves. But from the very beginning, when John and I met with Jim, part of what we were intrigued about was that he shared a vision that on shape was more than just going to be a cad authoring tool that, in fact, you know, in the past these engineering tools were very powerful, but they were very narrow in their purpose and focus. And we had specialty applications to manage the versions, etcetera. What we did in on shape is we kind of inverted that thinking. We built this collaboration and sharing engine at the core and then kind of wrap the CAD system around it. But that collaboration sharing and version ING engine is really powerful. And it was that vision that Jim had that he shared that we had from the beginning, which was, how do we take this thing to make a platform that could be used for many other applications inside of inside of any company? And so not only do we have a partner application area that is is much like the APP store or Google play store. Uh, that was sort of our first Stan Shih ation of this. This this platform. But now we're extending out to broader applications and much meatier applications. And internally, that's the thing works in the in the augmented reality. But there'll be other applications that ultimately find its way on top of this platform. And so they'll get all the benefits of of the collaboration, sharing the version ing the multi platform, multi device. And that's an extremely extremely, um, strategic leverage point for the company. >>You know, it's interesting, John, you mentioned the seaport before. So PTC, for those who don't know, built a beautiful facility down at the Seaport in Boston. And, of course, when PTC started, you know, back in the mid 19 eighties, there was nothing at the seaport s. >>So it's >>kind of kind of ironic, you know, we were way seeing the transformation of the seaport. We're seeing the transformation of industry and of course, PTC. And I'm sure someday you'll get back into that beautiful office, you know? Wait. Yeah, I'll bet. And, uh and but I wanna bring this up because I want I want you to talk about the future. How you how you see that our industry and you've observed this has moved from very product centric, uh, plat platform centric with sass and cloud. And now we're seeing ecosystems form around those products and platforms and data flowing through the ecosystem powering, you know, new innovation. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of what the future looks like to you from your vantage point. >>Yeah, I think one of the key words you said there is data because up until now, data for companies really was sort of trapped in different applications. And it wasn't because people were nefarious and they want to keep it limited. It was just the way in which things were built. And, you know, when people use an application like on shape, what ends up happening is there their day to day interaction and everything that they do is actually captured by the platform. And, you know, we don't have access to that data. Of course it's it's the customer's data. But as as an artifact of them using the system than doing their day to day job, what's happening is they're creating huge amounts of information that can then be accessed and analyzed to help them both improve their design process, improve their efficiencies, improve their actual schedules in terms of making sure they can hit delivery times and be able to understand where there might be roadblocks in the future. So the way I see it is companies now are deploying SAS based tools like on shape and an artifact of them. Using that platform is that they have now analytics and tools to better understand and an instrument and manage their business. And then from there, I think you're going to see, because these systems are all you know extremely well. Architected allow through, you know, very structured AP. I calls to connect other SAS based applications. You're gonna start seeing closed loop sort of system. So, for example, people design using on shape, they end up going and deploying their system or installing it, or people use the end using products. People then may call back into the customers support line and report issues, problems, challenges. They'll be able to do traceability back to the underlying design. They'll be able to do trend analysis and defect analysis from the support lines and tie it back and closed loop the product design, manufacture, deployment in the field sort of cycles. In addition, you can imagine there's many things that air sort of as designed. But then when people go on site and they have to install it. There's some alterations modifications. Think about think about like a large air conditioning units for buildings. You go and you go to train and you get a large air conditioning unit that put up on top of building with a crane. They have to build all kinds of adaptors to make sure that that will fit inside of the particulars of that building. You know, with on shape and tools like this, you'll be able to not only take the design of what the air conditioning system might be, but also the all the adapter plates, but also how they installed it. So it sort of as designed as manufactured as stalled. And all these things can be traced, just like if you think about the transformation of customer service or customer contacts. In the early days, you used to have tools that were PC based tools called contact management solution, you know, kind of act or gold mine. And these were basically glorified Elektronik role in Texas. It had a customer names and they had phone numbers and whatever else. And Salesforce and Siebel, you know, these types of systems really broadened out the perspective of what a customer relationship? Waas. So it wasn't just the contact information it was, you know, How did they come to find out about you as a company? So all of the pre sort of marketing and then kind of what happens after they become a customer and it really was a 3 60 view. I think that 3 60 view gets extended to not just to the customers, but also tools and the products they use. And then, of course, the performance information that could come back to the manufacturer. So, you know, as an engineer, one of the things you learn about with systems is the following. And if you remember, when the CD first came out CDs that used to talk about four times over sampling or eight times over sampling and it was really kind of, you know, the fidelity the system. And we know from systems theory that the best way to improve the performance of a system is to actually have more feedback. The more feedback you have, the better system could be. And so that's why you get 16 60 for example, etcetera. Same thing here. The more feedback we have of different parts of a company that a better performance, The company will be better customer relationships. Better, uh, overall financial performance as well. So that's that's the view I have of how these systems all tied together. >>It's a great vision in your point about the data is I think right on. It used to be so fragmented in silos, and in order to take a system view, you've gotta have a system view of the data. Now, for years, we've optimized maybe on one little component of the system and that sometimes we lose sight of the overall outcome. And so what you just described, I think is, I think sets up. You know very well as we exit. Hopefully soon we exit this this covert era on John. I hope that you and I can sit down face to face at a PTC on shape event in the near term >>in the seaport in the >>seaport would tell you that great facility toe have have an event for sure. It >>z wonderful >>there. So So John McElhinney. Thanks so much for for participating in the program. It was really great to have you on, >>right? Thanks, Dave. >>Okay. And I want to thank everyone for participating. Today we have some great guest speakers. And remember, this is a live program. So give us a little bit of time. We're gonna flip this site over toe on demand mode so you can share it with your colleagues and you, or you can come back and and watch the sessions that you heard today. Uh, this is Dave Volonte for the Cube and on shape PTC. Thank you so much for watching innovation for good. Be well, Have a great holiday. And we'll see you next time. Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of BTC company. We're live today really live TV, which is the heritage of the Cuban. Now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Fribourg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, so this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yes. As you said, the Bio Hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers in by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched five years ago. It >>was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operations in the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined um, so this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things >>take time. It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow from the beginning. I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem p off his building and MP labs. And very quickly we had something running about from anything. Eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now, with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work, um, very being of the pandemic In March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project. Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down, we could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the road, 150,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which, at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created a testing system that will serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down, >>right? Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe you describe a little bit more about silver side detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part. Thio Keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by a port border crossing Places like that they can help make sure that people aren't smuggling, shall we say, very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you can do things like but a detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's It's much more than you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge, or I kind of i o t application for what you guys do. >>You do both Zito shares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville city schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, Um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering. And, um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outside was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building up a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more more students in stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John her stock and integrate Grayson about this is do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or, you know, diverse base and And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career. And sometimes that that funnels kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO. We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible, and we've definitely seen the fruits of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club That eventually is what led our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also are a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line, and we should I mean, Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids and or the program and be successful, >>that's phenomenal. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd. And they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, So there are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do Onda. We also have ah lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing, um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication then would have been done previous technologies. Mhm. You know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston. But another one that was held, uh, of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than there would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the forced march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow Raphael one. If you could describe the process that you used to better understand diseases and what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um, in a way that foster So the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology how the human body functions and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create teachers in the body. Um, and then it has the set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology. Read it. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientists on. We have a genomics platform. That is all about sequencing DNA in our DNA. Um, and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and the little technologies to marry computation on microscope. So, um, the scientists said the agenda and the platforms we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on. I have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O, for example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins, and it's being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus on Dwyer, sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. So some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, God s o mat. I mean, you gotta be listening to this in thinking about, Okay? Some. Someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like Like like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people that just have I don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than, you know, the financial angles and that z e I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order We nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering is about making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so, um do Yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like Day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining eventually you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line By Jeff Hammond Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. E. I think we're really generally generationally finally, at the point where you know young students and engineering and really you know it passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that, but I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. But very quickly my engineers started loving it. Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed, and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Um, now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes that something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic. Especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings, eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody remembers, what they are, the person left and now nobody knows which version is the right one m s with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home. And they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a personal account on shape. And then, magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way, that is absolutely fantastic. >>Rafael, what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know, some of the traditional cloud stuff and I'm curious as to how How whether any of those act manifested were they really that you had to manage? What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team? to learn to use the system like it and buy into it because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some serving on site, but that that's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift. But very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive like I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape? Right is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, their concern was the learning curve right is like how is he will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed and there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on. They were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Phillip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey with on shape? >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped Silver Side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so and we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks? Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design, have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new. How we congrats modules from things that we already have. Put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing. And I really don't want to design in any other platform after after getting on Lee a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I will have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how e used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that day, timer, I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google Maps. Eso did we get anywhere? I don't know, but, uh, but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, um, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month It's through the roof in. But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of k 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that that was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um, and so one of my dreams and it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and, you know, march in, um, you said the forced march the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing. Cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school shoot chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of the cat. And there's so much about it, E >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer. I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, but but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software. And so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud >>Philip or Rafael anything. Your dad, >>I think I mean yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three D printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think there's a dream for kids Thio to be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino and all of these electronic things that live. Kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip Way >>had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development and support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a That's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based. It's an important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see See what your students are gonna be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do. Building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because yeah, I think that project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on. And I think he will give the kids a much better flavor What engineering is really about. Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept, and they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that. Hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform and I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in a modern era. And so that's, you know, it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is, and, like, platform agnostic abilities the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, that's super exciting as far as things that it to go from there, Um, I don't know. >>Other than price, >>you can't say I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on a PTC s that worked with us. Really well, so I'm not complaining. There. You there? >>Yeah. Yeah. No Gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Um, something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes, and now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where we're making those changes anyway, when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you. >>I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with comics necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like to. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I'm being spoiled, >>you know. That's good. I've been doing this a long time and I like toe Ask that question of practitioners and to me, it it's a signal like when you're nit picking and that you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product. And And I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture, But are things like alternative processors? You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe a helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now, then would maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics. Obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good can be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. But who wants toe start >>not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics education is the case If you wanna if you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think stem is key to that. I mean, all of the, ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries, thanks to science and technology, right, improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything they had? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody doing ableto pull together instead of pulling, pulling separately and to be able to spur the idea is onwards. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work? Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shaped and is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them. Andi, that's amazing. Right? To have somebody you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine. Right? Because, um, you know, they have a three d printer. You can you just give them the design and say, like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also so super important, I think, for any of these efforts to improve, um, some of the hardest part was in the world from climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, that point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. Uh, the answer is education and public policy. That really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we can. If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. What can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely. Like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can, to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope to look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful, and I we don't do this. But I have read quite a bit about how certain places air, using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off. A person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink earlier strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular, >>yet another, uh, advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at or like Raphael said. I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is aws re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know, Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software products by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these are the anomalies you need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that air going to result in, uh in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans, air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. You're welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of a dips reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host of the Cube great segment here with Presidio. Two great guests Chris Keg, Nazi senior vice president, general manager of the Cloud and Managed Services Group of Presidio, and Sam Fattah Gado, VP of Cloud Solutions Group with Presidio both been here in the Cube talking with us many times before. Great to have you guys on. Thanks for coming on Chris and Sam. >>Great. Thank you, John. Thanks for having us. >>We've had many great cloud conversations with your company and engineers. Architects going back, I think 2016 2017, really as cloud hit, that inflection point. Certainly, scaling Public Cloud and on premise is cloud operations. Certainly that has happened as continue to accelerate. Chris, I would like you to explain your relationship with AWS and you're focused at this. Reinvent what's going on with Presidio? What's new in your world? What's changed for you and the customers, >>right? So thank you, John. So Presidio's focus really is, um you know, around developing the right strategies, helping companies realize the full potential of the AWS cloud. Think of it as ah vory strategic approach that aligns technology with business outcomes really on a global scale. Um, this past year, um, if I look back a year ago, it reinvent when Presidio was there. Um, code a global was also there, which was an acquisition that we did. And we closed out, uh, in August and Sam Farr Gado was the CEO of Code Global. So what's really changed for us is taking our legacy business around infrastructure around security around Matic services on bond, combining that with really combining that with what Coda had around the professional services side of cloud engagement and really building out a company that I believe can deliver a very unique offering to clients because we can cover the full spectrum. So for us Ah, lots happened in a year since we were at reinvent attend day. It's really about, you know, business and technical leaders that we have that are really dedicated thio, you know, focusing on customers, their client experience, and really delivering the best business outcome that weekend >>you know, one of the things that we chat in the past, you just mentioned manage services. This is a huge deal because one of the trends that we've been reporting on here in the Cube and on Silicon angle is, you know, a lot of the transformational goals or accelerated Cove it. We see that projects that are doubling down are mostly cloud related, large scale automation, machine learning. But from an executive standpoint, the mandate is everything is a service. So there's a big executive push. See XO, CSOs, whatever for everything as a service. And when you put that out there and put that ball in play, so to speak, it's not easy, right? So when you go when you say hey, make everything is a service, it's not trivial, and then you get okay, How does that work? That's where the hard part happens. I want to get your take on that. Is that something that you're seeing with your customers? They put that ball in play, let's get the manage services and then you got to put it together. Not that easy. What's your take on that? >>I think you know when you think about clients today and what CEOs are looking for, it's really it is a pay by the drink or a consumption based model, right? But at the end of the day, they don't they want to manage their business. They don't want a Mac manage huge I t groups on DSO software developers within within their own business. They wanna pass that responsibility onto experts like Presidio. So I think it za fact. What's what's simple for them? How does how do they move kind of accountability and how did they get to their business outcomes without owning? And I t business within their existing business? So those are some of the changes that we've certainly seen from a mindset perspective, but but we're fully prepared. Thio offer that city >>that's great for your business is certainly a tail when Sam, I want to get to you. Because when you get to that conversation, okay, put his a service a lot in their unpack. I mean, depending on who you're talking to, you know, certainly accelerating it with Presidio. I see that you're now part of Presidio. Take us through what's going on in your world because when you get to the customer. You gotta work backwards from what they're trying to dio not trying to retrofit of technology into their environment. You've got to kind of work with what they got. But actually get them to the cloud. Can you share what you're doing with customers? >>Yeah. Thanks, John. I appreciate that. And one thing I want to say about joining Presidio is that, uh, you know, we, uh, had worked together for a couple of years and really found that we had a great cultural fit and that we had the same goal. And that's to become a W s number one partner globally, providing these kinds of mission critical solutions for clients. We've been told often times that we are Amazonian in terms of our customer obsession are bias for action. And what you just said there is helping them get the benefits of cloud quickly, no matter where they're coming from. Because, you know, they wanna have the availability security scalability, But they also have to integrate in with their existing systems. So what we're finding with clients is they want to transform the way they do business. They want to transform their industry oftentimes, and that's what they're looking for, you know, when they partner with us and they look for leveraging the AWS platform. >>So let me ask you a question then, because certainly we've seen I've interviewed a ton of Amazon customers and executives, and it's some >>of the >>things that's going on with Cove. It has just been amazing what they've enabled people to move so fast and put riel game changing impact, whether it's societal impact or some other transformative thing. And if you look at Amazon traditionally they started as a transactional thing. You get some easy to you by by the drink. Everything's going on. But every reinvent is more announcement. Andy Jassy said one hour keynote turns into a two hour keynote three, our keynote. And now you're looking at more transform inal transformational solutions. You still got some transactions in there. But when you gotta put the holistic, cohesive plan together, that has to be transformative. How do you guys talk to customers when you say it's not just transactional? Transformative? >>Yeah, well, we look, you know, we're doing it, you know, internally ourselves as well. You know, with Presidio now we've gone from transactions. Transactions are important but we really want to transform the way our customers are able to do business. And with co vid, it's been even more important to be ableto get things done without having to be physically present in one location. And so whether it's telehealth or remote learning, remote sales activities making sure that systems are integrated with commerce engines are again are very secure. The cloud and A W S is really bringing a big difference to the marketplace, and we're very immersed in that we have clients. Uh, I'll give you an example. Wheel pros. One of the leading tire after market tire and wheel manufacturers and designers we've talked with with their CEO, Randy White. He said. What we're doing with Presidio and on AWS platform is building the wheel. Pros of the future. What does that look like? He says he wants his systems to be just like his products for his customers. They've got to be high performing. They gotta be high quality, and they've got to deliver a great customer experience. Uh, well, you know, we want to be able to leverage a lot of the services that AWS has to be able to deliver those kinds of things quickly and with high quality. So it's really exciting to be able to see the impact we're having wheel pros, business and other clients like that. >>So when you talk about your solution to take him in to explain what you guys offer a client because you have a Presidio cloud solution, you get a lot of services can just take a minute to explain what people are buying and what they're getting from Presidio. Because, um, that sounds like a great customer success story. What are they? >>What >>are they getting? >>Okay, so what? They're getting really again following kind of the Amazonian way, working backwards, right? So let's start with an idea. Let's let's let's look at something we really want to do that's going to change dramatically. Change and improve the way they delight their customers. So start with that idea. Will help them design it. Welcome. Build it. Welcome. Deploy it. We could help support it. Fully managed service support eso from from the idea through to production and then ongoing support enhancements. They can count on Presidio to deliver all of those capabilities on Dakota Couldn't do all of that on our own. We were really grated application development, data and analytics. Uh, dev Ops and Automation. But with Presidio, we bring everything to the table Onda geun fully supported. Help them from, you know, even managing. You know, they're they're resell, being able to manage the environment, making sure that they're getting the most value out of these critical investments. >>Chris, I want to get your thoughts on this. Um, Sam mentioned you wanna be the number one solution provider for on AWS? Um, great mission, by the way, I wanna unpack that now. Last year, I reported at reinvent one of the feedback items was Amazon's gonna think more about solutions. Certainly Microsoft does that. We've seen that, um, Amazon doesn't really flout a plant. Those solutions very much. I mean, even though they have them there there you guys are a nice fit there. So if you're gonna be the number one solution provider, what do you guys need to do to do that? What a customers expect from you guys? Can you take a minute? Explain your plan? >>Sure. Yeah, absolutely, John. So I think you know, when you think about clients that air transforming their business right. They need to be competitive in their own market. So when they think about business outcomes in what Presidio does, we look at it in really a full life bull approach. If you think about the applications that Sam spoke about creating things that Air Cloud native, perhaps it's a mobile ordering app that's going to make them more competitive, especially in this covert environment. Um, think about their their just their normal consumption of services on the AWS platform. How do we optimize it for them? How do we ensure that they have the right services in a very agile, secure environment? So managing and owning it the full life cycle is really kind of what we deliver from a solution set. But every client is a little bit different, depending on really what their their needs are and what what their business outcomes are. So we can take it everywhere, anywhere from, uh, full development toe Full deployment Onda managing it in a very secure way, um, to adding in their consumption side of it, adding in their licensing component where perhaps they're buying under marketplace or a or a c p p o offering. So what's really unique about Presidio is that we offer that full solution to clients from end to end, and we can manage the entire process, deliver performance, cost savings and very predictable models >>from I love the, you know, a big fan of the entire and people who watch the Cubano. All I do is talk about and to end is really a critical way to look at things holistically if you're looking at something cohesive as a solution with transactional transformative capabilities. But I want to get your thoughts on some of the market demand challenges. And if you guys could react to it, um, Sam and Chris, there's two spectrums we're seeing with this pandemic clients, customers who were, like, have a tailwind. Oh, my God. This is accelerating my value proposition. I need more help. I gotta get to the cloud I gotta transformed quickly. And then the other end of the spectrum is the worst screwed. So we're gonna reset and retool while we're kind of in this bunker down mode and they want to come out of the pandemic with a growth plan. So kind of to spectrums, right? Did you guys see that as well what's the range of psychology or buyer behavior for your customers? Because there seems to be like the airline. They're not really getting a lot of business, but they're redoing their systems. They're being classified. Or, you know, this is an app for zoom or school educational. It's needed. It's in more demand. So you kind of everything in between those Do you guys see that? And if so, or if not >>way, certainly see a component with our client base around saving costs, right? What are they going to do in this environment? Toe save costs. But at the same time, we are seeing a lot of creativity around. What does their future model look like? And how did and what do they need to build? And that's what they're spending money on. Eso. We've seen it across kind of all verticals within the business, but certainly it it's a it's a dual approach. I think customers that go about doing that properly really prepare themselves for when we all do come out of this. That the business was will be set to capitalize on the change in market. That's what I've seen. I'm sure Sam has some additional comments >>Your thoughts? >>Yeah, absolutely. I would say necessity is the mother of invention. Invention. Right. So you know, we're seeing customers that we're thinking about cloud or, you know, considering maybe a new application cloud native application. But, you know, maybe you felt like they had time to do it where, you know, with covert ITT's bold are gonna be the ones that survive and thrive on DSO. Just like we saw when people came out of the 2000 and eight financial crisis. Those that invested in their systems, invested in their people, people skills is another big area right way at Presidio have I think we're upto like 600 AWS certifications across the board from sales through all different technologies. Because, you know, we wanna retain our people. We want to help them develop their skills and make sure that we're bringing the best talent to our clients. Eso yet z you know, it's a it's a difficult time, but it's a time for opportunity. >>Necessity could be business opportunity to capture opportunity, recognition, capture or survival. I mean, it is the mother of invention, you know it is it is a forcing function, guys. Thanks for the >>one of our clients. If I if I could, just mentioned Dunkin Brands, you know, they they couldn't have traffic in their stores. So, you know, mobile ordering became even more important. Um, you know, driving with Dr Drive up pick up and we helped them move from a multi tenant SAS application that was, you know, wasn't performing wasn't a reliable enough to an AWS Cloud native application, and they tripled the traffic while also improving performance and reliability. That's the kind of power that you can have with AWS and Presidio. >>That's a great eggs. And that's a great example looking relate to that. First of all, Dunkin Donuts makes great coffee and from the East Coast originally. So I love Dunkin Donuts. DND um, but great, great brand that mobile app. Good call, because people want to get in the curbside pickup or delivered. I mean, this is the new the new normal guys. Thanks so much for the insight. Final word. If you both can weigh in, um, share with the audience. The focus for this reinvent if you could share the Presidio message for reinvent virtual 2020. What do you think, >>Sam Why don't you go first? >>Well, from my perspective, it's all about, you know, taking it to another level. That's what we feel like we're doing was part of the video now again becoming the number one AWS partner. But it's also helping customers take their most important applications, uh, to the cloud so that they can improve the way they deliver for their customers. That's really what it's all about for me. >>Yeah, I would. I would have to concur with Sam. I mean, you know, our goal. Really like Sam said a few times to be be the number one aws partner. But with that comes, you know, a huge undertaking in a huge responsibility for us, you know, with our teams and and with our customers. At the end of the day, we want all of our clients to think of us first. Um, you know, when we're delivering these solutions and how impactful Presidio has been to their business for their growth onder for their future success. So for us, the customer obsession side of it all is really we want to continue that, and that's what we're gonna get out of this conference is how do we continue that? >>Well, congratulations. Like Chris and Sam. Thanks for coming on. I always say I enjoyed my conversations with your team. Uh, they get the technical chops, um, and having a service offering that accelerates mawr cloud goodness for customers on my, um, Amazon's got a great ecosystem clouds growing like crazy. So congratulations. Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. >>Thanks for coming on the Cuban John for your watching the Cube coverage of aws reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. We're not impersonal, but the cube virtualization It's hit the market. More cube interviews remotely. And I'm John for Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE virtual coverage of re:Invent 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person, this year because of the pandemic we're doing remote interviews and we've got a great coverage here of the APN, Amazon Partner Network experience. I'm your host John Furrier, we are theCUBE virtual. Got a great guest from Tel Aviv remotely calling in and videoing, Nimrod Vax, who is the chief product officer and co-founder of BigID. This is the beautiful thing about remote, you're in Tel Aviv, I'm in Palo Alto, great to see you. We're not in person but thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Great to see you as well. >> So you guys have had a lot of success at BigID, I've noticed a lot of awards, startup to watch, company to watch, kind of a good market opportunity data, data at scale, identification, as the web evolves beyond web presence identification, authentication is super important. You guys are called BigID. What's the purpose of the company? Why do you exist? What's the value proposition? >> So first of all, best startup to work at based on Glassdoor worldwide, so that's a big achievement too. So look, four years ago we started BigID when we realized that there is a gap in the market between the new demands from organizations in terms of how to protect their personal and sensitive information that they collect about their customers, their employees. The regulations were becoming more strict but the tools that were out there, to the large extent still are there, were not providing to those requirements and organizations have to deal with some of those challenges in manual processes, right? For example, the right to be forgotten. Organizations need to be able to find and delete a person's data if they want to be deleted. That's based on GDPR and later on even CCPA. And organizations have no way of doing it because the tools that were available could not tell them whose data it is that they found. The tools were very siloed. They were looking at either unstructured data and file shares or windows and so forth, or they were looking at databases, there was nothing for Big Data, there was nothing for cloud business applications. And so we identified that there is a gap here and we addressed it by building BigID basically to address those challenges. >> That's great, great stuff. And I remember four years ago when I was banging on the table and saying, you know regulation can stunt innovation because you had the confluence of massive platform shifts combined with the business pressure from society. That's not stopping and it's continuing today. You seeing it globally, whether it's fake news in journalism, to privacy concerns where modern applications, this is not going away. You guys have a great market opportunity. What is the product? What is smallID? What do you guys got right now? How do customers maintain the success as the ground continues to shift under them as platforms become more prevalent, more tools, more platforms, more everything? >> So, I'll start with BigID. What is BigID? So BigID really helps organizations better manage and protect the data that they own. And it does that by connecting to everything you have around structured databases and unstructured file shares, big data, cloud storage, business applications and then providing very deep insight into that data. Cataloging all the data, so you know what data you have where and classifying it so you know what type of data you have. Plus you're analyzing the data to find similar and duplicate data and then correlating them to an identity. Very strong, very broad solution fit for IT organization. We have some of the largest organizations out there, the biggest retailers, the biggest financial services organizations, manufacturing and et cetera. What we are seeing is that there are, with the adoption of cloud and business success obviously of AWS, that there are a lot of organizations that are not as big, that don't have an IT organization, that have a very well functioning DevOps organization but still have a very big footprint in Amazon and in other kind of cloud services. And they want to get visibility and they want to do it quickly. And the SmallID is really built for that. SmallID is a lightweight version of BigID that is cloud-native built for your AWS environment. And what it means is that you can quickly install it using CloudFormation templates straight from the AWS marketplace. Quickly stand up an environment that can scan, discover your assets in your account automatically and give you immediate visibility into that, your S3 bucket, into your DynamoDB environments, into your EMR clusters, into your Athena databases and immediately building a full catalog of all the data, so you know what files you have where, you know where what tables, what technical metadata, operational metadata, business metadata and also classified data information. So you know where you have sensitive information and you can immediately address that and apply controls to that information. >> So this is data discovery. So the use case is, I'm an Amazon partner, I mean we use theCUBE virtuals on Amazon, but let's just say hypothetically, we're growing like crazy. Got S3 buckets over here secure, encrypted and the rest, all that stuff. Things are happening, we're growing like a weed. Do we just deploy smallIDs and how it works? Is that use cases, SmallID is for AWS and BigID for everything else or? >> You can start small with SmallID, you get the visibility you need, you can leverage the automation of AWS so that you automatically discover those data sources, connect to them and get visibility. And you could grow into BigID using the same deployment inside AWS. You don't have to switch migrate and you use the same container cluster that is running inside your account and automatically scale it up and then connect to other systems or benefit from the more advanced capabilities the BigID can offer such as correlation, by connecting to maybe your Salesforce, CRM system and getting the ability to correlate to your customer data and understand also whose data it is that you're storing. Connecting to your on-premise mainframe, with the same deployment connecting to your Google Drive or office 365. But the point is that with the smallID you can really start quickly, small with a very small team and get that visibility very quickly. >> Nimrod, I want to ask you a question. What is the definition of cloud native data discovery? What does that mean to you? >> So cloud native means that it leverages all the benefits of the cloud. Like it gets all of the automation and visibility that you get in a cloud environment versus any traditional on-prem environment. So one thing is that BigID is installed directly from your marketplace. So you could browse, find its solution on the AWS marketplace and purchase it. It gets deployed using CloudFormation templates very easily and very quickly. It runs on a elastic container service so that once it runs you can automatically scale it up and down to increase the scan and the scale capabilities of the solution. It connects automatically behind the scenes into the security hub of AWS. So you get those alerts, the policy alerts fed into your security hub. It has integration also directly into the native logging capabilities of AWS. So your existing Datadog or whatever you're using for monitoring can plug into it automatically. That's what we mean by cloud native. >> And if you're cloud native you got to be positioned to take advantage of the data and machine learning in particular. Can you expand on the role of machine learning in your solution? Customers are leaning in heavily this year, you're seeing more uptake on machine learning which is basically AI, AI is machine learning, but it's all tied together. ML is big on all the deployments. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. So data discovery is a very tough problem and it has been around for 20 years. And the traditional methods of classifying the data or understanding what type of data you have has been, you're looking at the pattern of the data. Typically regular expressions or types of kind of pattern-matching techniques that look at the data. But sometimes in order to know what is personal or what is sensitive it's not enough to look at the pattern of the data. How do you distinguish between a date of birth and any other date. Date of birth is much more sensitive. How do you find country of residency or how do you identify even a first name from the last name? So for that, you need more advanced, more sophisticated capabilities that go beyond just pattern matching. And BigID has a variety of those techniques, we call that discovery-in-depth. What it means is that very similar to security-in-depth where you can not rely on a single security control to protect your environment, you can not rely on a single discovery method to truly classify the data. So yes, we have regular expression, that's the table state basic capability of data classification but if you want to find data that is more contextual like a first name, last name, even a phone number and distinguish between a phone number and just a sequence of numbers, you need more contextual NLP based discovery, name entity recognition. We're using (indistinct) to extract and find data contextually. We also apply deep learning, CNN capable, it's called CNN, which is basically deep learning in order to identify and classify document types. Which is basically being able to distinguish between a resume and a application form. Finding financial records, finding medical records. So RA are advanced NLP classifiers can find that type of data. The more advanced capabilities that go beyond the smallID into BigID also include cluster analysis which is an unsupervised machine learning method of finding duplicate and similar data correlation and other techniques that are more contextual and need to use machine learning for that. >> Yeah, and unsupervised that's a lot harder than supervised. You need to have that ability to get that what you can't see. You got to get the blind spots identified and that's really the key observational data you need. This brings up the kind of operational you heard cluster, I hear governance security you mentioned earlier GDPR, this is an operational impact. Can you talk about how it impacts on specifically on the privacy protection and governance side because certainly I get the clustering side of it, operationally just great. Everyone needs to get that. But now on the business model side, this is where people are spending a lot of time scared and worried actually. What the hell to do? >> One of the things that we realized very early on when we started with BigID is that everybody needs a discovery. You need discovery and we actually started with privacy. You need discovery in route to map your data and apply the privacy controls. You need discovery for security, like we said, right? Find and identify sensitive data and apply controls. And you also need discovery for data enablement. You want to discover the data, you want to enable it, to govern it, to make it accessible to the other parts of your business. So discovery is really a foundation and starting point and that you get there with smallID. How do you operationalize that? So BigID has the concept of an application framework. Think about it like an Apple store for data discovery where you can run applications inside your kind of discovery iPhone in order to run specific (indistinct) use cases. So, how do you operationalize privacy use cases? We have applications for privacy use cases like subject access requests and data rights fulfillment, right? Under the CCPA, you have the right to request your data, what data is being stored about you. BigID can help you find all that data in the catalog that after we scan and find that information we can find any individual data. We have an application also in the privacy space for consent governance right under CCP. And you have the right to opt out. If you opt out, your data cannot be sold, cannot be used. How do you enforce that? How do you make sure that if someone opted out, that person's data is not being pumped into Glue, into some other system for analytics, into Redshift or Snowflake? BigID can identify a specific person's data and make sure that it's not being used for analytics and alert if there is a violation. So that's just an example of how you operationalize this knowledge for privacy. And we have more examples also for data enablement and data management. >> There's so much headroom opportunity to build out new functionality, make it programmable. I really appreciate what you guys are doing, totally needed in the industry. I could just see endless opportunities to make this operationally scalable, more programmable, once you kind of get the foundation out there. So congratulations, Nimrod and the whole team. The question I want to ask you, we're here at re:Invent's virtual, three weeks we're here covering Cube action, check out theCUBE experience zone, the partner experience. What is the difference between BigID and say Amazon's Macy? Let's think about that. So how do you compare and contrast, in Amazon they say we love partnering, but we promote our ecosystem. You guys sure have a similar thing. What's the difference? >> There's a big difference. Yes, there is some overlap because both a smallID and Macy can classify data in S3 buckets. And Macy does a pretty good job at it, right? I'm not arguing about it. But smallID is not only about scanning for sensitive data in S3. It also scans anything else you have in your AWS environment, like DynamoDB, like EMR, like Athena. We're also adding Redshift soon, Glue and other rare data sources as well. And it's not only about identifying and alerting on sensitive data, it's about building full catalog (indistinct) It's about giving you almost like a full registry of your data in AWS, where you can look up any type of data and see where it's found across structured, unstructured big data repositories that you're handling inside your AWS environment. So it's broader than just for security. Apart from the fact that they're used for privacy, I would say the biggest value of it is by building that catalog and making it accessible for data enablement, enabling your data across the board for other use cases, for analytics in Redshift, for Glue, for data integrations, for various other purposes. We have also integration into Kinesis to be able to scan and let you know which topics, use what type of data. So it's really a very, very robust full-blown catalog of the data that across the board that is dynamic. And also like you mentioned, accessible to APIs. Very much like the AWS tradition. >> Yeah, great stuff. I got to ask you a question while you're here. You're the co-founder and again congratulations on your success. Also the chief product officer of BigID, what's your advice to your colleagues and potentially new friends out there that are watching here? And let's take it from the entrepreneurial perspective. I have an application and I start growing and maybe I have funding, maybe I take a more pragmatic approach versus raising billions of dollars. But as you grow the pressure for AppSec reviews, having all the table stakes features, how do you advise developers or entrepreneurs or even business people, small medium-sized enterprises to prepare? Is there a way, is there a playbook to say, rather than looking back saying, oh, I didn't do with all the things I got to go back and retrofit, get BigID. Is there a playbook that you see that will help companies so they don't get killed with AppSec reviews and privacy compliance reviews? Could be a waste of time. What's your thoughts on all this? >> Well, I think that very early on when we started BigID, and that was our perspective is that we knew that we are a security and privacy company. So we had to take that very seriously upfront and be prepared. Security cannot be an afterthought. It's something that needs to be built in. And from day one we have taken all of the steps that were needed in order to make sure that what we're building is robust and secure. And that includes, obviously applying all of the code and CI/CD tools that are available for testing your code, whether it's (indistinct), these type of tools. Applying and providing, penetration testing and working with best in line kind of pen testing companies and white hat hackers that would look at your code. These are kind of the things that, that's what you get funding for, right? >> Yeah. >> And you need to take advantage of that and use them. And then as soon as we got bigger, we also invested in a very, kind of a very strong CSO that comes from the industry that has a lot of expertise and a lot of credibility. We also have kind of CSO group. So, each step of funding we've used extensively also to make RM kind of security poster a lot more robust and invisible. >> Final question for you. When should someone buy BigID? When should they engage? Is it something that people can just download immediately and integrate? Do you have to have, is the go-to-market kind of a new target the VP level or is it the... How does someone know when to buy you and download it and use the software? Take us through the use case of how customers engage with. >> Yeah, so customers directly have those requirements when they start hitting and having to comply with regulations around privacy and security. So very early on, especially organizations that deal with consumer information, get to a point where they need to be accountable for the data that they store about their customers and they want to be able to know their data and provide the privacy controls they need to their consumers. For our BigID product this typically is a kind of a medium size and up company, and with an IT organization. For smallID, this is a good fit for companies that are much smaller, that operate mostly out of their, their IT is basically their DevOps teams. And once they have more than 10, 20 data sources in AWS, that's where they start losing count of the data that they have and they need to get more visibility and be able to control what data is being stored there. Because very quickly you start losing count of data information, even for an organization like BigID, which isn't a bigger organization, right? We have 200 employees. We are at the point where it's hard to keep track and keep control of all the data that is being stored in all of the different data sources, right? In AWS, in Google Drive, in some of our other sources, right? And that's the point where you need to start thinking about having that visibility. >> Yeah, like all growth plan, dream big, start small and get big. And I think that's a nice pathway. So small gets you going and you lead right into the BigID. Great stuff. Final, final question for you while I gatchu here. Why the awards? Someone's like, hey, BigID is this cool company, love the founder, love the team, love the value proposition, makes a lot of sense. Why all the awards? >> Look, I think one of the things that was compelling about BigID from the beginning is that we did things differently. Our whole approach for personal data discovery is unique. And instead of looking at the data, we started by looking at the identities, the people and finally looking at their data, learning how their data looks like and then searching for that information. So that was a very different approach to the traditional approach of data discovery. And we continue to innovate and to look at those problems from a different perspective so we can offer our customers an alternative to what was done in the past. It's not saying that we don't do the basic stuffs. The Reg X is the connectivity that that is needed. But we always took a slightly different approach to diversify, to offer something slightly different and more comprehensive. And I think that was the thing that really attracted us from the beginning with the RSA Innovation Sandbox award that we won in 2018, the Gartner Cool Vendor award that we received. And later on also the other awards. And I think that's the unique aspect of BigID. >> You know you solve big problems than certainly as needed. We saw this early on and again I don't think that the problem is going to go away anytime soon, platforms are emerging, more tools than ever before that converge into platforms and as the logic changes at the top all of that's moving onto the underground. So, congratulations, great insight. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it Nimrod. Okay, I'm John Furrier. We are theCUBE virtual here for the partner experience APN virtual. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)