(cheery synth music) >> Hello, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here for a KubeCon CloudNativeCon preview for the North America show in Los Angeles, here in person and a virtual event. Two of the co-chairs are with me again this year, Constance Caramanolis, principal engineer at Splunk, and of course, Stephen Augustus, head of Open Source at Cisco. Great to see you guys. Hey, thanks for coming on, virtually, for the preview. >> Great to be had! >> Constance: Thank you for having us. >> Stephen: Great to see you again John. (laughing) >> Constance: Yeah. >> So I love... well, KubeCon has gotten, It's my favorite event every year. This is where the DevOps actually, where the people are reading the tea leaves, connecting the dots, but also meeting up and doing what communities do best, which is set the agenda for the next, next generation that's happening in person. Last year, it was virtual. We had the European virtual KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This year a mix. Give us a taste of updates that you want to share. Let's get, let's get into it. >> Sure. Uh, so I think, you know, um, I-I-I think uh, seeing this event in particular and uh, you know, one, we've got this, we've got this hopeful r-return to you know, some semblance of normalcy. I know that you know, over the last year and change, we've been uh, we've been kind of itching t-t-to see each other in person. And, and you know, and, and I-I think I say on a lot of uh, interviews that I, you know, one of my favorite parts of any conference is the, is the hallway track, right? It's really hard to, and, and we've- we've made, you know, we've made strides to replicate it, but there's- I don't think there's anything uh, you know, close t-to being in person, right? And, and getting to, to bounce i-ideas off of uh, your, your co-conspirators, (laughs) co-conspirators or compatriots. Um, so I'm- I'm really excited for that, um, I love the, I love the um, the mandates that we've put in place, uh, to make sure that people are uh, a little bit more safe. Um, and, you know, overall, like seeing uh- I-I think one of the things that gets me most excited is the, is the uh, the set of day zero events, right? Um, I-I think the, the increase in the uh, day zero events, we, we've got uh, Constance, what's the, what's the count at now? I'm, I'm looking over it and, and it's uh, it's, it's massive, right? You know, SupplyChainSecurityCon, Uh, the, you know, the Cloud Native for Eclipse Foundation, it's beyond, >> Too, hmm, too many to count right off the bat when I'm looking at it. >> Too many, too many to count! >> And it's also like, this is a reduced number because some people decide or some, not people, like projects, decide to do virtual uh, days or a non-conference outside of the normal KubeCon cycle because of... >> Yeah, well, let's get, let's get- >> that thing that should not be named. >> Let's get into some of the data. >> I want to jump into the trends. But just for the folks watching, this is a hybrid event, and- >> Yeah. >> There's going to be this day zero, which is the pre-programming. Which by the way, I think has evolved into a format that's just tremendous. You got the pregame, pre-event action. Very dynamic, very ad-hoc, ephemeral in the, in the, in the, in the, in the people getting together and making things happen. Then you got the structured event. It's uh, the 11th to the 12th on the pre-programming, day zero stuff, which you talked about, and then the 13th to the 15th, the main conference. It's in-person and virtual, so it's going to be a hybrid event, which should be dynamic because you have an in-person dynamic where it's a scarce resource of the face-to-face, working and trying to create synchronicity with the asynchronous environment on virtuals. So it should be an action packed and a must-watch event. So I'm personally excited, we'll be there in person. But I got to ask you guys, the co-chairs, how are you guys handling this? How are the papers coming, what's the call for talks? How are you structuring things? Can you just give a quick overview of what's, what's happening on the talks? >> Uh, talks, uh, I feel like it went really well this round. >> Um, really like, wide variety. I know it's pretty vague, but there's a wide variety of topics, uh, things that are getting I think, I feel like more popularity, like security is getting more popular. Uh, business value, one thing that I'm really passionate about, is getting a lot more traction. Uh, student track 101 is also, as always, I guess, as ever since it's been, since inception has been popular, um, it's definitely getting to the point where we're actually, well not to the point, but maybe it's just being more highlighted that a lot of the, like, like, some of the like great content from the day zeros are also showing up in KubeCon and then like, vice versa and they're kind of everywhere. Uh, Yeah, the talks I think was really- >> John: The sessions, the sessions are always driving it. Stephen I'm like from a, from a, from a maturisation standpoint, you have the, the, the people developing and then you got the f... the things are getting hardened. Can you talk about the trends around, what's kind of hardening out from a project basis on these sessions and what's forming relative to the trend line this year. >> Yeah. So, you know, so to Constance's point, I think that we're, we're starting to see some diversity in, or continued diversity and kind of the personas that are coming into the conference, right? So whether you're talking about that continuing 101 track or, the student track, which, you know, a lot of people have, have kind of jumped in and seeing that as an opportunity to, to, to not only start becoming part of the community, but also to immediately contribute to content. And then you've got that For me? It's, it's security, all day, right? I think, you know, I think that, you know, there's not a week, there's not a week that passes that I don't have a chat with someone around what's happening in security lately. And I think you'll see that highlighted in in all of the keynotes that we have planned there are, there's not one, not two, but three uh, keynotes around software supply chain security, and some of the different things that you have to consider as we're kind of walking into the space of you know, protecting, protecting your, your build pipeline, protecting your production artifacts, so that's something that really, you know, that goes to that, you know, that goes to my work on that, you know, in Kubernetes for SIG release, release engineering, that's, you know, something that we, we know that there are countless downstream consumers, right? So, some, you know, some that we may not have even had contact with yet from the upstream perspective, right? So it's, it's paramount for us to make sure that, you know, everything that we're pushing out to the community and to the wider world is safe to consume. So, so security is definitely top of mind for me. I would say for, you know, lots of things around you know, continue, continuing to talk about uh, GitOps observability. And I think, and I think that, you know, each of these, what's, you know, what's fun about um, each of these, uh, the, each of these topics, each of these areas is that they're all interconnected, right? So more and more you're seeing, you're seeing, oh, well, you know, the, you know, the Tekton folks are, you know, are talking to the Flux folks. And, and they're talking to the, the folks who are working on uh, Sigstore and Rekor and, and, and all of these fun tools about how to integrate into, you know, how to integrate into those respective areas. Um, so it's, it's, it's really a time of um, collaboration underscored by um, you know, protecting, protecting the community and the, and the end users. >> John: Yeah. We're seeing a lot of ah, um, you know, the security discussions. I mean, how far can you shift left before it becomes like standard, right? So like, you know, we're seeing that being built in. I got to ask you guys also on the trend of DevOps there's been a lot of conversations around Cloud Native, around obsolete management and in terms of ability, but data, the role of data has been different approaches on how people are leveraging machine learning and AI, can you, did that come up a lot in, in some of the, the discussions and the analysis? Because everyone's slapping machine learning on things these days, and there's a little bit of that going on, but it seems to be data and machine learning and horizontal scale, classic DevOps, things are happening. What's your reaction to, to some of those things that are happening? Can you guys, is there anything happening there? >> I feel like this year wasn't that big of a machine learning year in terms of submissions. >> Yes. >> I'm certain you agree with that, but it wasn't, as I think, like, security took a lot and, and, like, and this might also just be like, thinking about it holistically now, like security was, had such amazing submissions that it probably took a little bit of the spotlight off of when we were looking at the machine learning ones. Um... >> John: So security... >> Also I'm biased, so I think >> John: So security dominated more than, than everyone else did. >> Yeah. I think, you know, I think for this year, security is, security is dominating. I, you know, I think we even talked about this in the last uh, chat we had, um, the, you know, kind of from the AI side, I think you're, we're, we're running, there have been discussions around the, uh, you know, bias in, in AI models and um, you know, how we work through that, um, I'm not sure that we have any content for that this time around, but I think it, yeah, but I think, you know, as we start to talk about like how we collect data, you know, are, are we collecting the right types of data, how we serve it, especially as a, those relate to like collecting data at the edge, right? Like, how do we, how do we, how, how do we even deploy applications at the edge? We, we have a lot of potential solutions for that. But when you combine that with, well, how do we, how do we scrape information from the things that we're deploying from the edge, right? Or, or, or some, some of the things you'll see in the, in the program. >> Constance and Stephen, talk about the community vibe right now, because you know, that's the biggest part of this conference is seeing how the people come together, but it's also the vibe sets the tone. What's, what's the current vibe in the community that you're seeing and what do we expect this year at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon? >> Yeah, I'm going to say, I imagine the community's tired and it's been a long few, two years. It feels like 10 years, it feels like forever. And a lot of the in-person aspect that used to be like social validation, we just get like is lacking, so, but that being said, there's still been amazing, like collaboration from like the open, from like the Observability and Open Telemetry part. Like, I am seeing so many projects within the tag Observability collaborate together and making that a focus. And so even though we are tired, it's still, we're still doing good work. And we're still making a point of trying to keep that community tight even though it's much harder on Zoom and right, you know, it's going to try and do the awkward, like Zoom handshake. It just doesn't do the same thing there. But to Stephen's keynote, can't remember how long ago it is, about like resiliency. We are pretty resilient. And we're also, I think we're all learning to work at a slower pace because maybe we were working too fast beforehand. And I think that, I think that's a really good takeaway from all of this. So I think it's going to, for as safe as it can be to have some variation, it's probably going to just be like, it's going to be a big party because we're going to finally get to see each other after a long time then. >> John: Yeah. >> I hope we get to do that in a safe way. >> Stephen, you bring it in, Steve, you go. Oh, Steve, you always got the energy certainly on camera, but in person as well. >> (laughs) >> This in-person dynamic this year is huge. >> Yeah, we, >> Wh-what do you think is going to happen? What, give us your take. >> Yeah, so I mean, I, you know, I would echo Constance in saying that, you know, we're, we're, we're all tired, we're all very tired at this point. Um, but I, you know, but, they, they, the conference tagline for, for North America is, uh, is 'Resilience Realized', right? I think that, you know, throughout this, this year, um, the, the contributors, maintainers of, of all of these, you know, CNCF projects have made incredible strides uh, to empower the communities to, to, uh, to be together, to be family, to, to work better together, um, in spite of, you know, in spite of uh, location, location uh, boundaries, in spite of, you know, uh, uh, health concerns, like we've, we've really made the effort to um, to show up for each other. Um, so I think that, you know, what we'll see in the conference and, and, you know, one of my favorite tracks personally um, is the, the community track, um, so lots of, lots of content around, you know, a-around community building, around uh, I think more of the, the meta of, of maintaining communities, right? So the, you know, the, the, the, the code of conduct committee, as well as uh, steering committee uh, for Kubernetes got together um, last conference to, to talk about the values and principles of the community, right? And, and I think that, you know, that, that needs to continue to be highlighted, um, you know, some of the conversations that we've had around um, how you maintain groups, you know, how do you maintain groups, especially as um, especially as a, the, the, the size of the group grows, right? Once you escape that kind of like Dunbar's number uh, area, like it gets harder and harder to s have the s the same bandwidth conversations that you would in a smaller group, right? So making sure that we're continuing to, to have valuable conversations, but also be inclusive while we're doing that is, um, is something that will continue to be highlighted over the next year and change really. >> Well. I'm really impressed by what you guys do. And I know we're all tired getting, and we want to get back and, hats off to pulling it together and creating a great program because your, your group and your community is a social construct. It's, it's, we're all social animals. And this whole COVID virtual, now hybrid really is going to, going to show in real world as all playing out, and we're going to see how it evolves, and evolution is part of social communities. And I think that the progress has been made and, you know, and with the team and you guys putting together this great event. So my hat's off to you guys, thanks for, for doing that. Appreciate, great stuff. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Now, final question, um, what do you expect? Given, I mean, this is a social organization, um, things evolve, we're social organisms. We're going to be face to face. We're going to have virtual. We're going to have great talks, security obviously is prime time, Mainstream Enterprise Adoption in Kubernetes and Cloud Native. This is crunch time, so what do you guys expect for this event? Share your thoughts. >> Yeah, I-I think there's going to be lots of um, lots of fun, uh, I think uh more social conversations, less structured. Um, you know, i-if you have, if you haven't had the opportunity to kind of hang out on CNCF Slack, while one of these events are happening, we, we've spun up something of like a hallway track. Um, so, so people are hanging out, they're giving their takes during the um, you know, you know, in between uh talks, there, there was also a, you know, kind of after conference uh, hangout for, for the hallway track that we did. Um, so w we definitely want to continue some of that stuff. Um, as you know, between the last few conferences we've launched uh, Cloud Native TV um, and lots of great producers uh, and, and, and content over there. So you'll see, you'll see, kind of, us start to break the wall between um, that virtual content that we've created uh, across the last few months, as well as, you know, th s seeing that turn physical, right? Um, so how do we, you know, how, how do we, how do we manage that and h-how do we make that seamless for people who may be maybe participating virtually as opposed to physically, right. That there's going to be a bit of um, there, there's an aspect of like, you're, you're almost running two conferences, right. Simultaneously. So. >> It's a total experiment in the real world, but it's, it's all important. It's super important. Constance, your thoughts on, on the event, what people are expecting to see and surprises that might emerge, what do you, what's your thoughts? >> Um, I, well actually, see while you were saying something, I had an idea that I think we can make it more connected, So I just wrote it down, um, uh, I, I have some silly ideas when it comes to the conference stuff, which is why Stephen's laughing, although you can't see it. >> (both men laughing) >> Um, my, I, like, I'm, I'm trying to go in with no expectations, mostly because I'm so excited. I don't want to be disappointed um, and I don't want to miss out. I think, I actually think that probably a lot of the discussions are just going to be like, hi, like, it's so nice to actually meet you and just talk about random things. Maybe not as much technology discussions as maybe there would be at a normal, I like, ah, I don't want to say normal, right? Because we are in a new normal, like what KubeCon was several years ago. Um, I think that I do. I think that it would be probably a little painful, this hybrid part, since we don't know what to expect. I think there's going to be so many things that we're going to look back and be like, face palm and be like, oh, we should've thought about these things. So for anyone who's attending virtually, apologies in advance, and please give us feedback. There's so many things I know we're going to have to improve, we just, we don't know them yet. So please be patient with us and know that we wish that you could be there in person with us too. >> Um, uh, I don't know. >> Well, that's the thing, that's the thing. >> I'm just going to go in there with an open mind. Well that's the thing, it's, it's new, it's all new, virtual. So it's, it's, we're learning together. That's, I think, people put too much pressure. I think people like expecting, you know, some magic to happen, but it's all evolving. And I think the magic is the event. And I think, I think it's going to work out great. And by the way, there's no downside it's, you know, learn. >> Exactly! >> So, yeah. So, you know, so one of the things that I um, I, I have this spiel that I give to um, the release team, the Kubernetes release team, every time we start a new cycle, right? Um, you've got a set of returning contributors. You've got a set of uh, net new contributors, right? And um, and, and moving into the release team, you're kind of like thrown right into the fire of Kubernetes, right? So it's, it's, it's one of those things. I, I, I come in and, and, and, essentially say, um, be curious, question everything. Um, this is like, it's a, it's, it's very much like a human experience, right? And I think that, you know uh, to, to Constance's point, we're all here to, to learn and grow, make this a better experience for everyone. Um, so bring yourself, like bring yourself to the conference, right? I think it's, you know, in, in terms of offering feedback, we have, you know, feedback forms for every one of the, you know, every one of the, the talks that you attend, um, you can feel free to reach out to Constance, and myself and, and Jasmine, um, if you have feedback that you want to give personally, you know, there, there are, there are ways to get in touch with us. There are ways to make the event better. And I think that every time we, we uh, we incorporate, like, we incorporate a lot of this feedback into the next conference. So every time um, you provide some piece of information for us, that gives us an opportunity to make it better, right? So this conference is built, uh, this conference is built by the community, right? The, you know, it's not just a, you know, it's not a, you know, it's not a body just uh making, making decisions kind of off the cuff, it's, we are taking your ideas and we're trying to turn them into a program, right? So it's, it's the maintainers, it's the end users. It's the students, it's people who have never used Kubernetes in their lives, or never used Cloud Native technology in their lives. It's folks who are coming from the, you know, the, the corporate IT kind of classic uh, background, and, and just trying to understand how to be effective in this, in this new world for them. Um so it's like, it takes all kinds and we, we don't get it done without your feedback. So please, um, as you're coming to the conference, whether it's in-person or virtually, like, bring yourselves, be curious, ask questions, um, provide that feedback. And then um, and I think, you know, from the, you know, th-the kind of from the uh, the, yes, we need to be human, but we also need to um recognize some of the, the requirements, uh, that, that are, that we have going into this conference. So reminder that, you know, all of, all of the events are under, you know, under a code of conduct, please make sure to familiarize yourself with uh, code of conduct. I think that um, you know, I-I think that coming back into a physical space for a lot of people, the um, the, some of the social skills can, can erode over time. So please not just bring yourself, bring your best self. And, you know, be sure to review all of the policies around health and, and safety as we go into this. >> Constance, Stephen, that's great stuff. Love talking with you guys. Constance, you want to add something? Go ahead. >> I want to add one thing, also be gentle with yourself and like, be really kind to yourself and others, because this is going to be really overwhelming. I haven't been around more than 10 people at once in almost two years. And so, just remember to be kind as well, always be curious and question everything. >> Yeah. That's great stuff. Great reminder. This is what it's all about, face-to-face. Face-to-face, presence, being together, but also having the openness and the community around you. A lot of mentoring, you guys have a great community for people coming in that are new and there's great mentors, people are open and cool, great community. Thanks for coming on for this special preview for KubeCon CloudNativeCon, thank you so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of Kubecon CloudNative, and we've been every year of KubeCon. It's been in fantastic growth. Going the next level again in person, a lot of security, real time adoption should be uh, should be great, virtual and in-person. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (cheery synth music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel AWS and our community partners. Welcome to the cubes Coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. The digital version I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by a couple of guests from Unisys. Please welcome unprompted high BP and Cloud CTO on income. Great to have you on the program. Thanks for joining me today. >>Great to be here leader >>and a new pre or a new Ram Raj, VP of Cloud Services. A new welcome. Great to have you on a swell. Great >>to be here in this virtual AWS being that great. >>Thank you. Very socially Distance We're following all the guidelines here. A new Let's start with you. I'd love to get just kind of Ah, you know, a vision of the AWS Unisys partnership. I know you guys are advanced consulting partner MSP. Tell me about that partnership. >>Absolutely. Lisa, we see our clients on a cloud journey which we accelerate with Unisys Cloud Services and AWS partnership is a big piece of that again. Way thorough. We have bean rated in aws MSP partner Come out very, very highly from those msb audited our, uh and we're investing in multiple competencies across the boat as well. So and we work very closely with AWS in terms off innovating in sharing our platform cloud 44 world map In looking at what our customers looking around the corner, what services could be co developed. So we're looking at some potential I o T engagements to jointly with AWS is, well, eso you're always co inventing and it's a great partnership with a W s >>excellent. And you let's stick with you Following on hybrid Cloud Journey you mentioned the Cloud Forte platform. I wanted to understand what that platform is, how your co developing that with AWS and how your customers are benefiting >>absolutely s. Um, every year Unisys does a cloud barometer study across thousands of our clients and and we got some interesting takeaways from that. Essentially two thirds of her clients that have started this cloud journey believe they don't really realize the benefits out of that and up thio 53% off. The the respondents said they needed some help with cloud security. And this is where I believe that Unisys Cloud Services has a strong viewpoint and can find their AWS, um, journey, no matter where, what challenges they're facing, whether it's budgetary challenges on optimizing AWS and whether it's getting I t operations right when you move your applications to AWS. Um, and is it is it getting the that I have seen cops models established? So no matter where clients are in the A journey, we look to accelerate with our set of solutions and services, and we're very proud about the fact that we respond very me to make sure our clients can innovate and achieve the business outcomes that they need. For example, with California Stink City, we were able to work with them on the AWS. John Pretty set up a native other lake and analytics on top of it so we could actually predict and influence graduation rates with students. Our scores are higher than any off are coming because of the outcomes that we deliver for our clients. And it's really about business outcomes and 40 platform, which helps us drive those outcomes. I mean, probably do you want to add on without cloud 40 platform? >>Sure, I know eso, as as I knew was saying cloud for the platform provides AH set off capabilities that allows us to create an offer highly differentiated services with Unisys Pipe and, as was mentioned earlier, our cloud solutions are are able to help customers no matter where they are in their car, in their cloud journeys, whether it's ah Greenfield opportunity, where they where the customers are intending to move to the cloud, or if it's a brownfield opportunity where they already have adopted the cloud and are looking to manage and operate and optimize their deployments. Cloud Forte Platform and our Cloud Solutions are able to provide, uh, customized solution for that customer context to really deliver the solution that addresses some of the pain points that you talked about. The keeping points really relate to security to get secured. It also relates to cost optimization and then optimizing the cloud purse, a cloud deployment hybrid cloud deployment of the key requirement. So our cloud 40 platform health drives the key use cases. The key pain points that our customers are looking for through a combination off accelerators, the number of cloud photo accelerators that enable customers to rapidly prove it provisioned customers and to rapidly migrate to the cloud with God rails so that they're the secure, their compliant. And then we've got the the Cloud Cloud 40 Cloud management platform for ensuring provisioning onda management and operations, along with cost optimization capabilities and the eyelid operations. So it's a comprehensive suite off services and solutions that addresses the key business outcomes. There are customers are are looking for >>outcomes. Focused is absolutely critical, especially these days. I knew I wanted to go back to you for a second. You talked about the Unisys Barometer study, and I like the name of that. When was that done? And I'm just wondering if there are certain things that you saw this year from a customer. Cloud journey. Need perspective because of the pandemic that have really influenced that barometer >>Wait Question. Hey said and development is study. The last version of it was done late last year, and we're still waiting on the ones from this year. So, but we're starting to see some of the trends that were influenced by the pandemic. We saw rush to cloud when the pandemic hit because business adopt to to remote workers to do more digital selling and then seeing our CEO is kind of struggle with optimizing and maximizing the results off their cloud. Spend right, So So that's a unique challenge that that we're seeing based on our tryingto interaction. So the rush to the cloud and the ask for more spend optimization and in terms of spend optimization, that's an interesting facet because, uh, it cuts through my multiple angles. It's it's cuts through having the platforms around, being able to dio right predictions on where you spend is going, and then it also it's across collaborative effort. Finn ops. As we see it, we call it as a synopsis of is that we bring to our clients it's passing with multiple organizations, including finance, to sometimes figure out. Where will this business be? Where should you spend be? What should be the reserved instance buys right. So combining cloud knowledge with financial knowledge and organizational and business knowledge. And that's the service that we bring to our clients with our phenoms services. At least a great question about how how is I kind of making the current business climate affecting our operating models? Um, like we said, there's increased ask for Finn ops is an increase. Ask for security ops because security threats have only amplified. And then the entire cloud ups model. I think hybrid cloud operations its's prompted us to rethink a lot off. How do we do? I t operations and and we're investing a lot in terms of automation and then underpinning that by ai led operation. So, um, you talked about the client management platform making sure we've got the best automation and processes which are repeatable around all the way from just doing provisioning to data operations to optimization. Just making all of that robust and repeatable um, is such a value. Add to clients because then they can see SOS can sleep at night knowing that everything is taken care off and, uh, the CIA, the CEOs can be rest assured that hey, they're not going to get that AWS bill that's going to make them hit the roof. So making sure we've got the right checks and balances and approval flow is all a part of our child management platform. And at that point, I know you really passionate AI and the role that it plays in operations and the entire cloud management platform and cloud for day platform So your thoughts in the poem? >>Yes, sir. No, thank you. But so yeah, yeah, I led operations is really part off the bigger question and the pain point that customers are faced with, which is I've reached the cloud. Now, how do I optimized and get benefits from the cloud on the benefits is around. You know, uh, utility for on demand access to resource is, uh, this cost optimization potential and the security, uh, cloud security potential that, if not managed properly, can really blow up in the face. And unfortunately, you know that in the case on the AI ops led Operation Side, that's again a huge foretell area where Unisys Investor is investing a lot off a lot off i p and creating a lot of differentiation. And the objective there is to ask Customers adopt cloud for day as they adopt Unisys Cloud services. They're able to take advantage off cost optimization capabilities, which essentially looks at historical usage on predicts future usage, based on a number off a I artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that that is able to give you predictions that otherwise very hard to hard to get and, uh, in the cloud environment because of the sheer velocity volume and variety of the data. Doing that in a manual fashion is very, very hard. So automated machine learning driven approach is very productive is very effective on, you know, some of the outcomes that we've achieved is is just amazing. We've been able to save up to 25% off infrastructure costs through the island operations. About 40% off infrastructure incidents have bean reduced due to root cause analysis. Eso onda up to 35% off meantime, to resolution improvements in time. So huge customer benefits driven by e I led operations. The I am a approaches to following the problem. >>Let me see him If I could stick with you for a second big numbers that you just talked about and we talked a few minutes ago about outcomes. It's all about outcomes right now with this rush to cloud as as a new set. And we talked about this on the Cuba all the time. We've seen that the last eight months there is an acceleration of this digital transformation. I'm just curious una come from your perspective as the VP and CTO cloud how are you? What are some of the things that you advise customers to do if they need to rush to the cloud 21 just, you know, move their business quickly and not have the stay on life support. What are some of the things that you advise them to do when they're in this? Maybe a few months ago, when they were in the beginning of this? >>Yeah, that's that's a very interesting question, and lot off our clients are faced with that question as they either they're already in the cloud or the deciding to migrate to the cloud on the whole journey. Customer journeys for either stepping on the cloud or managing and operating the optimizing the cloud deployments is very key. So if you look at the market research that's out there and what we hear from our customers, the key challenges are really, really around. How do I migrate to the cloud without facing a lot of bottlenecks and challenges, and how do I overcome them? So that's the keeping pain point and again cloud for the advisory services and the cloud services that we offer allows customers to take up uh, toe work with us, and we work with the customer to ensure that they're able to do that on and then rapidly migrating to the cloud, managing and operating their operations. The hybrid cloud operations in optimized fashion is a huge challenge. How do they migrate? How do they migrate with security and compliance not being compromised once they're in the cloud, ensuring cloud security is and compliance is is maintained. Ensuring that the cost structure is is optimized so that they're not being mawr wants to move to the cloud compared to on premises and and then taking advantage of the whole cloud. Deployments to ensure you're looking at data are nothing the data to derive meaningful business outcomes. So if the entire end to end customer journey that needs to be looked at optimized. And that's where Unisys comes in with a cloud for the platform where we work with the customers to enhance the journeys. And in this case I want to mention CSU, which is, uh, the California State University, where the approach Unisys to really work with them to deliver uh, cloud services by enhancing the the objective was to enhance the student learning experience to enable adoption off off the technology by the students but also to achieve better performance, better adoption cost savings on we were able to deliver about 30% better performance help realize about 30 33% savings on 40% plus growth in adoption. On this was for about half a million student bodies. The 50,000 plus faculty staff spread across 23 campuses. So deploying, optimizing on and managing the infrastructure is something that Unisys does. Does that. And this is an example of that. I know you want to add anything to that. >>Absolutely Any Permanente's really well and, >>uh, >>it Z also securing, making sure securities with the >>journey >>it Z O Keefe or hybrid cloud. Um, uh, at least I'm sure you're aware of the Unisys tagline is securing tomorrow. So who better s so we really, really take that really, really seriously in terms of making sure we seek clients cloud journeys, and >>you >>probably heard the statistic from her. About 80% off cloud breaches are due to mis configuration, and this could have bean prevented. And and it doesn't. There's an element of the human angle in there. You believe strongly that can automate using our platform. So we've got 2000 plus security policies, which makes sure which again enables our clients to be compliant as well. So no matter what compliant standards, we've got several off our clients, for example, in the financial sector that are hosted on AWS and that we managed and they have to, especially the US They have to comply with Y de f s, the New York Department of Financial Services and making sure that they compliant with all the standards out there, which is next plus plus in this case. So that's part of what we do and enabling those journeys and then just keeping up with the rate of change like on different was talking about the variety and velocity of the data and and the rate of change of the applications out there, especially as businesses react to the pandemic and have to cope with the changing business paradigms out there. They have to be quick. Um, so we've got a drugmaker, one of the most premium drug makers in the US, who is who is against it on AWS, and, uh, they're racing for the cure and they are always looking at How do they get drugs quicker to the market? And that means accelerating applications. And we know that based on research by the Dora study, that if you adopt develops paradigms, you can accelerate 200 times faster than if you didn't. But then you have to underpin backward security as well. So really helping this adopt deaths are cops in all their deployments to AWS so that they can really race for the cure. That's the kind of business outcomes that we really, uh, are really, really proud to drive for our clients. >>Excellent on a pound. Let's wrap this up with you. We've just got about 30 seconds left sticking on the security front. It's such a huge topic right now. It has been for a long time, but even more so during these unprecedented times when you're talking with customers, what makes Unisys unique from a security perspective? >>So first thing is to understand what it takes to solve the hybrid cloud security problem. Like you said earlier, that's the biggest pain point that we hear from customers from our clients on. It's all over the market research all the breaches that have happened, like the zoom breach that happened that compromised about half a million, you know, user log ins. And then there was also the the Marriott breach, where about half a billion users names and credential for legal legal. So it Zaveri easy for customers, potential customers to become like a headline. And our our job really are the companies to make sure that they're not the next capital one or the next Marriott, uh, showing up in the newspaper. So we kind of look at their customer deployments situation on. We put together a comprehensive into an hybrid cloud solution, hybrid cloud security and compliance solution that includes look, securing their cloud infrastructure, their cloud workloads in terms of applications that they might have secured, and also to look at securing their applications, which may or may not be running on the cloud. So we kind of take a very holistic approach, using our homegrown solutions and partner solutions to create a comprehensive, robust hybrid cloud solution that really fits the customer context and and so we we are essentially a trusted adviser for our for our clients to create the solution, which again, at the cloud 40 ashore, which is a cloud security posture management solution. We have a cloud worker protection solution on then stealth, which is a full stack security solution if combined together with the other cloud Forte platform components on. We wrap this up in a matter of security services offering that allows US customers to have complete peace of mind as we take care off assessment remediation monitoring on, then continues Posture, posture, management. I know. Do you want to add anything to that? >>If I'm think in terms of closing, I think like you covered it well, we've got platform competence and services that run the gamut off the off the life cycle from migrations to two transformations. And one thing that I think in terms of outcomes of these, uh, when the service built around it have really helped us. Dr is, um is kind of responding especially to our public sector clients, very passionate about enabling cloud journeys for our public sector clients. And we'll take the example of Georgia Technology s So this is the G t A. Is the technology agency for all services are 14 of the agencies in Georgia and many of these public sector agencies had to quickly adopt cloud to deal with the report workers. Whether it was v D I whether it was chatbots on cloud, um, it was it was, ah, brand new world out there, the new normal. And it was just using the cloud management platform that anyone was refering to. We were able to kind of take them from taking three months. Plus to be able to provision workloads Thio thio less than 30 minutes to provision workloads. And this is this is across hybrid cloud. So and this is >>a big outcome, especially in this time where things were changing so quickly. Well, I wish we had more time, guys because I could tell you have a lot more that you can share. You're just gonna have to come back. And I like that. The tagline securing tomorrow. Adding on to what Anu Pump said So your customers don't become the next headline. I think they would all appreciate that. Thank you both. So much for joining me on the Cube today and sharing what's the latest with Unisys. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank >>you for having us >>aren't my pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. And you're watching the Cube? Yeah,

>>covering the space and cybersecurity symposium 2020 hosted by Cal poly. Hold on. Welcome to this special presentation with Cal poly hosting the space and cybersecurity symposium, 2020 virtual, um, John for your host with the cube and Silicon angle here in our Palo Alto studios with our remote guests, we couldn't be there in person, but we're going to be here remotely. Got a great session and a panel for one hour topic preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow, but a great lineup. Bill Britain, Lieutenant Colonel from the us air force, retired vice president for information technology and CIO and the director of the California cyber security Institute for Cal poly bill. Thanks for joining us, dr. Amy Fisher, who's the Dean of the college of engineering at Cal poly and trunk fam professor and researcher at the U S air force Academy. Folks, thanks for joining me today. >>Our pleasure got a great, great panel. This is one of my favorite topics preparing students for the next generation, the jobs for today and tomorrow. We've got an hour. I'd love you guys to start with an opening statement, to kick things off a bill. We'll start with you. Well, I'm really pleased to be, to start on this. Um, as the director for the cybersecurity Institute and the CIO at Cal poly, it's really a fun, exciting job because as a Polytechnic technology, as such a forefront in what we're doing, and we've had a, a wonderful opportunity being 40 miles from Vandenberg air force base to really look at the nexus of space and cyber security. And if you add into that, uh, both commercial government and civil space and cybersecurity, this is an expanding wide open time for cyber and space. In that role that we have with the cyber security Institute, we partner with elements of the state and the university. >>And we try to really add value above our academic level, which is some of the highest in the nation and to really merge down and go a little lower and start younger. So we actually are running the week prior to this showing a cybersecurity competition for high schools or middle schools in the state of California, that competition this year is based on a scenario around hacking of a commercial satellite and the forensics of the payload that was hacked and the networks associated with it. This is going to be done using products like Wireshark autopsy and other tools that will give those high school students. What we hope is a huge desire to follow up and go into cyber and cyber space and space and follow that career path. And either come to Cal poly or some other institution that's going to let them really expand their horizons in cybersecurity and space for the future >>Of our nation. >>Bill, thanks for that intro, by the way, it's gonna give you props for an amazing team and job you guys are doing at Cal poly, that Dex hub and the efforts you guys are having with your challenge. Congratulations on that great work. Thank you >>Star team. It's absolutely amazing. You find that much talent in one location. And I think Amy is going to tell you she's got the same amount of talent in her staff. So it's, it's a great place to be. >>Amy flasher. You guys have a great organization down there, amazing curriculum, grazing people, great community, your opening statement. >>Hello everybody. It's really great to be a part of this panel on behalf of the Cal poly college of engineering here at Cal poly, we really take preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow completely seriously. And we claim that our students really graduate. So they're ready day one for their first real job, but that means that in getting them to that point, we have to help them get valuable and meaningful job experience before they graduate, but through our curriculum and through multiple internship or summer research opportunities. So we focus our curriculum on what we call a learn by doing philosophy. And this means that we have a combination of practical experience and learn by doing both in and out of the classroom. And we find that to be really critical for preparing students for the workforce here at Cal poly, we have more than 6,000 engineering students. >>We're one of the largest undergraduate engineering schools in the country. Um, and us news ranks us the eighth best undergraduate engineering program in the, in the country and the top ranked state school. We're really, really proud that we offer this impactful hands on engineering education that really exceeds that of virtually all private universities while reaching a wider audience of students. We offer 14 degree programs and really we're talking today about cyber and space. And I think most of those degree programs can really make an impact in the space and cybersecurity economy. And this includes not only things like Aero and cyber directly, but also electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, materials, engineering, even manufacturing, civil and biomedical engineering. As there's a lot of infrastructure needs that go into supporting launch capabilities. Our aerospace program graduates hundreds of aerospace engineers, and most of them are working right here in California. >>I'm with many of our corporate partners, including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon space, X, Virgin, galactic JPL, and so many other places where we have Cal poly engineer's impacting the space economy. Our cybersecurity focus is found mainly in our computer science and software engineering programs. And it's really a rapidly growing interest among our students. Computer science is our most popular major and industry interest and partnerships are integrated into our curriculum. And we do that oftentimes through support from industry. So we have partnerships with Northrop Grumman for professorship and a cyber lab and from PG and E for critical infrastructure, cybersecurity lab, and professorship. And we think that industry partnerships like these are really critical to preparing students for the future as the field's evolving so quickly and making sure we adapt our facilities and our curriculum to stay in line with what we're seeing in industry is incredibly important. >>In our aerospace program, we have an educational partnership with the air force research labs. That's allowing us to install new high performance computing capabilities and a space environments lab. That's going to enhance our satellite design capabilities. And if we talk about satellite design, Cal poly is the founding home of the cube sat program, which pioneered small satellite capabilities. And we remain the worldwide leader in maintaining the cube set standard. And our student program has launched more cube sets than any other program. So here again, we have this learn by doing experience every year for dozens of aerospace, electrical, computer science, mechanical engineering students, and other student activities that we think are just as important include ethical hacking through our white hat club, Cal poly space systems, which does really, really big rocket launches and our support program for women in both of these fields like wish, which is women in software and hardware. >>Now, you know, really trying to bring in a wide variety of people into these fields is incredibly important and outreach and support to those demographics. Traditionally underrepresented in these fields is going to be really critical to future success. So by drawing on the lived experiences by people with different types of backgrounds, while we develop the type of culture and environment where all of us can get to the best solution. So in terms of bringing people into the field, we see that research shows, we need to reach kids when they're in late elementary and middle schools to really overcome that cultural bias that works against diversity in our fields. And you heard bill talking about the cyber cybersec, the California cybersecurity institutes a year late cyber challenge. There's a lot of other people who are working to bring in a wider variety of, uh, of people into the field, like girl Scouts, which has introduced dozens of new badges over the past few years, including a whole cybersecurity series of badges and a concert with Palo Alto networks. So we have our work cut out for us, but we know what we need to do. And if we're really committed to prep properly preparing the workforce for today and tomorrow, I think our future is going to be bright. I'm looking forward to our discussion today. >>Yeah, you got a flashy for great, great comment, opening statement and congratulations. You got the right formula down there, the right mindset, and you got a lot of talent and community as well. Thank thank you for that opening statement. Next step from Colorado Springs, trunk fam, who's a professor and researcher. The us air force Academy is doing a lot of research around the areas that are most important for the intersection of space and technology trunk. >>Good afternoon, first electric and Cal poli for the opportunity. And today I want to go briefly about cyber security in S application. Whenever we talk about cyber security, the impression is got yes, a new phew that is really highly complex involving a lot of technical area. But in reality, in my personal opinion, it is in be complex because involve many disciplines. The first thing we think about is computer engineering and computer networking, but it's also involving communication sociology, law practice. And this practice of cyber security goes in on the info computer expert, but it's also info everybody else who has a computing device that is connected to the internet. And this participation is obviously every body in today's environment. When we think about the internet, we know that is a good source of information, but come with the convenience of information that we can access. >>We are constantly faced in being from the internet. Some of them, we might be aware of some of them we might not be aware of. For example, when we search on the internet, a lot of time, our browser will be saved and gotten this site is not trusted. So we will be more careful. What about the sites that we trusted? We know getting those salad chicken sites, but they're not a hundred percent good at proof. What happened? It was all side, uh, attack by hacker. And then they will be a silent source that we might not be aware of. So in the reality, we need to be more practicing the, um, cyber security from our SIBO point of view and not from a technical point of view. When we talk about space application, we should know that all the hardware, a computer based tool by computer system and therefore the hardware and the software must go through some certification process so that they can be record that air with the flight. >>What the, when we know that in the certification process is focusing on the functionality of the hardware and software, but one aspect that is explicitly and implicitly required is the security of those components. And we know that those components have to be connected with the ground control station and be communication is through the air, through the layby or signal. So anybody who has access to those communication regular signal will be able to control the space system that we put up there. And we certainly do not want our system to be hijacked by a third party. >>I'm not going to aspect of cybersecurity is we try to design the space system in a very strong manner. So it's almost impossible to hack in, but what about some August week system that might be connected to so strong system? For example, the spare system will be connected to the ground control station and on the ground control station, we have the human controller in those people have cell phone. They are allowed to use cell phones for communication, but at the same time, they are connected to the internet, to the cell phone and their cell phone might be connected to the computer that control the flight software and hardware. So what I want to say is that we try to build strong system and we protected them, but there will be some weaker system that we could not intended, but exists to be connected to our strong system. And those are the points that hacker will be trying to attack. If we know how to control the access to those points, we will be having a much better system for the space system. And when we see the cybersecurity that is requiring the participation everywhere, it's important to Merck that there is a source of opportunity for students to engage the workforce. To concede the obviously student in engineering can focus their knowledge and expertise to provide technological solution, to protect the system that we view. But we also >>Have students in business who can focus to write a business plan to reach the market. We also have student in law who can focus policy governing the cyber security. And we also have student in education who can focus the expert. She should be saying how to teach cyber security practice and students can focus the effort to implement security measures and it implies job opportunity. >>Thank you trunk for those great comments, great technology opportunities, but interesting as well as the theme that we're seeing across the entire symposium and in the virtual hallways that we're hearing conversations and you pointed out some of them, dr. Fleischer did as well. And bill, you mentioned it. It's not one thing. It's not just technology, it's different skills. And, um, Amy, you mentioned that computer science is the hottest degree, but you have the hottest aerospace program in the world. I mean, so all of this is kind of balancing it's interdisciplinary. It's a structural change before we get into some of the, um, how they prepare the students. Can you guys talk about some of the structural changes that are modern now in preparing, um, in these opportunities because societal impact is a law potentially impact it's, it's how we educate there's no cross-discipline skillsets. It's not just get the degree, see out in the field bill, you want to start. >>Well, what's really fun about this job is, is that in the air force, uh, I worked in the space and missile business and what we saw was a heavy reliance on checklist format, security procedures, analog systems, and what we're seeing now in our world, both in the government and the commercial side, uh, is a move to a digital environment. And the digital environment is a very quick and adaptive environment. And it's going to require a digital understanding. Matter of fact, um, the, uh, under secretary of the air force for acquisition, uh, rev recently referenced the need to understand the digital environment and how that's affecting acquisition. So as, as both Amy, um, and trunk said, even business students are now in the >>Cybersecurity business. And, and so, again, what we're seeing is, is the change. Now, another phenomenon that we're seeing in the space world is there's just so much data. Uh, one of the ways that we addressed that in the past was to look at high performance computing. It was a lot stricter control over how that worked, but now what we're seeing these adaptation of cloud cloud technologies in space support, space, data, command, and control. Uh, and so what we see is a modern space engineer who asked to understand digital, has to understand cloud and has to understand the context of all those with a cyber environment. That's really changing the forefront of what is a space engineer, what is a digital engineer and what does a future engineer, both commercial or government? So I think the opportunity for all of these things is really good, particularly for a Polytechnic air force Academy and others that are focusing on a more, uh, widened experiential level of cloud and engineering and other capabilities. >>And I'll tell you the part that as the CIO, I have to remind everybody, all this stuff works for the it stuff. So you've got to understand how your it infrastructures are tied and working together. Um, as we noted earlier, one of the things is, is that these are all relays from point the point, and that architecture is part of your cybersecurity architecture. So again, every component has now become a cyber aware cyber knowledgeable, and in what we'd like to call as a cyber cognizant citizen, where they have to understand the context, patients chip software, that the Fleischer talk about your perspective, because you mentioned some of the things that computer science. Remember when I'm in the eighties, when I got my computer science degree, they call the software engineers, and then you became software developers. And then, so again, engineering is the theme. If you're engineering a system, there's now software involved, um, and there's also business engineering business models. So talk about some of your comments was, you mentioned, computer science is hot. You got the aerospace, you've got these multidisciplines you got definitely diversity as well. It brings more perspectives in as well. Your thoughts on these structural interdisciplinary things. >>I think this is, this is really key to making sure that students are prepared to work in the workforce is looking at the, the blurring between fields no longer are you just a computer scientist, no longer are you just an aerospace engineer? You really have to have an expertise where you can work with people across disciplines. All of these, all of these fields are just working with each other in ways we haven't seen before. And bill brought up data, you know, data science is something that's cross cutting across all of our fields. So we want engineers that have the disciplinary expertise so that they can go deep into these fields, but we want them to be able to communicate with each and to be able to communicate across disciplines and to be able to work in teams that are across disciplines. You can no longer just work with other computer scientists or just work with other aerospace engineers. >>There's no part of engineering that is siloed anymore. So that's how we're changing. You have to be able to work across those, those disciplines. And as you, as Tron pointed out, you know, ethics has to come into this. So you can no longer try to fully separate what we would traditionally have called the, the liberal arts and say, well, that's over there in general education. No ethics is an important part of what we're doing and how we integrate that into our curriculum. So it was communication. So is working on public policy and seeing where all of these different aspects tied together to make the impact that we want to have in the world. So it, you no longer can work solo in these fields. >>Great point. And bill also mentioned the cloud. One thing about the cloud that showed us as horizontal scalability has created a lot of value and certainly data is now horizontal Trung. You mentioned some of the things about cryptography for the kids out there. I mean, you can look at the pathway for career. You can do a lot of tech and, but you don't have to go deep. Sometimes you can go, you can go as deep as you want, but there's so much more there. Um, what technology do you see, how it's going to help students in your opinion? >>Well, I'm a professor in computer science, so I'd like to talk out a little bit about computer programming. Now we, uh, working in complex project. So most of the time we design a system from scratch. We view it from different components and the components that we have either we get it from or some time we get it from the internet in the open source environment, it's fun to get the source code and then work to our own application. So now when we are looking at a Logie, when we talk about encryption, for example, we can easily get the source code from the internet. And the question is, is safe to use those source code. And my, my, my question is maybe not. So I always encourage my students to learn how to write source score distribution, where that I learned a long time ago before I allow them to use the open source environment. And one of the things that they have to be careful, especially with encryption is be quote that might be hidden in the, in the source, get the download here, some of the source. >>So open source, it's a wonderful place to be, but it's also that we have to be aware of >>Great point before we get into some of the common one quick thing for each of you like to get your comments on, you know, the there's been a big movement on growth mindset, which has been a great, I'm a big believer in having a growth mindset and learning and all that good stuff. But now that when you talk about some of these things that we're mentioning about systems, there's, there's an, there's a new trend around a systems mindset, because if everything's now a system distributed systems, now you have space in cyber security, you have to understand the consequences of changes. And you mentioned some of that Trung in changes in the source code. Could you guys share your quick opinions on the, the idea of systems thinking, is that a mindset that people should be looking at? Because it used to be just one thing, Oh, you're a systems guy or galley. There you go. You're done. Now. It seems to be in social media and data. Everything seems to be systems. What's your take dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you. >>Uh, I'd say it's a, it's another way of looking at, um, not being just so deep in your discipline. You have to understand what the impact of the decisions that you're making have on a much broader, uh, system. And so I think it's important for all of our students to get some exposure to that systems level thinking and looking at the greater impact of the decision that they're making. Now, the issue is where do you set the systems boundary, right? And you can set the systems boundary very close in and concentrate on an aspect of a design, or you can continually move that system boundary out and see, where do you hit the intersections of engineering and science along with ethics and public policy and the greater society. And I think that's where some of the interesting work is going to be. And I think at least exposing students and letting them know that they're going to have to make some of these considerations as they move throughout their career is going to be vital as we move into the future. Bill. What's your thoughts? >>Um, I absolutely agree with Amy and I think there's a context here that reverse engineering, um, and forensics analysis and forensics engineering are becoming more critical than ever, uh, the ability to look at what you have designed in a system and then tear it apart and look at it for gaps and holes and problem sets, or when you're given some software that's already been pre developed, checking it to make sure it is, is really going to do what it says it's going to do. That forensics ability becomes more and more a skillset that also you need the verbal skills to explain what it is you're doing and what you found. So the communication side, the systems analysis, >>The forensics analysis side, >>These are all things that are part of that system >>Approach that I think you could spend hours on. And we still haven't really done great job on it. So it's a, it's. One of my fortes is the really the whole analysis side of forensics and it reverse engineering >>Try and real quick systems thinking. >>Well, I'd like to share with you my experience. When I worked in the space patient program at NASA, we had two different approaches. One is a down approach where we design it from the system general point of view, where we put components to complex system. But at the same time, we have the bottom up approach where we have Ken Chile who spent time and effort the individual component. And they have to be expert in those Chinese component. That might be general component the gallery. And in the space station program, we bring together the welcome up engineer, who designed everything in detail in the system manager who manage the system design from the top down. And we meet in the middle and took the idea with compromise a lot of differences. Then we can leave a display station that we are operating to be okay, >>Great insight. And that's the whole teamwork collaboration that, that was mentioning. Thanks so much for that insight. I wanted to get that out there because I know myself as a, as a parent, I'm always trying to think about what's best for my kids in their friends, as they grow up into the workforce. I know educators and leaders in industry would love to know some of the best practices around some of the structural changes. So thanks for that insight, but this topics about students and helping them prepare. Uh, so we heard, you know, be, be multiple discipline, broaden your horizons, think like systems top down, bottom up, work together as a team and follow the data. So I got to ask you guys, there's a huge amount of job openings in cybersecurity. It's well documented and certainly at the intersection of space and cyber, it's only gonna get bigger, right? You're going to see more and more demand for new types of jobs. How do we get high school and college students interested in security as a career at the flagship? We'll start with you in this one. >>I would say really one of the best ways to get students interested in the career is to show them the impact that it's going to have. There's definitely always going to be students who are going to want to do the technology for the technology sake, but that will limit you to a narrow set of students. And by showing that the greater impact that these types of careers are going to have on the types of problems that you're going to be able to solve and the impact you're going to be able to have on the world, around you, that's the word that we really need to get out. And a wide variety of students really respond to these messages. So I think it's really kind of reaching out at the, uh, the elementary, the middle school level, and really kind of getting this idea that you can make a big difference, a big positive difference in the field with some of these careers is going to be really critical. >>Real question, follow up. What do you think is the best entry point? You mentioned middle squad in here, elementary school. This comes, there's a lot of discussions around pipelining and we're going to get into women in tech and under-represented matters later, but you know, is it too early or what's the, what's your feeling on this? >>My feeling is the earlier we can normalize it the better the, uh, if you can normalize an interest in, in computers and technology and building an elementary school, that's absolutely critical. But the dropoff point that we're seeing is between what I would call like late elementary and early middle school. Um, and just kind of as an anecdote, I, for years ran an outreach program for girl Scouts in grades four and five and grade six, seven, and eight. And we had a hundred slots in each program. And every year the program would sell out for girls in grades four and five, and every year we'd have spots remaining in grades six, seven, and eight. And that's literally where the drop-off is occurring between that late elementary and that middle school range. So that's the area that we need to target to make sure we keep those young women involved and interested as we move forward. >>Bill, how are we going to get these kids interested in security? You mentioned a few programs you got. Yeah. I mean, who wants to, who wouldn't want to be a white hat hacker? I mean, yeah, that sounds exciting. Yeah. Great questions. Let's start with some basic principles though. Is let me ask you a question, John, a name for me, one white hat, good person hacker. The name who works in the space industry and is an exemplar for students to look up to, um, you, um, Oh man. I'm hearing really. I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't imagine because the answer we normally get is the cricket sound. So we don't have individuals we've identified in those areas for them to look up to. I was going to be snarky and say, most white hackers won't even use their real name, but, um, there's a, there's an aura around their anonymity here. >>So, so again, the real question is, is how do we get them engaged and keep them engaged? And that's what Amy was pointing out too. Exactly the engagement and sticking with it. So one of the things that we're trying to do through our competition on the state level and other elements is providing connections. We call them ambassadors. These are people in the business who can contact the students that are in the game or in that, uh, challenge environment and let them interact and let them talk about what they do and what they're doing in life would give them a challenging game format. Um, a lot of computer based training, um, capture the flag stuff is great, but if you can make it hands on, if you can make it a learn by doing experiment, if you can make it am personally involved and see the benefit as a result of doing that challenge and then talk to the people who do that on a daily basis, that's how you get them involved. >>The second part is as part of what we're doing is, is we're involving partnership companies in the development of the teams. So this year's competition that we're running has 82 teams from across the state of California, uh, of those 82 teams at six students team, middle school, high school, and many of those have company partners. And these are practitioners in cybersecurity who are working with those students to participate. It's it's that adult connectivity, it's that visualization. Um, so at the competition this year, um, we have the founder of Def con red flag is a participant to talk to the students. We have Vince surf as who is of course, very well known for something called the internet to participate. It's really getting the students to understand who's in this. Who can I look up to and how do I stay engaged with them? >>There's definitely a celebrity aspect of it. I will agree. I mean, the influencer aspect here with knowledge is key. Can you talk about, um, these ambassadors and, and, and how far along are you on that program? First of all, the challenge stuff is anything gamification wise. We've seen that with hackathons is just really works well. Grades, bonding, people who create together kinda get sticky and get very high community aspect to it. Talking about this ambassador thing. What does that industry is that academic >>Absolutely partners that we've identified? Um, some of which, and I won't hit all of them. So I'm sure I'll short changes, but, uh, Palo Alto, Cisco, um, Splunk, um, many of the companies in California and what we've done is identified, uh, schools, uh, to participate in the challenge that may not have a strong STEM program or have any cyber program. And the idea of the company is they look for their employees who are in those school districts to partner with the schools to help provide outreach. It could be as simple as a couple hours a week, or it's a team support captain or it's providing computers and other devices to use. Uh, and so again, it's really about a constant connectivity and, uh, trying to help where some schools may not have the staff or support units in an area to really provide them what they need for connectivity. What that does gives us an opportunity to not just focus on it once a year, but throughout the year. So for the competition, all the teams that are participating have been receiving, um, training and educational opportunities in the game of education side, since they signed up to participate. So there's a website, there's learning materials, there's materials provided by certain vendor companies like Wireshark and others. So it's a continuum of opportunity for the, >>You know, I've seen just the re randomly, just going to random thought, you know, robotics clubs are moving den closer into that middle school area, in fact Fleischer. And certainly in high schools, it's almost like a varsity sport. E-sports is another one. My son just combined made the JV at the college Dean, you know, it's big and it's up and serious. Right. And, um, it's fun. This is the aspect of fun. It's hands on. This is part of the culture down there you learn by doing, is there like a group? Is it like, um, is it like a club? I mean, how do you guys organize these bottoms up organically interest topics? >>So, so here in the college of engineering, uh, when we talk about learning by doing, we have learned by doing both in the classroom and out of the classroom. And if we look at the, these types of, out of the classroom activities, we have over 80 clubs working on all different aspects of many of these are bottom up. The students have decided what they want to work on and have organized themselves around that. And then they get the leadership opportunities. The more experienced students train in the less experienced students. And it continues to build from year after year after year with them even doing aspects of strategic planning from year to year for some of these competitions. So, yeah, it's an absolutely great experience. And we don't define for them how their learned by doing experiences should be, we want them to define it. And I think the really cool thing about that is they have the ownership and they have the interest and they can come up with new clubs year after year to see which direction they want to take it. And, you know, we will help support those clubs as old clubs fade out and new clubs come in >>Trunk real quick. Before we go on the next, uh, talk track, what, what do you recommend for, um, middle school, high school or even elementary? Um, a little bit of coding Minecraft. I mean, what, how do you get them hooked on the fun and the dopamine of, uh, technology and cybersecurity? What's your, what's your take on that? >>On, on this aspect, I like to share with you my experience as a junior high and high school student in Texas, the university of Texas in Austin organized a competition for every high school in Texas. If we phew from poetry to mathematics, to science, computer engineering, but it's not about with university of Texas. The university of Texas is on the serving SSN for the final competition that we divide the competition to be strict and then regional, and then spit at each level, we have local university and colleges volunteering to host it competition and make it fun. >>Also students with private enterprises to raise funding for scholarship. So students who see the competition they get exposed to so they can see different option. They also get a scholarship when they attend university in college. So I've seen the combination in competition aspect would be a good thing to be >>Got the engagement, the aspiration scholarship, you know, and you mentioned a volunteer. I think one of the things I'll observe is you guys are kind of hitting this as community. I mean, the story of Steve jobs and was, was building the Mac, they call it bill Hewlett up in Palo Alto. It was in the phone book and they scoured some parts from them. That's community. This is kind of what you're getting at. So this is kind of the formula we're seeing. So the next question I really want to get into is the women in technology, STEM, underrepresented minorities, how do we get them on cybersecurity career path? Is there a best practices there, bill, we'll start with you? >>Well, I think it's really interesting. First thing I want to add is if I could have just a clarification, what's really cool that the competition that we have and we're running, it's run by student from Cal poly. Uh, so, you know, Amy referenced the clubs and other activities. So many of the, uh, organizers and developers of the competition that we're running are the students, but not just from engineering. So we actually have theater and liberal arts majors and technology for liberal arts majors who are part of the competition. And we use their areas of expertise, set design, and other things, uh, visualization of virtualization. Those are all part of how we then teach and educate cyber in our game effication and other areas. So they're all involved in their learning as well. So we have our students teaching other students. So we're really excited about that. And I think that's part of what leads to a mentoring aspect of what we're providing, where our students are mentoring the other students. And I think it's also something that's really important in the game. Um, the first year we held the game, we had several all girl teams and it was really interesting because a, they, they didn't really know if they could compete. I mean, this is their, their reference point. We don't know if they did better than anybody. I mean, they, they knocked the ball out >>Of the park. The second part then is building that confidence level that they can going back and telling their cohorts that, Hey, it's not this thing you can't do. It's something real that you can compete and win. And so again, it's building that comradery, that spirit, that knowledge that they can succeed. And I think that goes a long way and an Amy's programs and the reach out and the reach out that Cal poly does to schools to develop. Uh, I think that's what it really is going to take. It. It is going to take that village approach to really increase diversity and inclusivity for the community. >>That's the flusher. I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned, um, your, your outreach program and the dropoff, some of those data, uh, you're deeply involved in this. You're passionate about it. What's your thoughts on this career path opportunity for STEM? >>Yeah, I think STEM is an incredible career path opportunity for so many people. There's so many interesting problems that we can solve, particularly in cyber and in space systems. And I think we have to meet the kids where they are and kind of show them, you know, what the exciting part is about it, right. But, you know, bill was, was alluding to this. And when he was talking about, you know, trying to name somebody that you can can point to. And I think having those visible people where you can see yourself in that is, is absolutely critical and those mentors and that mentorship program. So we use a lot of our students going out into California, middle schools and elementary schools. And you want to see somebody that's like you, somebody that came from your background and was able to do this. So a lot of times we have students from our national society of black engineers or a society of Hispanic professional engineers or our society of women engineers. >>We have over a thousand members, a thousand student members in our society of women engineers who were doing these outreach programs. But like I also said, it's hitting them at the lower levels too. And girl Scouts is actually distinguishing themselves as one of the leading STEM advocates in the country. And like I said, they developed all these cybersecurity badges, starting in kindergarten. There's a cybersecurity badge for kindergarten and first graders. And it goes all the way up through late high school, the same thing with space systems. And they did the space systems in partnership with NASA. They did the cybersecurity and partnership with Palo Alto networks. And what you do is you want to build these, these skills that the girls are developing. And like bill said, work in and girl led teams where they can do it. And if they're doing it from kindergarten on, it just becomes normal. And they never think, well, this is not for me. And they see the older girls who are doing it and they see a very clear path leading them into these careers. >>Yeah. It's interesting. You used the word normalization earlier. That's exactly what it is. It's life, you get life skills and a new kind of badge. Why wouldn't learn how to be a white, white hat hacker, or have fun or learn new skills just in, in the, in the grind of your fun day. Super exciting. Okay. Trung your thoughts on this. I mean, you have a diverse diversity. It brings perspective to the table in cybersecurity because you have to think like the other, the adversary, you got to be the white headed hippie, a white hat, unless you know how black hat thinks. So there's a lot of needs here for more, more, more points of view. How are we going to get people trained on this from under represented minorities and women? What's your thoughts? >>Well, as a member of, I took a professional society of directed pool in the electronic engineer. You have the, uh, we participate in the engineering week. We'll be ploy our members to local junior high school and high school to talk about our project, to promote the discovery of engineering. But at the same time, we also participate in the science fair that we scaled up flex. As the squad organizing our engineer will be mentoring students, number one, to help them with the part check, but number two, to help us identify talents so that we can recruit them further into the field of STEM. One of the participation that week was the competition of the, what they call future CV. We're still going, we'll be doing a CT on a computer simulation. And in recent year we promote ops smart CV where CT will be connected the individual houses to be added in through the internet. >>And we want to bring awareness of cybersecurity into competition. So we deploy engineer to supervise the people, the students who participate in the competition, we bring awareness, not in the technical be challenged level, but in what we've called the compound level. So speargun will be able to know what is, why to provide cyber security for the smart city that they are building. And at the same time, we were able to identify talent, especially talent in the minority and in the room. And so that we can recruit them more actively. And we also raise money for scholarship. We believe that scholarship is the best way to get students to continue education in Epic college level. So with scholarship, it's very easy to recruit them, to give you and then push them to go further into the cyber security Eylea. >>Yeah. I mean, you know, I see a lot of the parents like, Oh, my kid's going to go join the soccer team, >>Private lessons, and maybe look at a scholarship >>Someday. Well, they only do have scholarships anyway. I mean, this is if they spent that time doing other things, it's just, again, this is a new lifestyle, like the girl Scouts. And this is where I want to get into this whole silo breaking down because Amy, you brought this up and bill, you were talking about as well, you've got multiple stakeholders here with this event. You got, you know, public, you got private and you've got educators. It's the intersection of all of them. It's again, that those, if those silos break down the confluence of those three stakeholders have to work together. So let's, let's talk about that. Educators. You guys are educating young minds, you're interfacing with private institutions and now the public. What about educators? What can they do to make cyber better? Cause there's no real manual. I mean, it's not like this court is a body of work of how to educate cybersecurity is maybe it's more recent, it's cutting edge, best practices, but still it's an, it's an evolving playbook. What's your thoughts for educators, bill? We'll start with you. >>Well, I don't really, I'm going to turn it off. >>I would say, I would say as, as educators, it's really important for us to stay on top of how the field is evolving, right? So what we want to do is we want to promote these tight connections between educators and our faculty and, um, applied research in industry and with industry partnerships. And I think that's how we're going to make sure that we're educating students in the best way. And you're talking about that inner, that confluence of the three different areas. And I think you have to keep those communication lines open to make sure that the information on where the field is going and what we need to concentrate on is flowing down into our educational process. And that, that works in both ways that, you know, we can talk as educators and we can be telling industry what we're working on and what are types of skills our students have and working with them to get the opportunities for our students to work in industry and develop those skills along the way as well. >>And I think it's just all part of this is really looking at, at what's going to be happening and how do we get people talking to each other and the same thing with looking at public policy and bringing that into our education and into these real hands on experiences. And that's how you really cement this type of knowledge with students, not by not by talking to them and not by showing them, but letting them do it. It's this learn by doing and building the resiliency that it takes when you learn by doing. And sometimes you learn by failing, but you just up and you keep going. >>And these are important skills that you develop along the way >>You mentioned, um, um, sharing too. That's the key collaborating and sharing knowledge. It's an open, open world and everyone's collaborating feel private public partnerships. I mean, there's a real private companies. You mentioned Palo Alto networks and others. There's a real intersection there there's, they're motivated. They could, the scholarship opportunities, trunk points to that. What is the public private educator view there? How do companies get involved? What's the benefit for them? >>Well, that's what a lot of the universities are doing is to bring in as part of either their cyber centers or institutes, people who are really focused on developing and furthering those public private partnerships. That's really what my role is in all these things is to take us to a different level in those areas, uh, not to take away from the academic side, but to add additional opportunities for both sides. Remember in a public private partnership, all entities have to have some gain in the process. Now, what I think is really interesting is the timing on particularly this subject space and cyber security. This has been an absolute banner year for space. The Stanhope of space force, the launch of commercial partnership, leaving commercial platforms, delivering astronauts to the space station, recovering them and bringing back the ability of a commercial satellite platform to be launched a commercial platforms that not only launch, but return back to where they're launched from. >>These are things that are stirring the hearts of the American citizens, the kids, again, they're getting interested, they're seeing this and getting enthused. So we have to seize upon that and we have to find a way to connect that public private partnerships is the answer for that. It's not one segment that can handle it all. It's all of them combined together. If you look at space, space is going to be about commercial. It's going to be about civil moving from one side of the earth, to the other via space. And it's about government. And what's really cool for us. All those things are in our backyard. Yeah. That's where that public private comes together. The government's involved, the private sector is involved. The educators are involved and we're all looking at the same things and trying to figure out like this forum, what works best to go to the future. >>You know, if people are bored and they want to look for an exciting challenge, he couldn't have laid it out any clearer. It's the most exciting discipline. It hits everything. I mean, we just talk about space. GPS is everything we do is well tested. Do with satellites. >>I have to tell you a story on that, right? We have a very unique GPS story right in our backyard. So our sheriff is the son of the father of GPS for the air force. So you can't get better than that when it comes to being connected to all those platforms. So we, we really want to say, you know, this is so exciting for all of us because >>It gives everybody a job for a long time. >>You know, the kids that don't think tick toxic, exciting, wait til they see what's going on here with you guys, this program, trunk final word on this from the public side, you're at the air force. You're doing research. Are you guys opening it up? Are you integrating into the private and educational sectors? How do you see that formula playing out? And what's the best practice for students and preparing them? >>I think it's the same in athlete university CP in the engineering program will require our students to be final project before graduation. And in this kind of project, we send them out to work in the private industry. The private company got sponsor. Then they get the benefit of having an intern working for them and they get the benefit of reviewing the students as the prospective employee in the future. So it's good for the student to gain practical experience working in this program. Some, some kind of, we call that a core program, some kind, we call that a capstone program and the company will accept the students on a trial PRCS, giving them some assignment and then pay them a little bit of money. So it's good for the student to earn some extra money, to have some experience that they can put on their resume when they apply for the final of the job. >>So the collaboration between university and private sector is really important. We, when I joined a faculty, normally they already exist that connection. It came from. Normally it came from the Dean of engineering who would whine and dine with companies. We work relationship and sign up women, but it's approach to do a good performance so that we can be credibility to continue the relationship with those company and the students that we selected to send to those company. We have to make sure that they will represent the university. Well, they will go a good job and they will make a good impression. >>Thank you very much for great insight, trunk, bill, Amy, amazing topic. I'd like to end this session with each of you to make a statement on the importance of cybersecurity to space. We'll go Trung bill and Amy Truong, the importance of cybersecurity space statement. >>We know that it's affecting components that we are using and we are connecting to. And normally we use them for personal purpose. But when we connect to the important system that the government public company put into space, so it's really important to practice cyber security and a lot of time, it's very easy to know concept. We have to be careful, but in reality, we tend to forget to partnership the way we forget how to ride safely. And with driving a car, we have a program called defensive driving that requires every two or three years to get. We can get discount. >>We are providing the cyber security practice, not to tell people about the technology, but to remind them not practicing cybersecurity. And it's a requirement for every one of us, bill, the importance of cyber security to space. It's not just about young people. It's about all of us as we grow and we change as I referenced it, you know, we're changing from an analog world to a digital world. Those of us who have been in the business and have hair that looks like mine. We need to be just as cognizant about cybersecurity practice as the young people, we need to understand how it affects our lives and particularly in space, because we're going to be talking about people, moving people to space, moving payloads, data, transfer all of those things. And so there's a whole workforce that needs to be retrained or upskilled in cyber that's out there. So the opportunity is ever expensive for all of us, Amy, the importance of cybersecurity space, >>Uh, and the, the emphasis of cybersecurity is space. Just simply, can't be over emphasized. There are so many aspects that are going to have to be considered as systems get ever more complex. And as we pointed out, we're putting people's lives at stake here. This is incredibly, incredibly complicated and incredibly impactful, and actually really exciting the opportunities that are here for students and the workforce of the future to really make an enormous impact on the world around us. And I hope we're able to get that message out to students, to children >>Today. But these are my really interesting fields that you need to consider. >>Thank you very much. I'm John foray with the cube and the importance of cybersecurity and space is the future of the world's all going to happen in and around space with technology, people and society. Thank you to Cal poly. And thank you for watching the Cypress of computer security and space symposium 2020.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special presentation with Cal Poly hosting the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE here in our Palo Alto studios with our remote guests. We couldn't be there in person, but we're going to be here remote. We got a great session and a panel for one hour, topic preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Got a great lineup. Bill Britton, Lieutenant Colonel from the US Air Force, retired vice president for information technology and CIO and the director of the California Cybersecurity Institute for Cal Poly. Bill, thanks for joining us. Dr. Amy Fleischer, who's the dean of the College of Engineering at Cal Poly, and Trung Pham, professor and researcher at the US Air Force Academy. Folks, thanks for joining me today. >> Our pleasure. >> Got a great- >> Great to be here. >> Great panel. This is one of my favorite topics. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Preparing students for the next generation, the jobs for today and tomorrow. We got an hour. I'd love you guys to start with an opening statement to kick things off. Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I'm really pleased to be, to start on this as the director for the Cybersecurity Institute and the CIO at Cal Poly, it's really a fun, exciting job, because as a polytechnic, technology has such a forefront in what we're doing, and we've had a wonderful opportunity being 40 miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base to really look at the nexus of space and cybersecurity. And if you add into that both commercial, government, and civil space and cybersecurity, this is an expanding wide open time for cyber and space. In that role that we have with the Cybersecurity Institute, we partner with elements of the state and the university, and we try to really add value above our academic level, which is some of the highest in the nation, and to really merge down and go a little lower and start younger. So we actually are running the week prior to this showing a cybersecurity competition for high schools and middle schools in the state of California. That competition this year is based on a scenario around hacking of a commercial satellite and the forensics of the payload that was hacked and the networks associated with it. This is going to be done using products like Wireshark, Autopsy, and other tools that will give those high school students what we hope is a huge desire to follow up and go into cyber and cyberspace and space and follow that career path and either come to Cal Poly or some other institution that's going to let them really expand their horizons in cybersecurity and space for the future of our nation. >> Bill, thanks for that intro. By the way, I just want to give you props for an amazing team and job you guys are doing at Cal Poly, the DxHub and the efforts you guys are having with your challenge. Congratulations on that great work. >> Thank you. It's a rock star team. It's absolutely amazing to find that much talent at one location. And I think Amy's going to tell you, she's got the same amount of talent in her staff, so it's a great place to be. >> Dr. Amy Fleischer. You guys have a great organization down there, amazing curriculum, amazing people, great community. Your opening statement. >> Hello everybody. It's really great to be a part of this panel on behalf of the Cal Poly College of Engineering. Here at Cal Poly, we really take preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow completely seriously, and we can claim that our students really graduate so they're ready day one for their first real job. But that means that in getting them to that point, we have to help them get valuable and meaningful job experience before they graduate, both through our curriculum and through multiple internship or summer research opportunities. So we focus our curriculum on what we call a learn by doing philosophy. And this means that we have a combination of practical experience and learn by doing both in and out of the classroom. And we find that to be really critical for preparing students for the workforce. Here at Cal Poly, we have more than 6,000 engineering students. We're one of the largest undergraduate engineering schools in the country. And US News ranks us the eighth best undergraduate engineering program in the country and the top ranked state school. We're really, really proud that we offer this impactful hands-on engineering education that really exceeds that of virtually all private universities while reaching a wider audience of students. We offer 14 degree programs, and really, we're talking today about cyber and space, and I think most of those degree programs can really make an impact in the space and cybersecurity economy. And this includes not only things like aero and cyber directly, but also electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, materials engineering, even manufacturing, civil, and biomedical engineering, as there's a lot of infrastructure needs that go into supporting launch capabilities. Our aerospace program graduates hundreds of aerospace engineers and most of them are working right here in California with many of our corporate partners, including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, JPL, and so many other places where we have Cal Poly engineers impacting the space economy. Our cybersecurity focus is found mainly in our computer science and software engineering programs, and it's really a rapidly growing interest among our students. Computer science is our most popular major, and industry interests and partnerships are integrated into our cyber curriculum, and we do that oftentimes through support from industry. So we have partnerships with Northrop Grumman for professorship in a cyber lab and from PG&E for critical infrastructure cybersecurity lab and professorship. And we think that industry partnerships like these are really critical to preparing students for the future as the field is evolving so quickly and making sure we adapt our facilities and our curriculum to stay in line with what we're seeing in industry is incredibly important. In our aerospace program, we have an educational partnership with the Air Force Research Labs that's allowing us to install new high-performance computing capabilities and a space environments lab that's going to enhance our satellite design capabilities. And if we talk about satellite design, Cal Poly is the founding home of the CubeSat program, which pioneered small satellite capabilities, And we remain the worldwide leader in maintaining the CubeSat standard, and our student program has launched more CubeSats than any other program. So here again we have this learn by doing experience every year for dozens of aerospace, electrical, computer science, mechanical engineering students, and other student activities that we think are just as important include ethical hacking through our white hat club, Cal Poly Space Systems, which does really, really big rocket launches, and our support program for women in both of these fields, like WISH, which is Women In Software and Hardware. Now, you know, really trying to bring in a wide variety of people into these fields is incredibly important, and outreach and support to those demographics traditionally underrepresented in these fields is going to be really critical to future success. So by drawing on the lived experiences by people with different types of backgrounds will we develop the type of culture and environment where all of us can get to the best solution. So in terms of bringing people into the field, we see that research shows we need to reach kids when they're in late elementary and middle schools to really overcome that cultural bias that works against diversity in our fields. And you heard Bill talking about the California Cybersecurity Institute's yearly cyber challenge, and there's a lot of other people who are working to bring in a wider variety of people into the field, like Girl Scouts, which has introduced dozens of new badges over the past few years, including a whole cybersecurity series of badges in concert with Palo Alto Networks. So we have our work cut out for us, but we know what we need to do, and if we're really committed to properly preparing the workforce for today and tomorrow, I think our future is going to be bright. I'm looking forward to our discussion today. >> Thank you, Dr. Fleischer, for a great comment, opening statement, and congratulations. You got the right formula down there, the right mindset, and you got a lot of talent, and community, as well. Thank you for that opening statement. Next up, from Colorado Springs, Trung Pham, who's a professor and researcher at the US Air Force Academy. He's doing a lot of research around the areas that are most important for the intersection of space and technology. Trung. >> Good afternoon. First I'd like to thank Cal Poly for the opportunity. And today I want to go briefly about cybersecurity in space application. Whenever we talk about cybersecurity, the impression is that it's a new field that is really highly complex involving a lot of technical area. But in reality, in my personal opinion, it is indeed a complex field because it involves many disciplines. The first thing we think about is computer engineering and computer networking, but it's also involving communication, sociology, law practice. And this practice of cybersecurity doesn't only involve computer expert, but it's also involve everybody else who has a computing device that is connected to the internet, and this participation is obviously everybody in today's environment. When we think about the internet, we know that it's a good source of information but come with the convenience of information that we can access, we are constantly facing danger from the internet. Some of them we might be aware of. Some of them we might not be aware of. For example, when we search on the internet, a lot of time our browser will be saying that this site is not trusted, so we will be more careful. But what about the sites that we trusted? We know that those are legitimate sites, but they're not 100% bulletproof. What happen if those site are attacked by a hacker and then they will be a silent source of danger that we might not be aware of. So in the reality, we need to be more practicing the cybersecurity from our civil point of view and not from a technical point of view. When we talk about space application, we should know that all the hardware are computer-based or controlled by by computer system, and therefore the hardware and the software must go through some certification process so that they can be rated as airworthy or flightworthy. When we know that in the certification process is focusing on the functionality of the hardware and software, but one aspect that is explicitly and implicitly required is the security of those components. And we know that those components have to be connected with the ground control station, and the communication is through the air, through the radio signal, so anybody who has access to those communication radio signal will be able to control the space system that we put up there. And we certainly do not want our system to be hijacked by a third party. Another aspect of cybersecurity is that we try to design the space system in a very strong manner so it's almost impossible to hack in. But what about some other weak system that might be connected to the strong system? For example, the space system will be connected to the ground control station, and on the ground control station, we have the human controller, and those people have cell phone. They are allowed to use cell phone for communication. But at the same time, they are connected to the internet through the cell phone, and their cell phone might be connected to the computer that control the flight software and hardware. So what I want to say is we try to build strong system and we've protected them, but there will be some weaker system that we could not intended but exists to be connected to our strong system, and those are the points the hacker will be trying to attack. If we know how to control the access to those weak points, we will be having a much better system for the space system. And when we see the cybersecurity that is requiring the participation everywhere it's important to notice that there is a source of opportunity for students who enter the workforce to consider. Obviously students in engineering can focus their knowledge and expertise to provide technological solution to protect the system that we view. But we also have students in business who can focus their expertise to write business plan so that they can provide a pathway for the engineering advances to reach the market. We also have student in law who can focus their expertise in policy governing the internet, governing the cybersecurity practice. And we also have student in education who can focus their expertise to design how to teach cybersecurity practice, and student in every other discipline can focus their effort to implement security measure to protect the system that they are using in their field. So it's obvious that cybersecurity is everywhere and it implies job opportunity everywhere for everybody in every discipline of study. Thank you. >> Thank you, Trung, for those great comments. Great technology opportunities. But interesting, as well, is the theme that we're seeing across the entire symposium and in the virtual hallways that we're hearing conversations, and you pointed out some of them. Dr. Fleischer did, as well. And Bill, you mentioned it. It's not one thing. It's not just technology. It's different skills. And Amy, you mentioned that computer science is the hottest degree, but you have the hottest aerospace program in the world. I mean, so all this is kind of balancing. It's interdisciplinary. It's a structural change. Before we get into some of the, how they prepare the students, can you guys talk about some of the structural changes that are modern now in preparing in these opportunities, because societal impact is a, law potentially impact, it's how we educate. There's now cross-discipline skill sets. It's not just get the degree, see you out in the field. Bill, you want to start? >> Well, what's really fun about this job is that in the Air Force, I worked in the space and missile business, and what we saw was a heavy reliance on checklist format, security procedures, analog systems, and what we're seeing now in our world, both in the government and the commercial side, is a move to a digital environment, and the digital environment is a very quick and adaptive environment, and it's going to require a digital understanding. Matter of fact, the undersecretary of Air Force for acquisition recently referenced the need to understand the digital environment and how that's affecting acquisition. So as both Amy and Trung said, even business students are now in the cybersecurity business. And so again, what we're seeing is the change. Now, another phenomenon that we're seeing in the space world is there's just so much data. One of the ways that we addressed that in the past was to look at high-performance computing. There was a lot stricter control over how that worked. But now what we're seeing is adaptation of cloud, cloud technologies in space support, space data, command and control. And so what we see is a modern space engineer who has to understand digital, has to understand cloud, and has to understand the context of all those with a cyber environment. That's really changing the forefront of what is a space engineer, what is a digital engineer, and what is a future engineer, both commercial or government. So I think the opportunity for all of these things is really good, particularly for a polytechnic, Air Force Academy, and others that are focusing on a more widened experiential level of cloud and engineering and other capabilities. And I'll tell you the part that as the CIO I have to remind everybody, all this stuff works with the IT stuff. So you've got to understand how your IT infrastructures are tied and working together. As we noted earlier, one of the things is that these are all relays from point to point, and that architecture is part of your cybersecurity architecture. So again, every component has now become a cyber aware, cyber knowledgeable, and what we like to call as a cyber cognizant citizen where they have to understand the context. (speaking on mute) >> (indistinct) software Dr. Fleischer, talk about your perspective, 'cause you mentioned some of the things about computer science. I remember in the '80s when I got my computer science degree, they called us software engineers and then you became software developers. And then, so again, engineering is the theme. If you're engineering a system, there's now software involved, and there's also business engineering, business models. So talk about some of your comments, 'cause you mentioned computer science is hot. You got the aerospace. You got these multi-disciplines. You got definitely diversity, as well, brings more perspectives in, as well. Your thoughts on these structural interdisciplinary things? >> I think this is really key to making sure that students are prepared to work in the workforce is looking at the blurring between fields. No longer are you just a computer scientist. No longer are you just an aerospace engineer. You really have to have an expertise where you can work with people across disciplines. All of these fields are just working with each other in ways we haven't seen before. And Bill brought up data. You know, data science is something that's cross-cutting across all of our fields. So we want engineers that have the disciplinary expertise that they can go deep into these fields, but we want them to be able to communicate with each other and to be able to communicate across disciplines and to be able to work in teams that are across disciplines. You can no longer just work with other computer scientists or just work with other aerospace engineers. There's no part of engineering that is siloed anymore. So that's how we're changing. You have to be able to work across those disciplines. And as you, as Trung pointed out, ethics has to come into this. So you can no longer try to fully separate what we would traditionally have called the liberal arts and say, well, that's over there in general education. No, ethics is an important part of what we're doing and how we integrate that into our curriculum. So is communication. So is working on public policy and seeing where all these different aspects tie together to make the impact that we want to have in the world. So you no longer can work solo in these fields. >> That's great point. And Bill also mentioned the cloud. One thing about the cloud that's showed us is horizontal scalability has created a lot of value, and certainly data is now horizontal. Trung, you mentioned some of the things about cryptography for the kids out there, I mean, you can look at the pathway for career. You can do a lot of tech, but you don't have to go deep sometimes. You can as deep as you want, but there's so much more there. What technology do you see that's going to help students, in your opinion? >> Well, I'm a professor in computer science, so I like to talk a little bit about computer programming. Now we are working in complex projects. So most of the time we don't design a system from scratch. We build it from different components, and the components that we have, either we get it from vendors or sometimes we get it from the internet in the open source environment. It's fun to get the source code and then make it work to our own application. So now when we are looking at cryptology, when we talk about encryption, for example, we can easily get the source code from the internet. And the question, is it safe to use those source code? And my question is maybe not. So I always encourage my students to learn how to write source code the traditional way that I learned a long time ago before I allow them to use the open source environment. And one of the things that they have to be careful especially with encryption is the code that might be hidden in the source that they downloaded. Some of the source might be harmful. It might open up back gate for a hacker to get in later. We've heard about these back gates back then when Microsoft designed the operating system with the protection of encryption, and it is true that is existing. So while open source code is a wonderful place to develop complex system, but it's also a dangerous place that we have to be aware of. >> Great point. Before we get into the comments, one quick thing for each of you I'd like to get your comments on. There's been a big movement on growth mindset, which has been a great big believer in having a growth mindset and learning and all that good stuff. But now when you talk about some of these things we're mentioning about systems, there's a new trend around a systems mindset, because if everything's now a system, distributed systems now you have space and cybersecurity, you have to understand the consequences of changes. And you mention some of that, Trung, in changes in the source code. Could you guys share your quick opinions on the of systems thinking? Is that a mindset that people should be looking at? Because it used to be just one thing. Oh, you're a systems guy or gal. There you go. You're done. Now it seems to be in social media and data, everything seems to be systems. What's your take? Dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you. >> I'd say it's another way of looking at not being just so deep in your discipline. You have to understand what the impact of the decisions that you're making have on a much broader system. And so I think it's important for all of our students to get some exposure to that systems level thinking and looking at the greater impact of the decision that they're making. Now, the issue is where do you set the systems boundary, right? And you can set the systems boundary very close in and concentrate on an aspect of a design, or you can continually move that system boundary out and see where do you hit the intersections of engineering and science along with ethics and public policy and the greater society. And I think that's where some of the interesting work is going to be. And I think at least exposing students and letting them know that they're going to have to make some of these considerations as they move throughout their career is going to be vital as we move into the future. >> Bill, what's your thoughts? >> I absolutely agree with Amy. And I think there's a context here that reverse engineering and forensics analysis and forensics engineering are becoming more critical than ever. The ability to look at what you have designed in a system and then tear it apart and look at it for gaps and holes and problem sets. Or when you're given some software that's already been pre-developed, checking it to make sure it is really going to do what it says it's going to do. That forensics ability becomes more and more a skillset that also you need the verbal skills to explain what it is you're doing and what you found. So the communication side, the systems analysis side, the forensics analysis side, these are all things that are part of system approach that I think you could spend hours on and we still haven't really done a great job on it. So it's one of my fortes is really the whole analysis side of forensics and reverse engineering. >> Trung, real quick, systems thinking, your thoughts. >> Well, I'd like to share with you my experience when I worked in the space station program at NASA. We had two different approaches. One is a compound approach where we design it from the system general point of view where we put components together to be a complex system. But at the same time, we have the (indistinct) approach where we have an engineer who spent time and effort building individual component and they have to be expert in those tiny component that general component they deliver. And in the space station program, we bring together the (indistinct) engineer who designed everything in detail and the system manager who managed the system design from the top down, and we meet in the middle, and together we compromised a lot of differences and we delivered the space station that we are operating today. >> Great insight. And that's the whole teamwork collaboration that Dr. Fleischer was mentioning. Thanks so much for that insight. I wanted to get that out there because I know myself as a parent, I'm always trying to think about what's best for my kids and their friends as they grow up into the workforce. I know educators and leaders in industry would love to know some of the best practices around some of the structural changes. So thanks for that insight. But this topic's about students and helping them prepare. So we heard be multiple discipline, broaden your horizons, think like systems, top down, bottom up, work together as a team, and follow the data. So I got to ask you guys, there's a huge amount of job openings in cybersecurity. It's well-documented. And certainly with the intersection of space and cyber, it's only going to get bigger, right? You're going to see more and more demand for new types of jobs. How do we get high school and college students interested in security as a career? Dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you on this one. I would say really one of the best ways to get students interested in a career is to show them the impact that it's going to have. There's definitely always going to be students who are going to want to do the technology for the technology's sake, but that will limit you to a narrow set of students, and by showing the greater impact that these types of careers are going to have on the types of problems that you're going to be able to solve and the impact you're going to be able to have on the world around you, that's the word that we really need to get out. And a wide variety of students really respond to these messages. So I think it's really kind of reaching out at the elementary, the middle school level, and really kind of getting this idea that you can make a big difference, a big positive difference in the field with some of these careers, is going to be really critical. >> Real question to follow up. What do you think is the best entry point? You mentioned middle. I didn't hear elementary school. There's a lot of discussions around pipelining, and we're going to get into women in tech and underrepresented minorities later. But is it too early, or what's your feeling on this? >> My feeling is the earlier we can normalize it, the better. If you can normalize an interest in computers and technology and building in elementary school, that's absolutely critical. But the drop-off point that we're seeing is between what I would call late elementary and early middle school. And just kind of as an anecdote, I for years ran an outreach program for Girl Scouts in grades four and five and grade six, seven, and eight. And we had 100 slots in each program. And every year the program would sell out for girls in grades four and five, and every year we'd have spots remaining in grades six, seven, and eight. And that's literally where the drop-off is occurring between that late elementary and that middle school range. So that's the area that we need to target to make sure we keep those young women involved and interested as we move forward. >> Bill, how are we going to get these kids interested in security? You mentioned a few programs you got. >> Yeah. >> I mean, who wouldn't want to be a white hat hacker? I mean, that sounds exciting. >> So yeah, great questions. Let's start with some basic principles, though, is let me ask you a question, John. Name for me one white hat, good person hacker, the name, who works in the space industry and is an exemplar for students to look up to. >> You? >> Oh man, I'm feeling really... >> I'm only, I can't imagine a figure- >> (indistinct) the answer because the answer we normally get is the cricket sound. So we don't have individuals we've identified in those areas for them to look up to. >> I was going to be snarky and say most white hackers won't even use their real name, but... >> Right, so there's an aura around their anonymity here. So again, the real question is how do we get them engaged and keep them engaged? And that's what Amy was pointing out to exactly, the engagement and sticking with it. So one of the things that we're trying to do through our competition on the state level and other elements is providing connections. We call them ambassadors. These are people in the business who can contact the students that are in the game or in that challenge environment and let 'em interact and let 'em talk about what they do and what they're doing in life. But give them a challenging game format. A lot of computer-based training, capture the flag stuff is great, but if you can make it hands-on, if you can make it a learn by doing experiment, if you can make it personally involved and see the benefit as a result of doing that challenge and then talk to the people who do that on a daily basis, that's how you get them involved. The second part is part of what we're doing is we're involving partnership companies in the development of the teams. So this year's competition that we're running has 82 teams from across the state of California. Of those 82 teams at six students a team, middle school, high school, and many of those have company partners, and these are practitioners in cybersecurity who are working with those students to participate. It's that adult connectivity. It's that visualization. So at the competition this year, we have the founder of Defcon Red Flag is a participant to talk to the students. We have Vint Cerf, who is, of course, very well-known for something called the internet, to participate. It's really getting the students to understand who's in this, who can I look up to, and how do I stay engaged with them? >> There's definitely a celebrity aspect of it, I will agree. I mean, the influencer aspect here with knowledge is key. Can you talk about these ambassadors, and how far along are you on that program? First of all, the challenge stuff is, anything gamification-wise, we've seen that with hackathons, it just really works well. Creates bonding. People who create together can get sticky and get very high community aspect to it. Talk about this ambassador thing. What is that, industry, is that academic? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What is this ambassador thing? >> Industry partners that we've identified, some of which, and I won't hit all of 'em, so I'm sure I'll short change this, but Palo Alto, Cisco, Splunk, many of the companies in California, and what we've done is identified schools to participate in the challenge that may not have a strong STEM program or have any cyber program. And the idea of the company is they look for their employees who are in those school districts to partner with the schools to help provide outreach. It could be as simple as a couple hours a week, or it's a team support captain or it's providing computers and other devices to use. And so again, it's really about a constant connectivity and trying to help where some schools may not have the staff or support units in an area to really provide them what they need for connectivity. What that does is it gives us an opportunity to not just focus on it once a year, but throughout the year. So for the competition, all the teams that are participating have been receiving training and educational opportunities in the gamification side since they signed up to participate. So there's a website, there's learning materials, there's materials provided by certain vendor companies like Wireshark and others. So it's a continuum of opportunity for the students. >> You know, I've seen, just randomly, just got a random thought. Robotics clubs are moving then closer into that middle school area, Dr. Fleischer, and in certainly in high schools, it's almost like a varsity sport. E-sports is another one. My son just called me. "I made the JV at the college team." It's big and serious, right? And it's fun. This is the aspect of fun. It's hands-on. This is part of the culture down there. Learn by doing. Is there, like, a group? Is it, like, a club? I mean, how do you guys organize these bottoms-up organically interest topics? >> So here in the college of engineering, when we talk about learn by doing, we have learned by doing both in the classroom and out of the classroom. And if we look at these types of out of the classroom activities, we have over 80 clubs working on all different aspects, and many of these are bottom-up. The students have decided what they want to work on and have organized themselves around that. And then they get the leadership opportunities. The more experienced students train the less experienced students. And it continues to build from year after year after year with them even doing aspects of strategic planning from year to year for some of these competitions. Yeah, it's an absolutely great experience. And we don't define for them how their learn by doing experiences should be. We want them to define it. And I think the really cool thing about that is they have the ownership and they have the interest and they can come up with new clubs year after year to see which direction they want to take it, and we will help support those clubs as old clubs fade out and new clubs come in. >> Trung, real quick, before we go on the next talk track, what do you recommend for middle school, high school, or even elementary? A little bit of coding, Minecraft? I mean, how do you get 'em hooked on the fun and the dopamine of technology and cybersecurity? What's your take on that? >> On this aspect, I'd like to share with you my experience as a junior high and high school student in Texas. The university of Texas in Austin organized a competition for every high school in Texas in every field from poetry to mathematics to science, computer engineering. But it's not about the University of Texas. The University of Texas is only serving as a center for the final competition. They divide the competition to district and then regional and then state. At each level, we have local university and colleges volunteering to host the competition and make it fun for the student to participate. And also they connected the students with private enterprises to raise fund for scholarship. So student who see the competition is a fun event for them, they get exposed to different university hosting the event so that they can see different option for them to consider college. They also get a promise that if they participate, they will be considered for scholarship when they attend university and college. So I think the combination of fun and competition and the scholarship aspect will be a good thing to entice the student to commit to the area of cybersecurity. >> Got the engagement, the aspiration, scholarship, and you mentioned a volunteer. I think one of the things I'll observe is you guys are kind of hitting this as community. I mean, the story of Steve Jobs and Woz building the Mac, they called Bill Hewlett up in Palo Alto. He was in the phone book. And they scoured some parts from him. That's community. This is kind of what you're getting at. So this is kind of the formula we're seeing. So the next question I really want to get into is the women in technology, STEM, underrepresented minorities, how do we get them on cybersecurity career path? Is there a best practices there? Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I think it's really interesting. First thing I want to add is, if I could, just a clarification. What's really cool, the competition that we have and we're running, it's run by students from Cal Poly. So Amy referenced the clubs and other activities. So many of the organizers and developers of the competition that we're running are the students, but not just from engineering. So we actually have theater and liberal arts majors and technology for liberal arts majors who are part of the competition, and we use their areas of expertise, set design and other things, visualization, virtualization. Those are all part of how we then teach and educate cyber in our gamification and other areas. So they're all involved and they're learning, as well. So we have our students teaching other students. So we're really excited about that. And I think that's part of what leads to a mentoring aspect of what we're providing where our students are mentoring the other students. And I think it's also something that's really important in the game. The first year we held the game, we had several all-girl teams, and it was really interesting because A, they didn't really know if they could compete. I mean, this is their reference point. We don't know if. They did better than anybody. I mean, they just, they knocked the ball out of the park. The second part, then, is building that confidence level that can, going back and telling their cohorts that, hey, it's not this obtuse thing you can't do. It's something real that you can compete and win. And so again, it's building that camaraderie, that spirit, that knowledge that they can succeed. And I think that goes a long way. And Amy's programs and the reach out and the reach out that Cal Poly does to schools to develop, I think that's what it really is going to take. It is going to take that village approach to really increase diversity and inclusivity for the community. >> Dr. Fleischer, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned your outreach program and the drop-off, some of those data. You're deeply involved in this. You're passionate about it. What's your thoughts on this career path opportunity for STEM? >> Yeah, I think STEM is an incredible career path opportunity for so many people. There's so many interesting problems that we can solve, particularly in cyber and in space systems. And I think we have to meet the kids where they are and kind of show them what the exciting part is about it, right? But Bill was alluding to this when he was talking about trying to name somebody that you can point to. And I think having those visible people where you can see yourself in that is absolutely critical, and those mentors and that mentorship program. So we use a lot of our students going out into California middle schools and elementary schools. And you want to see somebody that's like you, somebody that came from your background and was able to do this. So a lot of times we have students from our National Society of Black Engineers or our Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers or our Society of Women Engineers, which we have over 1,000 members, 1,000 student members in our Society of Women Engineers who are doing these outreach programs. But like I also said, it's hitting them at the lower levels, too, and Girl Scouts is actually distinguishing themselves as one of the leading STEM advocates in the country. And like I said, they developed all these cybersecurity badges starting in kindergarten. There's a cybersecurity badge for kindergartener and first graders. And it goes all the way up through late high school. The same thing with space systems. And they did the space systems in partnership with NASA. They did the cybersecurity in partnership with Palo Alto Networks. And what you do is you want to build these skills that the girls are developing, and like Bill said, work in girl-led teams where they can do it, and if they're doing it from kindergarten on, it just becomes normal, and they never think, well, this is not for me. And they see the older girls who are doing it and they see a very clear path leading them into these careers. >> Yeah, it's interesting, you used the word normalization earlier. That's exactly what it is. It's life, you get life skills and a new kind of badge. Why wouldn't you learn how to be a white hat hacker or have some fun or learn some skills? >> Amy: Absolutely. >> Just in the grind of your fun day. Super exciting. Okay, Trung, your thoughts on this. I mean, you have a diverse, diversity brings perspective to the table in cybersecurity because you have to think like the other guy, the adversary. You got to be the white hat. You can't be a white hat unless you know how black hat thinks. So there's a lot of needs here for more points of view. How are we going to get people trained on this from underrepresented minorities and women? What's your thoughts? >> Well, as a member of the IEEE Professional Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, every year we participate in the engineering week. We deploy our members to local junior high school and high school to talk about our project to promote the study of engineering. But at the same time, we also participate in the science fair that the state of Texas is organizing. Our engineer will be mentoring students, number one, to help them with the project, but number two, to help us identify talent so that we can recruit them further into the field of STEM. One of the participation that we did was the competition of the, what they call Future City, where students will be building a city on a computer simulation. And in recent year, we promote the theme of smart city where city will be connected the individual houses and together into the internet. And we want to bring awareness of cybersecurity into that competition. So we deploy engineer to supervise the people, the students who participate in the competition. We bring awareness not in the technical detail level, but in what we've call the compound level so student will be able to know what required to provide cybersecurity for the smart city that they are building. And at the same time, we were able to identify talent, especially talent in the minority and in the woman, so that we can recruit them more actively. And we also raise money for scholarship. We believe that scholarship is the best way to entice student to continue education at the college level. So with scholarship, it's very easy to recruit them to the field and then push them to go further into the cybersecurity area. >> Yeah, I mean, I see a lot of the parents like, oh, my kid's going to go join the soccer team, we get private lessons, and maybe they'll get a scholarship someday. Well, they only do half scholarships. Anyway. I mean, if they spent that time doing these other things, it's just, again, this is a new life skill, like the Girl Scouts. And this is where I want to get into this whole silo breaking down, because Amy, you brought this up, and Bill, you were talking about it, as well. You got multiple stakeholders here with this event. You've got public, you've got private, and you've got educators. It's the intersection of all of them. It's, again, if those silos break down, the confluence of those three stakeholders have to work together. So let's talk about that. Educators. You guys are educating young minds. You're interfacing with private institutions and now the public. What about educators? What can they do to make cyber better? 'Cause there's no real manual. I mean, it's not like this court is a body of work of how to educate cybersecurity. Maybe it's more recent. There's cutting edge best practices. But still, it's an evolving playbook. What's your thoughts for educators? Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I'm going to turn to Amy and let her go first. >> Let you go. >> That's fine. >> I would say as educators, it's really important for us to stay on top of how the field is evolving, right? So what we want to do is we want to promote these tight connections between educators and our faculty and applied research in industry and with industry partnerships. And I think that's how we're going to make sure that we're educating students in the best way. And you're talking about that inner, that confluence of the three different areas. And I think you have to keep those communication lines open to make sure that the information on where the field is going and what we need to concentrate on is flowing down into our educational process. And that works in both ways, that we can talk as educators and we can be telling industry what we're working on and what types of skills our students have and working with them to get the opportunities for our students to work in industry and develop those skills along the way, as well. And I think it's just all part of this really looking at what's going to be happening and how do we get people talking to each other? And the same thing with looking at public policy and bringing that into our education and into these real hands-on experiences. And that's how you really cement this type of knowledge with students, not by talking to them and not by showing them, but letting them do it. It's this learn by doing and building the resiliency that it takes when you learn by doing. And sometimes you learn by failing, but you just pick up and you keep going. And these are important skills that you develop along the way. >> You mentioned sharing, too. That's the key. Collaborating and sharing knowledge. It's an open world and everyone's collaborating. Bill, private-public partnerships. I mean, there's a real, private companies, you mentioned Palo Alto Networks and others. There's a real intersection there. They're motivated. They could, there's scholarship opportunities. Trung points to that. What is the public-private educator view there? How do companies get involved and what's the benefit for them? >> Well, that's what a lot of the universities are doing is to bring in as part of either their cyber centers or institutes people who are really focused on developing and furthering those public-private partnerships. That's really what my role is in all these things is to take us to a different level in those areas, not to take away from the academic side, but to add additional opportunities for both sides. Remember, in a public-private partnership, all entities have to have some gain in the process. Now, what I think is really interesting is the timing on particularly this subject, space and cybersecurity. This has been an absolute banner year for space. The standup of Space Force, the launch of commercial partnership, you know, commercial platforms delivering astronauts to the space station, recovering them, and bringing them back. The ability of a commercial satellite platform to be launched. Commercial platforms that not only launch but return back to where they're launched from. These are things that are stirring the hearts of the American citizens, the kids, again, they're getting interested. They're seeing this and getting enthused. So we have to seize upon that and we have to find a way to connect that. Public-private partnerships is the answer for that. It's not one segment that can handle it all. It's all of them combined together. If you look at space, space is going to be about commercial. It's going to be about civil. Moving from one side of the Earth to the other via space. And it's about government. And what's really cool for us, all those things are in our backyard. That's where that public-private comes together. The government's involved. The private sector's involved. The educators are involved. And we're all looking at the same things and trying to figure out, like this forum, what works best to go to the future. >> You know, if people are bored and they want to look for an exciting challenge, you couldn't have laid it out any clearer. It's the most exciting discipline. It's everything. I mean, we just talk about space. GPS is, everything we do is involved, has to do with satellites. (laughs) >> I have to tell you a story on that right? We have a very unique GPS story right in our backyard. So our sheriff is the son of the father of GPS for the Air Force. So you can't get better than that when it comes to being connected to all those platforms. So we really want to say, you know, this is so exciting for all of us because it gives everybody a job for a long time. >> You know, the kids that think TikTok's exciting, wait till they see what's going on here with you guys, this program. Trung, final word on this from the public side. You're at the Air Force. You're doing research. Are you guys opening it up? Are you integrating into the private and educational sectors? How do you see that formula playing out? And what's the best practice for students and preparing them? >> I think it's the same in every university in the engineering program will require our students to do the final project before graduation. And in this kind of project, we send them out to work in the private industry, the private company that sponsor them. They get the benefit of having an intern working for them and they get the benefit of reviewing the students as the prospective employee in the future. So it's good for the student to gain practical experience working in this program. Sometimes we call that a co-op program. Sometimes we call that a capstone program. And the company will accept the student on a trial basis, giving them some assignment and then pay them a little bit of money. So it's good for the student to earn some extra money, to have some experience that they can put on their resume when they apply for the final, for the job. So the collaboration between university and private sector is really important. When I join a faculty normally there already exist that connection. It came from normally, again, from the dean of engineering, who would wine and dine with companies, build up relationship, and sign up agreement. But it's us professor who have to do the (indistinct) approach to do a good performance so that we can build up credibility to continue the relationship with those company and the student that we selected to send to those company. We have to make sure that they will represent the university well, they will do a good job, and they will make a good impression. >> Thank you very much for a great insight, Trung, Bill, Amy. Amazing topic. I'd like to end this session with each of you to make a statement on the importance of cybersecurity to space. We'll go Trung, Bill, and Amy. Trung, the importance of cybersecurity to space, brief statement. >> The importance of cybersecurity, we know that it's affecting every component that we are using and we are connecting to, and those component, normally we use them for personal purpose, but when we enter the workforce, sometimes we connect them to the important system that the government or the company are investing to be put into space. So it's really important to practice cybersecurity, and a lot of time, it's very easy to know the concept. We have to be careful. But in reality, we tend to forget to to practice it the way we forget how to drive a car safely. And with driving a car, we have a program called defensive driving that requires us to go through training every two or three years so that we can get discount. Every organization we are providing the annual cybersecurity practice not to tell people about the technology, but to remind them about the danger of not practicing cybersecurity and it's a requirement for every one of us. >> Bill, the importance of cybersecurity to space. >> It's not just about young people. It's about all of us. As we grow and we change, as I referenced it, we're changing from an analog world to a digital world. Those of us who have been in the business and have hair that looks like mine, we need to be just as cognizant about cybersecurity practice as the young people. We need to understand how it affects our lives, and particularly in space, because we're going to be talking about people, moving people to space, moving payloads, data transfer, all of those things. And so there's a whole workforce that needs to be retrained or upskilled in cyber that's out there. So the opportunity is ever expansive for all of us. >> Amy, the importance of cybersecurity in space. >> I mean the emphasis of cybersecurity is space just simply can't be over emphasized. There are so many aspects that are going to have to be considered as systems get ever more complex. And as we pointed out, we're putting people's lives at stake here. This is incredibly, incredibly complicated and incredibly impactful, and actually really exciting, the opportunities that are here for students and the workforce of the future to really make an enormous impact on the world around us. And I hope we're able to get that message out to students and to children today, that these are really interesting fields that you need to consider. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, and the importance of cybersecurity and space is the future of the world's all going to happen in and around space with technology, people, and society. Thank you to Cal Poly, and thank you for watching the Cybersecurity and Space Symposium 2020. (bright music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back already, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today having a Cube conversation. You know nobody can really travel, conference seasons are all kind of on hold, or going to digital, so there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But thankfully we've got the capability to invite some of our community in. We're really interested in hearing from some of the leaders that we have in the community about what's going on in their world and you know, what they're telling their people. And what can we learn. So we're excited to have a good friend of mine who went to business school together, God it seems like it was over 20 years ago. He's Ben Nelson, the chairman and CEO of the Minerva Project. Ben great to see you and welcome. >> Thanks so much, great to be here. >> Yeah. So, you have always been kind of a trailblazer, I mean way back in the day I think that you've only had like two jobs in all this time, you know. (laughing) You know kind of changing the world of digital photography. >> Yeah three or four, three or four. >> Three or four. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> And after a really long run, you made this move to start something new in education. >> Yeah. >> Education's a big hairy monster. There's a lot of angles. And you started the Minerva Project, and I can't believe I looked before we got on today that that was nine years ago. So tell us about the Minerva Project, how you got started, kind of what's the mission, and then we'll get into it. >> Yeah so Minerva exists and it sounds somewhat lofty for an organization, but we do exist to serve this mission which is to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world. We think a wiser world is a better world. We think that really wisdom is the core goal of education and we decided that higher education is the area that is both most in need of transformation and also one that we're most capable of influencing. And so we set about actually creating our own university demonstrating an example of what a university can do. And then, helping tool other institutions to follow in those footsteps. >> Yeah it's a really interesting take. There's often times we're told if a time traveler came here from 1776, right, and walked around and would look at the way we drive, look at the way we communicate, look at the way we transact business. All these things would be so new and novel inventive. If you walked them over to Stanford or Harvard he'd feel right at home, you know. >> Yeah. >> So the education is still kind of locked in to this way that it's always been. So for you to kind of take a new approach, I mean I guess it did take actually starting your own school to be able to execute and leverage some of these new methods and tools, versus trying to move what is a pretty, you know, kind of hard to move institutional base. >> Yeah absolutely. And it's also you know, because we have to remember that universities as an institution started before the printing press. So if you go and talk to pretty much any university president, and ask him or her what is the mission of a university, generically, forget you know your university or what have you. They'll say, "Well generically universities exist "to create and disseminate knowledge." That's why they've been founded 1000 years ago and that's why they exist today. And you know, creation of knowledge I think there's a good argument to be made that the research mission of a university is important for the advancement of society and that it needs to be supported. Certainly directly in that regard. So much of you know the innovation that we benefit from today came from university labs and research. That's an important factor. But the dissemination of knowledge is a bit of an odd thing. I guess before the printing press, sure, yeah, I mean kind of hard to disseminate knowledge except for if you gather a whole bunch of people in a room and talk at them. Maybe they scribble notes very quickly. Well that's a decent way of disseminating knowledge because they can you know, one mouth and many pieces of paper and then they can read it later or study it. I guess that makes sense it's somewhat efficient. But after the printing press and certainly after the internet, the concept of a university needing to disseminate knowledge as it's core mission seems kind of crazy. It can't be that that's what universities are for. But effectively they're still structured in that way. And I don't think any university president when actually challenged in that way would argue the point. They would say, "Oh yes of course, "well what we really need to do is teach people "how to use knowledge or evaluate knowledge "or make sure that we communicate effectively "or understand how that knowledge can interact "with other pieces of knowledge and you know, "create new ways of thinking, et cetera." But that isn't the dissemination of knowledge. And that isn't the way that universities are actually structured. >> But it's funny that you say that. Even before you get to whether they should be still trying to disseminate knowledge, they're not even using the new tools now that they had the printing press that come along. (laughing) To disseminate knowledge. You know it's really interesting as we're going through this time right now with the coronavirus and a lot of things that were kind of traditional are moving in to digital and this new tool called Zoom which never fails to amaze me how many people are having their first Zoom call ever, right. >> Right, right. >> Ever, right I mean how long ago was Skype, how long ago was WebX. These tools have been around for a really interesting time, a long time. But now, you know, kind of a critical mass of technology that anybody can flip their laptop up, or their phone and go. You know you guys just in terms of a pure kind of tools play you know took advantage of the things that are available here in 2020 and 2019. So I wonder if you can share with the folks that don't have experience kind of using remote learning and remote access, you know what are some of the lessons you learned what are some of the best practice. What should people kind of think about what's capable and the things you can do with digital tools that you can't do when you're trying to get everybody in a classroom together at the same time. >> Right, so I think first and foremost, there's kind of the nuts and bolts. The basics. Right. So one of the things that you know, education environments have always been able to get away with is when you've got everyone in a room and you know, you're kind of cutting them off from the rest of life, you sometimes don't realize that you're talking into thin air, right. That maybe speaking students are not listening, they're not absorbing what you're saying. But you know they have to show up, at least in K 12, and higher ed they don't bother showing up and so the 15 people who do wind up showing up from the 100 person lecture I guess you do you say, "Oh at least they're listening." But the reality is that when you're online, you're competing with everything. You're competing with the next tab, you're competing with just not showing up. It's so much easier to just, you know, open up some game or something, some YouTube video. And so you've got to make this engaging. And making it engaging isn't about being entertaining. And that's actually one of the major problems of assessing who is a good professor and who isn't. You know people look at student reviews, right. They say, "Oh, you know such and such "was such a great professor." But when you actually track student reviews of professors to learning outcomes, there's a slight negative correlation. Right which means that the better the students believe the professor is actually that is an indicator that they've learned a little bit less. >> Right. >> That's really bizarre, intuitively. But when you actually think about it deeply, you realize that entertaining students isn't the job of a professor. It's actually teaching them. It's actually getting them to think through the material. And learning is hard, it's not easy. So you have to bring some of those techniques of engagement into online. And you can do that but it requires a lot of interactivity. So that's aspect number one. But really the much bigger idea isn't that you just do what you do offline and then put it online, right. Technology isn't at it's best when it mimics what you do without it, right. Technology didn't build an exact replica of the horse. >> Right, right. >> And said you know, ride that. Right. It doesn't make any sense, right. Instead, what technology should do is things you cannot do offline. One of the things that worked 300, 400 years ago is that you could study a subject matter in full. One professor, one teacher could teach you pretty much everything that people needed to know in a given field. In fact, the fields themselves were collapsed, right. Science, mathematics, you know, ethics were all put under this idea called philosophy. Philosophy was everything. Right. And so there's really we didn't have much to learn. But today, because we have so much information and so many tools to be able to process through that information, what happens is that education gets atomized. And you know you go through a college education you're you know, being taught by 25, 30 some different professors. But one professor really has no idea what you've learned previously. Even when they're in a 101, 102 sequence. How many times have we been in kind of the 102 class where in the first month all the professor did was repeat what happened in the 101 class because they didn't feel comfortable that you actually learned it. Or if the professor before them taught it the way they wanted it taught. >> Right, right. >> And that's because education is done offline with no data. If you actually have education in a data rich environment you can actually design cross cutting curriculum. You can shift the professor's role from disseminating knowledge to actually having students or mentoring students and guiding them in how to apply that knowledge. And so, once you have institutional views of curricula, you can use technology to deliver an institution wide education. Not by teaching you a way of thinking or a set of content, but giving you a set of tools that broadly any professor can agree on, and then apply them to whatever context professors want to present. And that creates a much more holistic education, and it's one that only can be done using technology. >> Ben that was a mouthful. You got into all kinds of good stuff there. (laughing) So let's break some of it down. That was fascinating. I mean I think you know the asynchronous versus synchronous opportunity if you will, to as you said kind of atomize education to the creation of content right the distribution of content and more importantly the consumption of content. Because why should I have to change my day if the person I want to hear is only available next Tuesday at noon pacific, right. It makes no sense anymore. And the long tail opportunities for this content that lives out there forever is pretty interesting. But it's a very interesting you know, kind of point of view if you assume that all the knowledge is already out there and now your job as an educator is to help train people to critically think about what's out there. How do I incorporate that, what are the things I should be thinking about when I'm integrating that into my decision. It's a very different way. And as you said, everything is an alt tab away. Literally the whole world is an alt tab away from that webinar. (laughing) Very good stuff. >> Exactly right. >> And the other piece I want to get your take on is really kind of lifetime learning. And I didn't know that you guys were you know kind of applying some of your principles oh my goodness where you actually measure effectiveness of teaching. And measure how long people hang out in the class. And measure whether it's good or not. But you're applying this really now in helping companies do digital transformation. And I think, you know, coming at that approach from a shift in thinking is really a different approach. I was just looking at an Andy Jassy keynote from a couple years ago yesterday, and he talked about the A number one thing in digital transformation is a buy in at senior leadership and a top down priority. So you know, what do you see in some of your engagements, how are you applying some of this principles to help people think about change differently? >> Yeah you know I think recessions are a very telling time for corporate learning. Right. And if you notice, what is the first budget that gets cut when economic times get tough it's the you know employee learning and development. Right. Those budgets just get decimated. Right off the bat. And that's primarily because employees don't see much value out of it, and employers don't really measure the impact of those things. No one's saying, "Oh my God, 'this is such an incredible program. "My employees were able to do x before this program, 'and then they were able to do one point five x afterward." You know, if people had that kind of training program in the traditional system, then they would be multi-billion dollar behemoths in the space. And there really are not. And that's because again, most of education is done in content land. And it's usually very expensive, and the results are not very good. Instead, if you actually think about learning tools as opposed to information, and then applying those tools in your core business, all of a sudden you can actually see transformation. And so when we do executive education programs as an example, you know we ask our learner how much of what you've learned can you apply to your job tomorrow? Right. And we see an overwhelming majority of our students are saying something like more than 80 to 90% of what they learned they can apply immediately. >> Wow, that's impressive. >> That's useful. >> Right. And why do you think is it just kind of institutional stuck in the mud? Is it the wrong incentive structure? I mean why you're talking about very simple stuff right. >> Yeah. >> Why don't you actually measure outcomes and adjust accordingly, you know. Use a data centric methodology to improve things over time, you know. Use digital tools in way that they can get you more than you can do in a physical space. I mean is it just inertia? I mean I really think this is a watershed moment because now everybody is forced into using these tools. Right. And there's a lot of, you know kind of psychology around habits and habit forming. >> Right, exactly. >> And if you do something for a certain amount of time every single day you know it becomes a habit. And if these stay in place orders which in my mind I think we are going to be doing it for a while, kind of change people's behavior and the way they use technology to interact with other folks. You know it could be a real, you know, kind of turning point in everyone's opening eyes that digital is different than physical. It's not exactly the same. There are some things in physical that are just better, but, you know there's a whole realm of things in digital that you cannot do when you're bound by time, location, and space. >> Exactly right. That's right. And I think the reason that it's so difficult to shift the system is because the training of people in the system, and I'm speaking specifically about higher education, really has nothing to do with education. Think about how a university professor becomes a university professor. How do they show up in a classroom? They get a bachelor's degree, where they don't learn anything about how to teach or how the mind works. They get a PhD, in which they learn nothing about how to teach or how the mind works. They do a post-doctoral research fellowship where they research in their field, right. Then they become an associate professor or an assistant professor and non-tenure, right. And in order to get tenure they've got seven years in order to make it on a publishing track, because how they teach is irrelevant. And they don't get any formal training on how to teach or how the brain works, right. Then they become you know, a junior tenured professor. A full tenured professor, right. And then maybe they become an administrator. Right. And so if you think about it, all they know is their field. And I've had conversations with academics which are to me befuddling, in the sense that you know they'll say, "Oh, you know, "everyone should learn how to think "like a historian. "Oh no everybody should learn to think "like an economist. "Everyone should learn to think "like a physicist." And you kind of unpack it, you say, "Well why?" And it's, "Oh well because we deploy pools "that nobody else deploys and it's so great." Right. And so it's OK give me an example. I had this conversation with a university president who was a historian. And that president said, "Look, you know, "what we do is we look at you know, "primary source materials hundreds of years ago "and learn to interpret what they say to us "and ascertain truth from that. "That's an incredibly important skill." I said, "OK, so what you're saying is you "examine evidence and evaluate that evidence "to see what it can actually tell you. "Isn't that what every single scientist, "social scientist, no matter what field they're in does? "Isn't that what a physicist does? "Isn't that what an economist does? "Isn't that what a psychologist does? "Right, isn't that what an English professor does?" Right actually thinking about I remember I took a mini module when I was an undergraduate with Rebecca Bushnell who is a literature professor, eventually became the dean of the college of arts and science at the University of Pennsylvania. And, we basically looked at a text written 400 years before, and tried to figure out what parts of the text were written by the author, what were transcription errors, and what was censored. That's looking at evidence. >> Right, right. >> This was an English professor. It's the exact same process. But because people know about it in their field and they think the only way to get to it is through their field, as opposed to teaching the tool, it can't get out of their own way. >> Yeah. >> And that's why I think education is so stuck right now. >> Yeah. That's crazy. And you know we're all victims of kind of the context in which we look through everything, and the lens in which we apply to everything that we see which is you know one of my things that there isn't really a kind of a truth it's what is your interpretation. And that's really you know, what is in your head. But I want to close it out. And Ben I really appreciate your time today. It's been a great conversation. And really kind of take it back to your mission which is around critical thinking. You know there's a lot of conversation lately, you know, this kind of rush to STEM as the thing. And there's certainly a lot of great job opportunities coming out of school if you're a data scientist and you can write in R. But what I think is a more interesting conversation is to get out of your own way. You know is the critical thinking as you know the AI and RPA and all these other things kind of take over more of these tasks and really this higher order need for people to think through complex problems. >> Right. >> I mean like we're going through today. Thank God people who are qualified and can see ahead and saw an exponential curve potential just really causing serious damage when we're still to head into this thing to take aggressive action. Dr. Sarah Cody here locally here you know, telling the San Jose Sharks you can't play. You know that is not an easy decision. But thankfully they did and they had the data. But really just your kind of thoughts on why you prioritize on critical thinking and you know can what you see with your students when they get out into the real world applying critical thinking not necessarily equations. >> Yeah look I think there's no better demonstration of how important critical thinking is than when you look at the kinds of advances that STEM is trying to make. Right. What happens any time we get a demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence, right. You remember a few years ago when Microsoft released it's AI engine. Right. Smartest engineers working on it, and all of a sudden it you know spat back misogynist racist types of perspectives. Why? The training set was garbage. It wasn't that the technology was bad, actually it was amazing technology. But the people who were writing it couldn't think. They didn't know how to think two steps ahead and say, "Wait a second, if we train "the information, kind of the random comments "we see on the internet, you know, "who bothers to write anonymomys comments?" Trolls, right. And so if we train it on a troll data set, it'll become an artificial intelligent troll. Right. It doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to actually realize that, but it takes some. >> Right. >> Right. And when you focus merely on those technical skills what you wind up doing is wasting it. Right. And so if you ground people in critical thinking, and we see this with our graduate. You know we graduated our very first class in May. And we had what as far as I can tell is the best graduate school placement of any graduating class in the country. As far as the quality of offers they got. We had a 94% placement rate in jobs in graduate positions. Which I think is tied with the very best ivy league institutions. And the kinds of jobs that the students are getting and six months into them the kinds of reviews that their employers are giving us looks nothing like a recent undergraduate. These are oftentimes types of jobs that are unavailable to recent undergraduates. And you know we had one student recently actually just told me, fresh in my mind, even though he was the youngest person in his company, when the CEO of his company has a strategic question he comes to him. And when he's in a meeting, full of PhDs, everybody looks to him to run the meeting and set the agenda. He's six months out of undergrad, right. And you know I can give you story after story after story about each and every one of these graduate. And it's not because they were born with it. They actually had a wise education. >> Yeah. Ben well that's a great story. And we'll leave it there. Congratulations again to you and the team at Minerva and what you've built and your first graduating class. Great accomplishment and really great to catch up, it's been too long. And when this is all over we'll have to get together and have an adult beverage. >> That would be wonderful. >> All right Ben thanks a lot. >> Thanks so much Jeff. >> All right. You've been watching theCUBE. Great check in with Ben Nelson. Thanks for watching. Everybody stay safe and we'll see you next time. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering UIPath FORWARD America's 2019. Brought to you by UIPath. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of UIPath FORWARD, here in Sin City, Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Dave Velante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Kurt Carlson, Associate Dean for faculty and academic affairs of the Mason School of Business at the college of William and Mary. Thanks for coming on the show. >> Thanks you for having me. >> Rebecca: And we have Tom Clancy, the SVP of learning at UIPath, thank you so much. >> Great to be here. >> You're a Cube alum, so thank you for coming back. >> I've been here a few times. >> A Cube veteran, I should say. >> I think 10 years or so >> So we're talking today about a robot for every student, this was just announced in August, William and Mary is the first university in the US to provide automation software to every undergraduate student, thanks to a four million dollar investment from UIPath. Tell us a little bit about this program, Kurt, how it works and what you're trying to do here. >> Yeah, so first of all, to Tom and the people at UIPath for making this happen. This is a bold and incredible initiative, one that, frankly, when we had it initially, we thought that maybe we could get a robot for every student, we weren't sure that other people would be willing to go along with that, but UIPath was, they see the vision, and so it was really a meeting of the minds on a common purpose. The idea was pretty simple, this technology is transforming the world in a way that students, we think it's going to transform the way that students actually are students. But it's certainly transforming the world that our students are going into. And so, we want to give them exposure to it. We wanted to try and be the first business school on the planet that actually prepares students not just for the way RPA's being used today, but the way that it's going to be used when AI starts to take hold, when it becomes the gateway to AI three, four, five years down the road. So, we talked to UIPath, they thought it was a really good idea, we went all in on it. Yeah, all of our starting juniors in the business school have robots right now, they've all been trained through the academy live session putting together a course, it's very exciting. >> So, Tom, you've always been an innovator when it comes to learning, here's my question. How come we didn't learn this school stuff when we were in college? We learned Fortran. >> I don't know, I only learned BASIC, so I can't speak to that. >> So you know last year we talked about how you're scaling, learning some of the open, sort of philosophy that you have. So, give us the update on how you're pushing learning FORWARD, and why the College of William and Mary. >> Okay, so if you buy into a bot for every worker, or a bot for every desktop, that's a lot of bots, that's a lot of desktops, right? There's studies out there from the research companies that say that there's somewhere a hundred and 200 million people that need to be educated on RPA, RPA/AI. So if you buy into that, which we do, then traditional learning isn't going to do it. We're going to miss the boat. So we have a multi-pronged approach. The first thing is to democratize RPA learning. Two and a half years ago we made, we created RPA Academy, UIPath academy, and 100% free. After two and a half years, we have 451,000 people go through the academy courses, that's huge. But we think there's a lot more. Over the next next three years we think we'll train at least two million people. But the challenge still is, if we train five million people, there's still a hundred million that need to know about it. So, the second biggest thing we're doing is, we went out, last year at this event, we announced our academic alliance program. We had one university, now we're approaching 400 universities. But what we're doing with William and Mary is a lot more than just providing a course, and I'll let Kurt talk to that, but there is so much more that we could be doing to educate our students, our youth, upscaling, rescaling the existing workforce. When you break down that hundred million people, they come from a lot of different backgrounds, and we're trying to touch as many people as we can. >> You guys are really out ahead of the curve. Oftentimes, I mean, you saw this a little bit with data science, saw some colleges leaning in. So what lead you guys to the decision to actually invest and prioritize RPA? >> Yeah, I think what we're trying to accomplish requires incredibly smart students. It requires students that can sit at the interface between what we would think of today as sort of an RPA developer and a decision maker who would be stroking the check or signing the contract. There's got to be somebody that sits in that space that understands enough about how you would actually execute this implementation. What's the right buildout of that, how we're going to build a portfolio of bots, how we're going to prioritize the different processes that we might automate, How we're going to balance some processes that might have a nice ROI but be harder for the individual who's process is being automated to absorb against processes that the individual would love to have automated, but might not have as great of an ROI. How do you balance that whole set of things? So what we've done is worked with UIPath to bring together the ideas of automation with the ideas of being a strategic thinker in process automation, and we're designing a course in collaboration to help train our students to hit the ground running. >> Rebecca, it's really visionary, isn't it? I mean it's not just about using the tooling, it's about how to apply the tooling to create competitive advantage or change lives. >> I used to cover business education for the Financial Times, so I completely agree that this really is a game changer for the students to have this kind of access to technology and ability to explore this leading edge of software robotics and really be, and graduate from college. This isn't even graduate school, they're graduating from college already having these skills. So tell me, Kurt, what are they doing? What is the course, what does it look like, how are they using this in the classroom? >> The course is called a one credit. It's 14 hours but it actually turns into about 42 when you add this stuff that's going on outside of class. They're learning about these large conceptual issues around how do you prioritize which processes, what's the process you should go through to make sure that you measure in advance of implementation so that you can do an audit on the backend to have proof points on the effectiveness, so you got to measure in advance, creating a portfolio of perspective processes and then scoring them, how do you do that, so they're learning all that sort of conceptual straight business slash strategy implementation stuff, so that's on the first half, and to keep them engaged with this software, we're giving them small skills, we're calling them skillets. Small skills in every one of those sessions that add up to having a fully automated and programmed robot. Then they're going to go into a series of days where every one of those days they're going to learn a big skill. And the big skills are ones that are going to be useful for the students in their lives as people, useful in lives as students, and useful in their lives as entrepreneurs using RPA to create new ventures, or in the organizations they go to. We've worked with UIPath and with our alums who've implement this, folks at EY, Booz. In fact, we went up to DC, we had a three hour meeting with these folks. So what are the skills students need to learn, and they told us, and so we build these three big classes, each around each one of those skills so that our students are going to come out with the ability to be business translators, not necessarily the hardcore programmers. We're not going to prevent them from doing that, but to be these business translators that sit between the programming and the decision makers. >> That's huge because, you know, like, my son's a senior in college. He and his friends, they all either want to work for Amazon, Google, an investment bank, or one of the big SIs, right? So this is a perfect role for a consultant to go in and advise. Tom, I wanted to ask you, and you and I have known each other for a long time, but one of the reasons I think you were successful at your previous company is because you weren't just focused on a narrow vendor, how to make metrics work, for instance. I presume you're taking the same philosophy here. It transcends UIPath and is really more about, you know, the category if you will, the potential. Can you talk about that? >> So we listen to our customers and now we listen to the universities too, and they're going to help guide us to where we need to go. Most companies in tech, you work with marketing, and you work with engineering, and you build product courses. And you also try to sell those courses, because it's a really good PNL when you sell training. We don't think that's right for the industry, for UIPath, or for our customers, or our partners. So when we democratize learning, everything else falls into place. So, as we go forward, we have a bunch of ideas. You know, as we get more into AI, you'll see more AI type courses. We'll team with 400 universities now, by end of next year, we'll probably have a thousand universities signed up. And so, there's a lot of subject matter expertise, and if they come to us with ideas, you mentioned a 14 hour course, we have a four hour course, and we also have a 60 hour course. So we want to be as flexible as possible, because different universities want to apply it in different ways. So we also heard about Lean Six Sigma. I mean, sorry, Lean RPA, so we might build a course on Lean RPA, because that's really important. Solution architect is one of the biggest gaps in the industry right now so, so we look to where these gaps are, we listen to everybody, and then we just execute. >> Well, it's interesting you said Six Sigma, we have Jean Younger coming on, she's a Six Sigma expert. I don't know if she's a black belt, but she's pretty sure. She talks about how to apply RPA to make business processes in Six Sigma, but you would never spend the time and money, I mean, if it's an airplane engine, for sure, but now, so that's kind of transformative. Kurt, I'm curious as to how you, as a college, market this. You know, you're very competitive industry, if you will. So how do you see this attracting students and separating you guys from the pack? >> Well, it's a two separate things. How do we actively try to take advantage of this, and what effects is it having already? Enrollments to the business school, well. Students at William and Mary get admitted to William and Mary, and they're fantastic, amazingly good undergraduate students. The best students at William and Mary come to the Raymond A. Mason school of business. If you take our undergraduate GPA of students in the business school, they're top five in the country. So what we've seen since we've announced this is that our applications to the business school are up. I don't know that it's a one to one correlation. >> Tom: I think it is. >> I believe it's a strong predictor, right? And part because it's such an easy sell. And so, when we talk to those alums and friends in DC and said, tell us why this is, why our students should do this, they said, well, if for no other reason, we are hiring students that have these skills into data science lines in the mid 90s. When I said that to my students, they fell out of their chairs. So there's incredible opportunity here for them, that's the easy way to market it internally, it aligns with things that are happening at William and Mary, trying to be innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial. We've been talking about being innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial for longer than we've been doing it, we believe we're getting there, we believe this is the type of activity that would fit for that. As far as promoting it, we're telling everybody that will listen that this is interesting, and people are listening. You know, the standard sort of marketing strategy that goes around, and we are coordinating with UIPath on that. But internally, this sells actually pretty easy. This is something people are looking for, we're going to make it ready for the world the way that it's going to be now and in the future. >> Well, I imagine the big consultants are hovering as well. You know, you mentioned DC, Booz Allen, Hughes and DC, and Excensior, EY, Deloitte, PWC, IBM itself. I mean it's just, they all want the best and the brightest, and now you're going to have this skill set that is a sweet spot for their businesses. >> Kurt: That's the plan. >> I'm just thinking back to remembering who these people are, these are 19 and 20 year olds. They've never experienced the dreariness of work and the drudge tasks that we all know well. So, what are you, in terms of this whole business translator idea, that they're going to be the be people that sit in the middle and can sort of be these people who can speak both languages. What kind of skills are you trying to impart to them, because it is a whole different skill set. >> Our vision is that in two or three years, the nodes and the processes that are currently... That currently make implementing RPA complex and require significant programmer skills, these places where, right now, there's a human making a relatively mundane decision, but it's sill a model. There's a decision node there. We think AI is going to take over that. The simple, AI's going to simply put models into those decision nodes. We also think a lot of the programming that takes place, you're seeing it now with studio X, a lot of the programming is going to go away. And what that's going to do is it's going to elevate the business process from the mundane to the more human intelligent, what would currently be considered human intelligence process. When we get into that space, people skills are going to be really important, prioritizing is going to be really important, identifying organizations that are ripe for this, at this moment in time, which processes to automate. Those are the kind of skills we're trying to get students to develop, and what we're selling it partly as, this is going to make you ready of the world the way we think it's going to be, a bit of a guess. But we're also saying if you don't want to automate mundane processes, then come with us on a different magic carpet ride. And that magic carpet ride is, imagine all the processes that don't exist right now because nobody would ever conceive of them because they couldn't possibly be sustained, or they would be too mundane. Now think about those processes through a business lens, so take a business student and think about all the potential when you look at it that way. So this course that we're building has that, everything in the course is wrapped in that, and so, at the end of the course, they're going to be doing a project, and the project is to bring a new process to the world that doesn't currently exist. Don't program it, don't worry about whether or not you have a team that could actually execute it. Just conceive of a process that doesn't currently exist and let's imagine, with the potential of RPA, how we would make that happen. That's going to be, we think we're going to be able to bring a lot of students along through that innovative lens even though they are 19 and 20, because 19 and 20 year olds love innovation, while they've never submitted a procurement report. >> Exactly! >> A innovation presentation. >> We'll need to do a Cube follow up with that. >> What Kurt just said, is the reason why, Tom, I think this market is being way undercounted. I think it's hard for the IDCs and the forces, because they look back they say how big was it last year, how fast are these companies growing, but, to your point, there's so much unknown processes that could be attacked. The TAM on this could be enormous. >> We agree. >> Yeah, I know you do, but I think that it's a point worth mentioning because it touches so many different parts of every organization that I think people perhaps don't realize the impact that it could have. >> You know, when listening to you, Kurt, when you look at these young kids, at least compared to me, all the coding and setting up a robot, that's the easy part, they'll pick that up right away. It's really the thought process that goes into identifying new opportunities, and that's, I think, you're challenging them to do that. But learning how to do robots, I think, is going to be pretty easy for this new digital generation. >> Piece of cake. Tom and Kurt, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE with a really fascinating conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, you guys >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Velante, stay tuned for more of theCUBEs live coverage of UIPath FORWARD. (upbeat music)

>> from Seattle WASHINGTON. It's the Q covering AWS Imagine brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back. You're writing Jeffrey here with the Cube. We're in downtown >> Seattle. It aws Imagine. Edie you. It's a brand new show. Actually, this is the second year were here last year to really is part of public sector on Really addressing education and education is K through 12. It's higher education. It's community college. It's that and so much border. We're really excited to have our next guest. The company's been in the space for a long time, are really driving a lot of digital transformation internally as well as with their customers. And we have Andrew Gilfillan. He is the VP of product management for Pearson. Andrew, great to see you. >> Great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> All right. So give us the kind of quick over on Pearson for people who aren't familiar with the country. >> S O Pearson's a global education company operating in 70 countries around the world. And our mission is really to help people progress their lives through learning. >> Now things are changing up. Change it up a little bit. You're here he had a big announcement earlier today during the keynote Yes, about a new product called Rebel Pearson Rebel Pearson Rebels been around for a little while, so give us the background and what's changed now, >> right? So Rebel first launched in 2014. So it's now been around for a little more than five years on. And really, it's at the forefront of our transformation to digital course materials. Revels intended. Thio replaced the traditional tax book and give students the opportunity to have a fully digital interactive learning experience where they can read practice, study anywhere, >> anytime. So it's basically an app that integrates all the different types of material that they're going to use in their kind of day to day. In the actual engagement with that class. >> Eso it incorporates all of their course materials, so their readings, their assignments, they can access it through their computer or through mobile app, which is which is great because it enables them to learn anywhere. We know that students are on the go lots of priorities they're squeezing in their course, you know, their course work while there juggling jobs, families, activity is everything else. So it's pretty >> interesting because you talk about it being pretty mobile, heavy, mobile centric because that's one of the big attributes of mobile. Right? We check our phones were in line at the grocery store and you get a couple of minutes here in a couple minutes here, as opposed to when used to sit down at the computer. And I've kind of dedicated attention span. So you're seeing that on the education side with the kids in the way they actually engage with their with their curricula? >> Absolutely. I mean, we have to meet students where they are way have to bring learning to them so they can learn on their terms >> and is a workout. I mean, old school people like me, like Come on, you guys, let's sit down and concentrate for 20 minutes. 30 minutes on a particular topic. Yeah, it works for >> that. It does. And actually, what we know from research is that students actually learn better. When material is broken down into smaller chunks, the rebel is able to break the material down into smaller pieces. I'm really optimize the learning, provide immediate feedback for them, and soon can kind of stop pick up where they left off later down the road. You know, if they were studying during a break at their job right now and they're gonna pick back up when they get home, they can do that. >> Interesting. Okay, So that what is the Lexx? I have to do this. What's the opportunity? How did this come about in the first place? And then you guys do >> s so we're super excited to be able to partner with Amazon again. Our goal is Thio really make learning more engaging and more convenient for more learners. And the partnership with Amazon to bring the rebel skill for Alexa is another step in that direction. Eso, Alexa really enable students too engaged in their learning on their own terms. We had one student who tested the skill for us while it was in development who was juggling a family taking a full course load and had a full time job. And she used Alexa toe listen to her reading while she was preparing meals for her, for her family on it was a great way to really show that Alexa made possible her to fit her course. Bergin, when she had time to do it. >> So it's really just connecting her Alexa device at home in tow. Her her her revel account. >> Yeah, So the link your rebel account with your with your Alexa with your Amazon Alexa a count, and it allows you to stay up to date on when your assignments or do it allows. You listen to the tax. You can change devices and pick up where you left off on a new device >> in a different location at a different time. So how many different kind of actions will do >> so their number of commands? It's really focused on audio playback on understanding when your assignments are due being able to play sort of, you know what, you what the current assignment is or to know when the next assignment is due. Right? So it's still really focused on sort of the key activities that a student's gonna participate in when they're engaging with their with their rebel product. >> Okay, And do you see just isn't open up your product manager, you know, kind of a whole new host of of potential capabilities. Using voice is an interface versus >> yeah, eso eso I mean, we know that students air mobile. We know that the sort of current generation of students what we call the eye Jen's grew up in a world where Internets always been a thing. And so we really want to take advantage of all of the tools that are out there to deliver more engaging experiences, right, and and to really be able to reach Maur learners in really positive ways, >> right? And then who's your customer? Your customer usually like the school, the school entity, >> So that's a great question. Eso Historically, our customer really was The student is the end user. The educator ultimately chose what, uh, what they used or what they expected this student to use. Increasingly, Pierson's transforming and really looking at institutions as customers as well. And so we have tears of customers. It's It's the institution. It's Theo educator, and it's the student, and we have to meet the needs of all three of those things. One of the great things about Revel is not only do we believe that it drives better outcomes for the student, but it allows us to deliver a better product at a more affordable price, >> right? Do you find that the engagement with the application because it still basically the same application under the cover significantly is significantly different with a voice interaction around. If you have enough data yet, yeah, I think I >> think it's too early to tell. I mean, certainly were optimistic about the promise of voice being a part of the experience. It's not going to be the whole experience but will be an important part of the experience. And it will really enable more flexibility for students to use the tool in a variety of ways. >> It's just interesting to me with the whole voice thing that you get e mails old people like us get e mails telling you what you should ask your voice. You should ask Alexei, Have you thought about asking like something more than just turn on the radio with the weather? It's only a joke, >> you know, it's it's amazing. I think when you watch students interact with these tools, it's so natural and so intuitive for them. They've grown up with mobile devices. They've grown up with the Internet, they've grown up sort of with a new paradigm, and they expect that they're learning experiences, air gonna adapt in those ways and in sort of the ways that they're adopting, >> right? So last question. Here we're here. It it Just imagine, obviously, Theresa's super passionate about this area. Andrews super passionate about this area. What's it meant for you guys? How's Amazon been? Our AWS is a partner, you know, still kind of early days for them in this type of area. But clearly there's a lot of resource is being put behind. >> Yes, eso Amazon has been a great partner and Alexa the rebel skill for Alexis, sort of our new launch. But we've partnered with Amazon. Andi used Amazon Web service is underpinning Ah, lot of a lot of our product experiences, including Revel So they've been a great partner. And I think this is an example of just extending that one more step. And we look forward to be ableto, you know, look even further to see how we can work together to improve learning for students. >> I love a 200 year old company using voice. That's right. All right, Andrew. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your way and congratulations. And look forward, Thio toe watching it progressively get more data coming out of that thing. Thank you. All right. He's an drum. Jeff, you're watching the key. Where eight of us. Imagine, in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo Live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem barkers. >> Welcome back. It's the Cube here at Cisco Live, San Diego 2019 times. Two minute My co host is Day Volante. First, I want to welcome back custom dos Katie, who is the vice president. Product management with Cisco Compute. We talked with him a lot about Piper Flex anywhere in Barcelona. Wanna welcome to the program of first time guests Laura Crone, who's the vice president of sales and marketing group in NSG sales and marketing at Intel. Laura, thanks so much for joining us, All right, So since Katie has been our program, let let's start with you. You know, we know, you know. We've watched, you know, Cisco UCS and that compute, you know, since it rolled out for about a decade ago. Now on DH, you know Intel always up on stage with Cisco talking about the latest enhancements everywhere I go this year, people are talking about obtained and how technologies like envy me are baking in tow. The environment storage class memories, you know, coming there. So you know, let's start with kind of intel. What's happening in your world and you know your activities. Francisco live >> great. So I'm glad to hear you've heard a lot about octane because I have some marketing of my organization. So obtain is the first new memory architecture er in over 25 years. And it is different than Nanda, right? It is you, Khun, right? Data to the silicon that is programs faster and has greater endurance. So when you think of obtain its fast like D ram But it's persistent, like nay on three D now. And it has some industry leading combinations of capabilities such a cz high throughput, high endurance, high quality of service and low latent see. And for a storage device, what could be better than having fast performance and hi consistency. Oh, >> Laura's you say? Yeah, but 25 years since this move. You know, I remember when I when I started working with Dave, it was, you know, how do we get out of you know, the horrible, scuzzy stack is what we had lived on for decades there. And finally, Now it feels like we're coming through the clearing and there is just going to be wave after wave of new technologies that air free to get us high performance low latent c on the like. >> Yeah, And I think the other big part of that which is part of Cisco's hyper flex all in Vienna, is the envy me standards. So, you know, we've lived in a world of legacy satya controllers, which created a lot of bottlenecks and the performance Now that the industry is moving toe envy me, that even opens up it. Mohr And so, as we were developing, obtain, we knew we had Teo go move the industry to a new protocol. Otherwise, that pairing was not going to be very successful. >> Alright, so Katie all envy me, tell more. >> So we come here and we talk about all the cool innovations we do within the company. And then sometimes you come here and we talk about all the cool innovation we do with our partners, our technology partner, that intel being a fantastic technology partner, obviously being the server business, you've got a partner with intel on. We've really going away that across the walls ofthe two organizations to bring, uh, just do to life, right? So Cisco 80 I hyper flex is one of the products >> we >> talked about in the past. Hyper Flex, all in Miami that uses Intel's obtain technology is, well, it's Intel's three demand all envy me devices to power really the fastest workloads that customers want to put on this device. So you talked about free envy me. Pricing is getting to a point where it becomes that much more accessible to youth, ese for powering databases for par like those those work clothes required that leyton see characteristics and acquire those I ops on DH. That's what we've enabled with Cisco Hyper Flex collaborating with Intel of Envy Me portfolio. >> Remember when I started in the business, somebody was sharing with me to educate me on the head? A pyramid? Think of the period is a storage hierarchy. And at the top of it, was it actually an Intel solid state device, which back then was not It was volatile, right? So you had to put, you know, backup power supplies on it. Uh, so but any rate and then with all this memory architecture coming and flash towards people have been saying, well, it's going to flatten that pyramid. But now, with obtain. You're seeing the reemergence of that periods of that pyramid. So help us understand, sort of where it fits from a supplier standpoint and a no yam and ultimate customer. Because if I understand it, so obtain is faster than NAND, but it's going to be more expensive, but it's slower than D Ram, but it's cheaper, right? So where does it fit? What, the use cases? Where does it fit in that hierarchy? Maybe. >> Yeah. So if you think about the hierarchy at the very top is D RAM, which is going to be your fastest lowest Leighton see product. But right below that is obtained. Persistent memory, the dims and you get greater density because that's one of the challenges with the Ram is they're not dense enough, nor are they affordable enough, right? And so you get that creates a new tear in the store tire curry. Go below that and you have obtain assist ease, which bring even mohr density. So we go up to a 1.5 terabyte in a obtain sst, uh, and you that now get performance for your storage and memory expansion. Then you have three Dean and and then even below that, you have three thing and Q l c, which gives you cost effective, high density capacity. And then below that is the old fashioned hard disk drive. And then magnet. Yeah, you start inserting all these tears that give architects and both hardware and software an opportunity. Teo rethink how they wantto do storage. >> So the demand for this granularity obviously coming from your your buyers, your direct bars and your customers. So what does it do for you and specifically your customers? >> Yeah. So the name of the game is performance and the ability to have in a land where things are not very predictable, the ability to support any thing that the your end customers may throw at you if you're a 90 department. That may mean a bur internal of, uh, data scientist team are traditional architect off a traditional application. Now, what Intel and Cisco can do together is truly unique because we control all parts of the stack, everything from the sober itself to the to the storage devices to the distributed file system that sits on top ofit. So, for example, in Etienne, hyper flecks were using obtain as a cashing here on because we write the distributed file system. We can speak in a balance between what we put in the cash in care how it moved out data to the non cashing 3 90 year, as as Intel came out with their latest processors that support memory class torched last memory. We support that now we can engineer this whole system and to end so that we can deliver to customers the innovation that Intel is bringing to the table in a way that's consumable by their, uh, one more thing I'll throw out there. So technology is great, but it needs to be resilient because I D departments will occasionally yank out the wrong wire. They are barely yank out the wrong drive. One of the things that we work together with Intel What? How do we court rise into this? How to be with reliability, availability, serviceability? How do we prevent against accidental removal or accidental insertion on DH? Some of those go innovations have let Teo asked, getting out in the market a hyper flecked system that uses these technologies in a way that's really usable by teens in our customs. I'd >> love to double click on that in the context of envy. Envy? What you guys were talking about, You mentioned horrible storage deck. I think he called it the horrible, scuzzy stack. And Laura, you were talking about the You know, the cheap and deep now is a spinning disk. So my understanding is that you've got a lot of overhead in the traditional scuzzy protocol, but nobody ever noticed because you had this mechanical device. Now, with flash storage, it all becomes exposed. And VM e allows just a like a bat phone. Right? Okay, so correct me where I got that wrong, But maybe you could give us the perspective. You know what? Why Envy Emmy is important from your standpoint. And how are you guys using it? >> Yeah, I think envy and me is just a much faster protocol. And you're absolutely right. We have a graph that we show of the old world and how much overhead there is all the way down to when you have obtained in a dim solution with no overhead octane assist. E still has a tiny bit, but there's a graph that shows all of that Leyton C is removed when you deploy, obtain so envy me gives you much greater band with right. The CPU is not bottlenecked, and you get greater CPU efficiency when you have a faster interface like and >> and like hyper flexes taking advantage of this house. Oh, >> yeah? Let me give you a couple of examples. So anything performance, the first thing that comes to mind is databases. So for those kinds of workloads, this system gets about 25% better performance. Next thing that comes to mind is people really don't know what they're gonna put on the system. So sometimes they put databases, sometimes put mixed workloads. So when we look at mixed workloads way get about 65% or so better I ops, we get 37% better lately sees. So even in a mixed I opened Wyman wherever have databases you may have a Web theory may have other things. This thing is definite resilient to handle the workload. So it's it just opens up the splatter abuse cases. >> So any other questions I had was specific to obtain. D ram has consumer applications, as does Flash Anand was obtained. Have similar consumer applications can achieve that volume so that the prices, you can come down, not free, but continue to sort of drive the curves. >> Eso When we look at the overall tam, we see the tam growing out over time. I don't know exactly when it crosses. Over the volume are the bits of the ram, but we absolutely see it growing over time. And as a technology ramps, it'll have a you know, it costs ramping curves. Well, >> it'll follow that curve. Okay, good. >> Yeah, Just Katie. Give us a little bit. Broad view of hyper flex here. Att? The show, people, you know, play any labs with the brand new obtained pieces or what? What other highlights that you and the team have this week? >> Yeah, absolutely. So in in Barcelona, we talked about high, perfect for all that is live today. So in the show floor, people can look at the hyper flex at the edge combined with S t one. How do you control How did deploy thousands of edge locations from a centralized location to the part of the inner side which cloud based management too? So that whole experience is unable. Now, at the other end of the spectrum is how do we drive even more performance. So we were always, always the performance leader. Now we're comparing ourselves to ourselves to behavior 35% better than our previous all flash. With the innovation Intel is bringing to the table, some of the other pieces are actually use cases. So there's a big hospital chain where my kids go toe goto, get treated and look and see the doctor. There are lots of medical use cases which require epic the medical software company to power it, whether it is the end terminals or it is the back and database. So that epic hyperspace and happy cachet those have been out be invalidated on hyper flex, using the technology that we just talked about around update on doll in via me that can get me there is that much more power. That means that when my my doctor and the nurse pulls off, the records don't show up fast. But all the medical records, all of those other high performance seeking applications also run that much more streamlined, so I would encourage people little water solution. We've got a tremendous set off demos out there to go up there and check us out >> and there's a great white paper out on this, right? That e g s >> e g is made one of the a company that I've seen benchmarking Ah, a hyper flex. >> So whatever Elaborate where they do a lab report or >> it's what they do is they bench around different hyper converge infrastructure vendors. So they did this first time around and they and they said, Well, we could pack that much more We EMS on a on a hyper flex with rotating drives. And then they did it again And I said, Well, now that you got all flash Well, deacon, you got now the performance and the ladies see leadership and then they did it again and they said, Well, hang on, you you've kind of left the competition that does that. That's not going to make a pretty chart to show when we compare your all in Miami against your hyper so many. When you get that good, you compare against yourselves. We've been the performance theater on the estate has been doing the >> data obtained. The next generation added up, >> and this is what a database workload. OK, nowyou bringing obtain a little toast to the latest report >> has that measures >> measures obtain against are all flash report and then also ship or measure across vendors. So >> where can I get this? Is at some party or website or >> it's off all of this. All of this is off off the Cisco Hyper Flex website on artist go dot com. But F is the companies that want to go directly to their about getting a more >> I guess final final question for you is you know, I think back the early is ucs. It was the memory enhancements that they had that allowed the dentist virtual ization in the industry back when it started. It sounds like we're just taking that to the next level with this next generation of solutions. What what else would you out about? The relationship with Cisco and Intel? >> Eso, Intel and Cisco worked together for years right innovation around the CPU and the platform, and it's super exciting to be expanding our relationship to storage. And I'm even more excited that the Cisco hyper flex solution is endorsing Intel obtain and three thing and and we're seeing great examples of really use workloads where are in customers can benefit from this technology. >> Katie Laura. Thanks so much for the update. Congratulations on the progress that you've made so far for David Dante on Student, and we'll be back with more coverage here. It's just go live 2019 in San Diego. Thanks for watching the cue >> theme.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin. With the cue, we're live Day one of our duel set coverage of Del Technologies World twenty nineteen student a menace here with me, and we're welcoming back a couple of alumni. But for the first time together on our set, we've got Terry Pellegrino, the BP of high performance computing at Delhi Emcee and Nick, who grew VP of Data Analytics and Cyber Securities just at MasterCard. Did I get that right? All right, good. So, guys, thanks for joining Suited me this afternoon, by the way. So we will start with you High performance computing. Talk about that a lot. I know you've been on the Cube talking about HPC in the Innovation lab down in in Austin, high performance computing, generating a ton of data really requiring a I. We talk a lot of it II in machine learning, but let's look at it in the context of all this data. Personal data data from that word, you know, it turns out do with mastercard, for example How are you guys working together? Dell Technologies and MasterCard to ensure that this data is protected. It secure as regulations come up as fraud, is a huge, expensive >> issue. Well, I think make way worked together to really well worry about the data being secure, but also privacy being a key item that we worry about every day you get a lot of data coming through, and if we let customer information or any kind of information out there, it can be really detrimental. So we've really spent a lot of time not only helping manage and worked through the data through the infrastructure and the solutions that we've put together for. For Nick, who also partnered with the consortium project that got started Mosaic Crown to try to focus even more on data privacy on Mosaic Crown is is really interesting because it's getting together and making sure that the way we keep that privacy through the entire life cycle of the data that we have the right tools tio have other folks understand that critical point. That's that's how we got all the brains working together. So it's not just Delon DMC with daily emcee and MasterCard It's also ASAP We have use of Milan, you're sort of bergamot and we'Ll solve the only three c and all together back in January decided to get together and out of Nick's idea. Think about how we could put together with all those tools and processes to help everybody have more private data. Other. >> I think this was your idea. >> I can't say it was my idea. The European Union itself with what? The advent of Judy parent privacy. Their biggest concern was we don't want people to stop sharing. Data began with artificial intelligence. The great things that we do with it from the security, you know, carrying diseases all the way through, making sure transactions are safe and secure. Look, we don't want people to stop our organizations to stop sharing that data because they have fear of the regulations. How do we create a date on market? So the U has something called Horizon twenty twenty on one of their initiatives. Wass Way wanted to understand what a framework for data market would look like where organizations can share that data with confidence that they're complying to all the regulations there, doing the anonymous ization of that data, and the framework itself allows someone to say, I could do analysis without worrying that if it's surfacing personally identifiable information or potentially financial information, but I can share it so that it can progress the market data economy. So as a result of that, what we did is we put the guilt. I said, This is a really good idea for us. Went to the partners at del. That's it, guys, this is something we should consider doing now. Organization always been looking at privacy, and as a result, we've done a very good job of putting that consortium together. >> So, Nick, we've talked with you on the Cuba quite a few times about security. >> Can you just give >> us? You know, you talked about that opportunity of a I We don't want people to stop giving data in. There was concerned with GPR that Oh, wait, I need you to stop collecting information because I'm going to get sued out of existence. If it happened, how do we balance that? You know, data is the new oil I need, you know, keep not flowing and oh, my God. I'm going to get hacked. I'm going to get sued. I'm going to have the regulation, You know, people's personal information. I'm goingto walk down the grocery store and they're going to be taking it from me. How do we balance that? >> Well, the nice part is, since State is the new oil, well, we considered it is artificial intelligences that refinery for that oil. So, for our perspective, is the opportunity to say we can use a eye to help. Somebody says, Hey, I don't want you to share my data information. I want to be private, but I can use a I d. S. Okay, let's filter those out so I can use a I'd actually sit on top of that. I can sit down and say, Okay, how do I keep that person's safe, secure and only share the necessary data that will solve the problem again, using artificial intelligence through different types of data classifications, whoever secure that data with different methods of data security, how we secure those types of things come into play. And again, there's also people say, I don't ever want my data to be we identified so we can use different methods to do complete anonymous ation. >> How do you do that when there are devices that are listening constantly, what Walmart's doing? Everybody that has those devices at home with the lady's name. I won't say it. I know it activates it. How How do you draw the line with ensuring that those folks that don't want certain things shared if they're in the island Walmart talking about something that they don't want shared? How do you facilitate that? >> Well, part of that is okay. At a certain point, when it comes to privacy, you've gotta have a little bit of parenting. Just because you have that information doesn't mean you need to use that information. So that's where we as humans have to come into play and start thinking about what is the data that we're collecting And how should we use that information on that person and who is walking through a store? And we say we are listening to what their conversations are? Well, I don't need to identify that you or you. I just didn't know what is the top talking about? Maybe that's the case, but again, you have to make that decision again. It's about being a parent at this point. That's the ethical part of data which we've discussed on this program before. Alright, >> so teary. Talkto us some about the underlying architecture that's going to drive all of this. You know, we we love the shift. For years ago, it was like storing my data. You know, Now we're talking about how do we extract the value of the data? We know data's moving a lot, So you know what's changing And I talk every infrastructure company I talked to, it's like, Oh, well, we've got the best ai ai, you know, x, whatever. So you know what kind of things should custom be looking for To be able to say, Oh, this is something, really. It's about scale. It's about, you know, really focused on my data. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I will say first, the end of underlying infrastructure. We have our set of products that have security intrinsic in the way they're designed. I really worry about ki management for software we have silicon based would have trust throughout a lot of our portfolio. We also think about secure supply chain, even thinking through security race. If you lose your hard drive on, we can go and make sure that the data is not removed. So that's on the security front. On the privacy side, as a corporation, William C. Is very careful about the data that we have access to on. Then you think about a HBC. So being in charge of H. P. C for Cordelia emcee way actually are part of how the data gets created, gets transferred, gets generated, curated and then stored. Of course, storage s O. What we want to make sure is our customers feel like where that one company that can help them through their journey for their data. And as you heard Michael this morning during keynote, >> uh, getting that value out of the data because it's really where that little transformation is going to get everybody to the next level. But right now there's a lot of data. Has Nick stated this data has more personal information at times? Andan i'll add one more thing way. Want to really make sure that innovation is not stifled and the way we get there is to make sure >> that the data sets are as broad as possible, and today it's very difficult to share data. Sets mean that there are parts of the industry there are so worried about data that they will not even get it anywhere else than their own data center and locked behind closed doors. But if you think about all the data scientists, they're craving more data. And the way we can get there is with what make it talked about is making sure that the data that is collected is free of personal information and can still be qualified for some analysis and letting all the data scientists out there to get a lot of value out of it. >> So HBC can help make the data scientist job simpler or simplify evaluating this innumerable amun of data. >> Correct. So what in the days you had an Excel spreadsheet and wanted to run and put the table on it, you could do that on a laptop for end up tablet. When you start thinking about finding a black hole in the galaxy, you can do that on tablet. So you're gonna have to use several computers in a cluster with the right storage of the right interconnect. And that's why it's easy comes in place. >> I mean, if I man a tactical level, what you'LL see with HBC computing is when someone's in the moment, right? You want to be able to recognize that person has given me the right to communicate to them or has not given me the right to communicate to them, even though they're trying to do something that could be a transaction. The ability to say Hey, I have I know that this person's or this device is operating here is this and they have given me these permissions. You've got to do that in real time, and that's what you're looking for. HBC competing to do. That's what you're saying. I need my G p you to process in that way, and I need that cpt kind of meat it from the courts. The edges say Yep, you can't communicate. No, you can't. Here's where your permissions like. So, >> Nick, what should we >> be looking for? Coming out of this consortium is people are watching around the industry. You know what, what, what >> what expect for us? The consortium's about people understand that they can trust that they're data's being used properly, wisely, and it's being used in the way it was intended to be used so again, part of the framework is what do you expect to do with the data so that the person understands what their data is being used for the analysis being done? So they have full disclosure. So the goal here is you can trust your data's being used. The way was intended. You could trust that. It's in a secure manner. You can trust that your privacy is still in place. That's what we want this construction to create that framework to allow people to have that trust and confidence. And we want the organization to be able to not, you know, to be able to actually to share that information to again move that date economy forward. >> That trust is Nirvana. Well, Nick Terry, thank you so much for joining suing me on the cue this afternoon. Fascinating conversation about HPC data security and privacy. We can't wait to hear what's in store next for this consortium. So you're gonna have to come back. Thank >> you. We'LL be back. Excellent. Thanks so much. >> Our pleasure. First Minutemen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us live from Las Vegas. The keeps coverage of day one of del technology World twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Cloud. Next nineteen, right Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Google Cloud next twenty nineteen Everybody, you're watching The Cube. The leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'm here with my co host Stew Minutemen. John Ferrier is also here. Three days of wall to wall coverage of Google's Big Cloud Show customer event this day to a Shook Ramu is here is the vice president of Cloud and Customer Active Fio Boston based Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on to be here. So big show Active fio Category creator. Yeah, right. Yeah, drying it out. Battling in a very competitive space. Absolutely. Doing very well. Give us the update on what's going on with your company. So first >> to follow your super excited to be here Google next, right with one of the strategic partners for Google been working well in all departments. He had a great announcement. Today we announced active field goal for Global Bazaar SAS offering on it's dedicated to the Google platform. We want tohave the activity of experience be that much more better and easier for people running data sets anywhere, particularly in Google. So and Google has been one of our premier partners over the last, I would say three years or so we've gone from strength to strength, so very happy to be here and super excited to be launching this offering. You >> guys started active, Theo. It was clear you saw market beyond just back up beyond just insurance. You started to develop you populist copy data management. That term, everybody uses that today you sort of focused on other areas Dev offs, analytics and things of that nature. How is that gone? How is it resonated with customers? Where you getting the most traction today? >> So great question. I mean, it's gone really well, right? We've kind of been the leader, like you said, setting up the category and basically changing the way that it has looked at and being managed right data now, as a commodity is no longer a commodity. But it's an asset and we're kind of enabling companies to leverage that as it in many different ways on a cloud is here. Everybody wants to go to the cloud. Every customer we talked to every prospect we touch. Want to leverage Cloud And Google is coming in with a lot of strength, a lot of capabilities. So what we're building in terms of data transformation the data aware application of where technologies we have is a resonating very well. The devil of space we talked about, you know, is is the tip of the spear. For us, accounts are over seventy percent of our business, you know, And the last I checked, over sixty to seventy percent of our customers are leveraging cloud in some form. I'd be for Del Ops, cloud bursting D r and all of those categories and, you know, having a very strong enterprise. DNA makes his deal with scale very easily take complex applications and make it look simple. And that's been our strength for the past nine years. So we continue to in a way that strengthen work with Google to make the platform even more stronger. >> When, when I think back of those early days you said enterprise architect her it was like, Okay, let me understand that architecture, the building blocks, you know, the software i p that you have, but it's been quite a different discussion I've been having with your your team the last couple of years. Because, as you say, cloud is front and center and not surprising. To hear the devil is a big piece of help. Help us update kind of that journey. And, you know, a full SAS offering today. How you got from kind of the origin to the company, too, You know, a sass offering. Sure, >> right. I mean, we always knew we had a phenomenal product, right? And a phenomenal customers. We have a number of fourteen thousand two thousand customers with us. And you know what we realized is the adoption off. You know, to understand how cloud works and understand how customers can easily manage to cloud, the experience becomes much more important on. So the SAS offering is more about how do you experience the same great active Your technology with the push button is of use. So we enable the implementation installation ingestion of data in a minute. So by the time you're done with the whole process, you're already starting to love respect If your technology in the closet, your choice. An active field goal for Google. Particularly targets ASAP. Hana Sequel and other complex workload. So these workloads are traditionally been in a very infrastructure heavy, very people heavy in terms of managing. And what we've done is to radically transform how you manage those worthless. A lot of organizations and the conversations I've had over the last twenty four hours has been Hana this and Hannah that How do I make on a simple I've heard active you is the way to go for managing a safety. Hannah, how do you guys tackle it? And this is very interesting conversations with a lot of thought leaders who help us not only build a better product at all, it'll be improve the experience that they take it from there. So that's how I I would see the transformation for the company. >> Why? Why is active field make Hana simple? What is it specifically about? You guys >> don't differentiate. You think the great question. So Hana in general has been a very complicated, hard to install, hard to hard to hard to manage application. So what active you brings in is native application technology, right? So we don't go after infrastructure. We don't go after just storage. But we look at the application of the hole. So when you talk application down, we learn the application. We figure out how it works, how it works best, and how does the best way to capture it and present data back, which is what it's all about. And when you start from there, it's a hard problem to tackle, so it takes a little bit of time for us to tackle that problem. But when the solution comes out, it works one way across all platforms. So we've had customers moving data from on crime to the cloud, and they don't see a difference. They used to go left. Now they go right. But as part of the application to thin works, it works the same way a developer, using Hannah is using Hannah the same way yesterday that he was today. Because even though the databases moved from on creme of the club, so that transformation requires the level of abstraction and understanding the application that we have automated and building your engine >> okay, The hard question for data protection data managed folks today is how are you attacking SAS? Most companies that we asked that question, too, is that his roadmap roadmap Maybe that case for you too. But what is your strategy with regard to sass? Because something triggered me when you talked about the application yet and I know Ash knows background systems view application view has always been his expertise, your company's expertise. How eyes that opportunity for you guys. Is it one that you're actually actively pursuing? If so explain. If not, why not? Is it on the road map? >> So it's certainly an opportunity of pursuing and, you know, working with a number of sass vendors to figure out again a sense of, you know, where is the critical data mass? SAS is a number of components toe and essence off. Any particular application is you know, where is the workload? What is the state machine and how do you manage it? That's the key element. And once you tackle that, the fast application is like any other applications. So we have, you know, people working with us to build custom connectors for, like, office three, sixty five and other other elements of sass products. So as time of walls, you'LL see us, we'LL start working. We'Ll have announcements for the Cloud sequel and other Google platform of the service offerings. Amazon Rd s Those offerings are coming, and we will be basically building the platform. And once the platform comes just like active you has done, we will tackle the SAS applications. One >> of the first technical challenge. It's Roma business challenges. >> It's a business challenge. And you know, for us we have to focus on where the customers want to go, where the enterprise customers wanna go. And Stass at this point is, I would say, emerging to be a place where Enterprise wants to adopt it out of scale that they want adopted. So we're certainly focusing on that. >> And I think there's a perception to stew that, well, the SAS vendor there in the cloud, they got my data protected so good. >> Yeah, well, we know that's not the case that they need to worry about that. >> And I said, I said protected and that's not fair to you guys because >> I was a little, >> much wider scale. >> So But, you know, we were talking about ASAP, and we've watched some of these, you know, big tough application, and they're moving to the clouds. There's a lot of choices out there. You've announcement specifically about Google. What can you tell us about why customers are choosing Google? And if you have any stories about joint Google customers that you have love, >> I would say, Let's start off. You know, I would thank Google because it's one of the key partners for us. You've done over many, many million dollars last year, and we want to double the number of this year right on. It's been all the way from companies that have fifteen to twenty PM's two companies that have twenty thousand, so it spans the gamut. You know, from an infrastructure perspective, Google is the best of the brief. Nobody knows infrastructure computer memory better than Google. Nobody knows networking better than Google. Nobody knows security better than moving. So these are the choices. Why Enterprises? Now we're saying OK, Google is a choice. And as I see on the field flow today, last year was, I have a project. Maybe gold this year is how do I do ABC with gold So the conversations have shifted off. Should I do Google? Worse is how do I do ABC with Google and then you marry active use technology, which is infrastructure agnostic we don't care their application runs. And with that mantra you marry that Google infrastructure. It creates a very powerful combination for enterprises to adopt. >> So just as the follow ups that when we talk to customers here, multi cloud is the reality. So how does that play into your story? And where do you see that fit? >> We were always built multi cloud. So right from day one active use platform architecture Everything has been infrastructure diagnostic. So when you build something for Veum, where or Amazon it works as is in group. And with the latest capabilities on Claude Mobility that be announced a few months ago, you Khun move data seamlessly between different cloud platforms. In fact, I've just chosen in active field Iran be its de facto data protection platforms on all my old life. So you could hear. I know activity also being supporter Nolly Cloud s so that we'll be the only floor platform that is the golden standard to protect complex works lords like a safety nets. >> You mentioned you have a team in in Hyderabad. What? What are they working on? Is it sort of part of the broader development team? Your cloud Focus, Google Focus. What's >> the team in Hyderabad is very much integrated to our engineering team out of Boston. So, you know, they're basically equivalent. We all work together collaboratively. The talent in Hyderabad is now building a lot off our cloud technologies. And the spell is the emerging Technologies s. So we've been able to staff up a very strong team instead of very strong partner. Seems to kind of help us argument what we have here. So leave. Leaders here are basically leveraging. The resource is in Hyderabad kind of accelerate the development because, like, you know, there's never started to work. >> Okay, so you're following the sun and that and that and that the talent pool in that part of India has really exploded. You've seen that big companies hold all the club providers All the all the new ride share companies for their war for talent. Isn't there exactly good? So talk road map a little bit. What could we expect going forward, You know, show us a little leg, if you would. >> So you can see a lot more announcements around activity ago for Google will be enhancing the experience around, you know, adapting and ingesting ASAP and sequel, etcetera. You'LL be looking at a lot of our SAS integration offerings that are coming out. You talk about obviously sixty five Cloud Sequel Amazon RD s Things like that. We'LL have a migration sweet to talk about. How do you How do you ingest and manage communities? Containers? Because that's becoming a commonplace today, Right? How do you How do you tackle complex container in nine minutes? Micro Services. That's a maybe a focus for us and continue to, you know, build and integrate further into the application ecosystem. Because these applications not getting simpler ASAP is continuing to build more complex applications. How do you tackle that? The words road map and keep up with it. That's going to be what we going to be focusing on. >> So active Diogo. We talked about that a little bit. That's announcement here. That's that's your hard news. Yes, it's went to chipping, and once it available >> to go, it's a sass offering, so there's nothing to ship you know so well. Actual SAS pricing model. It's an actual SAS pricing model, fast offering one click purchase. Was it busy installed? So yes, >> Stewie's laughing because so many sass is, aren't a cloud pricing >> three years but only grow up? Can still nod. >> It's not an entity for reporting. It's not an entity that just gives you a bunch of glamour screens. It is actually taking your Hannah workloads and giving it to you for data protection, backup, disaster recovery. So it is. It is true active feel, the time test addictive you and a price product now being off for this test. So >> and how are you going to market with that product? >> So we have a number of vendors, this fellow's Kugel partners here. I get work with them to tow and to kind of generate the man and awareness. So this has been in works for over six months now, So it's not something that came out of the blue, and we've been working with Google in formulating the roadmap. For us, it is >> the active ecosystem looking like these days. How is that evolving? >> It's it's it's It's, um I would say, you know, the customers are the front and center of our ecosystem. We've always built a company with customers first mentality, and they drive a lot of our innovation because They give us a lot of requirements. They reach us in different angle. So they've helped us push the cloud road map. They've helped us push to the point where they want faster adoption. Is that adoption? And that's kind of where we're going, how the ecosystem is now still around enterprises. But the enterprise is tryingto innovate themselves because now data is that will be available. Eso abject with large financial institutions. GDP are so these are all the requirements and they're throwing at us. Okay, you can manage data. How do you air gap it? How do you work with object storage? How do you work with different kinds of technologies? They wanna work with us. And, you know, we've always stepped up to the plate saying, Sure, if it's a new piece of technology that we feel is viable and has the road map will jump at it and solve the problem with you. And that's always been the way of you the partner and growing the company >> you mentioned Air Gap. Some we haven't talked about this week is ransom. Where we talk about most most conferences. It's it's one of those unpleasant things that's a tailwind for companies like >> bank. Right. And we have an offering on ransomware rights. If you look at cyber resiliency, we're the only product in town Where and if you're hit by Ransomware, you can instantly the cover and say, Oh, my ransom or hit me on the seventeenth January, anything after that is gone. But at least I can get to seventy the January and sought my business up. Otherwise, everything else every other product out that this will take weeks or months to figure it out. So, you know, that's another type of a solution that came up. Not there, not there. Not happy about handsome. Where? But that does happen. So we have a solution for the problem. >> Thanks so much for coming in the cubes. Have you >> happy to be here? >> So we'LL see you back in Boston. All right, All right. Thanks. Thanks for watching everybody, This is the cube Will be here tomorrow Day three Student A mandate Volante and John Furrier Google Next Cloud Big Cloud Show We'LL See you tomorrow. Thanks for watching

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hello from Orlando and Lisa Martin with Student A Man. We are in the five nine booth at Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. We're excited to welcome back to the cube of one of our alumni, Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and Head of a Eye of five nine. Jonathan. Thanks so much for joining Stew and me on the program on Day one of this big event. >> My absolute pleasure. I'm super excited to be here and super excited talk about my favorite topic, so love to be >> so. This event is has been around for a long time. Twenty eight twenty nine years evolving from PBX to voice con enterprise Connect. You've been to this event about the last ten years or so, least your perspective, and I know you're new at five a. M. But your perspective on the evolution of not just the contact center but customer experience and really thiss changing landscape of how enterprises and people want to communicate with each other. >> Yeah, well, I mean, it's been funny to sort of watch this through this technology. Evolution that manifested the show and in the market for a long time was about hardware by big, bulky iron and we used to have the petting, the hardware, petting zoos, we call it. You have racks of equipment. You could go look at this >> blinky lights and >> cables, you know. And then it moved to software on. We saw that here and now we're deep into the software is a service, as cloud based delivery models and actually a bunch of ways were coming to the tail end of that into this aye aye era. And that's what's all the hotness, and you see tons of that. Almost everyone's put some kind of a eye logo, our branding on their stuff, and there's there is some real meat to it, but but that sort of this interesting evolution and on its in its infancy in the Contact Center. And that's what's sort of exciting about it. >> So let's dig into that a little bit, because a CZ Lisa mentioned you've worked for a couple of the other companies that have big boost here at the show. We've talked about intelligence back in the call center days. Oh, yeah, but, you know, tell us what's different about the Aye aye data. The center of everything is something that way. Definitely believe in something that we hear all over the industry in the cloud shows an A I and everything. Why is this so exciting? What really brought you five nine and gets you've got a storied career? You know what? Why here? Why now? >> What is the technology is finally ready. I mean, technologies like speech recognition. And we've been the industry has been working on that for decades. And it was only in the last five years or so with the sort of creation of practical deep learning that the tech finally got good enough. And and that was because of new algorithms, New date, you know, massive data sets, great hardware that all made it possible. And so that sort of opened up the avenues. And that's why we're seeing products like Alexa and Cirie take off. Is the tech is finally gotten good enough. But what hasn't happened? Yes, it hasn't shown up in the workplace, and that's sort of what's really exciting to me is to take these technologies that have become so pervasive in the consumer world and use them to really re imagine how a lot of these enterprise products work. That's why I came to five nine came to find time to do that. To do that for five nine to do that for the industry. >> So you had a session this morning. Five surprising reasons why a business should move their contact center to the cloud. And we know cost is not the number one. Talk to us about some of those key imperatives that an enterprise in any industry really needs to be able to take advantage of by moving to cloud >> right, so a cost was a unsurprising reasons. So what I did in my session was I said, all right. Five. Unsurprising. Here's ten. Here's ten obvious reasons. So I went through those and cost is one of them. But I know what's surprising. There's a couple of the big ones. Story, really is that if you go to a truce as player, they have lots of customers, and they can actually aggregate data software capabilities across those customers and do things that are impossible on premise. So the two of them, for example, are better reliability. Often people like what you know. I want to go to the cloud. I'm worried about reliability. Well, if you dig into it. You can see that once the technology is matured, the reliability can be much better than it is on premise. Because of the complexity that you could build. Same with security, often viewed is wait. It's more secure in promise. Actually, if you look at what you can do in the cloud, you can spend a lot more money on security and advertise that cost over multiple customers. And then, of course, there's a I, and that's about getting access to training data, but not just training data from one company, but using it across multiple companies to make the I work better for everybody. So those were three the big ones. >> So when you talk about that kind of learning, how do you make sure that there's proper firewalls is, you know, is five nine going to be able to say, Okay, we can take care of everything. But wait, I don't know what my competitors on this I don't want them getting advantage based on you know what my company have. How do you balance? You know, there's the security issues. There's, you know, personal information issues, and they're, you know, competitive dynamics, which you know, is a talking point in the cloud. These absolutely. I mean, >> so that's a That's a paramount consideration to design of this whole thing. So it starts with a basic level of like, opted, like we're just, you know, we can't do this, and we can't use your data to train a model that shared unless you want it. And generally it's a given get like, Oh, you want access to the shared model, then you you provide training data for it. If you don't, you can use a custom one, but it won't be as accurate. But then you don't show your day. That's your choice. So give the customer the option and give them something in return for their data. And, of course, there's other parts of it, like, Well, you know, almost all the time, people aren't actually like looking at your data, its dues to train. These model's ideally without human in the loop having to do that. And so there's other privacy considerations baked in that it's that makes it feel that gives a customer comfort that they're they're able to do this >> without trust is critical, right? We talk about it stew and ideo and the Cuban every show. But that's really essential because, as we know is consumers, we're more and more and more empowered. These days, there were transacting something through chatter, video or Alexa or we're checking on. The status of a mortgage is something We have so much information. They also are very demanding. You want to have this conversation with a business regardless of the channel, and I want them to know what I'm what my issue is so that it can be addressed and resolved quickly. But I also want to make sure that what you're doing is not, you know, in the issue of privacy that we've all faced recently that it's done in a way where this business can actually foster a trusting relationship with me is like, >> Yeah, so the trust goes on many levels, one of which the most important to us is our customers have to trust us, and that's the only thing that gives trust his time. You know, you have to be invested for a long time, and so we've really focused on building this longtime customer trust with our reliability, with our high touch with our customers, and that gets us That's really just what gives us permission to even start to do these things. The other thing to to touch on what you said is that end users contact the contact center. That's one of the areas were actually there is already in the user expectation that my call is being recorded, that what I say can be used for training purposes. So one of the reasons I got into Contact Center was that the privacy issues are much more readily addressed in the contacts and space and other areas where you might be interested to apply this type of technology. I mean, we're talking about having a eyes that are listening in on calls and analyzing what you say. If I were to do that for a regular phone call between me and my friend like people be totally spooked like there's no expectation that that happens. There is an expectation on the contact center, so that's a great place to build and grow these technologies. >> Yeah, I love that because, right, those of us that have, you know, personal assistant at home there's almost an expectation that they're living listening in a little bit. Everybody's had the weight I was talking about that with someone not even on the phone, and all of a sudden I'm getting ads for that. That's not right. So question I have for you, you hired your first data scientist in the group. And one of things we look at is we now have this, you know, great access to data. One of the biggest challenges is okay, I can get the answers if I know the right questions to ask, What are some of the early areas that you're poking at? Any early use cases that you can share as to, you know, where we where we cease? Um, how did you >> do that? One of the first things we're looking at is what I'm calling cross customer analytics. So analytics is old news. Everyone's had that for a while. But what the cloud does is it gives a provider like us date across multiple customers. Now what we can't do is share one customer state is with another. That's a total nut. It's not what I'm talking about. But aggregates are interesting. So, for example, would be intrigued to know this is my first call resolution rate. How does that compare to similarly sized contact centers in my geography right, And that's something where we can produce an aggregate that has total anonymous ation. So no privacy issues, and it gives a customer this piece of insight that they have never, ever had before. Never, and the only way you could do it with enough privacy. Seven of data to produce a useful AGR ee it, and therefore it can only be done at the larger cloud contact centers and thus five nine, as one of the market leaders were wear having enough data to produce this kind of information. So this was an immediate, frankly fairly low hanging piece of fruit. We've started to dive into no product announcements. It's just just looking at data to see what comes out and see if there's interesting meet there. But it's a kind of insights. I'm really excited about >> it. I love that because people are always like, Oh, wait, I need to measure it. But sometimes numbers alone don't tell me anything. You gotta put that into context for me, right? What are my peers? What? One of my industry. You know, what other stuff do I have there? Otherwise, you know, numbers are just numbers. >> Numbers are just numbers. You don't really know how you're doing. You're like a little island, like, you know, your contact center is doing, but is that good? You have no idea. And we'LL be able to unlock that overtime. So very excited about that. >> Yeah. Sorry, Stuart, You guys have about five billion recorded customer conversations, so you can I can think of the massive amount of competitive advantage that's in there. But you also brought out something that I hadn't considered before. And that is whether I'm, you know, interacting with the business because I haven't issue to resolve with my Internet or something. And you're right. We do have this expectation that the call's going to be recorded, but I never think about it is this is actually something it's gonna help me down the line or the fifty other people that aren't calling in. So I thought your comment on privacy being kind of more advanced in the context of her was was point. It was very interesting and not something that I was aware. >> Yeah, it >> has to be right >> exactly. There's there's an expectation that this is what this conversation is about and and there's lots of tools in place for dealing with today. Already with credit card numbers and phone numbers, which do get communicated between a user and the comics in URGENT there's lots of you know, tak and precedent about how to read, act and extract and again all in the contacts and are nowhere else really does that technology exists. So >> yeah, so Jonathan, take us inside the life of the agent, so we know when we're from call centre to Contact Center. It really brought in the role a little bit when I've got a eye in there is their new skill sets. We need tohave. You know, we always talk about, you know, if if you're doing the same thing you were doing five years ago, chances are you might need to be looking for a new job, because by so fast, so in the context center, you know what, What? What is the life of the agent likely to go through over the next couple of years? >> So this is an interesting debate in the lemon, the industry, and there's sort of two thought camps in this one thought camp is the role of A I is to replace the agent. And this, frankly, is fairly traditional thinking. We use terms like Deflection, right, like we want to deflect the call from an agent means we don't want you to connect to a human being or containment, right? How successful were we keeping the call in the I. V. R. And a customer never got to an agent like these air industry terms, and they were. And people view a I is like helping those things. There's a different camp of which you can tell I'm sort of in, which is like, No, no, no, that's sort of the traditional way of thinking about it. And of course, we're gonna have voice spots and I V R is. But really, the question is, how do we deliver the best customer experience possible? That should actually be the guide post, and what's funny is in this industry we know what the best customer experiences. It's that you pick up the phone, you call the comic center. You didn't wait one second. You went right to an agent. They were an expert. They knew exactly what to do. They fixed their problem in twenty seconds, you were done. That's the best experience. The problem is, is no one can afford to deliver that experience today. Well, that's where technology could help. So for me, the central question is, how do we use a >> eye >> to label us to make it cost effective to deliver that experience all the time and that does have an impact on the agents. And it's going to be through assistance technologies that allow the agents to be guided in their interactions and allowing them to be experts quicker and to learn from the best experts in the contact center and change the way they think about training and access to data knowledge. It's going to be a pretty profound change, but it never takes the human out of the loop people. When you pick up the phone to call that Connick Center, it's because you actually want to talk to a person and that human touch, that empathy that you know, someone just tow, you know, vent at a little bit that matters, and we're nowhere anywhere near having an A. I provide that if ever so that's what's going to change >> humans and machines or Jonathan, Thank you so much for stopping by. The Cuban wedding was with me about what's happening at five nine. Contact Centerist Service and the tremendous advantage that data could bring two organizations. >> My pleasure. Thank >> you. Thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin was stewed Minutemen on the program Today Live from Orlando at Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen stew and I will be right back after a short break.

>> That's sort of what I bring, is an ability to catalyze the conversation, and share that knowledge with others in the community. Our philosophy is everybody expert in something, everybody is passionate about something, and has real deep knowledge about that something. What we want to focus in on that area and extract that knowledge and share it with our communities. This is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE. (smooth music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting with Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment, we have Anna Chu, who is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and Shona Chee, Product Marketing Manager Diversity and Tech Community Lead. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here! >> So, you are dressed very similarly. (laughs) >> Yes, we are. >> Yes, so we're going to get into diversity, because I want to go there, but let me start with you, Anna. So, you are really in charge of the community within the vast ecosystem of Microsoft. That's a big job. So how do you go about it? What's your approach to the Microsoft Community? >> Gosh, well, it's a lot of work. I've been leading the community efforts at Microsoft Ignite for the past two and a half, three years. And ultimately, it's all about the people in the room. These are IT pros, these are developers; people who care about technology. It's also end users as well; people who are business-focused. So we really want to make sure that we're delivering content that is going to help them go back to their communities, go back to their offices and be able to share all that knowledge back into the workplace. >> And Shona, so then you are within a slice of that community. So focusing on diversity and tech. So, what is your, how do you operate? >> So we see diversity as really closely integrated with technology. So we are a community that lives on the tech community. So there's a direct link, AKA dot MS Life Diversity and Tech, but what we're pretty much doing is bringing people together. All the tech communities to talk about important topics of diversity inclusion. So, traditionally, it's always been very HR driven, a lot about talent and acquisition and recruitment, but for us its really about what about the people in career, how do we help them feel like they belong, and they're apart of this ecosystem. So that's where we see the symbiotic relationship. >> And I have to say that it's my first time to the show. I've watched it from afar, I knew lots of people that were Microsoft MVPs over the years, very impressed. Maybe give our audience a little bit about what goes on in the show. You got all the podcasts going, there's meet-ups, there, you know, lots of good flare you're giving out at the show, and everything else like that. So, what's everybody missing that didn't come to this community gathering? >> Gosh, I hope I didn't miss out on anything, really. I really hope that we were as inclusive as possible. But every year we try and make the event more community infused than ever before. In previous years, we just really focused on content that would be live on a stage, such as at a theater or a breakout, but we really want to add a little bit more of the networking side of things too this year. So we've invested in the meetups, which are more formalized ways for the community to find their people. But we've also invested in idea swaps, such as a brand new concept that we've landed here in Microsoft Ignite, where we have group idea swaps where people are putting together topics that they want to meet with others about. And we also want to facilitate more one on one networking because personal relationships are such a critical part to being professionally strong in your career. You can't be successful without other people. So we really want to enable Ignite to be that platform. We've got people from all around the world. Shona's got this amazing pin wall in the Diversity and Tech area that showcases where everyone is coming from. There are people coming from really remote areas, to people all parts of Western Europe and the US, and I think there's a lot to be gained from people being able to find each other through Ignite. >> And what we always tell attendees is everything is live-streamed or recorded in terms of sessions, so the biggest take away here is really people and communities, so we really encourage people to meet-up, build valuable connections, just talk about topics that might be uncomfortable so that we can learn from it. >> Such a great point there. It's funny it is one of those pro tips out there. First of all, when there's a really big convention center, and there's a lot of people, there's certain sessions that you want to be at. Maybe you want to talk to the speaker in due but, when you find time on the plane ride back or spend a little time in that suite, you can go re-watch some of it, the people is really what drives everybody to the event. >> Where else would you meet 25,000 people in one venue, right? So it's really exciting. >> Shona you said talk about topics that are a little uncomfortable, those are the hardest things to talk about, particularly with a group of strangers. So what has been your experience at this conference, what are people saying that might count as that? >> Right, so the recent inclusion has really come front and center in terms of topics that's hot in the IT industry in particular. So traditionally people think about diverse inclusion as gender, right? Men and women. But, we're seeing that it's a lot more multi faceted than that. We're talking really about intersectionality of identities, all of us hold multiple identities, I'm a woman in tech, I'm an IT professional, I'm a millennial. So there's multi areas that we deal with, but we need to address each and every one of them. So for example, this year we have a lot of sessions focused on LGBTQ, and we also have our partners talking about this topic as well, and just really getting people in a room to say help me learn more about this area that I'm not that familiar with, or let's talk about race and culture. What do people in your culture do? What is the norm, what is acceptable? And that's why we also partnered with Tech Women, it's a US department of state initiative where we invite women from developing countries to come share their experience being an IT pro in those countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon. So we really want to give them platform to interact with attendees, but also giving mostly North American and European customers a chance to hear from someone in a completely different cultural setting. >> And just talking about all the various identities that we all encapsulate. Is the workplace the right place to talk about those things? That is another question too, in the sense of we are bringing our full self to work and we are spending so many hours at work. But at the same time, what is the right balance, do you think? >> Yeah, I think that's a great point. On the Monday leadership panel, we actually talk about leadership and building inclusive work cultures. Like you said, we spend so much time in the office, sometimes our coworkers become our family almost, right? How do we create and environment where people feel like they belong, where they feel like they can be genuine and not feel like they have to hide something, because in-authenticity really shows, and we want to encourage people to just feel like they have a safe place to express themselves. >> So in terms of advocating for yourself at work, I know that's another big theme that is in the diversity and tech workshops, what is some advice that you have for women, for underrepresented minorities, for people of various sexual orientations to make sure that they are having there careers that they are capable of having, and not being and not coming up against other biases and challenges. >> So in the Tuesday session, Donna Secaur actually talked about this, which was a great point, she said, you can write your own story, you can't control what people say about you, but you can control what's out there in the media, you can control how you do your social media profiles, and I think it's really encouraging people to take a look at what's online. Brand yourself how you want people to see you, and be proud of it, I think that's one of the biggest points. >> I also think that Microsoft Ignite brings so many people together, but they all have a common mutual passion which is about technology, and if that manages to bridge build bridges between people who may not necessarily get to know each other, so people from different religions or from different ethnic backgrounds, who don't really have that opportunity to get to know each other, and then they find a common passion, or they also face the same challenge on how to govern teams or things like that then suddenly we're doing a lot to help, build bridges and just drive that human connection so we can get beyond some of those challenges that we're facing in 2018. >> One of the ideas that bridges both community and diversity is career paths. I know a lot of the shows they go is how're we taking somebody from a certain world that growth mindset that we hear Sasha talking about how're you looking to address that and how is that discussed in the communities? >> Gosh, we've just launch a completely new Microsoft learned platform as well, one of the things that is really important ab6out learning is actually learning through community too. And if we can enable people to find their own people by helping them share best practices and tips, and we've made huge in roads there. So one of the things we've run as part of Microsoft Ignite, are community socials. So community socials are a way for people to find their people. So we've hosted ones for Microsoft Exchange an6d Outlook and we can make an element of fun out of that too, so there seems to be a certain personality in that community called squeaky lobster, I don't know if you've heard of squeaky lobster. It's some sort of inside joke that even I don't understand, but apparently he's a personality, and he's here to unite the community together, and then people will come together, and they'll talk about Exchange 2019, and they'll talk about how that impacts other parts of Office 365 and Microsoft 365, and then they'll talk about all the different ways that they can connect with each other as well. So it's a very amorphous thing. From a learning perspective, we have a lot of things that we can do to create platforms for learning, which is really awesome, but at the end of the day we have to learn through community because it's just IT professionals and developers are having to learn at a crazy pace, faster than they've ever had before. So that's a really big part. >> And I like that you mentioned career paths, because we just partnered with the MVP community to launch a community mentors program, and that's where we partner with over 700 participants all around the world from 65 countries, and over 800 years of combined industry experience, to have mentors work with mentees from other countries, and do a lot of cross sharing, just sharing expertise and best practices. >> And you have your student ambassadors here too. >> So that's a new thing that we've also rolled out at Ignite this year, we've invited seven student ambassadors from three local colleges here, and we invited them to work with our community reporters to push out some exciting video content. So that helps them to get a flavor of what kind of roles are out there in tech. We want to debunk the myth that you have to learn coding to work in technology and that is not true. There are so many amazing IT pro roles out there that we really want to educate people on. >> So the technology industry at this point in time has a very bad reputation in terms of diversity, there's not enough women, there's not enough minorities, there's not enough sexual orientation diversity. Coupled with this real bro culture, what's your best advice for technology companies today to be more inclusive, that's one of Satya Nadella's real guiding principles is embracing diversity, different perspectives, and being inclusive. How do you do it? >> I would say the first thing is really, just take the first step. We're all on a journey, this is a really big hairy issue that we're all working to tackle, and we cannot do this alone, and that's something we've heard consistently with all our partners. We are working together to tackle this as an industry, and I can't speak for other companies, but at Microsoft we have a strong culture of empathy, and as you know from Sasha's key note we're all about empowering people to be the best that they can be, and that is why we've developed code of conduct, we make sure people know what's acceptable, what are the boundaries that we can talk with, but still push the limit and say, hey I want to learn more about your culture, I want to know more about the LGBTQ community, I want to know about inclusive design and accessibility, how do I build technology that is accessible for everybody. So I think it's not easy for sure, even for Microsoft, we are still trying a lot of things for the first time. We learn and we grow from it, and we just keep improving it every year, so we hope that in future Ignites it will be even better. >> And having community members, even individually own being a champion for diversity too, whether it be in their own organization, or in their own user groups that they run, we really want to make sure that they are feeling like I can be an ally for diversity, whether you are someone who is the the typical persona in the IT pro world, which is a white male, and I'm really glad to hear a lot of these stories of people saying you know what, I am going to be that person that's going to step in and say something when I don't think things are right. >> And there are topics that everybody can relate to as well like mental health and wellness, that's an issue that's really come in the spotlight with a lot of stress in the industry. So it doesn't matter whether you're male, female, your gender identity, all of us are human beings. We all feel the same pressures and stress, and we just had that lunch session where literally tears were shed because people felt like I now have space to say I'm struggling with this, can you help me? And I think that's a really powerful thing to even just get started. >> It does require a lot of bravery, I think. Because for me even, I like to be able to find other people that I can relate to, who also share some of the same challenges that I have, and so I think that's the first step really, basically opening the doors and letting people express themselves and then other people are also going to feel like they're included. I think that's really one of the first steps. >> And where better to do it than a community. Finding your people in this space so yeah. >> And I want to ask about the buttons you have on so, yours, Anna's says Ringleader, Shona, game changer. >> Networking ninja >> And Networking ninja! I love it. So can you explain what these mean? >> Yeah so this year we want to try to really interactive button wall and we want people to come, and feel like they can share what's there diversity super powers, so all of us play a really important role, we where many hats from a day to day basis, but we want to know, what do people feel like is there ultimate strength, whether you're a mentor, are you an enabler, are you a supporter, what is it? And these were just great conversation topics, so if I saw that Anna's a Ringleader, I might come up to her and be like, oh that's me too, can we talk and schedule and idea slot? So we just want to create a fun way for people to interact, but another important thing we've launched this year is the pronoun buttons, so we want everybody to feel like they can be comfortable telling people what is the pronoun that they prefer rather than what visually people think they are, so that is something that we've launched this year as well. >> Very cool, very cool. Well thank you both so much for coming on theCube, it was really fun talking to you. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (smooth music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon '18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer on a stunning day here in San Francisco. This event draws between 5,000 and 6,000 people in only its fifth year. They did a very good job during the general session this morning, John, of having some great female leaders on stage and we're very pleased to welcome another female leader to theCUBE for the first time. Alex Qin, you are the Director of Technology at Gakko. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here. >> So, you're speaking here at DockerCon 2018, I want to get to that in a second, but tell us a little bit about Gakko. What do you guys do? >> Um, yeah. So we're a global education design studio based in Tokyo and New York and what we do is we put on experimental education programs and build experimental education technology that aim to reclaim the magic of learning. So, we put on summer camps, we have coding classes, music classes and we build software for early learners. >> And by early learners what age group are you talking about? >> So ages three to five. What we build is beautiful story and art driven apps for kids ages three to five to be able to spend time more thoughtfully on tablets 'cause nowadays kids are always on tablets no matter what we do and so what we want to do is create a world that they can be in, in which parents feel like, this is a good place for my child to spend time. They're learning, it's artful, it's thoughtfully built. >> Great, well Alex you are also the founder of The Code Collective. >> The Code Cooperative, yes. >> The Code Cooperative, I'm sorry. How did you get started with that and can you tell us a little bit about that as well? >> Yes, so The Code Cooperative is my passion project and I started it in 2016, the day after the presidential elections actually, and it's an organization that teaches formerly incarcerated individuals computer literacy and coding, so that they can build websites and technical solutions to the problems they've identified in the criminal justice system. >> Some examples of that might be? >> A story I love to tell is from the pilot class. I had one student who was a 65 year old man and he'd been in prison for over 20 years and so at 65, he took our class and he learned HTML, CSS and JavaScript and built a website that aims to educate visitors about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the criminal justice system today. Just like an interactive quiz. Yeah, that was really cool. It was called The Criminal Injustice System. >> Nice, nice. >> What were some of the drivers that really led you to go, you know what? We've got a huge opportunity here to take some of these people who have had made some different choices and really, sort of, rehabilitate them in a way that's gonna enable tech for good. What were some of those things that you just went, we've got to do this? >> That's a good question. Well, I read the book, The New Jim Crow, which you may have heard of. It's an incredible book that really details a lot of the problems that exist today within the U.S. criminal justice system and I thought to myself, I want to learn more about the justice system and contribute positively to justice system reform, but I don't know anything about it. So what I should do is work with people who have been through the system, learn from them and empower them to highlight the issues that they see within the justice system and that's something that I think is really important. When it comes to building technology, right now the gatekeepers of tech are kind of a homogenous group and we tend to build tech solutions for the entire world, but actually the people who are best equipped to solve problems are those who have experienced them and so that's why I decided to start The Code Cooperative. >> Nice. Alex, you're talking here, you've got an interesting titled session, I'll make sure I get it right, Shaving My Head Made Me a Better Programmer. If I can connect that to the rest of the DockerCon, maybe, I mean, Docker has been very good at their whole history about developer experience, making things easier for people and I think sometimes people don't realize not only when you make things easier, you actually can bring in new audiences. Kids, prisoners, right, are able to use today's technology where 30, 40 years ago they wouldn't have had access to it because it's easier, it's more powerful, it's more ubiquitous. But sometimes we get stuck in old tropes and so I'd love for you to kind of talk a little about your talk and kind of, what you're going to be talking about here at the show. >> Sure, yes. So, my talk is called Shaving My Head Made Me a Better Programmer and it's a little bit of a misleading title, but basically it's the story of my journey though the tech industry as a minority woman. So I studied computer science and I've been a software engineer for my entire career and yet, I've encountered a lot of challenges because of my gender, because of how I present to the world and when I shaved my head, a lot of those challenges kind of disappeared because I wasn't perceived as feminine anymore and so when I realized that tech isn't the meritocracy that I thought it was, I kind of started on this new quest to make tech as diverse and inclusive as possible so that people from all backgrounds, all genders can learn to code and write code happily and safely and it's just the story of how that happened and the lessons I've learned and some tips on how to make organizations more inclusive because that's the bulk of my work now. >> So you were a C.S. major in New York? >> Yes. >> So were you always interested in STEM as a kid or was it something that you got into when you were in college? What was that sort of age that you found it really exciting and said, no matter what, even if there's very few women here, I love this, I want to do this? >> That's a great question. So I am originally from France, actually. And when I was growing up there was really little computer science education in schools, but I really wanted to be an astronaut when I got to college so I joined the engineering program at my school and I'd never coded at that point, but one of the requirements was an intro to programming class in Python. So I took it and I fell in love with it immediately and I was like, I'm majoring in computer science, this is so cool, this is the coolest thing I've ever done and as I entered the computer science world I realized, oh, there's not that many women here and actually, I'm treated very differently. So, I fell in love with it and then because I love it so much I just kind of powered through. >> Your passion is very palpable, so at any point did you feel, sort of, out of place? Going, I'm one of the only females here, or did you say, I don't care, I like this. >> Yeah, it's both. I mean, you feel out of place when there's very few people who look like you in the room. Even if you don't want to feel out of place, even if you try to pretend that's not the case, you can't help but feel that and when I was starting out and throughout my career, people didn't necessarily want to work with me, didn't believe I was a good programmer, even though I was at the top of all my classes and so even though I tried to make the most out of my experience, I couldn't really escape the stigma attached to my gender in this field. >> Alex, we're at an interesting part of our culture now, I suppose, especially online. On one hand, social media has elevated a lot of folks' voices that would not have been heard otherwise because of gatekeepers. On the other hand, we have our current online discourse, which is kind of, not very pleasant sometimes. So I am interested both kind of how you're navigating that online and then maybe as a followup, then as you work with companies, how you're working with them and what you're telling them, but in terms of online, I love Twitter and yet it frustrates me. Facebook as well, et cetera. How do you navigate that online yourself? >> That's a great question. Honestly, I have been kind of retreating from social media. I haven't really experienced too many negative interactions on social media because I'm not really a big presence there. I did kind of have a really bad experience once during a Grace Hopper conference. I tweeted something during the Male Allied panel of like, 2015, or something and that got picked up by some GamerGate writers and then a lot of people started tweeting negative things at me, but that's kind of the extent of my negative experiences online. I do think that, as you say, social media has allowed for uplifting of voices that were previously unheard, has allowed for activism to organize. There's so many positive things that come from social media and also it has a really nefarious affect on people and I think that something needs to change in terms of how these companies build their software. It needs to be safer for all people and also needs to be built more ethically. Less trying to manipulate our psyches. >> That's, I think, super important. Luckily at least that's a conversation now, right Lisa? That at least Facebook, I think eventually as a society we'll, I hope, we'll get through this and figure this out, but I don't feel like we're particularly literate with social at this point. But I did want to ask about your work with companies. You said you do talk with some companies about diversity and things like that, is there any either signs that folks are getting it right or things that you start off with as you're working, if someone asks, how do we become a more diverse workforce? >> Yeah, that's a good question. I can't really point to any companies that, I say, are doing amazing. There are some companies where I know folks are very happy. Slack is one of them, thoughtbot is another one of them. I'll say Gakko, but a few tips I generally give organizations is that you need to work to understand the problem. Why is there a lack of diversity in tech? Why is your team not diverse? Then you need to measure your data. You can't make a positive change if you don't know how much you're changing, right? So gather diversity data on your team, not just in terms of who's there, but who's in a leadership role. Who gets promoted? Who gets fired? Who's a manager? And then you need to commit. That's, I think, the place where a lot of people struggle is there's a lot of candidates who fit this, kind of, homogenous image of what a programmer is and so it can be easy sometimes to be like, well we need to hire someone right now so let's just hire this person. But in order to actually make a change you need to commit and you need to say I'm not going to compromise on the goals that we've set. >> You're absolutely right, that commitment word is exactly what's needed to drive that accountability to hold organizations up to that. I was just at VMware a couple of weeks ago in Palo Alto at the Women Transforming Technology event and we had a whole day of all talking with females in tech, which I always loved to do and theCUBE is very passionate about supporting that. The cultural change is imperative. We talk about digital transformation at every event and there's the CIO that says, hey we have to change the culture here to transform digitally, but also to start moving those numbers from, what, less than 25% of tech roles are held by women. The culture has to change. It seems like you're in a position, potentially, to actually influence the culture at these companies that you talk to about opening their eyes to commit. Does that excite you from within? >> Yes, I do talk to a lot of organizations about this, but I think the work that I do that might actually tip the scale is, basically, the education programs that I run in New York. All of my classrooms reflect the diversity of New York, both in terms of student and teacher bodies. So all of my students learn in an environment that is extremely diverse. They learn from teachers who look like them and I wish I learned to code in that way. Another important thing we teach our students is how to code as an ethical endeavor. So we teach our students to measure the ethical ramifications of their decisions when they build software so that hopefully the technologists of tomorrow, the CTO's of tomorrow they build code in a way that is best for humanity. They build code with empathy. >> Goin' back to your day job. You're working with kids. We talked about getting through social media, cultural change. Its going to depend on the next generation. So Alex, are the kids alright? Are they gonna save us? >> The kids are pretty alright. I mean, so my classroom is basically coding meets social entrepreneurship so all of our kids build an app that solves a problem they've identified in their communities and these kids are just coming up with the most beautiful solutions, like, more brilliant than any adult that I've met. I feel good about the future. >> Well, it's key to get those different perspectives and when you were saying, they're having the opportunity to code and create apps that are relevant to them that's where you can really ignite that passion. >> Exactly, that's so important >> It is important because when you're passionate about something, and we saw that on stage today with a lot of the Docker folks and Microsoft and McKesson, when you're passionate about something and really making a change, you can feel it. So it's good to hear that we're going in the right direction. Also, we're in this age, you talked about ethics, where it's essential. Because technology, we see a lot of examples where tech is not used for good and there's world leaders getting some of the leaders of tech companies together saying, I'm challenging you, make tech for good because we're seeing too much of the negative right now. How does that influence, whether it's the breaches at Equifax, or, there was a breach recently at MyHeritage, the DNA testing companies, to Cambridge Analytica. How do you see the kids, the young kids respond to that, going, that's a really poor use of tech. Are they aware of that? >> I think some kids are and in our classroom we spend some time talking about, we have discussions about, ethics of software. So that's something that's very important to us. But largely, most classrooms in the United States, no, I mean computer science education is not a standard in most classrooms in the US. In New York state, only 1% of high schoolers actually have access to any kind of computer science education and so most kids, they might hear tid bits from the T.V. or social media or something, but they're not necessarily informed enough to make one, good decisions as consumers and two, good decisions as potential technologists. So that's something that we are trying to spread and I hope other folks are also trying to work on. >> Another thing that I think is shocking is when we were at the Women Transforming Technology event just a few weeks ago at VMware in Palo Alto, they just announced with Stanford, Stanford is investing 15 million dollars into their gender research. VMware and Stanford wanting to look at what are the barriers for women in tech and minorities in tech and starting to dissolve some of those barriers. One of the things they actually had in their press release announcing this big 15 million dollar investment from VMware and Stanford is a Mckinsey report that said 20%, sorry, enterprise organizations that have females in management positions, probably executive management positions, didn't specify positions, are 20% more profitable. You just think, the numbers are saying when you have more thought diversity, you're actually going to be a more profitable organization, but I think to your point earlier, Alex, there has to be a commitment and there has to be a group within an organization that stands accountable. >> Absolutely. >> So we are thankful for you. (Alex laughs) for donating some of your time today to tell us what you're doing, it's good to hear the next generation, John, I think they got our backs. >> Alright, that's good. >> And Alex, have a great time with your very provocative session this afternoon. >> Thank you. >> We thank you so much for your time and it's really cool to hear how you're using your passion for tech for good. >> Thank you so much, it was great to be here. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. From San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. Stick around, John and I will be right back with out next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Presenter: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's the Cube. Covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back everyone, we're live here with the Cube in Copenhagen, Denmark, for KubeCon 2018 Europe, via the CFCF Cloud Native Computing foundation, part of the Linux foundation. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Lauren Cooney here this week. And up next to Yaron Haviv, the founder, and CTO of Iguazio, and Doug Davis, who is the co-chair of the serverless working group, And the CNCF, as well as a developer advocate for IBM, IBM cloud. Great to see you welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for coming in. So love the serverless work, and want to dig into that with a bunch of questions. So, super important trend as we see in that success functions, and all the good stuff that's going on, programmable infrastructure. So I want to dig into that. But first, Yaron, I want to get into what's going on with the business, what's new with you? Iguazio, I saw you're on the sponsorship list here, you're doing a lot of work. You have some news as well. What's going on at KubeCon, Europe for you. >> Yeah, so we're expanding on the business side very nicely, taking more momentum, and this strength towards edge analytics, edge cloud, people starting to understand that central cloud is not the only way to build clouds. We're also progressing nicely on our serverless framework, called Nuclio. It just was published, maybe eight months ago, already made 2000 stars in GitHub, you know, users. We've got some quotes, NPR's around production version of that, including strong partnership with Acer, on being able to run the same functions in Acer, and the cloud in a joint development effort, as well as customers actually using it to build real-time analytics use case in development in the cloud, and deployment in different locations. >> Our audience knows you well, you've been on the cube many times. You also write for us, as well as other blogs with your opinion pieces and commentary. It's always edgy, and strong, and right on the money, I want to ask you your thoughts on serverless, because you were there from day one, I remember the conversation. It wasn't called serverless, we were talking about resource pools and looking at cloud computing, pontificating about, potentially, what Kubernetes and orchestration was going to look like. It's happening. So, are you happy with the progress of the industry, performance of the tech stack? What's your thoughts on serverless today, state of the union? What's your opinion? >> I think it's progressing nicely. I think many people call everything almost, serverless now. You have serverless data bases, you have serverless everything. I think serverless will become, more and more, a feature of a platform, not necessarily a thing. But, like Salesforce will have serverless functions, Wix will have serverless functions, for their own stuff. Obviously cloud platforms, analytic platforms, et cetera. So there'll be, maybe a family of generic ones, and a family of platform specific, that are more use case oriented. >> Does that connect with your business plan for Iguazio? Are you evolving with it? How are you navigating those waters on the adoption side. >> So, you know, I'm sort of trying to be inclusive, I think there's room for more than one serverless framework. There's also OpenWhisk, and Openfazzer, and a few of those. Our focus is mainly real-time analytics, and high performance in data processing. Yes, we can also do other things, but maybe we won't invest too much in some features that are more front-end oriented, or stuff like that. >> John: So you're staying focused on the core. >> Yes, on the other hand, other people to deal with front-end, we'll focus on HTTP, and Blue Logic, and things like that. Most of the frameworks don't have the same capabilities of Nuclio, like real-time stream distribution, real-time, low latencies, all that stuff. So, I think there's room for multiple frameworks, and that's also part of the relationship with Acer. Acer have their own product, which is very good with integration with the Acer stack, and the Acer components. On the other hand there is real-time analytics, in IOT Nuclio is stronger, So, there interest is, rather than saying, no we'll choose just one horse, why won't we enable the market, and allow the people the choice in solution. >> That's great. On IBM's side, Doug I want to get your thoughts on the working group, as well as IBM. You guys have done a lot of open source, IBM well known in the Linux history books, as we know. And now very active again, continuing that mission, congratulations, and thanks for doing that. But the serverless working group. This is a broader scope now, can you just give us some color on the commentary around how that's evolving, because you guys have a lot of blue chip customers. Cloud Foundry just did a survey, I was talking to Abby Kearns yesterday, about the results came back, mainstream tech, not middle of the country, but they heard about Kubenettis like, what's kubenettis? So you have people going, Okay, I've got a job to do, but now kubenettis has arrived, this is a key part of a micro-services focus. >> Right. Yeah, and so the way the serverless group got started was, about a year ago the CNCF TOC, technical oversight committee, decided serverless is kind of a new technology, we want to figure out what's going on in that space, and so they started up a working group. And our job wasn't to really decide what to do about it yet, it was to sort of give us the landscape of what's going on out there, what are people doing? What does serverless even mean, relative to function of the service, or even the other as's, and stuff like that What does a serverless framework generally look like? What do people use it for? Use cases, and stuff like that. And then at the end of that we produced a white paper with our results, as well as a landscape spreadsheet, to say all of the various technologies out there in that space, who's doing what. Without trying to pick winners, just saying what's there. And then we ended with a set of recommendations in terms of what possible next steps the CNCF could do in this space, with an eye towards interoperability building more than anything else, because that's what, really, we care about. We don't want vendor lock in and all the other good stuff. And so we had a set of recommendations, and one of the main ones was, two main things, one was function signatures was a very popular one, but we decided to focus on eventing first, because we thought that might be an easier fruit to pick off the tree first. And so we were going to focus on the formats, or meta data of an event, as it transfers between systems. And so from the service working group we create a cloud events, sort of little sub-group within our working group, to focus on creating a specification around what the meta-data around an event would look like, just so we can get some commonality. That way, at least the infrastructure between the two systems can transfer the events back and forth, much in the same way HTTP layer, doesn't have to understand the body of the message, but can look at common headers, and know how to route it properly. Same kind of thing with eventing. And again, this is all about trying to get interoperability, and portability for applications, and users more than anybody else. And so that's kind of where our focus has been on. How can we help the end user not get locked into one platform, not get locked into one solution, and make their life easier overall. >> Great. Where are you now with that? Is it running? Is it-- >> Overall done. No. >> Oh you're complete, yeah (laughs) >> Doug: But we did that last week. No, actually as of last week though, we just released our first version, 0.1. It's a very, very basic thing, and people might look at it and say, what's the big deal? But even with that simple little thing we've been able to get some level of interoperability between the various platforms. And if people actually join, when is it? Friday 11 o'clock? >> Yaron: Yeah. >> We have a session where someone's going to demonstrate interoperability between, oh gosh, IBM, you guys, Microsoft. >> Google. >> Dameware, Google. All the various companies involved in this thing. >> Love it, that's great. >> Huawei. >> Yeah. They're all going to be either sending or receiving events, using the cloud event format, to prove interoperability around the specification. So we're just at 0.1, we have some way to go, but that first step was huge just to get agreement, and everybody to the table to agree. So it's been really fun >> And it wasn't easy, it wasn't easy. And he's the peacemaker in the group. (laughs) I'm the troublemaker, he's the peacemaker. >> We have a lot of vocal people in the group, yes. (laughs) >> We're not pointing at anyone. >> No, never. >> Important first step obviously, commonality, and having some sort of standardization kind of thinking. >> Doug: Yes. >> Yaron: Don't use the standard word. There are people allergic to that. >> Well yeah, the standard bodies and what not, but in terms of the community work going on, this is super important. What's the impact of that? Obviously it's a small step, but a big step, right? So, what's it going to impact? What's next, what's coming next now that you've got the meta-data, and you've got the interoperability, what's next? >> Well, obviously we need to finish it up, because 0.1 is obviously just the first step. As I said, I think beyond that people are really itching to do function signatures. Because I think if you can get the event format coming in to be somewhat similar, and then you can get portability of moving your function from one platform to another, with hopefully minimal changes from a function signature point of view, you're a long way there towards getting portability for people. And I think that's probably the next step we're going to be looking at. >> What's the technical case from a commercial entity like yourself, who's in business to make money, obviously you have a business to run. As you build out your architecture, where is this going to be applied for you? What's the impact of this project to your product? >> So beyond my strong religion around open APIs, and you've seen the blogs I've written about it, our interest is twofold. First, we're not the market leader, Amazon is the market leader, et cetera. So if we have a better technology, and things are standard, it's easier for customers to move. Second, is we believe in interoperability, closer to the data, closer to where the processing, especially when 5G is going to evolve, and we're going to see bottlenecks between metro locations. Our sales is, go develop in the cloud, and then push it, you know the diesel twin model. This is exactly what we're demonstrating with Acer. You could develop at Acer, our Nuclio functions and deploy in a factory. So it may not be the same platform, it may not be the same serverless framework. So having the ability to run the same code in different frameworks or different platforms is very important. >> And IBM, you're doing a lot of work. OpenWhisk has been something that's gotten a lot of press and notoriety. What's up with you guys and open source? Obviously we see you guys out there doing a lot of studies and a lot content, a lot of coding. What's new over on the IBM side of the house with serverless? >> From my point of view, I think probably the biggest thing is, we're leading the charge in putting OpenWhisk to run on top of Kubernetes. And I think what's interesting about that is we're going to see, probably, some changes to Kubernetes need to be made to get the better performance that we need. Because when OpenWhisk runs vanilla on top of, say run C, or the docker stuff, we have a lot more freedom there. Pausing containers, stuff like that. Stuff you can't do in Kubernetes. We're probably going to see some more pressure on Kubernetes to add some more features, to get the kind of performance numbers we need going forward. >> And scale too, is important to understand. I was just talking about the keynotes earlier with another guest, and Cern is up there. They have a thousand nodes, it's not massive numbers yet, at scale, I mean Amazon are the big clouds, you guys have clouds. You've got a lot of nodes, so it's a lot more scale going on in the cloud as Kubernetes starts to get it's footing. >> Doug: Yep. >> How do you explain Kubernetes, how do both of you guys explain Kubernetes to the IT transformation group out there, that's going cloud operations. >> So what we've seen, because we're also selling an appliance, a full integrated solution, people, in the enterprise, they don't necessarily want to understand low level of Kubernetes. And actually serverless is a nice way for doing that. If you look at the new Nuclio dashboard, you just go, you write some code, you click deploy, it auto scales, you don't need to think about the underlying cube cut whole, the underlying networking. It's all done there for you. And I think, what you see in the trend in the industry, some people call it serverless, some people call it other things, is more and more abstractions, where users will deploy code, will deploy containers, and some frameworks underneath will deal with the high availability, elasticity, all that. I think that's what enterprise customers are looking for. Not everyone is eBay, and Google, and Netflix. >> John: Your thoughts? >> What I think is interesting, I agree with what you said, but I think it's interesting is you actually have a wider range of people, right. You have some people who think Kubernetes, as you said, nice abstraction layer, you don't have to get into the nitty gritty if you don't need to. But Kubernetes does allow you to get under the covers and twiddle those lower level bits if you actually need to. I think that's one of the things that. People who start out with Docker, they like it, it's so simple to use, and it's wonderful, and they love it. But they found it a little bit limiting, because it was too opinionated, or it didn't give you access to things under the covers. Kubernetes, I think, is trying to find that right balance between the two, and I think for the most part they kind of hit it. There's a little bit more of a learning, because it's not quite as user friendly as Docker is. But once you get over that learning hump, all the flexibility it gives you, people seem to really, really, like that. >> What are some of the things that people do under the covers, you mentioned some tweaks here and there. Is it policy based stuff? What's happening under the covers that Kubernetes getting that their groove swing on now. >> There is something called custom resource definition. So for example, when we deploy a Nulio, maybe OpenWhisk or others have it as well. It's essentially, Nuclio becomes another resource that you can actually view when you're running the Kubernetes CLI, or all the other things that manage it's liveliness, et cetera. So those are services that you get for free as a platform. But if you want your function to keep being alive you need to code your functions into the liveliness API, the thing that monitors it staying alive. So you're getting a generic service, but you need to work with it. >> Yeah, actually I'd go one step further with that and abstract it a little. Because obviously Kubernetes has a lot of knobs you can turn, a lot more than other platforms, like Docker has. But I think, for me the biggest benefit of Kubernetes is the plugability. Custom resource definitions, one of them. Ripping out schedulers, or whatever controllers you want, and replace it with your own. That kind of flexibility to say, I don't have to leave the entire Kubernetes world just to run my own scheduler, or write the infrastructure around it, I can plug in my own. That's the kind of flexibility people seem to really, really like. That way they don't feel locked in, they can still play with part of the ecosystem, but get the flexibility and customization they need. >> Awesome, great commentary there. I want to get your thoughts on KubeCon 2018 Europe, for CNCF. Continuing to see growth in CNCF, fantastic to see. As the boat gets full of people, you've got to be the peacemaker if you're co-chair. As people want to start getting their claws into the projects, this imbalance on the community side, are you guys happy with the direction, obviously the success, and the visibility is increased. What's your take on the show here? What are you guys doing? What's going on around the event for you guys. >> So it only started today, but my impression, comparing it with the previous show in the U.S. There are a lot more decision makers here. I don't know if it's the European culture of not funding every student to every show, or just the maturity of the ecosystem. But that's something I've noticed, the discussions I had with decision makers. and they're also not everyone, like in the U.S.A. everyone wants to build it their own way. People here think about operationalizing solutions, so sometimes you need to take something that someone else already built and test. >> And what's the conversations like, that you're having? Is it architecture? Is it deploying production workloads? >> So for us it's a lot about use cases, because we're doing things in a very different way. We're doing some nice demos on how, we're running real-time analytics with the sample database as the core, and we're showing how it's equivalent to another solution that they may build. And that immediately clicks. The other aspect is really, there is so much technology, but we need someone to wrap it up for us as a package solution. >> Doug, your thoughts. First of all I love your shirt, it says code with all the words in the community. >> Doug: Yeah, it's one of my favorite shirts. I like it. >> Love that shirt. I'm just looking at it like, all these questions are popping in my head. What's your plan at the show here? What's your goal, what are you guys doing, what conversations are you hearing in the hallways? >> Well, obviously being from IBM, we just promote IBM as much as we can. But beyond that, really talk about interoperability around what we're doing here, and make sure people understand that we're not here to necessarily sell our products, which we obviously want to do. We want to make sure that we do it in a way that gives people choice. And that's why we have the serverless working group, the cloud events spec. It's all about giving everybody the choice to move from one platform to another, to get their job done. As much as we want people to buy our stuff, if the customer isn't happy in getting what they need, then we're all going to lose. >> And these projects are super important to get the solidarity around these, quote, standards. >> And just to follow on your previous question about the conference, and stuff that we'd like. Obviously it's great that it's growing so much, but what I really like about this conference, beyond some other ones that I've seen is, a lot of the other ones tend to have more marketing flair to them. And obviously there's a little bit of that here, people are promoting their stuff, but I love the fact that most of the stuff that I'm doing here aren't in the sessions. Because the sessions are great and interesting, but it's the hallway chatter, and interacting with people face to face, and not just to meet them, to actually have real technical, deep discussion with them, here at the conference, because everybody's here you can do that much better face to face than you can over a Zoom call, or something else. The productivity from that level is just astronomical, I love it. >> Yeah, I totally agree. And one thing I would add, just my observation, interviews in the hallways, is that we're living, and we talk about this on the Cube all the time, a modern software architectures here. And it's got some visibility around it, it's not filled in yet, but I think there's clear visibility. Cloud, micro-service, interoperability, portability, pretty clear. And I think people are engaged, people are excited. So you have the progressive new guard coming in, on board. Great job. Thanks for coming on the cube, we appreciate that. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Iguazio and IBM, here on the Cube, breaking down KubeCon 2018 Europe. More live coverage, stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break. (electronic music)