from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi buddy welcome back to the cube this is Dave Volante and you're watching a special presentation data ops enacted made possible by IBM you know what's what's happening is the innovation engine in the IT economy is really shifted used to be Moore's Law today it's applying machine intelligence and AI to data really scaling that and operationalizing that new knowledge the challenges that is not so easy to operationalize AI and infuse it into the data pipeline but what we're doing in this program is bringing in practitioners who have actually had a great deal of success in doing just that and I'm really excited to have it Kumal a Himalayan Manali is here she's the executive head of data management or personal and business banking at Standard Bank of South Africa the tomb of length thanks so much for coming in the queue thank you for having me Dave you're very welcome and first of all how you holding up with this this bovid situation how are things in Johannesburg um things in Johannesburg are fine we've been on lockdown now I think it's day 33 if I'm not mistaken lost count and but we're really grateful for the swift action of government we we only I mean we have less than 4,000 places in the country and infection rate is is really slow so we've really I think been able to find the curve and we're grateful for being able to be protected in this way so all working from home or learning the new normal and we're all in this together that's great to hear why don't you tell us a little bit about your your role you're a data person we're really going to get into it but here with us you know how you spend your time okay well I head up a date operations function and a data management function which really is the foundational part of the data value chain that then allows other parts of the organization to monetize data and liberate it as as as the use cases apply we monetize it ourselves as well but really we're an enterprise wide organization that ensures that data quality is managed data is governed that we have the effective practices applied to the entire lineage of the data ownership and curation is in place and everything else from a regulatory as well as opportunity perspective then is able to be leveraged upon so historically you know data has been viewed as sort of this expense it's it's big it's growing it needs to be managed deleted after a certain amount of time and then you know ten years ago of the Big Data move data became an asset you had a lot of shadow I people going off and doing things that maybe didn't comply to the corporate ethics probably drove here here you're a part of the organization crazy but talk about that how what has changed but they in the last you know five years or so just in terms of how people approach data oh I mean you know the story I tell my colleague who are all bankers obviously is the fact that the banker in 1989 had to mainly just know debits credits and be able to look someone in the eye and know whether or not they'd be a credit risk or not you know if we lend you money and you pay it back the the banker of the late 90s had to then contend with the emergence of technologies that made their lives easier and allowed for automation and processes to run much more smoothly um in the early two-thousands I would say that digitization was a big focus and in fact my previous role was head of digital banking and at the time we thought digital was the panacea it is the be-all and end-all it's the thing that's gonna make organizations edit lo and behold we realized that once you've gotten all your digital platforms ready they are just the plate or the pipe and nothing is flowing through it and there's no food on the face if data is not the main photo really um it's always been an asset I think organizations just never consciously knew that data was that okay so so what sounds like once you've made that sort of initial digital transformation you really had to work it and what we're hearing from a lot of practitioners like self as challenges related to that involve different parts of the organization different skill sets of challenges and sort of getting everybody to work together on the same page it's better but maybe you could take us back to sort of when you started on this initiative around data Ops what was that like what were some of the challenges that you faced and how'd you get through them okay first and foremost Dave organizations used to believe that data was I t's problem and that's probably why you you then saw the emergence of things like chatter IP but when you really acknowledge that data is an essay just like money is an asset then you you have to then take accountability for it just the same way as you would any other asset in the organization and you will not abdicate its management to a separate function that's not cold to the business and oftentimes IT are seen as a support or an enabling but not quite the main show in most organizations right so what we we then did is first emphasize that data is a business capability the business function it presides in business makes to product management makes to marketing makes to everything else that the business needs for data management also has to be for to every role in every function to different degrees and varying bearing offense and when you take accountability as an owner of a business unit you also take accountability for the data in the systems that support the business unit for us that was the first picture um and convincing my colleagues that data was their problem and not something that we had to worry about they just kind of leave us to to it was was also a journey but that was kind of the first step into it in terms of getting the data operations journey going um you had to first acknowledge please carry on no you just had to first acknowledge that it's something you must take accountability of as a banker not just need to a different part of the organization that's a real cultural mindset you know in the game of rock-paper-scissors you know culture kinda beats everything doesn't it it's almost like a yep a trump card and so so the businesses embrace that but but what did you do to support that is there has to be trust in the data that it has to be a timeliness and so maybe you could take us through how you achieve those objectives and maybe some other objectives that business the man so the one thing I didn't mention Dave is that obviously they didn't embrace it in the beginning it wasn't a it wasn't there oh yeah that make sense they do that type of conversation um what what he had was a few very strategic people with the right mindset that I could partner with that understood the case for data management and while we had that as as an in we developed a framework for a fully matured data operations capability in the organization and what that would look like in a target date scenario and then what you do is you wait for a good crisis so we had a little bit of a challenge in that our local regulator found us a little bit wanting in terms of our date of college and from that perspective it then brought the case for data quality management so now there's a burning platform you have an appetite for people to partner with you and say okay we need this to comply to help us out and when they start seeing their opt-in action do they then buy into into the concept so sometimes you need to just wait for a good Christ and leverage it and only do that which the organization will appreciate at that time you don't have to go Big Bang data quality management was the use case at the time five years ago so we focused all our energy on that and after that it gave us leeway and license really bring to maturity all the other capabilities at the business might not well understand as well so when that crisis hit of thinking about people process in technology you probably had to turn some knobs in each of those areas can you talk about that so from a technology perspective that that's when we partnered with with IBM to implement information analyzer for us in terms of making sure that then we could profile the data effectively what was important for us is to to make strides in terms of showing the organization progress but also being able to give them access to self-service tools that will give them insight into their data from a technology perspective that was kind of I think the the genesis of of us implementing and the IBM suite in earnest from a data management perspective people wise we really then also began a data stewardship journey in which we implemented business unit stewards of data I don't like using the word steward because in my organization it's taken lightly almost like a part-time occupation so we converted them we call them data managers and and the analogy I would give is every department with a P&L any department worth its salt has a FDA or financial director and if money is important to you you have somebody helping you take accountability and execute on your responsibilities in managing that that money so if data is equally important as an asset you will have a leader a manager helping you execute on your data ownership accountability and that was the people journey so firstly I had kind of soldiers planted in each department which were data managers that would then continue building the culture maturing the data practices as as applicable to each business unit use cases so what was important is that every manager in every business unit to the Data Manager focus their energy on making that business unit happy by ensuring that they data was of the right compliance level and the right quality the right best practices from a process and management perspective and was governed and then in terms of process really it's about spreading through the entire ecosystem data management as a practice and can be quite lonely um in the sense that unless the whole business of an organization is managing data they worried about doing what they do to make money and most people in most business units will be the only unicorn relative to everybody else who does what they do and so for us it was important to have a community of practice a process where all the data managers across business as well as the technology parts and the specialists who were data management professionals coming together and making sure that we we work together on on specific you say so I wonder if I can ask you so the the industry sort of likes to market this notion of of DevOps applied to data and data op have you applied that type of mindset approach agile of continuous improvement is I'm trying to understand how much is marketing and how much actually applicable in the real world can you share well you know when I was reflecting on this before this interview I realized that our very first use case of data officers probably when we implemented information analyzer in our business unit simply because it was the first time that IT and business as well as data professionals came together to spec the use case and then we would literally in an agile fashion with a multidisciplinary team come together to make sure that we got the outcomes that we required I mean for you to to firstly get a data quality management paradigm where we moved from 6% quality at some point from our client data now we're sitting at 99 percent and that 1% literally is just the timing issue to get from from 6 to 99 you have to make sure that the entire value chain is engaged so our business partners will the fundamental determinant of the business rules apply in terms of what does quality mean what are the criteria of quality and then what we do is translate that into what we put in the catalog and ensure that the profiling rules that we run are against those business rules that were defined at first so you'd have upfront determination of the outcome with business and then the team would go into an agile cycle of maybe two-week sprints where we develop certain things have stand-ups come together and then the output would be - boarded in a prototype in a fashion where business then gets to go double check that out so that was the first iterate and I would say we've become much more mature at it and we've got many more use cases now and there's actually one that it's quite exciting that we we recently achieved over the end of of 2019 into the beginning of this year so what we did was they I'm worried about the sunlight I mean through the window you look creative to me like sunset in South Africa we've been on the we've been on CubeSat sometimes it's so bright we have to put on sunglasses but so the most recent one which was in in mates 2019 coming in too early this year we we had long kind of achieved the the compliance and regulatory burning platform issues and now we are in a place of I think opportunity and luxury where we can now find use cases that are pertinent to business execution and business productivity um the one that comes to mind is we're a hundred and fifty eight years old as an organization right so so this Bank was born before technology it was also born in the days of light no no no integration because every branch was a standalone entity you'd have these big ledges that transactions were documented in and I think once every six months or so these Ledger's would be taken by horse-drawn carriage to a central place to get go reconcile between branches and paper but the point is if that is your legacy the initial kind of ERP implementations would have been focused on process efficiency based on old ways of accounting for transactions and allocating information so it was not optimized for the 21st century our architecture had has had huge legacy burden on it and so going into a place where you can be agile with data is something that we constantly working toward so we get to a place where we have hundreds of branches across the country and all of them obviously telling to client servicing clients as usual and and not being able for any person needing sales teams or executional teams they were not able in a short space of time to see the impact of the tactic from a database fee from a reporting history and we were in a place where in some cases based on how our Ledger's roll up and the reconciliation between various systems and accounts work it would take you six weeks to verify whether your technique were effective or not because to actually see the revenue hitting our our general ledger and our balance sheet might take that long that is an ineffective way to operate in a such a competitive environment so what you had our frontline sales agents literally manually documenting the sales that they had made but not being able to verify whether that or not is bringing revenue until six weeks later so what we did then is we sat down and defined all the requirements were reporting perspective and the objective was moved from six weeks latency to 24 hours um and even 24 hours is not perfect our ideal would be that bite rows of day you're able to see what you've done for that day but that's the next the next epoch that will go through however um we literally had the frontline teams defining what they'd want to see in a dashboard the business teams defining what the business rules behind the quality and the definitions would be and then we had an entire I'm analytics team and the data management team working around sourcing the data optimising and curating it and making sure that the latency had done that's I think only our latest use case for data art um and now we're in a place where people can look at a dashboard it's a cubed self-service they can learn at any time I see the sales they've made which is very important right now at the time of covert nineteen from a form of productivity and executional competitiveness those are two great use cases of women lying so the first one you know going from data quality 6% the 99% I mean 6% is all you do is spend time arguing about the data bills profanity and then 99% you're there and you said it's just basically a timing issue use latency in the timing and then the second one is is instead of paving the cow path with an outdated you know ledger Barret data process week you've now compressed that down to 24 hours you want to get the end of day so you've built in the agility into your data pipeline I'm going to ask you then so when gdpr hit were you able to very quickly leverage this capability and and apply and then maybe other of compliance edik as well well actually you know what we just now was post TDP our us um and and we got GDP all right about three years ago but literally all we got right was reporting for risk and compliance purposes they use cases that we have now are really around business opportunity lists so the risk so we prioritize compliance report a long time it but we're able to do real-time reporting from a single transaction perspective I'm suspicious transactions etc I'm two hours in Bank and our governor so from that perspective that was what was prioritize in the beginning which was the initial crisis so what you found is an entire engine geared towards making sure that data quality was correct for reporting and regulatory purposes but really that is not the be-all and end-all of it and if that's all we did I believe we really would not have succeeded or could have stayed dead we succeeded because Dana monetization is actually the penis' t the leveraging of data for business opportunity is is actually then what tells you whether you've got the right culture or not you're just doing it to comply then it means the hearts and minds of the rest of the business still aren't in the data game I love this story because it's me it's nirvana for so many years we've been pouring money to mitigate risk and you have no choice do it you know the general council signs off on it the the CFO but grudgingly signs off on it but it's got to be done but for years decades we've been waiting to use these these risk initiatives to actually drive business value you know it kind of happened with enterprise data warehouse but it was too slow it was complicated and it certainly didn't happen with with email archiving that was just sort of a tech balk it sounds like you know we're at that point today and I want to ask you I mean like you know you we talking earlier about you know the crisis gonna perpetuated this this cultural shift and you took advantage of that so we're out who we the the mother nature dealt up a crisis like we've never seen before how do you see your data infrastructure your data pipeline your data ops what kind of opportunities do you see in front of you today as a result of ovid 19 well I mean because of of the quality of kind data that we had now we were able to very quickly respond to to pivot nineteen in in our context where the government put us on lockdown relatively early in in the curve or in the cycle of infection and what it meant is it brought a little bit of a shock to the economy because small businesses all of a sudden didn't have a source of revenue or potentially three to six weeks and based on the data quality work that we did before it was actually relatively easy to be agile enough to do the things that we did so within the first weekend of of lockdown in South Africa we were the first bank to proactively and automatically offer small businesses and student and students with loans on our books a instant three month payment holiday assuming they were in good standing and we did that upfront though it was actually an opt-out process rather than you had to fall in and arrange for that to happen and I don't believe we would have been able to do that if our data quality was not with um we have since made many more initiatives to try and keep the economy going to try and keep our clients in in a state of of liquidity and so you know data quality at that point and that Dharma is critical to knowing who you're talking to who needs what and in which solutions would best be fitted towards various segments I think the second component is um you know working from home now brings an entirely different normal right so so if we had not been able to provide productivity dashboard and and and sales and dashboards to to management and all all the users that require it we would not be able to then validate or say what our productivity levels are now that people are working from home I mean we still have essential services workers that physically go into work but a lot of our relationship bankers are operating from home and that face the baseline and the foundation that we said productivity packing for various methods being able to be reported on in a short space of time has been really beneficial the next opportunity for us is we've been really good at doing this for the normal operational and front line and type of workers but knowledge workers have also know not necessarily been big productivity reporters historically they kind of get an output then the output might be six weeks down the line um but in a place where teams now are not locate co-located and work needs to flow in an edge of passion we need to start using the same foundation and and and data pipeline that we've laid down as a foundation for the reporting of knowledge work and agile team type of metric so in terms of developing new functionality and solutions there's a flow in a multidisciplinary team and how do those solutions get architected in a way where data assists in the flow of information so solutions can be optimally developed well it sounds like you're able to map a metric but business lines care about you know into these dashboards you usually the sort of data mapping approach if you will which makes it much more relevant for the business as you said before they own the data that's got to be a huge business benefit just in terms of again we talked about cultural we talked about speed but but the business impact of being able to do that it has to be pretty substantial it really really is um and and the use cases really are endless because every department finds their own opportunity to utilize in terms of their also I think the accountability factor has has significantly increased because as the owner of a specific domain of data you know that you're not only accountable to yourself and your own operation but people downstream to you as a product and in an outcome depend on you to ensure that the quality of the data you produces is of a high nature so so curation of data is a very important thing and business is really starting to understand that so you know the cards Department knows that they are the owners of card data right and you know the vehicle asset Department knows that they are the owners of vehicle they are linked to a client profile and all of that creates an ecosystem around the plan I mean when you come to a bank you you don't want to be known as a number and you don't want to be known just for one product you want to be known across everything that you do with that with that organization but most banks are not structured that way they still are product houses and product systems on which your data reside and if those don't act in concert then we come across extremely schizophrenic as if we don't know our clients and so that's very very important stupid like I can go on for an hour talking about this topic but unfortunately we're we're out of time thank you so much for sharing your deep knowledge and your story it's really an inspiring one and congratulations on all your success and I guess I'll leave it with you know what's next you gave us you know a glimpse of some of the things you wanted to do pressing some of the the elapsed times and the time cycle but but where do you see this going in the next you know kind of mid term and longer term currently I mean obviously AI is is a big is a big opportunity for all organizations and and you don't get automation of anything right if the foundations are not in place so you believe that this is a great foundation for anything AI to be applied in terms of the use cases that we can find the second one is really providing an API economy where certain data product can be shared with third parties I think that probably where we want to take things as well we are really utilizing external third-party data sources I'm in our data quality management suite to ensure validity of client identity and and and residents and things of that nature but going forward because been picked and banks and other organizations are probably going to partner to to be more competitive going forward we need to be able to provide data product that can then be leveraged by external parties and vice-versa to be like thanks again great having you thank you very much Dave appreciate the opportunity thank you for watching everybody that we go we are digging in the data ops we've got practitioners we've got influencers we've got experts we're going in the crowd chat it's the crowd chat net flash data ops but keep it right there way back but more coverage this is Dave Volante for the cube [Music] you

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi buddy welcome this special digital presentation where we're covering the topic of data ops and specifically how IBM is really operationalizing and automating the data pipeline with data ops and with me is Interpol Bhandari who is the global chief data officer at IBM in Nepal has always great to see you thanks for coming on my pleasure you know the standard throw away question from guys like me is you know what keeps the chief data officer up at night well I know what's keeping you up at night it's kovat 19 how are you doing it's keeping keeping all of us yeah for sure so how you guys making out as a leader I'm interested in you know how you have responded with whether it's you know communications obviously you're doing much more stuff you know remotely you're not on airplanes certainly like you used to be but but what was your first move when you actually realized this was going to require a shift well I think one of the first things that I did was to test the ability of my organization who worked remotely this was well before the the recommendations came in from the government but just so that we wanted you know to be sure that this is something that we could pull off if there were extreme circumstances where even everybody was good and so that was one of the first things we did along with that I think another major activity that we embarked on is even that we had created this central data and AI platform for IBM using our hybrid multi cloud approach how could that be adapting very very quickly you helped with the covert situation but those were the two big items that my team embarked on very quickly and again like I said this is well before there was any recommendations from the government or even internally within IBM any recommendations but B we decided that we wanted to run ahead and make sure that we were ready to ready to operate in that fashion and I believe a lot of my colleagues did the same yeah there's a there's a conversation going on right now just around productivity hits that people may be taking because they really weren't prepared it sounds like you're pretty comfortable with the productivity impact that you're achieving oh I'm totally comfortable with the productivity in fact I will tell you that while we've gone down this spot we've realized that in some cases the productivity is actually going to be better when people are working from home and they're able to focus a lot more on the work aspect you know and this could this runs the gamut from the nature of the job where you know somebody who basically needs to be in the front of a computer and is remotely taking care of operations you know if they don't have to come in their productivity is gonna go up somebody like myself who had a long drive into work you know which I would use on phone calls but now that entire time is can be used a lot more productivity but not maybe in a lot more productive manner so there is a we realize that that there's going to be some aspects of productivity that will actually be helped by the situation provided you're able to deliver the services that you deliver with the same level of quality and satisfaction that you've always done now there were certain other aspects where you know productivity is going to be affected so you know my team there's a lot of whiteboarding that gets done there are lots of informal conversations that spark creativity but those things are much harder to replicate in a remote in life so we've got a sense of you know where we have to do some work what things together versus where we were actually going to be more productive but all in all they are very comfortable that we can pull this off no that's great I want to stay on Kovac for a moment and in the context of just data and data ops and you know why now obviously with a crisis like this it increases the imperative to really have your data act together but I want to ask you both specifically as it relates to Co vid why data ops is so important and then just generally why at this this point in our time so I mean you know the journey we've been on they you know when I joined our data strategy centered around the cloud data and AI mainly because IBM's business strategy was around that and because there wasn't the notion of ái in enterprise right there was everybody understood what AI means for the consumer but for the enterprise people don't really understand what it meant so our data strategy became one of actually making IBM itself into an AI and a BA and then using that as a showcase for our clients and customers who look a lot like us to make them into a eye on the prize and in a nutshell what that translated to was that one had to in few AI into the workflow of the key business processes of enterprise so if you think about that workflow is very demanding why do you have to be able to deliver data and insights on time just when it's needed otherwise you can essentially slow down the whole workflow of a major process with but to be able to pull all that off you need to have your own data very very streamlined so that a lot of it is automated and you're able to deliver those insights as the people who are involved in the workflow needed so we've spent a lot of time while we were making IBM into an AI enterprise and infusing AI into our keepers and thus processes into essentially a data ops pipeline that was very very streamlined which then allowed us to very quickly adapt to the covert 19 situation and I'll give you one specific example that we'll go to you know how one would say one could essentially leverage that capability that I just talked about to do this so one of the key business processes that we had taken aim at was our supply chain you know we're a global company and our supply chain is critical we have lots of suppliers and they are all over the globe and we have different types of products so that you know it has a multiplicative fact is we go from each of those you have other additional suppliers and you have events you have other events you have calamities you have political events so we have to be able to very quickly understand the risk associated with any of those events with regard to our supply chain and make appropriate adjustments on the fly so that was one of the key applications that we built on our central data and the Aqua and as part of a data ops pipeline that meant he ingested the ingestion of the several hundred sources of data had to be blazingly fast and also refreshed very very quickly also we had to then aggregate data from the outside from external sources that had to do with weather related events that had to do with political events social media feeds etcetera and overlay that on top of our map of interest with regard to our supply chain sites and also where they were supposed to deliver we'd also weaved in our capabilities here to track those shipments as they flowed and have that data flow back as well so that we would know exactly where where things were this is only possible because we had a streamlined data ops capability and we had built this central data Nai platform for IBM now you flip over to the covert 19 situation when go with 19 you know emerged and we began to realize that this was going to be a significant significant pandemic what we were able to do very quickly was to overlay the Kovach 19 incidents on top of our sites of interest as well as pick up what was being reported about those sites of interest and provide that over to our business continuity so this became an immediate exercise that we embarked but it wouldn't have been possible if you didn't have the foundation of the data ops pipeline as well as that central data Nai platform in place to help you do that very very quickly and adapt so so what I really like about this story and something that I want to drill into is it essentially a lot of organizations have a real tough time operationalizing AI and fusing it to use your word and the fact that you're doing it is really a good proof point that I want to explore a little bit so you're essentially there was a number of aspects of what you just described there was the data quality piece with your data quality in theory anyway is gonna go up with more data if you can handle it and the other was speed time to insight so you can respond more quickly if it's think about this Kovan situation if your days behind or weeks behind which is not uncommon you know sometimes even worse you just can't respond I mean these things change daily sometimes certainly within the day so is that right that's kind of the the business outcome and objective that you guys were after yes you know so trauma from an infused AI into your business processes by the overarching outcome metric that one focuses on is end to end cycle so you take that process the end-to-end process and you're trying to reduce the end-to-end cycle time by you know several factors several orders of magnitude we did for instance in my organization that have to do with the generation of metadata is data about data and that's usually a very time-consuming process and we've reduced that by over 95% by using AI you actually help in the metadata generation itself and that's applied now across the board for many different business processes that you know iBM has that's the same kind of principle that was you you'll be able to do that so that foundation essentially enables you to go after that cycle time reduction right off the bat so when you get to a situation like of open 19 situation which demands urgent action your foundation is already geared to deliver on that so I think actually we might have a graphic and then the second graphic guys if you bring up this second one I think this is Interpol what you're talking about here that sort of 95 percent reduction guys if you could bring that up would take a look at it so this is maybe not a co vid use case yeah here it is so that 95 percent reduction in in cycle time improving and data quality what we talked about there's actually some productivity metrics right this is what you're talking about here in this metadata example correct yeah yes the middle do that right it's so central to everything that one does with data I mean it's basically data about data and this is really the business metadata that we're talking about which is once you have data in your data Lee if you don't have business metadata describing what that data is then it's very hard for people who are trying to do things to determine whether they can even whether they even have access to the right data and typically this process has been done manually because somebody looks at the data they looks at the fields and they describe it and it could easily take months and what we did was we essentially use a deep learning and a natural language processing approach looked at all the data that we've had historically over an idea and we've automated the metadata generation so whether it was you know you were talking about both the data relevant for probit team or for supply chain or for a receivable process any one of our business processes this is one of those fundamental steps that one must go through to be able to get your data ready for action and if you were able to take that cycle time for that step and reduce it by 95% you can imagine the acceleration yeah and I liked it we were saying before you talk about the end to end a concept you're applying system thinking here which is very very important because you know a lot of a lot of points that I talked you'll they'll be they're so focused on one metric may be optimizing one component of that end to end but it's really the overall outcome that you're trying to achieve you you may sometimes you know be optimizing one piece but not the whole so that systems thinking is is very very important isn't it the system's thinking is extremely important overall no matter you know where you're involved in the process of designing the system but if you're the data guy it's incredibly important because not only does that give you an insight into the cycle time reduction but it also gives it clues you in into what standardization is necessary in the data so that you're able to support an eventual out you know a lot of people will go down the path of data governance and creation of data standard and you can easily boil the ocean trying to do that but if you actually start with an end-to-end view of your key processes and that by extension the outcomes associated with those processes as well as the user experience at the end of those processes and kind of then work backwards as to what are the standards that you need for the data that's going to feed into all that that's how you arrive at you know a viable practical data standards effort that you can essentially push forward with so there's there are multiple aspects when you take that end-to-end system you that helps the chief later one of the other tenets of data ops is really the ability across the organization for everybody to have visibility communications it's very key we've got another graphic that I want to show around the organizational you know in the right regime and this is a complicated situation for a lot of people but it's imperative guys if you bring up the first graphic it's imperative that organizations you know fine bring in the right stakeholders and actually identify those individuals that are going to participate so that there's full visibility everybody understands what their their roles are they're not in in silos so a guys if you could show us that first graphic that would be great but talk about the organization and the right regime they're Interpol yes yes I believe you're going to what you're gonna show up is actually my organization but I think it's yes it's very very illustrative of what one has to set up to be able to pull off the kind of impact you know so let's say we talked about that central data and AI platform that's driving the entire enterprise and you're infusing AI into key business processes like the supply chain you then create applications like the operational risk insights that we talked about and then extend it over to a faster merging and changing situation like the overt nineteen you need an organization that obviously reflects the technical aspects of the plan right so you have to have the data engineering arm and in my case there's a lot of emphasis around because that's one of those skill set areas that's really quite rare and but also very very powerful so they're the major technology arms of that there's also the governance arm that I talked about where you have to produce a set of standards and implement them and enforce them so that you're able to make this end-to-end impact but then there's also there's a there's an adoption where there's a there's a group that reports in to me very very you know empowered which essentially has to convince the rest of the organization to adopt but the key to their success has been in power in the sense that they are empowered to find like-minded individuals in our key business processes who are also empowered and if they agree they just move forward and go ahead and do it because you know we've already provided the central capabilities by central I don't mean they're all in one location we're completely global and you know it's it's it's a hybrid multi-cloud set up but it's central in the sense that it's one source to come for for trusted data as well as the expertise that you need from an AI standpoint to be able to move forward and deliver the business outcome so when these business schemes come together with the adoption that's where the magic hand so that's another another aspect of the organization that's critical and then we've also got a data officer council that I chair and that has to do with the people who are the chief data officer z' of the individual business units that we have and they're kind of my extended team into the rest of the organization and we leverage that bolt from a adoption of the platform standpoint but also in terms of defining and enforcing standard it helps us do want to come back the Ovid talked a little bit about business resiliency people I think you've probably seen the news that IBM's you know providing super computer resources to the government to fight coronavirus you've also just announced that some some RTP folks are helping first responders and nonprofits and providing capabilities for no charge which is awesome I mean it's the kind of thing look I'm sensitive the companies like IBM you know you don't want to appear to be ambulance-chasing in these times however IBM and other big tech companies you're in a position to help and that's what you're doing here so maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're doing in this regard and then we'll tie it up with just business resiliency and the importance of data right right so you know I'd explained the operational risk insights application that we had which we were using internally and be covert nineteen even be using it we were using it primarily to assess the risk to our supply chain from various events and then essentially react very very quickly to those through those events so you could manage the situation well we realize that this is something that you know several non government NGOs that big they could essentially use the ability because they have to manage many of these situations like natural disasters and so we've given that same capability to the NGOs to you and to help them to help them streamline their planning and their thinking by the same token but you talked about Oh with nineteen that same capability with the poet mine team data overlaid on top of them essentially becomes a business continuity planning and resilience because let's say I'm a supply chambers right now I can look the incidence of probe ignite and I can and I know where my suppliers are and I can see the incidence and I can say oh yes know this supplier and I can see that the incidence is going up this is likely to be affected let me move ahead and start making plans backup plans just in case it reaches a crisis level then on the other hand if you're somebody in our revenue planning you know on the finance side and you know where your keep clients and customers are located again by having that information overlaid with those sites you can make your own judgments and you can make your own assessment to do that so that's how it translates over into a business continuity and resilient resilience planning - we are internally doing that now - every department you know that's something that we are actually providing them this capability because we could build rapidly on what we had already done and to be able to do that and then as we get inside into what each of those departments do with that data because you know once they see that data once they overlay it to their sites of interest and this is you know anybody and everybody in IBM because no matter what department they're in there are going to be sites of interest that are going to be affected and they have an understanding of what those sites of interest mean in the context of the planning that they're doing and so they'll be able to make judgments but as we gain a better understanding of that we will automate those capabilities more and more for each of those specific areas and now you're talking about a comprehensive approach an AI approach to business continuity and resilience planning in the context of a large complicated organization like IBM which obviously will be of great interest to enterprise clients and customers right one of the things that we're researching now is trying to understand you know what about this crisis is gonna be permanent some things won't be but but we think many things will be there's a lot of learnings do you think that organizations will rethink business resiliency in this context that they might sub optimize profitability for example to be more prepared for crises like this with better business resiliency and what role would data play in that so no it's a very good question and timely question Dave so I mean clearly people have understood that with regard to such a pandemic the first line of beef right is it is it's not going to be so much on the medicine side because the vaccine is not even we won't be available for a period of time it has to go to development so the first line of defense is actually to take a quarantine like a pro like we've seen play out across the world and then that in effect results in an impact on the businesses right in the economic climate and the businesses there's an impact I think people have realized this now they will obviously factor this in into their into how they do business will become one of those things from if this is time talking about how this becomes permanent I think it's going to become one of those things that if you're a responsible enterprise you are going to be planning for you're going to know how to implement this on the second go-around so obviously you put those frameworks and structures in place and there will be a certain cost associated with them and one could argue that that could eat into the profitability on the other hand what I would say is because these two points really that these are fast emerging fluid situations you have to respond very very quickly to those you will end up laying out a foundation pretty much like we did which enables you to really accelerate your pipeline right so the data ops pipelines we talked about there there's a lot of automation so that you can react very quickly you know data ingestion very very rapidly that you're able to you know do that kind of thing the metadata generation just the entire pipeline that we're talking about that you're able to respond and very quickly bring in new data and then aggregated at the right levels infuse it into the workflows and then deliver it to the right people at the right time I will you know that will become a must now but once you do that you could argue that there is a cost associated with doing that but we know that the cycle time reductions on things like that they can run you know I mean I gave you the example of 95 percent you know on average we see like a 70% end to end cycle time era where we've implemented the approach that's been pretty pervasive with an idea across a business process so that in a sense in in essence then actually becomes a driver for profitability so yes it might you know this might back people into doing that but I would argue that that's probably something that's going to be very good long term for the enterprises involved and they'll be able to leverage that in their in their business and I think that just the competitive pressure of having to do that will force everybody down that path mean but I think it'll be eventually a good that end and cycle time compression is huge and I like what you're saying because it's it's not just a reduction in the expected loss during a crisis there's other residual benefits to the organization Interpol thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing this really interesting and deep case study I know there's a lot more information out there so really appreciate your time all right take care buddy thanks for watching and this is Dave Allante for the cube and we will see you next time [Music]

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation LeBron's special conversation I'm John Tory here in the cube I'm not in the studio I'm at home we're sheltering in place the studio quarantine crew is there we've got a great guest here to break down and Alice in the tech industries for vallah who's this principle of zk research Aziz great to check in with you for our check-in last time we chatted you broke down entire industry a lot to talk about now we have the Cisco earnings just came out and a lot of other great things are happening thanks for joining me well what's your take on what's going on yeah I think so thanks John it's uh it's been heard about tumultuous last few months I think one of the takeaways I had from Cisco's earnings actually was that it's not as bad as you think I know if you read a lot of what's going on the media we get everything from doomsday and the world's ending or whatever but I think what Cisco's earnings showed and in Cisco I know they have a lot of enemies and a lot of competitors out there but they're really still a bellwether for the industry and so everyone should rejoice in the fact that they actually had a pretty good quarter I think what was was telling about that was security was up the services business was up the margins were good and what that shows me is that there's still room for innovation customers relax are still buying things and they're willing to pay for things that actually help drive their business forward and so Cisco's put a lot of energy into their services group to make sure that customers are able to adapt their technology and change their business right and so from an overall market perspective Cisco is you know they're the quarters are the court has shifted from almost everybody else's and so they're generally a leading indicator of where things are going so I think the fact that they showed some strength they guided up from where the street thought I think that's a good thing for the entire industry and I think I'm not saying we're out of this yet but I think businesses are starting to spend money where they need to in order to put themselves in a position to come on strong after well once we start going back to work whoever knows what that'll be I think the other sort of interesting pivot here is that I think the overall role the network has changed with income right we've covered networking technologies a long time it gets a little bit of interest sometimes from sea level certainly not as much as it should from CEOs and CIOs a lot of people think of it as the plumbing and the pipes it's hard to understand it's a very complicated technology sometimes but when you look at what's happened with digital transformation initiatives and now covent we've got more people at home or adopting cloud services we use video for connecting more things with IOT initiatives so the overall value of the network is increased that I think that was also reflected in Cisco's numbers I think this transition had started when you look at a lot of the building blocks and digital transformation IOT cloud mobility things like that they're all Network centric in nature and so for the first time in history I think business leaders actually need to look at their network strategies because if that's without a sound network strategy as we sort of come out of this and the companies that have a good one will be able to really step on the gas and do what they want with their business the ones that don't I think I'd a really struggle to survive because I'm not gonna be able to do a lot of these advanced things yeah great point one of the things Brazil the new cisco has a new leadership new c has been in place for a while positioning they're going after and you know with the cloven crisis it really puts more pressure knock the move of the network because it's a core staple of an organization yet the transformation journey is going to be accelerated this gives Cisco it's a lucky strike for Cisco because it'll move packets around and the multi cloud conversation comes in and the enablement of application development all being five to the network is what cisco has been preparing on and this has kind of been a nuance point then that everyone understands but coming out of Cova to have a growth strategy if you're not programming up and down the stack with DevOps and Nets a cops or whatever you want to call it people working at home a new perimeter is now emerged that's everything everything is the premise is this a tailwind for Cisco your thoughts on that your face oh yeah the big time tailwind francisco i think what's happened gentlemen you look at network evolution over the last five years we can do much more with our network that's coming to cost and that cost us complexity so trying to tie all these things together SP Winn Sassie datacenter Sdn right we've got Wi-Fi six coming we've got 5g coming so we've got all these great things that we're gonna let our networks be faster than ever before and run applications we can never run before right you look at some of the demos on 5g we're able to wear untethered Wi-Fi our virtual reality headsets complete creating completely new shopping experiences educational experiences but you need a lot of bandwidth that but not only you need bandwidth I think the one thing that Kovac has taught us is do you have any weakness in the network anywhere right from the user's hand all the way to the cloud that weak point at the time and so now you have to start thinking of your network not in pieces of having a campus network Wi-Fi network data center network and that a single network right and so cisco is really one of the few companies maybe the only company that can actually deliver that end and network that starts in the company extends to people's homes goes out to the cloud and with what they've done masterfully under Chuck Robbins is they've been able to pile those things together to create a much simpler way of operating this complicated network so you look at what they're doing you know with a CI and intent based networking what that is is you can think of it almost as a software overlay that masks the complexity of the network that's underneath it yeah talking about cisco over the past decade and a half and i'm with the stack guys you gotta move up the stack this has been this is now their opportunity and with multi cloud on the horizon or here this is going to give cisco a path but I got to ask you what is your take and advice to Cisco when you're out there talking to them you're talking to of the customers all the time and practitioners you're the analyst what do they need to do better because you can't just wish a multi cloud upon the marketplace it's coming but it's not clearly not the use case yet so that's a time lag between a CI intent based networking to true multi-cloud what if Cisco do in the meantime yeah well I think what's this go has to do is is think about what they're doing with a CI and multi cloud and actually help their customers implement it in in pieces and what the description I'd use is is the paths this goes on and the path customers are on actually in this world of you think if the end state is true hybrid multi-cloud right we have to get there in ship shots and not moon shots and what I mean by that is if you were to say to a customer this is your end state right the path to get there is so donkey and it's like a moon shot that it paralyzes the customer if you break this down into a set of chip shots right that gets much easier so so put the infrastructure in place to be able to just have the visibility across applause then maybe automate movement from hi private the public cloud right then automate some of the processes that give you the most headaches then move to a bigger Ottoman Ottoman automation framework right so yeah areas like security network configuration right things like that those are those are very difficult for customers to do manually those are the things they should be automating today so what they want to do is almost take through their intent-based network to almost as a lighthouse the road to a visionary state and then help customers get there in pieces because if they try and rush them along too fast I think they'll lose the customer because the complexity is too high the other area they should really be focused on is continuing to mature the services business I think that's something under Chuck Robbins that's night and day different than what it was the services business - Cisco prior to Chuck was a lot of break fix you know their TAC is well renowned as being a great pack but now they've gotten more of the pro services they've gotten more into adoption services and I think the more subscription they sell what Cisco needs to really understand is that customers tend not to renew things they don't use right so making sure that the services group helps customers and use the things that they're paying for and that'll pay dividends for them multiple dividends for them down the road I want to get the silken one on that opportunity to upsell and do a refresh because what refreshes are not gonna be on the docket early on unless discuss business value so let's hold that for a second John Chambers has been on the cube recently in his new role as a coach and investor and he says to us on the cube you know transitions versus transformation Cisco and the big companies are expected to win the transitions but now with coming out of this there's real transformation so you got to look at things like collaboration hey guys get better this is not just win the enterprise with a better web max zoom is they can ask Bob teams is out there so you know Cisco's that's a huge collaboration piece and a bunch of other business so where's their transition wins and where's their transformational opportunity in Europe in well I think the entire company is kind of going through transformations right even on the network side so it's right it's like you know the industry has been calling Francisco to get commoditized for years right and if you look the product gross margins are actually the strongest they've been in a decade right so I remember when I fell below 60% they everybody thought the world was falling this quarter I think was a little over 65 on the product side and so my belief is nothing is really a commodity if you can drive innovation that's what's this has been doing so from a transition standpoint I think they've done a lot of that they've transitioned the company to software and services they've transitioned the company more terrain model they've actually decoupled software from the hardware so customers can buy differently and you brought up the fact that we may not have a hardware refresh but that's okay as long as they keep the software a newa cycles forth where the transformations has to come is completely change the dynamics of how something works and so with intent-based networking you think of the old way that network engineers to work like the way I used to work when I was an engineer a lot of hunting pecking and at a CLI doing a lot of cutting and pasting and using homegrown tools that doesn't scale anymore my research shows that on average takes companies about four months the implemented change network-wide far too slow for digital company right so Francisco's done is they've accelerated that by letting customers automate more things and so Francisco the transformation comes in allowing customers to new new things I think you read in the collaboration side there's more work to do nobody's got a bigger collaboration portfolio than Cisco they got endpoints they got rooms just right they've got software they were a cloud on Prem but they got to take that and tie it together and I think the other area that's is gonna need improving is on they've they've got a lot of management tools that that look at different things they have at the ACI manager and a whole bunch of different security consoles in fact they funded them sometimes and said that the market leader in single panes of glass because they have more than anybody right I think eventually they got to be able to tie that information together and help customers understand what it means from a cross domain perspective because they still build a product's wireless campus data center but as I mentioned before we just have one network and so Cisco can aggregate this data up apply machine learning to it and help customers what that means they see insight across the entire network that would really be powerful because they they've got the footprint now they just have to be able to deliver the machine learning based insights some customers understand what that data means and they have a unique opportunity in the short term no one's going to be kidding Cisco out anytime soon there's a safety rating and using the big companies I think what what Cisco is able to bring is a there's a level of financial stability that other companies may not have and so they can weather the storm for a long time so you know I it's easy to say going to Cisco is the safe bet it has been for a long time but but i but I think it's also the smart bet I think they're they're able to continue to invest in things maybe smaller companies more people do yeah my question on Cisco a big fan of their strategy have been vocal about that for a while my question on Cisco want to be critical is to say how fast can you get that development going show the software value in market show customers a growth trajectory that they can execute on it can advantage the network policy intelligence if they could do that they're gonna be in good shape you agree yeah I think one of the challenges though is the transformation of their customer base do and that's where the work Suzy we've been doing in the dev that teams so important like if if they were to shift their whole strategy over at the developer folks talk word today I think that would largely put them in a position or trouble because the engineers that work with the stuff and the resellers that work with the stuff aren't they don't really have the skill sets they advantage that right so last year Suzy we she really talked a lot about the growth a definite this year they came out with in Barcelona this year they they came up with a bunch of certifications for dev net now there they were actually coming out with a number of a partner certifications as well so the resellers can get certified but I think it's important that they continue to push their engineer base into gaining these new skills I'll give you an interesting data point for my research and that's you know that only about a quarter of networking engineers has ever made an API call right and so you look at all Cisco's new gear it's all API driven and so if you want to do something as simple as say get all the IP addresses in your network you can just use an API call for that right the other way to do it is you do a show command and the CLI your screen scrape and you take a visual basic trip that you parse it you know and you get it that way right so the API map using those is a lot easier and so I think Cisco's got a good strategy with Deb net they've grown that face a lot it's still relatively small you know it's under a million people and you think of the overall size the Cisco customer user base point that's where they gonna put some effort right more and more out driving adoption to them now well I think you're smarter than I think you're researching them they must be listening to you because they haven't really tried to jam that down their throats they've been very humble about it and I think a million is pretty damn good number I think Cisco again to your point they're bringing people into the water the low end first before you you go to the deep end so swim with the bubble if you will with definite what they did was they assumed the engineer had no knowledge of software because I think at first when they put the lot of the programs a place they assumed people would have some knowledge of how to code right and and I also think the industry did them a bit of a disservice we used her there was a lot of stuff written in the media how every network engineer needs to become a software developer well they don't have to summer get make them software developers but they at least have to come software power ease right so do your job through software but you don't have to be a developer and that's where definite really when it really matured is that diverge down to past developer engineer who's your saw common software skills and then you break down a specialist after that and so they've they've actually helped with the maturity of that they've changed their certification programs for reflect that and I think Devin that really is a big be and if they can transition that engineer base then it helps the adoption of the new on these I want to get your final thoughts on this segment on multi-cloud obviously it would be a really great win for it creates of interoperability strictly with the network intelligence cisco could bring to the table and others you got startups out there like aviatrix and others and vmware with nsx trying to get that for the security fabric a lot of action going on with multi cloud and networking your thoughts what does your research tell you what's gonna transpire how do you see that market playing out in my research shows that little R ad percent of companies prior to Co vid had multi-cloud on the roadmap and I'm assuming that's that's gone up I haven't actually done a survey since then um one of the I think it's funny koban exposed a lot of things from a lot of vendors right and I think one of the things that is is shown cracks in the cloud yeah you look at some of the the data and how many outages Microsoft had Google had some strains AWS has held up pretty well under the strain of of a lot of the higher utilization when coated but they've been building a lot of capacity into theirs as well so I think from a customer perspective it makes sense you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket some cloud providers are stronger in some regions they each have different their own different cloud platforms other private cloud platforms and the problem is is if you decide if you decide to go multi-cloud you can't use the cloud providers tools right so if I use an AWS load balancer that works great in AWS but it's not gonna help me with Azure or GCE similarly if I use GCP tools I can't extend that out the azure so something needs to connect those and be able to five security and policy and that's where multi cloud comes from and you're right there's some good startups there I think um the difference with Cisco this time versus the Sdn world was when as the ends came about I think Cisco didn't want that to happen and I think they actually actively worked against us the end and I've talked to chuck Robbins about that he said you'll never ever see Cisco do that again if something is good for the customers they want to lead that transition and so Cisco's been very active in multi focking and given they've got the install base already I do think they will help bring this long but there are some good stir yeah it's interesting Sdn really wasn't ready for primetime even when VMware bought in this era hey when it was still there I didn't have a lot of revenue it had a future VMware claims that's the saves and NSX was saved by a Sdn some people say was completely rewritten final thoughts on outlook and you see coming out of Ovid obviously it's been well reported we've been reporting VPNs have been under provision that was a blind spot bought a blind spots and disruption that wasn't forecasted in the classic sense there was no there was no you know hurricane there was no flood it was a covin invisible disruption yeah and there's no impact right like even with when you think of what happened with the the floods in New York and 9/11 people knew that they'd eventually go back and so business continuity and disaster recovery was a temporary thing and I can I set up a data center to work for a couple months so I can go back to New York that's not the case with koban where we're trying to manage for an undefined endpoint which is extremely difficult for an IT perspective I do think that Kogan again has highlighted the value of the network I think we'll see a lot of transition from VPN to sd when I think that's that's certainly good I think the rise in video will also cause a Wi-Fi upgrade cycle we'll get back to the office and I think you'll see a lot of focus on programmability and agility because I don't believe we're gonna see everybody return to the office was like one big bang John I think we're more likely to see is the future work to be almost like when you and I were in college we do a bunch of stuff at home we go to the campus when we have classes and when we want to meet people similarly we'll go to work when we have meetings and then in between meetings we'll go find an open place to work but in general we'll do a lot of work a lot more work from home in fact my research shows 93 percent of the business leaders I interviewed said they expect to see at least a 30 percent increase in the work from home post Kovan right so we're gonna have a lot more people doing that but it's not gonna be everyone working for home everybody work in the office it's gonna be a hybrid of the two people are gonna come and go and that bribes the need for agility and today's networks really not that agile and so I need I want to go back to college if we do thirsty happy hours do I mean have the whole week or the stupid stuff it's the final point you mentioned SP when I was talking with Dave Volante SP Minutemen just last week and I said you know this SD win today is not your grandfather's sdn meaning SP where it's changed a lot it's basically the internet now so what was the modern update definition of SD grin I mean it used to be you connect the wide area network you can have some campus you'd do some networking what is it now what's the same name but it's yeah what is it your journey the technology if you look at the adoption of anything right the first wave of stuff is to make the new stuff look like the old stuff so we put VoIP in we made it look a lot like TDM when we had cloud we lifted and shift it and how did we didn't really enjoy wraps and then we eventually get smart and think what can I do with the new thing that I can't do the old thing and so a lot of early SD win deployments were simply just replacements for MPLS and they were put in to save a bit of money but now companies are getting smarter they're thinking about what can I do with my SD win that I couldn't do before so there's a lot more tighter integration with security I think as companies but SD win in and and think about what the win is today John it used to be corporate offices and data centers I think it's everybody's house right and so being able to extend your win at the single people out to planes trains and automobiles you remember that movie but those are all getting connected as well people's back acts fan kiosk those are all becoming way endpoints right so that's where you need to embed more security in the network and so I think that's a transition we've seen into that see you and I think the technology has matured to the point where it's getting easier to deploy faster to flow and you're right we can use the internet for transport in some cases some will still keep there still be a lot of MPLS out there but I do think we wind up in this hybrid world but clearly then the time has never been better for for SD win I will see a rule of curve for that because it's the only way to extend the win the people's homes the things the cars and really anything that's connected you know that's such a great point and I think this is a real new once in the industry it's a whole nother rebirth of the category because the aperture is brighter you got policy you've got reliability and get security built in this is key key Johnny H salt key yeah yeah whole concept the AI ops becomes real because we're collecting data and we're able to use AI to automate operations so Z's we call it s T win 2.0 that's what you got to do we got making an acronym out of this come on we can't just saw s T when it is SD win - righto because it's the next it's that it's it's the second wave of it we're actually thinking about how to transform our companies so the the John Chambers quote of transition for transversus transformation is apropos because the like I said a lot of the waves that that Cisco went through early on was we transition the market and then we transform right and so SD win so far has been transitional moving away from the old thing but now in strength and defense formed where our entire network operates these gradients that always a pleasure to talk to you get the straight scoop for the signal right there from all the noise in the industry now more than ever people are gonna be focused on critical project so thanks for your insight as DK now can research great stuff and we'll keep keep following you in great guest thank you come on thanks John first burger okay cute conversation here remote we're doing our part either at home and studio quarantine in this is the cube virtual virtualization has come to the cube will do will do whatever it takes to get the content out there Z's thanks so much for coming I appreciate thanks for watching on John Currier [Music]

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to the cube from our Boston area studios we've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions talking about how everyone's dealing with the global global endemic I've been welcome program a first-time guest Katy Bullard she is the president of a tile guru of course a cloud guru a online learning company we've had on the cube many times over the years Katy thanks so much thank you so much sue for having me I really appreciate it all right so Katie I remember I saw the in I think the announce was the end of at the beginning of the year your based at the headquarters in Austin you know online you know learning is a huge topic cloud of course you know one of those mega waves that we've been walking a long time and then you know out of nowhere global pandemic you know it's striking us so you know bring us inside you know obviously you know taking a new role in a new organization as it own challenges normally it's like okay what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan tell us you know how were you reacted in how the company has reacted with the koban 19 did you get a chance to look at my 90-day plan dude that was exactly where it was no well let me take you back I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ECG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well when I when I was looking for the next opportunity what I look for is I look for two things primarily in a company one is a product that's in a market that's growing really really fast and a product that has raving customer bands and obviously ACG really you know check both of those boxes you think about this is pre Co but if you think about the cloud computing market growing you know 50 60 % a year and the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to to do that effectively there really wasn't a better intersection of two you know two who value propositions than what a CG offered which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market fast forward to February you know was interesting I actually went out to Australia offices in mid-february as this was starting to heat up came back just in time I think to not go into quarantine but we very quickly saw the impact and you know this isn't easy for anybody in in any situation but what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now I think the latest that I saw from the the 2028 odd report said 65 percent of companies are planning a cloud migration 95 percent are of companies are employing a multi cloud strategy so that is accelerating and then of course we're all sitting at home right now and you're getting me in my in my dining room and we have the both learn online versus in person there's no longer in-person training there's no longer events for us to go to lives we're doing that online we also are seeing that you know the way that we use our time is changing so we're not spending hours anymore muting we have a lot of customers who are saying let's use that time instead of muting to learn improve ourselves improve our skills so you know everything is very unpredictable in this environment but we do feel like at ACG our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need so that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later this year they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them ya know you hit on a lot of topics you know so much right now you know remote learning remote work or you know a big discussion the developer world has been looking at that for a long time and you know when I see you know the the the elementary and high school children as well as you know colleges and how they're handling distant learning I was well come on the Cronenberg's brothers you know built something in you know two or three week from your mother's basement Amazon and serverless and they framed millions of people now yeah you know good absolutely translate but it's challenging so I'm curious yes you know and you're working with the team is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience you know lessons that can be learned as I said you're you know highly scalable you know large scale and you know you have nowhere near the budget of you know these municipalities and colleges yet you do reach you know a very broad audience with some very important skill yes I mean if I think about the actual products itself and why it worked worked so well previously right why the Cronenberg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved but but more importantly why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks right most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit leave our job and go learn something and so from the very beginning their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minutes chunks so whether you know I'm on my commute in a previous world or whether I'm you know using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new I can do it in very digestible forms and in a way that's really engaging to me so I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles right we all learn a little bit differently and so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks so that's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on testing things breaking things building things the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey whether they're novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of you know the PowerPoint basics like me when I first came on board right of the or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications so I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long and now as we have you know added out of the platform specifically for enterprises where previously you know is for individual developers we now have both I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now right are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style yeah Katie is as you said before there is you know a broad need or the skill set of cloud computing I'm curious have you seen anything in kind of your customer base either from the enterprise side or individuals is there are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are a critical need or anything that is grown and you know we're curious we're always you know there's some people it's like oh I'm gonna come out of this you know whole experience and you know I love you know work in my home gym and you know learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough you know me personally I've been really busy so you know I wish I had more spare time travel has definitely reduced thing but it's also given up the time that normally I was gonna you know read a book or you know catch up on raining yeah the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse so we well we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months the first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30 percent so people are taking advantage I think of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning the other thing that we are seeing and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing some of this was happening free covert and some of this was happening post covitz all split those up freako but what we've seen over the last order two 2/4 actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills as you're in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CCS these although they're all three increasing rapidly so as we think about like the curriculum and our instructors that we're bringing on and what we're building up know historically ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world but we are responding to that change very very late and in investing in you know a juror GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses so that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what i call our beginner or fundamental courses they think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to rescale to set themselves up for a new career i'm so you know our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to DCP those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking and anecdotally one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at you know what people are saying about ACG and over the last week especially I can't even count the number of folks who've said I'm using my lock down I'm for you know learning or I'm putting my my time and Quarantine to the best use by you know getting trained on ECG and so I think that what we are seeing there is a direct reflection of that alright yeah Katie maybe you can give us a little bit of the update on you know a cloud guru there was the Linux Academy acquisition and if you can share a little bit about this kind of the the the numbers of how many people have gone through your programmed you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards which I know they need to go to the providers you know pay a fee for that kind of thing yeah we do yeah there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months right I've got a small acquisition and then you know we're dealing with this now so we acquire Linux Academy in December so actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business one of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June a cg had about a hundred employees total by the time I was actually accepting an offer in October I think it was 200 employees in total so in a four month span the company had actually doubled we acquired Lenox Academy which was of equivalent size the ACG and so by the end of December we were a 400 person company a company that had been a hundred people know in in the middle of 2019 so 400 people now we are our biggest office is here in Austin we do have a large office in Melbourne Australia which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is we have an office in London where Ryan is and Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth Texas so we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well so it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months everything that goes into scaling a business like that bringing two competitors together integrating the business you know we are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now so we're excited to bring that market later this year all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment yeah you know congratulations you know that you know always good to see great growth you know the thing I've noticed is you know ACG just as really goodwill in the community I see the orange shirts at many of the shows I you know right many of the other teams yeah we'll definitely have to get back to you about being on brain feed I was trying to coordinate with my background um one of the other things you know is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done the cube has been the serverless cough event so you know any discussion about you know will there be smokers to that or are we just going to need the weight or you know the physical events return before we see those so we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar actually our very first one was yesterday we had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series it's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry so expects if anyone's interested you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars but we'll be having those every two week through the course of this year awesome love that and I guess the last thing Katie there's some other things you've been doing help unity in this need of the pandemic tell us a little bit about that yeah so two things in particular that we've really focused on the first one is across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms we have lowered permanently the price of our individual memberships so for individuals from 449 down to 379 we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it so that's now in in market the other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program so we are offering 1,000 subscriptions to ACG for the year so annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by kovat so we have a couple of different specific criteria but if you've lost your job due to Ovid and you're in one of the the most heavily impacted industries whether that you know retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers get into the tech field get your initial certification we do now have a program for that so you go online to our website you're able to apply to that program we launched it yesterday maybe two days ago and I know we already have hundreds of applications so we're really excited to offer that all right well we'll make sure to get this out to the community is build out of that all right Katie thanks so much really pleasure to act up with you and I'm glad Congrats on all the progress thank you so much - thanks for having me alright serverless absolutely one of the topics I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple years hope you've enjoyed I'm an attorney I'm sue minimun and as always thank you for watching thank you [Music]

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM we're back this is the cubes coverage of the IBM think 20/20 digital experience my name is Dave Volante is a wall-to-wall coverage over the multi-day event Harish promise here he's the general manager of the IBM public cloud rishi welcome back to the cube good to see you sorry we're not face to face but this will do yeah thank you great to see you again as well and you know it is the times what do you do you know I want to start by asking you you did a stint at a large bank I'd love to talk to you about that but but I want to stay focused you said last year on the cube you can't do everything in the public cloud certain things need to remain on Prem I'm interested in how your experience at the large financial institution and your experience generally working with you know your colleagues in in the banking industry how that shaped your vision of the IBM public cloud yeah I think that's a great question you know if you think about trying to transform yourself to a public cloud a lot of people what they try to do is you know they take applications that I've been running their enterprise and they try to redo them in its entirety with micro services using as level services I mean trying to put it all up in the public cloud now you know just think about some of these applications that are running your large institution right some of them will have regulatory ruled around it some of them have latency requirements or low latency requirements I should say some of them need to be close to the back end because that's where the data is so for all these reasons you know you have to think about a holistic cloud picture of which public cloud is you know integral to it but some of the things will need to remain on Prem right so when I build my public cloud out for IBM I kind of keep those in in the back of my mind as I get the team to work on it to ensure that we have the right capabilities on the public cloud and then where it makes sense you know have the right capabilities on the hybrid side as well working with my colleagues in IBM well you know the doc Ovid 19 pandemic that we've been talking to a lot of CISOs and CIOs we had a couple of roundtables with our data partner ETR and it was interesting you know organizations that maybe wouldn't have considered the cloud certainly as aggressively maybe they put some test dev in the cloud but you know have said well we're really reconsidering that one CIO actually said you know I'd love to delete my data center but but to your point you can't just delete the data center um first of all you don't want to necessarily move stuff second of all we've got a lot of experience from a consulting standpoint looking at this if you have to migrate migrates like an evil word especially with mission critical systems if you have to freeze code and you can't upgrade you know for some number of months you may be out of compliance or you're not remaining competitive so you have to really be circumspect and thoughtful with regard to what you do move I wonder if you could comment on that no I completely agree with what you're saying you know if you think about to your point right with Kovac things that really changed I've been speaking with a lot of cloud transformers I would say you know in the various industries but specifically with banks as well and the cloud leader for one of the large European banks said to me he said this was amazing because for four years he's been trying to get his he shows organization and risk and compliance etc to get their heads around moving applications to the cloud and he said that you know one month of kovat and having everyone locked down and home has been able to unblock more than what he's tried in the last four years so that's telling in itself right so look you know I've been working on public clouds for a good long time now both from a provider side as well as a consumer side and while you know you certainly just can't close your data centers that are running your large enterprise overnight you certainly can take a lot of stuff over there and move it to the public cloud in a meaningful fashion where you're able to take the pieces that really iterate more rapidly where you can get the end while keeping your data safe and you know being able to connect back into your back-end systems which will run a lot of your large processes in your enterprise as well so I think there is a balance to be had here and people especially banks I would say haven't been moving so much to the public cloud and I think this is the time where they're starting to realize that there is a time and place for a bunch of applications that can safely move and that gives them the agility and the productivity while everyone's locked at home and I think that's the eye opening so I'd love to have a frank conversation about why the IBM cloud I mean you know you got the the big guys you know Amazon Microsoft and Google maybe not as large people put them sort of in a category of hyper scalars great fair enough that people oftentimes dismiss you know the IBM public cloud however your point that you just made is critical and Ginni Rometty you was the first to kind of make this point Arvin's picked up on it that 80% of the workloads still are on trem and and it's that hard to move stuff that hasn't moved so and that's kind of IBM's wheelhouse I mean let's face it that the hard stuff it's the mission-critical you're kind of running the the banks and the insurance companies and the manufacturers and airlines around the world so what's the what's the case for the IBM cloud why the IBM cloud and why even move that stuff why not just leave it where it is yeah so I think there's a couple of answers here right one of them is the fact that when you talk to the hyper scalars and by the way I can't stress enough or a hyper scaler as well right people have taken a look at iCloud from about two plus years ago which you know at which point in time we were not but we certainly are and we can provision via size and so on and so forth as best as the best guys can so I want to just get that out of the way but to your point you know the reason why you would consider the IBM public cloud is when you talk to the other people they come at it from a very narrow perspective right they think about you know use vs is on x86 using cloud native pass services now you know I want to stress again that we do all three of those things extremely well but if you think about how large enterprises work nothing is as clean as that I did say there is a lot of applications that I've been running your institution that you can just willingly rewrite and then you have bare metal you'll have power systems whether it's AIX or I you'll have some Z in there Z Linux in there and then there's containers and then there's the VMware stack and there's containers running on bare metal containers running on vsi containers running on you know the VMware stack as well as the other architectures that I mentioned so we really meet our customers where they are in their journey and we give them a wide variety of capabilities and choices and flexibility to do their applications on the public cloud and that's what we mean by saying our cloud is enterprise ready as opposed to the nano answer of you'll do everything with vs is x86 and a service yeah I like that and I want to I want to circle back on that thank you for clarifying that point about hyper skills having said that it I've often said and I wonder if you could confirm or deny it's not IBM strategy to go head-to-head on cost per bit even though you you will you'll price it very competitively but your your game is to add value in other ways through your your very large software portfolio through AI things like blockchain and differentiable services that you can layer on top I've often made the point I think a lot of people don't understand that that insulates IBM from a race to the bottom with the alcohol traditional a cloud suppliers I wonder if you could comment yeah you know so I have to stress the point that just because I talk about all our other distinguishing capabilities that people don't walk away with the impression that we don't do what any of the other large cloud service providers do you know to your point we have AI we have IOT we've got a hundred ninety API driven cloud native pass services where you can write a cloud native application just like you build on the hyper scale other hyper scalars as well right so we give nothing away but for us the true value proposition here is to give you all of those capabilities in a very secure environment you know whether it is the fact that we are the only cloud where we don't have access to your data or your code because we have a keep your own key mechanism where we as a cloud service provider have no access to your key nobody else can say that so it is those Enterprise qualities of service and security that we bring to the table and the other architectures and the other you know constructs around bare metal and containers etc that distinguishes us further right and that's how it really so these are really important points that you're making and I know I'm kind of bringing out probably parts of the landscape that IBM generally doesn't want to talk about but I think it's important again to have that frank conversation because I think a lot of people misunderstand IBM is in the cloud game not only in the cloud game to your point but has very competitive you know from an infrastructure standpoint so many companies in the last decade we saw HP tried to get in they exited very quickly Joe to cheese's the CEO of EMC said we will be in the cloud you know they're buying mozi and you know exiting that so Dell right now doesn't you know it won't have a cloud play VMware tried to get in and now its course big partner of yours so you got in and that to me is critical just in terms of positioning for the next decade and beyond and and the other piece of differentiation that I want to drill into is the financial services cloud so what is that you obviously have a strong background there let's let's dig into that a little bit yeah if you look at the way most banks or actually every bank uses a public cloud is they build guardrail right they build guardrails from where their data center ends to where the public cloud begins but once you get into the public cloud then it really depends on the security that the cloud service providers provide and the csps will tell you that they have a lot of secure mechanisms there but if you ever speak with a bang you know they will never put their highly confidential data bearing apps with PII on a public cloud because they don't feel that the security that the cloud service providers provide is good enough for them to be able to put it there safely number one and number two prove to their regulators that they are in fact and compliant so what we've done is we work with a Bank of America and now you know a whole bunch of other banks that I'm not allowed to mention by name as yet where we're building a series of controls right these are both controls during your dev Sakharov cycle when you're building your app and another 400-plus controlled and the runtime that allow you is the bank to securely take your apps that have highly confidential data in III and put it on the public cloud and will give you the right things whether it's the isolation of the control plane and the data plane or it's their data loss prevention mechanisms the right auditing points the right logging points the right monitoring points the right reporting data sovereignty so we have controls built into the cloud that enable you to do all of this now banks will be quick to tell you that the onus of proof is on them alone to the regulators and we can claim that for them and they're absolutely right but today they spend hundreds of millions of dollars collecting all of that in providing that proof to the regulators you use our cloud we automate a whole bunch of that so you're not number one as a bank trying to implement these controls on a public cloud because that's not your job that's not your core expertise and number two when you actually build these compliance report you spending you know millions and millions of dollars trying to put it together whether compliance regulator will say yes this is okay we automate a large part of that for you and I think that's the key is the key issue we're solving you I want to follow up and just make sure I understand it is when I talk to executives in the financial services industry and other industries those they'll say things like look it's not that the cloud security is is bad it's just that I can't map the edicts of my organization into it certainly easily or even at all because I'm getting a sort of standard set of capabilities and it may not fit with what I need what I'm what I what I'm hearing is that IBM you know you guys are enterprise-c you used the specials but but so that's part of it but you also said you know they feel sometimes the cloud is that the security is not good enough and I want to understand what that is specifically if IBM is doing something differently so two things there one is your willingness whether it's auditability transparency mapping to corporate edicts and it may be other things that you're doing that make it better relative to go together yeah absolutely so one of the things is as I mentioned it's the mechanisms like keep your own key which is fundamental to building some of these compliance safeguards in but the the fundamental different thing we've done here is we work with the Bank of America and we've defined these controls to use your language that maps to their edicts right which should map to every banks edicts no you know there'll be a couple of extra controls here or there but largely they're all regulated by the same regulator so what satisfies one bang for the most part satisfies every other bank of the US as well right and so specifically what we've done is we've built those controls whether they are preventative controls or compensating controls in the CI CD pipeline as well as in the runtime on the cloud and that gives them a path to automation to produce the right results and the right reports to their auditors and that's really what we've helped them do so I know I'm pushing you here a little bit I'm gonna keep pushing if that's okay I was a great conversation when when IBM completed the acquisition of Red Hat you know the marketing was all about cloud cloud cloud and I came out and said yeah okay fine but what it's really about is application modernization that's the near-term opportunity for IBM you certainly saw that in the last earnings report where I think you're working with a hundred plus you know clients in terms of their application modernization so I said that is the way in which this thing becomes a creative which by the way it's already a creative and from a cash cash flow standpoint but but but but I'm gonna press you on on the cloud piece so talk about Red Hat and why it is cloud in terms of a cloud play yeah so you know this is the power of Red Hat and the IBM public cloud and of course Red Hat works or the other cloud print service providers as well so if you think about modernizing your application you know the industry pretty much has standardized around containers right as the best way to modernize their applications and those containers are orchestrated by kubernetes that's the orchestrator that's basically won the battle and Red Hat has OpenShift which is a industry-leading capability you know it's a coupon IDs control plane that manages containers and we from IBM we've put our content we've read backer a content into containers and we've made it run on an open ship and we have a cloud managed open ship server on the IBM public cloud as well as an on-prem that really helps bring our content to people who are trying to modernize their applications now think about an application that most people try to modernize you know the rough rule of thumb about 20 to 25 percent of it there's application code that is the onus is on the client to go and modernize that and they've chosen containers and turbidities and the other 75 to 80% arguably is middleware that they've got right and we've really tected in refactor that middleware into containers managed by open ship and we've done 80% of the work for them so that's how this whole thing comes together and you can run that on Prem you can run it on the IBM public cloud and I give you a cloud managed openshift service to do that effectively honor so that's interesting yeah that's very interesting I think there are you know probably at least three sort of foundational platforms one is obviously easy mainframe it's still much of IBM's customer base you know the tied to the Z and it drives all kinds of other software and so what the second is middleware to your point and you're saying you refactored and I think the third really is your choice of hybrid cloud strategy you kind of made the point you threw an on-prem it's to me it's that end-to-end that's your opportunity and your challenge if you can show people that look we've got this cloud-like experience of from cloud all the way to RM multi clouds that is a winning strategy it's jump ball right now nobody really owns that space and I think IBM's intent is to try to go after that I think you've called it a trillion-dollar market opportunity and it's obviously growing yes that's exactly right and the P spot so that I've been describing to you the you know the way people modernize our applications all fit very nicely into that now if you speak with the analysts they're going towards a whole different category called distributed cloud which basically means you know how do you bring these capabilities that run on your public cloud do on-prem and do other people's clouds and you know what I hinted at here is that's exactly where we're going with our set of capabilities and that is a technical journey I mean kubernetes is necessary but insufficient condition to have that sort of Nirvana of this distributed massive distributed system bring in edge edge systems as well so this is a you know at least a multi-year maybe even a decade-long journey there's a lot of work to be done there what would you say are their strategic imperatives for IBM cloud over the next several years so I think for us really it is you know building on this notion of the distributed cloud as I talked about it is you know fully building out the FSS cloud most of which we've already done and you know some of these things will never be at end of job because regulations keep changing and you keep adding to it and so you have to keep adding to it as well so a focus on FSS to begin with but then also to other industries as well right because there are other regulated industries here that can benefit from the same kind of automation that we're doing for FSS so we'll certainly do that and we're in a good position because it's not only our technology but it's our services practice it's a premonitory that deals with regulators etc so we have the whole package so we want to continue to build out on that branch into other industry verticals using our industry expertise across the board services product everything and then of course you know if there's one thing I BM has market permission for it is understanding the enterprise and building a secure product so we clearly want to evolve on that as well the IBM is a lot of arrows in its quiver including as we discuss cloud you know you just got to get her done as they say so iris thanks so much for coming to the cute great discussion appreciate your your transparency and and stay well Thank You YouTube thank you so much re welcome and thank you for watching everybody this is the cubes coverage of the IBM pink 2020 digital event experience we'll be right back right after this short break [Music]