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

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World 2020 the virtual del tech world. Of course, the virtual queue with me is Alison Do. She's the CMO and a member of the executive leadership team at Dell Technologies. Hey there, Alison. Good to see you. >>Hi, David. Good to see you too. I'm gonna see you alive, but it's so good to see on the feed. >>Yeah, I miss you, too. You know, it's been it's been tough, but we're getting through it and, you know, it's a least with technology. We're able to meet this way and, you know, for us continue the cube for you to continue del Tech world, reaching out to your to your customers. But, you know, maybe we could start there. It's like I said the other day else into somebody. I feel like everybody I know in the technology industry has also become a covert expert in the last six months. But but, you know, it changed so much. But I'm interested in well, first of all, you're a great communicator. I have met many, many members of your team. They're really motivated group. How did you handle the pandemic? Your communications. Uh, did you increase that? Did you? Did you have to change anything? Or maybe not. Because like I say, you've always been a great communicator with a strong team. What was your first move? >>Eso There's obviously there's many audiences that we serve through communications, but in this instance, the two most important our customers and our team members. So I'll take the customers first. You have likely seen the spoof Real's Going Around the Internet of Here's How Not to Talk to Customers, Right? So you saw early in February and March in April, all of these communications that started with in these troubled times We are here to help you and, you know, we're already in a crisis every single day, all day long. I don't think people needed to be reminded that there was a crisis happening. So you've got this one end where it's over crisis mongering and the other side where it was just ignoring the crisis. And so what we did was we really looked at all of our communications a new So, for example, in our small business space, we were just about I mean days away from launching a campaign that was about celebrating the success of small businesses. It's a beautiful piece of creative. I love it, and we made the very tough decision to put that work on the shelf and not launch it. Why? Because it would have been incredibly tone deaf in a moment where small businesses were going out of business and under incredible struggle to have a campaign that was celebrating their success. It just wouldn't have worked. And what we did very quickly was a new piece of creative that had our own small business advisers, lower production values, them working from home and talking about how they were helping customers. But frankly, even that then has a shelf life, because ultimately you have to get back to your original story. So as we thought about our own communications, my own leadership team and I went through every single piece of creative toe. Look for what's appropriate now what's tone deaf, and that was a very heavy lift and something that we had to continue to do and I'm really proud of the work. We did pivot quickly, then on the employee side. If you'd asked me in January, was Team member Communications the most important thing I was doing? I would have said It's an important thing I'm doing and I care deeply about it, But it's not the most important thing I'm doing. Where there was a period from probably February to June where I would have said it became the most important thing that I was doing because we had 120,000 people pivot over a weekend toe. Working from home, you had all of the demands of home schooling, the chaos that stress whilst also were obviously trying to keep a business running. So this engagement with our employees and connecting the connecting with them through more informal means, like zoom meetings with Michael and his leadership team, where once upon a time we would have had a more high value production became a key piece of what we did. So it sounds so easy, but this increase of the frequency with our own employees, while also being really honest with ourselves about the tone of those communications, so that's what we did and continue to dio >>Well, you've done a good job and you struck a nice balance. I mean, you weren't did see some folks ambulance chasing and it was a real turn off. Or like you said, sometimes tone deaf. And we can all look back over history and see, you know, so many communications disasters like you say, people being tone deaf or ignoring something. It was sloughing it off, and then it really comes back to bite them. Sometimes security breaches air like that. So it seems like Dell has I don't know, there's a methodology. I don't know if you use data or it's just a lot of good good experience. How have you been able to sort of nail it? I guess I would say is it is. >>But there's some secret method that I'm cautiously optimistic. And the superstitious part of me is like, Don't say that, Okay, I'm not gonna would alright eso so that it's it's both it z experience, obviously. And then what? I What I talk a lot about is this intersection of data versus did data and creativity, and you spend a lot of time in marketing circles. Those two things can be sometimes pitched is competing with each other. Oh, it's all about the creativity, or it's all about the data. And I think that's a silly non argument. And it should be both things And this this time like this. This point that I make about ambulance chasing and not re traumatizing people every single day by talking about in these troubled times is actually from a piece of research that we did, if you believe it or not. In 2008 during the middle of the global financial crisis, when we started to research some of our creative, we found that some of the people who have seen our creative were actually less inclined to buy Dell and less positive about Dell. Why? Because we started with those really hackneyed lines of in these troubled times. And then we went on to talk about how we could take out I t costs and were targeted at I T makers, who basically we first played to their fear function and they said, and now we're going to put you out of a job, right? So there's this years of learning around where you get this sweet spot from a messaging perspective to talk about customer outcomes while also talking about what you do is a company, and keeping the institutional knowledge is knowledge of those lessons and building and refining over time. And so that's why I think we've been able to pivot as quickly as we have is because we've been data driven and had a creative voice for a very long time. The other piece that has helped us be fast is that we've spent the last 2.5 3 years working on bringing our own data, our own customer data internally after many, many years of having that with the third party agency. So all the work we had to do to retarget to re pivot based on which verticals were being successful in this time and which were not we were able to now due in a matter of hours, something that would have taken us weeks before. So there's places where it's about the voice of who we are as a brand, and that's a lot of that is creative judgment. And then there's places about institutional knowledge of the data, and then riel getting too real time data analysis where we're on the cusp of doing that. >>Yeah, so I like the way you phrase that it's not just looking at the data and going with some robotic fashion. It reminds me of, you know the book. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the famous movie, You know, it's like for a while it was it was in baseball, like whoever had the best nerds they thought we were gonna win. But it really is a balance of art and science, and it seems like you're on this journey with your customers together. I mean, how much how much? I mean, I know there's a lot of interaction, but but it seems like you guys are all learning together and evolving together in that regard. >>Absolutely. David, One of the things that has been really interesting to watch is we have had a connected workplace program for 10 years, so we've had flexible work arrangements for a very long time, and one of the things that we have learned from that is a combination of three key factors. The technology, obviously, can you do it? The three culture, and then the process is right. So when you have a the ability to work from home doesn't mean you should work from home 22 out of 24 hours. And that's where culture comes in. And I frankly, that's where this moment of cumulative global stress is so important to realize as a leader and to bring out to the Open and to talk about it. I mean, Michael's talked a lot about this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. We've done a lot of things to support our employees. And so if you think about those three factors and what we've learned, one of the things that we found as we got into the pipe pandemic was on the technology side. Even customers who thought they had business continuity plans in place or thought that they had worked from home infrastructure in place found that they didn't really so there was actually a very quick move to help our customers get the technology that would enable them to keep their businesses running and then on the other two fronts around processes and culture and leadership. We've been ableto have smaller, more intimate conversations with our customers than we would have historically, because frankly, we can bring Michael, Jeff. Other parts of the leadership team me together to have a conversation and one of the benefits of the fact that those of us who've been road warriors for many, many, many years as I know you have a swell suddenly found yourself actually staying in one place. You have time to have that conversation so that we continue to obviously help our customers on the technology front, but also have been able to lean in in a different way on what we've learned over 10 years and what we've learned over this incredibly dramatic eight months, >>you know, and you guys actually have some work from Home Street cred? I think, Del, you're the percentage of folks that were working from home Pre Koven was higher than the norm, significantly higher than normal. Wasn't that long ago that there were a couple of really high profile companies that were mandating come into the office and clear that they were on the wrong side of history? I mean, that surprised me actually on. Do you know what also surprised me? I don't know. I'm just gonna say it is There were two companies run by women, and I would have thought there was more empathy there. Uh, but Dal has always had this culture of Yeah, we were, You know, we could work. We could be productive no matter where. Maybe that's because of the the heritage or your founders. Still still chairman and CEO. I don't know. >>You know those companies and obviously we know who they are. Even at the time, what I thought about them was You don't have a location problem. You have a culture problem and you have a productivity problem and you a trust problem with your employees. And so, yes, I think they are going to be proven to be on the wrong side of history. And I think in those instances they've been on the wrong side of history on many things, sadly, and I hope that will never be us. I don't wanna be mean about that, but but the truth of the matter is one of the other benefits of being more flexible about where and how you work is. It opens up access to different talent pools who may or may not want to live in Austin, Texas, as an example, and that gives you a different way to get a more diverse workforce to get a younger workforce. And I think lots of companies are starting to have that really ization. And, you know, as I said, we've been doing this for 10 years. Even with that context, this is a quantum leap in. Now we're all basically not 100% but mainly all working from home, and we're still learning. So there's an interesting, ongoing lifelong learning that I think is very, very court of the Dell culture. >>I want to ask you about the virtual events you had you had a choice to make. You could have done what many did and said, Okay, we're going to run the event as scheduled, and you would have got a covert Mulligan. I mean, we saw Cem some pretty bad productions, frankly, but that was okay because they had to move fast and they got it done. So in a way, you kind of put more pressure on your yourselves. Andi, I guess you know, we saw this with VM Ware. I guess Was, you know, just recently last >>few >>weeks. Yeah, and so but they kind of raise the bar had great, you know, action with John Legend. So that was really kind of interesting, but, you know, kind of what went into that decision? A Zeiss A. You put more pressure on yourself because now you But you also had compares what? Your thoughts on >>that. So there was a moment in about March where I felt like I was making a multimillion dollar decision every single day. And that was on a personal note, somewhat stressful to kind of wake up and think, What? What? Not just on the events front. But as I said on the creative front, What work that my team has been working on for the last two years? I am I going to destroy today was sort of. I mean, I'm kind of joking, but not entirely how that felt for me personally at the moment. And we had about we made the decision early on to cancel events. We also made the decision quite early on that when we call that, we said we're not going to do any in person events until the end of this calendar year. So I felt good about the definitiveness there. We had about a week where we were still planning to do the virtual world in May and what I did together with my head of communications and head of event is we really sat and looked at the trajectory in the United States, and we thought, this is not gonna be a great moment for the U. S. The week we were supposed to run in May, if you looked at the trajectory of diseases, you would have news be dominated by the fact that we had an increasing spike in number of cases and subsequent deaths. And we just thought that don't just gonna care about our launches. So we had to really, very quickly re pivot that and what I was trying to do was not turn my own organization. So make the decisions start to plan and move on. And at the same time, though, what that then meant is we still have to get product launches out the door. So we did nine virtual launches in nine weeks. That was a big learning learning her for my team. I feel really good about that, and hopefully it helps us. And what I think will be a hybrid future going forward. >>Yeah, so not to generalize, but I've been generalizing about the following. So I've been saying for a while now that a lot >>of the >>marketing people have always wanted to have a greater component of virtual. But, you know, sales guys love the belly. The belly closed the deals, you know? But so where do you land on that? How do you see? You know, the future of events we do, you expect to continue to have ah, strong virtual component. >>I think it's gonna be a hybrid. I think we will never go back to what we did before. I think the same time people do need that human connection. Honestly, I miss seeing the people that I work with face to face. I said at the beginning of this conversation, I would like to be having this discussion with you live and I hate Las Vegas. So I never thought I'd be that interested in, like, let's go to Las Vegas, you know, who knew? But but so I think you'll see a hybrid future going forward. And then we will figure out what those smaller, more direct personal relationship moments are that over the next couple of years you could do more safely and then also frankly give you the opportunity to have those conversations that are more meaningful. So I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. Obviously, we're gonna learn a lot this year with this event, and we're going to continue to build on it. But there's places in the world if you look at what we've done in China for many, many, many years, we have held on over abundance of digital events because of frankly, just the size of the population and the the geographic complexity. And so there are places that even early into this, we could say, Well, we've already done this in China. How do we take that and apply it to the rest of the world? So that's what we're working through now. That's actually really exciting, >>You know, when you look at startups, it's like two things matter the engineering and sales and that's all anything else is a waste of money in their minds when you and and all they talk about is Legion Legion Legion. You don't hear that from a company like Dell because you have so many other channels on ways Thio communicate with your customers and engage with your customers. But of course, legions important demand. Gen. Is important. Do you feel like virtual events can be a Z effective? Maybe it's a longer tail, but can they be as productive as the physical events? >>So one thing that I've always been a little bit cantankerous on within marketing circles is I refuse to talk about it in terms of Brand versus Li Jen, because I think that's a false argument. And the way I've talked about it with my own team is there are things that we do that yield short term business results, maybe even in corridor in half for a year. And there are things that we do that lead to long term business results. First one is demand, and the second one is more traditional brand. But we have to do both. We have to think about our legacy as a known primarily for many, many years as a PC maker. In order for us to be successful in the business businesses that we are in now, we love our PC heritage. I grew up in that business, but we also want to embrace the other parts of their business and educate people about the things that we do that they may not even know, right? So that's a little bit of context in terms of you got to do both. You got to tell your story. You've got to change perceptions and you got to drive demand in quarter. So the interesting things about digital events is we can actually reach more people than we ever could in an in person world. So I think that expands the pie for both the perceptions and long term and short term. And I hope what we are more able to do effectively because of that point that I made about our own internal marketing digital transformation is connect those opportunities to lead and pass them off to sales more effectively. We've done a lot of work on the plumbing on the back end of that for the last couple of years, and I feel really fortunate that we did that because I don't think we'd be able to do what we're doing now. If we hadn't invested there, >>Well, it's interesting. You're right. I mean, Del of course, renowned during the PC era and rode that wave. And then, of course, the AMC acquisition one of the most amazing transformations, if not the most amazing transformation in the history of the computer industry. But when you when you look to the future and of course, we're hearing this week about as a service and you new pricing models, just new mindsets I look at and I wonder if you could comment, I look at Dell's futures, you know, not really a product company. You're becoming a platform. Essentially, for for digital transformation is how I look atyou. Well, how do you see the brand message going forward? >>Absolutely. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about Dell is that we have proven our ability to constantly and consistently reinvent ourselves, and I won't go through the whole thing. But if you look at started as a direct to consumer company, then went into servers then and started to go into small business meeting business a little bit about when private acquired e. M. C. I mean, we are a company who is always moving forward and always thinking about what's next. Oftentimes, people don't even realize the breadth and depth of what we do and who we are now so as even with all of that context in place, the horizon that we're facing into now is, I believe, the most important transformation that we've done, which is, as you see, historical, I t models change and it becomes, yes, about customer choice. We know that many of our customers will continue to want to buy hardware the way they always have. But we also know that we're going to see a very significant change in consumption models. And the way we stay on top of our game going forward is we lean into that huge transformation. And that's what we're announcing this week with Project Apex, which is that commitment to the entire company's transformation around as a service. And that's super exciting for us. >>Well, I was saying Before, you're sort of in lockstep with your customers. Or maybe you could we could. We could close by talking a little bit about Dell's digital transformation and what you guys have going on internally, and maybe some of the cultural impacts that you've seen. >>So you, you you touched on it. It's so easy to make it about just the I t. Work, and in fact, you actually have to make it about the i t. The business process. Change in the culture change. So if you look at what we did with the AMC acquisition and the fact that you know that there's a lot of skepticism about that at the time, they're not gonna be able to absorb that. Keep the business running. And in fact, we have really shown huge strides forward in the business. One of the reasons we've been able to do that is because we've been so thoughtful about all of those things. The technology, the culture and the business process change, and you'll see us continue to do that. As I said in my own organization, just to use the data driven transformation of marketing. Historically, we would have hired a certain type of person who was more of a creative Brett bent. Well, now, increasingly, we're hiring quants who are going to come into a career in marketing, and they never would have seen themselves doing that a couple of years ago. And so my team has to think about okay, these don't look like our historical marketing profile. How do we hire them? How do we do performance evaluations for them. And how do we make sure that we're not putting the parameters of old on a very new type of talent? And so when we talk about diversity, it's not just age, gender, etcetera. It's also of skills. And that's where I think the future of digital transformation is so interesting. There has been so much hype on this topic, and I think now is when we're really starting to see those big leaps forward and peoples in companies. Riel transformation. That's the benefit of this cookie year we got here, Dave. >>Well, I think I do think the culture comes through, especially in conversations like this. I mean, you're obviously a very clear thinker and good communicator, but I think your executive team is in lockstep. It gets down, toe the middle management into the into the field and and, you know, congratulations on how far you've come. And, uh, and and also I'm really impressed that you guys have such a huge ambitions in so many ways. Changing society obviously focused on customers and building great companies. So, Alison, thanks so much for >>thank you, Dave. You virtually I'm very >>great to see it. Hopefully hopefully see Assumes. Hopefully next year we could be together. Until then, virtually you'll >>see virtual, >>huh? Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there. Our coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> Announcer: From London, England. It's theCUBE covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA brought to you by Coupa. >> Hi welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London, at Coupa Inspire '19. Pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Mads Fink Jensen, partner advisory from KPMG. Mads, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa, it's a pleasure to be here. >> It's great to have you. So we have all this excitement around us, lots of folks here in London for Coupa Inspire. Talk to me about the state of procurement. Coupa talks about PIPE, procurement, invoicing, payments, expenses, but procurement has been changing a lot recently. You have a lot of experience in procurement. Talk to me about what the state of procurement is like today, and what some of those waves of disruption are. >> Yeah. So you could say traditionally, procurement has been very much about making agreements with suppliers. The business have had a need and asked or requested procurement to fulfill that need. Typically, it has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from the procurement departments, in many cases delaying projects and things like that. Businesses are much more agile now, they expect, you from, different back office functions, including procurement, they expect a much more agile approach to delivering services. So if you are running a projects in the business, and you go to procurement asking for a specific service or product, and procurement says, "Ah this will take "four to six months", that is absolutely not acceptable. So the businesses in general are now, you could say, transforming the way that they are requesting procurement services, which means procurement are now being disrupted quite a lot. They have to think very differently. They have to be more proactive instead of being a reactive business partner, you could day. So being proactive in the sense that they embrace the business and actually deliver the needs before they are asked by the business. So that's a way where procurement organizations they need to be much more predictive, and understand what's going on, both in the business, but also in the market. And then you could say, on the other hand, procurement traditionally, they do a contract, and then they finalize the contract, and then they kind of keep their hands off. So the future is that procurement, they do a contract of course, that's a key part of being a procurement department, but they also need to operationalize the contract. So in terms of making sure that the users in the business, that they can actually use the contract and buy under that specific contract. So a lot of things are changing in procurement, which also means that you will see now` different operating models. You will see different interaction with businesses, and you will see quite a lot of different expectations coming from the business to the procurement departments. >> I can imagine that will be, those are challenges for say, an incumbent Chief Procurement Officer, or financial decision maker who's used to certain processes with certain boundaries. How, in your advisory role, do you work with clients to help them even just embrace the cultural change that's required of this function, to be much more strategic, and much more impactful to a business? >> Absolutely. I mean, you know, we use Coupa as a platform to help clients transforming the way that they are doing procurement, and actually we don't see a Coupa implementation as an IT implementation project, we see it as a business transformation project. And the thing is that, one thing is that you start changing the way that you are doing things, but it's also a mindset change. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And the challenge here for CPOs, so for procurement officers, is actually to make sure that the procurement organization have the necessary challenges to make that transformation. And you know, a lot of the stuff that we are doing when we're implementing solutions like Coupa, is of course taking away all the transactional work. That's automated, and we are also providing insights. So insight into spend, insight into transaction, to transaction processes, to turn around times, to delivery, to you know, all these kind of things. And the challenge for the CPO is to make sure that the part of the organization that are currently doing very transactional processes, how can they transform to becoming more strategic thinking and proactive people. >> And tell me how, from KPMG's perspective, how is Coupa helping to drive that transformation for its customers? >> Yeah, it's a good question actually, because I mean, Coupa is a technology, but it's also much more than a technology, because as Coupa also emphasizes, it's also about a community. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So the thing is that, with a platform like Coupa, you get technology support for your processes, but you also get a lot more insight. So you get a lot of possibilities to act in a very different way. So for instance, you can see spend patterns, so in that way you can predict how businesses actually on an annual basis what their need will be. So in that way, you can also prepare for some of the stuff that are happening in the business. And also, you could say, as a procurement person, as a sourcing manager or category innovators, as Coupa is calling it, you now have the insight to actually think more strategic on your supplier base, on the market tendencies, you can see how other companies are procuring stuff, are they going from one type of vendors to another type of vendors, and how is that going. So you could say, Coupa is a tool, not only to structure processes and do transformations, but it's also a platform and a technology that changes the way that you think and you act. >> You mentioned the word predictive a second ago, and one of the things that, well the P in Coupa stands for prescriptive. Rob talked about, I think was over 22,000 prescriptions that were delivered through the community just in the last, I think he said 12 months, very short period of time. A lot of innovation there. Helping a business in whatever industry it's in, go from being reactive to proactive to predictive, is that a game changer, or is that something that you think every business has to become predictive to be relevant? >> Yeah, so you could say, of course it differs a little bit from industry to industry, there are many different ways of looking at the procurement, but a general thing across industries that doesn't really change whether it's manufacturing or fast moving consumer goods, or pharmaceutical or whatever, is that procurement needs to understand the business that they are serving, because traditionally, procurement they are a little bit isolated, like IT was 10, 15 years ago, didn't really understand what's going on in the business in many cases, in many cases it's not like that, but in many cases it is, you know, they are very transactional, they establishing contracts and things like that, but the thing is that if you don't understand your business, and if you don't understand the way that your business operates, you know, you can have annual cycles, you can have innovation cycles, you can have different demands in the market depending on the time of year and things like that. So in general, procurement organizations really need to change their mindset of getting out there, speaking with the business, understanding the business, understanding the strategies, aligning the procurement strategies into the general business strategy, and then embrace innovation, because, I mean, even though Coupa as a platform is at a really, really nice place right now, with a lot of transformational possibilities, I mean who know what comes tomorrow. There will be a number of different things changing over the course of two, six months, a year, two years, things like that. So I think in general, procurement organizations need to think in a much more agile way, adapting what the company in general is adapting. >> So tell me, let's dig a little bit deeper into what KPMG and Coupa are doing together to drive the future of procurement. >> Absolutely, so KPMG have developed a framework we call Powered Procurement, which is a framework that gives, you could say, clients a very, very structured way of doing a transformation, and that framework is actually built on top of the Coupa platform. So we have developed a model, which is, you could say, technology agnostic, but we have specifically developed a model that is placed on top of the Coupa platform, where we utilizes the possibilities the platform have, and one core thing is that the mantra of Coupa is measurable as business value, and the transformation that we want to do together with our clients is exactly open their eyes in terms of how do you get measurable business value, because how do you measure it, what is it that you want to measure, is it savings only? Not necessarily. It can be a lot of different things. And the Coupa platform you could say enable that transformation process in a really, really good way, because you actually don't really think about technology, you think about business transformation, and that's why I think the way that we utilize Coupa as a platform is quite unique. >> So thinking back to your long history in procurement advisory, your background as a supplier on the industry side, when you look at that compared to your day to day life where you're a consumer and you're buying things very easily through Amazon and different marketplaces, how is Coupa helping to bring in some of that consumerization and help meet the demands of people that want things to be, to your point, I don't want to be looking at a UI, or a technology, I want this to simpler like it is when I'm going to buy groceries online. >> Mads: Absolutely. >> Are they helping to really bridge that gap? >> So it's a really good question, actually, because you could say, in reality, the value comes from a meaningful experience, and you could say traditionally, when you have, you know, I was part of the Maersk organization, the Danish shipping company, and we did a lot of stuff on behalf of the business to make sure that they could execute their role and get the products and services they needed. It was typically a very cumbersome process, where people had to think in very complex processes and you know, how do I actually get this thing I need now? And what's happening now with a platform like Coupa is that you actually adopt the way of thinking coming from your private life as well. So it's kind of merging a little bit the way that you think when you do procurement because it's not a complex process. Of course, it takes longer in a business environment, you could say, also because you need to do different sourcing exercises, there are regulations in the public sector and so forth, but in the way that you're thinking of how you procure, and get access to the goods and services that you need for executing your role, it's a very different mindset. And that's where technologies like Coupa comes in as a, you could say, straightforward way of getting access to these things. >> So KPMG clearly has choice in who it chooses to partner with. Tell me a little bit more about what Coupa and the partnership means to KPMG, and the competitive differentiation it might deliver. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean there are a number of different platforms in the market, of course, and it's actually quite interesting this year because there's a lot of development. I actually started out a new company in 2001 where we developed an e-procurement platform, and I can tell that both the suppliers, and the market and the suppliers in general, have changed quite a lot since then. (laughs) >> Lisa: I can imagine. >> And a lot of more actors are coming into the market. And the interesting thing is that, you know, the traditional actors, they have quite some difficulties in following up with a company like Coupa. And you could say Coupa as a platform is really interesting because it, first of all it adopts the cloud technology, which means that companies doesn't have to think about you know, maintenance, operations, all these things that typically come with on premise solutions, and it has this ability to create this community, because the technology platform is developed and designed and architected in the way it is, which means you have a suite of components that all feeds into a common community, which create, you could say, a much, much better platform to innovate than what we see in the competing landscape. So in essence, when Rob today talked about the community, that's where we see a huge differentiator, the way that Coupa works with the community, and takes intelligence from the community, and based on that can actually come up with really, really impressive, innovative ideas. >> Last question for you, Mads. The category of business spend management that Coupa is working hard to define, what does that from KPMG's perspective? >> Yeah, so you could say, for me it's actually quite relieving that there is an actor in the market that starts to talk about business spend management. It's a new term that Coupa have introduced. I mean there have been variations on that subject, but it's the first time that you have a very clear pronunciation of what this is all about, because business spend management is much more than just than the, you could say, the narrow procurement bit. Procurement is of course a huge part of it, but I mean, there are expense management, as an example, you have all the procurement stuff, you have spend in a lot of different areas like salary, that's not kind of part of the platform yet, but which would make a lot of sense, you could say. So this is the first time where you actually have a suite that in all the different components and areas, embrace business spend management. And in essence, you could say, I think, Rob also mentioned it in a very good way, this is actually, it's the procurement department that manages a huge part of the value of the company, in terms of managing the spend. So it's an extremely important task that organizations have, and the good thing is that we see, increasingly see that procurement gets closer and closer to the strategic area of businesses. >> Well Mads, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE, and describing the procurement history that you have, what KPMG and Coupa are doing together. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you Lisa, it was a pleasure to be here. >> Likewise. For Mads, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London '19. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat tech music) >> Announcer: From London, England it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Insp!re 19 Emea. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Insp!re 19. Very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the CEO and Chairman of Coupa, Rob Bernshteyn. Rob, welcome back. >> Thank you so much, thank you for being with me. >> It's great to be here, so we are in with all of these customers and partners, this has been busy all day. You started things off today with a great keynote. I was telling you before we went live, I lost count of how many big customer examples were sprinkled, and I think infused throughout your keynote. I was looking at some numbers, Coupa just keeps doing this. 5x increase in spend under management since 2016, that's only three years. You guys have thousands of customers, five million suppliers on the platform, lot of growth. What are some of the key drivers to this great growth that you're seeing? Well a couple of things, I mean first of all, this is a huge total addressable market. Every company in the world could do a better job of the way they manage their business spending, and they could use information technology, hopefully from Coupa to help make that happen, and we are so proud to cultivate this community of like minded, thoughtful professionals that want to apply best practices, best in-class modern technology solutions like the ones we offer obviously, to drive quantifiable, measurable, outcomes for the companies that they work for. So in many ways, this is a celebration of our customer community and it's a wonderful opportunity to be with our customers here like this every year in Europe and every year in the United States, and now frankly in lots of other places around the world. >> So one of the themes that was also expressed during the keynote was Rachel Botsman's theme of trust and I think about the open community, the open platform and the community that Coupa is building, there's a lot of earned trust there that Coupa has earned from this growing community. Talk to me about what that means to you and the whole team and how it's influencing the direction that Coupa is going in. >> It means a lot to me personally frankly. The O in Coupa stands for Open, and that means not only technically open in terms of APIs and integrations, but it means open in spirit, open in dialogue, honest, transparent communications. I feel that our industry in enterprise software has a legacy or a history of a lot of PowerPoints, and a lot of demos, but frankly, quite a few failures of large scale deployments and a whole host of sectors. And we want to be part of the solution, we want to have an open, authentic, honest communication with our customers, with our prospective customers in the sales process, with our partners, with all of my Coupa colleagues, so we can avoid the friction and nonsense of politics that often gets in the way of driving measurable, meaningful value for every constituent. It's a very, very important thing to me, it's important to my team, and that's something we're doing our very best to cultivate in this Coupa community that we're creating. >> Speaking of cultivation, Coupa is cultivating this category of Business Spend Management. Tell us a little bit more about that and where you are with that. >> Sure, Business Spend Management is a pretty straightforward three words to describe the fact that our buyers and our customers are responsible for literally trillions of dollars and pounds and dollars and euros of spend all over the world. And as information becomes more and more transparent, the buyer, the one who's repsonsible for that spend becomes more and more powerful. So we sit on the side of that buyer, we give them information technology solutions from sourcing, to inventory management, to spend analytics, to procurement, to expensing, to invoicing, to payments, to supplier performance. All the capabilities needed to help them make the best purchasing decisions for their organizations, and help their companies become more profitable so that every one of these Coupa community customers we have here could get more bang for their buck and be that much more operationally efficient frankly in driving their own company's visions and missions and whatever it is that they bring to the world. And that's very aspirational for us and we're excited that so many have come on board with this establishment of the Business Spend Management category with us. >> So if we look at the PIPE, as you were calling it this morning, P-I-P-E, procure, invoice, pay, expense, I memorized that, you've got this one platform that can deliver all of that to this growing community of users who have the ability to get that visibility. That is one of the biggest challenges, I was reading some stats recently about the number of businesses, they were the percentages of businesses that don't have complete visibility over their spend, it's high. >> It's very high, we just did a study of 250 or so CFOs in the UK, and they're doing a great job at budgeting and reporting, but they have minimal visibility into their supply relationships, especially with what's happening here with Brexit. They have minimal visibility in supply risks, supply chain risks, and one of the ingredients that I think we're very special at and I'm proud of is the U in Coupa, the user centricity. In order to have visibility into your spend, you have to have adoption, you have to have people purchasing, spending, expensing, paying, processing invoices, everything that you just mentioned through this pipe on one centralized platform with a common UI layer, User Experience layer or User Interface, common business logic layer, common data model, use of community intelligence to help you make the best purchasing decisions, spend decisions. So we're really on the forefront of something very, very exciting because this adoption level is happening through this user centricity, and it's given these companies control and visibility of spend, and what could be more important to driving profitability, sustained business development? I think we're in a very unique position to help these customers. >> So is one of the biggest challenges for those, think it was 96% of those UK financial decision makers that you guys surveyed said, "We don't have complete visibility." Is it because they have legacy siloed solutions that don't give them that common layer? Or is it because maybe that and a mixture of users just not adopting it because it's not as intuitive to use? >> It's a number of things. First of all, for every process, whether it's procurement, expenses, invoicing, or payments, they have seperate systems to your point. Some cases, they don't even have systems. They're calling in orders, they're handling paper invoices, so there are different levels of maturity in each of those four areas. So one is getting them on to a common platform where all of those are orchestrating together. Secondarily, there's an opportunity to create synergy between those areas, so a lot of things that are getting expensed really should be preapproved and should be routed toward preferential pricing that procurement can negotiate on behalf of the user. Many times invoices are duplicate coming in from suppliers and AP departments are so excited that they pay quickly, but they're not necessarily sure whether they received the goods and services that the invoice is for. So having one common platform, that's the C in Coupa, Comprehensive. One common comprehensive platform for all these business processes is critical, leveraging the synergy of all them working together is critical, and getting that widespread user adoption is part of the secret formula here. >> Let's talk about the community. It's big, it's growing, 1.3 trillion in spend managed, and I watched our video back that you and I did a few months ago, it was 1.2. So that was four months ago, and you showed a bar chart today of just the last 12 months, had to look up this way to see that, so this community that has the ability to help derive and leverage the insights, talk to me about the insights and being able to help businesses go from reactive to predictive as a game changer for Coupa. >> Sure, it's a huge game changer and we really aspire to be, if you will, the tail that wags the dog in the enterprise software industry overall because the enterprise software industry, in effect, every customer is on their own island using information technology for a certain business process. What we've done with community intelligence is we've aggregated, anonymized, and sanitized data from the customer base and then are distilling insights that we could be prescriptive about. So we could tell our customers and we're telling them, "Hey, our community is having challenges with such "and such supplier based on literally perhaps millions "of dollars and millions of pounds in transactional spend. "We recommend you consider this supplier in "that same category because our community is having "great success with them. "The products are being shipped on time, "there's no war over invoicing, there's no breakage in "what's delivered." Those are just some examples, we're helping them think through commodities. A lot of our customers forgiven commodity, they have 20, 30 different suppliers. We're helping them think through in their industry. How can they do supply consolidation that makes sense based on benchmarking across the entire industry? We're helping them avoid supplier risk, we're helping them avoid fraud, we're identifying employees that may be expensing things or doing things that are fraudulent based on the collective intelligence of what we're seeing around the entire world in real time and we're prescribing actions to be taken before payments go out. So these are just some examples of what we're doing, we're doing things in benchmarking based on community intelligence, we're really just at the tip of the sphere of what's possible and we've prescribed tens of thousands of prescriptions in our platform to our customers. Many of them are taking those prescriptions and are making their businesses more operationally fit, and more agile, which is something we're very, very proud of. >> Speaking of those prescriptions, I think the number you shared this morning was 22,000 prescriptions delivered in one year? >> In the last 12 months, that's right. >> So we've got to talk about acceleration 'cause we've talked about the COUP, the acceleration, that is one example of that. I also saw that you guys have gotten, customers are doing approvals 30% faster than they were a year ago. You're getting mid-market customers up and running in four months, large enterprises up in eight months, talk to me about that acceleration that you guys are achieving. >> Absolutely, the A in Coupa is about Accelerated, it's about learning from our entire customer base and taking those learnings and making them part of best practices-based appointments so we could go faster and faster and faster. We look at retail customer, we've done dozens of retail customers, large and small. We know how to set up catalogs, we know how to set up workflow, we know how to think through the analytics that they need. So when they get going with the deployment from Coupa, they can get up and running way faster than with going back to five or six years ago where you have to think about it from scratch and a blueprint. They could leverage the insight from the community with doing that in mid-market, with doing that in subverticals like credit unions, for example. Biotechs, we're doing it in insurance, we're doing it in pharma, all hosts of industries, and I think as we learn from every deployment and collect those insights, we're going to be able to drive value faster and faster to our customers. And the other element that's important here is it's not just taking the customer live, all of our customers grow with us. They get more and more value every year, this is why our renewal rate is so strong and customers add more business with us because they're getting value and that value continues to grow, and that's really what value as a service is about. We're not a software company, and we're not a software as a service company. We're truly a value as a service company, which is a very different concept and one that we're cultivating in this marketplace. >> What are some of your favorite, I know you love being in front of the customers, what are some of your favorite examples that really show the value that Coupa is delivering to the changing role of procurement, making that girl or guy much more strategic and much more of a partner to the business? >> Sure, I shared some examples this morning that I really loved and appreciated celebrating some of our trendsetters, or what we call spendsetters. You look at Zalando, our retailer where they weren't necessarily going to take them so seriously about savings, but when they went to marketing and said, "We can give you much more bang "for your marketing budget "so you could reach more potential consumers," well of course they embraced that. And we gave them a usable opportunity, a usable platform for doing that as similar Zalando, they engaged. Now they have something like 85% spender management. When we started working with them, they had zero purchase orders, everything was the wild west. You look at, I was just speaking to one of our customers at Procter & Gamble just five minutes ago here at the expo. They've run more than 50 billion pounds of spend through the Coupa platform, 50 billion. That's not easy, but they've done that in just a couple of years with us, and not only did they have visibility spent, but they're saving, they're routing purchases to preferred suppliers, so the list just goes on and on and on our website, at Coupa.com on the Customers tab, you'll see obviously dozens of customers holding up signs of the real measurable value they're getting from working with us and that's something that we really take a lot of pride in. >> That speaks for itself. Last question for you Rob, talk to me about those strategic partnerships that Coupa has. I know some news coming out today with what you guys are doing with American Express. >> Sure, we've entered the payment space and we entered it because our customer community asked us for it. They said, "Look, if we're procuring goods "and services through you, why wouldn't we all, "and we're doing invoice and we're doing all "of the components of the pipe, "why wouldn't we also go deeper into payments, help us pay." Because many now have to log in to all these different ERP systems and kick off batch process, so we went into payments. And in payments, we have a host of partnerships. Now, today we announced the relationship with American Express in the UK and Australia for virtual credit card payments. Now it's very simple in Coupa, someone needs a good or service, it gets routed through workflow for approval. Once approved, a dynamic credit card number is generated by American Express, the individual makes the purchase, and all the reconciliation, the back-end is handled by Coupa. All the reporting, the visibility, the insights to price points and category assessments are there and visible and the company's in a position to fine tune their spend profile. So that's just one example, and we're doing things in dynamic discounting and accelerating payments. We've just launched today in general availability and Robby will be discussing it tomorrow ahead of business acceleration. We launched our batch payments capability, the ability to do invoice payments in batch along any rail, whether it be banking relationships, whether it be eCheck, whether it be credit card, going into one environment and kicking off batch payments without having to wait for all these different ERP systems to take hold. So we're really at the, in my mind, at the very beginning of addressing a huge market opportunity, we're proud of what we've achieved so far. I'm particularly proud of the customer community developing around us, and we're excited about the days, weeks, months, quarters, and years to come. >> So you talked about, last question, the big TAM, in this total adjustable market. What are some of the core elements to Coupa's path to a billion in revenue? >> We're not as exciting to many investors as a hot startup that grows really quickly and maybe has some sort of viral component to it. We've been at this for over 10 years, we've grown thoughtfully, we've grown carefully. The growth is fast 30, 40 plus percent, but it's thoughtful and careful, it's one customer at a time. We're careful in how much we spend on sales and marketing, especially want customers to choose us rather than us hard-selling them on everything, we want the offering to sell itself. We have an ecosystem of systems integrators, now more than 3,000, Centric, APMG, Deloitte, and others that are certified on deploying Coupa. We're expanding our product footprint, our customers now use on average 4.7 applications from us and they're consuming those applications rather than us pushing them on them. We're expanding globally, we're expanding in terms of the enterprise business and the mid-market business. Our mid-market business is now really at scale and scaling beautifully, it's a beautiful business model. So those are just some of the vectors in which we'll continue to expand, but I think the path to $1 billion for us is very clear, and ultimately comes down to execution, delivering for every customer, making sure they're getting value from working with us year in and year out, and I think before you know it, we'll be on the doorstep of that $1 billion. >> Excellent. Rob, it's been a pleasure having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for having theCUBE out here in London, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> For Rob Bernshteyn, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Insp!re 19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

>> Narrator: Live from New York, it's theCube! Covering AWS Global Summit 2019, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, we're here at the Javits Center in New York City for AWS Summit, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost is Corey Quinn and happy to welcome to the program Scott Mullins, who's the head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development with Amazon Web Services based here in The Big Apple, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Stu, thanks for having me, Corey. >> All right so we had obviously financial services big location here in New York City. We just had FINRA on our program, had a great conversation about how they're using AWS for their environments, but give us a thumbnail if you will about your business, your customers and what you're seeing there. >> Sure, we're working with financial institutions all the way from the newest FinTech startups, all the way to organizations like FINRA, the largest exchanges and brokers dealers like Nasdaq, as well as insurers and the largest banks. And I've been here for five years and in that time period I actually went from being a customer speaking at the AWS Summit here in the Javits Center on stage like Steve Randich was today to watching more and more financial institutions coming forward, talking about their use in the cloud. >> Yeah before we get into technology, one of the biggest trends of moving to cloud is I'm moving from CapEx more to OpEx and oh my gosh there's uncertainty because I'm not locking in some massive contract that I'm paying up front or depreciating over five years but I've got flexibility and things are going to change. I'm curious what you're seeing as the financial pieces of how people both acquire and keep on the books what they're doing. >> Yeah it can be a little bit different, right, then what most people are used to. They're used to kind of that muscle memory and that rhythm of how you procured technology in the past and there can be a stage of adjustment, but cost isn't really the thing that people I think look to the most when it comes to cloud today, it's all about agility and FINRA is a great example. Steve has talked about over and over again over the last several years how they were able to gain such business agility and actually to do more, the fact that they're now processing 155 billion market events every night and able to run all their surveillance routines. That's really indicative of the value that people are looking for. Being able to actually get products to market faster and reducing development cycles from 18 months to three months, like Allianz, one of our customers over in Europe has been able to do. Being able to go faster I think actually trumps cost from the standpoint of what that biggest value driver that we're seeing our customers going after in financial services. >> We're starting to see such a tremendous difference as far as the people speaking at these keynotes. Once upon a time you had Netflix and folks like that on stage telling a story about how they're using cloud to achieve all these amazing things, but when you take a step back and start blinking a little bit, they fundamentally stream movies and yes, produce some awesome original content. With banks and other financial institutions if the ATM starts spitting out the wrong number, that's a different point on the spectrum of are people going to riot in the street. I'm not saying it's further along, people really like their content but it's still a different use case with a different risk profile. Getting serious companies that have world shaking impact to trust public cloud took time and we're seeing it with places like FINRA, Capital One has been very active as far as evangelizing their use of cloud. It's just been transformative. What does that look like, from being a part of that? >> Well you know it's interesting, so you know you just said it, financial services is the business of risk management. And so to get more and when you see more and more of these financial institutions coming forward and talking about their use of cloud, what that really equates to is comfort, they've got that muscle memory now, they've probably been working with us in some way, shape or form for some great period of time and so if you look at last year, you had Dean Del Vecchio from Guardian Life Insurance come out on stage at Reinvent and say to the crowd "Hey we're a 158 year old insurance company but we've now closed our data center and we're fully on AWS and we've completed the transformation of our organization". The year before you saw Goldman Sachs walk out and say "Yeah we've been working with AWS for about four years now and we're actually using them for some very interesting use cases within Goldman Sachs". And so typically what you've seen is that over the course of about a two year to sometimes a four year time period, you've got institutions that are working deeply with us, but they're not talking about it. They're gaining that muscle memory, they're putting those first use cases to begin to scale that work up and then when they're ready man, they're ready to talk about it and they're excited to talk about it. What's interesting though is today we're having this same summit that we're having here in Cape Town in Africa and we had a customer, Old Mutual, who's one of the biggest insurers there, they just started working with us in earnest back in May and they were on stage today, so you're seeing that actually beginning to happen a lot quicker, where people are building that muscle memory faster and they're much more eager to talk about it. You're going to see that trend I think continue in financial services over the next few years so I'm very excited for future summits as well as Reinvent because the stories that we're going to see are going to come faster. You're going to see more use cases that go a lot deeper in the industry and you're going to see it covering a lot more of the industry. >> It's very much not, IT is no longer what people think of in terms of Tech companies in San Francisco building products. It's banks, it's health care and these companies are transitioning to become technology companies but when your entire, as you mentioned, the entire industry becomes about risk management, it's challenging sometimes to articulate things when you're not both on the same page. I was working with a financial partner years ago at a company I worked for and okay they're a financial institution, they're ready to sign off on this but before that they'd like to tour US East one first and validate that things are as we say they are. The answer is yeah me too, sadly, you folks have never bothered to invite me to tour an active AZ, maybe next year. It's challenging to I guess meet people where they are and speak the right language, the right peace for a long time. >> And that's why you see us have a financial services team in the first place, right? Because your financial services or health care or any of the other industries, they're very unique and they have a very specific language and so we've been very focused on making sure that we speak that language that we have an understanding of what that industry entails and what's important to that industry because as you know Amazon's a very customer obsessed organization and we want to work backwards from our customers and so it's been very important for us to actually speak that language and be able to translate that to our service teams to say hey this is important to financial services and this is why, here's the context for that. I think as we've continued to see more and more financial institutions take on that technology company mindset, I'm a technology company that happens to run a bank or happens to run an exchange company or happens to run an insurance business, it's actually been easier to talk to them about the services that we offer because now they have that mindset, they're moving more towards DevOps and moving more towards agile. And so it's been really easy to actually communicate hey, here are the appropriate changes you have to make, here's how you evolve governance, here's how you address security and compliance and the different levels of resiliency that actually improve from the standpoint of using these services. >> All right so Scott, back before I did this, I worked for some large technology suppliers and there were some groups on Wall Street that have huge IT budgets and IT staffs and actually were very cutting edge in what they were building, in what they were doing and very proud of their IT knowledge, and they were like, they have some of the smartest people in the industry and they spend a ton of money because they need an edge. Talking about transactions on stock markets, if I can translate milliseconds into millions of dollars if I can act faster. So you know, those companies, how are they moving along to do the I need to build it myself and differentiate myself because of my IT versus hey I can now have access to all the services out there because you're offering them with new ones every day, but geez how do I differentiate myself if everybody can use some of these same tools. >> So that's my background as well and so you go back that and milliseconds matter, milliseconds are money, right? When it comes to trading and actually building really bespoke applications on bespoke infrastructure. So I think what we're seeing from a transitional perspective is that you still have that mindset where hey we're really good at technology, we're really good at building applications. But now it's a new toolkit, you have access to a completely new toolkit. It's almost like The Matrix, you know that scene where Neo steps into that white room and hey says "I need this" and then the shelves just show up, that's kind how it is in the cloud, you actually have the ability to leverage the latest and greatest technologies at your fingertips when you want to build and I think that's something that's been a really compelling thing for financial institutions where you don't have to wait to get infrastructure provisioned for you. Before I worked for AWS, I worked for large financial institutions as well and when we had major projects that we had to do that sometimes had a regulatory implication, we were told by our infrastructure team hey that's going to be six months before we can actually get your dev environment built so you can actually begin to develop what you need. And actually we had to respond within about thirty days and so you had a mismatch there. With the cloud you can provision infrastructure easily and you have an access to an array of services that you can use to build immediately. And that means value, that means time to market, that means time to answering questions from customers, that means really a much faster time to answering questions from regulatory agencies and so we're seeing the adoption and the embrace of those services be very large and very significant. >> It's important to make sure that the guardrails are set appropriately, especially for a risk managed firm but once you get that in place correctly, it's an incredible boost of productivity and capability, as opposed to the old crappy way of doing governance of oh it used to take six weeks to get a server in so we're going to open a ticket now whenever you want to provision an instance and it only takes four, yay we're moving faster. It feels like there's very much a right way and a wrong way to start embracing cloud technology. >> Yeah and you know human nature is to take the run book you have today and try to apply it to tomorrow and that doesn't always work because you can use that run book and you'll get down to line four and suddenly line four doesn't exist anymore because of what's happened from a technological change perspective. Yeah I think that's why things like AWS control tower and security hub, which are those guardrails, those services that we announced recently that have gone GA. We announced them a couple of weeks ago at Reinforce in Boston. Those are really interesting to financial services customers because it really begins to help automate a lot of those compliance controls and provisioning those through control tower and then monitoring those through security hub and so you've seen us focus on how do we actually make that easier for customers to do. We know that risk management, we know that governance and controls is very important in financial services. We actually offer our customers a way to look from a country specific angle, add the different countries and the rule sets and the requirements that exist in those countries and how you map those to our controls and how you map those into your own controls and all the considerations that you have, we've got them on our public website. If you went to atlas.aws right now, that's our compliance center, you could actually pick the countries you're interested in and we'll have that mapping for you. So you'll see us continue to invest in things like that to make that much easier for customers to actually deploy quickly and to evolve those governance frameworks. >> And things like with Artifact, where it's just grab whatever compliance report you need, submit it and it's done without having to go through a laborious process. It's click button, receive compliance in some cases. >> If you're not familiar with it you can go into the AWS console and you've got Artifact right there and if you need a SOC report or you need some other type of artifact, you can just download it right there through the console, yeah it's very convenient. >> Yeah so Scott you know we talked about some of the GRC pieces in place, what are you seeing trends out there kind of globally, you know GDRP was something that was on everybody's mind over the last year or so. California has new regulations that are coming in place, so anything specific in your world or just the trends that you're seeing that might impact our environments-- >> I think that the biggest trends I would point to are data analytics, data analytics, data analytics, data analytics. And on top of that obviously machine learning. You know, data is the lifeblood of financial services, it's what makes everything go. And you can look at what's happening in this space where you've got companies like Bloomberg and Refinitiv who are making their data products available on AWS so you can get B-Pipe on AWS today, you can also get the elektron platform from Refintiv and then what people are trying to do in relation to hey I want to organize my data, I want to make it much easier to actually find value in data, both either from the standpoint of regulatory reporting, as you heard Steve talk about on stage today. FINRA is building a very large data repository that they have to from the standpoint of a regulatory perspective with CAT. Broker dealers have to actually feed the CAT and so they are also worried about here in the US, how do I actually organize my data, get all the elements I have to report to CAT together and actually do that in a very efficient way. So that's a big data analytic project. Things that are helping to make that much easier are leg formations, so we came up with leg formation last year and so you've got many financial institutions that are looking at how do you make building a data leg that much easier and then how do you layer analytics on top of that, whether it's using Amazon elastic map reduce or EMR to actually run regulatory reporting jobs or how do I begin to leverage machine learning to actually make my data analytics from a standpoint of trade surveillance or fraud detection that much more enriched and actually looking for those anomalies rather than just looking for a whole bunch of false positives. So data analytics I think is what I would point to as the biggest trend and how to actually make data more useful and how to get to data insights faster. >> On the one end it seems like there's absolutely a lot of potential in this, on the other it feels in many cases with large scale data analytics, it's we have all these tools for machine learning and the rest that we can wind up passing out to you but you need to figure out what to do with them, how to make it work and it's unclear outside of a few specific use cases and I think you've alluded to a couple of those how to take in a typical business that maybe doesn't have an enormous pile of data and start applying machine learning to it in a way that makes intelligent sense. That feels right now like a storytelling failure to some extent industry wide. We're starting to see some stories emerge but it still feels a little "Gold Rush"-y to some extent. >> Yeah I would say, and my advice would be don't try to boil the ocean or don't try to boil the data leg, meaning you want to do machine learning, you've got a great amount of earnestness about that but picture use case, really hone in on what you're trying to accomplish and work backwards from that. And we offer tooling that can be really helpful in that, you know with stage maker you can train your models and you can actually make data science available to a much broader array of people than just your data scientists. And so where we see people focusing first, is where it matters to their business. So if you've got a regulatory obligation to do surveillance or fraud detection, those are great use cases to start with. How do I enhance my existing surveillance or fraud detection, so that I'm not just wading again through a sea of false positives. How do I actually reduce that workload for a human analyst using machine learning. That's a one step up and then you can go from there, you can actually continue to work deeper into the use cases and say okay how do I treat those parameters, how do I actually look for different things that I'm used to with the rules based systems. You can also look at offering more value to customers so with next best offer with Amazon Personalize, we now have encapsulated the service that we use on the amazon.com retail site as a service that we offer to customers so you don't have to build all that tooling yourself, you can actually just consume Personalize as a service to help with those personalized recommendations for customers. >> Scott, really appreciate all the updates on your customers in the financial services industry, thanks so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here guys, thanks for having me. >> All right for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more here at AWS Summit in New York City 2019, thanks as always for watching theCube.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's The Cube covering Openstack Summit, North America, 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Open Stack Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Openstack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with cohost of the week, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program Stephan Fabel, who is the Director of Ubuntu product and development at Canonical. Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thank you for having me. Alright, so, boy, there's so much going on at this show. We've been talking about doing more things and in more places, is the theme that the Open Stack Foundation put into place, and we had a great conversation with Mark Shuttleworth, and going to dig in a little bit deeper in some of the areas with you. >> Stephan: Okay, absolutely. >> So we have the Cube, and we're go into all of the Kubernetes, Kubeflow, and all those other things that we'll mispronounce how they go. >> Stephan: Yes, yes, absolutely. >> What's your impression of the show first of all? >> Well I think that it's really, you know, there's a consolidation going on, right? I mean, we really have the people who are serious about open infrastructure here, serious about OpenStack. They're serious about Kubenetes. They want to implement, and they want to implement at a speed that fits the agility of their business. They want to really move quick with the obstrain release. I think the time for enterprise hardening delays an inertia there is over. I think people are really looking at the core of OpenStack, that's mature, it's stable, it's time for us to kind of move, get going, get success early, get it soon, then grow. I think most of the enterprise, most of the customers we talk to adopt that notion. >> One of the things that sometimes helps is help us lay out the stack a little bit here because we actually commented that some of the base infrastructure pieces we're not talking as much about because they're kind of mature, but OpenStack very much at the infrastructure level, your compute, storage, and network need to understand. But then we when we start doing things like Kubernetes as well, I can either do or, or on top of, and things like that, so give us your view as to what'd you put, what Canonical's seeing, and what customers-- how you lay out that stack? >> I think you're right, I think there's a little bit of path-finding here that needs to be done on the Kubernetes side, but ultimately, I think it's going to really converge around OpenStack being operative-centric, and operative-friendly, working and operating the infrastructure, scaling that out in a meaningful manner, providing multitenancy to all the different departments. Having Kubernetes be developer-centric and really help to on-board and accelerate the workload that option of the next gen initiatives, right? So, what we see is absolutely a use case for Kubernetes and OpenStack to work perfectly well together, be an extension of each other, possibly also sit next to each other without being too incumbenent there. But I think that ultimately having something like Kubernetes contain a based developer APIs that are providing that orchestration layer are the next thing, and they run just perfectly fine on Canonical OpenStack. >> Yeah, there certainly has been a lot of talk about that here at the show. Let's see, let's go a level above that, things we run on Kubernetes, I wanted to talk a little bit about ML and AI and Kubeflow. It seems like we're, I'd almost say that we're, this is like, if we were a movie, we're in a sequel like AI-5; this time, it's real. I really do see real enterprise applications incorporating these technologies into the workflow for what otherwise might be kind of boring, you know, line of business, can you talk a little bit about where we are in this evolution? >> You mean, John, only since we've been talking about it since the mid-1800s, so yeah. >> I was just about to point that out, I mean, AI's not new, right? We've seen it since about 60 years. It's been around for quite some time. I think that there is an unprecedented amount of sponsorship of new startups in this area, in this space, and there's a reason why this is heating up. I think the reason why ultimately it's there is because we're talking about a scale that's unprecedented, right? We thought the biggest problem we had with devices was going to be the IP addresses running out, and it turns out, that's not true at all, right? At a certain scale, and at a certain distributed nature of your rollout, you're going to have to deal with just such complexity and interaction between the underlying, the under-cloud, the over-cloud, the infrastructure, the developers. How do I roll this out? If I spin up 1000 BMs over here, why am I experiencing dropped calls over there? It's those types of things that need to be self-correlated. They need to be identified, they need to be worked out, so there's a whole operator angle just to be able to cope with that whole scenario. I think there's projects that are out there that are trying to ultimately address that, for example, Acumos (mumbles) Then, there is, of course, the new applications, right? Smart cities to connect to cars, all those car manufacturers who are, right now, faced with the problem: how do I deal with mobile, distributed inference rollout on the edge while still capturing the data continually, train my model, update, then again, distribute out to the edge to get a better experience. How do I catch up to some of the market leaders here that are out there? As the established car manufacturers are going to come and catch up, put more and more miles autonomously on the asphalt, we're going to basically have to deal with a whole lot more of proctization of machine-learning applications that just have to be managed at scale. And so we believe for all certain good company in that belief that having to manage large applications at scale, that containers and Kubernetes is a great way to do that, right? They did that for web apps. They did that for the next generation applications. This is one example where with the right operators in mind, the right CRDs, the right frameworks on top of Kubernetes managed correctly, you are actually in a great position to just go to market with that. >> I wonder if you might have a customer example that might go to walk us through kind of where they are in this discussion, talk to many companies, you know, the whole IOT even pieces were early in this. So what's actually real today, how much is planning, is this years we're talking before some of these really come to fruition? >> So yeah, I can't name a customer, but I can say that every single car manufacturer we're talking to is absolutely interested in solving the operational problem of running machine-learning frameworks as a service, making sure those are up running and up to speed at any given point in time, spin them up in a multitenant fashion, make sure that the GPU enablement is actually done properly at all layers of the virtualization. These are real operational challenges that they're facing today, and they're looking to solve with us. Pick a large car manufacturer you want. >> John: Nice. We're going down to something that I can type on my own keyboard then, and go to GitHub, right? That's one of the places to go where it is run, TensorFlow of machine-learning framework on Kubernetes is Kubeflow, and that little bit yesterday on stage, you want to talk about that maybe? >> Oh, absolutely, yes. That's the core of our current strategy right now. We're looking at Kubeflow as one of the key enablers of machine-learning frameworks as a service on top of Kubernetes, and I think they're a great example because they can really show how that as a service can be implemented on top of a virtualization platform, whether that be KVM, pure KVM, on bare metal, on OpenStack, and actually provide machine-learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, Pipe Torch, Seldon Core. You have all those frameworks being supported, and then basically start mix and matching. I think ultimately it's so interesting to us because the data scientists are really not the ones that are expected to manage all this, right? Yet they are the core of having to interact with it. In the next generation of the workloads, we're talking to PHDs and data scientists that have no interest whatsoever in understanding how all of this works on the back end, right? They just want to know this is where I'm going to submit my artifact that I'm creating, this is how it works in general. Companies pay them a lot of money to do just that, and to just do the model because that's where, until the right model is found, that is exactly where the value is. >> So Stephan, does Canonical go talk to the data scientists, or is there a class of operators who are facilitating the data scientists? >> Yes, we talk to the data scientists who understand their problems, we talk to the operators to understand their problems, and then we work with partners such as Google to try and find solutions to that. >> Great, what kind of conversations are you having here at the show? I can't imagine there's too many of those, great to hear if there are, but where are they? I think everybody here knows containers, very few know Kubernetes, and how far up the stack of building new stuff are they? >> You'd be surprised, I mean, we put this out there, and so far, I want to say the majority of the customer conversations we've had took an AI turn and said, this is what we're trying to do next year, this is what we're trying to do later in the year, this is what we're currently struggling with. So glad you have an approach because otherwise, we would spend a ton of time thinking about this, a ton of time trying to solve this in our own way that then gets us stuck in some deep end that we don't want to be. So, help us understand this, help us pave the way. >> John: Nice, nice. I don't want to leave without talking also about Microcades, that's a Kubernetes snap, you code some clojure download, Can we talk a little bit about that? >> Yeah, glad to. This was an idea that we conceived that came out of this notion of alright, well if I do have, talking to a data scientist, if I do have a data scientist, where does he start? >> Stu: Does Kubernetes have a learning curve to date? >> It does, yeah, it does. So here's the thing, as a developer, you have, what options do you have right when you get started? You can either go out and get a community stood up on one of the public clouds, but what if you're in the plane, right? You don't have a connection, you want to work on your local laptop. Possibly, that laptop also has a GPU, and you're a data scientist and you want to try this out because you know you're going to submit this training job now to a (mumbles) that runs un-prem behind the firewall with a limited training set, right? This is the situation we're talking about. So ultimately, the motivation for creating Microcades was we want to make this very, very equivalent. Now you can deploy Kubeflow on top of Microcades today, and it'll run just fine. You get your TensorBoard, you have Jupyter notebook, and you can do your work, and you can do it in a fashion that will then be compatible to your on-prem and public machine-learning framework. So that was your original motivation for why we went down this road, but then we noticed you know what, this is actually a wider need. People are thinking about local Kubernetes in many different ways. There are a couple of solutions out there. They tend to be cumbersome, or more cumbersome than developers would like it. So we actually said, you know, maybe we should turn this into a more general purpose solution. So hence, Microcades. It works like a snap on your machine, you kick that off, you have Kubernetes API, and under 30 seconds or little longer if your download speed plays a factor here, you enable DNS and you're good to go. >> Stephan, I just want to give you the opportunity, is there anything in the Queens Release that your customers have been specifically waiting for or any other product announcements before we wrap? >> Sure, we're very excited about the Queens Release. We think Queens Release is one of the great examples of the maturity of the code base and really the knot towards the operator, and that, I think was the big challenge beyond the olden days of OpenStack where the operators took a long time for the operators to be heard, and to establish that conversation. We'd like to say and to see that OpenStack Queens has matured in that respect, and we like things like Octavia. We're very exciting about (mumbles) as a service, taking its own life and being treated as a first-class citizen. I think that it was a great decision of the community to get on that road. We're supporting as a part of our distribution. >> Alright, well, appreciate the update. Really fascinating to hear about all, you know, everybody's thinking about it and really starting to move on all the ML and AI stuff. Alright, for John Troyer, I'm Tru Miniman. Lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)