(electronic music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada it's The Cube covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube live coverage here in Toronto, Canada Ontario for Untraceable presents Blockchain Futurist Conference. Two days we've been here. We're on day two, amazing event here, great community, I'm John Furrier your host. Dave Vellante went back east so he was here yesterday. Our next guest Pablo Gonzales is the Founder and CEO of Genesis Blockchain Technologies, welcome to The Cube thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I'm glad to have you on. First of all when Bradley Rodder says oh watch out for that guy, you must be smart because we trust Bradley so but you're doing something really cool. The future of trading and exchanges has been a topic that everyone's been talking about but not a lot of people have been actually moving the needle on. You've got some movement here, people doing here but no one's actually had the full package and they're running as fast as they can to do it. You guys have done it. >> We have. >> How? Take a minute, what have you guys done? What is the product? How did you guys do it and what can people use today? >> Thank you. So it's no longer hot air, as you said. A lot of people are saying what they're going to do. We're here to say what we have done which is very different. Yesterday up at the main stage we launched the world's first decentralized exchange on a mobile platform. We're fully licensed by the Costa Rican Commodities Exchange, we have brokerage license, a currency exchange license and a money remittance license. We already possess the licenses, we're not in pursuit of the licenses we have them. What we did obviously we pursued an MNA strategy, we acquired companies that were over a decade in the business and we just transformed them and cryptomized them, as I use the term and launched the exchange with those licenses and platforms. We listed the exchange with over 40 coins. Over four billion dollars of shared market cap and over half a million dollars of daily trading and liquidity. >> So this is right now going on in Costa Rica, mainly if stable. Is it stable? How's the stability there? >> So Costa Rica is extremely stable, they haven't had an army for over 50 years, it's considered a world-class country for banking, for international businesses so much so. Amazon, HP, Intel, all these humongous companies have large operations in the country. >> And their posture to crypto is they've come out formally. >> Yes. >> To state well what's the posture from Costa Rica? >> So they consider cryptocurrencies a commodity and not a security and that's why went on to pursue a commodities exchange license. >> So that opens up doors for you to do this. >> Of course it opens up the doors, think about it. So you can now trade Bitcoin with gold. In our exchange, not as of today we're going to launch that in January, so now you can trade cryptocurrencies with commodities and cryptocurrencies with fiat currencies. >> So I'm just kind of speculating here in terms of my mind where I'm going with this. Almost imagine the shakeup that's coming. It's like a blender, we trading gold and Bitcoin it's just like who would have thought that was possible a year ago? >> That's correct. >> They've been compared, people compare Bitcoin to new digital gold but actually comparing them this is going to shakeup like a blender. >> That's correct. >> Blend up the commodities market. >> Disrupt it. >> What's your vision? What do you see happening? >> I just think that a lot of people are focusing on they say on one of the interviews earlier today, one of the interviewers was asking me is that Bitcoin to the moon? I'm like guys we need to stop. If we want this industry to really grow and develop stop using those analogies. We need to create a community that's larger, we need mass adoption and I think by including the commodities into the equation you're catering to the traditional investors that are a little bit uncomfortable with cryptocurrencies because they don't know about them but they know about gold and then all of a sudden now you compare gold with Bitcoin. >> It brings retail into it. >> Yes. >> It brings a real retail market. >> That's correct. >> You know I just want to say something. I agree with you 100%. These news outlets out there, these other people they tend to focus on the price of Bitcoin and it's almost like okay can we get over that? Yes it's going to go up and down, if you're in the long game it should be 20,000. Okay we can buy that but let's talk about what people are doing. Who's building something? >> Yes. >> That's the focus. So if I ask you now that question, hey Pablo what have you built and what you you going to continue to build if this is a foundational product, what are you guys going to do on top of it? What's the build plan? >> Thank you. So yesterday we launched the decentralized exchange with 40 coins. We're going to add probably between now and December another 110 different tokens. We're doing 20 for now and in January we're launching a centralized exchange so that's where we're going to add the fiat currencies and the commodities. >> What date again? >> End of January. >> Okay got it. >> Then we're going to make an announcement in November at one of the conferences in Malta and so we're reserving the date and everything else for that but in May of next year we're launching over the counter trading desk with full KYC AML you know counter terrorism financing, all of the world class policies and by this time next year we're going to be launching our institutional platform. So we want to be a one stop shop via the currency exchange that we own. We already have the ability from the Central Bank of Costa Rica which is amazing to issue Visa cards. So now our users, besides trading, they can take their crypto with them from their mobile phone, convert it to fiat and pay, you know, for gasoline, buy groceries. >> So I'm an entrepreneur, I got my own cube coin coming out, cube token, security token or utility, what's in it for me? If I asked you Pablo what's in it for me? What do I get out of it as a business? Are people going to start trading my coins? Am I instantly going to have an over the counter so as a business what do I have to worry about? What's the benefit? What matters to me? What's the impact? >> So if you were to be a coin to list on our exchange you mean? Well first of all we all know exchanges now to list on them you know they're changing, some of them I'm not going to say the name. >> They're charging a lot of money. >> Yeah 400 BTC and crazy amounts like this. We are going to charge. It's a business at the end of the day but what we're looking for with the coins that we're going to list is partnerships and seeing what ways we can do more entrepreneurial projects to change the landscape of the industry together as an exchange and a coin because potentially what a coin is is a company. You know what's behind the coin is what's important to us and not the coin itself. As the company develops and progresses so will the coin's price appreciated value or depreciated value and so yes, besides facilitating trading fees and lowering that, up listing and so forth what we're bringing to the table wants to be much more dynamic. >> You got to balance you know business that you got to do with infrastructure build out. It's like the old telecom days you got to build some cell towers before you roll out mobile. You got to build this entire retail global fabric. >> Yes. How does community play in for it? Obviously community is very important. I agree with you that's big time. How are you guys building your community? Tapping into anything else? Obviously Untraceable has got a great community. How are you going to grow your community. >> So as an exchange there could be a conflict of interest we have to be really careful how we get involved in the community but what we want to do is by selected partnerships with projects and coins. The coins are already doing their work. They are appealing to a community. They are raising the money from that community what we want to do is we want to partner up with those coins, the coins that are worth partnering up with and that way our reach automatically will multiply. On top of that of course we want to work with government and banks and institutions. We believe, it may not be popular what I'm about to say, you know the good old honor kids that came to the hardcore crypto, forget about central banks and centralization, I don't think that that's ever going to happen. I think the more we cooperate with government, that the more we work with them, we together can shape the industry and the landscape for good. I do believe in that. It's a collaboration and cooperation with governments and banks to us is pivotal. >> I mean you can be a coach to the regulatory. >> Absolutely. >> You can be an advocate and partner. >> We are being. >> And not an enemy. >> In Costa Rica, so before they considered and they took a position on whether is was a commodity or not you know they approached us and we were teaching them so much so that a congressman that was going to be at the conference and couldn't make it, he's the founder of the Libertarian movement in Costa Rica he created a think tank of crypto because of us that now has Latin America reach. Think about it, there are 1.3 billion people in Latin America. >> They have mobile phones. >> Exactly. That can now learn about crypto and so we're going to capitalize on this. >> It's a real democratization, what you do is change a society. If you continue to get this right this is really key. Congratulations. Now I want to ask you personal questions so I love the hat, you look great. >> Thank you. >> How did you get here? Were you scratching an itch that was around this? Was it, how did you get to the point where you said hey I'm going to go out and build the first exchange. I'm going to roll up the companies, wire them together, cryptotize them and go nuts and build an exchange. I mean how did you get here? What's the story? >> Thank you well, it's a story. I began entrepreneurial projects over 10 years ago, been in the private sector, because Costa Rica is a services company we put together a call center. Took it from like four people to 4000 people in four years. I went on to like building my own sports brand in over 10 countries but then about two years ago a few companies from Canada they called me from here, they called me to help them go public in the Canadian Securities Exchange. I took two companies public last year and after that I was saying to myself and the crew guys what do we do next? How can we really disrupt the industry? And one of the things we were talking about was man, we're in a decentralized community that brags about decentralization, trading and centralized exchanges. How ironic is that? >> Yeah it's got to change. >> So we said you know what let's be the pioneers, let's head out on a quest to build the world's first mobile decentralized exchange and we achieved that. It's unbelievable. Now you hear all the big guys, the whales talking about we're going to come up with a decentralized exchange because that's what people want at the end of the day and we were able to be the first ones ever to give that. >> And stability is critical. I mean I was just at a bank starting up a new account for a new startup that we're doing and they're like is this a blockchain company? I'm like no, no God no, no, no we're a media business. >> Those are bad guys. >> So you can't even open a bank account some places. So this has really got to get fixed and I got liquid, I got fiat currency, I got to make movements around. The retail market, whether it's trading, investing, it's got to be converted over to the new world. >> Yes, yes. >> I mean it's almost like a full changeover. >> That's correct. Obviously I think that it'll be a transition process. It'll take some time. There are some banks that already getting more involved into the process. What's interesting in our case is we even got the Costa Rican Central Bank to be our bank. Think about it, we're not banking with any private bank or public bank but the Costa Rican Central Bank and I think that more and more banks will follow suit as they see good use cases. The ICO craze of last year, I don't think that it did any good to the greater good of the community. If anything it brought a lot of prejudice. >> It's a black eye. They'll be a hangover on that but that's like the dotcom bubble. All those things on the dotcom bubble actually happened so I think you're going to just see get that jested out of the system. >> Inevitable. >> And focus on quality. That's what happening now. >> Inevitable. >> Pablo thanks for coming on. Pablo Gonzales who is the Founder and CEO of Genesis Blockchain Technologies. First ever exchange bringing all new magic to the marketplace. This is The Cube bringing you the content magic here in Toronto, Canada. I'll be right back with more. Stay with us. Live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, everybody welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage of IBM think 20, 21, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Volante, and we're going to talk about observability, front and center for DevOps and developers. Things are really changing. We're going from monitoring and logs and metrics and just this mess. And now we're bringing in AI and machine intelligence and with us as Pablo Baron, who's the CTO of Instana, which is an IBM company that IBM acquired November of 2020 Pablo. Great to see you. Thanks for joining us from Munich. >>Thanks for having me. Thanks a lot. >>You're very welcome. So, you know, I always love to talk to founders and co-founders and try to understand sort of why they started their companies and congratulations on the exit. That's awesome. After, you know, five, five, I'm sure. Grinding, but relatively short years. Uh, why did you guys start in Stoneleigh and what were some of the trends that you saw and that you're seeing now in the observability space? >>Yeah, that's a very good question. So, um, the journey began, uh, as we worked in the company called code centric, the majority of the founders, and, uh, we actually specialized in troubleshooting, um, well, real hard customer performance problems. We used all different kinds of APM solutions for that. You know, we we've built expertise, uh, like, uh, collectively, maybe 300 years of the whole company. So we will go from one, um, adventure into the other and see customers suffer and to help them, you know, overcome this trouble. At some point we started seeing architectures, uh, coming up that were not well covered by the classic APM solutions. Like people went off to the suit, a suit, a suit of the virtualization, all in containers, you know, just dropping random, uh, workloads into container running this maybe in Cubanitos. Well, not, not actually not five, six ago but years ago, but you get the point we started with having continued containerization. >>And we've seen that a classic APM solution that is having the, you know, like machine oriented. And then, uh, some of them even counted by the number of CPU, et cetera, et cetera. The world very well suited for this plus all of the workloads are so dynamic. They keep coming and going. You cannot really, you know, place your agent there that is not adapting to change continuously. We've seen this coming and we really we've seen the trouble that we cannot really support the customers properly. So after looking around, we just said, Hey, uh, it's time to just implement the new one, right? This is, we started that adventure with the idea of a constant change to the AGL. If everything is containers with idea of everything goes towards cloud native people just, uh, run random, uh, um, workloads of all different versions that are linked all together that this whole microservices trend came up where people would just break down their model and resilience of, uh, literally very small components that could be deployed independently. Everything keeps changing all the time. The classic solution cannot keep up with it, >>Pick it up from there if I can. So it's interesting. Your timing is quite amazing because as you mentioned, it really wasn't cute Kubernetes when you started in the middle part of last decade, like containers have been around for a long time, but Coobernetti's, weren't that wasn't mainstream back then. So you had some foresight, uh, and, and the market has just come right into your vision, but, but maybe talk a little bit about the way APM used to work. It was, I started this talk about this. It was metrics, it was traces, it was logs. It was make your eyes bleed type of type of stuff. Um, and maybe you could talk about how, how you guys are different and how you're accommodating the rapid changes in the market today. >>Right? So, well, there is very, very many pieces to this. So first of all, we always have seen that the work that you should not be doing by hand, I mean, we already said that you should not be doing this and you shouldn't be automating as much as possible. We see this everywhere in the it industry that everything gets more and more automated and want to automate it through the whole continuous delivery cycle. Unfortunately, monitoring was the space that probably never was automated before installer came into place. So our idea was, Hey, just, just get rid of the unnecessary work because you keep people busy with stuff that they should not be doing, like manually watching dashboards, setting up agents, uh, with every single software change, like adopting configuration, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all of these things can be done automatically, you know, to very, very, very large extent. >>And that's what we did. We, we did this from the beginning, everything we approach, uh, we, we, we think twice about, uh, can we automate, you know, the maximum out of it. And only if we see that it's, it's, you know, too much in effort, et cetera, we will, we will problem in onto this, but otherwise we're not, we don't do this. And yet, you know, you can compromise the other, right? The other aspect is, so this is different to the classic APM world that is typically very expert heavy. The expert comes into, you know, into the project and really starts configuring, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is, this is a totally different approach. The other approach is continuous change and, uh, you know, adapting to the continuous change container comes up. You need to know what this kind of workload, what kind of workload this thing is, how it is connected to all the others. >>And then at some point, probably it's gonna, it's gonna, you know, go through the change and get a new version, et cetera, et cetera. You need to capture this whole life cycle without really changing your monitoring system. Plus if you move your workloads from the classic monolith through microservices onto cause the need is you kind of trans transitioning, you know, it's a journey in this journey. You want to keep your business abstractions as stable as possible. The term application is nothing that you should be reconfiguring. Once you figured out what is payments in your system? This is a stable obstruction. It doesn't matter if you deliver it on containers. It doesn't matter if this is just a huge, you know, JVM that owns the whole box alone. It simply doesn't matter. So we, we decoupled everything infrastructure from everything logic and, uh, the foundation for this is what we call the dynamic graph. >>It's technically, it's pretty much a data structure. The regular route, the dispatcher would do no connections, uh, in, in, in multiple directions, from different nodes. But the point is that we actually decompose the whole it geography. This is the term I like to use because there is, there is no other it's infrastructure. It's typology. It is on the other hand, just, you know, same sides of the same thing. When you have a Linux process, it can be a JVM. It just, at the same time, it can be a problem with application. It's the same thing. I can give a different names and this different, you know, facets of this thing can be linked with everything else in a different way. So we're decomposing this from the beginning of the product, which allows us to, to have a very deep and hierarchical understanding of the problem when it appears so we can nail it, not down to a metric that probably doesn't make sense to any user, but really name the cause by look in this JVM, the drop wizard metric XYZ that is misbehaving. >>This indicates that this particular piece of technology is broken and here's how it's broken. So there's a built in explanation to a problem. So, um, the cloud, the classic APM, as I said, it is a very expert, heavy, um, uh, territory. We try to automate the expert. We have this guy called Stan. This is your, you know, kind of, uh, virtual dev ops engineer has AI in there. It has some, some artificial brain. It never sleeps. It observes all of the problems. It really is an amazing guy because nobody likes them because he always tells you what's broken. You don't need to invite them to the body and give them a raise. They're just there and conserving the system. >>I liked Stan. I liked Stan better than Fred. No offense to Fred, but Fred's is the guy in the lab coat that I have to call every time to help me fix my, and what you're describing is end to end visibility or observability, uh, in, in terms that the normal either normal people can understand, or certainly Stan can understand and can automate. And that kind of leads me to this notion of, of anti-patterns. Um, getting in software, we think of anti-patterns is, you know, you have software hairballs and software bloat. You've got stovepipe systems. You're, you're a data guy by background. And so you will understand, you know, stovepipe data systems, there's organizational examples of, of, of anti-patterns like micromanagement or over-analyze analysis by paralysis. If you will, how do anti-patterns fit into this world of observability? What do you see? >>Oh, there is many, I could write a whole book actually about that. Um, let, let me just list a few. So first of all, it is valid for any kind of automation. What you can automate, you should not be doing by hand. This is a very common pattern. People are just doing work by hand, just because the lazy where you know, like repetitive work or there is no kind of foundation to automate the, whatever, the reason, this is clearly an impact pattern. What we, what we also see in the monitoring space are very interesting things like normally since the problems in the observability and monitoring space are so hard, you would normally send your best people, watching rats want them to contribute to the business value rather than waste the time of serving charts. That's like 99% of them are marble. The other aspect of course, is what we also have seen is the other side of the spectrum where people just send total mobilizes into the, into the problem of ops observability and let them learn on the subject, which is also not a good thing, because you can not really, I mean, there are so many unknown unknowns for people who are not experts in this space. >>They will not catch the problem. You will go through pain, right? So it's not a learning project. It's not the research from a project. This is very essential to the operation of your business and to it. And there's many examples like that, >>Right? Yeah. So I want to end by just sort of connecting the dots. So this makes a lot of sense. And if you think about, you know, Auburn Christian said that IBM has got to win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. And when I think of hybrid cloud, I think of on-prem connecting to public cloud, not only the IBM public cloud, but other public clouds going across clouds, going to the edge, bringing OpenShift and Kubernetes to the edge and developing new, supporting new workload. So as it is like the university keeps expanding and it gets more and more and more complicated. So to your point, humans are not going to be able to solve the classic performance problems in the classic way. Uh, they're going to need automation. So it really does fit well into IBM's hybrid cloud strategy, your, your thoughts, and I'll give you the last word. >>Yeah, totally. I mean IBM generally is of course, very far ahead in, in regards to AI and all these things, this desk, sorry, those could be combined within standard, very, very, you know, natively, right. We, we are prepared to automate using AI all of the, well, I would want to claim that all of the monitoring observability problems, of course there is manual work in some, uh, you know, in some cases you simply don't know what people want to observe, so you kind of need to give them names and that's what people come in, but this is more a creative work. Like you don't want to do the stupid work with people. It doesn't, you know, there is no, it doesn't make any sense. And IBM of course, um, requiring and Stan, I guess, you know, the foundation for all of the things that that used to be done by, by hand now fully automated, combined within starlet, combined with Watson AI ops. This is, this is huge. This is a real great story. Like the best research at the world meeting, uh, probably the best APM summit. >>That's great. Uh, Pablo really appreciate you taking us through and Stata and the trends and observability and what's going on at IBM and congratulations on your success. And thanks for hanging with us with all the craziness going on at your abode and, uh, really, it was a pleasure having you on. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante and the ongoing coverage of IBM. Think 2021. You're watching the cube.

>>from >>around the >>globe, it's the cube >>with digital coverage of >>IBM think 2021 >>brought to >>you by IBM >>everybody welcome back to the cubes, continuous coverage of IBM think 2021 the virtual edition, my name is Dave Volonte and we're gonna talk about observe ability front and center for devops and developers, things are really changing. We're going from monitoring and logs and metrics and just this mess and now we're bringing in a I and machine intelligence and with us is Pablo Baron, who is the Ceo of inst ana, which is an IBM company that IBM acquired november of 2020. Pablo great to see you. Thanks for joining us from Munich. >>Thanks for having me. Thanks a lot. >>You're very welcome. So you know, I always love to talk to founders and co founders and try to understand sort of why they started their companies and congratulations on the exit. That's awesome. After 55 I'm sure grinding but relatively short years. Why did you guys start in stana? And what were some of the trends that you saw in that you're seeing now in the observe ability space? >>Yeah, that's a very good question. So, um, the journey began ah, as we worked in the company called code centric, the majority of the founders and uh, we actually specialized in troubleshooting uh, well, real hard customer performance problems. We used all different kinds of A PM solutions for that. You know, we, we've built expertise like collectively maybe 300 years in the whole company. So we would go from one um, adventure into the other and see customers suffer and help them, you know, overcome this trouble. At some point we started seeing architectures coming up that were not well covered by the classic KPM sellers, like people went after this. Sudha, Sudha, Sudha virtualization all in containers, you know, just dropping random workloads into container running this maybe in cabinet as well. Not not actually not 56 ago, but years ago. But you get the point, we started with the heavy continues container ization and we've seen that a classic A PM solution that is heavily, you know, like machinery rented and and some of them you've encountered by the number of CPU etcetera etcetera. They were very well suited for this. Plus all of the workloads are so dynamic. They keep coming and going. You cannot really, you know, place your agent there that is not adopting to change continuously. We've seen this coming and we really, we've seen the trouble that we cannot really support the customers properly. So after looking around, we just said, hey, uh, I think it's time to just implement a new one. Right? So we started that adventure with the idea of a constant change, with the idea of everything is containers, with idea of everything goes towards glove needed. People just run random uh workloads of all different versions that are linked altogether than this. Whole microservices trend came up where people would just break down their monoliths and resilience of literally very small components that could be deployed independently. Everything keeps changing all the time. The classic solution cannot keep up with that. >>So let me pick it up from there if I can. So it's interesting. Your timing is quite amazing because as you mentioned, it really wasn't kubernetes when you started in the middle part of last decade. You know, containers have been around for a long time, but kubernetes weren't, it wasn't mainstream back then. So you had some foresight uh and and the market has just come right into your vision but but maybe talk a little bit about the way A. P. M. Used to work. It was, I started to talk about this. It was metrics, it was traces, it was logs, it was make your eyes bleed type of type of stuff. Um, and maybe you can talk about how you guys are different and how you're accommodating the rapid changes in the market today. >>Right? So well there is very, very many um cases this. So first of all we always have seen that the work that you should not be doing by hand. I mean we already said that you should not be doing this and you should be automating as much as possible. We see this everywhere in the industry that everything gets more and more automated. We want to animate through the whole continuous delivery cycle. Unfortunately monitoring was the space that probably never was automated before installing a came into place. So our idea was, hey, just just get rid of the unnecessary work because you keep people busy with stuff they should not be doing like manually watching dashboards, setting up agents with every single software change, like adopting configuration etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. All of these things can be done automatically, you know, to very, very, very large extent. And that's what we did. We did this from the beginning, everything we approached, we, we, we think twice about can we automate, you know, the maximum out of it And only if we see that it's, it's, you know, too much an effort, etcetera. We will, we will probably not do this, but otherwise we're not, we don't do the same thing. You know, you can compromise the other right? The other aspect is, so this is different to the classic A PM world that is typically very expert heavy. The expert comes into, you know, into the project and really starts configuring etcetera, etcetera etcetera. This is this is a totally different approach the other approaches continuous change and you know, adapting to the continuous change, container comes up, you need to know what this kind of workload, what kind of work load this thing is, how it is connected to all the others. And then at some point probably it's gonna it's gonna go through the change and get a new versions etcetera etcetera. You need to capture this whole life cycle without really changing your monitoring system. Plus, if you move your workloads from the classic Monolith, through microservices on to cuba needs, you kind of transitioning, you know, it's a journey and this journey, you want to keep your business abstractions as stable as possible. The term application is nothing that you should be reconfiguring. Once you figure out what is payment in your system. This is a stable abstraction. It doesn't matter if you deliver it on containers. Doesn't matter if this is just a huge JBM that owns the whole box alone. It simply doesn't matter. So we we decoupled everything infrastructure from everything logic and uh the foundation for this is what we call the dynamic ground. It technically is pretty much a data structure. Regular graph data structure with, you know, connections in multiple directions from different notes. But the point is that we actually decompose the whole, I teach geography. This is the term I like to use because there is, there is no other its infrastructure, its topology, it is on the other hand, just, you know, same sides of the same thing. When you have a limits process, it can be HIV m it's just at the same time, it can be approached with an application, it's the same thing and given different names and this different faces of this thing can be linked with everything else in a totally different way. So we're decomposing this from the beginning of the product which allows us to to have a very deep and hierarchical understanding of problems when it appears. So we can nail it not down to a metric. That probably doesn't make sense to any user but really name the cause by look in this J. V. M, the drop wizard metric exercise that is misbehaving. This indicates that this particular piece of technology is broken and here's how it's broken. So there's a built in explanation to a problem. So um the the classic eight pm as I said, it is a very expert heavy um, territory we try to automate the expert. We have this guy called stan this is your you know, kind of virtual devoPS engineer has a I in there. It has some artificial brain, it never sleeps, it observes all of the problems. It really is an amazing guy because nobody likes him because he always tells you what's broken. You don't need to invite them to the party and give them a raise just there and conserving your systems. >>I like stand, I like stand better than fred, no offense to fred but friends of the guy in the lab coat that I have to call every time to help me fix my problems and what you're describing is end to end visibility or observe ability in terms that norm either normal people can understand or certainly stand, can understand and can automate. And that kind of leads me to this notion of anti patterns um getting software, we think of anti patterns as you know you have software hairballs and software bloat, you've got stovepipe systems, your your data guy by background and so you will understand stovepiped data systems, there's organizational examples of of of anti patterns like micromanagement or over an analysis by paralysis. If you will, how do anti patterns fit into this world? Of observe ability? What do you see? >>Oh there's many, I could write a whole book actually about that. Um let me just list a few. So first of all it is valid for any kind of automation, what you can automate you should not be doing by hand, this is a very common entire pattern. People are just doing work by hand just because the lazy word, you know like repetitive work or there is no kind of foundation to automate that whatever the reason, this is clearly an anti pattern. What we, what we also see in the monitoring space are very interesting things like normally since the problems in the observe ability monitoring space is so hard, You normally send your best people watching grants who want them to contribute to the business value rather than waste the time observing charts that like 99 of them are normal. The other aspect, of course, is what we also have seen is the other side of the spectrum where people just send total mobilizes into the, into the problem of observe ability and let them learn on the subject. Which is also not a good thing because you cannot really I mean there are so many unknown unknowns for people who are not experts in the space. They will not catch the problem. You will go through pain, right? So it's not the learning project, that's not the research from a project. This is very essential to the operation of humor, business and humanity. And there's many examples like that, >>right? Yeah. So I want to end by just sort of connecting the dots so this makes a lot of sense. And if you think about, you know, Ivan Kushner said that IBM has got to win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. And when I think of Hybrid cloud, I think of on prem connecting to public cloud, not only the IBM public cloud but other public clouds going across clouds going to the edge, bringing open shift and kubernetes to the edge and developing new supporting new workloads. So as I. T. Is like the university keeps expanding and it gets more and more and more complicated. So to your point humans are not going to be able to solve the classic performance problems in the classic way. Uh they're gonna need automation. So it really does fit well into iBMS hybrid cloud strategy, your, your thoughts and I'll give you the last word. >>Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm IBM generally is of course very far ahead in regards to research AI and all these things this death, sorry, those could be combined with an stand a very, very, you know, natively right. We we are prepared to automate using AI all of the well, I would want to claim that all of the monitoring observe ability problems. Of course, there is manual work in some, you know, in some cases you simply don't know what people want to observe. So you kind of need to give them names and that's where people come in. But this is more creative work. Like you don't want to do the stupid work with people. It doesn't, you know, there is no, it doesn't make any sense. And IBM of course, um requiring in stana gets, you know, the foundation for all of the things that used to be done by hand. Now, fully automated, combined within standard, combined with Watson, the ions, This is, this is huge. This is like a real great story, like the best research of the world eating. Uh, probably the best a PMC. >>That's great Pablo, really appreciate you taking us through Astana and the trends and observe ability and what's going on at IBM. And congratulations on your, your success and thanks for hanging with us with all the craziness going on at your abode. And uh really, it was a pleasure having you on. Thank you. >>Thanks a lot. >>All right, and thank you for watching everybody says Dave Volonte and our ongoing coverage of IBM, think 2021 you're watching the Cube? Yeah. Mhm

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here in 2021 as we get through the pandemic and vaccine on the horizon all around the world. It's great to welcome Sandy Carter, Vice President of Partners and Programs with Amazon Web Services. Sandy, great to see you. I wanted to check in with you for a couple of reasons. One is just get a take on the landscape of the marketplace as well as you've got some always good programs going on. You're in the middle of all the action. Great to see you. >> Nice to see you too, John. Thanks for having me. >> So one of the things that's come out of this COVID and as we get ready to come out of the pandemic you starting to see some patterns emerging, and that is cloud and cloud-native technologies and SAS and the new platforming and refactoring using cloud has created an opportunity for companies. Your partner group within public sector and beyond is just completely exploding and value creation. Changing the world's society is now accelerated. We've covered that in the past, certainly in detail last year at re:Invent. Now more than ever it's more important. You're doing some pretty cutting things. What's your update here for us? >> Well, John, we're really excited because you know the heartbeat of countries of the United States globally are small and medium businesses. So today we're really excited to launch Think Big for Small Business. It's a program that helps accelerate public sector serving small and diverse partners. So you know that these small and medium businesses are just the engine for inclusive growth and strategy. We talked about some stats today, but according to the World Bank, smaller medium business accounts for 98% of all companies, they contribute a 50% of the GDP, two-thirds of the employment opportunities, and the fastest growing areas are in minority owned businesses, women, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned, aborigine, ethnic minorities who are just vital to the economic role. And so today this program enables us as AWS to support this partner group to overcome the challenges that they're seeing today in their business with some benefits specifically targeted for them from AWS. >> Can I ask you what was the driver behind this? Obviously, we're seeing the pandemic and you can't look at on the TV or in the news without seeing the impact that small businesses had. So I can almost imagine that might be some motivation, but what is some of the conversations that you're having? Why this program? Why think Big for Small Business pilot experience that you're launch? >> Well, it's really interesting. The COVID obviously plays a role here because COVID hit small and medium businesses harder, but we also, you know, part of Amazon is working backwards from the customers. So we collected feedback from small businesses on their experience in working with us. They all want to work with us. And essentially they told us that they need a little bit more help, a little bit more push around programmatic benefits. So we listened to them to see what was happening. In addition, AWS grew up with a startup community. That's how we grew up. And so we wanted to also reflect our heritage and our commitment to these partners who represent such a heartbeat of many different economies. That was really the main driver. And today we had, John, one of our follow the sun. So we're doing sessions in Latin America, Canada, the US, APJ, Europe. And if you had heard these partners today it was just such a great story of how we were able to help them and help them grow. >> One of the cultural changes that we've been reporting on SiliconANGLE, you're seeing it all over the world is the shift in who's adopting, who's starting businesses. And you're seeing, you mentioned minority owned businesses but it goes beyond that. Now you have complete diverse set entrepreneurial activity. And cloud has generated this democratization wave. You starting to see businesses highly accelerated. I mean, more than ever, I've never seen in the entrepreneurial equation the ability to start, get started and get to success, get to some measurable MVP, minimal viable product, and then ultimately to success faster than ever before. This has opened up the doors to anyone to be an entrepreneur. And so this brings up the conversation of equality in entrepreneurship. I know this is close to your heart. Share your thoughts on this big trend. >> Yeah, and that's why this program it's not just a great I think achievement for AWS, but it's very personal to the entire public sector team. If you look at entrepreneurs like, Lisa Burnett, she's the President and Managing Director of DLZP. They are a female owned minority owned business from Texas. And as you listen to her story about equity, she has this amazing business, migrating Oracle workloads over to AWS, but as she started growing she needed help understanding a little bit more about what AWS could bring to the table, how we could help her, what go to market strategies we could bring, and so that equalizer was this program. She was part of our pilot. We also had John Wieler on. He is the Vice President of Biz Dev from IMT out of Canada. And he is focused on government for Canada. And as a small business, he said today something that was so impactful, he goes, "Amazon never asked me if I'm a small business. They now treat me like I'm big. I feel like I'm one of the big guys and that enables me grow even bigger." And we also talked today to Juan Pablo De Rosa. He's the CEO of Technogi. And it's a small business in Mexico. And what do they do? They do migrations. They just migrate legacy workloads over. And again, back to that equality point you made, how cool was it that here's this company in Mexico, and they're doing all these migrations and we can help them even be more successful and to drive more jobs in the region. It's a very equalizing program and something that we're very proud of. >> You know what I love about your job and I love talking to you about this (Sandy laughs) because it's so much fun. You have a global perspective. It's not just United States. There's a global perspective. This event you're having this morning that you kicked off with is not just in the US, it's a follow the sun kind of a community. You got quite the global community developing there, Sandy. Can you share some insight behind the curtain, behind AWS, how this is developing? How you're handling it? What you're doing to nurture and grow that community that really wants to engage with you because you are making them feel big because (laughs) that's what cloud does. It makes them punch above their weight class and innovate. >> Yeah, that's very correct. >> This is the core thesis of Amazon. So you've got a community developing, how are you handling it? How are you building it? How are you nurturing it? What are your thoughts? >> You know what, John? You're so insightful because that's actually the goal of this program. We want to help these partners. We want to help them grow. But our ultimate goal is to build that small and medium business community that is based on AWS. In fact, at re:Invent this year, we were able to talk about MST which is based out of Malaysia, as well as cloud prime based out of Korea. And just by talking about it, those two CEOs reached out to each other from Korea and Malaysia and started talking. And then we today introduced folks from Mexico, and Canada, and the US, and Bulgaria. And so, we really pride ourselves on facilitating that community. Our dream here, our vision here is that we would build that small business community to be much more scalable but starting out by making those connections, having that mentoring that will be built in together, doing community meetings that advisory meetings together. We piloted this program in 2020. We already have 37 partners. And they told me as I met with them, they already feel like this small and medium business community or family. Family was the word they used, I think, moving forward. So you nailed it. That's the goal here is to create that community where people can share their thoughts and mentor each other. >> And it's on the ground floor too. It's just beginning. I think it's going to be so much larger. And to piggyback off that I want to also point out and highlight and get your reaction to is the success that you've been having and Amazon Web Services in general but mainly in the public sector side with the public private partnership. You're seeing this theme emerge really been a big way. I've been enclose to it and hosting and being interviewing a lot of folks at that, your customers whether it's cybersecurity in space, the Mars partnership that you guys just got on Mars with partnerships. So it's a global and interstellar soon to be huge everywhere. But this is a big discussion because as from cybersecurity, geopolitical to space, you have this partnership with public private because you can't do it alone. The public markets, the public sector cannot do it alone. And it pretty much everyone's agreeing to that. So this dynamic of public sector and partnering private public is a pretty big deal. Unpack that for us real quickly. >> Yeah, it really is a big deal. And in fact, we've worked with several companies. I'll just use one sector. Public Safety and Disaster Response. We just announced the competency at re:Invent for our tech partners. And what we found is that when communities are facing a disaster, it really is government or the public sector plus the private sector. We had many solutions where citizens are providing data that helps the government manage a disaster or manage or help in a public safety scenario to things like simple things you would think, but in one country they were looking at bicycle routes and discovered that certain bicycle routes there were more crashes. And so one of our partners decided to have the community provide the data. And so as they were collecting that data, putting in the data lake in AWS, the community or the private sector was providing the data that enabled the application, our Public Sector Partner application to identify places where bicycle accidents happen most often. And I love the story, John, because the CEO of the partner told me that they measured their results in terms of ELO, I'm sorry, ROL, Return on Lives not ROI, because they save so many lives just from that simple application. >> Yeah, and the data's all there. You just saw on the news, Tiger Woods got into a car accident and survived. And as it turns out to your point that's a curve in the road where a lot of accidents happen. And if that data was available that could have been telegraphed right into the car itself and slow down, kind of like almost a prevention. So he just an example of just all the innovation possibilities that are abound out there. >> And that's why we love our small businesses and startups too, John. They are driving that innovation. The startups are driving that innovation and we're able to then open access to that innovation to governments, agencies, healthcare providers, space. You mentioned Mars. One of our partners MAXR helped them with the robotics. So it's just a really cool experience where you can open up that innovation, help create new jobs through these small businesses and help them be successful. There's really nothing, nothing better. >> Can I ask you- >> Small, small is beautiful. >> Can I asked you a personal question on this been Mars thing? >> Yeah. >> What's it like at Amazon Web Services now because that was such a cool mission. I saw Teresa Carlson, had a post on the internet and LinkedIn as well as her blog post. You had posted a picture of me and you had thumbs were taking an old picture from in real life. Space is cool, Mars in particular, everyone's fixated on it. Pretty big accomplishment. What's it like at Amazon? People high five in each other pretty giddy, what's happening? >> Oh yeah. The thing about Amazon is people come here to change the world. That's what we want to do. We want to have an impact on history. We want to help make history. And we do it all on behalf of our customers. We're innovating on behalf of our customers. And so, I think we get excited when our customers are successful, when our partners are successful, which is why I'm so excited right now, John, because we did that session this morning, and as I listened to Juan Pablo Dela Rosa, and just all the partners, Lisa, John, and just to hear them say, "You helped us," that's what makes us giddy. And that's what makes us excited. So it could be something as big as Mars. We went to Mars but it's also doing something for small businesses as well. It runs the spectrum that really drives us and fuels that energy. And of course, we've got great leadership as you know, because you get to talk to Andy. Andy is such a great leader. He motivates and he inspires us as well to do more on behalf of our customer. >> Yeah, you guys are very customer focused and innovative which is really the kind of the secret sauce. I love the fact that small medium sized business can also be part of the solutions. And I truly believe that, and why I wanted us to promote and amplify what you're working on today is because the small medium size enterprise and business is the heart of the recovery on a global scale. So important and having the resources to do that, and doing it easily and consuming the cloud so that they can apply the value. It's going to change lives. I think the thing that people aren't really talking much about right now, is that the small medium size businesses will be the road to recovery. >> I agree with you. And I love this program because it does promote diversity, something that Amazon is very much focused on. It's global, so it has that global reach and it supports small business, and therefore the recovery that you talked about. So it is I think an amazing emphasis on all the things that really matter now. During COVID, John, we learned about what really matters, and this program focuses on those things and helping others. >> Well, great to see you. I know you're super busy. Thanks for coming on and sharing the update, and certainly talking about the small mid size business program. I'm sure you're busy getting ready to give the awards out to the winners this year. Looking forward to seeing that come up soon. >> Great. Thank you, John. And don't forget if you are a small and medium business partner 'cause this program is specifically for partners, check out Think Big for Small Business. >> Think Big for Small Business. Sandy Carter, here on theCube, sharing our insight, of course all the updates from the worldwide public sector partner program, doing great things. I'm John Furrier for theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. >>It's the Cube with coverage >>of Coop con and cloud, Native con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. I'm stew minimum. And this is the Cube's coverage of cube con cloud, native con Europe 2020 of course, happening virtual this year. We always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this community. So much happening in the developer space and really excited to have on the program first time guest in a very timely topic, we welcome our bod. Hassani, Who is the back and lead for house? My flattening, which is a joint research project. It related to code 19 associated with the University of Toronto. About thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. >>All right, so maybe explain how is my flattening? You know, the term flattening the curve is something that I think everyone around the globe is familiar with. Now, um, you know, Canada, you've got some great initiatives going. So help us understand how you got involved in this in what? What is the project? Sure, So I'll >>take a stock to March, which now feels like years ago. Um, back in March, way could look across in Europe, and we saw that. You know, I feel we're being overwhelmed. This new Cobra thing was happening, and there seems to be nothing happening here despite the fact that we know what was going on in Europe. So this whole collaboration started. It's really the brainchild of Dr Ben. Fine. Who's the radiologist that actually and partners on the idea was, Why don't we put all the data that is related to co bid, uh, for the province of Ontario, where I'm from in one place, right. So for the data mining people, like a lot of people on the on the program here and for the data minded people of Ontario to be able to have the information they need to make targeted both of the general public on that policy makers to really empower them with the right tools. We know the data was siloed in health care, and we know, you know, when this whole thing started, everything was on a website, you would get a daily update, but it wasn't something that you could analyze. Something you couldn't use. Really? It was unusable. How everything kind of started it. What if we did something about that? What if we brought all the data in one place? What if we visualize it and put all the resources in place that was released? How is my fattening got a Which is this initiative that I got involved with back in March and what we've been doing is building a number of dashboards based on Kobe data that are close to real time as possible. Doing a number of analyses. Um, the answer, your specific questions and doing deep dives into specific question. We have a team of scientific experts where our leadership, um you know Dr Ben Fine. I mentioned earlier. There's Dr Laura Rosello, the epidemiologists out of Ah, Perceptron. Oh, and then we have a Dr Alley that he's Austin Oy. Who the data science lead over it. Quick. Also, we got this kind of three perfect or the organization of the right talent required, and we've been trying Yeah, and whatever way we can by making the data transparent, >>Yeah, there's been a lot of initiatives, obviously that have had to accelerate really fast during this time it bring us inside a little bit. How long did it take to spend the site up? How do you make sure you're getting good data in Who decides? You know which visualizations love to hear a little bit about? You know how that has matured over the months that you've had project out there >>for sure. So when we started what people were doing out on Twitter, really, where there's a lot of this activity was happening was people were grabbing expect sheets and typing out every day what was happening. And I mean, coming from I'm not by any means a technical developer. That's not what I specialize in, but having some development dot com, and it makes sense that things could be done so much better. So we started to build data pipelines. Starting in March. We had a couple of government sources that were public. It was basically scrapping the government website and recording that in a database. Um, and then we start to visualize that we're using, you know, whatever we could that we started with Pablo just because we had a few. We're trying to build a community, right? So a community people want help and do this. But we have some tableau experts on our team and our community and, you know, the way we went. So we had the database. We started to connect with tableau and visualize it. Do you know, besides into and also that and then the project has matured from that web stopper ever since, with more complex data, pipeline building and data from different sources and visualizing them in different ways and expanding our dash boarding and expanding our now >>well in the cube con show that we're here at is so much about community. Obviously, open source is a major driver of what's going on there. So it sounded like that was that was a big piece of what you're working on. Help us bring inside out of that community build. I'd love to hear if there's any projects and tools you mentioned tableau for visualization, but anything from open source also that you're using. >>So actually, I I've never been involved in open source project before That this was kind of my first attempt, if you will, on we started, uh, on get hub quite early on. Actually, one of the partners I got involved in re shots was was Red hat off course. They're known for doing open source and for selling at it, and we have some amazing help from them into how we can organize community. Um, and we started to move the community over from getting up to get lab. You know, we started to the way we collaborate in slack. Ah, lot of times. And there's a lot of silos that we started to break those down and move them into get lab. And all conversations were happening in public that would beam or more closer to an open source approach. And honestly, a lot of people that are involved are our students, grass students who want to help our people in the community that want to help people from all kind of different backgrounds. I think we're really bringing in open source is not not a known concept in a lot of these clinical scientific communities, right? It's a lot more developer oriented, and I think it's been it's been learning opportunity for everyone involved. Uh, you know, something that may seem kind of default or basic have been a big learning opportunity for everyone of, you know, issues shocking and labeling and using comments and I'll going back into our own old ways of like, emailing people are people. Um, they had been digital art to it, and we'll get a lot of the big one. Um, we went from having this kind of monolithic container rising it and using Kubernetes, of course, were developed with the help of Red Hat. We're able to move everything over to their open shift dedicated platform, and that was that allowed us to do is really do a lot of do things a lot better and do things in a more mature way. Um, that's that's quite a bit of information, but that's kind of high level. What it? >>Well, no, it's great. We One of the things we've been poking out for the last few years is you know, in the early days you talk about kubernetes. It was Oh, I need things at a scale on And, you know, while I'm sure that the amount of data and scale is important, speed was a major major piece of what you need to be involved in and you'll be able to rally and James So can you talk a little bit more. Just open shift. What did that bring to the environment? Any aspects related to the data that red hat help you with. >>So a few things there. The one thing that open shift I think really helped us with was really mean and how to help us with generally was establishing a proper see I CD pipeline. Right. So now we we use git lab itself. We have get lab runners that everyone, basically all developers involved have their own branches when they push code to get auto. We like to their branch. It just made everything a lot easier and a lot faster to be able to push things quickly without worrying about everything breaking That was definitely a big plus. Um, the other thing that we're doing with, uh that is using containers. Actually, we've been working on this open data hub, which is, you know, working on another great open source project which is again built on kubernetes and trying to break down some of the barriers when it comes to sharing data in the healthcare system. Um, we're using that and we, with the help of red, how we're able to deploy that to be able to collaborate between hospitals, share data securely. You do security analytics and try to break down some of these silos that I've gone up due to fears over security and find the so That's another great example open source helping us kind of pushing forward. >>Well, that that's I'm glad you brought that up The open data hub, that collaboration with other places when you have data being able to share that, you know, has to be important talk. This was a collaboration to start with, you know, what's the value of being able to work with other groups and to share your data beyond beyond just the community that's working on it. >>So if you think about what's happening right now in a lot of hospitals in Canada, and I mean it's the same in the US is everyone is in this re opening stage. We shut down the economy. We should down a lot of elective surgeries and a lot of procedures. I know hospitals are trying to reopen right so and trying to figure out how to go back to their old capacity, and in that they're all trying to solve the same problem in different ways. So everyone is in their silo trying to tackle the same problems in a way. So what we're trying to do is basically get everyone together and collaborate on this open, open source environments, right? And what this open data allows us to do in to some degree alleviate some of the fears over sharing data so that we're not all doing the same thing in parallel are not talking to each other. We're able to share code, share data, get each other's opinions and, you know, use your resources in the healthcare system or official the drill, you know, all trying to address the same goal here. >>So imagine if you've had a lot of learnings from this project that you've done. Have you given any thought to? You know, once you get past that kind of the immediate hurdle of covert 19 you know what? Will this technology be able to help you going forward? You know, what do you see? Kind of post dynamic, if you will. >>I think the last piece I touched on, there is a big thing that I'm really hoping we'll be able to push forward past the pandemic. I think what? What the pandemic has shown us is the need for more transparency and more collaboration and being able to be more agile in response to things faster. And that's know how they're operating. And I think we know that now we can see that. I'm hoping that can be used as an opportunity to be able to bring people together to collaborate on projects like, How's my funding outside of this, right? We're not Not only the next pandemic. Hopefully I never come. Um but but for other, bigger problem that we face every day, collaboration can only help things, not tender thing. I'm hoping that's one big side effect that comes out of this. And I think the data transparency thing is is another big one that I'm hoping can improve outside of the situation. >>Yeah, I I wonder if I can ask you just a personal question. We've heard certain organizations say that, you know, years of planning have been executed in months. When I think about all the technologies that you had thrown at you, all the new things you learned often that something that would have taken years. But you didn't month. So how do you work through that? You know, there's only 24 hours in any day, and we do need some sleep. So what was important from your standpoint? What partners into tools helped, you know, and And the team, you know, take advantage of all of these new technologies. >>Yeah, honestly, I think that the team is really, really important. We've had an amazing set of people that are quite diverse and then usually would, quite honestly, never be seen in the same room together just because of all the different backgrounds that are there. Um, so that was a big driver. I think everyone was motivated to get things done. What happens when we first launched the site? We, you know, put it together. Basic feedback mechanism. Where we where we could hear from the public on. We've got an outpouring of support, people saying that they found that information really useful. And I think that pushed everyone to work harder and ah, and kind of reinforces our belief that this is what we're doing is helpful on, is making a difference in someone's life. And I think everyone that helped everyone work harder in terms of some of the tools that we use. Yeah, I totally agree. I think there was a 1,000,000 things that we all learned. Um, and it definitely wasn't amazing. Growing opportunity, I think, for the whole group. Um, I I don't know if there's a There's any wisdom I can impart. They're more than I think we were just being pushed by the need and being driven by the support that we're getting. Okay, >>well, you know, when there's a necessity to get things done, it's great to see the team execute the last question I have for you. You've got all this data. You've got visualizations. You've been going through a lot of things any any interesting learnings that you had or something that you were. You able to visualize things in a certain way in the community, reacted anything that you've learned along the way. That may be surprised you. >>That's a really interesting question there. I think the biggest, the biggest learning opportunity or surprise for me was what? How much people are willing to help if you just write, um, a lot of people involved. I mean, this is a huge group of volunteers who are dedicating their time to this because they believe in it on because they think they're doing the right thing and they're doing it for a bigger cause. It sounds very cheesy. Um, but I think that was wonderful to me to see that we can bring together such diverse people to dedicate their time for freedom to do something for the public. >>Yeah, well, and along that note, I I see on the website there is a get involved. But so is there anything you know, skill set or people that you're looking for, uh, further to help the team >>100%. So I think when I every time we do a presentation of any thought really got for anyone who's watching to just go on our site and get involved, there's a 1,000,000 different things that you can get involved with. If you're a developer, we can always use help. If you're a data, this person, we can always use help If you're a designer, honestly, there were a community driven organization. Uhm and we can always use more people in that community. That's that's the unique thing about the organization. 100%. Please do to house my finding, Dr and you get involved in get Lab. >>Well, so far, but thank you so much for sharing. We definitely encourage the unity get involved. It's projects like this that are so critically important. Especially right now during the pandemic. Thanks so much for joining. And thank you for all the work the team did. >>Thank you for having me. >>Alright. And stay tuned for more coverage from Cube Con Cloud native on 2020 in Europe Virtual Edition. I'm Stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

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

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation >> live in. Welcome to a special cube conversation here in Palo Alto. The Cube Studios. Jon, for your host. We're here with a special panel. Talk about the new brand of tech leaders in this era of cloud computing data. Aye, aye. And engineering excellence with us. We have Christine Heckart to CEO of Scaler J. P. Krishna of Marthe Moorthy. These s VP of engineering a Copa software and Patna saying, VP of engineering a glass door. Guys, welcome to come the Cube conversation. Welcome, engineer. And you guys are all running engineering organizations. You've been a former engineer now running a big company CEO, engineering led company. This is a big trend that's clearly defined. No one needs any validation. Cloud computing has certainly changed the game, eh? I certainly the hottest trend with respect, the data machine learning and the benefits. They're changing the cultures of companies changing how things were built, how people are hired. You're starting to see a complete shift towards old way and new ways. I want to get your thoughts about the engineering opportunities. What is engineering excellence today mean in this modern error? >> Well, for us it we talk a lot about mastery and setting up an environment where engineers have a chance to build their own mastery. But they can also have the necessary tools and technologies to be master of their domain. And these domains, especially if it's cloud base. They're very distributed. They're very, very fast moving. There's a lot of continual risk s so you have to set them up in the right way so they could be successful. >> What's your thoughts? I mean, you guys air cutting edge startup? >> Yes. For us, it's very important that the environment, the working moment for engineers, is organically inspiring. And what I mean by that is when every engineer no, why are there what are they doing? Well, how their work is impacting the company in the business initiators. At the same time, we are making sure that their interests are aligned with Albert projects and work in a way that we are also in a healthy, very extending and stretching their skills when their work has a purpose. And that's what our mission is, which is we want to make sure that everybody finds an opportunity where they feel there's a purpose that its purpose driven, that's when we feel like it. That's a great environment where they will be inspired to come every day and deliver their 110% >> J p excellence and engineering. I mean, this is what people strive for. >> So excellent points from both off them and I. I think I have a slightly different take on it as well. Today's business is we are asked to respond really, really fast, maybe hear the tongue a gel everywhere, John, right? So it's about how do we respond to the needs of the business as quickly as you can On dhe, it becomes the mantra for the organization. Having said that, there is another side to it. The dark side is technical debt. That's something we all have toe grapple with because you're moving fast, you're making decisions. You're hoping things all right, You want to prove your thesis out there, but at the same time, you don't wantto put yourself behind so that it might come and bite you later. So it's finding that balance is really, really important, and that becomes the focal point of the organization. How do you move fast, but at the same time Hold it. Oh, do you not slow yourself down in the >> future? That's a great point. I want to get probably your thoughts. That's because open source has been really a different game changer from the old way to the new way. Because you could work with people from different companies. You can work on projects that a better man for other people as well. So it's got a communal aspect to it. But also there is an element of speed the same time agile forces, this kind of concept. So technical debt. You want to move fast, we gotta recover. You kind of know how to get there. How is open source? Change that in Europe in >> well, number one thing that opens and allows all smaller company especially but more companies is that now you you can take on an open source project and start rather starting from ground zero. You can start somewhere where you know it's already helped, and you have a framework ready to start working on. So you're not every two single time we're building our thinking off a new idea you're not starting. Okay, Now let me school start from ground up, right? So you already are at a certain level, the second area where, like you said, you know, we're a Joe. Uh, we have open source, but we also have certain level of customization that the customers needed our application needs. And that's what inspires engineers as well, which is taking the challenger for K. We have a code based. Now let me build something more interesting, more innovative. And then what they also love is giving back to the community. It's we're not. The companies are not just tech community engineering team. We are have a bigger engineering community now, the whole tackle, and that's what makes a big difference for us working in Silicon Valley to even be part of that and contributing factor. >> J P Talk about technical debt when it comes back to the modern era because you can go back to It's been around for a while. Technical dead concerts, not new, but it's always been kind of the water cooler come with core lead engineer and the team. The Aussies have a term called feature creeping. You know, the old days. I don't get it. The feature creep. Actually, it kind of takes it away because of you. If you're applying technical debt properly, you're managing the velocity of the project. So the question is, how is technical debt evolved to the management levels of senior engineering managers? Because that seems to be a key variable in managing the speed and quality of the teams with managing the table. Done. Now, management is what some other conversations. >> So the game depends on the stage of the company Onda stage of the projects you are. If you're in a really mature suffer environment, very you're not making a lot of change. It's OK. It's not the primary conversation off the topic. But if you're trying to you capture a market or promote an idea, it becomes the fundamental thesis, forgetting things out there quickly Now, getting things out there quickly doesn't mean you get to let users suffer. You had to build it in the right way, needs toe work, but at the same time it needs to be just enough so that we can We can get the feedback from from the user's on. At the same time, you probably would have left out potentially features on. Maybe you didn't even make certain decisions on Let's say, hi availability or our scalability. Maybe you wanna prove it out in only one region of the world and so on. So you have to find those balances, and it becomes part of the planning conversations right in the front. And as you go into the further iterations of the product, it becomes part of the prioritization conversation of the product managers because it's not just about getting one part done and getting it out there. But as it reached the full level of maturity that you would want, >> I'm sure there's a lot of debates about an engineer organizations because, you know, engineers a very vocal you. Yeah, so you could fall in love with your product of your time to market, maybe taking some technical debt to get product market fit. And that's my baby, though, when you got a re platform or re scale it to make it scale, bringing with your point you mentioned. How do you guys manage? Because this becomes a talent management. People say, Oh, you gotta manage the ECOWAS. But if some people are managing the project in there. They're going to fire over their skis on technical debt. You gotta kind of rain that in. How do you guys manage the people side of the equation? That because it's an art and a science at the same time? What's your thoughts? >> Well, I'll say this, um, supporting al aspects of change, right? That's also is an injury leader. It's a core responsibility and call it a priority for us, not just the technical debt, but also the market shifts. Technology shifts. We have new tech coming in. We have involving in evolving every technology. So how do via dear to and make sure that it's very important that engineering is supporting and kind of coming up with these technologies a tte the same time? We are not just pulling down to their version of grades and all of them, so in a jest, it's it's a core aspect of leadership to make sure that you, as we are supporting these changes, were also making sure that these changes are not pulling us down. So that should be proper quality checks. There should be a proper conversation and roadmap items which is saying that it's not attack debt. It's more of a tech investment, and we are talking about so that we're in lock steps with our business partner and not behind, so that now we're saying Okay, we need a whole quarter to develop new things. So it's an aspect of filmmaking. Sure, team this motivated >> This comes back to culture. Next question. I want to get you guys thoughts on this building. A positive work culture given engineering led organization. Christine, you're leading that now to start up because your own real fast a lot. A lot of engineers. They're probably a lot of opinions on what that looks like. What is the cultural quick? Because this sets the DNA early on for startup. But as you're maturing organization, you gotta track the best talent. And some say, Well, we work on We saw hard problems. That's kind of cliche, but ultimately you do have to kind of have that problem solving aspect. You gotta have a culture what is a successful work culture for engineering. >> So every everybody talks about engineers wanna solve hard problems. I think that's true. But as Pablo said earlier, if you can help every engineer connect what they're doing, every day to the higher purpose. The organization to the problem that you're solving and how that makes the customers like better in our case, were accompanied by engineers for engineer. So our engineers get really excited about giving other engineers in the world a better day. We have taken it one step further recently by starting a peer network because one of my observations coming into this organization is there are so many peer networks in I t. Because it's been a 30 year industry. There are tons of pure organizations for CEOs. There are tons appear organizations for C. M. O's, but there really aren't for engineers. And if we want to help engineers really develop their career and their full skill set and therefore develop into their full potential, it's about more than just training them. It's about giving them context and full social skills and giving them places where they can learn not just from the other engineers in their company, but from engineers across the organization or across the industry at their same level, and maybe from very different industries and maybe in very different environments. So I think in our case, you know, really trying to bring these peer networks together has been one way that we can not only pay it forward for our own engineers, but also help a lot of other engineers around of the industry >> how you guys handling the engineering talent pertaining, attracting and keeping the best now. >> So I think that's where the whole company comes together, in my view. So as an injuring leader, it's not just that I said the tune of my engineering or as to what? That hiring his top priority. It's where the whole company comes together. You're recruiting team to build the stellar interview process. You are, you know, heads of other orcs to make sure that across the board you're helping define a mission for your company that resonates with your candidates who would want to work with you. So it's a collective effort of building a stellar environment for us glass door when one of the few values is transparency and we live and die by it, which means that when someone is higher, they need to see that be within the company. We are transparent, so we'd share a lot of data. A lot of information, good and bad with every single person in the company. It's never, um, hidden at the same time. We build and set up trust in them to say, Hey, it's confidential. Make sure that it doesn't leave the company and it's been 11 years and it hasn't It has never been the case. >> What class door you don't want have a glass door entry on black. Gotta be transparent. That's the culture. Culture matters minutes. Your culture is all about sharing and being open. >> You will see it. So that's what this is, what God goes down spike for as well, right? Building transparency within the company culture and more and more as we see many stories that we have seen for various companies. And sometimes I get a bad story, too, and I get an invitation. Oh, you're from class door, you know. But that helps overall Rios living and working for user's and professionals. >> Cross is big for you guys, >> absolutely professionals who are in this world looking for a job and life because you're spending a lot of time at work. So we want you to get up every day and be inspired and happy about where you're going to work and for that. That's why we have sharing a lot of the insights about the company's from reviews and ratings and CEO data to make sure that when you make your decision of the next move, you are you can be fully trust. You could be fully confident that the date of your sharing the new with that you're making a good decision. >> J. P. Your thoughts. You guys are on a tear. We've got a great coverage of your the annual conference in Vegas. Recent cube coverage. Your company on paper looks like you're targeting one segment, but you have a lot of range and you're technical platform with data. Um, how you guys articulating to engineering? How do you keep them? What if some of the stories you tell them to attract them to join you guys? >> So number one thing is about the talent that we already have in hopes. So people want to come to work at a place where they can learn, contribute on dhe, also for their Carrie Carrie Respert, both inside Cooper and as the lead on coming into Cooper. They look at it and they say, Oh, you have ah, wide variety of things going on here. You're solving a business problem. But at the same time, the technology stocks are different. You're on all the best clothes are there, so that's an easy attraction for them to come in. But also, it's not just about getting people, and how do you retain them on? We've been lucky. That had very low tuition for many years. Right now in the engineering organization, especially in the value, it is a big deal. Andi. I think part of the things that that is the collaboration and cooperation that they get from everybody on. You know, it's an age old saying diversity and thought, unity in action, right? So I really promote people thinking about radius ideas and alternatives. But there is a time for that debate. And once we agree on a solution, we all pulled in and try to make that successful. And then you repeat that often, and it becomes part of part of the culture and the way the organization operates as >> a follow up to culture. One thing that's become pretty clear is that's global engineering. You mention the valley very competitive, some start ups that they get on that rocket ship can get all the great talent. If you will public everyone. Everyone gets rich of one's happy, a good mission behind it, you know, win win outside. Some stars have to attract talent. You've got to start going on here. You might have a good colonel of great engineers, but you have development environments all over the world, so remote is a big thing. How do you manage the engineer remote? It's a time zone base. Does it put leaders in charge? Is there a philosophy in the Amazon? Has a two pizza team is their big thing. You get small groups. How did you guys view the engineering makeup? Because this becomes a part of the operational tension but operating model of engineering thoughts >> I can go first. I think there is a tension between keeping teams working on one problem on not distributing it across the world for efficiency reasons. But at the same time, how do you all owe for continuity, especially if you have a problem in one area? Can somebody else from another region step in in a different time zone continuing? That's always a problem, and then the other one is in a landscape like ours, in which is not uncommon for many, many companies. It is not that they built a lot of fragmented things. They all need to work together. So having a level of continuity within the radius remote centers is really critical on everybody has their own recipe for this one. But the ones that works for us and I've seen that played out many times, is if you can get a set off teams, toe, focus on certain problem areas and become experts in those >> cohesive within their >> within the physical, and then also have enough critical mass within a center that gives you the good balance between working on. One thing. Worse is knowing everything. So so that works for us, and I I think that's that's the way to get out >> of the operating system. It is a couple highly cohesive, >> and you need to have the right technical leaders on both sides and be willing to collaborate with each other >> partner thoughts >> I want to emphasize on the last statement you really need strong good, really, you know, trusted leaders in the location to Canada, then inculcated more bigger team everything Glassdoor groove from one location to four locations in last three years. And one thing that we learned after our first remote location that we started was that when we seeded our new remote location with few people from the original location that hoped start, you know, the similar aspects of what glassware stands for and over core at those and values. And then, as we added, new people, they just can easily just transfer to them so that hope does in a big way. And then he moved to Chicago with the same idea and, of course, Brazil. Now with the same >> knowledge transfer culture transfer, >> it all makes it easy. Even you have few people seating from the original location that was court for us. >> Pop in actually started their first remote office in San Francisco, which has now become their headquarters. So she has a lot of experience. Everyone of scale er's customers globally. You know, we sell the engineer, so we're dealing with with our customers who are dealing with this problem all the time. And in addition to culture, one thing that seems to bubble up regularly is can do you know when they need a common tool set and where they can do their own thing. How do you, you know, balance that and where do you need a single source of truth that people can agree on? And again, where can people have different points of view? >> You're talking sing associates from code base to what could >> be whatever, Like in our case, it's yeah, if you're going to troubleshoot something, you know, where the logs, the truth in the logs, Are you gonna have a single source for that? But for other people, it could be the data that they're bringing in or how they analyze the business. But if you can be proactive about understanding, when is commonality of tools of approach, of philosophy, of data, whatever, when it's commonality going to be what we drive and when are we going to allow people to do their own thing? And if you can put that framework in place than people know when they have the latitude and when they got a snap to grit and you could move a lot more quickly and there's kind of a technical debt that isn't code based? It's more about this kind of stuff, right? It's tool based its process and culture based. And if you can be more proactive about avoiding that debt, then you're gonna move more quickly. >> Videoconferencing. Very, very important. You should be able to jump on a video Constance very easily to be able to connect with someone driving just a phone calls all of these face time, different areas of face time Technology plays a big role >> technology. This is This is a modern management challenge for the new way to leave because it used to be just outsource. Here's the specs member, the old P. R. D S and M R D's. There's the specs, and you just kind of build it. Now it's much more collaborative to your point. There's really product and engineering going on, and it's gotta be. It's evolving. This is a key new ingredient >> because the expectation on the quality of product is so much more higher than competition is so much more. >> And when you know these engineers build in a lot of cases, they have to operate it now. So, like you say, whether it's a free service to a consumer, Aurens in enterprise, the expectation is perfect. No downtime, no hiccups >> and the reward incentives now become a big part of this now. New way of doing things. So I gotta ask the natural question. What's the reward system? Because Google really kind of pioneered the idea of a host 20% of your time work on your own project. That was about a decade or so ago. Now it's evolved beyond that to free lunches and all these other perks, but this has got to appeal to the human being behind it. What are some of the reward mechanisms? You guys see his management that's that's helpful in growing, nurturing and scaling up engineering organizations. >> Well, engineers are human, and as every human autonomy is critical for any aspects of moderation. And that's what please the core level. Then, of course, lunches, matter and other perks and benefits matter. Snacks of pours. Good coffee machine definitely is the core of it, but autonomy of what you want to do and is that the line. But what we want or what we are trying to deliver, and the aspect and the information of I did and rolled this out, what was the impact of it? That new should go back to that engineer who built that. So threading it through to the end and from the start is its very core for everybody to know because I want to know what I'm as I'm going every day. How is it helping >> and we really try. I personally try Thio. Make sure that each human on the team, regardless of their function, that we understand their potential and their career aspirations because a lot of times the the normal ladder, whatever that lander is, might not be right for every person. And people can pivot and use their skills in very, very different ways, and we need to invest in their ability to try new things. If it doesn't work out, let him come back. So you know, we try to spend time as a company for engineers not just in our company, but beyond. To really help them build out their own career, build out their own brands. Engineers more and more could be, you know, on TV shows and doing blog's and building out their own personal brand in their point of view. And that gives them impact. That goes beyond the one piece of code that they're writing for a company in a given day or a week. >> J. P you guys went public stock options. All these things going on as well. Your thoughts? Yeah, >> I just came back from a trip to my newest Dev center in Hyderabad, India. It's funny. I had sessions with every team over there. The number one topic was full >> s >> so excited about food. So there is something primal about food. Having said that, I think, uh, praise and recognition the age old things. They matter so much. That's what I've seen You acknowledge what somebody has done and kind of feedback to elect partner was saying, The impact that it creates, you know, it's it's a lot more fulfilling than monetary incentives. Not that they're not useful. Occasionally they are. But I think repeating that on doing it more often creates a sense off. Okay, here's what we can accomplish as a team. It is how I can contribute to it, and that creates a normal sense of purpose. >> Austin, you guys talked about tools of commonality is kind of key. It's always gonna be debates about which tools, much codes, languages to use, encoding, etcetera. But this brings up the notion of application development as you get continuous development. This is the operating model for modern engineering. What's the state of the art? What do you guys seeing as a best practice as managers to keep the machinery humming and moving along? And what what's on the horizon? What's next? >> Yeah, in my view, I would just say So what's humming and what state of the art I think I is core thio. Most of the systems and applications, the, uh, the core aspect of pretty much every company as you see, and that's the buzz word, even in Silicon Valley for the right reasons, is how we have built our platforms, insistence and ideas. But now let's make it smarter, and every company now has a lot of data. We are swimming in data, but it's very important that we can pick and pull the the core insides from that data to then power the same product and same system to make it more smarter, right? The whole goal for us ourselves is where they're making our platform or smarter, with the goal of making it more personalized and making sure that as users are navigating a project, pages they are seeing more personalized information so that they're not wasting their time there. We can make faster decisions in more rich data set, which is very catered towards them. So smart, so building that intelligence is core. >> And with continues, integration comes, continues risk. All right, so no risk, no reward. And so we live in an era of freemium. Free service is so you know why not take the risk? You don't have to do an A B test. You got digital. You do a B, C D and use all kinds of analytics. So this is actually a creative opportunity for engineering as they get to the front lines you mentioned earlier getting part of the empowerment. How is the risk taking changing the management? >> You know, I deal with class off users were willing to pay money, so I don't know if I can talk a lot about the freedom aspect of the problem. But now there's always desire for new functionality. If you want it, otherwise you don't want it. There's a lot of risk of worsens that's still floating around, especially in the interprets there today. On it is a big tension that you have to deal with. If you're not careful, then you can introduce problems on believing you're operating on the cloud and you're servicing thousands of customers. A small change can bring down the entire ecosystem, so you'll take it very seriously. You're helping others run their business, and that means you had invest in the right tools and processes. >> So you guys are actually Freemium business model, but still engineers. I got a test that they want to take the rhythms. So is it a cloud sand boxing? How is the risk taking managed? How you guys encouraging risk without having people hurt? You don't >> wantto overburden engineers to the point. They feel stifled and they cannot do anything. So there is a right balance. So you know, there are many techniques we follow the. For example, we roll out the software, tow US staging environment so customers can play around and make sure things are not breaking for their comfort more so than for us. But it is an important part of the equation, and then internally, you have to invest a lot of planning. Appropriately, there are the high risk content on the features, and then there are the low risk ones. You want to think about experimentation frameworks in no way be testing and so on and more importantly, about automation and testing. I don't think if a customer logs a bug and finds the problem, they don't want to see it one more time. Ever really have to make sure that those things don't happen when you're investing robust automation around testing processes because there isn't enough time for the complexity of these applications for destiny thing, man, >> this whale automation with cloud comes in containers kubernetes. All of >> those things, you know you heard will enable engineers with the technology said so that they contested scale. You have to provide access to production like data because you have to worry about no privacy, security and all those aspects. But at the same time, they need to have access to the variety off configurations that are out there so that they contested meaningful so to invest in all of those things. >> But I'll take it back to kind of where we started. This, which is the human factor with continuous delivery, is this continuous risk, and it doesn't matter if this engineer is supporting a free consumer application or the highest end of enterprise. When something goes wrong, this, their stress level goes through the roof and you know, how can we equipped? These people, too, solve problems in real time to have that visibility, to have whatever tool said or date or whatever they need? Because at the end of the day, a bad day for an engineer is a day when something is breaking and they're the ones that have to stay up all night and fix it and a good day for an engineer. A human being is the day they get to go home and have dinner with the family or not be woken up in the night. And there is >> for kite surfing or whatever, you >> know, whatever they dio, there's, you know, there is truly a human way. We think about engineers and engineers get up every day, and they want to change the world and they want to make an impact. And thank God we have, you know, teams of engineers that do that for all of us, and they're human beings, and there's a level of continuous stress that we've injected into their lives every day and to the extent that we, as companies and managers and leaders, can help take some of that burden off of them. The world becomes >> the whole being seeing the results of their work to is rewarding as well. >> Scaler does a lot of stuff there, so I have to call that are at the same time in a lot of very good nuggets, J P. Brother. But one more thing that has shifted in terms of how process of practice works is more of more. Engineers now participate very early on in product development is in the day. They try to understand what is the context and why are we doing. And we do a lot of users research to understand that that process, so that they have full context, that they are building in developing eso they're more of a partner now and not an afterthought. >> Think agile And Dev ops to me has proven that the notion of silos and waterfall practices has democratizing flatten. The organization's out where interdisciplinary crossovers are happening. >> Oh, yes, >> and this has been an interesting art of management is encouraging the right person that crust over the right line was you give people little taste, but sometimes they may not belong there kind of called herding cats in the old days. But now it's more of managing kind of interests and growth there. >> That original Dev ops model, though if you have anybody read the Phoenix project like years ago, but it it was really about bringing different points of view. It's a diversity thing. It's bringing different points of view around the table before the first line. It is written so that you're thinking about every angle on the problem and on the ongoing operation of whatever you're building >> Well, it's all about diversity and inclusion and diversity. I was with states, inclusion and diversity, diversity, inclusion Because male and females are involved. We have two females in tech here. This has been a discussion. We still don't have the numbers up to the senior levels within engineering in general. What has to happen to move the needle for women in tech and or inclusionary people involved in engineering to get the right perspective? What's what's >> not? Start with J P because he's actually a huge champion, and without the men involved, we don't have a solutions, >> inclusion and diversity, J. P your thoughts on this was super important. >> Yeah, Number one is recognition. I was stealing Christine yesterday. I just came back from India. That's like told you I took a picture there of my management team. Came back here, looked at it. There is no female, No right, it's crazy. I mean, it's not that we're not trying on gum it. We had the same problem and we started our center in 2015 right? There was a group picture off the team. There was like they were like two women on the thing. We put a lot of effort into it on. Two years later, a significant chunk of the organization has got women embedded in the team's came because we tried. We went out. Look, for those who are good in this area is not that we compromised on the qualifications. It's really about putting some energy in tow, getting the right resumes and then looking at it. The other thing. We're also doing his cultivation. You have to go to the grassroots because there are just enough women engineers. It's unfortunate, for whatever reasons, they're not taking up that professional military enough studies written on it So last two years we weigh, have conducted something called rails. Girls in India, 150 school age children, Women. I mean, girls come in and then we have supported them, run their classes, hold a class. And that helps, you know, even if 10% off them, you know, choose to take up this profession. It's gonna be a big boost. And we have to do a lot more of those in my opinion. >> Europe T rex President Leading Engineering. What's your view? >> Well, I'll say this, you know, for the people who are participating in helping drive this mission just like J. P. I say thank you, especially for men who are participating in it. We cannot do this without you, but for all the people who, if they're not participate in participating in helping drive this mission, I have all share this one data, uh, one of the initiative that glass or drives this gender pay gap, which is also an outcome off, not having diverse outlook at all levels into in the workplace. And we in our economic research team. They did a study and they shared a projection off when will be closed. The gender pay gap. It's 2017. That's depressing. So for for me, when I hear people who say you know, they, they don't want to participate or they don't think this is the right approach of solving for diversity in workplace, I say Okay, but that's not the reason for you to not participate and stay out. If it join it, join it in your own way. But it's only when l offers. Can I see it as a real problem and participate just like Gibby, as you said grassroot level as well as outside One of the example that I told my team when they say, You know, we don't want to drop the bar, the quality bar, I say Sure, don't drive it, but don't drop it. But if you have two candidates, one with a diverse background, Um, who who might be after cable to the same job in 2 to 3 months over someone who slam dunk today, let's invest in the person who is bringing the diverse background for 2 to 3 months and then make them successful. That's not dropping the bar that's still supporting and investing in helping diversity. >> My good friend and heat you saw at IBM. They put out a survey said Diversity, inclusion, diversity. First companies have a bit of advantage, so the investment is so much lower in the bars, more bringing perspective because if we tell about software here has male and female and that's being 17% female, it's >> not just, you know, I had two things to the comments, all of which I agree with one. It's not just a pipeline problem. It is a a culture problem where people have to feel welcome and it has to be a comfortable environment, and they have to believe that their diverse point of view matters and doesn't matter if they're men or women. But there are lots of times when we all make it hard for somebody with a different point of view to enter the conversation. So we have to do a better job of creating the culture, and secondly, there's a saying you have to see it to be it. We have to see people of diversity, gender and of every other type, cognitive diversity of all types at every level in the company. And, you know, we had the same thing, so I'm lucky enough to send a Fortune 500 public board. And I spend a lot of my time helping women and people of color and diversity get on public boards. But if you go back seven years ago, we were 14% women on public boards and it did not move and it did not move and it did not move and in one year popped over 20%. And that's before the loss. So you know, you make these linear projections we can with effort, yes, actually make >> a >> difference. It just takes a very concerted effort. And in this case, particularly for engineering and for leadership, it is making a concerted effort at every level, from board to CEO to executive team to all levels down. Making sure we have inclusion and diversity in >> this is a modern management challenge in the new way of leading managing >> this process. These things, This >> is the big challenge, folks, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate. Final question for you guys is what if you could summarize the new way to lead and his modern error from an engineering standpoint, building out of companies building along durable value creation with its company a product or service. What is the key keys to success >> as a leader >> as a leader has a new brand of leaders. >> I would say, You know, this lot goes into, I'm sure you need to know engineering and all the strategic aspect of your job. But the core aspect I feel, is as a leader, my success depends on the quality of relationships I'm building with my team and members that I work with. So that goes into the people aspect, the people connection that goes into it, >> J p. >> Absolutely People are are a big portion of the story. I also feel understanding the problem and driving for results. You know, it's not just about building something. It's about building for a purpose. What is it that you're you're tryingto accomplish and continuing to find that? And working with the teams is so critical for success, especially in a fast moving in Christine. >> Yeah, I agree. It is all about the people, and I think old and new. This hasn't changed. People need to feel like they belong and they're being appreciated, and they're being heard >> scaler. Glass door Copa software. You guys do a great work. Thanks for sharing the engineering inputs, Thio. Leading successful companies. >> Thank you for >> your leadership. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm shot for the Q. Thanks for watching. >> Well.

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington it's The Cube covering AWS Imagine. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're here in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Education Conference. It's the second year of the conference. It's really successful so much now they have another education conference, excuse me, Imagine Conference coming up for nonprofits, but this is the education one. About 800 people and we're excited to have, I think they had representatives from like 40 countries here. It's amazing, such a small conference with such great global representation. We've got our first guest, all the way from Valencia, Spain. He is Inaki Bilbao Estrada and the Vice Chancellor for Internationalization and Innovation at the CEU Universidad Cardenal Herrera. It's a mouthful, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So first off, impressions from the show, from the keynotes this morning. >> It was very impressive, the keynote by Andrew Co Intersession by Amazon. We were impressed, we were included in the keynote and we are very proud of having been included in the keynote for our Alexa skill. >> Great, so before we get into kind of what they talked about, let's back up a few steps in terms of what you are trying to accomplish as an institution. So give us a little bit of background on the college, how big it was, and kind of what was going on and what you wanted to really do differently. >> We are a Spanish University. We belong with CEU San Pablo Foundation which owns three universities in Spain, Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. We are a not for profit universities and in Valencia, in our case, we are very proud that we used to be a local university with only 300 international students eight years ago and right now we have reached 2500 international students which represents around 30-33% of the population of the university. We are right now 8000 undergraduate students and 3000 graduate students. >> So that's pretty amazing. So as you said, you were really kind of a regional university and you decided you wanted more international students. Why did you want more international students and then once you made that goal, what were some of the major objectives at the beginning of this process or problems that you had to overcome? >> It was a trend in higher education institutions but for us it was very important for two reasons, one the sustainability of the university, but also and I think the main reason is that we wanted to have our students to have a global experience. We wanted to become a global university based in Valencia, but we have right now more than 80 countries represented on campus. >> Wow, so what were some of the big hurdles that you saw that were going to get in the way of attracting more of these international students? >> So it was very important for us to adapt all our processes to our students. For this we have a very helpful firm partnered on campus. It was the IT department with Jose Roch in charge of this department and through technology we have been able to escalate and automate, get the automation of all of this process in order to reach bigger number of international students. So we have adapted all the processes to the needed of our international students, our new population of international students. >> Right, so you were highlighted today for a very specific thing, for a very specific device, which is Alexa, and voice as an interface and we saw some of the Alexa stuff last year, in terms of the kids asking it, you know, when is my test, is my homework due, these types of things, but you guys are actually taking it to the next level. Explain to the folks what you guys have done with Alexa. >> So we have used Alexa to introduce a virtual assistant for all our students national and international students and one other things that have been highlighted in the keynote is that is not only in English, but also in Spanish. Like this we are covering the two most speaked language on campus, English and Spanish. >> So it's bi, so you've got a bilingual Alexa in the room. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for us it was very important as explained before that technologies had been asked to cover all the population of students, not only part of them. >> Right and using English is kind of universal language, regardless of what their native tongue is. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So did you have to build all this from scratch? How much was Amazon helping you to do the English to Spanish translation, was it written in Spanish, how did some of those logistics work out? >> So we began six months ago with the project with the help of Amazon, they were very, very, very helpful for us. With Ana Cabez and Juan Manuel Gomez from the UK team of Amazon and they guided us how to develop the Alexa skills for the goals that we set with them, what we wanted to achieve with the virtual assistant for our students. >> And yeah, so the skills are the things that you actually write, so how many different skills did you write especially for your students? >> So we, what we are doing is to build only one, but we are integrating all the services in one only skill. So we are integrating services related with what my next assignment on Blackboard, which are my grades, how can I book a room in the library or another space of the university, locations of the different services or professors of the university. We are integrating a lot of services, but in one skill because we don't want the students to have to switch between skills. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So we're aiming to have one virtual assistant for the students in only one skill. >> So that's interesting, I didn't even think about all the integration points that you have. But you've got integration points in all these other systems. The room booking services, the library services, Blackboard and the other educational services. >> The learning management system. >> So how many points of integration are there? >> A lot we are working right now, we are focusing around five, seven integration points, because also we are integrating it with our CRM in order to have personalized message to different segments of our students, depending of if they are due to get some documentation to the registrar office. We think that integration with CRM allows us to give personalized message and notification to our students depending on the situations. >> Jeff: Right. >> So it's not a general notification for all of the students on campus. >> Right, that's awesome. Again, highlighted in the keynote really I think is the first kind of bilingual implementation of Alexa. So that's terrific. I want to shift gears a little bit about innovation and transformation. We go to a lot of tech shows, talk to a lot of big companies, everybody wants to digitally transform and innovate. Traditionally education hasn't been known as the most progressive industry in terms of transforming. You said right off the bat, that's your job is about transformation and innovation. Where's that coming from? Is that from the competitive world in which you live? Is that a top-down leadership directive? What's kind of pushing basically the investment in this innovation around your guys' school? >> So I believe that education can be disrupt in the next five, ten years. So what we think at the university is that we have to be closer to this disruption and in this sense we are working a lot to improve the students' experience of our students on campus because if not we think that it makes no sense to study on campus when you can go online. >> Jeff: Right. >> So that's why we're using technology to improve the students' experience on campus. So we are trying to avoid those things that have no value added for the students through technology and through the digital transformation. In order that we have more time for these value added interaction between the staff, academic and nonacademic staff, with the students. >> Right, and then how has the reception been with the staff, both the academic staff and the nonacademic staff because clearly the students are your customers, your primary customer, but they're a customer as well. So how have they embraced this and got behind it? >> So I seen all the institutions and you have a part of the institution that is not so in favor of these innovations, but the big number of professors and staff have seen the benefits of not to have to answer email Saturday night because the virtual assistant is 24 hours seven days a week. So they've seen the benefits of how technology can give them more time for these value added interaction with their students. For this in order to avoid only top-down decisions we have created digital ambassador programs which this program what we do is to share with our professors and with our nonacademic staff what we are planning and how they see the project. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And we are integrating their opinions and their suggestions in the program. >> So you're six months into it you said since you launched it. >> Yeah. >> Okay, I'm just curious if you could share any stories, biggest surprises, things that you just didn't expect. I always like long and unintended consequences, you know, as you go through this process. >> So one of things is in Spain, Alexa was launched in November, last November so it's very new. >> Jeff: Very new. >> Very new in Spain. There's no voice assistant in the last nine months, it have exploded, but we didn't have before. So the students have been very impressed that the university were working at this level with the technology so new because it was even new for them, even if they are younger and they knew a lot about this technology. They were impressed that the university so quickly reacted to the introduction of the technology. The other point is through innovation, we are also using Alexa for the digital transformation of learning and teaching. We have launched an innovation program for quizzes for the students. And we have the huge amount of volunteers that they want to see how it works. >> Right, right, just curious too, to get your take on voice as an interface. You made an interesting comment before we turned the cameras on that email just doesn't work very well for today's kids. They don't use it. They're not used to using it. But voice still seems to really be lagging. I get an email from Google every couple of days saying, here ask your Google Assistant this or ask your Alexa this, you know, we still haven't learned it. From where you're sitting and seeing kind of this new way to interact and as you said get away from these emails in the middle of the night that ask, when's my paper due and I could ask the assistant. How do you see that evolving? Are you excited about it? Do you see voice as really the centerpieces of a lot of these new innovations or is it just one of many things that you're working on? >> So I think the difference is that usually higher education institutions would have use of email for communication with students with so massive amount of emails. I think what they feel with the voice assistants is that they have the freedom to choose what they want to know or not to know. So if they can ask voice, virtual assistant, as in one case, they have the freedom when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think its a big difference between emails, in an email you decide when you send the information to the students, with voice technologies, the student, it's the student who is asking when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think it's important for them. >> It's huge because they never ask for the email. >> No, they, and after they tell us that it wasn't important information that they didn't check the email. >> Right. >> They complain that they don't have the right information. >> Right, well Inaki, thank you for sharing your story and congratulations on this project. Sounds like you're just getting started, you've got a long ways to go. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you. He's Inaki, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube, we're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education Conference. Thanks for watching. See you next time. 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