(upbeat intro music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a special remote guest coming in. Teresa Carlson, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport, theCUBE alumni, one of the first, let me go back to 2013, Teresa, former AWS. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh my gosh, almost 10 years. That is unbelievable. It's hard to believe so many years of theCUBE. I love it. >> It's been such a great honor to interview you and follow your career. You've had quite the impressive run, executive level woman in tech. You've done such an amazing job, not only in your career, but also helping other women. So I want to give you props to that before we get started. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. I, it's my, it's been my honor and privilege. >> Let's talk about Flexport. Tell us about your new role there and what it's all about. >> Well, I love it. I'm back working with another Amazonian, Dave Clark, who is our CEO of Flexport, and we are about 3,000 people strong globally in over 90 countries. We actually even have, we're represented in over 160 cities and with local governments and places around the world, which I think is super exciting. We have over 100 network partners and growing, and we are about empowering the global supply chain and trade and doing it in a very disruptive way with the use of platform technology that allows our customers to really have visibility and insight to what's going on. And it's a lot of fun. I'm learning new things, but there's a lot of technology in this as well, so I feel right at home. >> You quite have a knack from mastering growth, technology, and building out companies. So congratulations, and scaling them up too with the systems and processes. So I want to get into that. Let's get into your personal background. Then I want to get into the work you've done and are doing for empowering women in tech. What was your journey about, how did it all start? Like, I know you had a, you know, bumped into it, you went Microsoft, AWS. Take us through your career, how you got into tech, how it all happened. >> Well, I do like to give a shout out, John, to my roots and heritage, which was a speech and language pathologist. So I did start out in healthcare right out of, you know, university. I had an undergraduate and a master's degree. And I do tell everyone now, looking back at my career, I think it was super helpful for me because I learned a lot about human communication, and it has done me very well over the years to really try to understand what environments I'm in and what kind of individuals around the world culturally. So I'm really blessed that I had that opportunity to work in healthcare, and by the way, a shout out to all of our healthcare workers that has helped us get through almost three years of COVID and flu and neurovirus and everything else. So started out there and then kind of almost accidentally got into technology. My first small company I worked for was a company called Keyfile Corporation, which did workflow and document management out of Nashua, New Hampshire. And they were a Microsoft goal partner. And that is actually how I got into big tech world. We ran on exchange, for everybody who knows that term exchange, and we were a large small partner, but large in the world of exchange. And those were the days when you would, the late nineties, you would go and be in the same room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And I really fell in love with Microsoft back then. I thought to myself, wow, if I could work for a big tech company, I got to hear Bill on stage about saving, he would talk about saving the world. And guess what my next step was? I actually got a job at Microsoft, took a pay cut and a job downgrade. I tell this story all the time. Took like three downgrades in my role. I had been a SVP and went to a manager, and it's one of the best moves I ever made. And I shared that because I really didn't know the world of big tech, and I had to start from the ground up and relearn it. I did that, I just really loved that job. I was at Microsoft from 2000 to 2010, where I eventually ran all of the U.S. federal government business, which was a multi-billion dollar business. And then I had the great privilege of meeting an amazing man, Andy Jassy, who I thought was just unbelievable in his insights and knowledge and openness to understanding new markets. And we talked about government and how government needed the same great technology as every startup. And that led to me going to work for Andy in 2010 and starting up our worldwide public sector business. And I pinch myself some days because we went from two people, no offices, to the time I left we had over 10,000 people, billions in revenue, and 172 countries and had done really amazing work. I think changing the way public sector and government globally really thought about their use of technology and Cloud computing in general. And that kind of has been my career. You know, I was there till 2020, 21 and then did a small stint at Splunk, a small stint back at Microsoft doing a couple projects for Microsoft with CEO, Satya Nadella, who is also an another amazing CEO and leader. And then Dave called me, and I'm at Flexport, so I couldn't be more honored, John. I've just had such an amazing career working with amazing individuals. >> Yeah, I got to say the Amazon One well-documented, certainly by theCUBE and our coverage. We watched you rise and scale that thing. And like I said at a time, this will when we look back as a historic run because of the build out. I mean as a zero to massive billions at a historic time where government was transforming, I would say Microsoft had a good run there with Fed, but it was already established stuff. Federal business was like, you know, blocking and tackling. The Amazon was pure build out. So I have to ask you, what was your big learnings? Because one, you're a Seattle big tech company kind of entrepreneurial in the sense of you got, here's some working capital seed finance and go build that thing, and you're in DC and you're a woman. What did you learn? >> I learned that you really have to have a lot of grit. You, my mom and dad, these are kind of more southern roots words, but stick with itness, you know. you can't give up and no's not in your vocabulary. I found no is just another way to get to yes. That you have to figure out what are all the questions people are going to ask you. I learned to be very patient, and I think one of the things John, for us was our secret sauce was we said to ourselves, if we're going to do something super transformative and truly disruptive, like Cloud computing, which the government really had not utilized, we had to be patient. We had to answer all their questions, and we could not judge in any way what they were thinking because if we couldn't answer all those questions and prove out the capabilities of Cloud computing, we were not going to accomplish our goals. And I do give so much credit to all my colleagues there from everybody like Steve Schmidt who was there, who's still there, who's the CISO, and Charlie Bell and Peter DeSantis and the entire team there that just really helped build that business out. Without them, you know, we would've just, it was a team effort. And I think that's the thing I loved about it was it was not just sales, it was product, it was development, it was data center operations, it was legal, finance. Everybody really worked as a team and we were on board that we had to make a lot of changes in the government relations team. We had to go into Capitol Hill. We had to talk to them about the changes that were required and really get them to understand why Cloud computing could be such a transformative game changer for the way government operates globally. >> Well, I think the whole world and the tech world can appreciate your work and thank you later because you broke down those walls asking those questions. So great stuff. Now I got to say, you're in kind of a similar role at Flexport. Again, transformative supply chain, not new. Computing wasn't new when before Cloud came. Supply chain, not a new concept, is undergoing radical change and transformation. Online, software supply chain, hardware supply chain, supply chain in general, shipping. This is a big part of our economy and how life is working. Similar kind of thing going on, build out, growth, scale. >> It is, it's very much like that, John, I would say, it's, it's kind of a, the model with freight forwarding and supply chain is fairly, it's not as, there's a lot of technology utilized in this global supply chain world, but it's not integrated. You don't have a common operating picture of what you're doing in your global supply chain. You don't have easy access to the information and visibility. And that's really, you know, I was at a conference last week in LA, and it was, the themes were so similar about transparency, access to data and information, being able to act quickly, drive change, know what was happening. I was like, wow, this sounds familiar. Data, AI, machine learning, visibility, common operating picture. So it is very much the same kind of themes that you heard even with government. I do believe it's an industry that is going through transformation and Flexport has been a group that's come in and said, look, we have this amazing idea, number one to give access to everyone. We want every small business to every large business to every government around the world to be able to trade their goods, think about supply chain logistics in a very different way with information they need and want at their fingertips. So that's kind of thing one, but to apply that technology in a way that's very usable across all systems from an integration perspective. So it's kind of exciting. I used to tell this story years ago, John, and I don't think Michael Dell would mind that I tell this story. One of our first customers when I was at Keyfile Corporation was we did workflow and document management, and Dell was one of our customers. And I remember going out to visit them, and they had runners and they would run around, you know, they would run around the floor and do their orders, right, to get all those computers out the door. And when I think of global trade, in my mind I still see runners, you know, running around and I think that's moved to a very digital, right, world that all this stuff, you don't need people doing this. You have machines doing this now, and you have access to the information, and you know, we still have issues resulting from COVID where we have either an under-abundance or an over-abundance of our supply chain. We still have clogs in our shipping, in the shipping yards around the world. So we, and the ports, so we need to also, we still have some clearing to do. And that's the reason technology is important and will continue to be very important in this world of global trade. >> Yeah, great, great impact for change. I got to ask you about Flexport's inclusion, diversity, and equity programs. What do you got going on there? That's been a big conversation in the industry around keeping a focus on not making one way more than the other, but clearly every company, if they don't have a strong program, will be at a disadvantage. That's well reported by McKinsey and other top consultants, diverse workforces, inclusive, equitable, all perform better. What's Flexport's strategy and how are you guys supporting that in the workplace? >> Well, let me just start by saying really at the core of who I am, since the day I've started understanding that as an individual and a female leader, that I could have an impact. That the words I used, the actions I took, the information that I pulled together and had knowledge of could be meaningful. And I think each and every one of us is responsible to do what we can to make our workplace and the world a more diverse and inclusive place to live and work. And I've always enjoyed kind of the thought that, that I could help empower women around the world in the tech industry. Now I'm hoping to do my little part, John, in that in the supply chain and global trade business. And I would tell you at Flexport we have some amazing women. I'm so excited to get to know all. I've not been there that long yet, but I'm getting to know we have some, we have a very diverse leadership team between men and women at Dave's level. I have some unbelievable women on my team directly that I'm getting to know more, and I'm so impressed with what they're doing. And this is a very, you know, while this industry is different than the world I live in day to day, it's also has a lot of common themes to it. So, you know, for us, we're trying to approach every day by saying, let's make sure both our interviewing cycles, the jobs we feel, how we recruit people, how we put people out there on the platforms, that we have diversity and inclusion and all of that every day. And I can tell you from the top, from Dave and all of our leaders, we just had an offsite and we had a big conversation about this is something. It's a drum beat that we have to think about and live by every day and really check ourselves on a regular basis. But I do think there's so much more room for women in the world to do great things. And one of the, one of the areas, as you know very well, we lost a lot of women during COVID, who just left the workforce again. So we kind of went back unfortunately. So we have to now move forward and make sure that we are giving women the opportunity to have great jobs, have the flexibility they need as they build a family, and have a workplace environment that is trusted for them to come into every day. >> There's now clear visibility, at least in today's world, not withstanding some of the setbacks from COVID, that a young girl can look out in a company and see a path from entry level to the boardroom. That's a big change. A lot than even going back 10, 15, 20 years ago. What's your advice to the folks out there that are paying it forward? You see a lot of executive leaderships have a seat at the table. The board still underrepresented by most numbers, but at least you have now kind of this solidarity at the top, but a lot of people doing a lot more now than I've seen at the next levels down. So now you have this leveled approach. Is that something that you're seeing more of? And credit compare and contrast that to 20 years ago when you were, you know, rising through the ranks? What's different? >> Well, one of the main things, and I honestly do not think about it too much, but there were really no women. There were none. When I showed up in the meetings, I literally, it was me or not me at the table, but at the seat behind the table. The women just weren't in the room, and there were so many more barriers that we had to push through, and that has changed a lot. I mean globally that has changed a lot in the U.S. You know, if you look at just our U.S. House of Representatives and our U.S. Senate, we now have the increasing number of women. Even at leadership levels, you're seeing that change. You have a lot more women on boards than we ever thought we would ever represent. While we are not there, more female CEOs that I get an opportunity to see and talk to. Women starting companies, they do not see the barriers. And I will share, John, globally in the U.S. one of the things that I still see that we have that many other countries don't have, which I'm very proud of, women in the U.S. have a spirit about them that they just don't see the barriers in the same way. They believe that they can accomplish anything. I have two sons, I don't have daughters. I have nieces, and I'm hoping someday to have granddaughters. But I know that a lot of my friends who have granddaughters today talk about the boldness, the fortitude, that they believe that there's nothing they can't accomplish. And I think that's what what we have to instill in every little girl out there, that they can accomplish anything they want to. The world is theirs, and we need to not just do that in the U.S., but around the world. And it was always the thing that struck me when I did all my travels at AWS and now with Flexport, I'm traveling again quite a bit, is just the differences you see in the cultures around the world. And I remember even in the Middle East, how I started seeing it change. You've heard me talk a lot on this program about the fact in both Saudi and Bahrain, over 60% of the tech workers were females and most of them held the the hardest jobs, the security, the architecture, the engineering. But many of them did not hold leadership roles. And that is what we've got to change too. To your point, the middle, we want it to get bigger, but the top, we need to get bigger. We need to make sure women globally have opportunities to hold the most precious leadership roles and demonstrate their capabilities at the very top. But that's changed. And I would say the biggest difference is when we show up, we're actually evaluated properly for those kind of roles. We have a ways to go. But again, that part is really changing. >> Can you share, Teresa, first of all, that's great work you've done and I wan to give you props of that as well and all the work you do. I know you champion a lot of, you know, causes in in this area. One question that comes up a lot, I would love to get your opinion 'cause I think you can contribute heavily here is mentoring and sponsorship is huge, comes up all the time. What advice would you share to folks out there who were, I won't say apprehensive, but maybe nervous about how to do the networking and sponsorship and mentoring? It's not just mentoring, it's sponsorship too. What's your best practice? What advice would you give for the best way to handle that? >> Well yeah, and for the women out there, I would say on the mentorship side, I still see mentorship. Like, I don't think you can ever stop having mentorship. And I like to look at my mentors in different parts of my life because if you want to be a well-rounded person, you may have parts of your life every day that you think I'm doing a great job here and I definitely would like to do better there. Whether it's your spiritual life, your physical life, your work life, you know, your leisure life. But I mean there's, and there's parts of my leadership world that I still seek advice from as I try to do new things even in this world. And I tried some new things in between roles. I went out and asked the people that I respected the most. So I just would say for sure have different mentorships and don't be afraid to have that diversity. But if you have mentorships, the second important thing is show up with a real agenda and questions. Don't waste people's time. I'm very sensitive today. If you're, if you want a mentor, you show up and you use your time super effectively and be prepared for that. Sponsorship is a very different thing. And I don't believe we actually do that still in companies. We worked, thank goodness for my great HR team. When I was at AWS, we worked on a few sponsorship programs where for diversity in general, where we would nominate individuals in the company that we felt that weren't, that had a lot of opportunity for growth, but they just weren't getting a seat at the table. And we brought 'em to the table. And we actually kind of had a Chatham House rules where when they came into the meetings, they had a sponsor, not a mentor. They had a sponsor that was with them the full 18 months of this program. We would bring 'em into executive meetings. They would read docs, they could ask questions. We wanted them to be able to open up and ask crazy questions without, you know, feeling wow, I just couldn't answer this question in a normal environment or setting. And then we tried to make sure once they got through the program that we found jobs and support and other special projects that they could go do. But they still had that sponsor and that group of individuals that they'd gone through the program with, John, that they could keep going back to. And I remember sitting there and they asked me what I wanted to get out of the program, and I said two things. I want you to leave this program and say to yourself, I would've never had that experience if I hadn't gone through this program. I learned so much in 18 months. It would probably taken me five years to learn. And that it helped them in their career. The second thing I told them is I wanted them to go out and recruit individuals that look like them. I said, we need diversity, and unless you all feel that we are in an inclusive environment sponsoring all types of individuals to be part of this company, we're not going to get the job done. And they said, okay. And you know, but it was really one, it was very much about them. That we took a group of individuals that had high potential and a very diverse with diverse backgrounds, held 'em up, taught 'em things that gave them access. And two, selfishly I said, I want more of you in my business. Please help me. And I think those kind of things are helpful, and you have to be thoughtful about these kind of programs. And to me that's more sponsorship. I still have people reach out to me from years ago, you know, Microsoft saying, you were so good with me, can you give me a reference now? Can you talk to me about what I should be doing? And I try to, I'm not pray 100%, some things pray fall through the cracks, but I always try to make the time to talk to those individuals because for me, I am where I am today because I got some of the best advice from people like Don Byrne and Linda Zecker and Andy Jassy, who were very honest and upfront with me about my career. >> Awesome. Well, you got a passion for empowering women in tech, paying it forward, but you're quite accomplished and that's why we're so glad to have you on the program here. President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport. Obviously storied career and your other jobs, specifically Amazon I think, is historic in my mind. This next chapter looks like it's looking good right now. Final question for you, for the few minutes you have left. Tell us what you're up to at Flexport. What's your goals as President, Chief Commercial Officer? What are you trying to accomplish? Share a little bit, what's on your mind with your current job? >> Well, you kind of said it earlier. I think if I look at my own superpowers, I love customers, I love partners. I get my energy, John, from those interactions. So one is to come in and really help us build even a better world class enterprise global sales and marketing team. Really listen to our customers, think about how we interact with them, build the best executive programs we can, think about new ways that we can offer services to them and create new services. One of my favorite things about my career is I think if you're a business leader, it's your job to come back around and tell your product group and your services org what you're hearing from customers. That's how you can be so much more impactful, that you listen, you learn, and you deliver. So that's one big job. The second job for me, which I am so excited about, is that I have an amazing group called flexport.org under me. And flexport.org is doing amazing things around the world to help those in need. We just announced this new funding program for Tech for Refugees, which brings assistance to millions of people in Ukraine, Pakistan, the horn of Africa, and those who are affected by earthquakes. We just took supplies into Turkey and Syria, and Flexport, recently in fact, just did sent three air shipments to Turkey and Syria for these. And I think we did over a hundred trekking shipments to get earthquake relief. And as you can imagine, it was not easy to get into Syria. But you know, we're very active in the Ukraine, and we are, our goal for flexport.org, John, is to continue to work with our commercial customers and team up with them when they're trying to get supplies in to do that in a very cost effective, easy way, as quickly as we can. So that not-for-profit side of me that I'm so, I'm so happy. And you know, Ryan Peterson, who was our founder, this was his brainchild, and he's really taken this to the next level. So I'm honored to be able to pick that up and look for new ways to have impact around the world. And you know, I've always found that I think if you do things right with a company, you can have a beautiful combination of commercial-ity and giving. And I think Flexport does it in such an amazing and unique way. >> Well, the impact that they have with their system and their technology with logistics and shipping and supply chain is a channel for societal change. And I think that's a huge gift that you have that under your purview. So looking forward to finding out more about flexport.org. I can only imagine all the exciting things around sustainability, and we just had Mobile World Congress for Big Cube Broadcast, 5Gs right around the corner. I'm sure that's going to have a huge impact to your business. >> Well, for sure. And just on gas emissions, that's another thing that we are tracking gas, greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact we've already reduced more than 300,000 tons and supported over 600 organizations doing that. So that's a thing we're also trying to make sure that we're being climate aware and ensuring that we are doing the best job we can at that as well. And that was another thing I was honored to be able to do when we were at AWS, is to really cut out greenhouse gas emissions and really go global with our climate initiatives. >> Well Teresa, it's great to have you on. Security, data, 5G, sustainability, business transformation, AI all coming together to change the game. You're in another hot seat, hot roll, big wave. >> Well, John, it's an honor, and just thank you again for doing this and having women on and really representing us in a big way as we celebrate International Women's Day. >> I really appreciate it, it's super important. And these videos have impact, so we're going to do a lot more. And I appreciate your leadership to the industry and thank you so much for taking the time to contribute to our effort. Thank you, Teresa. >> Thank you. Thanks everybody. >> Teresa Carlson, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Flexport. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is International Women's Day broadcast. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro music)

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

>> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

(gentle music) >> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UI path. Hello everyone and welcome >>do the cubes live coverage of UI path forward. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Volante. We are joined by Layla Delage. She is the chief information and digital officer at Coca-Cola. ECEK thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Great to be here. Very exciting. And also Christina Perala, she is the group RPA lead at Generali. Thank you so much for coming into, for inviting me. Thank you. So I want to hear from you both about what, what your industry is and what your role is. Level. Let's start with you. Okay, great. Um, so we are, um, one of the Rogers bottlers within the Coca-Cola system. Uh, we produce, distribute and sell Coca Cola company products. The operating around 10 countries are middle East and central Asia and parts of middle East, Pakistan, Syria and Turkey. They are actually born out of Turkey and that's where our central offices, um, we've operate with 26 plants, around 8,500 employees. >>Uh, we serve a consumer base of 400 million and we have around close to 1 billion, uh, customers. Uh, and we continue to invest in the countries where we operate. And my role is to film and my role is all things digital within this community. So leading technologists, leading technology, all things digital. Yes. So Christina, tell us about Generali. Generalia. Sikora Zuni is a leading insurance company as the presidency. Enough 50 countries worldwide and more than a 70,000 employees that were wider. So it's a bigger company, not only for insurance. And my role with the internet rally group is to leader the LPA program. So I'm inside of the group that I in digital. So am I inside this group, I'm very focused on smart process automation. So RPA plus AI, because a has a, we already know all I loudly, LPA without a AI is announcer nowadays. So we have to keep on talking about AI, machine learning algorithms to enrich, uh, uh, the capabilities of basic robotic sell, hand reach, also the Antwerp and automation of processes. You're the CIO and the CDO. Yes. Yes. That's unique. First of all, there's one that's unique too. It's even more unique than a woman has both roles. So what's the reason behind it? So, um, there's definitely a reason behind it. I joined the Coca Cola >>system about a year ago, so I'm just a over a year in the company. The reason actually I wanted to make sure that we highlight the CIO and CTO CDO role together is, um, I want to advocate for all the it organizations to transform and really get into the digital world and get into the world of advanced technologies, become strategic business partners. Get out of the kitchen, I call it kitchen kitchen, it, you know, get out of the managing of data centers or cloud and um, just the core foundational systems and applications. Get into the advanced technology, understand the business, gain business acumen and deliver solutions based on business needs. So to highlight that, I want to make sure that I hold the role of both and I'm able to be advocate of both worlds. Cause digital without it support is not able to accomplish what they need to accomplish and it needs to get into more of the digital space. And Christina, as the RPA, you write bots, you evangelize the organization. >>Um, mostly the second. So in generally we have a, a very, uh, so, uh, sort of ivory the organization. So for something we are very decentralized, for example, for the developing of robots or the deploying for the action, the operational stuff and so on. Uh, but uh, for some stuff like a guidelines, uh, uh, risk framework to ensure that robots can do their work in the right way with notice to all for the business processes, uh, for this stuff before guidelines, framework, best practice sharing. We are a central centralized, we, we try to be centralized. So, uh, my role is to try to collect is to collect and not try and super lat, uh, best practices and share with you in the companies chair, uh, um, the best use cases. And, uh, also tried to gather what are the main concerns, what are the difficulties in order to a facilitator and to boost smarter process automation of the option. So >>Laila, you are up on the main stage this morning. You, I Pat highlighted Coca Cola itchy as a, as a customer that is embraced automation, embrace the UI pass solution. So tell us a little bit about the challenges you are facing and then why you chose I a UI path. So as I joined the company, uh, I introduced a very strong digital strategy that required a lot of change and it's within a company that has been very successfully operating all these years and doing pretty much know what to do very well. And all of a sudden with digital we are starting to disrupt the, are trying to say, Hey, we've got to change the way, do some of the things. Um, so belief in digital and belief that it can really bring efficiency and outcomes was very important. And I needed a quick win. I needed to have a technology or a solution or an outcome that I would generate very quickly and show to the whole organization that this can be done and we can do this as Coca-Cola. TJ. >>So that was, that was RPA, that was our PA for this fascinates me because you're an incumbent business, been around for a long time. you're a bottler and distributor, right? So yeah, processes are around the bottling plants and the distribution system. Yes. And now you're transforming into a digital business. Yes. I'll put data at your core. Totally not start his daytime customer. Okay. So describe the difference between the traditional business and what it looks like when you've transformed, particularly from a data perspective. And then I want to understand what role RPA plays. So we are definitely a very data rich company, however, to call ourselves data rich and to call it a strategic asset, I first need to capture and control my data and I have to treat it like a strategic asset. So that is a huge transformation. The second, once you treat it as an asset, how do you generate more insights? >>And I call this augmenting the gut feeling. I have an amazing gut feeling in the company. How do I augment that with data and provide our, this is partners and then our customers and our suppliers and some of the information. And then obviously future maturity level is, you know, shared economy and data monetization, et cetera. So that's how I describe within the company. And then assets, other assets like our plants and coolers cooler, we call it cooler, you know, where do you actually see all our products? They are called, they are visible and they are available, but they are also in that set where I can turn them into a digital cooler and I can do so much more with the cooler that standing. And I recently, in one of our leadership meetings I said we have as many coolers as the um, population on the fishy Island, which is close to 1 million. >>So just imagine in this new world, in this digital era, everything that you can do by just having a cooler, 1 million coolers present out there on the street, I can serve the consumers, I can serve customers with very different information. So that's kind of what I mean by turning the business into a digital business. So that's an awesome story. By the way, how does RPA fit into that vision? RPA is everywhere in division. So I said when I started the journey, uh, any digital journey has some Muslim battles for me. There are four must win battles. I need to get certain things right in it, in the, and that was one, one of the Mustin battles was alteration. So we have to create efficiency, we have to optimize, we have to streamline. And we said automation first. Um, and we started with, I call it robotics and automation. >>And I agree with what you said, Christina. It's more than just robots. It's actually a strategic application. It could be a good old ERP. It's the RPA, it's AI, it's all the other technologies that are out there that they bring the two of them brings. So how do you create this end to end solution using all the trends, technologies to create optimization? Uh, our goal was how do we get back to our customer much faster. We had so many customer facing processes and they're going to be there forever. They are a very customer centric customer into company obviously. So how do I get back to my customer faster? How do I make my employees just happy? They were working on so many things would be until midnight over time during weekends. How do I take that away from them? So we called it lifting the weight of the shoulders and giving you a new capabilities. So again, augmentation and then giving them that space. So we had uh, three of my employees upskilled and reskilled themselves. They became a developers in the robotics space, a couple of fire functional, um, colleagues are now reskilling themselves because now they have the time to reskill. More importantly, they have the time to actually leverage their expertise and they are so much more motivated. The engagement, the employee engagement is increasing. So that's how we are positioning RPA. Pristina ICU >>nodding a lot, your head too. A lot of what Layla is saying. I'm wondering if you can talk to about any best practices that have emerged as you've implemented RPA at Generali to what you've learned. Yes, for sure. Um, we have a lot of processes automated, uh, all around the group. Uh, but we are not, we have not reached our maximum or, uh, benefits, uh, gaining. So what we need to do right now is to try to boost the smart process automation, uh, via analyzing the issue around value, Cena. So each business area of the value chain because currently we have countries that has, that have a different level of maturity. So, so some countries are at the very beginning and we have to help them with best practice sharings with a huge case, successful use cases. And we are, uh, we have a lot of help from parts into, in this because locally and who I Potter as a, a very strong presence and is very powerful in doing that. >>And, uh, now, uh, our next mouth are very focused on try to, um, uh, deep dive, the vertical, our area of the issue around value chain and identify which are the processes inside them are best to automated. Uh, uh, Basinger. Uh, these activities are not so you, I part, we'd, his experience has created a heat mapper, value chain Heath mapper. And so it's given up as some advice where to focus our strengths, our hand energy in automating. And I think that this is a very huge, uh, uh, support that you are UI parties given us. So it's not just a matter of, okay, let's start, uh, uh, do some, uh, process assessment in order to identify which processes are the best candidates to be automated. But, uh, we have, uh, how our back, uh, us. So we, we are, uh, we have the backing of UI pass saying it's better to do that and automate in depth, uh, processes of that, but Oh, the value chain. So we are starting a program to do that with all the countries or the vertical area of the country. So, and I think that this could really bring a, uh, high benefits and can, uh, uh, drive us to, uh, really having a scaling up in using a smart process, automation and UI. But you a bot ecosystem not only are, so >>one of the nice things about RPA is you can take the software robots and apply them to an existing process. A lot of times changing processes and a lot of times almost always changing processes is painful. However, we've talked to some customers that have said by applying RPA to our business, it's exposed some really bad processes. Have you experienced that and can you maybe share that experience with it? Absolutely. So for us, one of the initial, um, robots, we applied to a customer facing process. It was our field team trying to get back to our customer with a, with some information. And we realize that the, um, the cycle time was very long. And the reason is there are four functions involved in answering the question and seven different applications are being touched all the way from XL to ERP to CRM. So what we did obviously bringing a strategic solution to fix the cycle time and reduce that to streamline the process was going to take us long. So RPA was great help. We reduced the cycle time by putting a robot and we were able to get back to ours, priests, sales team in the field in matter of minutes. What used to take hours was now being responded to in minutes. Now that doesn't mean that process is perfect, but that's our next step. So we created value for our customer and our sales team within the field, um, before, you know, streamlining and going into a bigger initiatives. So then you could share Christina. >>Yes. Uh, so, um, it is necessary to automate something that could be automated. So, uh, it is necessarily to out optimize the process before automating it, but sometimes it's better to automate it as Caesar because, uh, also the not optimize the process can bring value if ultimated. So let me share an example. If you, for example, have to migrate some data obviously is a one shot, uh, uh, activity. But with the robot you can do it in a very short, well sharp timer. Maybe it's not the best, uh, process to be automated, but that could be useful as well. So it's always a matter of understanding the costs and the benefits. Uh, and sometimes, uh, FBA is very quickly, is very quick to be implemented and can be, can have a, also a lot of savings instead of integrating instead of doing more complex things. >>And then other things, uh, that it's important to take into account is that, uh, uh, after having a automating goal, all the low hanging fruits and so the processes with a low cost, uh, uh, low complexity and high benefits, uh, then it starts to facer when it's necessary to understand how to the end to end processes. Because, uh, it happens, uh, in, uh, some of our countries that, uh, the second phase is very difficult because, uh, the situation is that you have very, um, a lot of very fermented processes. And so before automating it is necessary to apply operational efficiency methodology, lean six Sigma, rare business process for engineering and then automate it. So it's a longer trip. And our Amer as group head office in general is to give these kinds of methodologies and best practices for all kinds of level of maturity in our countries. So finally, w what is the customer is the employee response then in terms of how you're talking a lot about streamlining, getting rid of these tedious tasks that took forever, how, how our employees reacting to the implementation. >>So we, um, we actually launched the, uh, announce announced RPA robotics and automation with a Hekaton in our company. And we invited 40 colleagues from various functions and two and everybody from the business was there and they participated actually in gathering ideas and prioritizing what matters most to the company. And we looked at customer, we looked at compliance, we look to the employee and we actually with during the hackathon you iPad team helped us to go live with one of the robots. They were mesmerized. They couldn't believe that this could happen. I think that's where we kind of engaged them and now going forward everyone who generate the idea was part of the building of the robots so they continue to be engaged to me allowed them to name the robots so they start naming and once the robots were alive yet literally had some of our teams who are dancing from happiness and I think that said it all. That was the strongest voice of our business partner and we published that video. So our business partners became our advocates and that's really our how we born the robotic and automation within CCI. We have so many advocates right now they are coming to us. Our business partners are coming to us with more use cases and they are actually, they are sharing with rest of the system within Coca-Cola and with the group that we are part of locally in Turkey, they are sharing their stories. So now we have a hype going on in the system. >>Yes. And in generally, um, at the beginning, uh, we face some fears in our employees fears of losing their job, but fear is not be able to use this kind of technology. Uh, but, uh, also with the help of HR because I, Charlie is, uh, driving a huge program of upskilling and reskilling of people. Uh, nowadays, uh, also hand user are very happy to use robotics, uh, because, uh, uh, when they realize that they can really help in their activities, in their very boring and not useful activities, they are very happy to enjoy this, this program. But it is so, uh, it, it was a trip, a journey with the employees to make them understand that it's not something that, uh, is affecting their job. So, at least in generally group, we are, we are programming, uh, these, uh, uh, or employees, uh, journey in order to make them, uh, uh, to have more, uh, uh, awareness about robotics and not be scared about it. Layla and Christina, thank you both so much for coming on the cube. It was wonderful. Thank you very much for you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Volante. Please stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of UI path forward.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to two cubes. Live coverage in San Francisco, California for VM World 2019. I'm John Ferrier, Postal Cuba David Lattin, My Coast, Dave. 10 years covering the BM World Paul Maritz laid out the stack early on. We saw that and watch it go through Its motions now >> remain from the marketing people got a hold of >> that mainframe turned into cloud Now hybrid cloud seven years after we first started about 2012 has been great Our next guest, Paul Falsone, S V. P and general manager of the Cloud Native APS. This is a business unit within VM where that is going to the next level. This is the Act three is Jerry Chen said any of you I talked earlier for VM wears a company. I won't say moving up the staff because there is no stack. It's cloud, right? So its applications on top of operating infrastructure Dev ops going enterprise scale is about developers building APS operating them in scale. This is a big focus of what you're doing. >> It is a dead end of the day. One of my close friend of mine, who's in front of customers all the time, reminds our team constantly that our customers applications matter of the most cause. That's what they used to get in front of their customers with the Dillman teams and the tools they're building the user. Japs come second cause that's what supports the abs. And then the infrastructure comes third zone away. There is that stacks it, but never forget you were at the bottom of the pecking order, if you will, when it comes to ultimately bringing full customer value to our company, our customers, businesses. >> And it's one of the things we've been looking back at our 10 years covering VM where I think you're 13 15 of'em world is that the virtual ization of all very quickly around really optimizing server virtualization really kind of change. The game of one kind of knows that our knows the history there, but it did it without any code changes, too, APs and I think that was a very innovative thing. Now we looking containers and what Kubernetes is bringing to the table. You're starting to get some clear visibility into what's happening and what's possible. Could >> you >> share your vision on what that visibility is that you guys are eyeing for the marketplace in four of'em, where, >> sure, the APP development methodologies are changing, changing more today than they have in the last 20 years. We're seeing ah lot of new concepts and approaches that right now really only accessible to a small percentage of application developers worldwide. We want to try to bring those application development methodologies, practices tools to the mainstream so we can. We can touch the 13 or $14 million.1,000,000 enterprise developers around the world and help the CEOs in their line of business counterparts at our customers get a CZ much productivity out of their development teams as possible. At the end of the day, those APS we're gonna power the next decade of those organizations success or failures with their customers, and so that's becoming a real competitive asset. I've had a number of customer discussions here this week where the primary theme is how me help my developers move faster at enterprise scale, but in a regulated environment in an environment where compliance is is front center >> to big things going on in your world that we covered extensively, honestly, pretty impactful to the Vienna, where portfolio one as open source and hefty oh, acquisition half a billion dollars almost a year ago, about a year left in less than a year, probably was that we close in December last year. So yes, ovary. Just recently we know those guys all people. I mean, I've been covering that for a while, and then I'll see the pivotal acquisition. Just announced a drink from the fire hose. There be doing tons of press briefings, those to impact points, kind of leaving a mark. >> So we've been we've been building up to this. I joined AA Drink them were in 2012 through the Sierra acquisition, but I moved into this role about just about three years ago, and one of the things that we identified early on was, ah, close partnership with Pivotal was going to be essential inside of the Del Technologies umbrella for us to exist in thrive together. And so that's where the idea for P Cass was born. So the combination of V. M. R. R and D with pivotal RND focused on delivering our first community service to our enterprise. Customers we brought helped you in last year. Once they saw what we were doing and thought about the possibility of what would happen if we actually took some of the concepts of communities and p ks and embed them into V sphere, That was, I think, the real ah ha moment for for us and the happier team coming together in the power of what that could enable. But all along the way, we always believed that that was just covering the infrastructure side of the equation. You still needed to get through the making the APP developers productive and efficient in this new infrastructure world and so on to be able to do so on any cloud. And that's where the pivotal piece finally came together last just last month. July Pivotal put out a lot of information in the market around how they're evolving their portfolio to be very cool, bernetti centric, moving forward. And that was a big part about getting all the pieces lined up so that the M word could deliver what we announced this week. The in the town's a portfolio with the component tree for building running in managing modern applications on any club, >> we've kind of come full circle here, predates, and I Sarah, But you guys talking about the stack? Yeah. Paul Moretz. I used to have the whole stack. Ed actually applications up here with Simba. Spring sources around. Exactly. And then you had these when I used to call the misfit toys. Have you had some assets in the M. C as coming in Vienna, where Paul Maritz, Joe Tucci decided, create pivotal as the The platform developed next generation applications. Now it's all come full circle there. So my question is related to that stack and particularly the death part of that stack. This audience is not Deb's not, but increasingly, you've gotta attract that audience. So what's what's your thoughts there? And so >> I think pivotals done a very nice job over the years through the Con Foundry Foundation. The work they've done there through the spring community Spring is at this stage is is arguably the most popular modern Java development environment on the planet. So, you know, we're seeing a tremendous amount of leverage of that of that framework and so between the events of pimples is actively involved in Leeds and their ability to help customers, um teach their enterprise developers how to get the most out of this modern tool kit. We think that there is some wonderful ingredients to a recipe to really scale this thing up in a big way. We way. I also believe that Veum we're still has a lot to learn about what it means to best support enterprise developers and their organizations. And so we are quite a bit in learning mode right now. We're gonna take a lot of lessons from the pivotal team as we as we move forward towards the close and learn a lot more about the team in the culture and their customer engagements. But one of the things I think is is front and center to what pivotal has for customers today is their transformation Service's customers. You've got different groups inside a customer summer looking to build the newest applications. Some of them are just trying to get more operational efficiency out of what they have today. Some of these customers have 12,000 applications in their environments. Um, pivotal has ah set of service is that come in and they help them take their existing monolithic applications and just modernize key components of them so they can operate them more efficiently and reclaim a lot of resources to go do other things. That, I think is probably the lowest hanging fruit for enterprise organizations today. And I'm very, very excited about the service is that pimple has to make available the customers on that front. >> Assad and Jerry Chen, earlier than the other set I was mentioning earlier is a VC now, Greylock, big time to your one. We see former VM Where, uh, guy from 22,003. He also worked on cloud foundries in sight. We ask about the white spaces where starts to thrive in one of the transit is kind of pointing to was have some cummings going public. Some are being bought at sizable numbers, but we rift on. The idea of monitoring was a boring category right now. Observe ability, which is just be monitoring 2.0, you got I pose. You got acquisitions. I mean, major action happening in this observe ability space. I bring this up because that's an area you think, Oh, it's a white space Data opportunities for companies to build service is really points to this cloud. 2.0 application Renaissance And I want to get your thoughts on that environment. What needs to be in place to make that happen? Honestly, pivotals keep for you guys. I get that on Vienna. Where side, but for the ecosystem and for the marketplace, people trying to make careers and or do things What is that cloud 2.0, complexity that need to be abstracted away or >> so The Pepto team had a great Craig and Joe had this great, uh, one liner on kubernetes is all about where the people structure meets the infrastructure. When you think about that, our enterprise organizations have thousands if not tens of thousands of developers all trying to do similar. But a lot of cases different things at the same time, across lots of different cloud infrastructures. On the infrastructure team side, you've got private cloud, you've got hybrid cloud. You've got public cloud environments that you have to get your arms around, monitor, manage, secure and get visibility into. We believe that Carini sits at that perfect layer between the two domains on. This is a big part of why we developed Tom's a mission control. It's just that that perfect layer between the two domains, too, access the company's later and give you full visibility into what all of your developers were doing on every piece of your infrastructure. And we also think that's gonna be a very interesting place for third parties to plug into to gain access to all of the community's clusters that we're helping. Our customers managed across their app landscape to do very interesting things. And so we're really excited about the ecosystem that that project will open up. >> You think this opportunity to start ups in there? >> I do. I do. I think there's a ton of other I mean, think about it just really basic math. Ah, VM based application. When it gets containerized, it has just on the compute side alone. Never mind the networking in the storage site. There are 10 times as many moving parts. A typical containerized EPA's 10 times as many moving parts as avian bay Step. If you think about that applied to the networking layer, you think about that applied to the storage layer, the security layer. You've got 10 times as many points to secure. Now, how do you get your head around that level of complexity As a an operations person, you can't do it. Humans can't do it anywhere. You can't write down your actions. Control this on a pad of paper and know what's what's accessing what anymore, >> Dave. One more question, if I may, on the on the VM container thing, there's a debate or are architectural kind of conversation, and customers are having around when to do containers in three days on bare metal or with V EMS. How do you guys talk to that house? The >> steam going because that was my question. So there was a snarky tweets yesterday. I want to get your reaction to it. And the tweet was during yesterday's keynote. I thought we we launched pivotal so that we didn't have to run containers on V EMS. Now the reality to your point is that people are running containers on bare metal. They're running him on vehement the EMS. I don't have any data, but I wonder if you could comment on that >> so way Probably have a couple of snarky comments of our own on this three share one of the things that put up on stage. Yes, I'll start at the kind of a little little. And I worked my way up at the base layer. The testing we're doing with Project Pacific, which is something we announced this week, which is effectively bringing kubernetes into the heart of the sphere. We're actually using combinations to make the sphere better. We're also going to expose communities to our customers through V sphere, just like we exposed the EMS today. This is a pretty exciting project for the for the company in our early testing of this project, based on the advanced scheduling capabilities of the SX hyper visor take advantage of modern hardware. We're seeing an 8% better performance in a certain test sweet versus what you'd see on bare metal so are ready at the early stages. We're seeing some benefits now take that a step further. The big public college for writers out there if you look at service is like G K on Google. If you look at a ks, uh, recast on Amazon, a cast on his door, every single one of their community service is is run against a virtualized environment, not on a bare metal environment. Why is that? Well, because their customers are using containers in VM, side by side, the flexibility you get out of that virtualization layer. Whether you're a big public cloud provider or your ah smaller enterprise shop running your own data centers, the benefits are proportionate, rather equal on dso >> the narratives off a little bit. What you're saying. What I hear you saying is people use virtualization for a lot of efficiency and scale reasons that's independent of what happens with bearnaise decisions. So if you decide you want to run Cubans on bare metal, go >> to go to town. We think >> if you want to do that, >> you want to do that. But we don't. We actually see a lot of customers who have started down that path. When they go to get to that operational stage, they're realizing they're now dealing with firm where again, they're dealing with Nick drivers again. They're dealing with stuff, and they can easily take that and turn it over to their ops team that's already managing a huge virtualized state and operated with the same tool. >> That's a really a layer thing around round scale. You do the virtual ization for Ryan reasons, and then cos sits on top of it for a whole another reason. >> And the I'd say its operations scale these operations teams need to, you know, just look at the number of announcements we made this week. For an ops team to get their head around all of these new technologies simultaneously is impossible to bring them in one new capability of time into the thing that they're already operating for. That organization is very >> positive. If I understood yesterday, you're claiming better before 8% better performance relative to bare metal. I know that's apples to apples. Or what kind of juicing you're doing on the benchmark >> sex schedule that it chooses it right there. >> I want to ask you about integration and look at it as a quasi. His story of the the industry. You go back to see A with all the acquisitions, right? Historical force it with fusion. Different layer of the stack. I know. Certainly Del did a lot of acquisitions. Some of them work. Some of them didn t m c. Same thing pretty successful. Actually. VM were great engineering. Um, very strong. Go to market on really good acquisitions. My question is on integration with the nice Sarah background, I wonder. I mean, nice. Sarah seems to be very well integrated into the VM. Where platform How is integration The state of integration today within V. M. Where is it a lot easier today because we're living in this AP I economy. What about VM? Wears sort of integration ethos. One of the challenges. I wonder if you could comment and that long. So >> I've been through, uh, to significant integrations of'em where the 1st 1 was with this nice era on. I was on the I was on the incoming side, not the receiving side. The next was with hep Theo. I was on the receiving side, not the incoming side. And so, as coming into this year, back in 2012 Pat was extremely supportive and asked his entire team to be very supportive of getting us integrated quickly and productive. A CZ fastest possible. We were on campus on the via more campus from the next era office within days of the deal closing. That's how efficient Veum work. That's like that's the mindset hammerhead coming into. We were in a building. We were co located with the other networking engineers and product managers. Within the first week on, we were off to the races. That was about 100 20 person company. Hep Ko is about 100% company, Um, about the same efficiency we were consolidating. Offices were bringing them over again, mostly distributed team, but they had a center of gravity. In Seattle. We had a center of gravity in Bellevue. We brought the team's over within within a couple of months in about three months. In three and 1/2 months in, we had the team fully integrated. The organizational design done all the tools in a greater we're all in the same systems. So what happens very quickly now, an organization that's much bigger like like pivotal 3000 employees. Public company takes a little bit longer to get from Deal announced the deal close because it's too public entities. It'll take a little bit longer to do all the integration, but we're already thinking thinking about we know them so well and they know us so well. We already know where the potential landmines are, where the potential rough spots are. Pat prides himself and, uh, this pushes down into the rest of them were on well, welcoming new team members in new groups into the company. And so we try to do that really were very culturally sensitive way optimized for the right tool kit s O that we take, we take some learning like cloud health. When they came in, they had a lot of expertise around. SAS drooling and support of customers were adopting all of that, right. Were jettisoned some of our older tools in favor of some of the things that >> we're gonna win the modernization. So I want to get your thoughts on the last question for the second congratulations, your your your area. We love what you're doing. We think it's super important. Would be covering it like a blanket this year and going forward. But Pakistan came on was wrapped. Talking about 10 years and doing the riffing on the Cube are 10 years covering it. We have some 10 years forward, which waves to be on. They highlighted on the past 10 years in this ear acquisition as a critical moment to bring VM. We're into the S T D C kind of concept started networking up, so we know the history they're sti n and then going forward, he says. If you're not a networking and security in the next wave and Kubernetes is Number one, you're really gonna be missing out. So we highlighted networking, security and kubernetes. But networking. It's nice here on both sides of that 10 year spectrum. You're part of that. >> Why is that? Why is that wise >> watching people know that networking is the most important piece of the wave here? What's the relevance of what he's saying? Share their thoughts on >> Think about the increasing complexity of what at modernization drives into the infrastructure. You're getting smaller and smaller moving parts that that need to operate together at scale in a comprehensive, logical way. But at any point in time, if you're if you're an enterprise organization, if you've got if you've got compliance requirements, audit ability, requirements. If you want to protect, you hear about the number of of small towns that get blackmailed on a daily basis because someone's secured an encrypted There, there, there count taxpayer data and they're there, their victims. All right, this is this >> is some say, cyber warfare. >> It is something. So if you think about in orderto help, our customers get the most out of their developers, these tools that open up I think the potential of a lot more avenues of attack get a lot more complex. And so we think that these two have to progress hand in hand. One. We do want to help developers go as fast as possible. We won't help enterprises get the most out of those developers. That's a big part of why we brought them were into into the damn warfare. We're bringing a pivotal into the VM. We're family, but at the same time, we recognize that the infrastructure has to progress. Every bit is fast, and the network is the thing that ties all these parts together. Whether it's a layer three year layer for networking today or level layer several networking layer seven AP I based networking in the future >> all. I mean, I'm not gonna bring up I ot or industrial i ot to takeovers of physical devices, whether it's a self driving bus off a cliff or taking over towns and cities warfare, I mean the service areas of enormous networks, Internet connectivity applications over the cloud native. Anyway, we know that, right? So a lot to talk about. Thanks for coming on. The Cube Sharing your insight. Senior Vice President, General manager, The Cloud Native APS Group. This is really the key instrument with envy em where to take kubernetes and the advancement of cloud to 0.0 to the next level. I'm John for a day. Volante, be back after this short break.

>> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We are here in the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host here with Rehan Jalil, former president and CEO of Elastica, here to talk about the People First network and his approach and experiences and his entrepreneurial journey. Rehan thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting. >> So we were talking before we came on. You have a great entrepreneurial journey. It's a great podcast up on the Mayfield.com website. Really a good story about what you've done. But you had a lot of different kind of experiences through your progression journey in entrepreneurship. You had some failures and some successes. And certainly now with cloud security hot, I'm sure you're probably go into another one. But what it's like right now for you? You just left Semantic. You're kind of out on your own. Are you clipping coupons? Going to go to the beach and hang out? Are you working on a new startup? What's happening? >> I think there's a lot to do. Frankly for me it's very important to actually understand some new problems that needs to be solved. Especially there's so much changing with AI and all the intrusions are you're seeing and breaches that are going on. There are new problems to solve and that's where my head is. I'm not going to take too much of a break. I'm going to get going. >> Yeah you seem to get it going. And that's, most entrepreneurs do that. Let's talk about some of the experience you have. And one of the things we were talking about, before I got my cameras out, back in the old days when before internet, broadband wireless was hot, you get a startup around Wimax, which was early days of broadband wireless. And then you had some failures that successes but didn't work out. Then you had another wireless startup that was successful that became part of that 4G movement. This is an example of being correct in the thesis but you picked the wrong door to go through. Talk about that journey because I think that time in history, this was around 2001, 2002, 2003 timeframe. This was the internet was growing. Wireless, we didn't have the phones we have now. Obviously it's smartphone in 2007 years later. This was pre-mobile boom. This was the beginning of the shift to broadband, true broadband. Now we see it everywhere: LTE, 5G's around the corner. This was a pivotal moment, but for you, you were as an entrepreneur, you had the right decision, broadband wireless, but it was shifting. Feels like cloud today but I want to get in touch here. What did you learn? >> I think they were two very different companies. The mission of the first company which I joined as an employee, the first company, which was to take the high speed internet to the masses. In US and some developed world, they were DSL and cable kind of first coming up, but that infrastructure did not exist in the rest of the world, and the mission was that if we could take same level of high speed connectivity and enable it for the rest of the world, it'd be really cool. And this is back in the day. So thesis was right and hence I joined that company. And it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. But I think one thing you have to realize, even in those times, to do such a massive project and to go against some massive incumbents which exist in those ecosystems, the differentiation has to be extremely high. And to create differentiation on the radio side of things is just very difficult. And I think so, and of course at that time, the economy took a bad turn and that company didn't have some significant big outcome. From that learning I evolved a thesis that this technology needs to go mobile and this is again pre-iPhone times. It was Blackberry times. So if you were to go talk to investor and say look the world is going to look like when we will have internet in our pocket, the people would smile at you. It's like what are you talking about? So even raising money for that was not easy and that was my first company that I started myself called WiChorus. And these there was what if you could have DSL-type connectivity and literally all internet's power in your pocket. But the learnings from that first company were that if you go try to do that in straight in the wireless side of things in a telco environment, the competition is going to be significantly high. >> The scale, the presence, the market power they have. >> And the purchasing side. Most important is the purchasing cycles. People take time. Even if you come up with something really compelling, by the time it's going to be getting deployed, somebody will catch up to you. >> I mean just think about the time. This is a time for the folks watching, if you're younger or even older like my age, think about it. To actually have a phone in the car and surfing the internet didn't exist. I mean you could barely get email just through a lower latency and a lower bandwidth internet tower. They didn't have the broadband. And so today we surf, watch movies in the car. This was pre-broadband. So I remember a time when we were testing one router, it's like look it we're getting a ping back while we're driving down 101. That was like a miracle. Now it's standard. This is when big shifts happen and a lot of people are comparing that kind of environment to what we're seeing with cloud computing now. You're seeing Amazon Web Services, 26, 27 billion dollar run rate from just 47% a year. Google with great technology and now entering in. Microsoft pivoting to cloud. Those are big players and startups are now trying to figure out what you learned and how to not get in the way but also draft off the momentum. What's your view of this and what advice do you have for entrepreneurs that are out there because this is the number one question that I hear and I talk about entrepreneurs, either behind closed doors or on theCUBE. >> I think it's a blessing to have actually some infrastructure like that, but if you don't do it right it could be a curse. What I mean by that is that you have to leverage something that is available to you and not trying to kind of reinvent, do something slightly better. So I think on the infrastructure side, you have to be very thoughtful on where you could potentially play. And we're frankly some of the big players like AWS or Microsoft and perhaps Google is going to be basically wanting to actually play themselves in that area. However having said that, but the ecosystem and the layer of services that is made available, it's actually a big, big blessing for startups because all the value creation is kind of moving up the chain. And if you leverage that, then the cost of building startups and cost of doing new things is kind of gone down. So we did something very similar with Elastica, which was all about security for the cloud from the cloud. And if we didn't have that infrastructure and the layer available the amount of money that would have required would have been significantly higher. >> So the cloud gets you scaled up, leveled up quicker. Faster to go to market, more agile and dynamic, and then you could wrap IP around those old tasks of provisioning servers. >> There's plenty of intellectual property that first you can put on top of it but in a verticalized fashion. At least for Elastica it was very much kind of a vertical solution of security for the cloud in SaaS applications itself instead of trying to redo your own servers and server stack and our mission. I mean things that are available, just make use of it. >> So you guys were successful with the cloud and you sold that company to Symantec. What year was that? >> Actually it was 2015. We sold it to Bluecoat. And the Bluecoat got acquired by Symantec but then Bluecoat management took over Symantec and that was hurried. So we had like two acquisitions back to back. >> That's nice. It's a good experience. So I want to, before we move on to some of the things that are more personal, I want to get your take on an entrepreneurial dynamic that a lot of successful entrepreneurs take and I want to get your reaction to. Most entrepreneurs are very optimistic. They see the opportunity recognition. They go for it. They're persistent. But they're also in discovery mode to validate their thesis and always kind of self-aware, but there's always the fatal flaw out there that potentially could be there. We talked about broadband wireless, directionally correct, good concept, its fatal flaw was the incumbents. How do you in essence debug a startup venture, venture architecture or venture plan because if there's a fatal flaw in there it's like a bug in software. How as an entrepreneur do you debug that? I mean in your journey as you've had successes and you learned from some of the things that were teachable moments for you, is there a debugging formula? How would you react to that? How would you explain to entrepreneurs? Because that's what they always are naturally doing. Where's the fatal flaw? Where's the fatal flaw? >> And it's I think extremely important. Firstly, the intellectual honesty in setting your own direction is very important. You certainly have to have the aspiration to go do something and have that initiative to go do it, but at the same time setting direction is the most important thing or keep tuning the direction over time is actually extremely important. And then there is no one answer. The key thing is that if you're going to be building something, you have to see if there's going to be a big market for it. That's the first thing. And then when you're going to get there, how the adoption is going to be there. Would you have advantage in adoption as compared to incumbents if they get there? So I think you have to have a thesis because you just can't always project the right way, especially in the enterprise side of things. And if you can actually crack that code, and then if when you do offer this to the market, is it going to be easy to adopt? Easy to accept by the customers? And would it have some kind of an effect of quick movement? I think you have to have all those right. And some trend, if it kind of gives you support. Like when we built Elastica, there was thesis the cloud is going to take over. The SaaS is going to happen. >> That was a tailwind for you. >> So it was a tailwind. So it happened interestingly at the times when we had the product. Same actually happened for WiChorus interestingly, with a thesis that the need of very high speed internet to a mobile device, this is pre-iPhone times, would happen and luckily iPhone came on in around 2007 timeframe and we had the product which telco's would have needed and the iPhone came along. And we ended up building one of the first 4G networks along with ClearY in southern California. So I think all these things kind of have to line up. The market timing, your strategic advantage, your acceptance, all these stuff. >> The self awareness is a great point. Also having versatility and having the skills to flex because to get all those things right you're kind of juggling. And that persistence. Okay I got to ask you about People First. What does People First mean to you? >> At the end I think frankly that is the core, core of startups. And we've been kind of lucky within Elastica. Our main reason for success has been that the team that we ended up having and building over time, they not only had actually very good, diverse skill set because Elastica required very diverse skill set from networking to cloud to AI to all those. But the chemistry between the team was also quite amazing. So I think if you understand that not only the people and the company and the dynamics within them is going to be, which is going to be required, then you start paying attention to the culture that goes along with it. So the culture of executing as well as doing it with kindness and humility along the way. >> Sharing your experience, the journey together, co-creating, kind of creating that superglue in the culture. That's super important. What have you learned over your journey around the where it's worked, where it hasn't cause a lot of people are trying to figure out that people equation, and it's people they really if they sincerely believe they want to do it then but sometimes people don't know the playbook. Is there a playbook or people just go by their gut? What's your advice on in terms of hey I really want to get my people equation right. I want to get that right. We have a mission, you share that mission. What are some of the things that entrepreneurs and companies can do like immediately that's easy to get going? >> I think being is communication. And upfront I continue to start communicating not just in words, but in the things that you do yourself. Because it's not words don't count. How you actually deal with people and how you should treat them and how you actually collaborate additionally really matters. And that actually is the driving force of actually starting a culture I would say in place. And then if you observe anything that aren't working out, communication is going to be the key. You openly communicate and do it in a way that it is not a hostile environment. >> I love your history. I love your background. My personal family as a family of immigrants has come to the United States. You have a very immigrant story. Andy Grove was an immigrant, founder of Intel. I mean Silicon Valley is born, entrepreneurship is indiscriminate. Entrepreneurs are who they are but you have an interesting story where you came from, how you came to Silicon Valley. Tell that story. >> So I was born in Pakistan. My parents were born in India so they migrated to Pakistan which just happens to be that I came here for studies. Interestingly I didn't know much about Silicon Valley to be honest and I happened to have a job in Sun Microsystems that happened to be in Silicon Valley, but when I came here it was kind of a blessing. This is exactly where I needed to be because even when I was going to grad school I had the aspiration to actually go do something on my own but I didn't know how. And when you come here to Silicon Valley, the people around you and the friendships that you create here and the relations that you build here and what you learn from the other people is actually quite amazing. So I feel very blessed. >> And it really is a special place and you have to kind of understand that vibe and culture. I want to ask you a personal question. A lot of entrepreneurs think they can go to business school and get an entrepreneurship degree, and some do, but I always have that debate. You're kind of born with this kind of my philosophy. Some people might debate that. It's always a classic debate: are you born with it or can you learn it or both. Some people know their entrepreneurship early on. Some figure out like me when I'm in my 30's. That's when I kind of figured it out that I have that entrepreneurial talent looking back at some of the things I did. When did you find out that you knew that you were entrepreneurial and wanted to build stuff on your own and this is who I am as a person. What was that moment like? >> I think very early. I didn't have any doubt. This was undergrad times back in my undergrad school in Pakistan. I think I just knew that I'll be doing something on my own and that's exactly what I wanted to do so how I would do it, what time it was going to be, I didn't know any of that. But I had some belief in my mind that I'm going to basically build some things and build business around it. So it was quite early. >> You were lucky, got some time. And when you came to Silicon Valley, what were some of the things you did? Was it like a oh my God this is an amazing place or did you have to do some networking? What were some of the things that you did when you first came in to really kind of get in to that groove swing, entrepreneurial groove swing? >> This is one of those times when Sun was, is an amazing place. I ended up at Sun Microsystems and the people there were unbelievably talented. They have all kind of talented people there. >> Very entrepreneurial. Two coming out of Stanford, Scott McNeely, all the early DNA was very entrepreneurial. >> Exactly. So I think that was again a place where you could learn a lot not just in technology but actually how to solve problems, how to understand customer problems that you could solve and build new technology on top of it. And I didn't stay there that long. Within a couple of years, I decided that I need to go basically join a small company where I could do more things beyond just designing one aspect. I was building microprocessor designs. Instead of just doing that I could do other roles also. So I joined the broadband wireless company after that opportunity. >> As an entrepreneur, one of the big decisions is who are you going to marry in terms of the VC or partner, financial partner. It truly is taking on a new partnership and that's a big struggle and I think we've seen the programmer culture certainly amplified. It's just recently passed decade where everyone wants to go for the big valuations and like wow look it, I only sold 15% of my company and raised ten million or a big number, look how great it is. But then you realize that when they come to board meetings you got them a good valuation but they may not be receptive on the other side. So there's a dynamic in fundraising early on, not just market selection as a venture but partner selection. Talk about how important that is, how you handled it, and advice for people thinking about selection of a financial partner. >> In technology companies where you have to invest a bunch in R&D early on, you do need money. It's just the way it works. But money is not everything because right now at least, today, money is kind of commodity. You can actually raise from many, many different sources, many different VC's. But one thing I've learned within the startups is that any and all startups will have good times and bad times, will have doubt in a strategy and will have conviction. And when those times are not so good, you need people who you can just go talk frankly without having to worry about it and without getting judged along the way. >> Trust. >> Trust is the key. So I think you pick people essentially based on how much you actually trust them, especially very, very early stage startups. And then as you go along, perhaps things change over time because over time if the company's scaling you may need a lot more money. But I think again people first. You want to partner people you can actually trust. >> In that hard conversation sometimes, you want to be self aware and that's always step one but two, vulnerability and then partnering with a financial partner that's going to sit on the same side of the table at the right times and maybe on the other side to be a counterbalance at the right times. And also when you need more money they got to help you sell the next round too. There's a lot of things that they have do to, and the dynamic is critical. And you've had success with that. >> So far it's been a success. >> Well what's the big thing happening right now in your mind, just to kind of take it forward now as we look forward. You see a lot of cloud computing. You got a great experience with cloud. You've been successful. Cloud security is really hot. What do you see as opportunities in the cloud space now that you got your entrepreneurial 20 mile stare out, they're looking for opportunities. I'm sure you probably mean more security space but in general as an entrepreneur, what do you see as things that people can go after markets? >> In general I sit on the enterprise side of things. Anything that simplifies work and automates it, whether it's using AI and whether they're using other technologies, software technologies, I think that space is going to grow more because the horizontal layers where you have big data platforms and you have infrastructure providers, I think they are doing a great job in integrating the system, but now you're going to see a lot more verticalized solutions based on machine learning and AI and automation. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. There's plenty of opportunities. >> It's super early. Do you agree with that? Great, well thanks for coming in the CUBE conversation. I appreciate this part of the Mayfield People First conversations. I'm John from theCUBE. We are here with Rehan Jalil, former president and CEO of Elastica. Successful serial entrepreneur about to embark on his next adventure. Good luck and I'm looking forward to catching up. >> You know, thank you so much for inviting me. >> Thanks for watching. This is the CUBE conversation People First network. I'm John Furrier.

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> Live, from Las Vegas! It's theCube! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, it's theCube's live coverage in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018, it's theCube. We got two sets, 24 interviews per day, 94 interviews total. Next three days, we're in day two of three days coverage. It's our ninth year of covering VMworld. It's been great. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, next guest, Cube alumni, number one in the leading boards right now, Sanjay Poonen did a great job today on stage, keynote COO for VMware. Great to have you back. Thanks for coming on. >> John and Dave, you're always so kind to me, but I didn't realize you've been doing this nine years. >> This is our ninth year. >> That's half the life of VMware, awesome. Unreal. Congratulations. >> We know all the stories, all the hidden, nevermind, let's talk about your special day today. You had a really, so far, an amazing day, you were headlining the key note with a very special guest, and you did a great job. I want you to tell the story, who was on, what was the story about, how did this come about? Tech for good, a big theme in this conference has really been getting a lot of praise and a lot of great feedback. Take us through what happened today. >> Well listen, I think what we've been trying to do at VMware is really elevate our story and our vision. Elevate our partnerships, you've covered a lot of the narrative of what we've done with Andy Jessie. We felt this year, we usually have two 90 minute sessions, Day One, Day Two, and it's filled with content. We're technical company, product. We figured why don't we take 45 minutes out of the 180 minutes total and inspire people. With somebody who's had an impact on the world. And when we brainstormed, we had a lot of names suggested, I think there was a list of 10 or 15 and Malala stood out, she never spoke at a tech conference before. I loved her story, and we're all about education. The roots of VMware were at Stamford Campus. Diane Greene, and all of that story. You think about 130 million girls who don't go to school. We want to see more diversity in inclusion, and she'd never spoken so I was like, you know what, usually you go to these tech conferences and you've heard somebody who's spoken before. I'm like, lets invite her and see if she would come for the first time, and we didn't think she would. And we were able to score that, and I was still a little skeptical 'cause you never know is it going to work out or not. So thank you for saying it worked, I think we got a lot of good feedback. >> Well, in your first line, she was so endearing. You asked her what you thought a tech conference, you said too many acronyms. She just cracked the place up immediately. >> And then you heard my response, right? If somebody tells me like that, you tell VMotion wrong she looked at me what? >> Tell them about our story, real quick, our story I want to ask you a point in question. Her story, why her, and what motivated you to get her? >> Those stories, for any of you viewers, you should read the book "I'm Malala" but I'll give you the short version of the story. She was a nine year old in the Pashtun Area of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, and the Taliban setted a edict that girls could not go to school. Your rightful place was whatever, stay at home and become a mom with babies or whatever have you. You cannot go to school. And her father ran a school, Moster Yousafzai, wonderful man himself, an educator, a grandfather, and says know what, we're going to send you to school. Violating this order, and they gave a warning after warning and finally someone shot her in 2012, almost killed her. The bullet kind of came to her head, went down, and miraculously she escaped. Got on a sort of a hospital on a plane, was flown to London, and the world if you remember 2012, the world was following the story. She comes out of this and she's unscathed. She looks normal, she has a little bit of a thing on the right side of her face but her brains normal, everything's normal. Two years later she wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Has started the Malala Fund, and she is a force of nature, an amazing person. Tim Cook has been doing a lot with her in the Malala Fund. I think that actually caught my attention when Tim Cook was working with her, and you know whatever Apple does often gets a little bit of attention. >> Well great job selecting her. How's that relevant to what you guys are doing now, because you guys had a main theme Tech for Good? Why now, why VMware? A lot of people are looking at this, inspired by it. >> There are milestones in companies histories. We're at our 20 year birthday, and I'm sure at people's birthday they want to do big things, right? 20, 30, 40, 50, these decades are big ones and we thought, lets make this year a year to remember in various things we do. We had a 20 year anniversary celebration on campus, we invited Diane Greene back. It was a beautiful moment internally at Vmware during one of our employee meetings. It was a private moment, but just with her to thank her. And man, there were people emotional almost in tears saying thank you for starting this company. A way to give back to us, same way here. What better way to talk about the impact we're having in the community than have someone who is of this reputation. >> Well we're behind your mission 100%, anything you need. We loved the message, Tech for Good, people want to work for a mission driven company. People want to buy >> We hope so. >> from mission driven companies, that stated clear and the leadership you guys are providing is phenomenal. >> We had some rankings that came out around the same time. Fortune ranked companies who are changing the world, and VMware was ranked 17th overall, of all companies in the world and number one in the software category. So when you're trying to change the world, hopefully as you pointed out it's also an attractor of talent. You want to come here, and maybe even attractor of customers and partners. >> You know the other take-away was from the key note was how many Cricket fans there are in the VMworld Community. Of course we have a lot of folks from India, in our world but who's your favorite Cricketer? Was it Sachin Tendulkar? (laughs) >> Clearly you're reading off your notes Dave! >> Our Sonya's like our, >> Dead giveaway! >> Our Sonya's like our Cricket Geek and she's like, ask him about Sachin, no who's your favorite Cricketer, she wants to know. >> Sachin Tendulkar's way up there, Shayuda Free, the person she likes from Pakistan. I grew up playing cricket, listen I love all sports now that I'm here in this country I love football, I love basketball, I like baseball. So I'll watch all of them, but you know you kind of have those childhood memories. >> Sure >> And the childhood memories were like she talk about, India, Pakistan games. I mean this was like, L.A. Dodgers playing Giants or Red Socks, Yankee's, or Dallas Cowboys and the 49ers, or in Germany playing England or Brazil in the World Cup. Whatever your favorite country or team rivalry is, India Pakistan was all there more, but imagine like a billion people watching it. >> Yeah, well it was a nice touch on stage, and I'd say Ted Williams is my favorite cricketer, oh he plays baseball, he's a Red Sock's Player. Alright Sanjay, just cause your in the hot seat, lets get down to business here. Great moment on stage, congratulation. Okay Pat Gelsinger yesterday on the key note talked about the bridges, VMware bridging, connecting computers. One of the highlights is kind of in your wheelhouse, it's in your wheelhouse, the BYOD, Bring Your Own Device bridge. You're a big part of that. Making that work on on the mobile side. Now with Cloud this new bridge, how is that go forward because you still got to have all those table stakes, so with this new bridge of VMware's in this modern era, cloud and multicloud. Cluely validated, Andy Jassy, on stage. Doing something that Amazon's never done before, doing something on premise with VMware, is a huge deal. I mean we think it's a massive deal, we think it's super important, you guys are super committed to the relationship on premises hybrid cloud, multicloud, is validated as far as we're concerned. It's a done deal. Now ball's in your court, how are you going to bring all that mobile together, security, work space one, what's your plan? >> I would say that, listen on as I described in my story today there's two parts to the VMware story. There's a cloud foundation part which is the move the data center to the cloud in that bridge, and then there's the desk job move it to the mobile. Very briefly, yes three years of my five years were in that business, I'm deeply passionate about it. Much of my team now that I put in place there, Noah and Shankar are doing incredible jobs. We're very excited, and the opportunity's huge. I said at my key note of the seven billion people that live in the world, a billion I estimate, work for some company small or big and all of them have a phone. Likely many of those billion have a phone and a laptop, like you guys have here, right? That real estate of a billion in a half, maybe two billion devices, laptops and phones, maybe in some cases laptop, phone, and tablets. Someone's going to manage and secure, and their diverse across Apple, Google, big option for us. We're just getting started, and we're already the leader. In the data center, the cloud world, Pat, myself, Raghu, really as we sat three years ago felt like we shouldn't be a public cloud ourselves. We divested vCloud Air, as I've talked to you on your show before, Andy Jassy is a friend, dear friend and a classmate of mine from Harvard Business School. We began those discussions the three of us. Pat, Raghu, and myself with Andy and his team and as every quarter and year has gone on they become deeper and deep partnerships. Andy has told other companies that VMware Amazon is the model partnership Amazon has, as they describe who they would like to do business more with. So we're proud when they do that, when we see that happen. And we want to continue that. So when Amazon came to us and said listen I think there's an opportunity to take some of our stack and put it on premise. We kept that confidential cause we didn't want it to leak out to the world, and we said we're going to try'n annouce it at either VMworld or re:Invent. And we were successful. A part with these projects is they inevitably leak. We're really glad no press person sniffed it out. There was a lot of speculation. >> Couldn't get confirmation. >> There was a lot of speculation but no one sniffed it out and wrote a story about it, we were able to have that iPhone moment today, I'm sorry, yesterday when we unveiled it. And it's a big deal because RDS is a fast growing business for them. RDS landing on premise, they could try to do on their own but what better infrastructure to land it on than VMware. In some cases would be VMware running on VxRail which benefits Dell, our hardware partners. And we'll continue doing more, and more, and more as customers desire, so I'm excited about it. >> Andy doesn't do deals, as you know Andy well as we do. He's customer driven. Tell me about the customer demand on this because it's something we're trying to get reporting on. Obviously it makes sense, technically the way it's working. You guys and Andy, they just don't do deals out of the blue. There's customer drivers here, what are those drivers? >> Yeah, we're both listening to our customers and perhaps three, four, five years ago they were very focused on student body left, everybody goes public cloud. Like forget your on premise, evaporate, obliterate your data centers and just go completely public. That was their message. >> True, sweep the floor. >> Right, if you went to first re:Invent I was there on stage with them as an SAP employee, that's what I heard. I think you fast forward to 2014, 2015 they're beginning to realize, hey listen it's not as easy. Refactoring your apps, migrating those apps, what if we could bring the best of private cloud and public cloud together enter VMware and Amazon. He may have felt it was harder to have those cultivations of VMware or for all kinds of reasons, like we had vCloud Air and so on and so forth but once we divested that decision culminations had matured between us that door opened. And as that door opened, more culminations began. Jointly between us and with customers. We feel that there are customers who want many of those past type of services of premise. Cause you're building great things, relational database technology, AI, VI maybe. IoT type of technologies if they are landing on premise in an edge-computing kind of world, why not land on VMware because we're the king of the private cloud. We're very happy to those, we progress those discussion. I think in infrastructure software VMware and Amazon have some of the best engineers on the planet. Sometimes we've engineers who've gone between both companies. So we were able to put our engineering team's together. This is a joint engineering effort. Andy and us often talk about the fact that great innovation's built when it's not just Barny go to Marketing and Marketing press releases this. The true joint engineering at a deep level. That's what happened the last several months. >> Well I can tell you right now the commitment I've seen from an executive level and deep technology, both sides are deep and committed to this. It's go big or go home, at least from our perspective. Question I want to ask you Sanjay is you're close to the customer's of VMware. What's the growth strategy? If you zoom out, look down on stage and you got vSAN, NSX at the core, >> vSANjay (laughs) >> How can you not like a product that has my name on it? >> So you got all these things, where's the growth going to come from, the merging side, is the v going to be the stable crown jewels at NSX? How do you guys see the growth, where's it going to come from? >> Just kind of look at our last quarter. I mean if you peel back the narrative, John and Dave, two years ago we were growing single digits. Like low single digits. Two, three percent. That was, maybe the legacy loser description of VMware was the narrative everyone was talking about >> License revenue was flattish right? >> And then now all of sudden we're double digits. 12, 15 sort of in that range for both product revenue. It's harder to grow faster when you're bigger, and what's happened is that we stabilize compute with vSphere in that part and it's actually been growing a little bit because I think people in the VMware cloud provider part of our business, and the halo effect of the cloud meant that as they refresh the servers they were buying more research. That's good. The management business has started to grow again. Some cases double digits, but at least sort of single digits. NSX, the last few order grew like 30, 40%. vSAN last year was growing 100% off a smaller base, this year going 60, 70%. EUC has been growing double digits, taking a lot of share from company's like Citrix and MobileIron and others. And now, also still growing double digits at much bigger paces, and some of those businesses are well over a billion. Compute, management, end-user computing. We talked about NSX on our queue forming called being a 1.4 billion. So when you get businesses to scale, about a billion dollar type businesses and their sort of four, training five that are in that area, and they all get to grow faster than the market. That's the key, you got to get them going fast. That's how you get growth. So we focus on those on those top five businesses and then add a few more. Like VMware Cloud on AWS, right now our goal is customer logo count. Revenue will come but we talked on our earnings call about a few hundred customers of VMware Cloud and AWS. As that gets into the thousands, and there's absolutely that option, why? Because there's 500,000 customers of VMware and two million customers of Amazon, so there's got to be a lot of commonality between those two to get a few thousand. Then we'll start caring about revenue there too, but once you have logos, you have references. Containers, I'd like to see PKS have a few hundred customers and then, we put one on stage today. National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. Fantastic story of PKS. I even got my PKS socks for this interview. (John laughs) >> So that give you a sense as to how we think, there will be four, five that our businesses had scale and then a few are starting to get there, and they become business to scale. The nature of software is we'll always be doing this show because there will be new businesses to talk about. >> Yeah, hardware is easy. Software is hard, as Andy Patchenstien said on theCUBE yesterday. Congratulations Sanjay and all the success, you guys are doing great financially. Products looking really good coming out, the bloom is rising from the fruit you guys have harvested, coming together. >> John if I can say one last thing, I shared a picture of a plane today and I put two engines behind it. There's something I've learned over the last years about focus of a company, and I joked about different ways that my name's are pronounced but at the core of me there's a DNA. I said on stage I'd rather not be known as smart or stupid but having a big heart. VMware, I hope is known by our customers as having these two engines. An engine of innovation, innovating product and a variety of other things. And focused on customer obsession. We do those, the plane will go a long way. >> And it's looking good you guys, we can say we've been to Radio Event, we've been doing a lot of great stuff. Congratulations on the initiative, and a great interview with you today on doing Tech for Good and sharing your story. Getting more exposure to the kind of narratives people want to hear. More women in tech, more girls in tech, more democratization. Congratulations and thanks so much for sharing. >> Thank you John and Dave. >> Appreciate you being here. >> Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware. Friend of theCUBE, Cube Alumni, overall great guy. Big heart and competitive too, we know that from his Twitter stream. Follow Sanjay on Twitter. You'll have a great time. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more coverage from day two live, here in Las Vegas for VMware 2018. Stay with us. (tech music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE! >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference put on by Untraceable, Tracy and her team doing a fantastic job, so shout out to the team at Untraceable for another great event. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost's Dave Vellante, and we're here with CUBE's friend, CUBE alumni, from the CryptoChicks, Nataliya Hearn, director, good to see you, great to have you back. >> Thank you. (laughs) >> Okay, good to see you, we're laughing, we've got some great funny stories we've been telling, since PolyCon, but really, some great things going on, so give us the update, you had a hackathon recently, you got new things happening here in your organization, take a quick minute to explain what it is for the folks that don't know, what do you guys do, and what's going on? >> Good, well, CryptoChicks is a organization focused on educating women in blockchain and cryptospace. We started because at meetups there would be one or two women out of hundreds of men, who would be afraid to ask stupid questions, so we said, Oh, okay, there's no stupid questions, come and join us, and we'll show you how to open a wallet, what blockchain is all about, so we've been doing that. We've actually grew quite a bit, we are now have chapters in all over the world, in Pakistan, in Bahamas, in Moscow, we just teamed up with She Codes in Israel, which is 50,000 women, so, we're doing really well. >> Congratulations, a great mission, we totally support it, and, you know, I'm proud to say that I love my shirt that says, Satoshi is Female, thanks to Nyla Rodgers, who gave it to me, at Consensus in Blockchain Week in New York, but this is really beyond women in tech, it's beyond that, it's a really, you're doing some innovative things around onboarding, new talent and education, this is a really important, because the Internet is bounded on discovery, learning. >> Absolutely. >> What's the new thing? >> Well, you know when you hear, when you go to the blockchain conference and events, and we hear again and again about the chasm. How do we bridge the chasm, right? That's just the, like, big word that you hear like every third presentation, because the blockchain community needs it. But I think globally, blockchain represents something that's quite unique, and it's an opportunity not just to make money and speculate, or to develop new technology, it's technology that can liberate. But how do we get that message across? And I think we have to start with kids. Kids are our future, but they're also the ones who spend most of their time on social media, so that's a good thing, but if you ask their parents, that's not such a good thing necessarily. So how do we convert them, some of their time from social media to learning? So we've put, we're putting together this program that focuses on children to earn to learn. >> Earn to learn, like they earn coins or money, or? >> That's right, basically they can earn swag, so basically we're creating the marketplace that rewards children for learning. >> All kids, right? >> All kids, well we're focusing on -- >> On girls. >> No, not on girls, we're going to high schools, so immediate next generation. >> So girls, boys, everybody's welcome? >> Absolutely. Yep. >> Awesome. >> Next generation, and they're the next generation that has to solve the problems that we, and opportunities that can be captured, that's coming right to their front door. >> Absolutely, we have a lot of question marks in the blockchain community. Which blockchain, how do we do it, there is going to be multi-chain tokens, we're talking about, next generation is the one who's going to provide solutions for us. So we got to open their minds, and to show that blockchain is a tool like potentially calculus is a tool. To create something that hasn't been there before. >> You know, I have a lot of conversations in Silicon Valley and Nataliya, recently at the Google Cloud event, Google's been very much a great change agent, especially with women in tech and underrepresented minorities, but Aparna Sinha, who's one of the senior people there, dual degrees from Stanford, she's got a PhD, she said we're losing the girls early, and what came out of it was a conversation that, when you have these new market movements like blockchain, AI, these are new skills that you can level up, so the ability to come from behind and level up is an opportunity for people who have traditionally been behind, whether it's women or other minorities, to level up. So it's a huge opportunity now to put the naysayers down to rest, and saying, Screw you, we're going to level up and learn. >> Absolutely, and it's global, the thing is -- >> There's nothing stopping anyone from learning. >> Absolutely, and trust, and the borderless system that blockchain potentially can provide is at a global advantage. As long as you have a cell phone, you can be in a village, an old village, like at our last hackathon, we actually were streaming women hackers from Zimbabwe. So there you go, it's doable. >> So how are you, how are you scaling your message globally? >> So we're starting, one thing is that education today, is basically the bill is being paid either by the government or by parents. The reason I would call that a marketplace, I would like companies to be involved. And it could be local companies, or it could be global. What about creating ARVR classrooms, and providing the information to kids, via a completely new way that they would actually move away from swiping or just looking on some random YouTube videos, to something that they can get a phone, some shoes, mascara, focusing on girls, right? And to understand what that borderless economy really means by experiencing, what does it mean to have tokens that you can trade globally? You are used to your parents giving you some dollars, you go to a corner store. What about if you learn something, you go to a bakery, in Kenya, and for the work that you've done, you get a bun, right, or a meal? >> So this democratizing access, it's bringing education to the masses? >> And it's also uniting the blockchain community, 'cause we would be building this governance platform on blockchain, we would tokenize it, and there will be many elements of it, reward programs, smart contracts that reward content, some level of AI in terms of analysis of what we're doing, so I think this is why I was looking at multi-chain tokens. Maybe that would be a solution to kind of, to deal with -- >> Explain that, what does that mean? >> Well, we've got different chains right now, right? You've got Hyperledger, you've got Ethereum, and all this good stuff. How do you bridge all this, right, instead of having to choose one, you're now saying, I can work in all of them, because each one potentially can offer something unique. Maybe you don't have to choose one. We don't know. Only time will tell, as this, this is such a young industry, and this is why it's so exciting. >> Well, Nataliya -- >> It -- >> Oh, go ahead. >> No, I was going to say, and you're giving the kids examples, so a lot of times kids ask me, Well, what's the difference between crypto and Venmo? I'm like, okay, you know, let's talk about the different things you can do with crypto that you can't do, but they're closer than the older generations are to transferring, you know, money, at least, so now you're applying different use cases and expanding their minds in ways that, perhaps -- >> Absolutely, and I'll give you my example. I mean, I got into blockchain early before Ethereum was launched, and partly I was into public markets, and then I kind of stopped because that project ended, or I stopped and I actually reentered it, because my fifteen-year-old who started mining. But he started mining because I was in that field already, so there you go, it kind of, you know, what comes around. >> Good job. I hope he gets all his Bitcoin. >> Yeah, he did. (laughs) >> So, I want you to tell a story, of what you've seen that's been high impact from your work you've done. You had, again, that whole Pakistan thing going on, you've got all these hackathons, what is a good story you could share? >> You know, the good story we can share, I think the part that we were able to do, the hackathons that we are doing are local, but they're also global, it really is, there's this sense of empowerment, and you know what I think the best story, this is the best story: best story was, at the hackathon that we ran, it was women, over 100 women, that participated. But all our mentors were young, geeky programming guys. Sorry guys. But you really knew they really knew their stuff, so there was technology transfer, and we had a 48 hour hackathon, these guys stayed 48 hours, they didn't go to sleep, they didn't have to as mentors, and there was this amazing technology transfer that happened, and I think some relationships were formed too. >> Yeah, some serious bonding went on, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's actually a good thing that you're including people. It's not just a certain thing, you got this inclusion. >> Absolutely, and actually all it is is about inclusion, all it is is we are giving a platform for women not to be afraid, I mean, I'm an engineer, so I've been working with men all my life, so for me to ask difficult questions, or stupid questions, it's like natural now, because it's been what my life, but for women, for many, it isn't. So we just wanted to kind of cross that divide, it's not a chasm, it's just a little divide that we're bridged. >> So when you say stupid questions, do you mean like, Why do you do it that way? (laughs) Why don't you do it this way? >> Or, what's a wallet? Like, what's a private key? What's a public key? And asking that not once, but twenty times until you got it. That's okay too. >> That's called learning. >> Yeah. >> Last question, okay I got to ask you, the most important question is, how do someone get a CryptoChicks shirt? >> I think you can order it on our website, sizes are a problem, I know we've discussed this, so we need to -- >> Extra-large. >> Well, CryptoChicks is a not-for-profit organization so there are, we'll have to order this in bunches, so I'll figure this out, but what I wanted to say is that we have another hackathon that's coming up. And the hackathon is in New York, October 5th to 8th, and we have three streams, so if you're a developer, and this is for women, so if you're a developer, we have a stream. If you're not a developer, or you've never coded in your life, but you have a business mind, and you think you have a really good idea that you can put on blockchain, you're welcome to join as well, and now with all the news and regulations, we also have a regulatory stream. >> So for entrepreneurs and for business-minded people, that want to get involved, that they can come too? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, and their website is cryptochicks.ca, that's where you can get access to the information, that's great. >> October 5th to 8th, you said, right? >> That's right. >> And anybody can go? >> Anybody can register. >> And where in New York? >> It's going to be at University of New York, and at their School of Law. >> Great. >> Blockchain Educational Fun Hub. That's what it says on the website, love your website. Looking forward to getting some shirts, and putting it out there, and promoting your mission. Great job, good to see you again. >> You guys are awesome. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Nataliya. >> Thank you. >> This is crypto for good, a lot of education, and this opportunity, and our role is to share that, as a community, and I think this is a great example of the kind of community that crypto is. Education people can level up and move fast through and get proficiency, and change their lives. This is what this is all about, glad to bring us this CUBE coverage live, stay with us! Day One continues, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back from Toronto Blockchain Futurist Summit. Thank you. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back in Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. And many-time Cube guest Xavier Poisson is back. He's the vice president of Cloud28+ and service providers worldwide for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And he's joined by Eugene Viskovic, who is the chief business officer at Veon, a Cloud28+ partner. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back, Xavier, it's good to see you again. >> Thank you, hi. >> Hi. So give us the update on Cloud 28. It started out as sort of this focused European effort. It has exploded now globally. What's the update? >> So I don't remember, I don't know if you remember it. It was last year, the same event. We were in London, I believe. And we were saying, "Okay, we are 300. "How many will be next year?" I took that back. It will be 700. We are 700. >> Dave: Wow, congratulations. >> 700 members. We have been expanding in the different geographies. So also in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, but we expanded in North America, in A-Pac, Latin America, and Caribbean. So now we are present in 60 countries. We are proposing 24,000 cloud services, so the catalog has been expanding dramatically. We are offering capabilities, data center capabilities from all partners in 33 countries. And we can offer from 400 data centers already. So average we have 40,000 hits per month on the platform, acquiring members and so on. And, yes, it has been a delight to launch that everywhere. It's really taking off very, very quickly. >> And the basic value proposition, you are essentially enabling cloud partners to create cloud-like business capabilities. >> Yeah, so what we do is, first of all, we enable the partners to get known on the market on this side, to publish all their services built and consume also. So it's not only IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, but also integration services as well because it's a comprehensive value chain. Then, what we do, we're not a marketplace where people go and leave. In the center, they can speak everyday. So they publish articles, full leadership articles around security, big data, manufacturing, and so on and so on. This year, only this year, they have published 600 articles. So when you're a customer, you go to this platform. You can see the offering, but you can see how the vendor is positioning himself around the market, his value-add, and what they are doing. So digital marketing a lot, also for them. We have been increasing the value on the market of many of our partners with social media because we are very good activity in this area, and also lead-generation engine because now we have so much offerings that we can target specific campaigns for our partners in specific geographies and generate a lot of leads on the market. Last, but not least, the market is evolving. We have a lot of partners, so we create platform-connected offerings. Example we have done is a specific cloud-in-a-box for manufacturing for plants where, in six clicks, you can provision from Cloud28+ all your information system for a plant. So this is also the kind of things that we do. >> Great, okay, Eugene, tell us about Veon. Why are you in business? What's your story? >> Okay, yes. Just talk a few minutes about Veon because it's not a very well-known name around the world, and don't be ashamed if you don't know Veon because it still is the seventh largest mobile operator in the world. It's significant. We are, today, around 42,000 employees, over 12 different countries. I have to say, very unusual countries. Not the type of countries you may choose to go for holidays, but it would be a shame because, honestly, some of them are good like, you know, all Eurasia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia. We have also emerging market, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, and one, only one European market, which is Italy with WIND, WIND Three. Which means it's a very large region. We are dealing with 10, more than 10% of the total population of the globe, 235 million customers, which is significant. And within this organization, there is an enterprise division, which I'm leading, which is around 4,500 people dedicated for enterprise and wholesales. Full revenue around $3 billion, just to give you a scale on who we are. Again, not very well-known, but definitely within our footprint we are the number one in this particular region of the world. >> It's sizable, substantial business. >> Eugene: Exactly, yes. >> So what's driving your business today? Obviously mobile is exploding. >> Yes, it's clear we came from the mobile business. We are number one mobile operator in the majority of these countries. We are what we call some fixed business. And since the last two, three years when I joined the organization, we completely reorganized our business model and moving more into the what we call value added services, ICT services. And one of the components, definitely, was to try to find a partner for our cloud proposition. You need to understand that we're in a very emerging market for this type of subject. We are sitting in a very traditional way, you know, how enterprise operating. They own the infrastructure, they own data center, they own the servers, the management platform, and their own people. And they have not yet shifted to this new model, which is to try to outsource some of the infrastructure. And this is where we came into the game as a global provider in order to have enterprise really to operate the shift. There is also another interesting situation is every time we bid a cloud proposition, usually we try to centerize it and have different country. In our part of the world is not possible. We have to set up a cloud platform in every single of our countries for regulatory constraints, which is not very economical, but definitely it's an opportunity for us to lead this market especially with HP Enterprise. >> Well, it allows you to differentiate, as well, from some of the mega-cloud providers that everybody knows, everybody talks about. So is that a primary way in which you compete? >> Oh, completely. It's clear the big players today are not very well-implemented in this part of the world because of this particular constraint, outside of Italy which is a little bit different game. But it's clear in Russia and Eurasia, yes. Today there is a opportunity. We believe that we want to be the single provider within this region operating across different market segments because we're covering from SO up to multinational accounts, even government. And having a set of value propositions we can offer across every single of our countries. >> Xavier, is it common that, amongst the Cloud28+ partners, there's that theme of local presence, of course, but is there also a differential in terms of what the partners will do, the types of work they'll do, customizations? >> Yeah, typically the case of Veon is very specific because they address very specific markets. Some other players will ask different things. But what is very important in the case of Veon is, first of all, to have a ready-to-deploy solution that you can industrialize in different countries. So this is the reason why we played with one of the technology partners of Cloud28+, with Ormuco, who has a cloud-in-a-box solution that can be deployed and managed remotely if needed. But that was fitting the needs of the market. Then, what we need to do is really to engage locally. So, in this particular case, what we're going to do is to engage with the HP organization in order that when we have the needs for our customers to go for cloud computing kind of workloads, we say, "Okay, we have the solution. "We have a partner, a Cloud28+ partner, "who took the decision to go with us, "and we trust each other. "So you, Mr. Customer, you want to do "backup as a service, disaster recovery "as a service, compute, storage as a service, "or security as a service, Veon is there." And the good point is Veon is there on very qualified hardware of HP synergy with a very good solution, which is one of the solution ready for service providers of HPE and operated by a very serious tech operator with the number six on the market, this is Veon. And we go together. So in this particular case, what was interesting was to have a solution that can be deployed everywhere the same with workloads that may fit with the different expectations of the market, engage the HP people to play with and, then, we market and with Cloud28+ we'll amplify their message. We will be able to drive lead generation campaigns. We'll be able to onboard our resellers because one thing I believe is that in this kind of regions, people don't go, as you say, Eugene, directly to the cloud. They continue to go to their resellers and, "What do I need to do?" And here, you know that we have the largest reseller network in the industry. So we will introduce this solution to our resellers in order that when a reseller of HPE is in front of such a case, it can have the mind to say, "Okay, let's engage with Veon." So this is the way we are going to operate. >> So when I think of many of the Akistan countries, I think of natural resources, challenging topography, challenging terrain. How does the physical reality and the industries that typify that region impact the way you're providing cloud services? >> It's clear, we're talking sometime a very, very large geography in terms of country size. When you take only in Russia. >> Mountainous. >> Eleven time zones you have in one single country. And when we operate, yes we have to spread our capability in order to be able to touch every single country, including in some infrastructure. Especially as a carrier, I like to imagine how much we need to pull fiber, cable, across the country and have these different set up of infrastructure, cloud propositions, to make sure we can serve better in term latency especially when we're talking about financial sections and so on, which brings some level of complexity and, as I said earlier, also some level of efficiency in term investment because we are not in a perfect world, especially when we talk about the regulatory constraints, which, yes, we need to find some middle way. How we can have a better, being still competitive, but as sometimes still delivering the expected quality. But you are right. This particular part of the world require a lot of work in term of physical infrastructure and also in our team. Our people are spread across these different countries, and for that reason yes, it's not an easy situation. >> Does it drive, are you likely to see a higher demand? HPE talks about the intelligent edge. Are you likely to see a higher demand for things like the intelligent edge because of the nature of the natural resource industry's petrochemical, et cetera, mountainous regions and a lot of communities that you serve, is that going to be a driver of new services or is it going to be something else? What do you think? >> Well, I think there would be two aspects. The first one, there is, definitely, a requirement driven, very often, by very large, multinational corporations. You'll be surprised how this multinational corporations are covering this part of the world. You have natural resources. All the western industry is present. And because they are present, they need to bring their standard in term of infrastructure they are using within this particular country. That the reason, yes, the demand is coming from there. At the same time, you have the rest of the market in term of large, local businesses where it's clear. They are moving. If you're looking in our part of the world, we are exactly where we were 10 years ago in Europe, in North America, and in Asia. We are really into emerging in face, in adopting this type of infrastructure. It's clear it's going to go much more quicker because, on top of that, enterprises have big pressure to reduce costs, but at the same time not to sacrifice the quality, what they're looking. Which, again, together we're capable and we can demonstrate they can get better for less. And this is a big work, and that's the reason when Xavier was mentioning about working together in each of the countries, this was one of the critical element in choosing with HP Enterprise because I'm a mobile operator and fixed. I'm not yet organized as an ICT services or cloud. It was very important for me, if we wanted to go very quickly to associate a brand with a leading organization like HP. And I have to say, I have tested several times. Every time we say, "Okay, we are in "partnership with HP Enterprise. "We are partnered with Cloud28+." This ring immediately the bell of the enterprise we are meeting, and it's easier for us to move quicker. But, definitely, I think we have a big, big opportunity. Large market to address, but definitely something interesting to go after. >> And it's early days, it's only been two years now, what do you want from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and what are you guys going to deliver? Let's talk road map a little bit. First, from the partner/customer. What are you driving HPE and Xavier to deliver? >> For me there would be three axes in term of development. The first one in term of value proposition. We want to be able, over the next 12, 18 months to be able to offer to the market a full set of propositions, as you mentioned earlier. But Xavier, in term of public, private, hybrid cloud, and moving to different solution, we're talking about security. And, also, we're moving into more vertical market approach. We're talking about IUT where will also be some direction. This is the first ax. The second one, it's in term of countries. We're not going to launch a platform in every single, as I said earlier. We need to do it country by country. We are starting with Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan will come behind, Algeria. Very quickly, over the next 12 months, we are going to launch one by one these different countries. And the last element for us, which is also very key, is market segment. We are organized, as I said, by market segment. SO, small-medium enterprise, large key account, multinational corporation, and government. And each of these segments have different requirements. And we need to customize our approach. This is where where working with HP and Ormuco, we want to have a very customized, bi-market segment from highly customized to off-the-shelf type proposition. But, for me, these would be the three key axes in term of development working with HP Enterprise. >> And Xavier, how does that align with your roadmap? >> Well, you know, it's fully alligned in the sense that, first of all, we are expanding a lot the value prop of Cloud28+ with ISV software vendors. And the problems of telcos and service providers moving to the cloud, that's correct there is ICT branding, and there we can help. But this is the content because one day or another, they will face what the others have been facing, even in these countries, meaning yes is not enough. So if you have a portfolio of applications, verticals, horizontal applications, that they can use to continue to satisfy the demand of the market, so it will be great for them, and we are investing a lot in this order. The other thing is today I believe that we have now reached a maturity on digital marketing with Cloud28+, which is impressive. We had a big event yesterday. I will not give to you the number of impression we had only in four hours. It has been massive. If we take that, we put this at the disposal of this partner in every single country, we will speed them on the market. So these are the two big elements. The third element is what I said about this platform connected solutions because the more we go, the more we see that our outside-in approach with Cloud28+, thinking customers first, is excellent. We need to continue on that. But, as you were mentioning, the move to the edge, we see more and more solutions for energy, for manufacturing, oil and gas, environment, that we need pure hybrid because you cannot put everything into a cloud. And where we are lucky with Veon is that they have the network. So you can imagine, they have their big cloud in a country that they could deploy also some private cloud very, very quickly in specific area within an oil and gas land or I don't know where in energy, mining, or where you have not that. And you cannot, because of latency issues you cannot go directly to the cloud, but you need to handle at the edge, send back to the cloud for analytics or AI or so on, and this will be at the disposal for them. And I believe the combination of the two for that will be for the benefit of the customer. So this is my opinion. >> I completely agree. I think they approach, in term of the partnership, as I said, I think when we're going to deal with very large organizations is going to be very infrastructure-type discussion driven. But when we're going to cool down, it's purely, definitely Sowasis, content. I want to be able to address, for example, the marketing department, how we can help them to understand the behavior of a consumer by using data, big data, you know, analytics. In term of delivery for an organization, using fleet management. In term of manufacturing, using more IUT. But when you look at these different solutions, what is below is a type of infrastructure. Is to have a cloud infrastructure where we can rely on a strong partnership, bringing this solution, and offering to our customer definitely a very cost-effective but also agile, very, you know, able to move with the market demand in a very vertical way, but definitely this is a way we want to work together. >> Excellent. All right, we have to leave it there, gentlemen. Cloud is exploding. Cloud is going to be local. We've talked about this a lot. Hybrid IT, intelligence edge with a local flavor. Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations for all the success. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering PentahoWorld 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of PentahoWorld brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We are joined by Derek Mathieson, he is the group leader at CERN. Welcome, Derek, glad to have you on the show. >> Well, glad to be here, thank you very much. >> So, CERN, which is of course the European Organization for Nuclear Research. And you know we think of it as this place of physicists and engineers working together to solve these problems. And probe the mysteries of the universe but in fact, CERN is a technology organization. >> Absolutely, I mean, I think that's the- CERN has this reputation of being exclusively physics. I mean, it is the world leading particle physics laboratory. But in fact, in the end, yeah, we're an infrastructure organization who provides all the technology, all the science. And all the scientists and engineers come to CERN to do their work. But CERN itself provides the facilities. So, our main focus, in fact, is technology. Computer science, civil engineering, construction. I mean, we built cathedral size concrete structures 400 and 50 feet underground, 17 mile long tunnels. I mean, this is civil engineering in the grand scale. And that's actually one of the major focuses. Is that CERN, although it's a physics organization, one of the difficulties we have as an organization is to explain to people, in fact, what we're looking for when we're recruiting. When we're contacting other universities. It's all about the fact that we're not looking for physicists, we're looking for engineers and technology specialists to come and work at CERN. >> So talk to us about some of the new, exciting projects that you're working on there. >> Oh, I mean, there's a lot going on. Obviously, the reason I'm here today is all about the work that we're doing with Pentaho. So we're, you know, building a new data warehouse. My group's actually responsible for the administrative computing of CERN. So basically running CERN as a business. I mean this is, there's a budget of around about one billion U.S. dollars. Going into CERN every year, in order to do all this physics research. So obviously we have a responsibility to treat, be faithfully to these tax dollars, carefully and you know spend them wisely. So a lot of my work is to make sure that we have the appropriate infrastructure, controls and proper technology there. To make sure that it's used effectively and wisely. >> So paint a picture of that infrastructure for us, if you would. What's it look like if we took a peak under the tent? Well, I mean, it's what quite nice about it is with the technology infrastructure that we have. So we have a huge computer center. There's a hundred thousand CPU's in our computer center. That's mainly used for doing physics but because we have all this infrastructure there, we can use part of it to also run the administration. Which gives us the ability to run a real world class technology stack to actually run the organization. So we have a huge data warehouse. Which gives a very rapid response to the physicists and engineers who actually want to go on and do their work. My job is to make sure that the administration of CERN doesn't get in their way. So we want to provide them the facilities so they just get on with their job and all the other things to do with actually running the organization are my problem and the team that works for me. And good examples is that CERN literally sits on the border between France and Switzerland. So we have, you know, we care about things like, there's 80 different customs forms that we have to worry about on a daily basis just as we move materials around the site. So we have such an usual organization but it's unique in the world. And that's what attracts people to work there is all these new challenges that we got. It's really a fantastic place. >> And the view is pleasant I bet. >> Oh yeah. (all giggling) >> Okay, so tell us more about the infrastructure. So you talked about this really fast data warehouse. 100,000 CPUs, is it all sort of on prem? Is it a mix sort of on prem and the Cloud? What's the data warehouse, you know, give us a sense of what that infrastructure is. 'Cause people hear data warehouse, they think you know, kind of old, clunky data warehouse. You're talking about this super high performance. >> Exactly, in fact, that's one of the challenges that we face is. We've got scientists who are used to dealing with high volumes of data with high fixation. Our particle detectors produce around 2 petabytes of data per second. So they're used to dealing with large amount of data. So immediately when they started looking at the administration of the organization of the same high expectations. They want it to be fast, they want it to process the data. Large quantities of data, very quickly indeed and give the answers (snaps) in a split second. So to do that we have to obviously put quite a lot of hardware behind it and also use good technical strength as well. We're quite big users of Oracle at CERN. We have a big Oracle database which is for the principle, where we keep most of our data. And then we use Pentaho on top of that in order to do all the deporting, the analytics, the building the Cube, so all this kind of thing. And their user base is very transient. So there's around fifteen thousand people who're actually working at CERN at any one time. Half of the world's particle physicists work at CERN. >> Rebecca: Wow. >> So, they're coming and going all the time. They don't want to worry about how to get the data. So it has to be there, has to be there right away. Has to be easy to use and easy to understand. These people live and work and breathe particle physics. They don't worry about the budget and the details about how to do all this stuff. This is something where the accountants have to get there. Get it in such a way that it's easy for them to do the right thing and make sure that we stay compliance with the various regulations. And make sure that the organization continues to function as a business while still getting on with our primary mission of particle physics research. >> And that infrastructure is primarily on premise, that correct? >> It's on premise, the vast majority of it. In fact, one of the, we have two main data centers. So there's one physically located at Cern in Geneva. And then there's another one over in the (mumbles) institute, in (snaps) >> The other place. >> The other place. (both laughing) >> Okay. >> Yep. >> And that, presume, because you've got such volumes of data. You can't just be moving that stuff around up into the Cloud. >> Right, in fact yeah, we have a lot of high speed data links between the different data centers in order to. We have a copy of quite a lot of the data in fact. The principle physics data is copied, not only at CERN, which is what's called a 2-0 site where we have all the data to start with. But we also copy it to I think it's around about seven different institutes around the world. So they have a first-line copy as well. Altogether we have a network of around a hundred computer centers working for CERN in some way or other. That's part of what we call the LHC computing grids which is (mumbles) a planetary data center in computer infrastructure to do all this processing of the LHC data. >> I'm going to ask you to go back to about the organizational structure. I mean, you described this office situated on the border of France and Switzerland. Where half the world's particle physicists work. What is the culture like? And how do you get- and as you said also the administrations job is to really get out of their way so they can do their thing. What is the culture like there? How do people work together? How do people collaborate? What do you do when there's disagreement? >> I mean this is one of the unique aspects of CERN. Is bringing people together. There's around about 90 different countries represented at CERN. Around about 100 different nationalities, all working on site. It's very much like a university environment. We have a canteen where people will come in. Their always saying that probably most of the physics and most of the science discoveries are happening within the canteen as people meet together from all over the world. We have countries, India, Pakistan, have just joined as associate members. We've got 22 member states. Mainly around Europe but now we have a policy enlargement. So we're actually trying to make the organization even larger. Touching more countries around the world. United States is an observer now within the organization. So they actually participate in the CERN council and they're also major players in some of the large LHC experiments as well. But yeah, on a day to day basis, I'll be sitting in the restaurant and there will be Nobel Prize winners. We have our director general, she will be there as well, having lunch with everyone else. So it's a very much a leveling organization where everyone feels free to speak to each other. And discuss the matters of the day and particle physics. >> So what do you guys talk about? >> (laughs) What's the canteen conversation? >> I think this is the utter geek speak usually. That's the main problem in CERN is that people are passionate about what they do. So they come to CERN, they love what they do, they talk about it all the time. So, I mean, people will be talking about the latest generation of the CPU architecture, GPU programming. How do we do simulations with petabytes of data? This is lunch time conversation. And evening and everything else. >> So you're not talking about the a football game, right? You're talking about this sort of, talking shop mostly right? >> There is a football team, there is a rugby team as well. There's real life as well at CERN but yeah, I mean, most people are there because they're passionate about what they do. >> Obviously you're listening to those conversations you must pick up a lot of it. >> Yeah, I know, I mean, I think it's if you work at Cern and you're at a dinner party, someone laughs, "Oh you work at Cern, tell me all about physics." So you pick up a bit about it of course. Everyone can speak a little bit about what we're doing at Cern and I think that's an imperative because we work there. Of course you hear about what's going on and understand a little bit about it. But I would never claim to be a physicist of course. >> Rebecca: You can fake it though. >> I have lunch with physicists, I'm not one myself. >> How 'about Pentaho? You painted the picture of the infrastructure before. Where does Pentaho fit? And how are they adding value? >> We've been using Pentaho now for the last few years. We started, I mean, what really attracted is actually this combination of open-source plus propriety software. We like the core and the open-source nature of it which it very much fits with the values of CERN as well as being an open lab. And sharing everything that we do. So we started, as I say, with Pentaho a few years ago. Now, it's a core component. It's a core strategic component of the administration and also used in other areas as well. So it's also used in some of the more technical infrastructure areas in terms of: how do we actually run the lab? Parts of the infrastructure in terms of monitoring the different parts of the accelerator complex. And even in terms of, you know, the maintenance of the buildings, all of that. So it's really, you know, core within the organization as a core component for us. >> So, CERN is an organization then as- I'll use the word insistent, if you will, on open-source as a component. So that puts pressure on companies like Pentaho to pay attention to the next project. Maybe contribute, maybe not. But it certainly integrate. Score card, how have they done on that? What would you like to see them do better in that regard? And what kind of open-source projects do you- and you may not be able to answer this. But, might your organizations see in the horizon that you want Pentaho to capture? I mean, obviously 8.0, you've heard about, Spark and bringing in Kafka and the like. But maybe you could comment. >> Absolutely, I think this is one of the eighters who's really attracted us was the open-source nature. And certainly Pentaho's movement in that direction particularly, I think, was the integration with Hitachi as well. They're seeing many other projects now being integrated within to that sort of pentacle world. This is something that was interesting to us. Of course because of our Cloud based infrastructure. The idea of scaling up and scaling out. And they're going with the open-source projects to particular and the patchy projects. Which was really interesting to us as well. Something that we've been working on a bit ourselves. And now to hear that Pentaho was doing that as well. That was great, a good piece of news for me because it was something that we have been struggling with is basically spreading out. We've got fifteen thousand users. We want to have a dynamic infrastructure where we can actually provision more service where necessary in order be able to take load when we need it. But at the same time we don't want to waste the resources when they're off doing something else. >> Over the course of last decade, let's say, has there ever been a tendency for- 'cause you've got so many alpha geeks running around. To say, "Hey, I can take these open-source components and kind of do it myself." >> Derek: Yeah. >> "I don't need the Pentaho load bouncer, I got yarn to negotiate my resources. Look what I built." And so, how do you manage that? >> No, I mean, you're absolutely right. It's a problem here there's always the risk of the naught of engineer syndrome where, "I could do it better." And we have to pressure against that. But, I mean, I think the important of the issue is take the bigger picture. If it's already done well, we don't need to do it again. Build on top of it, make something better on top of something that already exists. And that's the thing, that's the message that we can give to any of the engineers working at CERN. Is, "You can do so much more if you already use the infrastructure that's already solid." And that's part of this, you know, reuse, of course. Open-source software allows us to build on things which are already solid. We don't need to make another one of them. We'll make something on top of it. That's a primary message that we try to give. >> So here we are at Pentaho World and you're with a bunch of other practitioners. Sharing best practices, talking about how you use the product, learning from them too. What are some of the take aways? And how much are you actually talking to them versus talking to the Pentaho product people? >> We did a presentation yesterday. The focus of our presentation was managing Pentaho. So, one of the things that we've been using now for a number of years is you have to have an infrastructure to be able to actually take care of all the different artifacts, all the different reports. We have many, many different user who want to be able to use Pentaho at the same time creating their own artifacts. I mean we have to have some way of managing to actually manage all this landscape. Although Pentaho has got some tools necessary, that was one of the areas that we felt we could add some value in there. So we've been building on top of the existing Pentaho APIs. Building an infrastructure to make it easier to support for other people. And what was quite nice is we were speaking to some of the other attendees. And that's exactly the kind of thing they've been worrying about as well. And there was even some presentations of people doing a similar approach in their own organizations. On how they were actually trying to build some kind of architecture on top of Pentaho just to manage the whole thing. When you have hundred of reports and hundred of artifacts and very complicated data warehouse cubes, you need something on top of that to actually just manage the whole thing. And that's something that we've been focused on. And I see other people are doing the same kind of thing. So I can imagine that Pentaho will be taking note of this and probable incorporating some of the ideas. >> It's sending a loud and clear message to Pentaho, yes absolutely. >> How about the event? You've been to at least two or that I know of. I don't know if you were at the original. >> I've been to three altogether. >> Okay, so you've been to, I think all of them, right? >> I could have been all of them, yeah. >> I think the first one was 14, I think, I'm pretty sure. Things you've taken away? You know, interesting conversations? >> I think it's the main reason we come in. It's a long way for us to come all the way from Geneva to come here. It's really important for us to touch base with other people using the product. It is an open community, people do like to talk to each other about, you know the new things that are happening within the Pentaho community. And I think face to face contact, in the end, is very hard to beat. And we're coming to an event like this you actually get the opportunity to speak to people over lunch. Or in the evening events you can talk to them and actually find out what it's really like to use Pentaho. >> Great, well thank you so much Derek for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We well have more from Pentaho World just after this.