>> Announcer: From around the globe, It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020, our 11th year covering VMworld, the global experience, so we get to be able to pull in the community from around the globe. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, but a new role. Jill Stelfox, she is the chairman and CEO at Panzura. Jill, so nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, Jill, so first, before we get into kind of what you're bringing to Panzura and the direction, we're here at VMworld. Panzura is a longtime partner of VMware. Why don't you just give us the update as to VMware and Panzura and how you support customers together? >> Yeah, so most of our deployments of Panzura actually run on VMware, whether it's on-prem or at the closest cloud location. So we work really closely in our hundreds and hundreds of deployments across the world. >> Wonderful, and for most of our audience, if they're not familiar with Panzura, of course, it's very high performance, really look at that cloud file system. Is that how it's positioned on your website? Bring us as to what brought you to Panzura, and what that means to the organization now that you're chairman and CEO. >> Yeah, so about five months ago now, we purchased the company from the current set of investors. We saw a really interesting technology here, and the ability to grow quite quickly, which, honestly, it's come true in the last few months, and Panzura is more than just a file system. It is a piece of fabric that allows you to put files in a really high performance way into the cloud, and collaborate across the globe, and who knew that five months ago when we bought the company, literally we bought the company a few days before California closed for COVID, and so this is the moment where file storage and collaboration is absolutely key, so great timing for us from that perspective. >> Yeah, absolutely. We've had so many conversations with companies as they have to really move fast, to be able to exist in the, I guess we call it the new abnormal, Jill. Help us maybe, if you've got a customer example of what's bringing the customers to Panzura, especially right now when there's acceleration of cloud, it's the theme we see, and the keynote here at VMworld and beyond, but what is it that differentiates Panzura and brings customers to you? >> Yeah, so we work, for example, with one of the largest banks in the world that took a legacy wire transfer application and put it out into the cloud, because they had no way of managing both the volume of transactions and the breadth worldwide that they needed in order to manage that application, and it would have taken years to rewrite that in a cloud native app, and putting it on Panzura works great. We also work with architecture firms, some of the largest in the world, where they're able to collaborate on building buildings all from home, which is pretty amazing, and then I would say the last, and maybe the coolest, is what we do in entertainment. We work with a large majority of the gaming companies, and they use Panzura to run all their files and collaborate on those really large games where they can code across the world, and then in the case, we just announced a partnership with the New Orleans Saints, where we're taking all their game day footage, and making it available to all their constituents quite quickly, and the big difference in all of those examples from other solutions, and what we do at Panzura, is that in other solutions, you have to duplicate that data across the world. We don't. We provide one single file, one single source, that's kept securely all the time and available all the time. >> Jill, help us understand how this fits into the cloud environment. So we talked about your VMware connection. I know Panzura is in the AWS marketplace, lots of discussions, AWS, Azure, even Oracle Cloud as to how it fits there. When I think about storing things in cloud, there's some of that just global replication that can happen, or how it can access it. Help us understand really the added value that Panzura has, and why that's important for that New Orleans Saints example that you talked about. >> Yeah, so one of the great things about the way that we handle data is you don't have to duplicate it. We just do snapshots, and it's there and available when you need it. The really important thing about putting this much data, very large files in the cloud, is you need to be able to manage your costs and also where you put it. So let's talk about cost for a second. Being able to have a solution that automatically manages cash versus S3 and longterm storage, that's one of our key, we have 34 patents or something like that. It's one of our main claims to fame is that we can absolutely do that, and that reduces the costs longterm of your storage in the cloud. That's one of the big deals. The other is look, AWS, pick Google, pick Azure. You likely are using more than one cloud, and we have a full hybrid solution. It can mirror what you have going on within your cloud or across clouds, which is perfect. >> Yep, maybe it would help if you dig in a little bit there. When people talk about hybrid cloud, they talk about multicloud. Often the red herring gets thrown out of portability. When we're talking about large data sets, we know we're not moving it. I mean, AWS has the big boxes they can ship you, or have a truck come to your facility to move it, but most customers, wherever you create your data, you tend to want to keep it there, but it's managing my data and fitting across these hybrid environments, or I'll have my data application in one cloud, I'll have a transactional application in another cloud. What are you seeing from your customers out there? How are they dealing and managing this overall cloud environment that they end up with? >> Yeah, it's actually really interesting, because I think the expectations from users day to day is that the cloud works exactly like your laptop or desktop would work in your office environment where you can seamlessly go between an Outlook 365 to a Dropbox. Each of those are on different cloud environments. They're different in terms of how they work, but from a user perspective, you want no latency and immediate access to your data. Well, the cloud doesn't really work like that, and so you need something like Panzura to be the system in the middle, the fabric in the middle that connects all those things together, so that when you want to reach for your big CAD drawing, and pull that, it's going to pull just as quickly as an email from Office 365, and you, as the user, don't need to know whether you pulled that out of cash, because it's a file that's used quite often, or whether it was over on S3 and in longterm storage, or longterm or cheaper storage in the cloud, and I think it's interesting, because a lot of people, we, by the way, work with a lot of customers that do move their data around. They have petabytes and petabytes of data, and they do move it around based on cost and availability, and we can do it all in the background, and as a user, you would see no degradation in legacy or in latency, and you would see no legacy data gone missing, which is kind of cool. >> Jill, it really sounds, David Floyer on the Wikibon team, writes about the hybrid and multicloud environments, and he says we've got these planes. So if you think of the networking planes, people in VMware will say that the vision that Nicera originally had, and MSX has, is that interconnective issue for the networking piece. It sounds like you're doing very much the same thing on the data layer to be able to sit on top of the storage, but provide some consistency in books. I know Panzura has been around for a while. Are there certain use cases that are kind of bubbling to the top? You mentioned things like collaboration, being something that, of course, is very active here in 2020, but if there's some of the, a couple of use cases that bubble up for you as to key things that customers are driving forward today. >> Yeah, I would say two main use cases in the last five months. One is, there is, sadly, dealing with a global pandemic isn't enough. We're getting ransomware at a higher level, and if you've got Panzura, and the way in which we take snapshots and we store your data, you can have a ransomware attack, and we've seen it with a number of our clients during COVID. You simply, in minutes, re-install a snapshot, and off you go. You didn't lose a thing and you can completely ignore ransomware, which has been really great for the folks that have had that installed. The second is the need to collaborate at the bitter end, people's houses. So this is one of the great things about working with VMware is we can put a VM certainly on-prem, but we can put it in your nearest cloud. So, for example, let's say you're using AWS, but the closest place to a particular group of people's home is a Google area. Fine, put it in Google. It won't matter for our deployment, and so you can get those files really quickly at the very edge, and being able to deploy it on VMware just makes it even faster, so. >> All right, Jill, as you said, you've been on for five months. What should we be looking at from Panzura through the rest of 2020? Give us a little bit as to your vision, and what we should expect to see. >> The company is growing really quickly. We've invested a ton of money in our sales partners and customers. So since I've been here, we've literally grown our revenue about 65%, and so that's been super fun. Also, we're investing heavily in R&D, and you're going to see some fun things coming from us on the R&D front about how to really support this data services layer that's coming, and the kinds of information that we all need to get about what's going on in the cloud and our ever-important data, so excited about that. >> Wonderful, we always love VMworld's one of those times where people go through the show floor, and they're like, "Okay, wait." You're hiring, what positions you have, any key things that people should be looking for? If you say, "Hey," what are you looking for when it comes to new talent for Panzura? >> Yeah, so one of the best things about, by the way, new talent for Panzura is that we use Panzura to run our company, and so you can work anywhere in the world, or live anywhere in the world, and work for us, and we're looking for development talent at all levels. We're looking for sales help at all levels, and honestly, there are some internal roles as well, so you can definitely come to our website and see all of those. We're very excited about the growth and hires. >> Always good to see that growth. Jill, why don't you give us a final takeaway that you want people to have about Panzura, what you're seeing from VMware customers these days, and help us get the final takeaways? >> Yeah, so what we enjoy about Panzura and VMware is really being able to deploy some of the largest companies in the world, whether it's federal government, or a very large worldwide enterprise, and if you are looking for a common fabric that allows you to deploy across clouds, we are your choice. >> Jill, thank you so much for catching up. We need to bring you back. Jeff Frick's going to want to talk to you more about the technology and football. Glad to see that you're still plugged in with those as we knew you were. Jill Stelfox, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE at VMworld 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost is John Troyer. It's our 10th year at the show, we've been going three days, wall to wall, on two sets and really happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest, Geoff Tudor is the vice president, general manager of Vision.AI, inside Panzura. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yes, you best suit things John. >> All right, so, we've known Panzura for quite a number of years, the founder of the company's someone we've talked to a bit. I believe this is the first time we've talked about Vision.ai, so maybe set the table with us, of Panzura Today, and the value of the sharing app. >> Sure, absolutely, so, Panzura is known predominantly for its file services, of which we can provide a global collaborative name space, across multiple different locations. So, entities that are in the design, engineering, manufacturing, anything where you're working with a lot of distributed groups that need access to the same kind of working set files, and big data files have been using Panzura for file services for a number of years. We're in 33 countries, 7,000 deployments, and largely in the Fortune 100. And that's kind of where we started to see that the growth of data is not only in user-generated content like PowerPoints or data-based backups, but it's the machine-generated data, and that's what brought us to Vision.ai. >> Okay, so great. The layout, that was an internally created product. How long has it been available, what's the key IP in there that differentiates from others in the marketplace? >> So, great question. Well, the thing with machine-generated data is there's a lot of it, right? And as you know, it's growing at 60% compounding growth rate, all these great statistics, but in order to drive value of machine data, especially when you're looking at ML and AI, the larger the data set, the larger the training data set, the better the prediction models, and one of the problems with today's storage platforms for machine data, is that you're taking data, you're indexing it, then you're putting it on Flash, which is a phenomenal storage platform, but if you're looking for petabytes of Flash for just retaining a couple months worth of data, it becomes very expensive, very fast so a couple of years ago, we took some of the core IP that we had and creating file to object mapping, and said, look, let's build a new cloud native architecture to manage cloud native digital machine-generated data, and be able to transfer that not only for the block storage to put in the object storage. So we created something called VBOS, Vision Block Object Storage, that allows us to take, index this data, and then write it to object but still, while it's an object, have it still searchable, and that really unlocks a value of these very large data sets, so you no longer have to push this off on a tape, or push it off into object storage where it's no longer available, it sits in object storage, but it's always on, it's always available. >> And is this a software offering, does it sit in my bucket somewhere, or does it sit in yours, and then actually are we, machine-generated data, that's a pretty wide term. Are we talking log files, or? >> Well, certainly log files is a core starting point because that's something everyone here at VMWorld, you know, has in common, right? As our systems and records are creating and running virtual machines, it's generating digital data about who accessed what, when, where, when and how, for IP address security information, dashboards, et cetera. So, we've created this as a service because, in a multicloud world, you need one platform where you can ingest these data feeds and these log feeds, and then store that and search it. People have been generating and deploying on-site log files for some time, but we've seen a large interest among our customer base, in a hosted service that can securely store and make their logs accessible. >> All right, Geoff, bring us inside a customer. What is some of the typical use cases, outcomes, that customers, if you have any example that might illustrate it, I'd love that. >> Sure, so we'll take a customer that is in the publishing business and as you know, in the publishing busines, we were going from paper into digital right? So it's just digital transformation and as their industry changed, they became now a web hoster, so the sites and their papers that used to advertise and their classifieds and by-print ads, they're now managing their digital experience, well, as they were doing that, they came into a situation where some of their sites were having unpredictable performance lows, and they're just sophisticated enough to have one IT person managing, you know, 50 different, to about 50 different servers, virtual machines, running these, hosting these sites. So they needed help, like is there a platform that can come help me create dashboards so I can visualize this log data that came in to us so our partner, one of our key partners here is phoenixNAP at the show, and Intel's demonstrating our Octane Accelerated Technology, so we went into this particular customer, onboarded him in five minutes, created the dashboards for him, and now their logs are coming in a number of gigabytes per day, and that can visualize and find out any points of their operations that are creating problems and slow access time for their customers. >> You know, I love the storage data aspect of it, right? The searchable object store sounds very neat, I bet there's some very cool computer science there, storage and data geeks love that. It's also got AI in the name, and we talked about ML and AI, so where does that come into the picture? >> Absolutely, sir, great question. The AI and ML aspect of this is because as you get primarily the large data set sizes, then you can start putting machine generated algorithms on top of it, right, so creating large data stores, and then the first machine generated analytics that we've run on top of it, are things such as storage prediction costs, it's actually one where we've saved one of our customers in financial services, tens of thousands of dollars a month, because we can look at their bucket, their bucket sizes and the access times to their S3 buckets and say look, you know, you're actually not accessing it. You can drop it down in the infrequent access and you're not going to get a higher bill, so we can run these analytics for them, provide that data to them. >> Geoff, we're here at VMWorld. >> Yes. >> VMworld's talking a lot about multicloud, and microservices, cloud native, VMware cloud pieces, help us understand the intersection between what you're doing, and how that ties into VMware and their customers. >> Absolutely, well, in a multicloud world, VMware is obviously one very important component of it. But there's also components that are non-Vsphere based, right, and so, we have to be cognizant of this, and need a platform that can support any data feed from any data source, so that's certainly one of them. But number two, as you mention it, microservice. Traditional log platforms or machine data platforms such as Elastix, or Archer Splunk or things like that, is where you go and you create your architecture, and your infrastructure, and you manage that infrastructure as you're putting that data into it so it puts operational burden on the customer to go manage all this. In our view of the world, it needs to be completely serverless. You need to be able to consume machine data, log data, as a microservice in a complete service mythology, so you send your data into this URL, it goes into your bucket, it's encrypted, it's dropped into your object service where it's searchable. >> Yeah, it's funny, I've been looking at the serverless space for a couple of years now, functions, really interesting stuff, Kelsey Hightower actually put out, he said, isn't most of networking serverless by definition? Maybe just clarify that for us. >> Yeah, so serverless is just like the cloud. It's just somebody else's data center, okay? >> I actually have the T-shirt for serverless, it updates that there is no cloud, it's a computer, it's just a microservice that you pay a little bit for when you need it, things like that. >> Right, when you need it, but really, it gets into if I want to spin up elastic searches, talk about that, because that is one of the key workloads that's running in our platform, when you talk about elastic search service, if you want to spin that up, you need to go literally spin up virtual machines, assign block storage to those virtual machines, and hope that you assign enough storage for your data ingestion, otherwise your performance is going to go down, your data is going to become blocked, then you're going to need to assign storage. So, you're still managing stuff, even though it's in the cloud, in our world, we're kind of trying to turn machine generated data and democratize it into simple as a Gmail account right? I create, I request a microservice endpoint, then you write to that endpoint. Now, of course, we're managing servers, and we're managing clusters and virtual machines, and all that funness, but it's transparent to you, and most importantly, you're not hit with any cost for the infrastructure. You're only charged for what you're consuming, and that means it's a complete consumable base bottle from that standpoint, which saves customers a lot money from otherwise having to buy and host a lot of infrastructure. >> So, Geoff, you have a big presence here at the show, A nice booth, I hope it's been a good week, I'm curious about what you thought the energy was, I think you all had an announcement, talk a little about that and how that works with the ecosystem in the audience here. >> Yeah, we actually have two announcements, and let's take the first from the file services, because from our file service platform, we're announcing Vsense certification, which is coming in the fall, we've gone through that process, so that anywhere you're running VMware, on any of the cloud providers on top of SAN, vSAN, you now have a file services platform on top of that that can expand beyond just your NVMe, and also leverage that object storage for this kind of infinite filer, if you will, for that, but the other announcement we have is the log analytics service. >> All right, yeah, tell us a little bit about customer meetings you're having. What are the things that are bringing customers to you, is there a certain thing that, you know, when you hear it, you're like ah, this is a perfect Panzura customer. >> Well, yeah, certainly, I would think that any data and storage is just a universal problem, and people can't get enough of it, and ultimately they want to get out of the business of managing storage a lot, in this case so in that particular instance, being able to offer them a software defined file system platform for our traditional filer environment, is something that's going to, it's just a evergreen forest, right, it's going to continue to grow, you know, the performance of file and flash at the price of object, that's a pretty clear value proposition. In the machine generated data analytics space with Vision.ai, it is how do I make sense of my data? I need to take all of these data streams, and actually put some intelligence on it, and create alerts, visualize this data, so our big proposition here is five minutes to visualize your data, and that resonates. I can walk these customers that are traditionally having to go build their own log service environments, and I'm saying here, let me onboard you. We can actually start sending their data up and having visualizations and alerts in five minutes, and that's revolutionary to them, right? The simplicity of it is key, and I think that's making IT simple to consume and democratizing is something we're focused on doing. >> Geoff, last thing I have, tell us a little bit about what we should expect going forward. Obviously, the AI and ML stuff is continuing to grow, what should customers be looking for from Panzura in the near future? >> No matter how sophisticated a customer in an enterprise is, they don't have enough smart people, right? And data scientists are very expensive, and they're very scarce so what we're doing and focused on doing and we will be doing more of, is we've built a marketplace, a marketplace where data applications, data analytics applications, can be created by the community, can be published into and be consumed by an enterprise, so that they have their account, they add in this application, they can immediately start utilizing and experiencing and unlocking the power of their data. >> Geoff Tudor, really appreciate the update on Panzura. Congrats on the progress of Vision.ai, and hope to catch up with you in the near future. >> Great, thanks so much, I look forward to next year. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of our coverage from Vmworld 2019, but as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

(bright music plays) >> Welcome to theCUBE's Special Program Series: Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome our next guest, Sherry Karamdashti, sales director at AWS Startups. Sherry, welcome to the program. It's great to have you today. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> Tell me a little bit about you, a little bit about your role at AWS Startups. >> Great. Yes, um, I run the startup sales in the US uh, for AWS. I've joined AWS really early in the cloud journey, um, that was in 2013, so I'm almost 10 years there, all in sales leadership. So I've been able to work with really amazing customers, mostly, you know, startups in the beginning cause those were our predominantly original customers. And now obviously going to, the business has grown to, you know, other enterprises and, and really have seen some great things in my 10 year journey. >> Lisa: So you're almost a 10 year Amazonian. Congratulations on your impending anniversary. Talk to me a little bit about your career path. Did you always know you wanted to be in tech? Did you get into tech from a different field? What does that look like? >> Yeah, yes. I was always interested in technology. I was a electrical engineer in my undergrad and I pretty much quickly realized I didn't want to write code or, you know, design integrated circuits. There really wasn't an internet back then. I think the engineering students had emails but we emailed each other, nobody else had them. And I just got into a program actually at Intel and it was a technical sales program and so they recruited folks, engineering students, put us through some rotations and various um, reps. And then we rolled out to the field and I became a sales, technical sales person. >> Got it. So you were a EE from the start, kind of always knew you wanted to be in tech but then now as a sales leader, talk to me a little bit about that path and what are some of your recommendations for people that might be starting out in tech or interested and don't really know how to navigate their career? >> Yeah, I think, you know, I think for me I was a little bit of luck and timing and you know, some intelligence of picking the right path. And I think really just around your skill sets, right? And I had a technical background, I was a people person. Relationships and connections were something that were important to me. And really just figuring out kind of how to match your skill sets to what you, what you actually enjoy doing. You know, again, I wasn't looking for a career in sales leadership but it was definitely something I quickly embraced. You know, I enjoy developing people, working with our customers to help them solve their challenges and various technology companies I've worked for. And as far as navigating, I think having, I always tell people, do the best job you can in your current role and be looking at what you want next. Because I have a lot of people that come to me and say, I want to do this next. And I'm like, well, you have to really be doing excellent in what you're doing today, so that you get to have supporters and allies to help sponsor you in other, other things. >> Absolutely. Mentors and sponsors are so critical. Often when I ask people this question, they talk about things like, raise your hand, ask a question. Let me pay attention to your point about the things that you're interested in and start navigating a pathway that way. But also the importance of having mentors, having sponsors who you can share your ideas with, share your dreams with is also something that I think is quite helpful for those that are navigating maybe early in their tech careers or maybe they're midway through and there's a change they want to make but they just aren't aware of what else is out there. >> Sherry: Yep, absolutely. And I think I've been really lucky to have some great allies and mentors along the way. >> So you've had some great successes. I want to now kind of pivot to understanding some of the successes that you've had, where you've helped customers internally, externally solve problems where it's related to cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, yeah, so, you know, for 10 years I've been doing that, you know, early in my career, like I thought it was, most of our customers were startups and it was really a great place to be because AWS at the time, very early helped democratize access to the cloud, right? And so there were these startups who didn't have a lot of capital or people. And so it helped bring that flexibility and agility to startups that maybe, you know, most enterprises have the resources to do. And you know, and I, throughout my career, I've worked with really interesting companies. Right now I've just met with the CEO, Jill Stelfox at Panzura who really outlined, you know, why AWS is great and what, what it's helped, how it had helped them achieve things. And it's really, her thing is that AWS is really helps them build and deploy at scale so that they're able to reach their customer, you know, more broadly. And it really helps them with the backend functions like deploying products, you know, maintaining that security and these user controls that become part of the AWS solutions, so they don't have to worry about it. You know, I've had interesting startups that are embracing machine learning in various ways, right? They, I had an autonomous vehicle startup that uses the advanced driving, the assisted driving system to predict and, you know, whether it's, you know, changing lanes or helping, you know, automate those things and they want to make sure that they provide reliability to their car manufacturers. And there's many, many others, you know, in the healthcare industry that we've helped bring really, ultimately helping them deploy and so that they can innovate and bring market, bring products to market faster. >> That's what it's all about. Innovation, being able to bring products to market faster, being able to pivot quickly when change happens. I literally just today saw that interview that Jill did from Panzura on AWS and the relationship there. I've got a number of friends who've just starting their, their new jobs at Panzura. So it's so great to see just the tech ecosystem being so intertwined and interconnected. I love that so much. I want to understand now from your perspective, switching gears a bit, talking about diversity thought diversity, diversity of people, what, you know, we talk about this Sherry, so often intact DE&I is, it's a very prominent topic of conversation but there's still some challenges there. Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen with respect to diversity that are still challenges present and what are some of your recommendations for organizations to employ to get some of those challenges scraped out of the way? >> Yeah, I mean, I was an engineer and you know, (laughs) in the early nineties, engineering student in the early nineties. So I was the one of 10 females in my, in my, in my school, in my degree area. So, you know, being underrepresented was nothing new. And I wish that we weren't here talking about that, right? It's like, it doesn't matter if I'm a female tech leader, I'm just a tech leader, but we're not quite there yet, right? And, and I think maybe in the next generation can have that luxury and that we have to do that, you know, make that investment and effort today, so that we are helping the path. Now I tell people, you know, you have to, it takes time, right? You can't just go and say, "I'm going to hire a tech sales leader", right? And I started very early and developed my career there. So you have to invest and give yourself time to help develop, you know, underrepresented folks. And ultimately, I think you have to be intentional and you have to, you know, focus on, you know, maybe looking or having different criteria that maybe you haven't typically had, to bring that diverse perspective. Because if you're always looking for the same thing, that's what you'll get. And so I encourage my leaders at their hiring and recruiting to really, you know, look at one developing the pipeline of candidates, right? To bring on board, but also be open to, you know, the profile or the skill sets and things that they're looking for. >> You hit on three things there, Sherry, in all the interviews for this series that I've done, I'm hearing consistently where it comes to diversity, it's the investment that organizations need to make. It's the intention that organizations and leaders need to have and finding that talent. And it's the, the ability to be open-minded to looking for different thoughts, different skills, maybe going outside of the comfort zone to bring in diverse perspectives. So I love what you just said. It very much aligns with all the female leaders that we've been talking to in terms of this is what's needed next to make diversity, to actually bring diversity to life throughout organizations and not just have it as a talking point on an agenda. >> Yep, absolutely. And yeah, and honestly like I, my team is, I take pride in having a very diverse team. I have a very gender diverse team, and I would say it was intentional, but sometimes it's not. (laughs) So. >> Lisa: No, that's true. >> Right? And sometimes it's, you know, people gravitate towards, you know, female leaders, so they want to come work for me but also really it's just we have to create an environment where different people want to come in and feel like they can, you know, have a voice and contribute and grow, you know, in their career. >> Absolutely. People need to see what they can be, be able to feel that I'm going to be included in this conversation. I can raise my hand, I can ask a question. That's not a stupid question, it's probably a question that many other people in the room or on, on the virtual meeting have as well. So that, that ability to bring that diversity and that inclusion into roles whether it's we're talking about AI, machine learning, cloud is so important and it really will impact the direction that we go in. And so, for example, impact the direction that cloud goes in, in terms of how cloud's going to evolve, how your role is going to evolve. What are some of the things that you see there in terms of the next steps in cloud and in your role? >> Yeah, I think really, you know, in my role in dealing with various customers, I think succeeding with data in today's world really requires taking an end to end view. For organization today, people are drowning in their data and don't how to make, use it to make decisions. And we are, we are seeing an intersection of data and machine learning and analytics and databases. So I think we, um, all have to get, uh, smart about it and, you know, help our customers, you know, work their way through this journey. >> It is a journey and you know, every company these days has to be a data company. They've got to be a tech company, they have to be a software company, however you want to describe it but data is gold to an organization and I always think it's whether it's my grocery store or a retailer or a manufacturer or an automotive company, they have to be able to glean insights from data as quickly as possible to make business decisions that push their businesses forward. So that's one of the things that I love is that every company these days has to be a data company but they have to have the right tools, the right people, the right processes in place to be able to extract that value so that they can jump ahead of their competition. >> Exactly. And it's a competitive need. So I think that's, that's our job, that's our next, next big role is to help our, help our customers, you know, align that journey. >> Absolutely and be successful. Last question for you is if you look back over the last three to five years, what are some of the biggest changes in tech, in the tech workforce that you've seen and in innovation and what excites you about the direction that we're going in? >> Yeah, you know, I meet with startup founders and you know, you read their backgrounds or you get to know them and, you know, there were some engineering student at, you know, X, Y, Z and I was like, what if I were an engineer like five years ago? What could I have accomplished, right? So I am seeing this evolution of, you know, things or problems that are, smart people are solving whether it's machine learning like you said, whether it's biosciences. And so, you know, I'm really seeing things coming out of universities, like research things that are really coming to light and solving real world problems. So, so that's a big trend, right? When I, when I was a, you know, when I, in the, you know, years ago, I know you couldn't do much with, you know, satellite or telecommunications like you can with some of the topics that are coming out of school now. I'm also seeing investment in early talent. So, you know, companies that, you know, like you said, you, you know, you're finding really great experienced smart people. So you know, AWS, you know, on the sales and solution architect team, you know, we are investing in early, early talent, in early career talent. So, you know, and they're accomplishing great things. So I'm seeing companies like AWS embrace that a lot more. >> I love that, investing early in talent is so going to be so beneficial to companies in every industry. I'm excited, as are you, to see what happens in the future with that so much potential. So much potential. Sherry, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about what your role is, what you're doing, how you've been helping organizations succeed with cloud, what you see coming down the road and your recommendations for organizations to be more diverse. We so appreciate your time and your insights. >> It was my pleasure. Thank you. >> Excellent. For Sherry Karamdashti, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's Special Program Series: Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. Thanks for watching. (soft music plays)