>>Hi everyone. Welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks for having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So, very interesting at pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple, is also really sustainable and the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions. >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you see despite so many people saying sustainability huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that, that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company's sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals, and that it, of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those CO was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a tip the, to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability and IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. And wanna dig in a little bit to peers, ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned, peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, I, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then, but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our products. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as peer storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time. >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage, right in, in your entire IT port portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability, your cost, et cetera. And really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and it left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had, demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the, the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole. Thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>Pleasure speaking with you as well. We wanna thank you so much for watching. This is Pure Storage, the path to sustainable it. I'm Lisa Martin, we'll see you next time.

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

(Music) >> Welcome to the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got two Cube alum here with me, please welcome Merim Becirovic, Managing Director of Global IT Enterprise Architecture at Accenture and Chris Wegmann, Accenture, AWS Business Group technology and practices, Senior Managing Director, gentlemen, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Great to be here. >> It is nice to be back in a way right here we are at this hybrid event, but we want to talk about what Accenture is doing with its, with AWS to serving its clients. And then we're going to get into your own internal use case, drinking your own champagne. Chris go ahead and start with you, talk to us about what Accenture is doing with AWS to serve its clients. >> Yeah, Lisa, it's exciting, as you said to be back in this hybrid event and you know, for me, this will be my 10th re-invent and for Accenture we're in year 14 of our partnership with AWS and actually year six of our partnership called Accenture AWS business group. And you know, the focus over the last year has been helping our clients come out of the pandemic stronger than, than where they started. Right? And a lot of that has been around focusing our customers, getting past cloud migration, past cloud modernization, and getting further into what we now call the cloud continuum, starting to truly leverage all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to, to truly speed their transformation. You know, we work with a lot of our customers who are needing to transform even faster today than they were before the pandemic. And, you know, we're focused on helping those customers do that with AWS services. >> So Merim, let's bring you into the conversation. Now Accenture's internal IT organization has been leveraging AWS and public cloud for a while. Talk to me about that you completed the journey a couple of years ago, 95% in the cloud. Talk to me about what you're doing there. >> Sure. Lisa, so our, our journey into the public cloud is complete. As you said, we put a bow on that project a couple of years ago. We started in 2015 and we went all in on public cloud. So we, the number 95%, 95% represents a true measure of everything it takes to run Accenture. Everything addressable is in the public cloud today. So the 95% just represents a small component of things that have to live outside of the cloud. But other than that, our journey to the cloud is complete, and we are very happy being in the cloud because it has opened tremendous doors for us as a business. I'm sure we'll talk about here as we go, but it's fundamentally a different place we live in today and where we were before we were in the cloud. >> Merim, you said something really powerful there a second ago. The Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. I don't think I'd ever heard anybody say that. Talk to me about the impact, especially during the last 18 months that that cloud journey is delivered. >> I mean, one of the things I am extremely proud of for our collective global teams around the world, when the, obviously the, you know, when COVID hit and the pandemic engulf the world, the only difference for us was that people just did not come into an office to work. Our capabilities in the cloud, our capabilities of having everything in the cloud really made it that much easier for our people to go to work. We weren't fighting over resources around infrastructure. People could just work from home directly. So I'm extremely proud of the collective global team that made all of that happen as part of that execution of all those things. So it was really a very proud moment, I would say for all of us running IT. >> As well, it should be. Chris, talk about that from your perspective of facilitating that massive pivot 18, 19 months ago, and what your group was responsible for doing to enable this cloud journey to be complete. >> Yeah. I always laughed at, you know, Merim and our internal CIO organizations, we call it was our first customer, right. You know, way back when I started working in this partnership, you know, we were already starting to leverage AWS, S3 and EC2, and that insight Accenture, and we took a lot of those best practices and started helping, our clients leverages best practices. So, you know, from an Accenture, we always kind of harvest from internally what we're doing, but, you know, over the last several years, we really are our focused with the CIO organization, Merim's organization has been, you know, expanding the usage of non, you know, I, as I call Maya services, right? So past EC2, you know, past S3. Obviously there's always storage. There's always compute, but you know, truly doing and building serverless applications, truly using, you know, services, fully managed services. So, you know, the CIO organization doesn't have to spend their time doing that. And, for our customers, that's while it's, they're still early on in a lot of their journeys, that's a novel idea is a truly try to sunset IS services or EC2 and things like that, you know, and whether that's, you know, fix some containerization or things like that, I think the other big part is, is the maturing security footprint, right? Obviously, as you use one or more of these AWS services, your security posture, your presence, how you think about security. We created an asset called secure cloud foundation, leveraging many of the AWS services in the security space that have come out like guard duty and others really to help make that security foundation stronger, make it easier for our customers, including CIO to leverage those services and truly enable that move further up the cloud or further down the continuum as we call it. >> Merim, I want to get your thoughts on security from in a, because we have seen such a dramatic change in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We've seen a huge spike in ransomware. It's getting much more personal. It's now a household word. We've got the executive order. We had this rapid pivot to and hundreds of thousands of Accenture employees working from home. Talk to me about, you feel very confident in the cloud during that you didn't word where's your competence from a security perspective. >> As you said, security is the fastest growth in our business. Collectively, like you said, the bad guys don't sleep. We don't sleep either when it comes to security. One of the things that we're constantly thinking about is how do we turn on a lot of our capabilities as an example. So even, I would say at an enterprise level, it's different when you're running a big multinational corporation, 650,000 people like we do. We can't just turn everything on and hope for the best. We are very scripted in terms of how we think about those services, how we think about the processes, how we work with our CSO organization, so that we're very meticulous and very thorough in terms of what services we turn on, how we turn them on, when we turn them on? How long we make them available, because this is, this is the new world, right? We have extended our corporate structure out into the cloud. That means we have to think of different ways for how we want to consume those capabilities and services. So like Chris said, you know, the, the journey to the cloud for us is complete. A lot of it was I, as I would tell you, a lot of it was lift and shift for less. And we can talk about that if we get time, but it was more about getting into the cloud and taking advantage of the cloud where we are today, because now that we're there, we get to take advantage of all those capabilities that are there. And I would say the best part of being with on, in, in the cloud is also having the, the providers like AWS they are with us, helping us with that security posture. So it's not just us doing this by ourselves. >> So Chris, I want to talk about that Merim just said, this was mostly lift and shift. Talk to us about that. Cause when we talk to organizations in every industry, the cloud transition, the cloud journey is extremely challenging. It's complex. How did you do this? How did you facilitate this and in a relatively short time period, Chris? >> Yeah. And, and you're right. Everyone has conversations I have with my clients. You know, there's a huge debate whether to lift and shift or modernize or build new build cloud native, right? So, you know, in Accenture's situation, you know, very early on, it was identified that we can, we can do a large savings by doing a lift and shift migration, right. We were not a big data center owner, right. That wasn't, we're not a big capital intense organization. So for us, that, that journey we had, you know, colos and that stuff coming up for renewal. And we knew that we could, you know, get some early savings there and really, you know, reduce our footprint and take that investment and then invest it into, you know, true modernization. So Merim and his organization worked very closely to build the factory, to do the migrations, get that done in a very short amount of time and then turn their attention on truly refactoring rebuilding the applications. I'm super proud of the number of applications that we've rebuilt. I'm super proud of the number of applications that, that now are cloud native. And we live in these applications every day. You know, they they're everything from our performance to how we do our payroll and do our time charging and things like that. But which, you know, it was a big reason why, you know, we can access our systems remotely and at home versus going into different systems to get to that stuff. So, you know, it was very much heavily lift and shift early, then really focusing on modernization. And as Merim said, getting, you know, now it's about living there and continuing, continuing to modernize, continuing to accelerate what we're doing in the cloud. >> Yeah. Lisa, its little bit like, so our journey lift and shift was a core component of it. But the minute we decided to go to the cloud, one of the things, the first things we did, as I said, no more vans. So any new capability that we were going to build, we were going to build a cloud native micro-services based, and that's been our standard for the last 3 or 4 years ago. So any new capability that comes along today that we must do custom, we build a cloud native microservices because one of the other things that I've got on my plate is I'm trying to reduce our overall technical debt. So all of these IS platforms, I still have to maintain them, patch them, support them, upgrade them. And I would rather be much more efficient at doing those things as, as I can and reinvest money into refactoring and modernizing the rest of the application, plead through containers through microservices, et cetera, which then gives me the agility right back to actually go even faster, to enable more services for the business. >> Speed is something that we've seen become even more critical in the last 18, 19 months where we needed to everybody pivot businesses multiple times over and over. But part of the challenge there Merim, I want to get your thoughts on this is they are something cultural shift. Talk to me about, you've been at Accenture for a long time. Talk to me about the cultural shift needed to facilitate this massive transformation to cloud and how Chris's team was a facilitator of that. >> So, you know, one of the things for us, I have probably in the last five years spoken to a thousand of our clients, around our cloud journey and this culture conversation always comes up and I will say, you know, the biggest thing for us was interesting. We had those same fears. We had some same in when we first talked about going to the cloud, you know, six years ago, it was very, not everything was there, that's there today. So the teams were extremely nervous and they were confident that we could never be as, as good in the cloud as we were on, on site. Yet here we are six years later and we're constantly finding ways to add value and take, bring value back. And though, it's so same teams. And one of the things is just, we gave them the challenge to say, Hey, this is the future. We're telling our clients, this is where we're going. We have an opportunity here to do something different and they took it and the team really took it on. And they said, okay, let's do it. And they act, and we looked at how we run into cloud the many different ways, whether we're using reserved instances, whether we're using containers, whether we're using, you know, different computer capabilities, we went through all of it and we're running such a highly efficient machine right now that it's like, we're still able to continue to eat out savings even five years after the program. Even two years after the program is complete, we're still able to get savings. >> That's outstanding. That's ROI that every business and every industry hopes to be able to achieve from this. I want to switch gears a little bit now because this is actually pretty cool. Accenture is really focused also on sustainability. You guys have signed onto the Amazon climate pledge, which if you don't know what the Amazon climate pledge, and this is back in 2019, Amazon, co-founded this a commitment to be net zero carbon across businesses by 2040, which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris agreement. You're in talk to us about that. And from Accenture's perspective, why it was important to sign on to that. >> So on a, on a personal level, I love obviously sustainability as a whole, that I think about the world park for my children that are growing up. So it's very important to me on a personal level as well. But I would say at a company level, what I love about the cloud is I am there right there with them as they make investments. All of our enterprise capabilities are there. We are able to very quickly shift and use those capabilities. So as Amazon, for example, in this scenario creates new capabilities, new compute offerings, new, new storage offerings, whatever it may be. They're doing it with a sustainability lens and me by being in the cloud already, I can then turn to start using those things too. So as much as I can, on that perspective, I'm in a great place with, as Amazon puts these sustainability capabilities out there, I'm right there consuming and making them more efficient. And then the other one is obviously as much of our workloads, as we can get to a cloud native perspective, microservices perspective, then we keep reducing that compute consumption and everything else that goes along with it. And lastly, I would say, you know, the, the other thing is we're very aggressive in managing all of our systems in terms of uptime. So for example, in a data center, most, most organizations don't think about turning off their development environments and everything else. But for us, we're very rigid in this process. And we have a, we have a target of all of our development environments being down 55% of the time. And primarily that's also a sustainability play in addition to a financial savings plan. >> Awesome. Great stuff, Chris, last question for you, as we wrap up here, what are some of the things that you were excited about that's coming in cloud in the next few years? Obviously here we are at, re-invent going to be hearing a lot of news, a lot of announcements about cloud in the coming days. What excites you most, Chris? >> Yeah. You know, obviously the machine learning and AI stuff is, is always the most exciting things right now in cloud. And, you know, we've put a lot of those to use here inside of Accenture as well. And, and our, you know, in our synopsis platform, which we use with our customers to run in a more intelligent operations, we use that internally as well. But you know, one of the things that excites me the most is the continued innovation at the core. Right. And you know, whether that be, you know, chip sets, you know, Merim talked a little bit about, you know, improvement and performance improvement and power consumption, you know, grabbing time, those types of stuff that, that excites me every year, I look forward to seeing what, what they come out with and, and then how we're going to put that to use. >> Well, I look forward to talking to you guys next year, you've done such a tremendous job. You should be proud of the massive transformation that you've done. I imagine this is, would be a great case study. If it's not already written up, it should be. It's really impressive. Merim and Chris, thank you for joining me at the summit. Talking to me about what's going on with Accenture and AWS and some of the things that you are looking forward to, we appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> You're welcome for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. This is the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. (Music)

(Music) >> Welcome to the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got two cube alum here with me, please welcome Merim Bertovic, managing director of global IT enterprise architecture at Accenture and Chris Wegmann, Accenture, AWS business group technology and practices, senior managing director, gentlemen, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Great to be here. >> It is nice to be back in a way right here we are at this hybrid event, but we want to talk about what Accenture is doing with its, with AWS to serving its clients. And then we're going to get into your own internal use case, drinking your own champagne. Chris go ahead and start with you, talk to us about what Accenture is doing with AWS to serve its clients. >> Yeah, Lisa, it's exciting, as you said to be back in this hybrid event and you know, for me, this will be my 10th re-invent and for Accenture we're in year 14 of our partnership with AWS and actually year six of our partnership called Accenture AWS business group. And you know, the focus over the last year has been helping our clients come out of the pandemic stronger than, than where they started. Right? And a lot of that has been around focusing our customers, getting past cloud migration, past cloud modernization, and getting further into what we now call the cloud continuum, starting to truly leverage all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to, to truly speed their transformation. You know, we work with a lot of our customers who are needing to transform even faster today than they were before the pandemic. And, you know, we're focused on helping those customers do that with AWS services. >> So Merim, let's bring you into the conversation. Now Accenture's internal IT organization has been leveraging AWS and public cloud for a while. Talk to me about that you completed the journey a couple of years ago, 95% in the cloud. Talk to me about what you're doing there. >> Sure. Lisa, so our, our journey into the public cloud is complete. As you said, we put a bow on that project a couple of years ago. We started in 2015 and we went all in on public cloud. So we, the number 95%, 95% represents a true measure of everything it takes to run Accenture. Everything addressable is in the public cloud today. So the 95% just represents a small component of things that have to live outside of the cloud. But other than that, our journey to the cloud is complete, and we are very happy being in the cloud because it has opened tremendous doors for us as a business. I'm sure we'll talk about here as we go, but it's fundamentally a different place we live in today and where we were before we were in the cloud. >> Merim, you said something really powerful there a second ago. The Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. I don't think I'd ever heard anybody say that. Talk to me about the impact, especially during the last 18 months that that cloud journey is delivered. >> I mean, one of the things I am extremely proud of for our collective global teams around the world, when the, obviously the, you know, when COVID hit and the pandemic engulf the world, the only difference for us was that people just did not come into an office to work. Our capabilities in the cloud, our capabilities of having everything in the cloud really made it that much easier for our people to go to work. We weren't fighting over resources around infrastructure. People could just work from home directly. So I'm extremely proud of the collective global team that made all of that happen as part of that execution of all those things. So it was really a very proud moment, I would say for all of us running IT. >> As well, it should be. Chris, talk about that from your perspective of facilitating that massive pivot 18, 19 months ago, and what your group was responsible for doing to enable this cloud journey to be complete. >> Yeah. I always laughed at, you know, Merim and our internal CIO organizations, we call it was our first customer, right. You know, way back when I started working in this partnership, you know, we were already starting to leverage AWS, S3 and EC2, and that insight Accenture, and we took a lot of those best practices and started helping, our clients leverages best practices. So, you know, from an Accenture, we always kind of harvest from internally what we're doing, but, you know, over the last several years, we really are our focused with the CIO organization, Merim's organization has been, you know, expanding the usage of non, you know, I, as I call Maya services, right? So past EC2, you know, past S3. Obviously there's always storage. There's always compute, but you know, truly doing and building serverless applications, truly using, you know, services, fully managed services. So, you know, the CIO organization doesn't have to spend their time doing that. And, for our customers, that's while it's, they're still early on in a lot of their journeys, that's a novel idea is a truly try to sunset IS services or EC2 and things like that, you know, and whether that's, you know, fix some containerization or things like that, I think the other big part is, is the maturing security footprint, right? Obviously, as you use one or more of these AWS services, your security posture, your presence, how you think about security. We created an asset called secure cloud foundation, leveraging many of the AWS services in the security space that have come out like guard duty and others really to help make that security foundation stronger, make it easier for our customers, including CIO to leverage those services and truly enable that move further up the cloud or further down the continuum as we call it. >> Merim, I want to get your thoughts on security from in a, because we have seen such a dramatic change in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We've seen a huge spike in ransomware. It's getting much more personal. It's now a household word. We've got the executive order. We had this rapid pivot to and hundreds of thousands of Accenture employees working from home. Talk to me about, you feel very confident in the cloud during that you didn't word where's your competence from a security perspective. >> As you said, security is the fastest growth in our business. Collectively, like you said, the bad guys don't sleep. We don't sleep either when it comes to security. One of the things that we're constantly thinking about is how do we turn on a lot of our capabilities as an example. So even, I would say at an enterprise level, it's different when you're running a big multinational corporation, 650,000 people like we do. We can't just turn everything on and hope for the best. We are very scripted in terms of how we think about those services, how we think about the processes, how we work with our CSO organization, so that we're very meticulous and very thorough in terms of what services we turn on, how we turn them on, when we turn them on? How long we make them available, because this is, this is the new world, right? We have extended our corporate structure out into the cloud. That means we have to think of different ways for how we want to consume those capabilities and services. So like Chris said, you know, the, the journey to the cloud for us is complete. A lot of it was I, as I would tell you, a lot of it was lift and shift for less. And we can talk about that if we get time, but it was more about getting into the cloud and taking advantage of the cloud where we are today, because now that we're there, we get to take advantage of all those capabilities that are there. And I would say the best part of being with on, in, in the cloud is also having the, the providers like AWS they are with us, helping us with that security posture. So it's not just us doing this by ourselves. >> So Chris, I want to talk about that Merim just said, this was mostly lift and shift. Talk to us about that. Cause when we talk to organizations in every industry, the cloud transition, the cloud journey is extremely challenging. It's complex. How did you do this? How did you facilitate this and in a relatively short time period, Chris? >> Yeah. And, and you're right. Everyone has conversations I have with my clients. You know, there's a huge debate whether to lift and shift or modernize or build new build cloud native, right? So, you know, in Accenture's situation, you know, very early on, it was identified that we can, we can do a large savings by doing a lift and shift migration, right. We were not a big data center owner, right. That wasn't, we're not a big capital intense organization. So for us, that, that journey we had, you know, colos and that stuff coming up for renewal. And we knew that we could, you know, get some early savings there and really, you know, reduce our footprint and take that investment and then invest it into, you know, true modernization. So Merim and his organization worked very closely to build the factory, to do the migrations, get that done in a very short amount of time and then turn their attention on truly refactoring rebuilding the applications. I'm super proud of the number of applications that we've rebuilt. I'm super proud of the number of applications that, that now are cloud native. And we live in these applications every day. You know, they they're everything from our performance to how we do our payroll and do our time charging and things like that. But which, you know, it was a big reason why, you know, we can access our systems remotely and at home versus going into different systems to get to that stuff. So, you know, it was very much heavily lift and shift early, then really focusing on modernization. And as Miriam said, getting, you know, now it's about living there and continuing, continuing to modernize, continuing to accelerate what we're doing in the cloud. >> Yeah. Lisa, its little bit like, so our journey lift and shift was a core component of it. But the minute we decided to go to the cloud, one of the things, the first things we did, as I said, no more vans. So any new capability that we were going to build, we were going to build a cloud native micro-services based, and that's been our standard for the last 3 or 4 years ago. So any new capability that comes along today that we must do custom, we build a cloud native microservices because one of the other things that I've got on my plate is I'm trying to reduce our overall technical debt. So all of these IS platforms, I still have to maintain them, patch them, support them, upgrade them. And I would rather be much more efficient at doing those things as, as I can and reinvest money into refactoring and modernizing the rest of the application, plead through containers through microservices, et cetera, which then gives me the agility right back to actually go even faster, to enable more services for the business. >> Speed is something that we've seen become even more critical in the last 18, 19 months where we needed to everybody pivot businesses multiple times over and over. But part of the challenge there Merim, I want to get your thoughts on this is they are something cultural shift. Talk to me about, you've been at Accenture for a long time. Talk to me about the cultural shift needed to facilitate this massive transformation to cloud and how Chris's team was a facilitator of that. >> So, you know, one of the things for us, I have probably in the last five years spoken to a thousand of our clients, around our cloud journey and this culture conversation always comes up and I will say, you know, the biggest thing for us was interesting. We had those same fears. We had some same in when we first talked about going to the cloud, you know, six years ago, it was very, not everything was there, that's there today. So the teams were extremely nervous and they were confident that we could never be as, as good in the cloud as we were on, on site. Yet here we are six years later and we're constantly finding ways to add value and take, bring value back. And though, it's so same teams. And one of the things is just, we gave them the challenge to say, Hey, this is the future. We're telling our clients, this is where we're going. We have an opportunity here to do something different and they took it and the team really took it on. And they said, okay, let's do it. And they act, and we looked at how we run into cloud the many different ways, whether we're using reserved instances, whether we're using containers, whether we're using, you know, different computer capabilities, we went through all of it and we're running such a highly efficient machine right now that it's like, we're still able to continue to eat out savings even five years after the program. Even two years after the program is complete, we're still able to get savings. >> That's outstanding. That's ROI that every business and every industry hopes to be able to achieve from this. I want to switch gears a little bit now because this is actually pretty cool. Accenture is really focused also on sustainability. You guys have signed onto the Amazon climate pledge, which if you don't know what the Amazon climate pledge, and this is back in 2019, Amazon, co-founded this a commitment to be net zero carbon across businesses by 2040, which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris agreement. You're in talk to us about that. And from Accenture's perspective, why it was important to sign on to that. >> So on a, on a personal level, I love obviously sustainability as a whole, that I think about the world park for my children that are growing up. So it's very important to me on a personal level as well. But I would say at a company level, what I love about the cloud is I am there right there with them as they make investments. All of our enterprise capabilities are there. We are able to very quickly shift and use those capabilities. So as Amazon, for example, in this scenario creates new capabilities, new compute offerings, new, new storage offerings, whatever it may be. They're doing it with a sustainability lens and me by being in the cloud already, I can then turn to start using those things too. So as much as I can, on that perspective, I'm in a great place with, as Amazon puts these sustainability capabilities out there, I'm right there consuming and making them more efficient. And then the other one is obviously as much of our workloads, as we can get to a cloud native perspective, microservices perspective, then we keep reducing that compute consumption and everything else that goes along with it. And lastly, I would say, you know, the, the other thing is we're very aggressive in managing all of our systems in terms of uptime. So for example, in a data center, most, most organizations don't think about turning off their development environments and everything else. But for us, we're very rigid in this process. And we have a, we have a target of all of our development environments being down 55% of the time. And primarily that's also a sustainability play in addition to a financial savings plan. >> Awesome. Great stuff, Chris, last question for you, as we wrap up here, what are some of the things that you were excited about that's coming in cloud in the next few years? Obviously here we are at, re-invent going to be hearing a lot of news, a lot of announcements about cloud in the coming days. What excites you most, Chris? >> Yeah. You know, obviously the machine learning and AI stuff is, is always the most exciting things right now in cloud. And, you know, we've put a lot of those to use here inside of Accenture as well. And, and our, you know, in our synopsis platform, which we use with our customers to run in a more intelligent operations, we use that internally as well. But you know, one of the things that excites me the most is the continued innovation at the core. Right. And you know, whether that be, you know, chip sets, you know, Merim talked a little bit about, you know, improvement and performance improvement and power consumption, you know, grabbing time, those types of stuff that, that excites me every year, I look forward to seeing what, what they come out with and, and then how we're going to put that to use. >> Well, I look forward to talking to you guys next year, you've done such a tremendous job. You should be proud of the massive transformation that you've done. I imagine this is, would be a great case study. If it's not already written up, it should be. It's really impressive. Merim and Chris, thank you for joining me at the summit. Talking to me about what's going on with Accenture and AWS and some of the things that you are looking forward to, we appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> You're welcome for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. This is the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. (Music)

>>from >>around the >>globe, it's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM, >>Think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube, had a great line up here talking sustainability. Kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains, career great to see you and wayne both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you. What's driving? IBMS investment sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>you know, johN what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM is 100 10 year old company. We've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation, that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental, our stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. C. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense. It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson that IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error. How is that evolved in today's focus? Because you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have uh A I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So, you know, these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that. And that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they say, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. We supported the Paris agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council, which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term >>action. That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna. We leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you've got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're in the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right? Is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, all of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and the context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those needs. >>You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because this waste involved is also disruption to business a security issues. But when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne? Because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right? So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network, where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you onboard them and off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A. I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours, he uses maximum to really focus on the maintenance and sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection, actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging ai to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed um for our clients. >>It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, It's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh, how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now, thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation, which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, NGos and Academia. Some examples. There's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zar in that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment programs science policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'm just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under Call for Code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much, Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being in what we like to turn clients zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing, that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative. Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>From around the globe, it's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube. We had a great line up here talking sustainability, kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains going great to see you and wayne, both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you what's driving? IBMS investment in sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>You know, jOHn what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM 110 year old company, we've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's a long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental a stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. E. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence, really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense, It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson, the IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error, how has that evolved in today's focus? Because, you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have a I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials, waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that and that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they said, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. He supported the Paris Agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term action. >>That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna we leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're on the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, All of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those >>needs. You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about on the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because there's waste involved is also disruption to business, a security issues, but when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne, because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right. So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you on board in an off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours he uses maximum too rarely focus on the maintaining sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection. Actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging AI to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed for our >>clients. It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, it's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with Korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, Ngos and Academia. Some examples, there's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zarin that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment Programs science Policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of Environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'll just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under call for code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's, that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer, both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being and what we like to turn client zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative, Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. >>Mm. Mhm.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)