(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is going to be the topic. Paul Daugherty, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, Global Managing Director of Thought Leadership and Technology Research, Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this conversation around your new hit book, "Radically Human." >> Thanks, John. It's great to be with you and great to be present at re:Invent. >> We've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolution is going on now where things have consequences and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as as humans. And so I love the book, very, very strong content, really right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations, but I noticed you got the structure, part one and part two, this book seems to be packing a big punch. What was the motivation, and what was some of the background in putting the book together? >> That's a great question, John. And I'll start, and then, Jim, my co-author and colleague and partner on the book can join in too. If you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called "Human + Machine", which focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the human plus machine pairing. And then when we started working on the next book, it was the COVID era. COVID came on line as we were writing the book. And that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing. Once COVID hit, every company became more dependent on technology. Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies, and what was different from the first research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that pre-pandemic, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of 2x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we redid the research and the gap widened into 5x. And I think that's played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around inflation, energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in "Radically Human." And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud, data and AI, and the metaverse that signal out as three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. In the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are going to set companies apart as they look to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >> Jim, weigh in on this flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. >> You used a really important word there and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as a point solution. They don't think about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that. All right, if you're going to build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate it using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability? >> I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you set the table. It's like, 'cause people right now are like in the mode of what's going on around me? I've been living through three years of COVID. We're coming out the other side. The world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home. Like, here's the current situation and then part two is here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or society. >> Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where "Radically Human", the title came from. And what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot. And the whole hypothesis or premise of the book I should say, is that the more human like the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the human potential improvement is, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the I in IDEAS. The ideas framework is the first part of the book. The five areas to flip your assumptions. The I stands for intelligence and we're talking about more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques. Things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And things like emotional AI, common sense AI, new techniques in addition to machine, the big data driven machine learning techniques, which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's just an example of how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >> I love the idea, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say we've been used to adapting to technology, and contorting our fingers to keyboards and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus, in fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >> I love the idea of flipping the script, flipping the assumptions, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, S for strategy. Notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution. Really interesting how you guys put that together. It feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and how it's going to be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think observing how developers becoming much more part of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation if you take it down to a conclusion and strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to lay out with the S in IDEAS, the strategy. The subtitle that chapter is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, that's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential role that technology plays and therefore they need to master technology. Well, you need to think about strategy differently then because of the pace of technology innovation. And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really important. It's about continuous strategy in all cases. An example is one of the techniques we talk about, forever beta, which is, think about a Tesla or companies that it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days as Paul was saying. >> It's interesting because that's the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation, but the human plays a much critical role. And just aside on the Tesla example, is well documented. I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three, Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off scripts and get to humans back in charge 'cause it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up to part two, which I like, which is this human piece of it. We always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that second half, trust, talent, experiences. That's more of the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group. Is talent the scarce resource now where that's the goal, that's the key 'cause it all could point to that in a way. Skills gap points to, hey, humans are valuable. In fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think that's something that is not, kind of nuanced point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say it, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book, really zooming in on talent. I think you might think that for every hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you might put 50 or 75 into re-skilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely going to need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means on talent, on getting the best talent, on re-skilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >> That's a huge point. >> And I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we talked about in the book are becoming a talent creator. We believe the successful companies of the future are going to be able not just to post a job opening and hire people in because there's not going to be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist 'cause the technology changing so fast. So the companies that succeed are going to know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such, and shape to tale as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're going to be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what employees want. And then democratizing access to technology. Things like Amazon's Honeycode is an example, low-code/no-code development to spread development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the human talent's important, but it's magnified and multiplied by the power of people, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new ways. >> I think you nailed it, that's super important. That point about the force multiplier when you put things in combination, whether it's group constructs, two pizza teams flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think groups and collectives you're going to start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're going to start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the metaverse play into this new radically human world, and what does it mean for the future of business? >> Yeah, I think the metaverse is radically misunderstood to use the word title when we're not with the title of our book. And we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse and the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I believe that it has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward. That's going to shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, infused with the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. So you have cloud, AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to generate experiences for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds, but trust becomes more important because just as AI raises new questions around trust, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five-part framework or five essential parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >> Yeah, we're seeing that about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their IT so they're focusing on security and privacy, transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems, explainability. One of the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we were doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI using that sense of humanity 'cause other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that AI system is learning from. Some really interesting innovations happening in that trust space. John. >> Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about. Because you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and we've been calling it supercloud, some call it multi-cloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's going to happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with chat and some video. It's group behavior, it's groups convening, talking, getting things done, debating, doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low-code/no-code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >> Yeah, no, I go back to one of the, the E in the IDEAS framework is expertise. And we talk about from machine learning to machine teaching, which is exactly that. Machine learning is maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with AI. One of the examples we give is one of the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to encode in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting. I want to to get your thoughts as we get wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the the future. They got to start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table. We were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are new things you guys are hitting in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge certainly that is an opportunity. How do you apply all this stuff for business? >> I'll go first then Jim can add in. But the first thing I think starts with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right technology talent, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why the fact you're at re:Invent is so important because companies are, again, rebuilding that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that as the foundation to go forward, to do, to build the other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. Do you have the right talent brand? Are you attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward? And then you marry the two together and that's what gives you the radically human formula. >> Yeah. When we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of research, and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. One statistic is that 70% of companies that had never tried AI before went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies were not trying to do it themselves and to necessarily build an AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale, and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >> If you see the transformation of just AWS, we're here at re:Invent, since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been a thematic thing. It was startups, enterprise, now builders, and now change your company. This year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming categorical applications in for this new era. And we're calling it supercloud, superservices, superapps, 'cause they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools, or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and we've been talking about it a lot lately. So I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like what is radical? How can I put a pin in that? It's like take a temperature or we like radical enough, what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening? How do you know if you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to take advantage? >> Yeah, I think one. >> You can go ahead, Paul. >> Yeah, I was going to say one of the tests is the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business, and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. That's still something you need to do. But now our focus with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's the platform that you're using for your new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test whether you're being radical enough is on the one hand, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the two tests that I would give. >> Totally agree. >> Interesting enough, we love this topic and you guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs of big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like IDEAS, your framework, and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean you're building clouds on top of clouds or something's happening. I think you see it, look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >> Yeah and that's a good example. And it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows and the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great, again, that you're at re:Invent. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times 'cause we tell a lot of customer company stories about how they're leveraging AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in their business. And I think that's what it's all about. >> Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great 'cause it has the systems thinking, it's got really relevant information, but you guys have seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. We're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing all kinds of new things emerging. Thoughts on the global impact 'cause you take your book and you overlay that to business, like you got to operate all over the world as a human issue, as a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >> Well that's why you got to think about cloud as one technology. We talked about in the book and cloud is, I think a lot of people think, well, clouds, it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to re:Invent since 2013. Cloud is really just getting started. And it's 'cause the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability if you're in Europe. For many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities that you need to deploy differently in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid cloud capability that they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which comes into play in different ways. And so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in IDEAS is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and just modularity was the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the pace of technology advancement. >> Yeah, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is going to be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's going to be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on theCUBE as we break down your new book, "Radically Human" and how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at re:Invent. Thanks so much for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >> Thanks, John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. People who need to be relevant in the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those that need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we've mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds from the book are being donated to NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human change in technology that's happening. >> Great. Buy the book. Proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book. If you're in the middle of this big wave that's coming. this is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to reset, reflip the scripts, refactor, replatform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John. Great discussion. >> You're watching theCUBE here covering the executive forum here at AWS re:Invent '22. I'm John Furrier, you're host with Accenture. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back friends. It's theCUBE LIVE in Las Vegas at the Venetian Expo, covering the first full day of AWS re:Invent 2022. I'm Lisa Martin, and I have the privilege of working much of this week with Dave Vellante. >> Hey. Yeah, it's good to be with you Lisa. >> It's always good to be with you. Dave, this show is, I can't say enough about the energy. It just keeps multiplying as I've been out on the show floor for a few minutes here and there. We've been having great conversations about cloud migration, digital transformation, business transformation. You name it, we're talking about it. >> Yeah, and I got to say the soccer Christians are really happy. (Lisa laughing) >> Right? Because the USA made it through. So that's a lot of additional excitement. >> That's true. >> People were crowded around the TVs at lunchtime. >> They were, they were. >> So yeah, but back to data. >> Back to data. We have a couple of guests here. We're going to be talking a lot with customer challenges, how they're helping to overcome them. Please welcome Kevin Zawodzinski, VP of Sales Engineering at COMMVAULT. >> Thank you. >> And Paul Meighan, Director of Product Management at AWS. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Paul: It really is. >> Kevin: Hell, yeah. >> You cannot replicate this on virtual, you just can't. It's nice to see how excited people are to be back. There's been a ton of buzz on our program today about Adam's keynote this morning. Amazing. A lot of synergies with the direction, Paul, that AWS is going in and where we're seeing its ecosystem as well. Paul, first question for you. Talk about, you know, in the customer environment, we know AWS is very customer obsessed. Some of the main challenges customers are facing today is they really continue this business transformation, this digital transformation, and they move to cloud native apps. What are some of those challenges and how do you help them eradicate those? >> Well, I can tell you that the biggest contribution that we make is really by focusing on the fundamentals when it comes to running storage at scale, right? So Amazon S3 is unique, distributed architecture, you know, it really does deliver on those fundamentals of durability, availability, performance, security and it does it at virtually unlimited scale, right? I mean, you guys have talked to a lot of storage folks in the industry and anyone who's run an estate at scale knows that doing that and executing on those fundamentals day after day is just super hard, right? And so we come to work every day, we focus on the fundamentals, and that focus allows customers to spend their time thinking about innovation instead of on how to keep their data durably stored. >> Well, and you guys both came out of the storage world. >> Right. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It was a box world, (Kevin laughs) and it ain't no more. >> Kevin: That's right, absolutely. >> It's a service and a service of scale. >> Kevin: Yeah. So architecture matters, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Paul, talk a little bit about, speaking of innovation, talk about the evolution of S3. It's been around for a while now. Everyone knows it, loves it, but how has AWS architected it to really help meet customers where they are? >> Paul: Right. >> Because we know, again, there's that customer first focus. You write the press release down the road, you then follow that. How is it evolving? >> Well, I can tell you that architecture matters a lot and the architecture of Amazon S3 is pretty unique, right? I think, you know, the most important thing to understand about the architecture of S3 is that it is truly a regional service. So we're laid out across a minimum of 3 Availability Zones, or AZs, which are physically separated and isolated and have a distance of miles between them to protect against local events like floods and fires and power interruption, stuff like that. And so when you give us an object, we distribute that data across that minimum of 3 Availability Zones and then within multiple devices within each AZ, right? And so what that means is that when you store data with us, your data is on storage that's able to tolerate the failure of multiple devices with no impact to the integrity of your data, which is super powerful. And then again, super hard to do when you're trying to roll your own. So that's sort of a, like an overview of the architecture. In terms of how we think about our roadmap, you know, 90% of our roadmap comes directly from what customers tell us matters, and that's a tenant of how we think about customer obsession at AWS and it really is how we drive a roadmap. >> Right, so speaking of customers Kevin, what are customers asking you guys- >> Yeah. >> for, how does it relate to what you're doing with S3? >> Yeah, it's a wonderful question and one that is actually really appropriate for us being at re:Invent, right? So we got, last three years we've had customers here with us on stage talking about it. First of all, 3 years ago we did a virtual session, unfortunately, but glad to be back as you mentioned, with Coca-Cola and theirs was about scale and scope and really about how can we protect hundreds of thousands of objects, petabyte to data, in a simple and secure way, right. Then last year we actually met with a ACT, Inc. as well and co-presented with them and really talked about how we could protect modern workloads and their modern workloads around whether it was Aurora or as well as EKS and how they continue to evolve as well. And, last but not least it's going to be, this year we're talking with Illinois State University as well about how they're going to continue to grow, adapt and really leverage AWS and ourselves to further their support of their teachers and their staff. So that is really helping us quite a bit to continue to move forward. And the things we're doing, again, with our customer base it's really around, focused on what's important to them, right? Customer obsession, how are we working with that? How are we making sure that we're listening to them? Again, working with AWS to understand how can we evolve together and really ultimately their journeys. As you heard, even with those 3 examples they're all very different, right? And that's the point, is that everybody's at a different point in the journey. They're at a different place from a modernization perspective. So we're helping them evolve, as they're helping us evolve as well, and transform with AWS. >> So very mature COMMVAULT stack, the S3 bucket and all the other capabilities. Paul, you just talked about coming together- >> Right. >> Dave: for your customers. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just, you know, we were talking the other day, Paul and I were talking the other day, it's been, you know, we've worked with AWS, with integration since 2009, right? So a long time, right? I mean, for some that may not seem like a long time ago, but it is, right? It's, you know, over a decade of time and we've really advanced that integration considerably as well. >> What are some of the things that, I don't know if you had a chance to see the keynote this morning? >> Yeah, a little bit. >> What are some of the things that there was, and in fact this is funny, funny data point for you on data. One of my previous guests told me that Adam Selipsky spent exactly 52 minutes talking about data this morning. 52 minutes. >> Okay. >> That there's a data point. But talk about some of the things that he talked about, the direction AWS is going in, obviously new era in the last year. Talk about what you heard and how you think that will evolve the COMMVAULT-AWS relationship. >> Yeah, I think part of that is about flexibility, as Paul mentioned too, architecture matters, right? So as we evolve and some of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we developed our systems and our software and everything else to not worry about what do I have to build to today but how do I continue to evolve with my customer base? And that's what AWS does, right? And continues to do. So that's really how we would see the data environment. It's really about that integration. As they grow, as they add more features we're going to add more features as well. And we're right there with them, right? So there's a lot of things that we also talk about, Paul and I talk about, around, you know, how do we, like Graviton3 was brought up today around some of the innovations around that. We're supporting that with Auto Scale right now, right? So we're right there releasing, right when AWS releasing, co-developing things when necessary as well. >> So let's talk about security a little bit. First of all, what is COMMVAULT, right? You're not a security company but you're an adjacency to security. It's sort of, we're rethinking security. >> Kevin: Yep. >> including data protection, not a bolt-on anymore. You guys both have a background in that world and I'm sure that resonates. >> Yeah. >> So what is the security play here? What role does COMMVAULT play? I think we know pretty well what role AWS plays, but love to hear, Paul, your thoughts as well on security. >> Yeah, I'll start I guess. >> Go on Paul. >> Okay. Yeah, so on the security side of things, there's a quite a few things. So again, on the development side of things, we do things like file anomaly detection, so seeing patterns in data. We talked a lot about analytics as well in the keynote this morning. We look at what is happening in the customer environment, if there's something odd or out of place that's happening, we can detect that and we'll notify people. And we've seen that, we have case studies about that. Other things we do are simple, simple but elegant. Is with our security dashboard. So we'll use our security dashboard to show best practices. Are they using Multi-Factor Authentication? Are you viewing password complexity? You know, things like that. And allows people to understand from a security landscape perspective, how do we layer in protection with their other systems around security. We don't profess to be the security company, or a security company, but we help, you know, obviously add in those additional layers. >> And obviously you're securing, you know, the S3 piece of it. >> Mmmhmm. >> You know, from your standpoint because building it in. >> That's right. And we can tell you that for us, security is job zero. And anyone at AWS will tell you that, and not only that but it will always be our top priority. Right from the infrastructure on down. We're very focused on our shared responsibility model where we handle security from the hypervisor, or host operating system level, down to the physical security of the facilities in which our services run and then it's our customer's responsibility to build secure applications, right. >> Yeah. And you talk about Graviton earlier, Nitro comes into play and how you're, sort of, fencing off, you know, the various components of the system from the operating system, the VMs, and then that is designed in and that's a new evolution that it comes as part of the package. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> Paul, talk a little bit about, you know, security, talking about that we had so many conversations this year alone about the threat landscape and how it's dramatically changing, it's top of mind for everybody. Huge rise in ransomware attacks. Ransomware is now, when are we going to get hit? How often? What's the damage going to be? Rather than, are we going to get hit? It's, unfortunately it's progressed in that direction. How does ensuring data security impact how you're planning the roadmap at AWS and how are partners involved in shaping that? >> Right, so like I said, you know, 90% of our roadmap comes from what customers tell us matters, right? And clearly this is an issue that matters very much to customers right now, right? And so, you know, we're certainly hearing that from customers, and COMMVAULT, and partners like COMMVAULT have a big role to play in helping customers to secure and protect their applications, right? And that's why it's so critical that we come together here at re:Invent and we have a bunch of time here at the show with the COMMVAULT technical folks to talk through what they're hearing from customers and what we're hearing. And we have a number of regular touch points throughout the year as well, right? And so what COMMVAULT gets from the relationship is, sort of, early access and feedback into our features and roadmap. And what we get out of it really is that feedback from that large number of customers who interface with Amazon S3 through COMMVAULT. Who are using S3 as a backup target behind COMMVAULT, right? And so, you know, that partnership really allows us to get close to those customers and understand what really matters to them. >> Are you doing joint engineering, or is it more just, hey here you go COMMVAULT, here's the tools available, go, go build. Can you address that? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. There's definitely joint engineering like even things around, you know, data migration and movement of data, we integrate really well and we talk a lot about, hey, what are you, like as Paul mentioned, what are you seeing out there? We actually, I just left a conversation about an hour ago where we're talking about, you know, where are we seeing placement of data and how does that matter to, do you put it on, you know, instant access, or do you put it on Glacier, you know, what should be the best practices? And we tell them, again, some of the telemetry data that we have around what do we see customers doing, what's the patterns of data? And then we feed that back in and we use that to create joint solutions as well. >> You know, I wonder if we could talk about cloud, you know, optimization of cloud costs for a minute. That's obviously a big discussion point in the hallways with customers. And on your earnings call you guys talked about specifically some customers and they specifically mentioned, for example, pushing storage to lower cost tiers. So you brought up Glacier just then. What are you seeing in the field in that regard? How are customers taking advantage of that? And where does COMMVAULT play in, sort of, helping make that decision? >> You want to take part one or you want me to take it? >> I can take part one. I can tell you that, you know, we're very focused on helping customers optimize costs, however necessary, right? And, you know, we introduced intelligent hearing here at the show in 2019 and since launch it's helped customers to reduce costs by over $750 million, right? So that's a real commitment to optimizing costs on behalf of customers. We also launched, you know, later in 2020, Glacier Deep Archive, which is the lowest cost storage in the cloud. So it's an important piece of the puzzle, is to provide those storage options that can allow customers to match the workloads that are, that need to be on folder storage to the appropriate store. >> Yeah, and so, you know, S3 is not this, you know, backup and recovery system, not an archiving system and, you know, in terms of, but you have that intelligence in your platform. 'Cause when I heard that from the earnings call I was like, okay, how do customers then go about deciding what they can, you know, when it's all good times, like yeah, who cares? You know, just go, go, go. But when you got to tighten the belt, how do you guys? >> Yeah, and that goes back to understanding the data pattern. So some of that is we have intelligence and artificial intelligence and everything else and machine learning within our, so we can detect those patterns, right? We understand the patterns, we learn from that and we help customers right size, right. So ultimately we do see a blend, right? As Paul mentioned, we see, you know, hey I'm not going to put everything on Glacier necessarily upfront. Maybe they are, it all depends on their workloads and patterns. So we use the data that we collect from the different customers that we have to share those best practices out and create, you know, the right templates, so to speak, in ways for people to apply it. >> Guys, great joint, you talked about the joint engineering, joint go to market, obviously a very strong synergistic partnership between the two. A lot of excitement. This is only day one, I can only imagine what's going to be coming the next couple of days. But I have one final question for you, but I have same question for both of you. You had the chance to create your own bumper sticker, so you get a shiny new car and for some reason you want to put a bumper sticker on it. About COMMVAULT, what would it say? >> Yeah, so for me I would say comprehensive, yet simple, right? So ultimately about giving you all the bells and whistles but if you want to be very simple we can help you in every shape and form. >> Paul, what's your bumper sticker say about AWS? >> I would say that AWS starts with the customer and works backwards from there. >> Great one. >> Excellent. Guys- >> Kevin: Well done. >> it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you- >> Kevin: Thank you. >> for sharing what's going on, the updates on the AWS-COMMVAULT partnership and what's in it for customers. We appreciate it. >> Dave: Thanks you guys. >> Thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Good afternoon and welcome back to the Classiest Show in Technology. This is the Cube we are at AWS Reinvent 2022 in Fabulous Sin City. That's why I've got my sequence on. We love a little Vegas, don't we? I'm joined by John Farer, another, another Vegas >>Fan. I don't have my sequence, I left it in my room. We're >>Gonna have to figure out how to get us 20 as soon as possible. What's been your biggest shock for you at the show so far? >>Well, I think the data story and security is so awesome. I love how that's front and center. If you look at the minutes of the keynote of Adamski, the CEO on day one, it's all bulked into data and security. All worked hand in hand. That's on top of already the innovation of their infrastructure. So I think you're gonna see a lot of interplay going on in this next segment. It's gonna tell a lot of that innovation story that's coming next. It's pretty awesome. >>It is pretty awesome, and I'm super excited. It's not only what we do here on the Cube, it's also in my show notes. We are gonna be geeking out for the next segment. Please welcome Paul and Puja. Wonderful to have you both here. Paul from Amazon, s3, glacier, and Pujan, CEO of kuo. I wanna turn to you Pujan, to start us off, just in case the audience isn't familiar, give us the Kuo pitch. >>Yeah, so basically Kuo is a, a backup as a service offering, right? Built in AWS four aws, right? And effectively going after, you know, any service that a customer uses on top of aws, right? And so a lot of the data sitting on s3, right? So that's been like our, our big use case going and basically building backup and air gap protection for, for s3. But we basically go to every other service, e c two, ebs, dynamo, you know, you name it, right? So basically do the whole thing >>And the relationship with aws. Can you guys share, I mean, you got you here together. You guys are a great partnership. Born in the cloud, operation in the cloud. Absolutely. I think talk about the partnership with aws. >>Absolutely. I think the last five years of building on AWS has been phenomenal, right? And I love the platform. It's, it's a very pure platform for us. You know, the APIs and, and the access you get and access you get to the service teams like Paul sitting here and the other teams you have gotten access to, I think has been phenomenal. But we also have, I would say, pushed the envelope in terms of how innovative we have been and how aggressive we have been in utilizing all the innovation that AWS has built in over the last few years. But it would not have happened without the fantastic partnership with the service teams. >>Paul, talk about the, AM the S3 part of this. What's the story there? >>Well, it's been great working with the CUO team over the course of the last few years. We were just upstairs diving deep into the, to the features that they're taking advantage of. They really push us hard on behalf of customers, and it's been a, it's just been a great relationship over the last years. >>That's awesome. And the ecosystem at such a, we're gonna hear tomorrow, the keynote on the, from Aruba who's gonna tend over the ecosystem. You guys are working together. There's a lot of strategic partnerships, so much collaboration between you guys that makes it very, this is the next gen cloud of cloud environment we're seeing. And you heard the, the economies around the corner. It's still gonna be challenging, but still there's more growth in the cloud. This is not stopping. This is impacts the customers. What are the customers saying to you guys when you work backwards from their needs? They want it faster, easier, cheaper. They want it more integrated. What are some of the things, all those you guys hearing from customers? >>So for us, you know, if you think about it, like, you know, as people are moving to the cloud, especially like take a use case like s3, right? So much of critical data sitting on top of S3 today. And so what folks have realized that as they're, you know, putting all of those, you know, what, over two 50 trillion objects, you know, sitting on s3, a lot of them need backup and data protection because there could be accidental deletions, there could be software bugs, there could be a ransomware type event due to which you need a second copy of the data that is outside of your security domain, right? But again, that needs to get be done at the, at the right price point, right? And that's where like a technology like Columbia comes in because since we've been built on the cloud, we've optimized it correctly. So especially for folks who are very cost conscious, given the macroeconomic conditions, we are heading into a technology that's built correctly so that, you know, you get the right architecture and the right solution at the right price point and the scale, right? Talking about trillions of objects, billions of objects within a single customer, within a single bucket sometimes. And that's where Columbia comes in. Cause we basically do that at scale without, again, impacting the, the customer's wallet more than it needs to. >>The porridge has to be the right temperature and the right size bowl. With the right spoon. You've got a lot of complexity when it comes to solving those customer challenges. You have a couple customer story examples you're allowed to share with us. Correct? Paul, do you want to kick one off? Go ahead. Oh, puja. All right. >>No, absolutely. I think there's a ton of them. I, I'll talk about, you know, want to begin with like Cox Automotive, right? A phenomenal customer that we, all of us have worked together with them. And again, looking for a solution to backup S3 to essentially go air gap protection outside of their account, right? They looked at doing it themselves, right? They thought they'll go and basically do it themselves. And then they fortunately bumped into Columbia, they looked at our architecture, looked at what it would really go and take to build it. And guess what, sitting in 2022, getting 23 right now, nobody wants to go and build this themselves. They actually want a turnkey solution that just does it, right? And so, again, we are a phenomenal joint customer of ours doing this at a pretty massive scale, right? And there are many more like that. There's Warner Brothers that are essentially going into the cloud from on premises, right? And they're going really fast accelerating the usage on aws again, looking at, you know, backup and data protection and using clum because of our extreme simplicity that we provide. >>Yeah, I think it's, you've got a, a lot of different people solving different problems that you're working with all the time. Millions of customers. Well, how do you prioritize? >>Well, for us, it really all comes down to fundamentals, right? So Amazon, s3 s unique distributed architecture delivers industry leading durability, availability, performance and security at virtually unlimited scale, right? And it's really been delivering on the fundamentals that has earned the trust of so many customers of all sizes and industries over the course of over 16 years. Now, in terms of how we prioritize on behalf of those customers, we always say that 90% of our roadmap comes directly from what customers are telling us is important. And a large number of our customers now are using S3 through lumino, which is why the relationship is so important. We're here talking about customer use cases here at the show, and we do that regularly throughout the year as well. And that's, that's how we land on a road. >>And what are the, what are the top stories from customers? What, what are they telling you? What's the number one top three things you're hearing? >>I tell you, like, again, it just comes down to the fundamentals, right? Of security, availability, durability and performance at virtually unlimited scale. Like that is the first customer first discussions that we have with customers talking about durable storage, for >>Sure. What I find interesting in, you mentioned scale, right? That comes up a lot scale with data. Yeah. That we heard data. The big theme here, security, what's in my S3 bucket? Can you find out what's in there? Is it backed up properly? How do I get it back? Where's the ransomware? Why not just target the ransomware? So how do you navigate the, the security challenges, the, the need to store all that scale data? What's the secret sauce? >>Yeah, so I think the, the big thing is we'll start with the, you know, how we have architected the product, right? If you think about it, this, you're dealing with a lot of scale, right? You get to a hundred million, a billion and billions very fast on S3 few, especially on a cloud native application. So it starts with the visibility, right? It's basically about, like we have things where you do, where you create a subset of your buckets called protection groups that you can essentially, you know, do it based on prefixes. So now you can essentially figure out what prefix you want to back up and what you don't want to back up. Maybe there's log data that you don't care about, so you don't back that up, right? And it all starts with that visibility that you give. And the prefix level data protection then comes the scale, which is where I was telling you, right? We have basically built an orchestration engine, right? It's like we call the ES for Lambdas, right? So we have a internal orchestration engine and essentially what what we have done is we have our own language internally that spawns off these lambdas, right? And they go after these S3 partitions do the right things and then you basically reel them back. So things like that that we do that are not possible if you're not built on the >>Clock. Well also, I mean, just mind blowing and go back 10 years. Yeah. I mean you got Lambda. What you're talking about here is the gift of the cloud innovation. Yeah. So the benefit of S3 is now accelerated. This is the story this year. Yeah. I mean they're highlighting it at scale, not just in the data, but like what we knew when Lambda came out and what S3 could do. But now mainstream solutions are coming in. Does that change your backup plans? Because we're gonna see a lot more end to end, lot more solutions. We heard that on the keynote. Some are saying it's more complexity. Of course it might, but you can abstract another way with the cloud that's the best part of the cloud. So these abstraction leads. So what's your view on that? But I wanna get your thoughts because you guys are perfectly positioned for this scale, but there's more coming. Yes. Yes. Exactly. What, how are you looking at that? >>So again, I think the, you know, obviously the, the S3 teams and every team in AWS is basically pushing the envelope in terms of innovation. But the key for a partner like us is to go and take that innovation. A lot of complex architectures behind the scene. But what you deliver to the customer is simple. I'll give you one more example. One of the things we launched that, you know, Paul and others are very excited about, is this ability to do instant access on the backup, right? So you could have billions of objects that you backed up. Maybe you need just 10,000 of them for a DR test. And we can basically create like an instant virtual bucket on top of that backup that you can instantly restore >>Spinning up a sandbox of temporary data to go check it >>Out. Exactly. Offer an inte application. >>Think we're geeking out right now. >>Yeah, I know. Brought that part of the segment, John. Don't worry, we're safely there. But, >>But that's the thing, right? That all that is possible because of all the, the scale and innovation and all the APIs and everything that, you know, Paul and the team gives us that we go and build on top of >>Paul, geek out on with us on this. We >>Are super excited for instant restore >>For store. I mean, automation programmability. >>It is, I mean it's the logical next step for backup in the cloud. Exactly. Yeah. But it's a super hard engineering problem to go solve for customers. I mean, the RTO benefits alone are super compelling, but then there's a cost element as well of not having to bring back all that stuff for a test restore, for example. And so it's, it's been really great to, to work with the team on that. We have some ideas on how we may help solve it from our side, and we're looking forward to collaborating on it. >>This is a great illustration of what I was writing about this week around the classic cloud, which is great. And as Adam said, and used like to use the word and, and you got this new functionality we're seeing emerge from the growth. Yes. From the companies that are built on Amazon web services that are growing. You're a partner, they have a lot of other partners and people are taking over restaurant here off action. I mean, there's real growth and new functionality on top of aws. You guys are no different. What's, are you prepared for that? Are you ready to go? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think if you think about, if you think about it, right, I think it's also about doing this without impacting the primary application. Like if the customer is running a primary application at scale on s3, a backup application like ours can't come in and really mess with that. So I think being able to do things where, and this is where you solve really hard computer science problems, right? Where you're bottling yourself. If you are essentially seeing any kind of, you know, interfering with the primary, you're going to cut yourself down. You're gonna go after a different partition. So there are a lot of things you need to do behind the scenes, which is again, all the complexity, all of that, but deliver the, to the customer a very, very simple thing. >>You know, Paul, I wanna get your thoughts and I want you to chime in. Yeah. In 2014, I interviewed Steven Schmidt, my first interview with the, he was the CISO then, and now he's a CSO and, and former ciso, he's back at that time, the word was the cloud's not secure. Now we're talking about security. Just in the complexity of how you're partitioning and managing your sub portions, how you explained it, it's harder for the attackers. The cloud in its in its architecture has become a more secure environment. Yeah. Well, and getting more secure as you have laying out this, this is a new dynamic. This is good. Can you explain the, >>I mean, I, I can just tell you that at AWS security is job zero and that it will always be our number one priority, right? We have a, an infrastructure with under AWS that is vetted and approved to run even top secret workloads, which benefits all customers in all regions. >>And your, your security posture is embedded on top of that. And you got your own stuff. >>Yeah. And if you think of it as a shared responsibility model, so security of the cloud is the responsibility of the cloud provider, but then security of the data on top of it. Like you, you go and delete stuff, your software goes and does something that resiliency, the integrity of the data is your responsibility as a customer. And that's where, you know, we come in. Who >>Shared responsibility has been such a hot topic all week. Yeah. >>I gotta ask him one more question. Cause this is fascinating. And we are talking about on the cube all day today after we saw the announcement and Adam's comment on the cube, Adams LE's comment on the keynote. I mean, he said, if you're gonna tighten your belt, meaning economic cost recovery, re right sizing. If you want to tighten your belt, come to the cloud. So I have to ask you guys, Puja, if you can comment, that'd be great. There's a lot of other competitors out there that aren't born on aws. What is the customer gonna do when they tighten the build? What does that mean? They're gonna go to, to the individual contracts. They're gonna work in the marketplace. I mean this, there's a new dynamic in town. It's called AWS 2022. They weren't really around much in the recession of 2008. They were just starting to grow. Now they're an economic force. People like yourselves have embedded in there. There's a lot of competition. What's gonna happen? >>I think people are gonna just go to a place like, you know, AWS marketplace. You're going to essentially look for solutions and essentially like, and, and the right solutions built in are going to be self-service like aws. It's a very self-service thing. A hundred percent. So you go and do self-service, you figure out what's working, what's not working. Also, the model has to be consumption oriented. No longer can you expect the customer to go and pay a bunch of money for shelfware, right? It's like, like how we charge how AWS charges, which is you pay for what you consume. That and all has to be front and center, >>Right? I think that's a really, I think that's a really important >>Point. It's time >>And I think it's time. So we have a new challenge on the cube. We give you 30 seconds roughly to give us your extraordinarily hot take your shining thought leadership moment and, and highlight what you think is the most important takeaway from the show. The biggest soundbite, the juiciest announcement. Paul, I'll >>Start with an Instagram. Real basically. Yeah. Okay. >>Yeah. Hi. Go. I would just say from an S3 perspective, over the course of the last several years, we've really seen workloads shift from just backup and recovery and static images on websites to data lake analytics applications. And you continue to see that here. And I can tell you that some of these scaled applications are running at enormous mind blowing scale, right? And so, so every year we come here, we talk to customers, and it's just every year it sort of blows me away. And I've been in the storage industry for a long time and it's just is, it blows me away. Just the scale at customers are running in >>And >>Blowing scale. And when it comes to backup, let me just say that it's easy to back up and recover a single object, but doing an easy thing, a billion or 10 billion times over, that's actually quite hard. >>And just to, just to bold that a little bit, just pull out my highlighter. S3 now has over 280 trillion objects. That's a lot. >>That's a lot of objects. >>Yeah. You are not, you are not kidding. When you talk about scale, I mean, this is the most scalable. >>That's not solution's not there. Yeah. That, that's right. And we wake up every, we have a culture of durability and we wake up every single day to raise the bar on the fundamentals and make sure that every single one of those objects is protected and safe. >>Okay. You, I, >>I can't imagine worrying about two, two 80 trillion different things. >>Let's go. You're Instagram real >>For me again, you know, between S3 and us, we are two players out there that are really, you know, processing the data at the end of the day, right? And so I'm very excited about, you know, what we are going to do more and more with the instant restore capability where we can integrate third party services on top of it that can do more things with the data that is not, not passively sitting, but now becomes active data that you can analyze and do things with. So that's something where we take this to the next level is something that I'm super excited about. >>There's a lot to be excited about and, and we're excited to have you. We're excited to hear what happens next. Excited to see more collaboration like this. Paul Pon, thank you so much for joining us here on the show. Thank all of you from for tuning into our continuous wall to wall super thrilling live coverage of AWS reinvent here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. We're the cube, the leading source for high tech coverage.

>>Welcome back here on the Cube. I'm John Walls. We are in Las Vegas at the Venetian, and this is Reinvent 22 in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. Glad to have you with us here as we continue our conversations. I'm joined by Paul Puckett, who's the former director of the Enterprise Cloud Management Services at the US Army. Paul, good to see you sir. Hey, you as well, John. Thank you. And Justin, she who is managing director and cloud go to market lead at Accenture Federal Services. Justin, good morning to you. Good morning, John. Yeah, glad to have you both here on the cube. First time too, I believe, right? Yes sir. Well, welcome. I wish we had some kind of baptism or indoctrination, but I'll see what I can come up with in the next 10 minutes for you. Let's talk about the Army, Paul. So enterprise cloud management, US Army. You know, I can't imagine the scale we're talking about here. I can't imagine the solutions we're talking about. I can't imagine the users we're talking about. Just for our folks at home, paint the picture a little bit of what kind of landscape it is that you have to cover with that kind of title. >>Sure. The United States Army, about 1.4 million people. Obviously a global organization responsible for protecting and defending the United States as part of our sister services in the Department of Defense. And scale often comes up a lot, right? And we talk about any capability to your solution for the United States Army scale is the, the number one thing, but oftentimes people overlook quality first. And actually when you think of the partnership between the Army and Accenture Federal, we thought a lot when it came to establishing the enterprise Cloud management agency that we wanted to deliver quality first when it came to adopting cloud computing and then scale that quality and not so much be afraid of the, the scale of the army and the size that forces us to make bad decisions. Cuz we wanted to make sure that we proved that there was opportunity and value in the cloud first, and then we wanted to truly scale that. And so no doubt, an immense challenge. The organization's been around for now three years, but I think that we've established irreversible momentum when it comes to modernization, leveraging cloud computing >>For the army. So let's back up. You kind of threw it in there, the ecma. So this agency was, was your a collaboration, right? To create from the ground up and it's in three years in existence. So let's just talk about that. What went into that thinking? What went into the planning and then how did you actually get it up and run into the extent that it is today? >>Sure. Well, it was once the enterprise cloud management office. It was a directorate within the, the CIO G six of the United States Army. So at the headquarters, the army, the chief information Officer, and the G six, which is essentially the military arm for all IT capability were once a joint's organization and the ECMO was created to catalyze the adoption of cloud computing. The army had actually been on a, a cloud adoption journey for many years, but there wasn't a lot of value that was actually derived. And so they created the ecma, well, the ECMO at the time brought me in as the director. And so we were responsible for establishing the new strategy for the adoption of cloud. One of the components of that strategy was essentially we needed an opportunity to be able to buy cloud services at scale. And this was part of our buy secure and build model that we had in place. And so part of the buy piece, we put an acquisition strategy together around how we wanted to buy cloud at scale. We called it the cloud account management optimization. OTA >>Just rolls right off the >>Tongue, it just rolls right off the tongue. And for those that love acronyms, camo, >>Which I liked it when I was say cama, I loved that. That was, that was, >>You always have to have like a tundra, a little >>Piece of that. Very good. It was good. >>But at the time it was novetta, no, Nevada's been bought up by afs, but Novea won that agreement. And so we've had this partnership in place now for just about a year and a half for buying cloud computing net scale. >>So let's talk about, about what you deal with on, on the federal services side here, Justin, in terms of the army. So obviously governance, a major issue, compliance, a major issue, security, you know, paramount importance and all that STEM leads up to quality that Paul was talking about. So when you were looking at this and keeping all those factors in, in your mind, right? I mean, how many, like, oh my God, what kind of days did you have? Oh, well, because this was a handful. >>Well, it was, but you could see when we were responding to the acquisition that it was really, you know, forward thinking and forward leaning in terms of how they thought about cloud acquisition and cloud governance and cloud management. And it's really kind of a sleepy area like cloud account acquisition. Everyone's like, oh, it's easy to get in the cloud, you know, run your credit card on Amazon and you're in, in 30 seconds or less. That's really not the case inside the federal government, whether it's the army, the Air Force or whoever, right? Those, those are, they're real challenges in procuring and acquiring cloud. And so it was clear from, you know, Paul's office that they understood those challenges and we were excited to really meet them with them. >>And, and how, I guess from an institutional perspective, before this was right, I I assume very protective, very tight cloistered, right? You, you, in terms of being open to or, or a more open environment, there might have been some pushback was they're not. Right? So dealing with that, what did you find that to be the case? Well, so >>There's kind of a few pieces to unpacking that. There's a lot of fear in trepidation around something you don't understand, right? And so part of it is the teaching and training and the, and the capability and the opportunity in the cloud and the ability to be exceptionally secure when it comes to no doubt, the sensitivity of the information of the Department of Defense, but also from an action acquisition strategy perspective, more from a financial perspective, the DOD is accustomed to buying hardware. We make these big bets of these big things to, to live in today's centers. And so when we talk about consuming cloud as a utility, there's a lot of fear there as well, because they don't really understand how to kind of pay for something by the drink, if you will, because it incentivizes them to be more efficient with their utilization of resources. >>But when you look at the budgeting process of the d od, there really is not that much of incentive for efficiency. The p PPE process, the planning program, budgeting, execution, they care about execution, which is spending money and you can spend a lot of money in the cloud, right? But how are you actually utilizing that? And so what we wanted to do is create that feedback loop and so the utilization is actually fed into our financial systems that help us then estimate into the future. And that's the capability that we partnered with AFS on is establishing the closing of that feedback loop. So now we can actually optimize our utilization of the cloud. And that's actually driving better incentives in the PPE >>Process. You know, when you think about these keywords here, modernized, digitized, data driven, so on, so forth, I, I don't think a lot of people might connect that to the US government in general just because of, you know, it's a large intentionally slow moving bureaucratic machine, right? Is that fair to characterize it that way? It >>Is, but not in this case. Right? So what we done, >>You you totally juxtapose that. Yeah. >>Yeah. So what we've done is we've really enabled data driven decision making as it relates to cloud accounts and cloud governance. And so we have a, a tool called Cloud Tracker. We deployed for the army at a number of different classifications, and you get a full 360 view of all of your cloud utilization and cloud spend, you know, really up to date within 24 hours of it occurring, right? And there a lot of folks, you know, they didn't never went into the console, they never looked at what they were spending in cloud previously. And so now you just go to a simple web portal and see the entire entirety of the army cloud spend right there at your fingertips. So that really enables like better decision making in terms of like purchasing savings plans and reserved instances and other sorts of AWS specific tools to help you save money. >>So Paul, tell me about Cloud Tracker then. Yeah, I mean from the client side then, can you just say this dashboard lays it out for you right? In great detail about what kind of usage, what kind of efficiencies I assume Yeah. What's working, what's not? >>Absolutely. Well, and, and I think a few things to unpack that's really important here is listen, any cloud service provider has a concept. You can see what you're actually spending. But when it comes to money in the United States government, there are different colors of money. There's regulations when it comes to how money is identified for different capabilities or incentives. And you've gotta be very explicit in how you track and how you spend that money from an auditability perspective. Beyond that, there is a move when it comes to the technology business management, which is the actual labeling of what we actually spend money on for different services or labor or software. And what Cloud Tracker allows us to do is speak the language of the different colors of money. It allows us to also get very fine grain in the actual analysis of, from a TBM perspective, what we're spending on. >>But then also it has real time hooks into our financial systems for execution. And so what that really does for us is it allows us to complete the picture, not just be able to see our spend in the cloud, but also be able to able to see that spending context of all things in the P P P E process as well as the execution process that then really empowers the government to make better investments. And all we're seeing is either cost avoidance or cost savings simply because we're able to close that loop, like I said. Yep. And then we're able to redirect those funds, retag them, remove them through our actual financial office within the headquarters of the army, and be able to repurpose that to other modernization efforts that Congress is essentially asking us to invest >>In. Right. So you know how much money you have, basically. Exactly. Right. You know how much you've already spent, you know how you're spending it, and now you how much you have left, >>You can provide a reliable forecast for your spend. >>Right. You know, hey, we're, we're halfway through this quarter, we're halfway through the, the fiscal year, whatever the case might be. >>Exactly. And the focus on expenditures, you know, the government rates you on, you know, how much have you spent, right? So you have a clear total transparency into what you're going to spend through the rest of the fiscal. Sure. >>All right. Let's just talk about the relationship quickly then about going forward then in terms of federal services and then what on, on the, the US Army side. I mean, what now you've laid this great groundwork, right? You have a really solid foundation where now what next? >>We wanna be all things cloud to the army. I mean, we think there's tremendous opportunity to really aid the modernization efforts and governance across the holistic part of the army. So, you know, we just, we want to, we wanna do it all with the Army as much as we can. It's, it's, it's a fantastic >>Opportunity. Yeah. AFS is, is in a very kind of a strategic role. So as part of the ecma, we own the greater strategy and execution for adoption of cloud on behalf of the entire army. Now, when it comes to delivery of individual capabilities for mission here and there, that's all specific to system owners and different organizations. AFS plays a different role in this instance where they're able to more facilitate the greater strategy on the financial side of the house. And what we've done is we've proven the ability to adopt cloud as a utility rather than this fixed thing, kind of predict the future, spend a whole bunch of money and never use the resource. We're seeing the efficiency for the actual utilization of cloud as a utility. This actually came out as one of the previous NDAs. And so how we actually address nda, I believe it was 2018 in the adoption of cloud as a utility, really is now cornerstone of modernization across all of the do d and really feeds into the Jo Warfighting cloud capability, major acquisition on behalf of all of the D O D to establish buying cloud as just a common service for everyone. >>And so we've been fortunate to inform that team of some of our lessons learned, but when it comes to the partnership, we just see camo moving into production. We've been live for now a year and a half. And so there's another two and a half years of runway there. And then AFS also plays a strategic role at part of our cloud enablement division, which is essentially back to that teaching part, helping the Army understand the opportunity of cloud computing, align the architectures to actually leverage those resources and then deliver capabilities that save soldier's >>Lives. Well, you know, we've, we've always known that the Army does its best work on the ground, and you've done all this groundwork for the military, so I'm not surprised, right? It's, it's a winning formula. Thanks to both of you for being with us here in the executive summit. Great conversation. Awesome. Thanks for having us. A good deal. All right. Thank you. All right. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture here at Reinvent 22, and you're catching it all on the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is going to be the topic. Paul Daugherty, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, Global Managing Director of Thought Leadership and Technology Research, Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this conversation around your new hit book, "Radically Human." >> Thanks, John. It's great to be with you and great to be present at re:Invent. >> We've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolution is going on now where things have consequences and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as as humans. And so I love the book, very, very strong content, really right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations, but I noticed you got the structure, part one and part two, this book seems to be packing a big punch. What was the motivation, and what was some of the background in putting the book together? >> That's a great question, John. And I'll start, and then, Jim, my co-author and colleague and partner on the book can join in too. If you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called "Human + Machine", which focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the human plus machine pairing. And then when we started working on the next book, it was the COVID era. COVID came on line as we were writing the book. And that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing. Once COVID hit, every company became more dependent on technology. Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies, and what was different from the first research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that pre-pandemic, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of 2x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we redid the research and the gap widened into 5x. And I think that's played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around inflation, energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in "Radically Human." And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud, data and AI, and the metaverse that signal out as three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. In the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are going to set companies apart as they look to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >> Jim, weigh in on this flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. >> You used a really important word there and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as a point solution. They don't think about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that. All right, if you're going to build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate it using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability? >> I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you set the table. It's like, 'cause people right now are like in the mode of what's going on around me? I've been living through three years of COVID. We're coming out the other side. The world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home. Like, here's the current situation and then part two is here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or society. >> Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where "Radically Human", the title came from. And what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot. And the whole hypothesis or premise of the book I should say, is that the more human like the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the human potential improvement is, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the I in IDEAS. The ideas framework is the first part of the book. The five areas to flip your assumptions. The I stands for intelligence and we're talking about more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques. Things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And things like emotional AI, common sense AI, new techniques in addition to machine, the big data driven machine learning techniques, which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's just an example of how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >> I love the idea, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say we've been used to adapting to technology, and contorting our fingers to keyboards and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus, in fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >> I love the idea of flipping the script, flipping the assumptions, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, S for strategy. Notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution. Really interesting how you guys put that together. It feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and how it's going to be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think observing how developers becoming much more part of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation if you take it down to a conclusion and strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to lay out with the S in IDEAS, the strategy. The subtitle that chapter is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, that's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential role that technology plays and therefore they need to master technology. Well, you need to think about strategy differently then because of the pace of technology innovation. And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really important. It's about continuous strategy in all cases. An example is one of the techniques we talk about, forever beta, which is, think about a Tesla or companies that it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days as Paul was saying. >> It's interesting because that's the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation, but the human plays a much critical role. And just aside on the Tesla example, is well documented. I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three, Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off scripts and get to humans back in charge 'cause it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up to part two, which I like, which is this human piece of it. We always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that second half, trust, talent, experiences. That's more of the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group. Is talent the scarce resource now where that's the goal, that's the key 'cause it all could point to that in a way. Skills gap points to, hey, humans are valuable. In fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think that's something that is not, kind of nuanced point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say it, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book, really zooming in on talent. I think you might think that for every hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you might put 50 or 75 into re-skilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely going to need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means on talent, on getting the best talent, on re-skilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >> That's a huge point. >> And I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we talked about in the book are becoming a talent creator. We believe the successful companies of the future are going to be able not just to post a job opening and hire people in because there's not going to be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist 'cause the technology changing so fast. So the companies that succeed are going to know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such, and shape to tale as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're going to be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what employees want. And then democratizing access to technology. Things like Amazon's Honeycode is an example, low-code/no-code development to spread development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the human talent's important, but it's magnified and multiplied by the power of people, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new ways. >> I think you nailed it, that's super important. That point about the force multiplier when you put things in combination, whether it's group constructs, two pizza teams flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think groups and collectives you're going to start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're going to start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the metaverse play into this new radically human world, and what does it mean for the future of business? >> Yeah, I think the metaverse is radically misunderstood to use the word title when we're not with the title of our book. And we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse and the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I believe that it has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward. That's going to shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, infused with the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. So you have cloud, AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to generate experiences for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds, but trust becomes more important because just as AI raises new questions around trust, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five-part framework or five essential parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >> Yeah, we're seeing that about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their IT so they're focusing on security and privacy, transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems, explainability. One of the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we were doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI using that sense of humanity 'cause other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that AI system is learning from. Some really interesting innovations happening in that trust space. John. >> Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about. Because you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and we've been calling it supercloud, some call it multi-cloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's going to happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with chat and some video. It's group behavior, it's groups convening, talking, getting things done, debating, doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low-code/no-code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >> Yeah, no, I go back to one of the, the E in the IDEAS framework is expertise. And we talk about from machine learning to machine teaching, which is exactly that. Machine learning is maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with AI. One of the examples we give is one of the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to encode in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting. I want to to get your thoughts as we get wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the the future. They got to start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table. We were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are new things you guys are hitting in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge certainly that is an opportunity. How do you apply all this stuff for business? >> I'll go first then Jim can add in. But the first thing I think starts with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right technology talent, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why the fact you're at re:Invent is so important because companies are, again, rebuilding that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that as the foundation to go forward, to do, to build the other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. Do you have the right talent brand? Are you attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward? And then you marry the two together and that's what gives you the radically human formula. >> Yeah. When we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of research, and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. One statistic is that 70% of companies that had never tried AI before went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies were not trying to do it themselves and to necessarily build an AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale, and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >> If you see the transformation of just AWS, we're here at re:Invent, since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been a thematic thing. It was startups, enterprise, now builders, and now change your company. This year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming categorical applications in for this new era. And we're calling it supercloud, superservices, superapps, 'cause they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools, or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and we've been talking about it a lot lately. So I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like what is radical? How can I put a pin in that? It's like take a temperature or we like radical enough, what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening? How do you know if you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to take advantage? >> Yeah, I think one. >> You can go ahead, Paul. >> Yeah, I was going to say one of the tests is the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business, and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. That's still something you need to do. But now our focus with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's the platform that you're using for your new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test whether you're being radical enough is on the one hand, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the two tests that I would give. >> Totally agree. >> Interesting enough, we love this topic and you guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs of big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like IDEAS, your framework, and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean you're building clouds on top of clouds or something's happening. I think you see it, look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >> Yeah and that's a good example. And it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows and the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great, again, that you're at re:Invent. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times 'cause we tell a lot of customer company stories about how they're leveraging AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in their business. And I think that's what it's all about. >> Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great 'cause it has the systems thinking, it's got really relevant information, but you guys have seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. We're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing all kinds of new things emerging. Thoughts on the global impact 'cause you take your book and you overlay that to business, like you got to operate all over the world as a human issue, as a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >> Well that's why you got to think about cloud as one technology. We talked about in the book and cloud is, I think a lot of people think, well, clouds, it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to re:Invent since 2013. Cloud is really just getting started. And it's 'cause the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability if you're in Europe. For many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities that you need to deploy differently in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid cloud capability that they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which comes into play in different ways. And so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in IDEAS is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and just modularity was the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the pace of technology advancement. >> Yeah, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is going to be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's going to be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on theCUBE as we break down your new book, "Radically Human" and how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at re:Invent. Thanks so much for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >> Thanks, John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. People who need to be relevant in the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those that need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we've mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds from the book are being donated to NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human change in technology that's happening. >> Great. Buy the book. Proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book. If you're in the middle of this big wave that's coming. this is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to reset, reflip the scripts, refactor, replatform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John. Great discussion. >> You're watching theCUBE here covering the executive forum here at AWS re:Invent '22. I'm John Furrier, you're host with Accenture. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Hello and welcome to the Cube's coverage here at AWS Reinvent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furry, your host of the Cube at two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is gonna be the topic. Paul Dardy, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, global managing director of thought Leadership and Technology research. Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the cube for this conversation around your new hit book. Radically human. >>Thanks, John. It's great to, great to be with you and great, great to be present at reinvent. >>You know, we've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're kind of in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolutions going on now where things have consequences and, and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as, as humans. And so I love the book. Very, very strong content, really. Right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations. But, you know, I noticed you got the, the structure part one and part two, This book seems to be packing a big punch. What's, what was the motivation and, and what was some of the background in, in putting the book together? >>That's a great question, John, and I'll start, and then, you know, Jim, my co-author and, and part colleague and partner on this, on the book and join in too. You know, the, if you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called, you know, Human Plus Machine, which talked about the, you know, focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the Human plus machine pairing. And then, you know, when we started, you know, working on the next book, Covid was, you know, it was kinda the Covid era. Covid came online as, as we were writing the book. And, but that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing, you know, once Covid hit, every company became more dependent on technology. >>Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies ba, you know, and what was different from the first, you know, research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that, is that, you know, pre pandemic, the, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of two x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic. We redid the research and the gap widen into five x. And I think that's, and, and that's kind of played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline, you know, from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around, you know, inflation energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. >>And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in, in Radically Human. And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud data and ai and the metaverse that signal out is three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. And the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are gonna set companies apart as they look to, you know, to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >>Jim, weigh in on this. Flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. No, >>You, you, you used a really important word there, and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as kind of a point solution. They don't think of about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that, all right, if you're gonna build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the, the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability. >>You know, I like this, I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you kind of set the table. It's like, cuz people right now are like in the mode of, you know, what's going on around me. I'm been living through three years of covid. But coming out the other side, the world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where I am, where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home, like, here's the current situation and then part two is, here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or you know, society. >>Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where, you know, radically human, you know, the title came from. And you know, the, what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot and, and that, you know, the whole hypothesis, you know, or premise of the book I should say, is that the more humanlike the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the, you know, the, the the, the human potential improvement is the more, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I, you know, talk about, you know, talked about, you know, talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. >>Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the eye and ideas is each of the, the ideas framework is the first part of the book, The five areas to flip your Assumptions, The eye stands for intelligence. And we're talking about more, more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques, things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build, using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And you know, things like emotional ai, common sense ai, new techniques in addition to machine the big data driven machine learning techniques which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's, that's just an example of, you know, how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >>I love the, we've been, >>We've >>Go ahead Jim. >>I was gonna say we've been used to adapting to technology, you know, and you know, contorting our fingers to keyboards and and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus. In fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the, one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >>You know, I love the idea of flipping the script, flicking assumptions, but, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, s for strategy, notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution really kind of interesting kind of how you guys put that together. It kind of feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and it's how it's gonna be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think, you know, observing how developers becoming much more part of, of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is kind of how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation? If you take it down to a conclusion, strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need. Is that, can you, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, yeah, I think, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in, in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old, old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to, you know, to lay out with the, the essence ideas, you know, the strategy and the, the, the fun. You know, the, the subtitle that chapter is is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, That's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential world that technology plays and therefore they need to, to master technology, well, you need to think about strategy differently than because of the pace of technology innovation. >>And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really report it's about continuous strategy in all cases. Yet an example is one of the techniques we talk about forever beta, which is, you know, think about a Tesla, you know, companies that, you know, it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along, you know, the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we, we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions, you know, might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days. As Paul was saying, >>It's interesting because that's the kind of the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation. But the human plays a much critical role. And, and just as a side on the Tesla example, you know, is well documented, I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off script and get to humans back in charge cuz it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up the, the part two, which I like, which is, you know, this human piece of it, you know, we always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that, that second half, you know, trust, talent experiences, that's the more the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group is talent. The scarce resource now where that's the, that's the goal, that's the, the key because I mean, it all could point to that in a way, you know, skills gap kind of points to, hey, you know, humans are valuable, in fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think, you know, that's something that is not kind of nuance point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, it's, go ahead Jim. I was gonna say it, you know, we're, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book. You know, really zooming in on talent. I think, you know, you might think that for every, you know, a hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you know, you might put 50 or 75 into reskilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw a, a economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely gonna need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means, you know, on talent, on, on getting the best talent on reskilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >>That's a huge point. >>I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we, we talked about in the book are, are becoming a talent creator. We believe that the successful companies of the future are gonna be able not, not just to post, you know, post a job opening and hire, hire people in because there's not gonna be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist, you know, cause the technology changing so fast. So companies that succeed are gonna know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such and, and, and, you know, shape to tail as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're gonna be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what you know, employees want. And then democratizing access to technology, You know, things like, you know, Amazon's honey code is an example, you know, low code, no code development to spread, you know, development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical, you know, going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the, the human talent's important, but it's magnified to multiplied by the power of people, you know, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new >>Ways. I think you nailed it, That's super important. That point about the force multiplier, when you put things in combination with it's group constructs, two pizza teams, flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is kind of a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think, you know, groups and collectives, you're gonna start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these kind of, you know, ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or, or, or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously Metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're gonna start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the Metaverse play into this new radically human world and and what does it mean for the future of business? >>Yeah, I think the Metaverse is radically, you know, kind of misunderstood to use the word title, word of a, when we're not with the title of our book, you know, and we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So, you know, that that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's about, it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse in the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I, I believe you know that it is, has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. >>And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You, you have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward that's gonna shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, you know, in infused with, you know, the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. You have cloud AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to, to generate experiences for, for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds. But trust becomes more important because the, just as AI raises new questions around trust, you know, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five part framework or or five, you know, essential, you know, parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >>Yeah, we're seeing that, you know, about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, you know, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their it, so they're, you know, they're focusing on security and privacy transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems. Explainability. One of the, you know, the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we're doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by kind of a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, the, they're, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So kind of turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI kind of using that sense of humanity cuz you know, the other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that that AI system is learning from or some really interesting innovations kind of happening in that trust space. John, >>Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about because you know, you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the, the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and you know, we've been calling it super cloud, some call it multicloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's gonna happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with Chad and some video, you know, it's, it's group behavior, it's group con groups, convening, talking, getting things done, you know, debating doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low code no code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >>Yeah, no, I go back to, you know, one of the, the, the, the e and the ideas frameworks is expertise. And we talk about, you know, from machine learning to machine teaching, which, which is exactly that, you know, it's, you know, machine learning is, you know, maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with ai? One of the examples we give is one of the, the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to code in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create, you know, amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >>Well you, what's interesting is that I wanna to get your thoughts as we can wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in, in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the, the future, they gotta start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table where, you know, we were, we were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are, these are new things you guys are hitting on this in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge, certainly that is an opportunity. How, how do you apply all this stuff for, for business >>Now? I'll go first then Jim Canad. But the, the first thing I think starts with, with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right, you know, technology, talent, you know, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why, you know, the fact you're at reinvent is so important because companies are, you know, again rebuilding that, that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that, you know, as the foundation to go forward, to do, you know, to, to build the other, other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. You know, do you, do you have the right the, do you have the right talent brand? Are you attacking the right, attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward and then you marry the two together and that's what, you know, gives you the radically human formula. >>Yeah. When, you know, when we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of, of research, and this was ju and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. You know, one statistic is that 70% of, there was a, there was a of companies that had never tried AI before, went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies are not, or we're not trying to do it themselves and to, you know, to necessarily, you know, build an it, a AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to, to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the, that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >>If you see the transformation of just aws, we're here at reinvent just since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been kind of a thematic thing. It was, you know, startups, enterprise now builders and now, now change your company this year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and, and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming, categorical applications in for this new era. And you know, we're calling it super cloud super services, super apps cuz they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and you know, we've been talking about a lot lately, so I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like when, what is radical? How do, how can I put a pin in that say that could take a temperature or we like radical enough what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening. How do you know if you're, you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to, to take advantage? >>Yeah, I think one, yeah, I was gonna say one of the, one of the tests is is you know, the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. Yeah. That that's still something you need to do. But now we, our focus, you know, with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's, what is, you know, how, how, what's the platform you know, that you're using to, you know, for your, the new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test. Whether being radical, you know, radical enough is on the one hand, is this really, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping, you know, people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the the two tests that I would give. Totally agree. >>Yeah. You know, interesting enough, we, you know, we, we love this topic and guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs a big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think, you know, one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like ideas your framework and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the, in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean some, you're building clouds on top of clouds or, or something's happening. You can, I think you see it like look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >>Yeah, and that's a good example and it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is, is, is is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you know, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great again that you're at reinvents. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times cuz we tell a lot of cus of cus customer and company stories about how they're leveraging aws, AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in your, in their business. And I, I think that's what it's, that's what it's all about. >>Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great cuz it has kind of a, the systems thinking it's got really relevant information but you know, you guys have seen the, seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. You know, we're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing, you know, all kinds of new things, emerging thoughts on the global impact cuz you, you take your book and you overlay that to business. Like you gotta, you gotta operate all over the world as a human issue. It's a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >>Well that's, that's why the, the, you gotta think about cloud as as one technology, you know, we talked about in the book and cloud is a lot, I think a lot of people think, well clouds it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to reinvent since 2013. You know, cloud is really just getting, you know, just getting started. And, and it's cuz the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability, if you're in Europe for many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities. You need to deploy, you know, differently in different, in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid, hybrid cloud, you know, capability that they, they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which is comes into play in, in different ways. >>And, and so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in and ideas is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and mod and you know, just modularity was kind of the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's, that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the, with the pace of technology advancement. >>You know, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is gonna be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's gonna be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on the queue as we break down your new book, Radically Human and how it, how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at reinvent. Thanks so much for, for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >>You know, Thanks John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the, the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. You know, people who need to, you know, be, be relevant to the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those who need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds for the book are being donated to not NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling. Those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human new, you know, change in technology that's happening >>Great by the book proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book if you're in the middle of this big way that's coming. This is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to, to reset re flip the scripts. Refactor, re-platform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing, really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >>Thanks, John. John, great discussion. >>Okay, you're watching the Cube here, covering the executive forum here at AWS Reinvent 22. I'm John Furrier, your host with aen. Thanks for watching.

(soft joyful music) >> Welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore '22. I'm John Furrier with my host Dave Vellante. Three days of wall to wall live coverage. Two sets here at the CUBE, here on the ground floor in Moscone, and we got VMware and HPE back on the CUBE. Paul Turner, VP of products at vSphere and cloud infrastructure at VMware. Great to see you. And Mark Nickerson, Director of Go to Mark for Compute Solutions at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. >> Thank you for having us. >> So we, we are seeing a lot of traction with GreenLake, congratulations over there at HPE. The customers changing their business model consumption, starting to see that accelerate. You guys have the deep partnership, we've had you guys on earlier yesterday. Talked about the technology partnership. Now, on the business side, where's the action at with the HP and you guys with the customer? Because, now as they go cloud native, third phase of the inflection point, >> Yep. >> Multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, steady state. Where's the action at? >> So I think the action comes in a couple of places. Um, one, we see increased scrutiny around, kind of not only the cost model and the reasons for moving to GreenLake that we've all talked about there, but it's really the operational efficiencies as well. And, this is an area where the long term partnership with VMware has really been a huge benefit. We've actually done a lot of joint engineering over the years, continuing to do that co-development as we bring products like Project Monterey, or next generations of VCF solutions, to live in a GreenLake environment. That's an area where customers not only see the benefits of GreenLake from a business standpoint, um, on a consumption model, but also around the efficiency operationally as well. >> Paul, I want to, I want to bring up something that we always talk about on the CUBE, which is experience in the enterprise. Usually it's around, you know, technology strategy, making the right product market fit, but HPE and VMware, I mean, have exceptional depth and experience in the enterprise. You guys have a huge customer base, doesn't churn much, steady state there, you got vSphere, killer product, with a new release coming out, HP, unprecedented, great sales force. Everyone knows that you guys have great experience serving customers. And, it seems like now the fog is clearing, we're seeing clear line of sight into value proposition, you know, what it's worth, how do you make money with it, how do partners make money? So, it seems like the puzzle's coming together right now with consumption, self-service, developer focus. It just seems to be clicking. What's your take on all this because... >> Oh, absolutely. >> you got that engine there at VMware. >> Yeah. I think what customers are looking for, customers want that cloud kind of experience, but they want it on their terms. So, the work that we're actually doing with the GreenLake offerings that we've done, we've released, of course, our subscription offerings that go along with that. But, so, customers can now get cloud on their terms. They can get systems services. They know that they've got the confidence that we have integrated those services really well. We look at something like vSphere 8, we just released it, right? Well, immediately, day zero, we come out, we've got trusted integrated servers from HPE, Mark and his team have done a phenomenal job. We make sure that it's not just the vSphere releases but VSAN and we get VSAN ready nodes available. So, the customers get that trusted side of things. And, you know, just think about it. We've... 200,000 joined customers. >> Yeah, that's a lot. >> We've a hundred thousand kind of enabled partners out there. We've an enormous kind of install base of customers. But also, those customers want us to modernize. And, you know, the fact that we can do that with GreenLake, and then of course with our new features, and our new releases. >> Yeah. And it's nice that the products market fits going well on both sides. But can you guys share, both of you share, the cadence of the relationship? I mean, we're talking about vSphere, every two years, a major release. Now since 6, vSphere 6, you guys are doing three months' releases, which is amazing. So you guys got your act together there, doing great. But, you guys, so many joint customers, what's the cadence? As stuff comes out, how do you guys put that together? How tightly integrated? Can you share a quick... insight into that dynamic? >> Yeah, sure. So, I mean Mark can and add to this too, but the teams actually work very closely, where it's every release that we do is jointly qualified. So that's a really, really important thing. But it's more interesting is this... the innovation side of things. Right? If you just think about it, 'cause it's no use to just qualify. That's not that interesting. But, like I said, we've released with vSphere 8 you know... the new enhanced storage architecture. All right? The new, next generation of vSphere. We've got that immediately qualified, ready on HPE equipment. We built out new AI servers, actually with Invidia and with HPE. And, we're able to actually push the extremes of... AI and intelligence... on systems. So that's kind of work. And then, of course, our Project Monterey work. Project Monterey Distributed Services Engine. That's something we're really excited about, because we're not just building a new server anymore, we're actually going to change the way servers are built. Monterey gives us a new platform to build from that we're actually jointly working. >> So double click on that, and then to explain how HPE is taking advantage of it. I mean, obvious you have more diversity of XPU's, you've got isolation, you've got now better security, and confidential computing, all that stuff. Explain that in some detail, and how does HPE take advantage of that? >> Yeah, definitely. So, if you think about vSphere 8, vSphere 8 I can now virtualize anything. I can virtualize your CPU's, your GPU's, and now what we call DPU's, or data processing units. A data processing unit, it's... think of it as we're running, actually, effectively another version of ESX, sitting down on this processor. But, that gives us an ability to run applications, and some of the virtualization services, actually down on that DPU. It's separated away from where you run your application. So, all your applications get to consume all your CPU. It's all available to you. Your DPU is used for that virtualization and virtualization services. And that's what we've done. We've been working with HPE and HPE and Pensando. Maybe you can talk some of the new systems that we've built around this too. >> Yeah. So, I mean, that's one of the... you talked about the cadence and that... back to the cadence question real briefly. Paul hit on it. Yeah, there's a certain element of, "Let's make sure that we're certified, we're qualified, we're there day zero." But, that cadence goes a lot beyond it. And, I think Project Monterey is a great example of where that cadence expands into really understanding the solutioning that goes into what the customer's expecting from us. So, to Paul's point, yeah, we could have just qualified the ESX version to go run on a DPU and put that in the market and said, "Okay, great. Customers, We know that it works." We've actually worked very tightly with VMware to really understand the use case, what the customer needs out of that operating environment, and then provide, in the first instantiation, three very discrete product solutions aimed at different use cases, whether that's a more robust use case for customers who are looking at data intensive, analytic intensive, environments, other customers might be looking at VDI or even edge applications. And so, we've worked really closely with VMware to engineer solutions specific to those use cases, not just to a qualification of an operating environment, not just a qualification of certain software stack, but really into an understanding of the use case, the customer solution, and how we take that to market with a very distinct point of view alongside our partners. >> And you can configure the processors based on that workload. Is that right? And match the workload characteristics with the infrastructure is that what I'm getting? >> You do, and actually, well, you've got the same flexibility that we've actually built in why you love virtualization, why people love it, right? You've got the ability to kind of bring harness hardware towards your application needs in a very dynamic way. Right? So if you even think about what we built in vSphere 8 from an AI point of view, we're able to scale. We built the ability to actually take network device cards, and GPU cards, you're to able to build those into a kind of composed device. And, you're able to provision those as you're provisioning out VM's. And, the cool thing about that, is you want to be able to get extreme IO performance when you're doing deep learning applications, and you can now do that, and you can do it very dynamically, as part of the provisioning. So, that's the kind of stuff. You've got to really think, like, what's the use case? What's the applications? How do we build it? And, for the DPU side of things, yes, we've looked at how do we take some of our security services, some of our networking services, and we push those services down onto the SmartNIC. It frees up processors. I think the most interesting thing, that you probably saw on the keynote, was we did benchmarks with Reddit databases. We were seeing 20 plus, I'm sure the exact number, I think it was 27%, I have to get exact number, but a 27% latency improvement, to me... I came from the database background, latency's everything. Latency's king. It's not just... >> Well it's... it's number one conversation. >> I mean, we talk about multi-cloud, and as you start getting into hybrid. >> Right. >> Latency, data movement, efficiency, I mean, this is all in the workload mindset that the workhorses that you guys have been working at HPE with the compute, vSphere, this is heart center of the discussion. I mean, it is under the hood, and we're talking about the engine here, right? >> Sure. >> And people care about this stuff, Mark. This is like... Kubernetes only helps this better with containers. I mean, it's all kind of coming together. Where's that developer piece? 'Cause remember, infrastructure is code, what everybody wants. That's the reality. >> Right. Well, I think if you take a look at... at where the Genesis of the desire to have this capability came from, it came directly out of the fact that you take a look at the big cloud providers, and sure, the ability to have a part of that operating environment, separated out of the CPU, free up as much processing as you possibly can, but it was all in this very lockdown proprietary, can't touch it, can't develop on it. The big cloud guys owned it. VMware has come along and said, "Okay, we're going to democratize that. We're going to make this available for the masses. We're opening this up so that developers can optimize workloads, can optimize applications to run in this kind of environment." And so, really it's about bringing that cloud experience, that demand that customers have for that simplicity, that flexibility, that efficiency, and then marrying it with the agility and security of having your on premises or hybrid cloud environment. And VMware is kind of helping with that... >> That's resonating with the customer, I got to imagine. >> Yeah. >> What's the feedback you're hearing? When you talk to customers about that, the like, "Wait a minute, we'd have to like... How long is that going to take? 'Cause that sounds like a one off." >> Yeah. I'll tell you what... >> Everything is a one off now. You could do a one off. It scales. >> What I hear is give me more. We love where we're going in the first instantiation of what we can do with the Distributed Services Engine. We love what we're seeing. How do we do more? How do we drive more workloads in here? How do we get more efficiency? How can we take more of the overhead out of the CPU, free up more cores. And so, it's a tremendously positive response. And then, it's a response that's resonating with, "Love it. Give me more." >> Oh, if you're democratizing, I love that word because it means democratization, but someone's being democratized. Who's... What's... Something when... that means good things are happening, which means someone's not going to be winning out. Who's that? What... >> Well it, it's not necessarily that someone's not winning out. (laughs) What you read, it comes down to... Democratizing means you've got to look at it, making it widely available. It's available to all. And these things... >> No silos. No gatekeepers. Kind of that kind of thing. >> It's a little operationally difficult to use. You've got... Think about the DPU market. It was a divergent market with different vendors going into that market with different kind of operating systems, and that doesn't work. Right? You've got to actually go and virtualize those DPU's. So then, we can actually bring application innovation onto those DPU's. We can actually start using them in smart ways. We did the same thing with GPU's. We made them incredibly easy to use. We virtualized those GPU's, we're able to, you know, you can provision them in a very simple way. And, we did the same thing with Kubernetes. You mentioned about container based applications and modern apps in the one platform now, you can just set a cluster and you can just say, "Hey I want that as a modern apps enabled cluster." And boom. It's done. And, all of the configurations, set up, Kubernetes, it's done for you. >> But the thing that just GreenLake too, the democratization aspect of how that changed the business model unleashes... >> Right. >> ...efficiency and just simplicity. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> But the other thing was the 20% savings on the Reddit's benchmark, with no change required at the application level, correct? >> No change at the application level. In the vCenter, you have to set a little flag. >> Okay. You got to tick a box. >> You got to tick a little box... >> So I can live with that. But the point I'm making is that traditionally, we've had... We have an increasing amount of waste to do offloads, and now you're doing them much more efficiently, right? >> Yes. >> Instead of using the traditional x86 way of doing stuff, you're now doing purpose built, applying that to be much more efficient >> Totally agree. And I think it's becoming, it's going to become even more important. Look at, we are... our run times for our applications, We've got to move to a world where we're building completely confidential applications at all time. And that means that they are secured, encrypted, all traffic is encrypted, whether it's storage traffic, whether it's IO traffic, we've got to make sure we've got complete route of trust of the applications. And so, to do all of that is actually a... compute intensive. It just is. And so, I think as we move forward and people build much more complete, confidential, compute secured environments, you're going to be encrypting all traffic all the time. You're going to be doing micro-zoning and firewalling down at the VM level so that you've got the protection. You can take a VM, you can move it up to the cloud, it will inherit all of its policies, will move with it. All of that will take compute capacity. >> Yup. >> The great thing is that the DPU's give us this ability to offload and to use some of that spare compute capacity. >> And isolate so the application chance can't just tunnel in and get access to that >> You guys got so much going on. You can have your own CUBE show, just on the updating, what's going on between the two companies, and then the innovation. We got one minute left. Just quickly, what's the goal in the partnership? What's next? You guys going to be in the field together, doing joint customer work? Is there bigger plans? Is there events out there? What are some of your plans together in the marketplace? >> That's you. >> Yup. So, I think, Paul kind of alluded to it. Talk about the fact that you've got a hundred thousand partners in common. The venn diagram of looking at the HPE channel and the VMware channel, clearly there's an opportunity there to continue to drive a joint, go to market message, through both of our sales organizations, and through our shared channel. We have a 25,000 strong... solution architect... force that we can leverage. So as we get these exciting things to talk about, I mean, you talk about Project Monterey, the Distributed Services Engine. That's big news. There's big news around vSphere 8. And so, having those great things to go talk about with that strong sales team, with that strong channel organization, I think you're going to see a lot stronger partnership between VMware and HPE as we continue to do this joint development and joint selling >> Lots to get enthused about, pretty much there. >> Oh yeah! >> Yeah, I would just add in that we're actually in a very interesting point as well, where Intel's just coming out with Next Rev systems, we're building the next gen of these systems. I think this is a great time for customers to look at that aging infrastructure that they have in place. Now is a time we can look at upgrading it, but when they're moving it, they can move it also to a cloud subscription based model, you know can modernize not just what you have in terms of the capabilities and densify and get much better efficiency, but you can also modernize the way you buy from us and actually move to... >> Real positive change transformation. Checks the boxes there. And put some position for... >> You got it. >> ... cloud native development. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate you coming out of that busy schedule and coming on and give us the up... But again, we can do a whole show some... all the moving parts and innovation going on with you guys. So thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. I'm John Dave Vellante we're back with more live coverage day two, two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. This is the CUBE at VMware Explorer. We'll be right back.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to HPE. Discover 2022. You're watching the cubes, uh, coverage where day two here at Dave ante with John furrier, HaCo Myers here. He's the executive vice president and chief sales officer, newly minted, relatively newly minted chief sales officer at HPE at HPE and Paul Hunter. Who's the senior vice president and managing director of north America for Hewlett Packard enterprise gentlemen. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thanks having us. >>Hi coach. This is the first time back in Vegas in a while three years. I think it's been. And your first as the chief sales officer. Yep. What's the vibe like how how's, how's >>It feel? I can tell you. It's so cool. Is it you, you walk down the hallway, everybody's smiling and you see people from, you have seen three years ago or in this format on your screen the last three years, I think, uh, what is amazing. We had exactly three years ago, we had this event and Antonio mentioned, Hey, and by end of 20, 22, you will see everything being available as a service. Yeah. And nobody thought about that. We will not meet in person until 2022 at that point in time. Yeah, indeed. And that's what happened that I can tell you, what's the best decision to make an in person event here in vigor with so many people, uh, because it's about, Hey, the change in the market, the demand, the transition. And, uh, so I think it, I, couldn't be more happy to see the last two days and looking for, for the, to the rest of the event, >>Paul, you have a, a, a background in the, the channel, um, and now you're heading north America. What are you seeing in the ecosystem? Is it, is there a difference as HaCo was saying from 2019, is there a different, you know, feeling different conversations? What are you seeing? Yeah. >>Well, the good thing is like, because we haven't been here for three years, you've got a really marked moment of comparison. So you cast your mind back. What were the conversations like? I think three years ago we were talking about cloud services and partners were nodding their heads and thinking, yeah, but the world is gonna continue as normal and we fast forward three years and, uh, the partners are really talking about, uh, proactively how do they build up that cloud services? And, uh, they're also talking about customer experiences as well. We've landed and won new customers. So, uh, that's really sort of thrilling to hear that they're really excited about the journey on with us. >>You know, I'd like to get your perspective on the, what happened during the pandemic, because we saw, um, first of all, you know, zoom and video com saved the internet, uh, had meetings, but the partner, the partners delivered a lot of value. Um, customers had to pivot, or if they had a tailwind, they had, they took advantage of it. Some had headwinds with the pandemic everyone's working at home. So a lot of disruptions for all the companies, but a lot of the partners had success during the pandemic. And because they have that solution. What was the, uh, uh, the learnings that you guys saw during the pandemic, because now with cloud cloud scale hybrid, mainstream, and now steady state people lived it and partners delivered a lot of solutions in hybrid mode. Yeah. In virtual mode. What was the learnings for you guys out, coming out of that with customers and partners? >>I think first of all, we, we all learned during the pandemic that, uh, you can business, uh, do business in a different way, but as well, you learned, uh, how to pivot faster in the digital transformation. This makes a difference. And this creates value. And I think together with our partner ecosystem, we were able to develop faster solutions there while we developed everything as a service and came up with more and more cloud services. The good thing is it resonates. And our history with the partners is I donors, as long as I can, uh, think back in my career. And you only can do that together with the channel partners. And I think they appreciate that. We learn from each other. We do the same enablement from my guys, like from the partner guys and this close relation, I think made a difference, >>You know, in 2019 GreenLake, as a service was really a financial vehicle right now that's, that's evolved. And now, you know, two years on three years on it's actually a cloud service. Absolutely. And so what's the resonance been with customers because I mean, every everybody says they want that cloud experience. They may not all want OPEX. Yeah. But so what have you hearing from customers? So >>First of all, what I hear is, um, not the, if, so the strategy is clear, the customer they'll love it. They like it. They have, they want to have the cloud-like experience and guess what? We have 70 cloud services now. Yeah. And we have announced a lot of new one the last couple of days, but it's not so much that if they should do this, it's more the question, how can we help me to scale faster? Yeah. And, uh, that's the, the, the, the feedback I got the last couple of days, and for us, it's a motivation. We are on the right track. There is, this is a moment where you have a demand from the market and a strategy that fits, and this is so strong and you can do this with the partner through the partners and you see the, the customers, they love it. I have never seen an event where I got so many requests the last two days where I say, I thought that, can you help me to get there faster? It's perfect. >>Yeah. I think, I think it was also a landmark moment when we presented the cloud platform as part of the Antonio's keynote, I've had a lot of partners say this was sort of really marked the moment where we felt there was there's real substance to the offering now. And, uh, I had one of the sales guys relate to me a story where they have a, a, a client in the audience. And, uh, they're thinking about how they might, um, have a relationship with us and through seeing the kind of significance of it for us, we're able to close deals. So that's also, you know, a really exciting thing. We're actually know we're closing deals and, and winning new >>Customers, Hey, being agile and closing deals fast is a good thing. Right? I mean, that's what you guys like. Yeah. >>I mean, that's >>What it, so I, so I love the channel conversation partners because one of the things that I've observed and, and, and, and, and knowing the HP channels so strong, they're obviously they want make money. Gross margin is all about the profit, the profit motive, but the enablement that you guys have, how is that translated into this, this, this shift everyone's aligned behind GreenLake and as a service, cuz this seems to be a good fit for partner. Cause they're gonna go to the customer, the ultimate end customer and bolt on services. >>Yeah. >>How is that going? Cuz this is, to me, seems like a dream scenario for services, which we all know is high gross margin. >>Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a journey. What's a journey for our sales organization. Like it is for the partners, but it's a journey worth to do that. And um, so what, what is our, our strategy to have this together with our channel partners in mind, uh, to, to combine their strengths and they can, we, we have a kind of modular approach so that they can plug in their strengths, their IP, or as well, their services, which makes them sticky and, uh, relevant to the customer. And it drives profitability. And I think that's the, the, the secret behind the model, working with the channel, not, uh, separate to the channel. And I think this resonates this story, it's, it's a journey. And, uh, we learned a lot the last three years how to sell it. We, in the past we were selling, uh, transactional hardware. Yeah. Now we are selling services, cloud services, like you mentioned different game and this is an enablement. And we, we, um, we offer the same trainings we are doing with our folks to our channel partners because we are together in this journey. >>Yeah. It, you, you described it really well. And uh, so did, Hico essentially, this is, it requires a lot of persistence because you, you're not gonna get it right the first time. And so we now seen partners try and fail several times, but now try fail and succeed. So that's exciting. Um, and also I think what we're also seeing is partners is doing quite a good job of building services that integrate into the cloud services. So they're right into the APIs. I was, I was with a meeting with a partner called CBTS and they talked about the whole of their services portfolio now is embedded in, in GreenLake. So that certainly was not the case three years ago. >>Yeah. And the other, the big tailwind too, as you got the open source software movement, you're seeing, you know, the ability for partners and ultimately the channel being software enabled they're adding services, not just professional services, but cloud services where they have the domain expertise. Yeah. They're close to the customer. Yeah. And they could really be, um, customizing solutions. Um, and that's gonna always be great for the customer. The question I have for you guys is do you see that domain specialism with machine learning and with software, do you see partners start to get vertically focused and like, and start, get more targeted towards save verticals? >>Yeah. >>You go, no, go first. Yeah. >>Well, again, I was, uh, it's funny, your questions are completely resonating with the conversations we've been having all day. Like I was with our partner called connection and they're talking about how do they build practices in four areas? And they're, I'm quite closely allowed to aligned to our areas of edge cloud and data. Um, they have another one which is also workplace transformation. So, and they're thinking, how do we add expertise? How do we hire, recruit and retain the best talent? And, uh, that again, that wasn't a conversation we were having two, three years ago. So where partners really add value to us is through their services and their expertise and progressive partners are hiring and doing that. >>Yeah. And this transformation I mentioned earlier, it's selling outcomes, business outcomes for the end customer. And, uh, I think selling outcomes means you need to be specialized in something, be it on a domain area or be on a vertical. And I think, uh, when you focus on that, uh, that's the best way you can add value to a customer. This creates this trust, this trust relationship. Yeah. >>So edge cloud and data, obviously, I, I think edge, you guys, you got sending stuff and outta space, that's the ultimate edge. So you got some proof points there. Deep edge, I think. Deep edge. Yeah. >><laugh> I is very good. >>I think cloud, you showed the console Alma. It was very, had a very clear and strong platform message say, okay, now go build the data piece to me is the least mature when I walk around. Although I did see Starburst. Yeah, yeah. Out there. I think Starbursts a very advanced leading edge thinker. So that was a good sign. What do you see as having to happen to really build out that data ecosystem now? >>So I think what is important, this, this is all connected to each other edge cloud and data. And at the end, it's about, uh, how we can create insights out of the data, uh, and uh, where they, they live, where they come up, the data, how we structure them, how we get insights out of the data. So I think this is an area we see much more. It's not only about AI, but it's about having a data strategy as a customer. This is one of those areas. We have customer advisory bots that tell us, Hey, help us. We want to create our data strategy. And this is something where I think we can play together with our partners to really create value, get these insights out of the data. >>Are you hearing conversations where cus customers or partners are saying, okay, I wanna get insights out of the data, but I actually want to build a data business. I wanna build data products on, on, on GreenLake. Are you hearing that yet? >>Yeah, we are. Um, particularly the sort of, we, we think of them as sort of information, um, modern companies, um, they're building out new service lines. I mean, you, you, we see it in a lot of industries. Now you can see like how car manufacturers are increasingly thinking about how do they monetize their data, they're getting from it. And, uh, so there are new businesses being established, like in lots of different verticals. Pharmaceuticals will be another one where, um, traditional players are really being challenged and there are big businesses growing very rapidly based off data. So we're seeing it quite extensively. And, and we have to think about how do we access those new customers? How do we intersect them? And it's not just the people that we've been dealing with for 10, 20 years. They're very new companies, >>Which, which announcement's got the most buzz in your conversations with customers, partners. >><laugh>, it's funny. So I, I had, uh, when, when, when I started my conversation at a couple of, uh, meetings now, the last two days always started and said, what, what resonates? Yeah. And first of all, the funny thing is everybody told me the clarity of the message, the strategy second, uh, the consistency that we do, what we promise to do. Um, a couple of them, I know that down ISS, private cloud enterprise, uh, it's a great solution here. And, uh, then, uh, what, what I hear as well with our clarity and the strategy we are leapfrogging the competition. That's what I get out of these meetings. And I think that's the best compliment we can get for the two days. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think the platform and the conversations around machine learning, AI, we even had an HP executive talk about quantum. Yeah. So you guys are already starting to think about what's around the corner. And I think if the platform works, the test will be, and the results will be enablement ecosystem will be flourishing, and we're gonna watch that. So I wanna get your, your take on the early, um, shift. Cause I think this year with GreenLake and the platform it's, it's maturing enough to the right. No doubt about it. We see the momentum, but there's still a lot more to do than go. So how do you guys envision the ecosystem developing? Because that'll be the true test, the flourishing, cuz if you enable people will get value out of it and it's gotta be a step function, not incremental value. >>Yeah. I think we, we, we, we always talk about, Hey, we landed and then we expand from there. That's the beauty of the model. And the good thing is there's no window looking for the customer. So they are free. That's a modular system. And what we see it's uh, really first of all, to understand the customer digital journey, where are the journey and they're all in a different place. And we have this digital, uh, uh, next advisor workshops when we have this anchor point mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you start there, you really can grow. And then you add workloads based on where the customer sits, what are the partnerships we have to bring to that? So it's really a model which starts and is, uh, designed for the future. >>The field must love it. The folks in the field, we love it. Yeah. You guys love that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Give it the customer plan future and >>I can tell you the partners love it the, well, yeah, >>Got it. When I talk to CIOs, I, I, and I ask them, you know, what's changed, you know, with Ukraine and supply chain and inflation and rising interest rate, what's changed in terms of your assumption from the beginning of the year, you know, let's say, you know, in, in terms of it spend and they're saying, well, not a lot, actually we're gonna continue to spend, we are reprioritizing. You know, we got, we're taking Robb a little bit from over here to put it into security. Yeah. Okay. But generally speaking, it's, it's the same as we expected, let's call it six, 7% growth, which is pretty good on top of last year. Um, and, and maybe there's some dry powder there, depending on how business goes. It also seems like there's, there's a lot of headwinds at the macro and B to C you know, some of the consumer companies, but B2B is booming. >>So I think >>That what do you guys are seeing? >>Absolutely. I, I completely agree that the demand will continue. Mm-hmm <affirmative> for different reasons. It could be a little bit shift within the demand as you described, but, uh, they know exactly they're on a journey in the digital transformation. If they stop now, they have a competitive disadvantage. So they are wisely in investing. So I think that the, the demand will stay here. Yes. Everybody talks about macroeconomics recession. Uh, we are confident we will see in our B2B >>Part continued demand and they're well capitalized as are a lot of the ecosystem partners. >>Yeah. And it's not a nice to have. It's a must have, I mean, I dunno of any customers that are deinvest in technology, deinvest in the life blood of their business >>Business. Exactly. Guys, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Great. Great to see you. Yeah. Congratulations on being here and, and, and best of luck with all the follow up from the show. I'm sure that lot we're gonna update next year. You see how it turned out? Yeah. >><laugh> numbers >><laugh> thanks for having us. Thank you for watching this segment. This is Dave ante for John furrier, the cubes coverage of HPE discover 22 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

>>To the Seaport in Boston, Massachusetts, everybody's buzzing. The Bruins are playing tonight. They tied it up. The Celtics tied it up last night. We're excited. We don't talk about the red Sox. Red Sox are getting struggles, but you know, we have good distractions. Paul goer is here. He's the president and chief executive officer at red hat and also a Boston fan of great to see, of course, you too. >>Nice to see you guys, you know, it's been a, it's been a while. >><laugh> yeah, we saw you, you know, online and virtually for a couple of years there, but, uh, you know, we've been doing red hat summit for a long, long time. Yeah, of course we were talking earlier. It's just much more intimate, kind of a VIP event, a few more suit jackets here. You know, I got my tie on, so I don't get too much grief. I usually get grief when I wear a tie of red hat summit, but it's a different format this year. Compressed keynotes. Your keynote was great. The new normal, sometimes we call it the new abnormal <laugh>, uh, but you know, how do you feel? >>I, I, I, I feel great. First of all, you know, combination today, virtual audience in, in house audience here today. I think we're gonna see a lot of that in the future. I mean, we designed the event around that and I, I think it, I think it played pretty well. Kudos, kudos to our team. You're right. It's, it's, it's a bit more intimate even the way it was set up, but those are the conversations we like having with our customers and our partners, much more partner centric, uh, as well right now, as well. >>You know, we were talking about, you know, hybrid cloud. It was kind of, you know, it was a good marketing term. And, but now it's, it's, it's become the real thing. I've said many times the, the definition of cloud is changing. It's expanding it's no, the cloud is no longer this remote set of services, you know, somewhere up in the cloud, it's on prem connecting to a cloud across clouds, out to the edge and you need capabilities that work everywhere. And that's what red hat did. The market's just swimming toward you. >>Yeah. I mean, you look at it, you know, I was, uh, you know, if you look at it, you know, the clouds are powerful unto themselves, right? The clouds are powerful unto themselves. They're all different. Right? And that that's, I mean, hardware vendors were, were similar, but different, same thing. You need that connective tissue across, across the whole thing. I mean, as I said, in my keynote today, I remember talking to some of our CIOs and customers 10 years ago and they said, we're going 90% of our apps tomorrow to one cloud. And we knew that wasn't practical because of course the clouds are built from Linux. So we knew it was underneath the hood and, and what's happened. It's taken some time, but as they started to get into that, they started to see, well, maybe one cloud's more suited for one application than the other, these apps. You may have to keep on premise, but you know, what really exploded at the, the, the hybrid thing, the edge. Now they're putting things at the edge, the GM announcement tell you, I know you're gonna talk to Francis. Yeah, yeah. Later. I mean, that's, that's a mini data center in, in every cloud, but that's still under the purview of the CIO, you know? So, so, so that's what hybrid's all about is tying all those pieces together, cuz it got more powerful, but it also more complex. >>You mentioned being the connective tissue, but we don't hear as much talk about multi-cloud seems to me, as we used to this conference has been all about hybrid cloud. You don't really talk about multi-cloud. How important is that to the red hat strategy, being that consistent layer? >>It's probably my mistake or our mistake because multi's more prevalent and more important than just hybrid alone. I mean, hybrid hybrid started from on-premise to one part to any one particular cloud. That was the, the first thought of hybrid. But as I said, as, as, as um, some of the cloud providers became so big, um, every, every CIO I talked to, whether they know whether they know it or not most do are in a multi environment for a whole bunch of reasons, right. You know, one cloud provider might be better in a different part of the world. And another one cloud provider might have a better service than another. Some just don't like to be stuck to one it's it's really hybrid multi. We should, we should train ourselves to every time we say hybrid, say multi, because that's really, that's really what it is. It, I think that happened overnight with, with Microsoft, you know, with Microsoft they've, they've, they've really grown over the last few years, so has Amazon for that matter. But Microsoft really coming up is what really made it a, a high, a multi world. >>Microsoft's remarkable what, what they're doing. But I, I, I have a different thinking on this. I, I heard Chuck Whitten last week at, at the Dell conference he used, he said used the phrase a multicloud, uh, by default versus multi-cloud by design. And I thought that was pretty interesting because I've said that multi-cloud is largely multi-vendor, you know? And so hybrid has implications, right? We, we bring and a shesh came up with a new term today. Metacloud I use Supercloud I like Metacloud better because something's happening, Paul. It feels like there's this layer abstraction layer that the underlying complexity is hidden. Think about OpenShift. Yeah. I could buy, I could get OpenShift for free. Yeah. I mean, I could, and I could cobble together and stitch together at 13, 15 dozens of different services and replicate, but I don't, I don't want that complexity. I want you to hide that complexity. I want, I'd rather spend money on your R and D than my engineering. So something's changing. It feels like >>You buy that. I totally buy that. I mean, you know, I, I, I'm gonna try to not make this sound like a marketing thing because it's not, not fair enough. Right. I mean, I'm engineer at heart, you know that, so, >>Okay. >>I really look to what we're trying to do is we're building a hybrid multi cloud. I mean that we, I look at us as a cloud provider spanning the hybrid multi all the way out to the edge world, but we don't have the data centers in the back. Like the cloud providers do in and by that is you're seeing our products being consumed more like cloud services because that's what our customers are demanding. Our, our products now can be bought out of the various marketplaces, et cetera. You're seeing different business models from us. So, uh, you're seeing, uh, committed spend, for example, like the cloud providers where a customer will buy so much up front and sort of just work it down. You're seeing different models on how they're consumed, consumption, based pricing. These, these are all things that came from the cloud providers and customers buying like that. >>They now want that across their entire environment. They don't wanna buy differently on premise or in one cloud and they don't wanna develop differently. They don't wanna operate differently. They don't wanna have to secure it differently. Security's the biggest thing with, with our, with our customers, because hybrid's powerful, but you no longer have the, you know, your security per perimeter, no longer the walls of your data center. You know, you're, you're responsible as a CIO. You're responsible for every app. Yeah. No matter where it's running, if that's the break in point, you're responsible for that. So that's why we've done things like, you know, we cried stack rocks. We've, we've built it into the container Kubernetes platform that spans those various footprints because you no longer can just do perimeter security because the perimeter is, is very, very, very large right now >>Diffuse. One of the thing on the multi-cloud hyper skills, I, I, red hat's never been defensive about public cloud. You, I think you look at the a hundred billion dollars a year in CapEx spend that's a gift to the industry. Not only the entire it industry, but, but the financial services companies and healthcare companies, they can build their own hybrid clouds. Metacloud super clouds taking advantage of that, but they still need that connective tissue. And that's where >>We products come in. We welcome our customers to go to, to the public cloud. Um, uh, look, it's it's. I said a long time ago, we said a long time it was gonna be a hybrid. Well, I should have said multi anybody said hybrid, then it's gonna be a hybrid world. It is. And it doesn't matter if it's a 20, 80, 80, 20, 40, 60, 60, 40. It's not gonna be a hundred percent anywhere. Yeah. And, and so in that, in that definition, it's a hybrid multi world. >>I wanna change the tune a little bit because I've been covering IBM for 40 years and seen a lot of acquisitions and see how they work. And usually it follows the same path. There's a commitment to leaving the acquire company alone. And then over time that fades, the company just becomes absorbed. Same thing with red hat. It seems like they're very much committed to, to, to leaving you alone. At least they said that upon the acquisition, have they followed through on that promise? >>I have to tell you IBM has followed through on every commitment they've made, made to us. I mean, I, I owe it, I owe a lot of it to Arvin. Um, he was the architect of the deal, right. Um, we've known each other for a long time. Um, he's a great guy. Um, he, uh, he, he believes in it. It's not, he's not just doing it that way because he thinks, um, something bad will happen if he doesn't, he's doing it that way. Cuz he believes in that our ecosystem is what made us. I mean, I mean, even here it's about the partners in the ecosystem. If you look at what made REL people think what made red hat as a company was support, right. Support's really important. Small piece of the value proposition life cycle supports certainly their life cycle a 10 year life cycle just came out of a, a, a customer conference asking about the life cycle and could we extend it to 15 years? You know? Um, the ecosystem is probably the most important part of, of, of, of the, of the overall value proposition. And Arvin knows in IBM knows that, you know, we have to be neutral to be able to do everything the same for all of our ecosystem partners. Some that are IBM's competitors, even. So, >>So we were noticing this morning, I mean, aside from a brief mention of power PC and the IBM logo during, at one point, there was no mention of IBM during the keynote sessions this morning. Is that intentional? Or is that just >>No, no, it it's, it's not intentional. I mean, I think that's part of, we have our strategy to drive and we're, we're driving our, our strategy. We, we, we IBM great partner. We look at them as a partner just as we do our, our many other partners and we won't, you know, we wouldn't, we wouldn't do something with our products, um, for I with IBM that we wouldn't offer to our, our entire ecosystem. >>But there is a difference now, right? I don't know these numbers. Exactly. You would know though, but, but pre 2019 acquisition red hat was just, I think north of 3 billion in revenue growing at maybe 12% a year. Something like that, AR I mean, we hear on the earnings calls, 21% growth. I think he's publicly said you're north of 5 billion or now I don't know how much of that consulting gets thrown in. IBM likes to, you know, IBM math, but still it's a much bigger business. And, and I wonder if you could share with us, obviously you can't dig into the numbers, but have you hired more people? I would imagine. I mean, sure. Like what's been different from that standpoint in terms of the accelerant to your >>Business. Yeah. We've been on the same hiring cycle percentage wise as, as we, we always were. I mean, I think the best way to characterize the relationship and where they've helped is, um, Arvin, Arvin will say, IBM can be opinionated on red hat, but not the other way around <laugh>. So, so what that, what that means is they had a lot of, they had, they had a container based Linux platform. Yeah, right, right. They, they had all their, they were their way of moving to the cloud was that when we came in, they actually stopped that. And they standardized on OpenShift across all of their products. We're now the vehicle that brings the blue software products to the hybrid cloud. We are that vehicle that does it. So I think that's, that's how, that's how they, they look about it. I mean, I know, I mean in IBM consulting, I know, I know they have a great relationship with Microsoft of course. >>Right. And so, so that's, that's how to really look at it. They they're opinionated on us where we not the other way around, but that, but they're a great partner. And even if we're at two separate companies, we'd do be doing all the same things we're doing with them. Now, what they do do for us can do for us is they open a lot of doors in many cases. I mean, IBM's been around for over a hundred years. So in many cases, they're in, in, in the C-suite, we, we may be in the C suite, but we may be one layer down, one, two layers down or something. They, they can, they help us get access. And I think that's been a, a part of the growth as well as is them talking into their, into, into their >>Constituents. Their consulting's one of the FA if not the fastest growing part of their business. So that's kind of the tip of the spear for application modernization, but enough on IBM you said something in your keynote. That was really interesting to me. You said, you, you, you didn't use the word hardware Renaissance, but that my interpretation was you're expecting the next, you know, several years to be a hardware Renaissance. We, we certainly have done relationships with arm. You mentioned Nvidia and Intel. Of course, you've had relationships with Intel for a long time. And we're seeing just the spate of new hardware developments, you know, does hardware matter? I'll ask you, >>Oh, oh, I mean the edge, as I said, you're gonna see hardware innovation out in the edge, software innovation as well. You know, the interesting part about the edge is that, you know, obviously remade red hat. What we did with REL was we did a lot of engineering work to make every hardware architecture when, when it was, when, when the world was just standalone servers, we made every hardware architecture just work out of the box. Right? And we did that in such, because with an open source development model. So embedded in our psyche, in our development processes is working upstream, bringing it downstream 10 years, support all of that kind of thing. So we lit up all that hardware. Now we go out to the edge, it's a whole new, different set of hardware innovation out at the edge. We know how to do that. >>We know how to, we know how to make hardware, innovation safe for the customer. And so we're bringing full circle and you have containers embedded in, in Linux and REL right now as well. So we're actually with the edge, bringing it all full circle back to what we've been doing for 20 plus years. Um, on, on the hardware side, even as a big part of the world, goes to containers and hybrid in, in multi-cloud. So that's why we're so excited about, about, about the edge, you know, opportunity here. That's, that's a big part of where hybrid's going. >>And when you guys talk about edge, I mean, I, I know a lot of companies will talk about edge in the context of your retail location. Okay. That's fine. That's cool. That's edge or telco that that's edge. But when you talk about, um, an in vehicle operating system, right. You know, that's to me the far edge, and that's where it gets really interesting, massive volumes, different architectures, both hardware and software. And a lot of the data may stay. Maybe it doesn't even get persisted. May maybe some comes back to the club, but that's a new >>Ballgame. Well, think about it, right? I mean, you, if you listen, I think you, right. My talk this morning, how many changes are made in the Linux kernel? Right? You're running in a car now, right? From a safety perspective. You wanna update that? I mean, look, Francis talked about it. You'll talk to Francis later as well. I mean, you know, how many, how many in, in your iPhone world Francis talked about this this morning, you know, they can, they can bring you a whole new world with software updates, the same in the car, but you have to do it in such a way that you still stay with the safety protocols. You're able to back things out, things like that. So it's open source, but getting raw upstream, open source and managing itself yourself, I just, I'm sorry. It takes a lot of experience to be able to be able to do those kinds of things. So it's secure, that's insecure. And that's what that's, what's exciting about it. You look at E the telco world look where the telco world came from in the telco world. It was a hardware stack from the hardware firmware operating system, every service, whether it was 9 1, 1 or 4, 1, 1 was its own stack. Yep. In the 4g, 3g, >>4g >>Virtualized. Now, now it's all software. Yeah. Now it's all software all the way out to the cell tower. So now, so, so now you see vendors out there, right? As an application, as a container based application, running out, running in the base of a cell tower, >>Cell tower is gonna be a little mini data >>Center. Yeah, exactly. Because we're in our time here asking quickly, because you've been at red hat a long time. You, you, you, uh, architected a lot of the reason they're successful is, is your responsibility. A lot of companies have tried to duplicate the red hat model, the, the service and support model. Nobody has succeeded. Do you think anybody ever will or will red hat continue to be a unicorn in that respect? >>No, I, I, I think, I think it will. I think open source is making it into all different parts of technology. Now I have to tell you the, the reason why we were able to do it is we stayed. We stayed true to our roots. We made a decision a long time ago that we weren't gonna put a line, say everything below the line was open and above the line was closed. Sometimes it's hard sometimes to get a differentiation with the competition, it can be hard, but we've stayed true to that. And I, to this day, I think that's the thing that's made us is never a confusion on if it's open or not. So that forces us to build our business models around that as well. But >>Do you have a differentiated strategy? Talk about that. What's your what's your differentiation >>Are, are, well, I mean, with the cloud, a differentiation is that common cloud platform across I differentiate strategy from an open source perspective is to, to sort make open source consumable. And, and it's even more important now because as Linux Linux is the base of everything, there's not enough skills out there. So even, even a container platform like open source op like OpenShift, could you build your own? Certainly. Could you keep it updated? Could you keep it updated without breaking all the applications on top? Do you have an ecosystem around it? It's all of those things. It was, it was the support, the, the, the hardening the 10 year to predictability the ecosystem. That was, that was, that is the secret. I mean, we even put the secret out as open. >>Yeah, <laugh> right. Free, like a puppy, as they say. All right, Paul, thanks so much for coming back in the cubes. Great to see you face to face. Nice to see you guys get it. All right. Keep it right there. Dave Valante for Paul Gill, you're watching the cubes coverage of red hat summit, 2022 from Boston. Be right back.

(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for in-person AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE two sets, live wall to wall coverage, all scopes of the hybrid events. Well, great stuff online. That was too much information to consume, but ultimately as usual, great show of new innovation for startups and for large enterprises. We've got a great guest, Paul Duffy head of startups Solutions Architecture for North America for Amazon Web Services. Paul, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Hi John, good to be here. >> So we saw you last night, we were chatting kind of about the show in general, but also about start ups. Everyone knows I'm a big startup fan and big founder myself, and we talk, I'm pro startups, everyone loves startups. Amazon, the first real customers were developers doing startups. And we know the big unicorns out there now all started on AWS. So Amazon was like a dream for the startup because before Amazon, you had to provision the server, you put in the Colo, you need a system administrator, welcome to EC2. Goodness is there, the rest is history. >> Yeah. >> The legacy and the startups is pretty deep. >> Yeah, you made the right point. I've done it myself. I co-founded a startup in about 2007, 2008. And before we even knew whether we had any kind of product market fit, we were racking the servers and doing all that kind of stuff. So yeah, completely changed it. >> And it's hard too with the new technology now finding someone to actually, I remember when we stood with our first Hadoop and we ran a solar search engine. I couldn't even find anyone to manage it. Because if you knew Hadoop back then, you were working at Facebook or Hyperscaler. So you guys have all this technology coming out, so provisioning and doing the heavy lifting for start is a huge win. That's kind of known, everyone knows that. So that's cool. What are you guys doing now because now you've got large enterprises trying to beat like startups. You got startups coming in with huge white spaces out there in the market. Jerry Chen from Greylock, and it was only yesterday we talked extensively about the net new opportunities in the Cloud that are out there. And now you see companies like Goldman Sachs have super cloud. So there's tons of growth. >> Paul: Yeah. >> Take us through the white space. How do you guys see startups taking advantage of AWS to a whole another level. >> And I think it's very interesting when you look at how things have changed in those kind of 15 years. The old world's horrible, you had to do all this provisioning. And then with AWS, Adam Szalecki was talking in his keynote on the first day of the event where people used to think it was just good for startups. Now for startups, it was this kind of obvious thing because they didn't have any legacy, they didn't have any data centers, they didn't have necessarily a large team and be able to do this thing with no commitment. Spin up a server with an API call was really the revolutionary thing. In that time, 15 years later, startups still have the same kind of urgency. They're constrained by time, they're constrained by money, they're constrained by the engineering talent they have. When you hear some of the announcements this week, or you look what is kind of the building blocks available to those startups. That I think is where it's become revolutionary. So you take a startup in 2011, 2012, and they were trying to build something maybe they were trying to do image recognition on forms for example, and they could build that. But they had to build the whole thing in the cloud. We had infrastructure, we had database stuff, but they would have to do all of the kind of the stuff on top of that. Now you look at some of the kind of the AIML services we have things like Textract, and they could just take that service off the shelf. We've got one startup in Canada called Chisel AI. They're trying to disrupt the insurance industry, and they could just use these services like text extracts to just accelerate them getting into that product market fit instead of having to do this undifferentiated (indistinct). >> Paul, we talk about, I remember back in the day when Web Services and service oriented architecture, building blocks, decoupling APIs, all that's now so real and so excellent, but you brought up a great point, Glue layers had to be built. Now you have with the scale of Amazon Web Services, things we're learning from other companies. It reminds me of the open source vibe where you stand on the shoulders of others to get success. And there's a lot of new things coming out that startups don't have to do because startup before then did. This is like a new, cool thing. It's a whole nother level. >> Yeah, and I think it's a real standing on the shoulders of giants kind of thing. And if you just unpick, like in Verna's announcement this morning, his key to this one, he was talking about the Amplify Studio kind of stuff. And if you think about the before and after for that, front-end developers have had to do this stuff for a long period of time. And in the before version, they would have to do all that kind of integration work, which isn't really what they want to spend that time doing. And now they've kind of got that headstart. Andy Jassy famously would say, when he talked about building AWS, that there is no compression algorithm for experience. I like to kind of misuse that phrase for what we try to do for startups is provide these compression algorithms. So instead of having say, hire a larger engineering team to just do this kind of crafty stuff, they can just take the thing and kind of get from naught to 60 (indistinct). >> Gives some examples today of where this is playing out in real time. What kinds of new compression algorithms can startups leverage that they couldn't get before what's new that's available? >> I think you see it across all parts of the stack. I mean, you could just take it out of a database thing, like in the old days, if you wanted to start, and you had the dream that every startup has, of getting to kind of hyper scale where things bursting that seems is the problem. If you wanted to do that in the database layer back in the day, you would probably have to provision most of that database stuff yourself. And then when you get to some kind of limiting factor, you've got to do that work where all you're really wanting to do is try and add more features to your application. Or whether you've got services like Aurora where that will do all of that kind of scaling from a storage point of view. And it gives that startup the way to stand on the shoulders of giants, all the same kind of thing. You want to do some kind of identity, say you're doing a kind of a dog walking marketplace or something like that. So one of the things that you need to do for the kind of the payments thing is some kind of identity verification. In the old days, you would have to have gone pulled all those premises together to do the stuff that would look at people's ID and so on. Now, people can take things like Textracts for example, to look at those forms and do that kind of stuff. And you can kind of pick that story in all of these different stream lines whether it's compute stuff, whether it's database, whether it's high-level AIML stuff, whether it's stuff like amplify, which just massively compresses that timeframe for the startup. >> So, first of all, I'm totally loving this 'cause this is just an example of how evolution works. But if I'm a startup, one of the big things I would think about, and you're a founder, you know this, opportunity recognition is one thing, opportunity capture is another. So moving fast is what nimble startups do. Maybe there's a little bit of technical debt. There maybe a little bit of model debt, but they can get beach head quickly. Startups can move fast, that's the benefit. So where do I learn if I'm a startup founder about where all these pieces are? Is there a place that you guys are providing? Is there use cases where founders can just come in and get the best of the best composable cloud? How do I stand up something quickly to get going that I could regain and refactor later, but not take on too much technical debt or just actually have new building blocks. Where are all these tools? >> I'm really glad you asked that one. So, I mean, first startups is the core of what everyone in my team does. And most of the people we hire, well, they all have a passion for startups. Some have been former founders, some have been former CTOs, some have come to the passion from a different kind of thing. And they understand the needs of startups. And when you started to talk about technical debt, one of the balances that startups have always got to get right, is you're not building for 10 years down the line. You're building to get yourself often to the next milestone to get the next set of customers, for example. And so we're not trying to do the sort of the perfect anonymity of good things. >> I (indistinct) conception of startups. You don't need that, you just got to get the marketplace. >> Yeah, and how we try to do that is we've got a program called Activate and Activate gives startup founders either things like AWS credits up to a hundred thousand dollars in credits. It gives them other technical capabilities as well. So we have a part of the console, the management console called the Activate Console people can go there. And again, if you're trying to build a backend API, there is something that is built on AWS capability to be launched recently that basically says here's some templatized stuff for you to go from kind of naught to 60 and that kind of thing. So you don't have to spend time searching the web. And for us, we're taking that because we've been there before with a bunch of other startups, so we're trying to help. >> Okay, so how do you guys, I mean, a zillion startups, I mean, you and I could be in a coffee shop somewhere, hey, let's do a startup. Do I get access, does everyone gets access to this program that you have? Or is it an elite thing? Is there a criteria? Is it just, you guys are just out there fostering and evangelizing brilliant tools. Is there a program? How do you guys- >> It's a program. >> How do you guys vet startup's, is there? >> It's a program. It has different levels in terms of benefits. So at the core of it it's open to anybody. So if you were a bootstrap startup tomorrow, or today, you can go to the Activate website and you can sign up for that self-starting tier. What we also do is we have an extensive set of connections with the community, so T1 accelerators and incubators, venture capital firms, the kind of places where startups are going to build and via the relationships with those folks. If you're in one, if you've kind of got investment from a top tier VC firm for example, you may be eligible for a hundred thousand dollars of credit. So some of it depends on where the stock is up, but the overall program is open to all. And a chunk of the stuff we talked about like the guidance that's there for everybody. >> It's free, that's free and that's cool. That's good learning, so yeah. And then they get the free training. What's the coolest thing that you're doing right now that startups should know about around obviously the passionate start ups. I know for a fact at 80%, I can say that I've heard Andy and Adam both say that it's not just enterprising, well, they still love the startups. That's their bread and butter too. >> Yeah, well, (indistinct) I think it's amazing that someone, we were talking about the keynote you see some of these large customers in Adam's keynote to people like United Airlines, very, very large successful enterprise. And if you just look around this show, there's a lot of startups just on this expert floor that we are now. And when I look at these announcements, to me, the thing that just gets me excited and keeps me staying doing this job is all of these little capabilities make it in the environment right now with a good funding environment and all of these technical building blocks that instead of having to take a few, your basic compute and storage, once you have all of these higher and higher levels things, you know the serverless stuff that was announced in Adam's keynotes early, which is just making it easy. Because if you're a founder, you have an idea, you know the thing that you want to disrupt. And we're letting people do that in different ways. I'll pick one start up that I find really exciting to talk to. It's called Study. It's run by a guy called Zack Kansa. And he started that start up relatively recently. Now, if you started 15 years ago, you were going to use EC2 instances building on the cloud, but you were still using compute instances. Zack is really opinionated and a kind of a technology visionary in this sense that he takes this serverless approach. And when you talk to him about how he's building, it's almost this attitude of, if I've had to spin up a server, I've kind of failed in some way, or it's not the right kind of thing. Why would we do that? Because we can build with these completely different kinds of architectures. What was revolutionary 15 years ago, and it's like, okay, you can launch it and serve with an API, and you're going to pay by the hour. But now when you look at how Zack's building, you're not even launching a server and you're paying by the millions. >> So this is a huge history lesson slash important point. Back 15 years ago, you had your alternative to Amazon was provisioning, which is expensive, time consuming, lagging, and probably causes people to give up, frankly. Now you get that in the cloud either you're on your own custom domain. I remember EC2 before they had custom domains. It was so early. But now it's about infrastructures code. Okay, so again, evolution, great time to market, buy what you need in the cloud. And Adam talked about that. Now it's true infrastructure is code. So the smart savvy architects are saying, Hey, I'm just going to program. If I'm spinning up servers, that means that's a low level primitive that should be automated. >> Right. >> That's the new mindset. >> Yeah, that's why the fun thing about being in this industry is in just in the time that I've worked at AWS, since about 2011, this stuff has changed so much. And what was state of the art then? And if you take, it's funny, when you look at some of the startups that have grown with AWS, like whether it's Airbnb, Stripe, Slack and so on. If you look at how they built in 2011, because sometimes new startups will say, oh, we want to go and talk to this kind of unicorn and see how they built. And if you actually talked to the unicorn, some of them would say, we wouldn't build it this way anymore. We would do the kind of stuff that Zack and the folks studied are doing right now, because it's totally different (indistinct). >> And the one thing that's consistent from then to now is only one thing, it has nothing to do with the tech, it's speed. Remember rails front end with some backend Mongo, you're up on EC2, you've got an app, in a week, hackathon. Weekend- >> I'm not tying that time thing, that just goes, it gets smaller and smaller. Like the amplify thing that Verna was talking about this morning. You could've gone back 15 years, it's like, okay, this is how much work the developer would have to do. You could go back a couple of years and it's like, they still have this much work to do. And now this morning, it's like, they've just accelerated them to that kind of thing. >> We'll end on giving Jerry Chan a plug in our chat yesterday. We put the playbook out there for startups. You got to raise your focus on the beach head and solve the problem you got in front of you, and then sequence two adjacent positions, refactor in the cloud. Take that approach. You don't have to boil the ocean over right away. You get in the market, get in and get automating kind of the new playbook. It's just, make everything work for you. Not use the modern. >> Yeah, and the thing for me, that one line, I can't remember it was Paul Gray, or somehow that I stole it from, but he's just encouraging these startups to be appropriately lazy. Like let us do the hard work. Let us do the undifferentiated heavy lifting so people can come up with these super cool ideas. >> Yeah, just plugging the talent, plugging the developer. You got a modern application. Paul, thank you for coming on theCUBE, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Head of Startup Solution Architecture North America, Amazon Web Services is going to continue to birth more startups that will be unicorns and decacorns now. Don't forget the decacorns. Okay, we're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE. You're watching the Leader in Global Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (bright upbeat music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> People hate to be sold, but they love to buy. We become what we think about, think, and grow rich. If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive. The world is replete with time-tested advice and motivational ideas for aspiring salespeople, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, and many others have all published classics with guidance that when followed closely, almost always leads to success. More modern personalities have emerged in the internet era, like Tony Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and Angela Duckworth. But for the most part, they've continued to rely on book publishing, seminars, and high value consulting to peddle their insights and inspire action. Welcome to this video exclusive on theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Mark Roberge, who is one of the Managing Directors at Stage 2 Capital, and Paul Fifield, who's the CEO and Co-Founder of Sales Impact Academy. Gentlemen, welcome. Great to see you. >> You too Dave and thanks. >> All right, let's get right into it. Paul, you guys are announcing today a $4 million financing round. It comprises $3 million in a seed round led by Stage 2 and a million dollar in debt financing. So, first of all, congratulations. Paul, why did you start Sales Impact Academy? >> Cool, well, I think my background is sort of two times CRO, so I've built two reasonably successful companies. Built a hundred plus person teams. And so I've got kind of this firsthand experience of having to learn literally everything on the job whilst delivering these very kind of rapid, like achieving these very rapid growth targets. And so when I came out of those two journeys, I literally just started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London where I now live. I spend a bunch of time over in New York, and literally started this because I wanted to sort of kind of give back, but just really wanted to start helping people who were just really, really struggling in high pressure environments. And that's both leadership from sense of revenue leadership people, right down to sort of frontline SDRs. And I think as I started just doing this voluntary teaching, I kind of realized that actually the sort of global education system has done is a massive, massive disservice, right? I actually call it the greatest educational travesty of the last 50 years, where higher education has entirely overlooked sales as a profession. And the knock-on consequences of that have been absolutely disastrous for our profession. Partly that the profession is seen as a bit sort of embarrassing to be a part of. You kind of like go get a sales job if you can't get a degree. But more than that, the core fundamental within revenue teams and within sales people is now completely lacking 'cause there's no structured formal kind of like learning out there. So that's really the problem we're trying to solve on the kind of like the skill side. >> Great. Okay. And mark, always good to have you on, and I got to ask you. So even though, I know this is the wheelhouse for you and your partners, and of course, you've got a deep bench of LPs, but lay out the investment thesis here. What's the core problem that you saw and how are you looking at the market? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. So this one was a special one for me. We've spoken in the past. I mean, just personally I've always had a similar passion to Paul that it's amazing how important sales execution is to all companies, nevermind just the startup ecosystem. And I've always personally been motivated by anything that can help the startup ecosystem increase their success. Part of why I teach at Harvard and try to change some of the stuff that Paul's talking about, which is like, it's amazing how little education is done around sales. But in this particular one, not only personally was I excited about, but from a fun perspective, we've got to look at the economic outcomes. And we've been thinking a lot about the sales tech stack. It's evolved a ton in the last couple of decades. We've gone from the late '90s where every sales VP was just, they had a thing called the CRM that none of their reps even used, right? And we've come so far in 20 years, we've got all these amazing tools that help us cold call, that help us send emails efficiently and automatically and track everything, but nothing's really happened on the education side. And that's really the enormous gap that we've seen is, these organizations being much more proactive around adopting technology that can prove sales execution, but nothing on the education side. And the other piece that we saw is, it's almost like all these companies are reinventing the wheel of looking in the upcoming year, having a dozen sales people to hire, and trying to put together a sales enablement program within their organization to teach salespeople sales 101. Like how to find a champion, how to develop a budget, how to develop sense of urgency. And what Paul and team can do in the first phase of essay, is can sort of centralize that, so that all of these organizations can benefit from the best content and the best instructors for their team. >> So Paul, exactly, thank you, mark. Exactly what do you guys do? What do you sell? I'm curious, is this sort of, I'm thinking in my head, is this E-learning, is it really part of the sales stack? Maybe you could help us understand that better. >> Well, I think this problem of having to upscale teams has been around like forever. And kind of going back to the kind of education problem, it's what's wild is that we would never accept this of our lawyers, our accountants, or HR professionals. Imagine like someone in your finance team arriving on day one and they're searching YouTube to try and work out how to like put a balance sheet together. So it's a chronic, chronic problem. And so the way that we're addressing this, and I think the problem is well understood, but there's always been a terrible market, sort of product market fit for how the problem gets solved. So as mark was saying, typically it's in-house revenue leaders who themselves have got massive gaps in their knowledge, hack together some internal learning that is just pretty poor, 'cause it's not really their skillset. The other alternative is bringing in really expensive consultants, but they're consultants with a very single worldview and the complexity of a modern revenue organization is very, very high these days. And so one consultant is not going to really kind of like cover every topic you need. And then there's the kind of like fairly old fashioned sales training companies that just come in, one big hit, super expensive and then sort of leave again. So the sort of product market fit to solve, has always been a bit pretty bad. So what we've done is we've created a subscription model. We've essentially productized skills development. The way that we've done that is we teach live instruction. So one of the big challenges Andreessen Horowitz put a post out around this so quite recently, one of the big problems of online learning is that this kind of huge repository of online learning, which puts all the onus on the learner to have the discipline to go through these courses and consume them in an on-demand way is actually they're pretty ineffective. We see sort of completion rates of like 7 to 8%. So we've always gone from a live instruction model. So the sort of ingredients are the absolute very best people in the world in their very specific skill teaching live classes just two hours per week. So we're not overwhelming the learners who are already in work, and they have targets, and they've got a lot of pressure. And we have courses that last maybe four to like 12 hours over two to sort of six to seven weeks. So highly practical live instruction. We have 70, 80, sometimes even 90% completion rates of the sort of live class experience, and then teams then rapidly put that best practice into practice and see amazing results in things like top of funnel, or conversion, or retention. >> So live is compulsory and I presume on-demand? If you want to refresh you have an on demand option? >> Yeah, everything's recorded, so you can kind of catch up on a class if you've missed it, But that live instruction is powerful because it's kind of in your calendar, right? So you show up. But the really powerful thing, actually, is that entire teams within companies can actually learn at exactly the same pace. So we teach it eight o'clock Pacific, 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM in the UK, and 5:00 PM Europe. So your entire European and North American teams can literally learn in the same class with a world-class expert, like a Mark, or like a Kevin Dorsey, or like Greg Holmes from Zoom. And you're learning from these incredible people. Class finishes, teams can come back together, talk about this incredible best practice they've just learned, and then immediately put it into practice. And that's where we're seeing these incredible, kind of almost instant impact on performance at real scale. >> So, Mark, in thinking about your investment, you must've been thinking about, okay, how do we scale this thing? You've got an instructor component, you've got this live piece. How are you thinking about that at scale? >> Yeah, there's a lot of different business model options there. And I actually think multiple of them are achievable in the longer term. That's something we've been working with Paul quite a bit, is like, they're all quite compelling. So just trying to think about which two to start with. But I think you've seen a lot of this in education models today. Is a mixture of on-demand with prerecorded. And so I think that will be the starting point. And I think from a scalability standpoint, we were also, we don't always try to do this with our investments, but clearly our LP base or limited partner base was going to be a key ingredient to at least the first cycle of this business. You know, our VC firm's backed by over 250 CRO CMOs heads of customer success, all of which are prospective instructors, prospective content developers, and prospective customers. So that was a little nicety around the scale and investment thesis for this one. >> And what's in it for them? I mean, they get paid. Obviously, you have a stake in the game, but what's in it for the instructors. They get paid on a sort of a per course basis? How does that model work? >> Yeah, we have a development fee for each kind of hour of teaching that gets created So we've mapped out a pretty significant curriculum. And we have about 250 hours of life teaching now already written. We actually think it's going to be about 3000 hours of learning before you get even close to a complete curriculum for every aspect of a revenue organization from revenue operations, to customer success, to marketing, to sales, to leadership, and management. But we have a development fee per class, and we have a teaching fee as well. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think you guys, it's really an underserved market, and then when you think about it, most organizations, they just don't invest in training. And so, I mean, I would think you'd want to take it, I don't know what the right number is, 5, 10% of your sales budget and actually put it on this and the return would be enormous. How do you guys think about the market size? Like I said before, is it E-learning, is it part of the CRM stack? How do you size this market? >> Well, I think for us it's service to people. A highly skilled sales rep with an email address, a phone and a spreadsheet would do really well, okay? You don't need this world-class tech stack to do well in sales. You need the skills to be able to do the job. But the reverse, that's not true, right? An unskilled person with a world-class tech stack won't do well. And so fundamentally, the skill level of your team is the number one most important thing to get right to be successful in revenue. But as I said before, the product market for it to solve that problem, has been pretty terrible. So we see ourselves 100%. And so if you're looking at like a com, you look at Gong, who we've just signed as a customer, which is fantastic. Gong has a technology that helps salespeople do better through call recording. You have Outreach, who is also a customer. They have technologies that help SDRs be more efficient in outreach. And now you have Sales Impact Academy, and we help with skills development of your team, of the entirety of your revenue function. So we absolutely see ourselves as a key part of that stack. In terms of the TAM, 60 million people in sales are on, according to LinkedIn. You're probably talking 150 million people in go to market to include all of the different roles. 50% of the world's companies are B2B. The TAM is huge. But what blows my mind, and this kind of goes back to this why the global education system has overlooked this because essentially if half the world's companies are B2B, that's probably a proxy for the half of the world's GDP, Half of the world's economic growth is relying on the revenue function of half the world's companies, and they don't really know what they're doing, (laughs) which is absolutely staggering. And if we can solve that in a meaningfully meaningful way at massive scale, then the impact should be absolutely enormous. >> So, Mark, no lack of TAM. I know that you guys at Stage 2, you're also very much focused on the metrics. You have a fundamental philosophy that your product market fit and retention should come before hyper growth. So what were the metrics that enticed you to make this investment? >> Yeah, it's a good question, Dave, 'cause that's where we always look first, which I think is a little different than most early stage investors. There's a big, I guess, meme, triple, triple, double, double that's popular in Silicon Valley these days, which refers to triple your revenue in year one, triple your revenue in year two, double in year three, and four, and five. And that type of a hyper growth is critical, but it's often jumped too quickly in our opinion. That there's a premature victory called on product market fit, which kills a larger percentage of businesses than is necessary. And so with all our investments, we look very heavily first at user engagement, any early indicators of user retention. And the numbers were just off the charts for SIA in terms of the customers, in terms of the NPS scores that they were getting on their sessions, in terms of the completion rate on their courses, in terms of the customers that started with a couple of seats and expanded to more seats once they got a taste of the program. So that's where we look first as a strong foundation to build a scalable business, and it was off the charts positive for SIA. >> So how about the competition? If I Google sales training software, I'll get like dozens of companies. Lessonly, and MindTickle, or Brainshark will come up, that's not really a fit. So how do you think about the competition? How are you different? >> Yeah, well, one thing we try and avoid is any reference to sales training, 'cause that really sort of speaks to this very old kind of fashioned way of doing this. And I actually think that from a pure pedagogy perspective, so from a pure learning design perspective, the old fashioned way of doing sales training was pull a whole team off site, usually in a really terrible hotel with no windows for a day or two. And that's it, that's your learning experience. And that's not how human beings learn, right? So just even if the content was fantastic, the learning experience was so terrible, it was just very kind of ineffective. So we sort of avoid kind of like sales training, The likes of MindTickle, we're actually talking to them at the moment about a partnership there. They're a platform play, and we're certainly building a platform, but we're very much about the live instruction and creating the biggest curriculum and the broadest curriculum on the internet, in the world, basically, for revenue teams. So the competition is kind of interesting 'cause there is not really a direct subscription-based live like learning offering out there. There's some similar ish companies. I honestly think at the moment it's kind of status quo. We're genuinely creating a new category of in-work learning for revenue teams. And so we're in this kind of semi and sort of evangelical sort of phase. So really, status quo is one of the biggest sort of competitors. But if you think about some of those old, old fashioned sort of Miller Heimans, and then perhaps even like Sandlers, there's an analogy perhaps here, which is kind of interesting, which is a little bit like Siebel and Salesforce in the sort of late '90s, where in Siebel you have this kind of old way of doing things. It was a little bit ineffective. It was really expensive. Not accessible to a huge space of the market. And Salesforce came along and said, "Hey, we're going to create this cool thing. It's going to be through the browser, it's going to be accessible to everyone, and it's going to be really, really effective." And so there's some really kind of interesting parallels almost between like Siebel and Salesforce and what we're doing to completely kind of upend the sort of the old fashioned way of delivering sort of sales training, if you like. >> And your target customer profile is, you're selling to teams, right? B2B teams, right? It's not for individuals. Is that correct, Paul? >> Currently. Yeah, yeah. So currently we've got a big foothold in series A to series B. So broadly speaking out, our target market currently is really fast growth technology companies. That's the sector that we're really focusing on. We've got a very good strong foothold in series A series B companies. We've now won some much larger later stage companies. We've actually even won a couple of corporates, I can't say names yet, but names that are very, very, very familiar and we're incredibly excited by them, which could end up being thousand plus seat deals 'cause we do this on a per seat basis. But yeah, very much at the moment it's fast growth tech companies, and we're sort of moving up the chain towards enterprise. >> And how do you deal with the sort of maturity curve, if you will, of your students? You've got some that are brand new, just fresh out of school. You've got others that are more seasoned. What do you do, pop them into different points of the curriculum? How do you handle it? >> Yeah we have, I'll say we have about 30 courses right now. We have about another 15 in development where post this fundraise, we want to be able to get to around about 20 courses that we're developing every quarter and getting out to market. So we're literally, we've sort of identified about 20 to 25 key roles across everything within revenue. That's, let's say revenue ops, customer success, account management, sales, engineering, all these different kinds of roles. And we are literally plotting the sort of skills development for these individuals over multiple, multiple years. And I think what we've never ceases to amaze me is actually the breadth of learning in revenue is absolutely enormous. And what kind of just makes you laugh is, this is all of this knowledge that we're now creating it's what companies just hope that their teams somehow acquire through osmosis, through blogs, through events. And it's just kind of crazy that there is... It's absolutely insane that we don't already exist, basically. >> And if I understand it correctly, just from looking at your website, you've got the entry level package. I think it's up to 15 seats, and then you scale up from there, correct? Is it sort of as a seat-based license model? >> Yeah, it's a seat-based model, as Mark mentioned. In some cases we sell, let's say 20 or $30,000 deal out the gate and that's most of the team. That will be maybe a series A, series B deal, but then we've got these land and expand models that are working tremendously well. We have seven, eight customers in Q1 that have doubled their spend Q2. That's the impact that they're seeing. And our net revenue retention number for Q2 is looking like it's going to be 177% to think exceeds companies like Snowflakes. Well, our underlying retention metrics, because people are seeing this incredible impact on teams and performance, is really, really strong. >> That's a nice metric compare with Snowflake (Paul laughs) It's all right. (Dave and Paul laugh) >> So, Mark, this is a larger investment for Stage 2 You guys have been growing and sort of upping your game. And maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we're in the middle of Fund II right now. So, Fund I was in 2018. We were doing smaller checks. It was our first time out of the gate. The mission has really taken of, our LP base has really taken off. And so this deal looks a lot like more like our second fund. We'll actually make an announcement in a few weeks now that we've closed that out. But it's a much larger fund and our first investments should be in that 2 to $3 million range. >> Hey, Paul, what are you going to do with the money? What are the use of funds? >> Put it on black, (chuckles) we're going to like- (Dave laughs) >> Saratoga is open. (laughs) (Mark laughs) >> We're going to, look, the curriculum development for us is absolutely everything, but we're also going to be investing in building our own technology platform as well. And there are some other really important aspects to the kind of overall offering. We're looking at building an assessment tool so we can actually kind of like start to assess skills across teams. We certify every course has an exam, so we want to get more robust around the certification as well, because we're hoping that our certification becomes the global standard in understanding for the first time in the industry what individual competencies and skills people have, which will be huge. So we have a broad range of things that we want to start initiating now. But I just wanted to quickly say Stage 2 has been nothing short of incredible in every kind of which way. Of course, this investment, the fit is kind of insane, but the LPs have been extraordinary in helping. We've got a huge number of them are now customers very quickly. Mark and the team are helping enormously on our own kind of like go to market and metrics. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've raised over 100 million myself in venture capital. I've never known a venture capital firm with such value add like ever, or even heard of other people getting the kind of value add that we're getting. So I just wanted to a quick shout out for Stage 2. >> Quite a testimony of you guys. Definitely Stage 2 punches above its weight. Guys, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on. Good luck and we'll be watching. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, thank you everybody for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMB customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought it home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

>>Really excited about this year's data, citizens with so many of you together. Uh, I'm going to talk today about accessible data, because what good is the data. If you can get it into your hands and shop for it, but you can't understand it. Uh, and I'm here today with, uh, bald, really thrilled to be here with Paul. Paul is an award-winning author on all topics data. I think 20 books with 21st on the way over 300 articles, he's been a frequent speaker. He's an expert in future trends. Uh, he's a VP at cognitive systems, uh, over at IBM teachers' data also, um, at the business school and as a champion of diversity initiatives. Paul, thank you for being here, really the conformance, uh, to the session with you. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's a privilege. >>So let's get started with, uh, our origins and data poll. Um, and I'll start with a little story of my own. So, uh, I trained as an engineer way back when, uh, and, um, in one of the courses we got as an engineer, it was about databases. So we got the stick thick book of CQL and me being in it for the programming. I was like, well, who needs this stuff? And, uh, I wanted to do my part in terms of making data accessible. So essentially I, I was the only book that I sold on. Uh, obviously I learned some hard lessons, uh, later on, as I did a master's in AI after that, and then joined the database research lab at the university that Libra spun off from. Uh, but Hey, we all learned along the way. And, uh, Paula, I'm really curious. Um, when did you awaken first to data? If you will? >>You know, it's really interesting Stan, because I come from the opposite side, an undergrad in economics, uh, with some, uh, information systems research at the higher level. And so I think I was always attuned to what data could do, but I didn't understand how to get at it and the kinds of nuances around it. So then I started this job, a database company, like 27 years ago, and it started there, but I would say the awakening has never stopped because the data game is always changing. Like I look at these epochs that I've been through data. I was a real relational databases thinking third normal form, and then no SQL databases. And then I watch no SQL be about no don't use SQL, then wait a minute. Not only sequel. And today it's really for the data citizens about wait, no, I need SQL. So, um, I think I'm always waking up in data, so I'll call it a continuum if you will. But that was it. It was trying to figure out the technology behind driving analytics in which I took in school. >>Excellent. And I fully agree with you there. Uh, every couple of years they seem to reinvent new stuff and they want to be able to know SQL models. Let me see. I saw those come and go. Uh, obviously, and I think that's, that's a challenge for most people because in a way, data is a very abstract concepts, um, until you get down in the weeds and then it starts to become really, really messy, uh, until you, you know, from that end button extract a certain insights. Um, and as the next thing I want to talk about with you is that challenging organizations, we're hearing a lot about data, being valuable data, being the new oil data, being the new soil, the new gold, uh, data as an asset is being used as a slogan all over. Uh, people are investing a lot in data over multiple decades. Now there's a lot of new data technologies, always, but still, it seems that organizations fundamentally struggle with getting people access to data. What do you think are some of the key challenges that are underlying the struggles that mud, that organizations seem to face when it comes to data? >>Yeah. Listen, Stan, I'll tell you a lot of people I think are stuck on what I call their data, acumen curves, and you know, data is like a gym membership. If you don't use it, you're not going to get any value on it. And that's what I mean by accurate. And so I like to think that you use the analogy of some mud. There's like three layers that are holding a lot of organizations back at first is just the amount of data. Now, I'm not going to give you some stat about how many times I can go to the moon and back with the data regenerate, but I will give you one. I found interesting stat. The average human being in their lifetime will generate a petabyte of data. How much data is that? If that was my apple music playlist, it would be about 2000 years of nonstop music. >>So that's some kind of playlist. And I think what's happening for the first layer of mud is when I first started writing about data warehousing and analytics, I would be like, go find a needle in the haystack. But now it's really finding a needle in a stack of needles. So much data. So little time that's level one of mine. I think the second thing is people are looking for some kind of magic solution, like Cinderella's glass slipper, and you put it on her. She turns into a princess that's for Disney movies, right? And there's nothing magical about it. It is about skill and acumen and up-skilling. And I think if you're familiar with the duper, you recall the Hadoop craze, that's exactly what happened, right? Like people brought all their data together and everyone was going to be able to access it and give insights. >>And it teams said it was pretty successful, but every line of business I ever talked to said it was a complete failure. And the third layer is governance. That's actually where you're going to find some magic. And the problem in governance is every client I talked to is all about least effort to comply. They don't want to violate GDPR or California consumer protection act or whatever governance overlooks, where they do business and governance. When you don't lead me separate to comply and try not to get fine, but as an accelerant to your analytics, and that gets you out of that third layer of mud. So you start to invoke what I call the wisdom of the crowd. Now imagine taking all these different people with intelligence about the business and giving them access and acumen to hypothesize on thousands of ideas that turn into hundreds, we test and maybe dozens that go to production. So those are three layers that I think every organization is facing. >>Well. Um, I definitely follow on all the days, especially the one where people see governance as a, oh, I have to comply to this, which always hurts me a little bit, honestly, because all good governance is about making things easier while also making sure that they're less riskier. Um, but I do want to touch on that Hadoop thing a little bit, uh, because for me in my a decade or more over at Libra, we saw it come as well as go, let's say around 2015 to 2020 issue. So, and it's still around. Obviously once you put your data in something, it's very hard to make it go away, but I've always felt that had do, you know, it seemed like, oh, now we have a bunch of clusters and a bunch of network engineers. So what, >>Yeah. You know, Stan, I fell for, I wrote the book to do for dummies and it had such great promise. I think the problem is there wasn't enough education on how to extract value out of it. And that's why I say it thinks it's great. They liked clusters and engineers that you just said, but it didn't drive lineup >>Business. Got it. So do you think that the whole paradigm with the clouds that we're now on is going to fundamentally change that or is just an architectural change? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's a great comment. What you're seeing today now is the movement for the data lake. Maybe a way from repositories, like Hadoop into cloud object stores, right? And then you look at CQL or other interfaces over that not allows me to really scale compute and storage separately, but that's all the technical stuff at the end of the day, whether you're on premise hybrid cloud, into cloud software, as a service, if you don't have the acumen for your entire organization to know how to work with data, get value from data, this whole data citizen thing. Um, you're not going to get the kind of value that goes into your investment, right? And I think that's the key thing that business leaders need to understand is it's not about analytics for kind of science project sakes. It's about analytics to drive. >>Absolutely. We fully agree with that. And I want to touch on that point. You mentioned about the wisdom of the crowds, the concept that I love about, right, and your organization is a big grout full of what we call data citizens. Now, if I remember correctly from the book of the wisdom of the crowds, there's, there's two points that really, you have to take Canada. What is, uh, for the wisdom of the grounds to work, you have to have all the individuals enabled, uh, for them to have access to the right information and to be able to share that information safely kept from the bias from others. Otherwise you're just biasing the outcome. And second, you need to be able to somehow aggregate that wisdom up to a certain decision. Uh, so as Felix mentioned earlier, we all are United by data and it's a data citizen topic. >>I want to touch on with you a little bit, because at Collibra we look at it as anyone who uses data to do their job, right. And 2020 has sort of accelerated digitization. Uh, but apart from that, I've always believed that, uh, you don't have to have data in your title, like a data analyst or a data scientist to be a data citizen. If I take a look at the example inside of Libra, we have product managers and they're trying to figure out which features are most important and how are they used and what patterns of behavior is there. You have a gal managers, and they're always trying to know the most they can about their specific accounts, uh, to be able to serve as them best. So for me, the data citizen is really in its broadest sense. Uh, anyone who uses data to do their job, does that, does that resonate with you? >>Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of myself. And to be honest in my eyes where I got started from, and I agree, you don't need the word data in your title. What you need to have is curiosity, and that is in your culture and in your being. And, and I think as we look at organizations to transform and take full advantage of their, their data investments, they're going to need great governance. I guarantee you that, but then you're going to have to invest in this data citizen concept. And the first thing I'll tell you is, you know, that kind of acumen, if you will, as a team sport, it's not a departmental sport. So you need to think about what are the upskilling programs of where we can reach across to the technical and the non-technical, you know, lots and lots of businesses rely on Microsoft Excel. >>You have data citizens right there, but then there's other folks who are just flat out curious about stuff. And so now you have to open this up and invest in those people. Like, why are you paying people to think about your business without giving the data? It would be like hiring Tom Brady as a quarterback and telling him not to throw a pass. Right. And I see it all the time. So we kind of limit what we define as data citizen. And that's why I love what you said. You don't need the word data in your title and more so if you don't build the acumen, you don't know how to bring the data together, maybe how to wrangle it, but where did it come from? And where can you fixings? One company I worked with had 17 definitions for a sales individual, 17 definitions, and the talent team and HR couldn't drive to a single definition because they didn't have the data accurate. So when you start thinking of the data citizen, concept it about enabling everybody to shop for data much. Like I would look for a USB cable on Amazon, but also to attach to a business glossary for definition. So we have a common version of what a word means, the lineage of the data who owns it, who did it come from? What did it do? So bring that all together. And, uh, I will tell you companies that invest in the data, citizen concept, outperform companies that don't >>For all of that, I definitely fully agree that there's enough research out there that shows that the ones who are data-driven are capturing the most markets, but also capturing the most growth. So they're capturing the market even faster. And I love what you said, Paul, about, um, uh, the brains, right? You've already paid for the brains you've already invested in. So you may as well leverage them. Um, you may as well recognize and, and enable the data citizens, uh, to get access to the assets that they need to really do their job properly. That's what I want to touch on just a little bit, if, if you're capable, because for me, okay. Getting access to data is one thing, right? And I think you already touched on a few items there, but I'm shopping for data. Now I have it. I have a cul results set in my hands. Let's say, but I'm unable to read and write data. Right? I don't know how to analyze it. I don't know maybe about bias. Uh, maybe I, I, I don't know how to best visualize it. And maybe if I do, maybe I don't know how to craft a compelling persuasion narrative around it to change my bosses decisions. So from your viewpoint, do you think that it's wise for companies to continuously invest in data literacy to continuously upgrade that data citizens? If you will. >>Yeah, absolutely. Forest. I'm going to tell you right now, data literacy years are like dog years stage. So fast, new data types, new sources of data, new ways to get data like API APIs and microservices. But let me take it away from the technical concept for a bit. I want to talk to you about the movie. A star is born. I'm sure most of you have seen it or heard it Bradley Cooper, lady Gaga. So everyone knows the movie. What most people probably don't know is when lady Gaga teamed up with Bradley Cooper to do this movie, she demanded that he sing everything like nothing could be auto-tuned everything line. This is one of the leading actors of Hollywood. They filmed this remake in 42 days and Bradley Cooper spent 18 months on singing lessons. 18 months on a guitar lessons had a voice coach and it's so much and so forth. >>And so I think here's the point. If one of the best actors in the world has to invest three and a half years for 42 days to hit a movie out of the park. Why do we think we don't need a continuous investment in data literacy? Even once you've done your initial training, if you will, over the data, citizen, things are going to change. I don't, you don't. If I, you Stan, if you go to the gym and workout every day for three months, you'll never have to work out for the rest of your life. You would tell me I was ridiculous. So your data literacy is no different. And I will tell you, I have managed thousands of individuals, some of the most technical people around distinguished engineers, fellows, and data literacy comes from curiosity and a culture of never ending learning. That is the number one thing to success. >>And that curiosity, I hire people who are curious, I'll give you one more story. It's about Mozart. And this 21 year old comes to Mozart and he says, Mozart, can you teach me how to compose a symphony? And Mozart looks at this person that says, no, no, you're too young, too young. You compose your fourth symphony when you were 12 and Mozart looks at him and says, yeah, but I didn't go around asking people how to compose a symphony. Right? And so the notion of that story is curiosity. And those people who show up in always want to learn, they're your home run individuals. And they will bring data literacy across the organization. >>I love it. And I'm not going to try and be Mozart, but you know, three and a half years, I think you said two times, 18 months, uh, maybe there's hope for me yet in a singing, you'll be a good singer. Um, Duchy on the, on the, some of the sports references you've made, uh, Paul McGuire, we first connected, uh, I'm not gonna like disclose where you're from, but, uh, I saw he did come up and I know it all sorts of sports that drive to measure everything they can right on the field of the field. So let's imagine that you've done the best analysis, right? You're the most advanced data scientists schooled in the classics, as well as the modernist methods, the best tools you've made a beautiful analysis, beautiful dashboards. And now your coach just wants to put their favorite player on the game, despite what you're building to them. How do you deal with that kind of coaches? >>Yeah. Listen, this is a great question. I think for your data analytics strategy, but also for anyone listening and watching, who wants to just figure out how to drive a career forward? I would give the same advice. So the story you're talking about, indeed hockey, you can figure out where I'm from, but it's around the Ottawa senators, general manager. And he made a quote in an interview and he said, sometimes I want to punch my analytics, people in the head. Now I'm going to tell you, that's not a good culture for analytics. And he goes on to say, they tell me not to play this one player. This one player is very tough. You know, throws four or five hits a game. And he goes, I'd love my analytics people to get hit by bore a wacky and tell me how it feels. That's the player. >>Sure. I'm sure he hits hard, but here's the deal. When he's on the ice, the opposing team gets more shots on goal than the senators do on the opposing team. They score more goals, they lose. And so I think whenever you're trying to convince a movement forward, be it management, be it a project you're trying to fund. I always try to teach something that someone didn't previously know before and make them think, well, I never thought of it that way before. And I think the great opportunity right now, if you're trying to get moving in a data analytics strategy is around this post COVID era. You know, we've seen post COVID now really accelerate, or at least post COVID in certain parts of the world, but accelerate the appetite for digital transformation by about half a decade. Okay. And getting the data within your systems, as you digitize will give you all kinds of types of projects to make people think differently than the way they thought before. >>About data. I call this data exhaust. I'll give you a great example, Uber. I think we're all familiar with Uber. If we all remember back in the days when Uber would offer you search pricing. Okay? So basically you put Uber on your phone, they know everything about you, right? Who are your friends, where you going, uh, even how much batteries on your phone? Well, in a data science paper, I read a long time ago. They recognize that there was a 70% chance that you would accept a surge price. If you had less than 10% of your battery. So 10% of battery on your phone is an example of data exhaust all the lawns that you generate on your digital front end properties. Those are logs. You can take those together and maybe show executive management with data. We can understand why people abandoned their cart at the shipping phase, or what is the amount of shipping, which they abandoned it. When is the signal when our systems are about to go to go down. So, uh, I think that's a tremendous way. And if you look back to the sports, I mean the Atlanta Falcons NFL team, and they monitor their athletes, sleep performance, the Toronto Raptors basketball, they're running AI analytics on people's personalities and everything they tweet and every interview to see if the personality fits. So in sports, I think athletes are the most important commodity, if you will, or asset a yet all these teams are investing in analytics. So I think that's pretty telling, >>Okay, Paul, it looks like we're almost out of time. So in 30 seconds or less, what would you recommend to the data citizens out there? >>Okay. I'm going to give you a four tips in 30 seconds. Number one, remember learning never ends be curious forever. You'll drive your career. Number two, remember companies that invest in analytics and data, citizens outperform those that don't McKinsey says it's about 1.4 times across many KPIs. Number three, stop just collecting the dots and start connecting them with that. You need a strong governance strategy and that's going to help you for the future because the biggest thing in the future is not going to be about analytics, accuracy. It's going to be about analytics, explainability. So accuracy is no longer going to be enough. You're going to have to explain your decisions and finally stay positive and forever test negative. >>Love it. Thank you very much fall. Um, and for all the data seasons is out there. Um, when it comes down to access to data, it's more than just getting your hands on the data. It's also knowing what you can do with it, how you can do that and what you definitely shouldn't be doing with it. Uh, thank you everyone out there and enjoy your learning and interaction with the community. Stay healthy. Bye-bye.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMBs customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought at home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

>> (lively music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got an alumni joining me and a brand new guest to the CUBE please welcome Paul Papas, the Global Managing Partner, for IBM Global Business Services, this is transformation services. Paul, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thanks Lisa great to be here with you today. And Dominique Dubois is here as well. She is the Global Strategy and Offerings Leader in business transformation services or BTS at IBM. Dominique, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, great to be here. So, we're going to be talking about accelerating business transformation with intelligent workflows. We're going to break through all that, but Paul we're going to start with you. Since we last got together with IBM, a lot has changed so much transformation, so much acceleration of transformation. Talk to me from your perspective, how have you seen the way that businesses running change and what some of the changes in the future are going to be? >> Well, you hit on two key words there Lisa and thanks so much for that question. Two key words that you hit on were change and acceleration. And that's exactly what we see. We were seeing this before the pandemic and if anything, with the pandemic did when things started started kind of spreading around the world late or early last year, around January, February timeframe we saw that word acceleration really take hold. Every one of our clients were looking for new ways to accelerate the change that they had already planned to adapt to this new, this new normal or this new abnormal, depending on how you view it. In fact, we did a study recently, an IBV study that's our Institute of Business Value and found that six out of 10 organizations were accelerating all of their transformation initiatives they had already planned. And that's exactly what we're seeing happening right now in all parts of the world and across all industries. This acceleration to transform. >> So, one of the things that we've talked about for years, Paul, before the pandemic was even a thing, is that there was a lot of perceived technical barriers in terms of like the tech maturity for organizations and employees being opposed to change. People obviously it can be a challenge. They're used to doing things the way they are. But as you just said, in that IBV survey, nearly 60% of businesses say we have to accelerate our transformation due to COVID, probably initially to survive and then thrive. Talk to me about some of those, those barriers that were there a little over a year ago and how businesses 60 plus percent of them have moved those out of the way. >> You know at IBM we've got a 109 year history of being a technology innovation company. And the rate of pace of technical change is always increasing. It's something that we love and that we're comfortable with. But the rate and pace of change is always unsettling. And there's always a human element for change. And the human element is always the rate, the rate setter in terms of the amount of change that you can have in an organization. Our former chairman Ginni Rometty, used to say that growth and comfort cannot co-exist. And it's so true because changing is uncomfortable. It's unsettling. It can be, it can be nerve-racking. It can instill fear and fear can be paralyzing in terms of driving change. And what we also see is there's a disconnect, a lot of times and that IBV study that I was referring to before, we saw results coming back where 78% of executives feel that they have provided the training and enablement to help their employees transform to new required skills and new ways of working but only half of the people surveyed felt the same way. Similarly, we saw a disconnect in terms of companies feeling that they're providing the right level of health and wellness support during the pandemic. And only half of the employees responded back they feel that they're getting that level of support. So, the people change aspect of doing a transformation or adapting to new circumstances is always the most critical component and always the hardest component. And when we talk about helping our clients do that in IBM that's our service as organization. That's the organization that Dominique Dubois is representing here today. I'm responsible for business transformation services within our organization. We help our clients adapt using new technologies, transforming the way they work, but also addressing the people change elements that could be so difficult and hitting them head on so that they can make sure that they can survive and thrive in a meaningful and lasting way in this new world. >> One of the hardest things is that cultural transformation regardless of a pandemic. So, I can't imagine I'd love to get one more thing, Paul from you before we head over to Dominique. IBM is on 109 year old organization. Talk to me about the IBM pledge. This is something that came up last year, huge organization massive changes last year, not just the work from home that the mental concerns and issues that people had. What did IBM do like as a grassroots effort that went viral? >> Yeah, so, it's really great. So, when the pandemic started, we all have to shift it, We all have to shift to working from home. And as you mentioned, IBM's 109 year old company, we have over 300,000 employees working in 170 countries. So, we had to move this entire workforce. It's 370,000 humans to working in a new way that many of which have never done before. And when we started experiencing, the minute we did that, within a few weeks, my team and I were talking Dominique is on my team and we were having conversations where we were feeling really exhausted. Just a few weeks into this and it was because we were constantly on Webex, we were constantly connected and we're all used to working really hard. We travel a lot, we're always with our clients. So, it wasn't that, you have a team that is adapting to like working more hours or longer hours, but this was fundamentally different. And we saw that with schools shutting down and lock downs happening in different of the world the home life balance was getting immediately difficult to impossible to deal with. We have people that are taking care of elderly parents, people that are homeschooling children, other personal life situations that everyone had to navigate in the middle of a pandemic locked at home with different restrictions on when you can go out and get things done. So, we got together as a group and we just started talking about how can we help? How can we help make life just a little bit easier for all of our people? And we started writing down some things that we would, we would commit to doing with each other. How we would address each other. And when that gave birth to was what we call the IBM Work From Home Pledge. And it's a set of principles, all grounded in the belief that, if we act this way, we might just be able to make life just a little bit easier for each other and it's grounded in empathy. And there are parts of the Plex that are pledging to be kind. Recognizing that in this new digital world that we're showing up on camera inside of everyone's home. We're guests in each other's homes. So, let's make sure that we act appropriately as guests at each other's home. So, if children run into the frame during the middle of a meeting or dog started barking during the middle of a meeting, just roll with it. Don't call out attention to it. Don't make people feel self-conscious about it. Pledged the support so your fellow IBM by making time for personal needs. So, if someone has to, do homeschooling in the middle of the day, like Dominique's got triplets she's got to do homeschooling in the middle of the day. Block that time off and we will respect that time on your calendar. And just work around it and just deal with it. There are other things like respecting that camera ready time. As someone who's now been on camera every day it feels like for the last 14 months we want to respect the time that people when they have their cameras off. And not pressure them to put their cameras on saying things like, Hey, I can't see you. There's no reason to add more pressure to everyone's life, if someone's camera's off, it's all for a reason. And then other things like pledging to checking on each other, pledging to set boundaries and tend to our own self-care. So, we published that as a group, we just again and we put it on a Slack channel. So it's kind of our communication method inside the company. It was just intended to be for my organization but it started going viral and tens of thousands of IBM members started taking, started taking the pledge and ultimately caught the attention of our CEO and he loved it, shared it with his leadership team, which I'm a part of. And then also then went on LinkedIn and publicly took the pledge as well. Which then also got more excitement and interaction with other companies as well. So, grassroots effort all grounded in showing empathy and helping to make life just a little bit easier for everyone. >> So important, I'm going to look that up and I'm going to tell you as a person who speaks with many tech companies a week. A lot of businesses could take a lead from that and it gets really important and we are inviting each other into our homes and I see you're a big Broadway fan I'll have to ask you that after we wrap (giggles) Dominique I don't know how you're doing any of this with triplets. I only have two dogs (Dominique laughs) but I'd love to know this sense of urgency, that is everywhere you're living it. Paul talked about it with respect to the acceleration of transformation. How from your lens is IBM and IBM helping customers address the urgency, the need to pivot, the need to accelerate, the need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation actually getting it done? >> Right, thanks Lisa, so true our clients are really needing to and ready to move with haste. That that sense of urgency can be felt I think across every country, every market, every industry. And so we're really helping our clients accelerate their digital transformations and we do that through something that we call intelligent workflows. And so workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done. But intelligent workflows are how we infuse; predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility, end to end across a workflow. So, pulling those processes together so they're not solid anymore and infusing. So, simply put we bring intelligent workflows to our clients and it fundamentally reinvents how they're getting work done from a digital perspective, from a predictive perspective, from a transparency perspective. And I think what really stands apart when we deliver this with our clients in partnership with our clients is how it not only delivers value to the bottom line, to the top line it also actually delivers greater value to their employees, to the customers, to the partner to their broader ecosystem. And intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements. The first is around better utilizing data. So, aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data, and then using that insight not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage. So we talked about AI, automation, IOT, blockchain, all of these technologies require vast amounts of data. And what we're able to bring both on the internal and external source from a data perspective really underpins what these emerging technologies can do. And then the third area is skills. Our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients deep, deep expertise, partner expertise, expertise from the ecosystem at large and pulling all of that together, is how we're really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations because we're helping them shift, from a set of siloed static processes to an end-to-end workflow. We're helping them make fewer predictions based on the past historical data and actually taking more real-time action with real time insights. So, it really is a fundamental shift and how your work is getting done to really being able to provide that emerging technologies, data, deep skills-based end to end workflow. >> That word fundamental has such gravity. and I know we say data has gravity being fundamental in such an incredibly dynamic time is really challenging but I was looking through some of the notes that you guys provided me with. And in terms of what you just talked about, Dominique versus making a change to a silo, the benefits and making changes to a spectrum of integrated processes the values can be huge. In fact, I was reading that changing a single process like billing, for example might deliver up to 20% improved results. But integrating across multiple processes, like billing, collections, organizations can achieve double that up to 40%. And then there's more taking the intelligent workflow across all lead to cash. This was huge. Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from that. So that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make. >> Right, I mean, it really is when we see it really is about unlocking exponential value. So, when you think about crossing end to end workflow but also, really enhancing what clients are doing and what companies are doing today with those exponential technologies from kind of single use the automation POC here and AI application POC here, actually integrating those technologies together and applying them at scale. When I think intelligent workflows I think acceleration. I think exponential value. But I also really think about at scale. Because it's really the ability to apply these technologies the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value. >> So let's go over Paul, in the last few minutes that we have here I want to talk about IBM garage and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Talk to me a little bit about what IBM garage is. I know it's not IBM garage band and I know it's been around since before the pandemic but help us understand what that is and how it's delivering value to customers. >> Well, first I'm going to be the first to invite you to join the IBM garage band, Lisa so we'd love to have you >> I'm in. no musical experience required... >> I like to sing, all right I mean (laughs) We're ready, we're ready for. So, let me talk to you about IBM garage and I do want to key on two words that Dominique was mentioning speed and scale. Because that's what our clients are really looking for when they're doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale, but do that with speed. And that really becomes the critical issue. As Dominique mentioned, there's a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that's kind of like a throw away piece of work that maybe proves a point or just proves a point. But even if it does prove the point at that point you'd have to restart a new, to try to get something that you could actually scale either in the production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization. And that's where IBM garage comes in. It's all a way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then cooperate, innovating at scale. So, we use methods like design thinking inside of IBM we've trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. We use technologies like neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what's amazing for me is that, the cause of the way we were, we were doing work with clients in a garage with using IBM garage in a garage environment before the pandemic. And one of our clients Frito-Lay of North America, is an example where we've helped them innovate at scale and speed using IBM garage over a long period of time. And when the pandemic hit, we in fact were running 11 garages across 11 different workflow areas for them the pandemic hit and everyone was sent home. So, we all instantly overnight had to work from home together with relay. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the garage method to working in a virtual world. To being able to run that same type of innovation and then use that innovation at scale in a virtual world, we did that overnight. And since that time which happened, that happened back in March of last year throughout the pandemic, we've run over 1500 different garage engagements with all of our clients all around the world in a virtual, in a virtual environment. It's just an incredible way, like I said to help our clients innovate at scale. >> That's fantastic, go ahead Dominique. >> Oh, sorry, was just said it's a great example, we partnered with FlightSafety International, they train pilots. And I think a great example of that speed and scale right is in less than 12 weeks due to the garage methodology and the partnership with FlightSafety, we created with them and launched an adaptive learning solution. So, a platform as well as a complete change to their training workflow such that they had personalized kind of real-time next best training for how they train their pilots for simulators. So, reducing their cycle time but also improving the training that their pilots get, which as people who normally travel, it's really important to us and everyone else. So, just a really good example, less than 12 weeks start to start to finish. >> Right, talk about acceleration. Paul, last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left I know this is an ecosystem effort of IBM, it's ecosystem partners, it's Alliance partners. How are you helping align right partner with the right customer, the right use case? >> Yeah, it's great. And our CEO Arvind Krishna has really ushered in this era where we are all about the open ecosystem here at IBM and working with our ecosystem partners. In our services business we have partnerships with all the major, all the major technology players. We have a 45 year relationship with SAP. We've done more SAP S 400 implementations than anyone in the world. We've got the longest standing consulting relationship with Salesforce, we've got a unique relationship with Adobe, they're only services and technology partner in the ecosystem. And we just recently won three, procedures Partner Awards, with them and most recently we announced a partnership with Celonis which is an incredible process execution software company, process mining software company that's going to help us transform intelligent workflows in an accelerated way, embedded in our garage environment. So, ecosystem is critical to our success but more importantly, it's critical to our client success. We know that no one alone has the answers and no one alone can help anyone change. So, with this open ecosystem approach that we take and global business services and our business transformation services organization, we're able to make sure that we bring our clients the best of everyone's capabilities. Whether it's our technology, partners, our services IBM's own technology capabilities, all in the mix, all orchestrated in service to our client's needs all with the goal of driving superior business outcomes for them. >> And helping those customers in any industry to accelerate their business transformation with those intelligent workloads and a very dynamic time. This is a topic we could keep talking about unfortunately, we are out of time but thank you both for stopping by and sharing with me what's going on with respect to intelligent workflows. How the incremental exponential value it's helping organizations to deliver and all the work that IBM is doing to enable its customers to be thrivers of tomorrow. We appreciate talking to you >> Paul: Thanks Lisa. >> Dominique: Thank you >> For Paul Papas and Dominique Dubois I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think the digital event experience. (gentle music)

>>mhm Yes. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of red hat summit 2021 virtual john for your host of the cube paul. Comey who's here is the president and Ceo of red hat cube alumni paul always great to have you on the leader of red hat now President and Ceo for a year I think about a year now we're looking at under your belt now part of IBM Great to see you. >>You too nice to see you again john. >>So we've talked many times on the Cuban now. It's kind of playing out in real time. The software world with open source has gone mainstream. The conversation was moved to the cloud. Okay. People move to the cloud. Cloud native emerges devil has been around for a while. But now the conversation is cloud for the enterprise that uh, the enterprises, it's a tough world. You gotta, it's complicated is a lot of legacies, a lot of value and you want the new stuff. This is what the conversation is now. It's shifted to I got cloud, it's hybrid. What's your reaction to that? >>Well, you know, it really is, as you say, it's complicated but it's evolving and really, really fast. I mean, you know, I think you remember we've been here a lot. You first remember first software is eating the world and open source software is eating the world and in every every company is becoming a software company. All true. But that evolution continues today with the proliferation of hybrid cloud environments that it encompasses everything from data centers to public cloud services to And even now we'll talk about two for far flung edge deployments. That's all now part of the cloud. I mean, this is all what makes up hybrid. I like to always say that Hybrid really is the new data centers but now see IOS and I thi leaders, they need to reconsider what their roles, what their role here is and the way we look at it as every C I O now needs to be a cloud operator because because Hybrid is what their environment is now today, that used to be all in their data center. So, so but one of the things that really makes a choice even more important and its leaders, they need to address address specific needs, um not only to the organization, but even as they change and evolve in this because it really is a dynamic environment, I mean think about it and just mentioned edge and how how important that is to see IOS, we weren't even talking about that two years ago, so, so it's not a single answer here, right? Um and and you know, and there as there wasn't a single answer when it was all in one building or in one data center, but now it's even it's even more complex. So, so we need to enable really a new wave of cloud operators here with technologies that can be deployed as cloud services as well as on premises. We'll talk more about this too, but and we'll talk about this at the summit. We talked about the summit. Cloud services become really important, especially managed services, for example, because, um because we're so complex, Hybrid brings so much power, but it is complex. You know, see I need help with this, they need help managing this now. And so that's really where a lot of our focus is today. >>It's interesting you say there's no single answer. I would agree with you because it's now you can actually do a lot more customization with cloud and Hybrid. I think there's a general sentiment and directionally correct answer uh in the industry is that hybrid is operating model right? And I think you guys are have a whole division of SRS google talks about this all the time and their cloud site reliability engineers. And I think you're seeing that in educational institutions which we'll talk about. But I think this idea of cloud scale as the new I. T. And you mentioned hybrids, the new data center. You know, I don't I don't want to offend my I. T. Friends out there but they're kind of all realizing it to that if they don't understand how to operate cloud scale they'll be irrelevant and they're and they understand that their jobs are not just provisioning storage, networking and servers. Those are now involved in a hybrid architecture. And by the way, there is no one recipe, it's dependent. Each enterprise can have its own set of architecture based on their workloads again. So I buy that no single answer, but there is hybrid and I think it's pretty well understood. I mean, do you agree with that? >>I absolutely agree with that. But let's take a look at this, unpack it a little bit and take a look at the building blocks a bit. Right. Um, you know, we talked about open sources, what's driving all of this now and and everything we're talking about here is built in and around Lennox and it was only possible because Lennox was so open, so available and became so powerful, that's now been the platform that all this new innovation is built around. I mean, I oftentimes saying it's true the cloud just wouldn't be here had Lennox not only made its way in the open source development environment, but made its way into the enterprise to enable it to companies like us that make it enterprise ready, secure etcetera. So I think that's really an important thing to understand here. So when you talk about skills that the Ceos need certainly SRE skills, operation skills etcetera, but they also need Lennox skills and even open source skills. So so I think I think that's important, everything that's coming down the road and in in this space in um in his open source based and built in and around Lennox things like ai quantum computing, autonomous vehicles um IOT in and out to the edge all built on a foundation of Lennox and open source. So we see it in the enterprise everywhere now. I mean a survey where you know we did a survey out there and looking at the survey of C I O s out there, open is predominant out there, Lennox is predominant out there in hybrid is predominant and growing in a pretty big clip every year. >>You know, paul, I want to get your reaction to something because this may be kind of a dot connecting moment for me because I want to get your thoughts on this because it's a it's a pattern I'm seeing emerging now multiple times and usually I thought this was kind of a one off, but I'm starting to see it. So I'm going to get your thoughts on this. You guys have been super successful with open source in the enterprise, Super successful over decades, building a community and an ecosystem now with open source with with cloud Native, specifically we're seeing end users participating more in the, in the contribution starts out with the hyper scale ear's but now you're seeing kind of, I would call general purpose mainstream enterprises contributing projects, not necessarily their expertise, but they've been participating in taking the goodness of open source and bringing that into the into the enterprise. And I'll see you relying on you guys as well. But now I'm starting to see the pattern where people are relying on you to bring your community to them and they merge their communities with you guys and being kind of a steward there, is that a pattern? Do you see that evolving? Because we've heard that on multiple interviews on the cube where we've heard end users say we love the red hat ecosystem and and that seems to be more and more about they want to be building their ecosystem. So you did it for yourselves, you did it for the industry. Now, enterprises want this service is this is this is a pattern. And what's your reaction to that? >>It actually is a pattern because it's actually one of the reasons why innovation is moving so quickly right now. As I just said, you know, you know, this whole area here in infrastructure and cloud and development environments, Hybrid included. It's all built in and around, it's all built in and around Lennox. And in the past, what's happening and driven by open source development in the past? What happened? Look at the old fashioned way, right, where a company like us would be in a company, software company, not like us, but any old software company would be, you know, in their stovepipe, talking to their customers, getting their requirements and then bringing those requirements back from the customer base and then trying to work that into their products over time, get that back out to the customer to test it and try it, see it as it works. That's probably a five year, there's probably a five year journey, uh, for big, big requirements for big change requirements you look at now with, with actually end users now participating in upstream development, they're building their requirements into that upstream, which is our development environment. And actually that's what feeds our products. And so we've cut out the middleman, if you will completely in there now when we're building those requirements into our future future, R and D work in the upstream and then we bring that down into a product back into their enterprise for them to use in production. So it cuts out years of time for that innovation to get from concept to building to product, rising to production. And, and I think, you know, john, that's one of the big reasons why that customer base participating is one of the big reason why we're seeing innovation move like we've never seen it before in the enterprise, which in the old days that was a stodgy place where they didn't want to move very quickly. >>Yeah. And the values there, I mean I think it's clear what the pandemic we get to this towards the the last last talking track here. But with the pandemic I think it's pretty clear what the value is and the speed to capture opportunities and growth. I think enterprises are realizing that I think the power of the ecosystem is a modern error kind of phenomenon that is now kind of showing its its value and clearly in the market. And I think people who harness communities and ecosystems not try to fork them but connect them and and intersect them and kind of played well together. So again this is an open source concept kind of re imagined so we'll keep an eye on that. So, um, I want to get to your comment in the kino you mentioned at the top here every C I. O. It has to be a cloud operator. You know, that reminds me of all the start ups and all the positioning statements. Every company needs to be a software company. Every company needs to be a media company. Every company needs to be a cloud operator. So I love that. What does it mean? Because I could say, hey paul, I have a cloud, I'm working on amazon Or is that it? Or wait a minute as yours got, I got 365 over here and I'm using big query over here. I might use oracle over here. I mean all these multi cloud conversations. So it's confusing. >>Yeah. Tell me what, you know, if you look at, if you look at it, we were really one of the first ones to really build around this hybrid, this hybrid concept. And the reason why we were one of the first ones is because what amazon hit the world 12 or 13 years ago or something like that, They were the first major cloud and at the time that the narrative was that, you know, every application was going to move to the cloud tomorrow. Right well, because as I said earlier, everything is built in and in and around open source. And legs were very involved with our customers as they tried to move those first applications to the cloud. So certainly is a lot of value and moving to the cloud. But our customers quickly realized with us helping them, quickly realized that you know what, this is great. But not every application suited for the cloud, um for any cloud, but also I may want to run multiple clouds because another cloud provider over here might have a better service than this particular service over here, vice versa. And so we were in the middle of that. So one of the decisions we made seven or eight years ago, everything we did in that last seven or eight years around the portfolio, whether it was building products, m and A, requiring new companies etcetera, was built around that hybrid portfolio. What that means is a common platform that sits both on premise and bare metal machines. Virtual machines, private clouds on premise multiple clouds across out in the enterprise, that common platform so that developers, operators and the security people have that common platform to build with because just like in Lenox, even though they are all derived from open source upstream, they're all different, they all make different choices and how they're going to configure themselves. So, so that's important. So now we're out there with these multiple clouds. One of our surveys we see our Ceo is telling us now that You're using on the average I think six Clouds today and they expect that to go 8-10 over the next 3-5 years. So how are they going to manage that? How are they going to secure that? How are their operations people going to operate with that? That's all the things that we've been working on over the last number of years. So from that common platform, which is sort of the basis which is open shift to underneath it, which is the Linux operating system, which is well that spans all those footprints that I talked about. And then also you look at one of the latest trends is as well as manage services because what customers are now telling us is okay I got this environment that this hybrid is now my data center. It means I have to worry about these apps all in different footprints. Um I want to the platform to act like a cloud in some cases I don't want to I don't want to even manage it. I want you to manage it for me because for many reasons I want great up time. I might not have the right skill sets in my organization and so I want you to manage it. And so that's where we develop managed services and that's where we have set a large group today large SRE group that's providing those managed services no matter where our platform runs for our customers. Also, what I talked about in my keynote today is that to support that thought process is that we're doing a lot of research in this and so, you know, in a typical computer science research world, you know, of the past, you might really be into the into the real computer science of Research. We with the consortium around mass Open cloud with Boston University, MIT, Harvard Northeastern with this consortium. We're running mass Open cloud on all Red Hat with the collaboration of these universities and we're really focusing on the sorry aspect of it. What do we need to manage it? What do we need around automation to manage it? What do we need around ai to manage it? What do we need for tools to manage it? And and that's really goes down to what I fully briefly said in the beginning, is that every C I O N I T uh executive now has to be their own cloud operator because they are effectively stitching all these disparate clouds together. So that's where a big part of our focus takes us all the way from, You know, upstream development to product to the research we're doing for the next 3-5 plus years. >>You know, I gotta say the hybrid cloud is a new data center which is implying I T in the cloud operators with C X O S and C IOS is interesting because it's validated by Mckinsey's recent report that came out that said there's a trillion dollars of untapped value in one retrofitting existing infrastructure and operations and to net new operate use cases that the cloud enables. So there's clearly not two categories of value proposition that businesses are facing. One is, you know, kind of take care of the existing and then also bring in the new that cloud enables. So, you know, I think that's really key and that will drive the business leaders to foresight, if you will to be agile and adaptive to that. So so totally agree on that. I love this open cloud initiative, you mentioned the mass open cloud which I know is kind of like this beanpot for techies, um people who know what that means, uh it's in the boston area these institutions um this is gonna be a training and an opportunity to train the next generation and if you take it to the next level cybersecurity is also in this kind of net new novelty, interdisciplinary components. So you got engineering which is like devops engineering and then Systems Engineering and Computer Science intersecting together with kind of this data discipline. So it hits cybersecurity which is a board level conversation, it hits the new business model opportunities which is a driver, this is new, this is there's no pre existing curriculum. What how do you explain that to heads of the departments and the deans of these institutions saying, you know, it's an engineering thing. No, it's computer science thing. No, it's a it's a business school thing with data science. What's your what's your conversation with folks in the industry when you say this is a different thing? >>Uh you know, the university, you know, the university is getting, it was actually one of the one of the first things this is you know what you'll see. You know, I talked to uh dr bob Brown from President bu earlier in an interview and and this is what we imagined with them early on and even they brought those disciplines together now in in in what they call a harry institute, where to bring data, computer science engineering as you say. And now even operations, it's almost like, you know, systems engineering on steroids, it's a really big spanning system. And so so the universities are starting understand that's why these universities in the consortium, that's why we're working here. But also, you know, the industry's kind of learning it the hard way because now that they get some of their developers starting to move some of their application developments out into one, maybe two clouds and having the now they have to figure out how they're going to do all those things that we talked about, develop, secure operated. So they're they're learning the hard way that this is the new discipline because that's reality. I also think that, you know, as I said, like anything in tech, we always say this is going to happen tomorrow. I also think, like I said, when when cloud first came came out, everybody saying, I'm moving every app to the cloud tomorrow. We even had customers that bought into that said we're moving going full board but they realized once they get into it it wasn't practical. Don't take me wrong. Cloud brings a ton of value here but from a practical perspective it's going to be some apps and across many clouds and and so now they're having to deal with the I. T. Execs and the C. I. Was having to deal with it. So they're learning really fast because of the reality that they have to deal with. Now having said all that to it also brings up why managed services you're seeing so popular right now because as that's moving so fast they just don't have the skills necessary in many cases to really operate and run in this in this type of environment. It brings so much power but the skills aren't necessarily there in the industry. So that now you see the connection between the industry where we sit and even the university now looking at this whole big problem as as you put said, john, actually a new discipline, >>I think, I think, and I think one final leg of a three legged stool is at the business schools because when you think about systems programming, you mentioned that and you know, I love to go back in history and look at the history of operating systems. And you know, paul, we've talked us in the past and you guys know a lot about operating systems from a technology standpoint, it's not just about a productivity suite for a user or a department with the system, it's a company that needs to be programmed. So when people want to globally operate their business, that software defined this isn't now and this is now happening, right? So this the new leaders in these companies that want to run these global companies that scale operate them, just like operating the business not necessary. Operating a tech or shiny new toy, have to build the operating system for the business. To me, I think that's where I see IBM looking at cloud differently and saying, hey, this is an operating system under the covers for the business. The applications are multi fold from, you know, an application for productivity to an edge device, industrial or consumer user work at home. I mean it's a plethora of applications. What's your reaction to that? And you you see the same thing? >>I mean frankly, I think this is an area that a lot of the infrastructure players missed in the past. And I think I think this is what IBM saw with with bringing us in as well. It's all about the application. You know, I said earlier that, you know, we said every every company was a software company is true. And so that means the companies are running their businesses on these applications. So it's all about the app and I think a lot of infrastructure companies miss that. And and so with Hybrid now you have that ability to run the app wherever makes the most sense for for a whole host of reasons. And so now, but now comes the complexity of all of that. I think, I think IBM with bringing us in saw that that Hybrid was maybe as big, if not a bigger opportunity than cloud itself because of of the complexity it's going to bring, the power is going to bring. But also the complexity is gonna bring. I see that's why, you see Arvind, I sort of doubling down the entire IBM company on on hybrid services that are that are going to be really important here, that they provide these applications on top that are going to be really important, but that have to be architected in such a way that they can run in a hybrid environment. And finally there's all the infrastructure and tools and development pieces that we bring to the table. So, So yeah, I think I think are really, really understood that as they made the decision to bring redheaded, >>I talked to a center all the time and they also have this kind of concept of re factoring and reprogramming your business. Uh, it's not, it's a holistic view. This is kind of what's happening. So my final question for you is as as that becomes software enabled and programmed if you will with applications the business with many different subsystems in there. Um a lot of companies now looking at the light at the end of the tunnel with the pandemic and they're seeing vaccines coming out. Some say vaccines will be pretty much everywhere, everyone over 12 by the fall. So we're back to real life. There's gonna be a pullback of some projects on doubling down on others. As you as you mentioned, what are we doing? We're starting to see hybrid as companies come out of the pandemic, they're all jockeying to make sure that they have either done their work to re factor or reposition, reprogrammed their business and be set up for net new opportunities. >>What >>do you see as a growth model or growth opportunities for companies? You want to come out with a growth strategy out of the gate of the pandemic. What's your thoughts? >>Well, I mean, I think you have to plan for companies have to plan for your workforce to be anywhere, but in order to be anywhere in and to be productive, you need you need services like we're on right now for example, but you need the infrastructure to be able to do that. You need you need a way for your customers if you buy the fact that every company is a software company, you're running a business through their applications either way for your customers to be able to interact with you anywhere from where they are anywhere in a real time way. And so I think that's why from our perspective, things like that we're pushing a lot on the edge. Now, that's why you're seeing the hybrid cloud moved all the way out into the edge and you can see it in every vertical, you know, in the telco space. The edge means you gotta do, you have data and compute that needs to be done on the set on the cell tower in the manufacturing world. You have the state and compute that needs to be done on the factory floor, in the retail vertical. We see the edge really being significant in all these verticals, but but that edge is now extends that hybrid data center that we've been talking so much about. So even though you have all these edge devices way out there on the edge, it's a critical part of the business. So you have to have, your developers need need to be able to develop for it, you need to secure it, you need to and you need to operate it and manage it. So now, you know, in a very short period of time, hybrids taken on another dimension, bringing you out to all these points on the edge which is the same but slightly different in every vertical. Now comes complexity and that's why automation is so important because with that power comes complexity but it's going to take automation to keep it all running, >>paul. Great insight. Thanks for coming on the cube. Open innovation out in the open with with you guys again continue. And the focus of the evolution of software and the cloud with enterprise I. T. Clearly a lot of innovation and your contribution to academia and the mass open cloud and all the open cloud initiatives, phenomenal. The world's going. Open source and continues and continues. Doesn't stop. The operating system of businesses is coming and you guys are well positioned. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks again john. Always a pleasure. >>Okay paul, Cormier, President Ceo of Red Hat here on the Cuban, john for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Yeah. Mhm mm.