>>I'm john free with the Q we are here. It's exciting news around the next evolution switching, Sony jean Donny, co founder and chief business officer Pensando and David Hughes chief product and technology officer Aruba HP. Welcome back. We just heard from Antonio neary and john Chambers about the HPV Ruba partnership with Pensando and the new switching platform. Tell me more about the exciting news you're announcing? >>Yeah, I'm really excited today to be introducing the CX 10,000 distributed services switch. It's a brand new class of switch way bringing together the best of Aruba switching technology adding to R C X portfolio combining with Pence Sandoz technology that technology embedded in the platform. The problem we're solving is that in a traditional data center, all of those services like fire walling and low balancing provided by centralized appliances. And while that might be okay for north south traffic traffic that's going in and out of the data center. It's not scalable and it's not cost effective to apply to every service in every port to every flow traversing their data center As we all know with microservices more and more of the traffickers east west over 70% today and growing and so what we're doing here with the C X 10,000 is giving enterprises away to take the smart nick technology that's been proven out by hyper scholars and introduce it into their data centers in a very cost effective and easy to deploy way we're embedding that capability in the top of rack switch so that we can apply Fireable services, low balancing services to every port To every flow, delivering 100 times a scale in terms of a CLS 10 times of performance, in terms of encryption at a third of the cost of those traditional network architectures. So it's a super exciting time, >>love the speed, love the energy there. But I gotta ask what makes this a new category of switch. >>Well if you take a look at the journey we have been on as we have evolved our data centers and the applications have evolved for our customers. Uh and the world is now a bold new world of multi cloud. Uh the architecture is in the data center which are leaves spine architectures have become the new norm. Software defined, networking is pervasively deployed by our customers but as this journey began five or seven or even about 10 years ago uh and has culminated into a much more mature set of building blocks. We have taken the problem from one space of automating networks in the data center to then introducing lots and lots of expensive appliances to bring about security for example, or the state full services, whether it's load balancing or whether it's encryption and visibility and telemetry types of services. Now the customers had to try, you know, trombone all the traffic in and out of these appliances driving up the cost uh and the complexity and when time comes to troubleshoot these environments, it's extremely complex because you're trying to rationalize fabrics coming from one place appliances coming from four or five different vendors, maintaining all the software elements that need to be kept track off. Uh and as more and more customers want to aspire towards zero trust security model. Uh we need to start to embrace a lot of the principles that have been implemented by the hyper scholars and the cloud vendors, which is doing away with the appliances doing away with agent technology on servers, but instead to bring that technology for east west uh into play as well as to ensure that if there are bad actors that are landing inside of the data centers that they do not have the ability to, you know, create attack surfaces with complete lateral movement. Today, that is possible. Uh if you look at 70% of all the attacks that have been happening here in the past few years, it's as a result of having a attack surface which is pretty large in the data centers. And that gets further complicated when you move towards a multi cloud environment where the perimeter of the data center is now moving into the edge. Whether that edges, whether fleet resides for our customers or whether that edge happens to be a co location edge where you're building your own rampant off ramps. So I think the compelling event essentially is driven by the whole notion of distribution of services and having them available from a security and from a services point of view and these are state full services as close to the workload as you possibly can get them. >>So you guys really hit on some key points, their cloud, native microservices East west, north south, um no perimeter edge. These are topics that we would talk about kind of individually over the years, it's happening now all at the same time, this is causing a lot of complexities and then the security challenges you just laid out are everywhere. This brings up a big conversation around solving this. How does this new architecture, this solution solve the complexity and the security challenges in the data center. >>If you look at the use cases that our customers are talking about. The first, the initial use case really is to bring about security and state full security for east west traffic right into the fabric of their data centers. So having the ability to deliver that while eliminating the complex appliances only to do the job which they do very well, which is not South protection of services. Uh that also allows us the ability then to start to deliver visibility and telemetry at the same time that we're delivering state full security firewall and micro segmentation services because what I cannot see, I cannot secure. Uh so those two elements are initial use cases out of the box for our customers as we deliver this platform to them and then as more and more use cases that are becoming evident to us through customer interactions come into play. For example, the co location edge that I would like. David to walk you through a bit more in terms of how we help solve for that use case. >>So for the cooler use case, I think we're moving from a world where people talk about data centers to now talking about centers of data and those centers of data. Yes, they can be in a core private data center, they could be in the cloud but more and more they're going to be distributed around the edge in co location environments. And what we need to be able to do is extend those services that were provided in the data center to be provided in those Kahlo's at the edge And again we want to do that without having to deploy a whole rack of appliances that may be cost more than a computer itself and so with the CX- 10,000 we can have that as a top of rack switch for that polo. And from that switch deploy all of the encryption and firewall ng services that that polo requires. And what's important is that we're doing it with the same policy framework under the same management system across the whole enterprise in the data center as well as in these co location environments and out into the cloud. >>So you guys mentioned visibility and a quick follow up on this question because you mentioned visibility can't see it, you can't protect it. But also there's a lot of workloads that people are trying to automate. These are two factors. Can you guys just double down on that? I want to just get that out there because I think this becomes a big thing. >>I think policy having the ability to have an intent based policy that is a foundational technology building block that we are brought together is a very important element. And then when you map it back to tools that Aruba is extending support for including this platform, become very valuable. So David, why don't you walk us >>through? You know, I think one of the advantages that we bring is that this is an extension of the Aruba C X switching portfolio. So yeah, it's a cloud native microservices, very modern switch architecture and we have a comprehensive management platform, the Aruba fabric controller. And so what we are doing is making sure that everything fits together nicely, that we're delivering a complete solution to our customers. But one important thing to mention here is that we are thinking about how customers can do this step by step. So no, we're not requiring them to rebuild their entire data center, They can do this one rack at a time. We can work with their existing spine and deploy one leaf at a time in a very measured way. And so we think it's a great way for enterprises to be able to consume this modern distributed platform. >>That's a great segment. The next question. I mean I totally see this as you guys are talking about the cloud native trend, driving a cloud operational model to every edge. The data center is just another edge. It's a center of data. Love that. I love that line. So I have to kind of ask the operational side of the question, how would an enterprise customers manage all this take us through the nuts and bolts of deploying and managing of his gum? A customer >>That's a very good question. If you take a look at the customer's deployment models and let's let's take the example of they want to now bring in this technology and build a part or highly secure part with it for east west and to make sure that they're protecting 100% of that east west traffic. I think that leveraging all the building blocks that we have innovated between us and Aruba. We want to make sure that the ecosystem that the customer has built, they want whether they have built it with companies like Splunk and service now or Guardianco, they want integration points will be made available to them. If you take a look at, take a step back and say for these environments as you aspire to go toward zero trade security. The issues of inserting security appliances into network flows and having the ability to map it to the knowledge of applications and their dependencies for policy becomes an important function to tackle. So once you accept that, Okay, I have state full security functions built into this top of rack device available for my applications and all workloads, whether they're container workloads, bare metal workload, virtualized workloads uh and I have complete visibility into those workloads without compromising on connectivity and I can control through enforcement of policy where I need it because now security is part of the fabric, it's not a bolt on. Then comes the job of integration with an ecosystem. So whether you're looking at seem and sold companies where we are delivering in close collaboration with Splunk, A Pensando app for Splunk there's also going to be the availability of an elastic module, A plug in module. Uh then turn attention to what's more automation and devops and civil playbooks for the C X 10-K will be made available day one so that where you do not have the ability to deploy the A. F. C. You can use your existing answerable toolkit and they're making those playbooks available to our customers. Uh They want integration with application discovery mapping companies like Guardianco, allowing them to discover who's talking to whom and push and enforce that policy through the C X 10-K will allow for more automated deployments of those policies and finally, compliance integration with vendors like too thin for continuous security compliance monitoring becomes extremely important as the screen depicts a lot of lot of visualization capabilities with companies like Elk which are in beta today and answerable and Splunk and Elk will all be targeted at first customer shipment. So again, telemetry visibility with the integration of the ecosystem. Uh, it becomes a very powerful combination for the customers as they look to operationalize this for day to day three and they, you know, day one, day two, day three automation. >>That's awesome. David, I'd like to let you weigh in on this whole question of operations because you're hitting all the marks here that are relevant cloud, native microservices, apps, explosion and data volume and velocity, hyper scale operational cloud operations, performance, price point security all in this one solution. This is big. Um, it's not like you mentioned earlier, it's not a rip and replace but you can roll it out how how do you see a customer best operational izing this new, >>You know, I think the answer is a little bit different for each customer but you are very careful at the beginning, we introduced this. It's an evolution of switching. It's not a revolution where we have to replace everything and I think that's really exciting is that it builds on the foundational architecture of leaf and spine. And what we're able to do is let that customer introduced these new capabilities one leaf at a time. So maybe when they're upgrading from 10 gigs to 25 gigs, it's a great time for them to introduce this capability into their data center um and then depending on their application, you know, it may be, as Sony said that they've got one particular application, a crown jewel application and so they want to build out that in one rack and provide, you know, very, very robust East west as well as north south um security around that application, but there's so many different ways that customers can deploy this technology and what's really exciting is now is we're beginning to work with our customers, learning about these new use cases and then feeding that back into our roadmap and we all >>know, as you get down lower in the network layer, security is distributed architecture. So everything is paramount like security, super relevant, great conversation, I gotta ask what's next with this technology. Yeah, >>well, you know the teams, the two engineering teams are working together and this is step one on, on a really exciting new path, I don't know, Sony, what would you say? >>I think there's a lot more to come here. This is just a starting point. We have an incredibly strong partnership and go to market partnership here with Uber team with this platform. It is just the beginning uh and it will lead our customers onto the multi cloud journey. Uh and last but not least, I would like to say that you know, in closing uh that are seldom opportunities where you look at disrupting the way things are happening while fitting into customers existing models. So this is, as I said with everything being software defined, you will continue to see as delivering at great velocity more and more software defined services, whether it's encryption, Lord balancing and other state full services over time. Making this technology easier to deploy by fitting into the existing ecosystem and continuing to provide them with the 100 extra scale, 10 X. The performance as well as the ability to do it at a third of the same, you know, at the third of the cost of what they would need to if they had to build this uh today with disparate devices, >>exciting news in the industry. You guys are the pros you've seen all the waves of innovation over the years. I guess my final final question would be, how would you summarize this point in time right now? This is pretty um exciting all this is all happening At the same time, customers are having opportunity to innovate the pandemic has shown a lot of scale and and the need for stability and security. This is a special moment. How would you guys weigh in on that? >>Yeah, I think about it every decade, there's a change in how data centers a belt. And so this is the change that's happening this decade. Moving to a distributed services, switch. The other big mega trend that I see is this move, as I said from data centers to stand as a data and the opportunity for customers to use this technology as they move out to the edge. Have distributed compute and tell us, what do you think Sony? >>I think I couldn't agree more. I think there are so many various technology transitions occurring now. The cloud being the biggest one. Uh the explosion of data and uh, you know, the customers making decisions of having a distributed model And if indeed two thirds, if not 75% of all data will be processed at the edge over the next few years. This architecture is prime for the enterprise to go leverage their best practices of today while they can gradually move that architecture is for the future, which is a multi cloud future >>centers of data, large scale cloud operations automation. The speed of innovation has never seen this before. Uh It's exciting time. Sunny, thank you for coming on. And David, thanks for chatting about this exciting new announcement. Thank you very much. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>This is the power of and hp. Ruba and Pensando partnership. I'm john forward the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Hello and welcome back. You're just in time for our third session spot. I Q amplify your insights with AI in this session will explore how AI gets you to the why of your data capturing changes and trends in the moment they happen. >>You'll >>start to understand how you can transform your data culture by making it easier for analysts to enable business users to consume insights in real time. >>You >>might think this all sounds too good to be true. Well, since seeing is believing, we're joined by thought spots. Vika Scrotum, senior product manager. Anak Shaped Mirror, principal product manager to walk you through all of this on MAWR. Over to you actually, >>Thank you. Wanna Hello, everyone. Welcome to the session. I am Action Hera, together with my colleague because today we will talk to you about how spot I Q uses a. I to generate meaningful insights for the users Before we dwell into that. Let's see why this is becoming so important. Your business and your data is growing and moving faster than ever. Data is considered the new oil Howard. Only those will benefit who can extract value of it. The data used in most of your organization's is just the tip of the iceberg beneath the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see or what you don't know to ask. That makes the difference in this data driven world. Let's learn how one can extract maximum value of the data to make smarter business decisions. We believe that analytics should require less input while producing more output with higher quality in a traditional approach. To be honest, users generally depend on somebody else to create data models, complex data queries to get answers to their pre anticipated questions. But solution like hot spot business users already have a Google like experience where they can just go and get answers to their questions. Now, if you look at other consumer applications, there are multiple of recommendation engines which are out there, which keep recommending. Which article should I read next? Which product should I buy? Which movie should I watch in a way, helping me optimized? Where should I focus my time on in a Similarly in analytics, as your data is growing, solutions must help users uncovered insights to questions which they may not ask, we believe, and a I automated insights will help users unleash the full potential off their data Across the spectrum, we see a potential in a smart, AI driven solution toe autonomously. Monitor your data and feed in relevant insights when you need them, much like a self driving car navigates our users safely to their desired destination. With this, yeah, I'm happy to introduce you to spot like you are a driven insights engine at scale, which will help you get full potential off your data like you automatically discovers, personalize and drive insights hidden in your data. So whenever you search to create answers, spot that you continues to ask a lot more questions on your behalf as it keeps drilling and related date dimensions and measures employed insights which may be of interest to you. Now you as a user can continue to ask your questions or can dig deeper into the inside, provided by spotted you Spartak. You also provides a comprehensive set of insights, which helps user get answers to their advance business questions. In a few clicks, so spotted it. You can help you detect any outlier, for example, spot that you can not only tell you which seller has the highest returns than others, but also which product that sellers selling has higher returns than other products. Or, like you can quickly detect any trends in your data and help us answer questions like how my account sign ups are trending after my targeted campaign is over. I can quickly use for, like, toe get unanswered how my open pipeline is related to my bookings amount and what's the like there. What it means is that how much time a lead will take to convert into a deal I can use partake. You, too, create multiple clusters off my all my customer base and then get answers to questions that which customer segment is buying which particular brand and what are the attributes last and the most used feature Key drivers of change spotted you helps you get answer to a question. What factors lead to the change in sales off a store in 2020 as compared to 2019? We can do all this and simple fix. That's barbecue. What is so unique about Spartak? You how it works hand in hand with our search experience, the more you search, the smarter. The spot that you get as it keeps learning from your usage behavior on generates relevant insights for you for your users. Spartak. You ensures that users can trust every insights. A generator. It broadly does this and broadly, two ways. It keeps their insights relevant by learning the underlying data model on. By incorporating the users feedback that is, users can provide feedback to the spot I Q similar to any social media back from, they can like watching sites they find useful on dislike. What insights Do not find it useful based on users. Feedback Spot like you can downgrade any insight if the users have not find it useful. In addition to that, users can dig deep into any Spartak you insight on all calculations behind it are available for a user to look and understand. The transparency in these calculations not only increases the analytical trust among the users, but also help them learn how they can use the search bar to do much more. I'm super excited to announce Partake you is now available on embrace so our automated A insights engine can run queries life and in database on these datasets so you do not need to bring your data to thoughts about as you connect your data sources. Touch Part performs full indexing value to the data you have selected, not just the headers in the material and as you run sport in Q, it optimizes and run efficient queries on your data warehouse on. I am super pleased to introduce you. This new spot like you monitor the spot that you monitor will enable all your users to keep track of their key metrics. Spartak, you monitor will not only provide them regular updates off their key metrics, but we also analyze all the underlying data on related dimensions to help them explain. What is leading to the change of a particular metric monitor will also be available on your mobile app so that you can keep track of your metrics whenever and wherever you go, because will talk for further detail about this during the demo. So now let's see Spartak in action. But before we go there, let's meet any. Amy is an analyst at a global retail about form. Amy is preparing for her quarterly sales review meeting with the management, so Amy has to report how the sales has meat performing how, what, what factors lead to the change in the sales? And if there are any other impressing insights, which everyone should off tell to the management? So but this Let's see how immigrant use part like you to prepare for the meeting. So Amy goes to that spot, chooses the sales data set for her company. But before we see how many users what I Q to prepare for the meeting. I just wanted to highlight that all this data which we're going to talk about is residing in Snowflake. >>So >>Touch Part is going to do a life query on the snowflake database on even spot. A Q analysis will run on the Snowflake databases, so we'll go back and see how you can use it. So Amy is preparing for the sales meeting for 2019. We just ended. So images right Sales 2019 on here. She has the graph of the Continent tickets, >>so >>what she does is immediately pence it >>for >>the report. She's creating Andi now. This graph is available >>there now. >>Any Monnet observed >>that >>the Q four sales is significantly higher than Q >>three, so >>you she wants to deep dive into this. So she just select these two data points and does the right click and runs particularities. So now, as we talked earlier, Spartak, you recommends which columns Spartak Things Will best explains this change >>on. >>Not only that, you can look that Spartacus automatically understood that Amy is trying toe identify what led to this change. So the change analysis we selected So now with this, >>Amy >>has a bit more business context when he realizes that she doesn't want to add these columns. So she's been using because she thinks this is too granular for the management right now. >>If >>she wants, she can add even more columns. All columns are available for her, and she can reduce columns. So now she runs 42 analysis. So while this product Unisys is running, what the system will do with the background, this part I Q will drill across all the dimensions, which any is selected and try to explain the difference, which is approximately $10 million in sales. So let's see if Amy's report is ready. Yeah, so with this, what's product you has done is protect you has drilled across all dimensions. Amy has selected and presented how the different values in these dimensions have changed. So it's product. You will not only tell you which values in these dimensions have changed the most, but also does an attribution that how much of this change has led to the overall change scenes. So here in the first inside sport accuse telling that 10 products have the largest change out of the 3 45 values and the account for 39% increase. Overall, there has been look by the prototype category. It's saying that five product types of the largest change out of the 15 values, and they account for 98.6% of total increase. And they're not saying the sailors increased their also demonstrating that in some categories the sales has actually decreased to ensure the sales has decreased. Amy finds this inside should be super useful so immediately pins this on the same pain, but she was preparing for and she's getting ready with that. Amy also wants to dig deeper into this inside. My name goes here. She sees that spot. I Q has not only calculated the change across these product types, but has also calculated person did change. So Amy immediately sorts this by wasn't did change. And then she notices that even though Sweater as a category as a prototype, was not appearing in the change analysis but has the most significant change in terms of percentage in comparison to Q two vs Q four. So she also wants to do this so she can just quickly change the title. And she can pin this insight as well under spin board for the management to look at with this done. Now, Amy, just want to go back to this sales and see if she can find anything else interesting. So now Amy has already figured out the possible causes. What led to the increase in sales? So now, for the whole of 2019, as this is also your closing, Amy looks, uh, the monthly figures for 2019, and she gets this craft now. If Amy has to understand, if there is an interesting insight, she can dig into different dimensions and figure out on her own or immigrant, just click on this product analysis. That's product immediately suggest all the dimensions and measures immigrant analyze sales by Andi many. We will run this What will happen is this barbecue system will try to identify outliers. The different trend analysis Onda cross correlation across different measures. So Amy again realizes that this is a bit too much for her. So she reduces some of these insights, which she thinks are not required for the management right now from the business context and the business meeting. And then she just immediately runs this analysis. So now, with this, Amy is hoping to get some interesting insights from Spartak, which immigrant present to her management meeting. Let's see what sport gets for her. So now the Alice is run within 10 seconds, so spot taken started analyzing. So these are the six anomaly sport like you found across different products, where their total sales are higher than the rest. He also founded Spot. I just found eight insights off different product types which has tired total sales and look across these enemy sees that oh jackets have against the highest sales across all the categories in December as well. Amy wants toe been this to the PIN board on M. It moves further now. Amy's is that it has also shown Total Country purchased their product a me thinks this is not a useful insights. Amy can get this feedback. The system and system asked, Why are you saying you don't find this useful so the system can remember? So you can also say that anomalies are obvious right now and give this feedback and the system will remember. In addition, Amy finds that the system has automatically correlated the total sales in total contrary purchase. Amy Pence this as well to the pin board. Andi. She loves this inside where she she is that not only the total sales have increased, but total quantity purchases have increased a lot more on their training, opposed as well. So she also opens this now anything. She is ready for her meeting with the management. So she just goes and shares the PIN board, which she just created with the management. And you know what happens immediately? The jacket sales category Manager Mr Tom replies back to Amy and says in the request, Any d really like this? So now we will see how Spartak you can help any educators as request doesn't mean really need to create these kind of reports every month to cater toe Tom's request. So with this, I will handle it because to take us walk us through How spot that you can cater this request. Hi, >>everyone. So analysts like Amy are always flooded with such requests from the business users and with Spot and you monitor. Amy can set up everyone who needs updates on a on a metric in just a few simple steps and enable them to drag these metrics whenever and wherever they want. And north of the metrics, they also get the corresponding change analysis on the device off their choice with hot Spot. What I give money being available on both Web and the mobile labs. So let's get started with the demo will be set up a meet and go to the search tab and creator times we start for the metrics you want to monitor, right? And please know if the charges already created is already created. All is available is, um, usually a section in a PIN board. Also dancer. Then there's no need to create a new child. She can simply then uh, right click on the chart and select moisture from the menu, which then shows, which then shows the breakdown off the metric he's going to monitor, including the measure. What it's been grouped by on what it is filtered on. Okay, and also as this is a weekly metric, all the subscribers are going to get a weekly notification for this metric had been a monthly metric. Then the notifications would have been delivered on a monthly cadence. Next she can click on, continue and go to the configure dimensions called on Page. Here A is recommending what all dimensions could best being the change in this metric, she can go ahead with default recommendation, or she can change the columns as she seems very she can click, she conflict, continue and go to the next page, which is the subscriber stage. It is added by default to the subscriber, but she can search everyone who needs update on this metric and add them on this metric by clicking confirmed, she'll see a toast message on the bottom of the page, taking on which will take a me to this page, which is a metric detail page On the top of this page, we can see the movement of the metric and how it is changing over time, 92 you can see that the Mets jacket, since number has increased by 2.5% in the week off 23rd of December has compared toa the week off 16th of December and just below e a has invaded the man is generated in sites which are readily available for consumption. Okay to discharge. Right here says that pain products have the largest change out of all the 28 values and contributes to the 88% of the total increase in the same. And this one right here is that Midwest is the larger Midwest has the largest change and accounts for 55.66% off the total increase. Now, all this goodness is also available on the mobile lab. Right? So let me just show you how business users are going to get notified on the based. On this metric, all the business users who are subscribed to this metric are going to get a regular email as well as push notifications on the mobile lab. And when the click on this, they line on a metric detail page which has all the starts, which I just showed you on the on the bed version, okay. And one cyclic on back burden. They land on this page, which is a monitor tab, and it summarizes all the metrics Which opportunity monitoring and gives them a whole gave you to stay all I want to stay on top of their businesses. Okay. Eso that folks was monitor. Now I'll search back to slaves and cover. Summarize the key takeaways. From what? That she and I just don't know. So it's part of you wanted, uh, Summit Spartak you. It automatically discovers insights and helps you unless the full potential of your data and that's what I do is comprehensive set off analysis. You can answer your advanced business question in just a few simple steps and the end speed of your time. Bring state. And with a new support for embrace, you can run sport like you on your data in your data warehouse and with spotted you monitor, you can monitor all the business metrics and not just died. We can also understand that teaching teaching drivers on those metrics on the platform of your choice. So with that, I'll hand over toe, you know. >>Thank you so much. Both of you That was fantastic. Um, I just love spot like, because it makes me look like much more of a rock star with data than I really am. So thank you guys for that fantastic presentation. Um, so we've got a couple of minutes for a couple of questions for you. The first one is for action. Um, once spot I Q generates a number of insights. Can you run spot I Q again on one of those insights? >>Yeah, As a philosophy off Spiric, you sport like you never takes the user to the dead end Spartak. You also transparently shares the calculation. So user can not only the keeper that on edit Understand how this product you inside has been calculated, but user can also run us for like you analysts is honest for data analysis as well. Which music? And continue to do not on the first level. Second level in the third level as well. >>That's cool. Thank you. Actually on then The next one is for because for spot ik monitor is it possible to edit the dimensions used for explaining the factors to change that was detected? >>Yes. It's an owner of the metric you can change the dimensions whenever you want and save them for everyone else. >>Okay, well, I think that's about all we've got time for in this session. So all that remains is for me to say a huge thank you to Because an Akshay Andi, we've got the last session of this track coming up in a few minutes. So grab a snack. Come right back and listen to an amazing customer story with Snowflake on Western Union, they're up next.

>> Announcer: Live, from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube! Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Inforum, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host, Dave Vilante. We are joined by Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here. Thank you guys for coming. >> So you're fresh off the keynote. A big deal. Thousands of people here at the Javits Center. What would you say is the most exciting to you about being here and what you really want us participants, attendees to come away with? >> Well, there's a lot of energy at the conference. And people can see the investments we've been making. All the innovation. And just the feedback we're getting is just keep doing what you're doing. You guys just really change the industry. The idea of a network commerce and a network ERP coming together is something new. They like the fact that we kind of find these new areas on our own. People are buzzing about Coleman, our new AI announcement, that platform as well. So it's been fun getting the feedback. >> So talk a little bit about Coleman. Talk about the naming of Coleman. >> Yeah, so it's named after Katherine Coleman Johnson, who is one of the early pioneers in NASA. She was a researcher mathematician there to calculate a lot of the orbital fractions that were needed for reentry. And John Glenn relied on her. And she's in the movie, Hidden Figures. And got to know that movie pretty well, because along with about 30 other African American executives, we raised enough money to send almost 30 thousand kids to see the movie for free. We screened it probably three months before it hit the theaters. And a lot of buzz. We didn't know a lot about it ourselves, so we learned a lot about them. So I was excited to say, if we're going to have an AI platform, why not name it after her? Such a pioneer. And it worked out. Her family was at the event and they were just blown away. And they're asking, can I get copies of everything? And taking pictures with us. So, I thought it was the highlight of the show. >> You know, I liked your first slide today and yesterday in the analysts meeting. It basically was your strategy in a nutshell. Micro verticals was sort of the starting point, the decision to go AWS cloud, The GT Nexus network component, burst analytics and then Coleman AI. Just fit together so nicely and it sounds great. And then you also said, look. Cloud and mobile and social, that's table stakes today. It's really sort of a new ball game. So my question is, you know, the slide's nice. It sounds great. How fully baked is it? >> Yeah, well, we're, I think we're, you know, we've had some time now. We're building the network. And so we've been working on figuring out the right integration points and where the value add was. And so, we're already able to kind of ship things like ASM directly to our ERP. And we showed in context where you can click on the order, an M3, for example, and see where it is on an ocean container. So we've already done a lot of that work. And there's only more to come. We want to, we didn't mention it today, but we want to attack the EDI market and commoditize that and have it be a free service. Because we already have a network. We can ship packets around it. Doesn't cost us anything. And we do that for some customers today. So we have more that we could have talked about that we didn't get to. So a lot of it's real today. >> We also heard at the analysts meeting, in great depth, and a little bit today, you had the CFO of Koch industries up there, made a large $2 billion plus investment. Koch is also a customer. And was a customer prior to the announcement of the investment. How did that all come about? Can you share that sort of story with us? >> Yeah, so we had a very successful project at Georgia Pacific. They brought us in because they were frustrated with SAP. It's too expensive, taking to long. We had the micro vertical reaches that could get going quickly. And we collaborated with them and added a few other things they wanted. So that went very well. And kind of, word travels when you come in under budget. (laughter) And one thing led to another. Made a trip to Wichita at their invite, and hit it off very well with Charles Koch. He understood what we did, he's an MIT grad, very technical. So, wasn't sure what I was kind of getting into. But once I started talking to him, he clearly understood everything else. And the more technical the conversation became, the more animated he got. So, clearly he's our kind of guy. We're product people. And so, we hit it off very well. >> And they're becoming a larger customer. You're getting deeper and deeper into that account. But there's an old saying, you know, God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. And so, you guys have emerged as this really viable alternative to SAP and Oracle. But how do you go from where they are to this cloud native platform that you guys have developed? >> Well, it'll be one of the largest global implementations ever. Of any financial project, of any HCM. 130,000 employees, which is great. So a project of that scale, that happens usually top down. When they're invested and ready to go. So they have four members on our board. And including the CFO, including the president of Georgia Pacific, and many other important executives. And so the guys who run the divisions, many of them are on our board and learning this stuff and excited. So they're actually pushing us right now. Which we think is great. We have a weekly cadence call with all these senior execs of all the projects to make sure here's where we are, are you getting what you need, are people responding. I mean, they are driving. These people know how to execute. And that's why they're $115 billion. It's great for us, great for them. They're pushing us. So I'm not too worried about that, given what I've seen so far. >> When you think about the long term strategy of Infor, you're now one of the most well-funded unicorns along with Uber and Air B&B. Where do you go? What do you sort of see as sort of the long term play here? >> Yeah, post world domination? (laughter) Then after that, we have other industries we want to get into. There's a few acquisitions we probably will consider. We want to expand our network. These networks grow up by vertical and by industry. There's a few other vertical we want to get into. But the list of things that we could build and what people are asking us to build is almost endless. You know? And they like the way we do these kind of digital transformation projects. There's lots of those out there. And so, we just want to make sure we have the ecosystem where we can implement. That's why it's so important to get a censure, Cap Jim and I, and Grant Thorton and Deloit, they're all taking training as we speak. Filling out their practices. Which we didn't have a year ago. So, that was our kind of constraint to scaling. We just couldn't take on so many projects. But now we can. >> I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the structure of the industry, the software industry specifically. I mean, you're fairly famous for having sort of predicted consolidation, and then orchestrating that consolidation. Mark Andreson's famous for saying software's eating the world. I think Bennioff said there's going to be more non tech companies that are SAS companies than tech companies. Do you expect we'll just see a sort of de-consolidation of software? Or maybe a bi frication? Where maybe some of the enterprise guys acquire, but there's all these burgeoning, blooming flowers of software companies emerging. What's your point of view on the software industry and its structure? >> I think you'll see more industrial companies wanting to own software. I think you'll see software executives running non software companies. Most companies think they have to get digital. And a lot of the board of directors recognize that and recognize they don't have the expertise to do that. And so a lot of software executives get asked to run non tech companies for that reason. Because you can learn retail faster than they can learn how to program. And if you've been building the applications for those verticals, you actually kind of know the vertical pretty well. So I think you'll see some of these domains over time where people have to become more technology fluent. And the way to do that is to bring in tech people. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you sort of as a follow up on that, you see Amazon buys Whole Foods and is getting into grocery, they're a content company. Apple's get the financial services. And you know it's because of digital. It allows you to sort of jump industry value chains. But for decades, people just stay within their own little value chain silo. Do you expect that to change as well? Where executives are able to traverse industries? >> I think so. Technology is causing that. There's enough disruption and fear where people are willing to consider something completely different than they were before. And that helps us, because usually we need someone to either take an action because they see an opportunity or because they're worried about getting disrupted. That's how these big projects get started. That's part of the reason why our growth is so good right now. >> Is that's what's driving it? Is it the fear of being left behind? >> It's probably equal amount of both. They see opportunity, I should be doing something, but I don't know what. So we have to tell them the what. Or, I'm worried about what everybody else is doing. I don't want to get Ubered out. And we tell them how not to be in that position. So we're getting an audience at senior levels that we couldn't before. Just because it's top of mind for everybody. >> How about, talk about MNA a little bit. And what you look for in an acquisition candidate. You have a platform, that's probably dogmatic about running on that platform. But talk a little but more about what you look for. >> We usually want next generation thinking in a technical platform that we don't have to completely rewrite. Because we don't to kind of pollute our architecture. If it's a modern architecture where we can graph it on to our information OS, as we call it, that's fine. So we don't buy things just for scale. And that was kind of early strategy for the company 10 or 15 years ago. We buy things because it's a specific value proposition for customers or fills a hole we think we need to fill. >> Okay. >> I would rather buy something that is small, maybe not much traction, not much revenue, but a great product. Because we have a huge distribution channel and we can grow it pretty quickly. We can fix all those other problems if the product is there. >> Well, the burst acquisition is very interesting because you saw the ascendancy we were talking about earlier, Rebecca. Saw the ascendancy of tableau, and Christian Chabeau, very articulate, would talk about the slow BI companies and really de positioning them. You're positioning is actually quite compelling. Not the old, takes forever to build a cube. And not the lightweight version of just a visualization. You're sort of the best of both worlds. Maybe unpack that a little bit. >> Yeah, that's the attractions we saw in Berson's. You need some of those enterprise features to understand fragmented and enterprise scale data. That's a hard problem. Having a nice desktop tool that can only handle a single table or gives you conflicting information so you can't have any semantic meaning across different data sources. It's nice to get answers quickly, but if they're wrong, that doesn't help you. So, we need somebody who could handle the back end. Our customers were asking us to do that. They want us to be the analytic layer, a system of record for analytics, because other companies don't want to do that. SAP or Oracle will say, just use all my stuff. I don't want to connect to anybody else. And we know that we have to coexist. And if we can build that analytic layer, we think that's strategic high ground. Let's own that. And if we can replace some of the underlying systems later, great. You know? >> I was just going to talk about, I was going to switch gears entirely and talk a little bit about politics. Before the cameras were rolling, you were on Obama's economic recovery board, which was led by Paul Volker. You've been to Washington, met with Trump, met with Pence. I'm curious about how you view the roll of business in advising government. In which directions to take, and the approach. >> I think it's increasingly important in a sense that, especially with the current administration, they should respect business opinion. Because he's a business guy. Secondly, so many of our institutions people don't trust any more. THey've kind of lost some of that credibility. I hope we can turn that around. But in the interim, we have to have other people who can fill in for some of that. And, especially tech companies. People want to know what tech companies think. And so, I think we almost have a duty to try to fill in some of that. And every part of the economy and the government has been effected by technology. They want to understand it. We can help them do that. >> And so many of your customers are in fact municipalities, and cities, and public school systems. >> That's a good point. We have 1500 state and local governments and federal customers. And that's a fast growing part of our business right now. And we're rooting a lot of federal agencies as we speak. Because they're going through an upgrade cycle as well. Something called Fed Round they have to get certified in. And they want to move to the cloud. And we're doing both of those with them. >> Now, you also talked about how you see technology executives perhaps moving into other industries. Do you see them also moving into public service? Do you see that as a possibility? >> That's going to take longer. That's probably later in their careers because of the economics of that. But every now and then, you'll see one do it, yeah. >> So, a question on cloud. It was almost by necessity, I would argue, that you gravitated toward AWS. Smart move. Others have said, you know, Oracle in particular, we're going to own the whole stack. We can make a lot of money owning the whole stack. If you had to do it again, would you pursue that same strategy, and why? >> Well, when we got there, the company was just trying to build a cloud business. We were doing it traditional. Trying to own data centers and, you know, doing data sharing. We could have done that and continued with that over time. But I just thought it wouldn't provide the elastic compute and the scale of data management that I thought was coming. We looked at all the platforms that we out there at the time. We met with Microsoft, IBM, you name it. And at the time, AWS was just so much further along in terms of services available, capabilities, entrepreneurial spirit, scale, it wasn't even close. In our minds, anyway. And so, they were great partners to work with. For us, it's been the right decision. They've helped us a lot. >> Yeah, and seeing your arc as maybe a question. But you're pretty technical. Maybe a better question for Duncan or Soma, but I'll ask you. Because you're more technical than I am. When you look at your architecture slides, there's a lot of Amazon in there. >> There is, yeah. >> There's like this dynamo dv, looks like some kineses, there's S3, there's all kinds of flywheel oriented tech. I wonder if you could sort of elaborate on that in terms of the impact that that has not only on you, but ultimately on your customers. >> Yeah, no. That was by design, by my direction. I wanted to take advantage of every single serviture we could on AWS. Because every time we do that, that's less work for my developers. I don't want them to worried about infrastructure. Just write the application and be an industry expert. So any time they come out with a new service, you name it. Whether it's Promethium, archiving, backup. We were one of the early customers of RedShip. We take advantage of it. Because it's cheaper for us to do it that way and we get the scale that we need. And we get it in multiple countries. So when any other strategy than that, we have to replicate things in multiple places and we have to figure out how to make it work on AWS. >> And I know we're limited on time, but if software's eating the world, software's going to eat the edge. So talk about your edge strategy. >> Well, it depends on what you mean by edge strategy. I think that software eating the world is true. Maybe it's helping the world, is a better way to put it. But almost every product that we see its inside of now. That's actually good for us, being the largest vendor for asset management. Every IOT company is coming to us because all that data is meaningless unless you can generate a work order or requisition and get something fixed, schedule someone to come. That's what we do. So all of that data needs to end up on a repository. That can effect the business process. And we own that business process. >> Well, something that we've said on the Cube since the early days of so-called big data is the practitioners of big data are the guys who are going to do well. It's not necessarily the guys selling big data infrastructure. And that's proven true. You guys never talked ever, I don't think, about big data. But you're a data company now, first. >> Yeah, and we've collected a lot more data than we ever thought we would. And so, now we've got to figure out how to use that. >> How to parse it, how to use it. >> Exactly. Which is why we added the next two layers of that stack. >> That will be next year's summit. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Next year's Inforum. Well, Charles Phillips, thanks so much for joining us. It was a pleasure. >> Great. Thanks you guys. >> See ya, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Valante, we will have more from the Cube's coverage of Inforum after this. (upbeat music)