>> I've got Madhav Mekala here with me, commerce architect at PepsiCo Madhav welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. >> So we're going to be talking about the solution that you implemented that helped with the global supply chain. So let's talk first about your role, commerce architect. Help me understand that a little bit better. >> So Frito-Lay PepsiCo is pretty big. It's a conglomerate of multiple product lines. So I worked for Frito-Lay, which is basically all the salty snacks and then we have a Quaker products as well in our portfolio. So I oversee all the architecture for all the commercial IoT solutions in the FNA portfolio. >> Got it all the commercial lines. So we all know the last 18 months major challenges with the global supply chain component shortages, we've seen a huge increase in the cost of raw materials, limited labor, but you guys actually started to tackle this challenge before the pandemic happened. So talk to me about the catalyst that PepsiCo, what you saw to modernize field service and supply chain application. >> Yeah, so we have a pretty old system that our field force, our frontline users are using. So we have a world-class supply chain system where we go into the stores and place orders and deliver products throughout the U.S. And then we penetrate, I think, more than 95% of the households with our products. So we need to have a robust supply chain as well as a good frontline sales application, to be able to manage the orders, and be able to deliver the products, right? So the system that we have is almost 20 year old system running on a very outdated technology. We've been trying to replace that for a while now. And finally, we started this early last year to completely replace the solution with a brand new IPhone based app. And then that gives our frontline the ability to go place orders, do deliveries to retail execution in the store like check-in check-out, bill displays. There are so much functionality that our RSRs or frontline users do in the stores and this app enables them to do much more efficiently. >> And we're going to break into that, but you mentioned you had a 20 year old technology. Talk to me about some of the challenges that that likely presented to those frontline workers. >> Yeah. I mean, there are multiple challenges for one, we cannot enable new business models. So business wants to come up with new ideas for, to be able to implement in the field, but with our system being so old, it's so hard to implement anything on that one. And then even the physical device is not scaling. We had a lot of memory issues, so it's time for it to kind of retire, but also the technology we use the 3G technology is retiring pretty soon at the next year. So we were definitely need to move to a new solution. And this is one of the must things we have to do right away. So that's where we started the project and we are in pilot phase right now. >> What would have been some of those negative consequences, had you not undertaken the effort? I imagine from a competitive perspective, knowing how much competition is out there, what would some of those challenges have been if this had persisted? >> Yeah, so one is the stability of the application, right? So the frontline users have to spend more time because the app is not stable, the current one. So that reduces the efficiency of our Salesforce. Right? And then on the other hand, we also not able to put new features or new business models enable new business models on top of the existing ones. So we are losing out on some of them because of our outdated system. So that's one thing we want to solve with the new one. >> So this is really critical to really evolve PepsiCo's business at, at its baseline, right? >> That's true. Yeah. It is very critical application that we are building and this will enable us to do a lot more things in future. And we can come up with new ideas, including like virtual reality or connecting to multiple systems. There are so many new ideas that we want to enable once we have this in place. >> Awesome. Talk to me about why Couchbase and then tell us more about, you started to talk a little bit about the solution, but let's go ahead and dig in and unpack the actual solution that you implemented. >> Yeah. So this is, eh, we call it an ERP and a mobile device because it has so much functionality as a company Frito-Lay, we have been over a hundred years in this business, right? We have so many optimized process that we have that kind of led to some digility in the system because we want to do in a particular way, because that's the best way to do it as part of our business process. So what we're trying to do here is take that business process and also provide an app that will enhance it and then connect to more, more systems. So that's what we are trying to do here. And then on top of that one, we will replace all the existing peripherals that we use with the new technology, like Bluetooth and all so that, they are much more faster and they slot more productive for our frontline force. >> Sounds like a lot of sales folks are going to to be a lot more productive. Talk to me about where Couchbase is as an integral component to this new system. >> Yeah. So one of the key requirements for this app is offline mode. What that means is one of our other salesforce who go from our system from our DC to other stores, should be able to run the whole day without any major disruption, even if they're not connected, let's say because when they go into big stores, typically there's no connection there all metal boxes. So the cellular reception is not there, but most of our work that we do from our frontline is within the store. So it has to be a full offline where we have to have all the data within the device and we should be able to place orders, create inventory that records or adjust inventory, and then create invoices. All the majority of the things that we do are in the store and they should be able to do without the connection. So that's where we explored multiple options and kind of zeroed in on Couchbase where we bring all the data into Couchbase database on the device and then sync it when there is connection, but there's no connection, we still have all the data on the device and we can go do all of our duties in the stores without any issues, even if it is not connected. >> So the sales folks can be in the stores with their mobile device, doing all the transactions that they need to do with the stores, regardless of if there's connectivity. Talk to me about what happens when they get back to connectivity in that and the Couchbase database sync. >> Yeah. And the other big thing we want is instant connect. I mean, when there's connectivity, we want instant sync with the backend, right? If there's new data that comes, we need that in the device. At the same time, if I place an order, I want to send it back immediately to our backend systems so that our fulfillment starts for those. So that's very critical when we have a lot of cutoff times for our orders. So we need order as soon as we've placed to be going into the backend systems. So what happens when it gets connected, as soon as the sales folks come out of the store or when, within the story they could connectivity the Couchbased technology that we are using using the sync gateway immediately syncs the data back and forth if there's any new data that's available. So that is key for us in this particular app. >> So our transactions happening in real time or near real time. >> Yeah. So the data flow happens in real time when there's connectivity, but when it is not connected still, it doesn't have any issue with the actual transactions with the RSR that can go complete anything that. >> Got it. Okay. So there's no impediment there. In fact, it's a productivity enhancer. It sounds like for all of those sales folks out on the frontline. Tell us so millions of documents go through the system, tens of billions of dollars. Talk to me about the volume of data and the actual monetary value that's traversing the system. >> Yeah. It's huge, again, this is kind of the lifeline of the company. The sales are always the life of any company, right? So most of the sales for Frito-Lay goes through our system and we're talking anywhere between hundreds of thousands of documents that flow through back and forth between the Couch between the device and the server. So there's a lot of master data that comes like products price from customers, all that information that comes from the backend to the device and all the orders inventory and everything that gets created on the device gets flown sync back to the server. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's a very complex system. And also from the volume perspective, it's huge. So we had to build a massive infrastructure on the backend to be able to handle all this. One of the key feature is again, we have this massive data that we need to sync to the devices, but each device should only get the portion of the data that they want because a particular Salesforce only goes to a small set of 20 stores, let's say. So the data that we sync to that device is only for those 20 stores. So that's the key here. So Couchbase allows us to do that. The Couchbase sync, where we can subset the data into different portions and only send the data that is relevant for a particular device. >> So then from a, from a latency perspective, it must be pretty low latency, pretty fast to be able to get this data back to the device and to the sales person that is in the middle of a transaction. >> Yes. I mean, it's pretty, the sink is very fast. The Couchbase sync, especially user's web sockets. And we do continuous replicators where if I complete an order, the next instant it's on the server. So it's, it's we observed the speeds improved a lot. So the technology that we are using uses syncs for a long, long time compared to Couchbase, and that's another productivity gain for our Salesforce. >> What were some of the differentials? You mentioned some of the technology requirements that PepsiCo had in rearchitecting, the infrastructure, but what were some of the key technology differentiators that really made Couchbase stand out as the obvious choice? >> Yeah, so we, when we started this project, we all know the sink is the key for this whole project, because we thought the data going back and forth, we cannot really build a robust offline app. So we looked at multiple options, other providers that are doing the sync. And we also looked at building our own sink, in-house using APIs, but then we did lots of performance testing across all the options that we had at that time. And then Couchbase came above all of them pretty handily. So obviously we can coach base takes care of the sync, and then we can focus on our business process. So we can go build all the business process and not worry about how to build the syncing engine. And then that is itself a big effort. So that's what Couchbase provided us saying a instant sync engine. And then we were able to focus more on our, the app applicants, the frontline application, the sensor application. >> And those business processes. Let's talk about some of the business outcomes. We've mentioned a few already in our conversation, increased in productivity, the sales forces increased in that as well. But I imagine there's a lot of benefits for the end-user customer in terms of being able to get the transactions completed faster. What are some of those positive business outcomes that PepsiCo is seeing as a result of implementing Couchbase? >> Yeah. So you hit on a couple of them that the sync times are definitely a big factor where that will directly give more time for the sales folks to go either go to most stores, or even if they go to the existing stores, they can do more, spend more time with the customer merchandising and making sure everything is correct. So that's one, also the new app users connect with a lot of new peripherals that are not available on the previous platform. Also, the, our folks are very enthusiastic about using a new app, right? So it's like coming into the 21st century for them using such an old lab for a long time. So a lot of things that they see, they can see the images of the bags while ordering, which was not a feature earlier. Some of them are small, but they make a huge impact on our users. So, yeah, I mean, and then this is just a start that we are doing. And then once we are able to completely implement this one, we have a lot more going into, in future. I was just talking about, we can do virtual reality or show them how to sell using virtual reality. We can show a display to a store manager saying, 'Hey, I want to put a display here. And this is how it looks,' they can show it on the phone directly, than just explaining and showing some paper images. So there's a lot of possibilities. >> A lot of improvements to the customer experience. It sounds like, it sounds like adoption is quite high for your folks who are used to 20 year old technology, probably being very excited that they have a modern app. But talk to me a little bit about the appetite of the organization to continue modernizing the application infrastructure and presuming going from older technology to that 21st century, like you talked about. >> Yeah. So in other parts, we are already modernized some of these. So we have been on the journey for the last four, five years building multiple digital platforms. So one of the examples I can give is when COVID hit, there's a lot of disruption for everybody, for the consumers, so they are not able to find the products in the stores, a lot people are afraid to go to the stores to even buy products. So we reacted very quickly and opened a consumer website called snacks.com, which Pepsi never sold it to consumer directly. We always go through our stores, but the first time we open the consumer channel and Couchbase powered some of it for the backend purpose. So this is not a mobile app, it's just a desktop app, but we already have been on the digital transmission journey, even before we quickly turn into COVID for the snacks.com. And similarly, we are, doing this for our retail execution, portion of it using this project. So, and then we'll be continuing to do this going forward to enable a lot of functionality for I mean, for all of our sales, as well as supply chain and other systems, so that we can be more efficient. We can be more elastic saying if there is more demand, our backend should be able to handle all that, which was not the case before. So now we've built a state of the art backend system on cloud. So there's a lot of transmission, digital transmission going on within PepsiCo. And I'm really proud to be part of this project so that we took this to the next level. And then this is just a start. We can do a lot more. >> Right? This is just the beginning. That sounds like a great transformation for a historied company that we all, everybody knows PepsiCo and all of its products. But it sounds like when the pandemic hit, you had the infrastructure in place to be able to pivot quickly to launch that direct to consumer, which of course consumers, patience has been quite thin in the last year and a half. Talk to me a little bit about the impact to the overall organization as a result of being able to, to get more direct with those consumers. >> Yeah. So till now, again, we are the business model is we sell to the stores and then go customer. So we'd never get a direct sense of what consumer liking is. I mean, we get through some surveys and stuff, but we don't have a direct channel to the consumer, which this particular project enabled us snacks.com. So we know the consumer behavior, how they buying patterns, browsing patterns, which ones they like and including with geography and all so we learned a lot from the consumer behavior point of view for the project. And then we kept on enhancing. So one new thing we introduced was called Multipack where the consumers can come and pick, make their own Multipacks basically. They can say, okay, I need these many of this particular product, this particular product and make their Multipack and we ship them the customized Multipack. And it was, such a huge hit that we are not able to even fulfill them so much demand was there for that one, so we had to revamp and then get back. And now it's a huge thing on all the snacks.com platform. So all of this is possible because we had a digital platform underneath that supports this kind of innovation. So the new business models are just coming to life in within weeks or even few months and that's what we will be trying to do with the new platform that we're building for this app as well, where we'll bring in lot of new business models on top of we have already. >> Excellent, a lot of transformation it sounds like at PepsiCo in the last couple of years, I love the customization, that personalization route that you're going and I think that's going to be a huge hit for consumers. And as you said, there's a lot of demand , Madhav thank you for joining me today, talking about how you are modernizing the field service and supply chain application, the impact it's making for end users for your customers and for the sales folks. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much Lisa. >> From McCalla. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube conversation.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back. David Ante with David Nicholson. This is UiPath Forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, you know, the customers here, they're automating all the time, sucking work and the cube. We're sucking all the information out of the experts and the customers. A bar Toban is here. He's the global business, Shared services, leading automation and AI at PepsiCo. And Para Colan is back is the chief, He's the chief product officer, UiPath longtime Cube alum. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great to see us all day. So you guys keynote today, you know, excited to have PepsiCo on. I'm not sure I've ever interviewed PepsiCo in the Cube, but tell us about your role there. >>Absolutely. So I'm part of a PepsiCo global business shared services team. I lead automation and AI capabilities. GBS has, you know, we started GBS portfolio back about three and a half years ago, and we have a six hubs across PepsiCo. And as, as a part of my role, we deliver transformational capability across the PepsiCo. >>When did it all start? >>About three and a half years ago, 2019. So >>Prior to the pandemic. Yeah. You know, versus the pandemic was a catalyst for this. Yeah. But it was at the catalyst, but maybe it sped it up a bit. Yeah. >>PepsiCo journey started with, if, if you look at the PepsiCo, you know, the automation journey, it started back in 2017, but the GBS portfolio took shape back in 2019. So prior to that, you know, PepsiCo was definitely, you know, working on lot of, you know, the automation capabilities and automation product across, you know, PepsiCo. But with the introduction of PepsiCo global business shared services team, we are, you know, centralizing a lot of transformation capability, you know, across the functions that, that we support within the >>PepsiCo and, and UI path. Was going to part of that journey all along? Or was there sort of other activities beforehand or how >>No, no, absolutely. Starting from 2017, if I, you know, remembered, you know, with the vision of our, you know, some of our senior leadership team and recognizing the value of, you know, automation in the core, you know, capability as a transformation at that time, you know, we started with just like anybody else, right? We started with, you know, proof of concept, showed some, you know, early wins and the value back to the business, start setting up some, you know, business processes and capabilities, stood up the platform, build a complete, you know, ecosystem around that, you know, platform and partnership with, you know, UI bot team. And you know, from there, here we are five years. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very critical component to our digital transformation capability and, and yes, leverage across >>Let's talk platform. So you, you guys have made some announcements this week. You talk about the business automation platform. I remember our first forward was, you know, RPA tool. Okay. Yeah. And then you guys made acquisitions. I was there for that. So the process process cold and then people started to really expand it and it's really come in amazingly long way in a short time. So what did you guys announce today? What'd you talk about on stage 20, 22, 10? Tell us more about it. >>Absolutely, Dave. So you've seen the journey, you've been with us since the early days. You know, we were in 2017 and RPA tool that could automate a representative task that happened over and over again in the environment. And then three years ago you were here when we announced the automation platform, we said, it's not just about a task, it's about involving humans in bots to manage end to end processes. It's about discovering what automation opportunities exist. It's about using ai. Pepsi Co was actually the pioneer of using AI along with automation. You know, we were in stage together with them in, in 2019. And where we are now is we're essentially seeing people want to take the next step with automation. They're saying that it's no longer just an automation tool, It's the way we operate. It's the way we innovate in the organization. So they're really making sure that it becomes a part of their digital transformation journey that they're on. >>And they're saying that we can do the digital transformation by consolidating multiple DRP systems and CRM systems. And that'll take us seven years to do, or we can go with UI path and we can leverage the core that we can leverage the GL system that exists today. We can leverage inventory tracking system that exists today and start to build processes on top of that that can adapt to what customers are trying to do in this digital age. And that's where, you know, we've made announcements today is, is really pivot the platform to be a business automation platform. And there's sort of three layers, you know, unique but you know, connected layers of the platform. The first one is discover. And Discover is all about finding your processes, identifying the opportunities, making sure that you are managing the return on investment. What is the process? You know, how are you getting ROI on it? >>The second one is automated, and that is really where we're applying semantic automation to identify the digital building blocks of an enterprise, which is your data, your document, your screens and communication. Like putting all of that together and saying you can automate our processes, leveraging a lot of intelligence that exist in how business processes are done. And the last one is operate, which is if you're trying to execute a business process at scale, you're processing not just, you know, a task thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You're, you know, you're looking at trillions of records to identify what processes you need. A scalable enterprise platform that's able to ingest a lot of data, report on metrics, reporting efficiency. So that's what we've announced today is an automation platform that companies can use to put at the center of the digital transformation >>Journey. So I about the interesting thing about PepsiCo, you guys started in 2017. Yeah. So kind of early, early on. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of been there with the progression platform. So my question to you is end up, it was, you know, we've seen the e from primarily on-prem, now it's cloud first. Yeah. How disruptive or non disruptive was that for you? Did you have to rip and replace? Did you have to sort of retool or migrate? What was that like? >>No, I mean, significant disruption, right? I mean, I mean, as, as we started our journey back in 2017, just like, you know, PRM mentioned, right? With simple rule based, you know, the automation from then now to our journey where our continue to, you know, infuse, you know, AI capability, document understanding, conversation ai, right? As a part of our end to end portfolio. At the same time, I think the cloud is providing a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to scale, right? You know, scale at, at a large. So that I think is a fantastic, you know, fantastic platform and fantastic, you know, the opportunity that we are looking forward >>To know. So how do you affect adoption inside of the organization? Can you talk about that? What's working? What's, >>It's always value driven as you know, right? I mean, the business business has to see the value. It it, it was, I mean, I would, you know, admit it was not as easy as before, but as the mindsets have started to shift, right? As the people have started to realize the value that, you know, the automation brings to, you know, the, I mean, you know, not just the, the value for the business, but actually transforming the entire portfolio, right? And, and people have started to see now that not every automation project is going to be transformation product, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it. So I, I, I think that's what has started to shift the mindset of, of uniforms. >>So how do you know when you have end to end? What are you wake up one day and say, Wow, we've achieved it. You know, is it pieces that come together? Yeah. What do you say? >>Yeah, You know, we wanna look at customers from, you know, from an end to end perspective. It's not just about piecemealing mealing finding a problem, solving it, really what does it deliver from, from an end to end perspective. Did you actually, you know, because a lot of times companies will say, we wanna automate X number of processes, and, and they do that and they're like, Well, we've automated a lot of processes. We're not sure what value we're getting out of it. It's the ability to measure like, what impact is this automation having on your business from an operational metric, but from a business metric as built. But then going back and saying, Well, where is the biggest pain point? Where do we have the largest value that we can give to the business back? So one of the things we actually announced today is the ability to take at an look at an idea and look at what was the estimated benefits of that idea, and then map it all the way through execution to say, what are we getting? >>We estimated we were gonna save a million dollars by doing those automation, or what have we achieved till now? Have we achieved a million dollars? Have we achieved half a million dollars by having achieved? That's true. That never happens. That, and, and, and, and it's hard to do that, like the data existed, but it's really hard for people to pull that data out. So we build out the box dashboards that give you the ROI bag, and that's why it's really important to, to make sure that, you know, you look at it not just as a technology project, but more as a investment from a business side. And so you can making a business more efficient. Yeah, >>That's, I just, I know you were jumping in, but that's super important. Cause you know, you run a lot of projects. Yeah, absolutely. And each of those projects has zone roi, then you jam it into the application portfolio. Exactly. And then everybody sort of forgets about it. You can't really track what impact it had because there's always, you know, some things that are benefit, some things are sometimes a negative. And so it's that holistic picture that you >>Trying to achieve, extremely critical point, what you hit on, right? From it's measuring the benefit and measuring the continuous benefit across, and not just from start and end, Okay, what I promised I delivered or not, but, but you have to have this continuous mindset. And so I think Yeah, definitely that that's a very, very critical to our finance team and our cfo, >>They organic mechanisms. It's constantly >>Evidence. Absolutely. Yeah. So abar, yeah. Global business shared services. Yeah. When you think of PepsiCo, yeah, of course people immediately think of Sure, Pepsi. But PepsiCo is a multi tentacled absolutely beast of a company. Absolutely. In a good way. Yeah. For organizations that are in that same category, holding companies, companies that have all sorts of different entities that are working together under one umbrella, how shareable is this idea of automation and business automation process moving forward? How, how shareable is that on the share oter? Yeah. Yeah. As far as, as far as, as far as you're concerned, are you, are you talking to some people where you're saying, Hey, I'm here, I'm here from GBS and I'm here to help, and they look at you like you're crazy because you don't understand their business? Or is this something that relatively easily applies across businesses >>That No, to your point, I mean, very valid point, right? I mean, it's, that's, that's the gbs, global business shared services mindset, right? As you move the functional areas into the Pepsi, into the Pepsi, gbs, like hr, procurement, commercial sales, supply chain, right? That's where you wanna start to find those, you know, the optimization, you know, opportunity. You wanna start to ize your processes, and that's where you will, you know, as you transition this processes within the gbs, that's what create those, you know, opportunities for you. So >>What, >>What about automation opportunities? Not in the sh I know you're in the shared arena. Yeah, yeah. But each of those business units has processes that could probably be optimized and automated. Sure. Is that something that's under your purview? We've heard, we've heard a lot about citizen developers. Yeah. I don't know if that, if that >>Applies to No, that definitely. I mean, you cannot just have focus on end to end, you know, automation. I mean, that's, that's a huge portfolio for gps at the same time supporting, you know, automation through the citizen development capability. That that's where, once again, you know, you have not provided a lot of capability and solution tools that we use, right? To continue to empower the folks who are part of our, you know, GBS team inside or outside gbs, right? It, it, it's, I think it's very, very critical. It, it, it helps people transform their career even in one ways, right? And, and, and, and you have that muscle, you have that resource, and you have the power. You definitely want to utilize that. >>So let's talk about metrics for a minute. So more data, the better. Usually I like data. Yeah. But, but if you're trying to optimize for 15 metrics, I feel like you're not gonna optimize on any, So how do you deal with that from both, as par was saying, an operational standpoint and a business standpoint? What are the things about how do you sort of get the, the teams focused on the right things? >>B business, functional leadership team drive those alignment for us as a part of a global business, shared services, we, we are hip to have connected with our business, you know, functions, right? They, they have to help us prioritize those. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you cannot attack 15 metrics at once. You have to prioritize, you have to make sure that you bring the focus to the product, you know, project, right? So, so definitely, I mean, it's, it's, it's not often 15 metrics, but top three metrics, let's, let's focus, let's zoom in and ensure we are driving it. But, >>And if you think about the system, I mean, at the end of the day, the p and l manager, he or she cares about ebit, let's say. Sure, okay. But there are so many factors, you know, in that complicated organization that are gonna affect ebitda and they're gonna be different. But somebody's gotta figure out, okay, how do they fit together in a system? And can, can UiPath help me understand that, those relationships and those dependencies? >>Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a, there's an aspect of human relationships and, and making sure that you get the right level of sponsorship from the business and, and there's a business stakeholder and, and looking at every investment and, and outcomes that you're driving based on that. But, but that is something that we, from a tools perspective, we're trying to make sure that you can measure the value throughout the entire value chain. But then getting the business sponsorship, like where we've seen automation scale is always because there's a business sponsor that's essentially saying, Here's what I'm trying to achieve and here's the, here's my goal, here's a North star and go get it and let me know how you're tracking against it. And, and our job is to make sure that we can provide the visibility, the people that are operating the, the programs to make sure they get that level of visibility. >>What's the scope of automations in your, you know, organization? Is it dozens, hundreds, >>Huge. >>That is thousands. >>We are getting there. Okay. No, definitely. I mean, we have definitely, you know, realized that it's, it's a core component to our digital transformation, right? So, so there is no, there's no stopping on it. There, there, there, there's plenty of support from top down and you know, it's a fantastic time to be at PepsiCo. Right? Especially at the PepsiCo gbs. Right, >>Right. Thanks for sharing your story. Congratulations on all the progress you guys have made. It's actually quite remarkable to see where you guys have come from. So I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. Thanks. Thank you Dave. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson. We are right middle of day two at forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, we're right back.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back. David Ante with David Nicholson. This is UiPath Forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, you know, the customers here, they're automating all the time, sucking work and the cube. We're sucking all the information out of the experts and the customers. A bar Toban is here. He's the global business, Shared services, leading automation and AI at PepsiCo. And Para Colan is back is the chief. He's the Chief product officer at UiPath, longtime Cube alum. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great to see us all day. So you guys keynote today, you know, excited to have PepsiCo on. I'm not sure I've ever interviewed PepsiCo in the Cube, but tell us about your role there. >>Absolutely. So I'm part of a PepsiCo global business shared services team. I lead automation and AI capabilities. GBS has, you know, we started GBS portfolio back about three and a half years ago, and we have a six hubs across PepsiCo. And as, as a part of my role, we deliver transformational capability across the PepsiCo. >>When did it all start? >>About three and a half years ago, 2019. So >>Prior to the pandemic. Yeah. You know, versus the pandemic was the catalyst for this. Yeah. But it was at the catalyst, but maybe it sped it up a bit. >>Yeah. PepsiCo journey started with, if, if you look at the PepsiCo, you know, the automation journey, it started back in 2017, but the GBS portfolio took shape back in 2019. So prior to that, you know, PepsiCo was definitely, you know, working a lot of, you know, the automation capabilities and automation product across, you know, PepsiCo. But with the introduction of PepsiCo global business shared services team, we are, you know, centralizing a lot of transformation capability, you know, across the functions that, that we support within the >>PepsiCo and, and UI path was kind of part of that journey all along? Or was there sort of other activities beforehand or how did that >>No, no, absolutely. Starting from 2017, if I, you know, remembered, you know, with the vision of our, you know, some of our senior leadership team and recognizing the value of, you know, automation in the core, you know, capability as a transformation at that time, you know, we started with just like anybody else, right? We started with, you know, proof of concept, showed some, you know, early wins and the value back to the business, start setting up some, you know, business processes and capabilities, stood up the platform, build a complete, you know, ecosystem around that, you know, platform partnership with, you know, UI bot team. And you know, from there, here we are five years. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very critical component to our digital transformation capability and, and yes, leverage across >>Let's talk platform probably. So you, you guys have made some announcements this week. You talk about the business automation platform. I remember our first forward was, you know, RPA tool. Okay. Yeah. And then you guys made acquisitions. I was there for that. So the process process cold and then people started to really expand it, and it's really come in amazingly long away in a short time. So what did you guys announce today? What'd you talk about on stage 2022 dot 10? Tell us more about it. >>Absolutely, Dave. So you've seen the journey, you've been with us since the early days. You know, we were in 2017 and RPA tool that could automate a representative task that happened over and over again in the environment. And then three years ago you were here when we announced the automation platform, we said, it's not just about a task, it's about involving humans in bots to manage end to end processes. It's about discovering what automation opportunities exist. It's about using ai. Pepsi Co was actually the pioneer of using AI along with automation. You know, we were in stage together with them in, in 2019. And where we are now is we're essentially seeing people want to take the next step with automation. They're saying that it's no longer just an automation tool, It's the way we operate. It's the way we innovate in the organization. So they're really making sure that it becomes a part of their digital transformation journey that they're on. >>And they're saying that we can to the digital transformation by consolidating multiple RP systems and CRM systems. And that'll take us seven years to do, or we can go with UI path and we can leverage the core that we can leverage the GL system that exists today. We can leverage the inventory tracking system that exists today and start to build processes on top of that that can adapt to what customers are trying to do in this digital age. And that's where, you know, we've made announcements today is, is really pivot the platform to be a business automation platform. And there's sort of three layers, you know, unique but you know, connected layers of the platform. The first one is discover. And Discover is all about finding your processes, identifying the opportunities, making sure that you are managing the return on investment. What is the process? >>You know, how are you getting ROI on it? The second one is automated, and that is really where we're applying semantic automation to identify the digital building blocks of an enterprise, which is your data, your document, your screens and communication. Like putting all of that together and saying you can automate in our processes, leveraging a lot of intelligence that exist in how business processes are done. And the last one is operate, which is if you're trying to execute a business process at scale, you're processing not just, you know, a task thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You're, you know, you're looking at trillions of records to identify what processes you need, a scalable enterprise platform that's able to ingest a lot of data report on metrics report and efficiency. So that's what we've announced today is an automation platform that companies can use to put at the center of the digital transformation journey. >>So like about the interesting thing about PepsiCo, you guys started in 2017. Yeah. So kind of early, early on. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of been there with the progression of platform. So my question to you is, and it was, you know, Yeah, we've seen the e from primarily on-prem now it's cloud first. Yeah. How disruptive or non disruptive was that for you? Did you have to rip and replace? Did you have to sort of retool or migrate? What was that like? >>No, I mean, significant disruption, right? I mean, I mean, as, as we started our journey back in 2017, just like, you know, PRM mentioned, right? With simple rule based, you know, the automation from then now to our journey where our continue to, you know, infuse, you know, AI capability, document understanding, conversation ai, right? As a part of our end to end profile. At the same time, I think the cloud is providing a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to scale, right? You know, scale at, at large. So that I think is a fantastic op, you know, fantastic platform and fantastic, you know, the opportunity that we are looking forward >>To. So how do you affect adoption inside of the organization? Can you talk about that? What's working? What's, >>It's always value driven as you know, right? I mean, the business business has to see the value. It it, it was, I mean, I would, you know, admit it was not as easy as before, but as the mindsets have started to shift, right? As the people have started to realize the value that, you know, the automation brings to, you know, the, I mean, you know, not just the, the value for the business, but actually transforming the entire portfolio, right? And, and people have started to see now that not every automation project is going to be transformation product, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it. So I, I, I think that's what has started to shift the mindset of, of uniforms. >>So how do you know when you have end to end? What are you still wake up one day and say, Wow, we've achieved it. You know, is it pieces that come together? Yeah. What do you say? >>Yeah, You know, we wanna look at customers from, you know, from an end to end perspective. It's not just about piecemealing finding a problem, solving it, really what does it deliver from, from an end to end perspective. Did you actually, you know, because a lot of times companies will say, we wanna automate X number of processes, and, and they do that and they're like, Well, we've automated a lot of processes. We're not sure what value we're getting out of it. It's the ability to measure like, what impact is this automation having on your business from an operational metric, but from a business metric as well. But then going back and saying, Well, where is the biggest pain point? Where do we have the largest value that we can give to the business back? So one of the things we actually announced today is the ability to take at an look at an idea and look at what was the estimated benefits of an idea, and then map it all the way through execution to say, what are we getting? >>We estimated we were gonna save a million dollars by doing those automation, or what have we achieved till now? Have we achieved a million dollars? Have we achieved half a million dollars by having achieved? That's, that never happens. That, and, and, and, and it's hard to do that, like the data existed, but it's really hard for people to pull that data out. So we build out the box dashboards that give you the ROI bag. And that's why it's really important to, to make sure that, you know, you look at it not just as a technology project, but more as a investment from a business side. And so you can, making a business more efficient. You >>Know, that's, I just, I know you were jumping in, but that's super important. Cause you know, you run a lot of projects Absolutely. And each of those projects has zone roi, then you jam it into the application portfolio. Exactly. And then everybody sort of forgets about it. You can't really track what impact it had because there's always, you know, some things that are benefit, some things are sometimes a negative. And so it's that holistic picture that >>You trying >>To achieve, extremely critical point, what you hit on, right? From it's measuring the benefit and measuring the continuous benefit across, and not just from start and end, Okay, what I promised I delivered or not, but, but you have to have this continuous mindset. And, and so I think yeah, definitely that, that's a very, very critical to our finance team in our cfo, >>Organiza, they're organic mechanisms and it's constantly >>Absolutely. Yeah. So abar, yeah. Global business shared services. Yeah. When you think of PepsiCo, yeah, of course people immediately think of Sure, Pepsi. But PepsiCo is a multi tentacled absolutely beast of a company. Absolutely. In a good way. Yeah. For organizations that are in that same category, holding companies, companies that have all sorts of different entities that are working together under one umbrella, How shareable is this idea of automation and business automation process moving forward? How, how shareable is that on the share oter? Yeah. Yeah. >>As >>Far as, as far as, as far as you're concerned, are you, are you talking to some people where you're saying, Hey, I'm here, I'm here from gvs and I'm here to help, and they look at you like you're crazy because you don't understand their business? Or is this something that relatively easily applies across >>Businesses that No, to your point, I mean, very valid point, right? I mean, it's, that's, that's the gbs, global business shared services mindset, right? As you move the functional areas into the Pepsi, in, into the PepsiCo gbs like hr, procurement, commercial sales, supply chain, right? That's where you gonna start to find those, you know, the optimization, you know, opportunity. You wanna start to standardize your processes, and that's where you will, you know, as you transition this processes within the gbs, that's what create those, you know, opportunities for you. >>What, >>What, what about automation opportunities? Not in the, I know you're in the sharing arena. Yeah, yeah. But each of those business units has processes that could probably be optimized and automated. Sure. Is that something that's under your purview? We've heard, we've heard a lot about citizen developers. Yeah. I don't know if that, if that >>Applies to No, that definitely. I mean, you cannot just have focus on end to end, you know, automation. I mean, that's, that's a huge portfolio for gps at the same time supporting, you know, automation through the citizen development capability. That that's where, once again, you know, you have had, provides a lot of capability and solution tools that we use, right? To continue to empower the folks who are part of our, you know, GBS team inside or outside gbs, right? It, it's, I think it's very, very critical. It, it, it helps people transform their career even in one ways, right? And, and, and, and you have that muscle, you have that resource, and you have that power. You definitely want to utilize that. >>So let's talk about metrics for a minute. So more data the better. Usually I like data. Yeah. But, but if you're trying to optimize for 15 metrics, I feel like you're not gonna optimize on any, So how do you deal with that from both as Paramo saying an operational standpoint and a business standpoint? What are the things about how do you sort of get the, the teams focused on the right things, >>Bi business, functional leadership team drive those alignment for us as a part of a global business, shared services, we, we are hip to have connected with our business, you know, functions, right? They, they have to help us prioritize those. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you cannot attack 15 metrics at once. You have to prioritize, you have to make sure that you bring the focus to the product. You have a project, right? So, so definitely, I mean, it's, it's, it's not often 15 metrics, but top three metrics, let's, let's focus, let's zoom in and ensure we are driving it. But then >>If you think about the system, I mean, at the end of the day, the p and l manager, he or she cares about ebit, let's say. Sure, okay. But there are so many factors, you know, in that complicated organization that are gonna affect ebitda. Yeah. And they're gonna be different. Yeah. But somebody's gotta figure out, okay, how do they fit together in a system? And, and can, can UiPath help me understand that, those relationships and those dependencies? >>Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a, there's an aspect of human relationships and, and making sure that you get the right level of sponsorship from the business and, and there's a business stakeholder and, and looking at every investment and, and outcomes that you're driving based on that. But, but that is something that we, from a tools perspective, we're trying to make sure that you can measure the value throughout the entire value chain. But then getting the business sponsorship, like where we've seen automation scale is always because there's a business sponsor that's essentially saying, Here's what I'm trying to achieve and here's the, here's my goal, here's the North star and go get it and let me know how you're tracking against it. And, and our job is to make sure that we can provide the visibility, the people that are operating the, the programs to make sure they get that level of visibility. >>What's the scope of automations in your, you know, organization? Is it dozens, hundreds, huge. That is thousands. >>We are getting there. >>Okay. >>No, definitely. I mean, we have definitely, you know, realized that it's, it's a core component to our digital transformation, right? So, so there is no, there's no stopping. I mean there, there, there, there's plenty of support from top down and you know, it's a fantastic time to be at PepsiCo. Right? Especially at the PepsiCo ubs, Right. >>So, Right. Thanks for sharing your story, Pam. Congratulations on all the progress you guys have made. It's actually quite remarkable to see where you guys have come from. So I really appreciate it. Thank you Dave. Thank you Dave. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson. We are right middle of day two at forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, we're right back.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage here live on the floor at AWS re:MARS 2022. I'm John Furrier, host for theCUBE. Great event, machine learning, automation, robotics, space, that's MARS. It's part of the re-series of events, re:Invent's the big event at the end of the year, re:Inforce, security, re:MARS, really intersection of the future of space, industrial, automation, which is very heavily DevOps machine learning, of course, machine learning, which is AI. We have Luis Ceze here, who's the CEO co-founder of OctoML. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me in the show, John. >> So we've been following you guys. You guys are a growing startup funded by Madrona Venture Capital, one of your backers. You guys are here at the show. This is a, I would say small show relative what it's going to be, but a lot of robotics, a lot of space, a lot of industrial kind of edge, but machine learning is the centerpiece of this trend. You guys are in the middle of it. Tell us your story. >> Absolutely, yeah. So our mission is to make machine learning sustainable and accessible to everyone. So I say sustainable because it means we're going to make it faster and more efficient. You know, use less human effort, and accessible to everyone, accessible to as many developers as possible, and also accessible in any device. So, we started from an open source project that began at University of Washington, where I'm a professor there. And several of the co-founders were PhD students there. We started with this open source project called Apache TVM that had actually contributions and collaborations from Amazon and a bunch of other big tech companies. And that allows you to get a machine learning model and run on any hardware, like run on CPUs, GPUs, various GPUs, accelerators, and so on. It was the kernel of our company and the project's been around for about six years or so. Company is about three years old. And we grew from Apache TVM into a whole platform that essentially supports any model on any hardware cloud and edge. >> So is the thesis that, when it first started, that you want to be agnostic on platform? >> Agnostic on hardware, that's right. >> Hardware, hardware. >> Yeah. >> What was it like back then? What kind of hardware were you talking about back then? Cause a lot's changed, certainly on the silicon side. >> Luis: Absolutely, yeah. >> So take me through the journey, 'cause I could see the progression. I'm connecting the dots here. >> So once upon a time, yeah, no... (both chuckling) >> I walked in the snow with my bare feet. >> You have to be careful because if you wake up the professor in me, then you're going to be here for two hours, you know. >> Fast forward. >> The average version here is that, clearly machine learning has shown to actually solve real interesting, high value problems. And where machine learning runs in the end, it becomes code that runs on different hardware, right? And when we started Apache TVM, which stands for tensor virtual machine, at that time it was just beginning to start using GPUs for machine learning, we already saw that, with a bunch of machine learning models popping up and CPUs and GPU's starting to be used for machine learning, it was clear that it come opportunity to run on everywhere. >> And GPU's were coming fast. >> GPUs were coming and huge diversity of CPUs, of GPU's and accelerators now, and the ecosystem and the system software that maps models to hardware is still very fragmented today. So hardware vendors have their own specific stacks. So Nvidia has its own software stack, and so does Intel, AMD. And honestly, I mean, I hope I'm not being, you know, too controversial here to say that it kind of of looks like the mainframe era. We had tight coupling between hardware and software. You know, if you bought IBM hardware, you had to buy IBM OS and IBM database, IBM applications, it all tightly coupled. And if you want to use IBM software, you had to buy IBM hardware. So that's kind of like what machine learning systems look like today. If you buy a certain big name GPU, you've got to use their software. Even if you use their software, which is pretty good, you have to buy their GPUs, right? So, but you know, we wanted to help peel away the model and the software infrastructure from the hardware to give people choice, ability to run the models where it best suit them. Right? So that includes picking the best instance in the cloud, that's going to give you the right, you know, cost properties, performance properties, or might want to run it on the edge. You might run it on an accelerator. >> What year was that roughly, when you were going this? >> We started that project in 2015, 2016 >> Yeah. So that was pre-conventional wisdom. I think TensorFlow wasn't even around yet. >> Luis: No, it wasn't. >> It was, I'm thinking like 2017 or so. >> Luis: Right. So that was the beginning of, okay, this is opportunity. AWS, I don't think they had released some of the nitro stuff that the Hamilton was working on. So, they were already kind of going that way. It's kind of like converging. >> Luis: Yeah. >> The space was happening, exploding. >> Right. And the way that was dealt with, and to this day, you know, to a large extent as well is by backing machine learning models with a bunch of hardware specific libraries. And we were some of the first ones to say, like, know what, let's take a compilation approach, take a model and compile it to very efficient code for that specific hardware. And what underpins all of that is using machine learning for machine learning code optimization. Right? But it was way back when. We can talk about where we are today. >> No, let's fast forward. >> That's the beginning of the open source project. >> But that was a fundamental belief, worldview there. I mean, you have a world real view that was logical when you compare to the mainframe, but not obvious to the machine learning community. Okay, good call, check. Now let's fast forward, okay. Evolution, we'll go through the speed of the years. More chips are coming, you got GPUs, and seeing what's going on in AWS. Wow! Now it's booming. Now I got unlimited processors, I got silicon on chips, I got, everywhere >> Yeah. And what's interesting is that the ecosystem got even more complex, in fact. Because now you have, there's a cross product between machine learning models, frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and like that and so on, and then hardware targets. So how do you navigate that? What we want here, our vision is to say, folks should focus, people should focus on making the machine learning models do what they want to do that solves a value, like solves a problem of high value to them. Right? So another deployment should be completely automatic. Today, it's very, very manual to a large extent. So once you're serious about deploying machine learning model, you got a good understanding where you're going to deploy it, how you're going to deploy it, and then, you know, pick out the right libraries and compilers, and we automated the whole thing in our platform. This is why you see the tagline, the booth is right there, like bringing DevOps agility for machine learning, because our mission is to make that fully transparent. >> Well, I think that, first of all, I use that line here, cause I'm looking at it here on live on camera. People can't see, but it's like, I use it on a couple couple of my interviews because the word agility is very interesting because that's kind of the test on any kind of approach these days. Agility could be, and I talked to the robotics guys, just having their product be more agile. I talked to Pepsi here just before you came on, they had this large scale data environment because they built an architecture, but that fostered agility. So again, this is an architectural concept, it's a systems' view of agility being the output, and removing dependencies, which I think what you guys were trying to do. >> Only part of what we do. Right? So agility means a bunch of things. First, you know-- >> Yeah explain. >> Today it takes a couple months to get a model from, when the model's ready, to production, why not turn that in two hours. Agile, literally, physically agile, in terms of walk off time. Right? And then the other thing is give you flexibility to choose where your model should run. So, in our deployment, between the demo and the platform expansion that we announced yesterday, you know, we give the ability of getting your model and, you know, get it compiled, get it optimized for any instance in the cloud and automatically move it around. Today, that's not the case. You have to pick one instance and that's what you do. And then you might auto scale with that one instance. So we give the agility of actually running and scaling the model the way you want, and the way it gives you the right SLAs. >> Yeah, I think Swami was mentioning that, not specifically that use case for you, but that use case generally, that scale being moving things around, making them faster, not having to do that integration work. >> Scale, and run the models where they need to run. Like some day you want to have a large scale deployment in the cloud. You're going to have models in the edge for various reasons because speed of light is limited. We cannot make lights faster. So, you know, got to have some, that's a physics there you cannot change. There's privacy reasons. You want to keep data locally, not send it around to run the model locally. So anyways, and giving the flexibility. >> Let me jump in real quick. I want to ask this specific question because you made me think of something. So we're just having a data mesh conversation. And one of the comments that's come out of a few of these data as code conversations is data's the product now. So if you can move data to the edge, which everyone's talking about, you know, why move data if you don't have to, but I can move a machine learning algorithm to the edge. Cause it's costly to move data. I can move computer, everyone knows that. But now I can move machine learning to anywhere else and not worry about integrating on the fly. So the model is the code. >> It is the product. >> Yeah. And since you said, the model is the code, okay, now we're talking even more here. So machine learning models today are not treated as code, by the way. So do not have any of the typical properties of code that you can, whenever you write a piece of code, you run a code, you don't know, you don't even think what is a CPU, we don't think where it runs, what kind of CPU it runs, what kind of instance it runs. But with machine learning model, you do. So what we are doing and created this fully transparent automated way of allowing you to treat your machine learning models if you were a regular function that you call and then a function could run anywhere. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> That's why-- >> That's better. >> Bringing DevOps agility-- >> That's better. >> Yeah. And you can use existing-- >> That's better, because I can run it on the Artemis too, in space. >> You could, yeah. >> If they have the hardware. (both laugh) >> And that allows you to run your existing, continue to use your existing DevOps infrastructure and your existing people. >> So I have to ask you, cause since you're a professor, this is like a masterclass on theCube. Thank you for coming on. Professor. (Luis laughing) I'm a hardware guy. I'm building hardware for Boston Dynamics, Spot, the dog, that's the diversity in hardware, it's tends to be purpose driven. I got a spaceship, I'm going to have hardware on there. >> Luis: Right. >> It's generally viewed in the community here, that everyone I talk to and other communities, open source is going to drive all software. That's a check. But the scale and integration is super important. And they're also recognizing that hardware is really about the software. And they even said on stage, here. Hardware is not about the hardware, it's about the software. So if you believe that to be true, then your model checks all the boxes. Are people getting this? >> I think they're starting to. Here is why, right. A lot of companies that were hardware first, that thought about software too late, aren't making it. Right? There's a large number of hardware companies, AI chip companies that aren't making it. Probably some of them that won't make it, unfortunately just because they started thinking about software too late. I'm so glad to see a lot of the early, I hope I'm not just doing our own horn here, but Apache TVM, the infrastructure that we built to map models to different hardware, it's very flexible. So we see a lot of emerging chip companies like SiMa.ai's been doing fantastic work, and they use Apache TVM to map algorithms to their hardware. And there's a bunch of others that are also using Apache TVM. That's because you have, you know, an opening infrastructure that keeps it up to date with all the machine learning frameworks and models and allows you to extend to the chips that you want. So these companies pay attention that early, gives them a much higher fighting chance, I'd say. >> Well, first of all, not only are you backable by the VCs cause you have pedigree, you're a professor, you're smart, and you get good recruiting-- >> Luis: I don't know about the smart part. >> And you get good recruiting for PhDs out of University of Washington, which is not too shabby computer science department. But they want to make money. The VCs want to make money. >> Right. >> So you have to make money. So what's the pitch? What's the business model? >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Share us what you're thinking there. >> Yeah. The value of using our solution is shorter time to value for your model from months to hours. Second, you shrink operator, op-packs, because you don't need a specialized expensive team. Talk about expensive, expensive engineers who can understand machine learning hardware and software engineering to deploy models. You don't need those teams if you use this automated solution, right? Then you reduce that. And also, in the process of actually getting a model and getting specialized to the hardware, making hardware aware, we're talking about a very significant performance improvement that leads to lower cost of deployment in the cloud. We're talking about very significant reduction in costs in cloud deployment. And also enabling new applications on the edge that weren't possible before. It creates, you know, latent value opportunities. Right? So, that's the high level value pitch. But how do we make money? Well, we charge for access to the platform. Right? >> Usage. Consumption. >> Yeah, and value based. Yeah, so it's consumption and value based. So depends on the scale of the deployment. If you're going to deploy machine learning model at a larger scale, chances are that it produces a lot of value. So then we'll capture some of that value in our pricing scale. >> So, you have direct sales force then to work those deals. >> Exactly. >> Got it. How many customers do you have? Just curious. >> So we started, the SaaS platform just launched now. So we started onboarding customers. We've been building this for a while. We have a bunch of, you know, partners that we can talk about openly, like, you know, revenue generating partners, that's fair to say. We work closely with Qualcomm to enable Snapdragon on TVM and hence our platform. We're close with AMD as well, enabling AMD hardware on the platform. We've been working closely with two hyperscaler cloud providers that-- >> I wonder who they are. >> I don't know who they are, right. >> Both start with the letter A. >> And they're both here, right. What is that? >> They both start with the letter A. >> Oh, that's right. >> I won't give it away. (laughing) >> Don't give it away. >> One has three, one has four. (both laugh) >> I'm guessing, by the way. >> Then we have customers in the, actually, early customers have been using the platform from the beginning in the consumer electronics space, in Japan, you know, self driving car technology, as well. As well as some AI first companies that actually, whose core value, the core business come from AI models. >> So, serious, serious customers. They got deep tech chops. They're integrating, they see this as a strategic part of their architecture. >> That's what I call AI native, exactly. But now there's, we have several enterprise customers in line now, we've been talking to. Of course, because now we launched the platform, now we started onboarding and exploring how we're going to serve it to these customers. But it's pretty clear that our technology can solve a lot of other pain points right now. And we're going to work with them as early customers to go and refine them. >> So, do you sell to the little guys, like us? Will we be customers if we wanted to be? >> You could, absolutely, yeah. >> What we have to do, have machine learning folks on staff? >> So, here's what you're going to have to do. Since you can see the booth, others can't. No, but they can certainly, you can try our demo. >> OctoML. >> And you should look at the transparent AI app that's compiled and optimized with our flow, and deployed and built with our flow. That allows you to get your image and do style transfer. You know, you can get you and a pineapple and see how you look like with a pineapple texture. >> We got a lot of transcript and video data. >> Right. Yeah. Right, exactly. So, you can use that. Then there's a very clear-- >> But I could use it. You're not blocking me from using it. Everyone's, it's pretty much democratized. >> You can try the demo, and then you can request access to the platform. >> But you get a lot of more serious deeper customers. But you can serve anybody, what you're saying. >> Luis: We can serve anybody, yeah. >> All right, so what's the vision going forward? Let me ask this. When did people start getting the epiphany of removing the machine learning from the hardware? Was it recently, a couple years ago? >> Well, on the research side, we helped start that trend a while ago. I don't need to repeat that. But I think the vision that's important here, I want the audience here to take away is that, there's a lot of progress being made in creating machine learning models. So, there's fantastic tools to deal with training data, and creating the models, and so on. And now there's a bunch of models that can solve real problems there. The question is, how do you very easily integrate that into your intelligent applications? Madrona Venture Group has been very vocal and investing heavily in intelligent applications both and user applications as well as enablers. So we say an enable of that because it's so easy to use our flow to get a model integrated into your application. Now, any regular software developer can integrate that. And that's just the beginning, right? Because, you know, now we have CI/CD integration to keep your models up to date, to continue to integrate, and then there's more downstream support for other features that you normally have in regular software development. >> I've been thinking about this for a long, long, time. And I think this whole code, no one thinks about code. Like, I write code, I'm deploying it. I think this idea of machine learning as code independent of other dependencies is really amazing. It's so obvious now that you say it. What's the choices now? Let's just say that, I buy it, I love it, I'm using it. Now what do I got to do if I want to deploy it? Do I have to pick processors? Are there verified platforms that you support? Is there a short list? Is there every piece of hardware? >> We actually can help you. I hope we're not saying we can do everything in the world here, but we can help you with that. So, here's how. When you have them all in the platform you can actually see how this model runs on any instance of any cloud, by the way. So we support all the three major cloud providers. And then you can make decisions. For example, if you care about latency, your model has to run on, at most 50 milliseconds, because you're going to have interactivity. And then, after that, you don't care if it's faster. All you care is that, is it going to run cheap enough. So we can help you navigate. And also going to make it automatic. >> It's like tire kicking in the dealer showroom. >> Right. >> You can test everything out, you can see the simulation. Are they simulations, or are they real tests? >> Oh, no, we run all in real hardware. So, we have, as I said, we support any instances of any of the major clouds. We actually run on the cloud. But we also support a select number of edge devices today, like ARMs and Nvidia Jetsons. And we have the OctoML cloud, which is a bunch of racks with a bunch Raspberry Pis and Nvidia Jetsons, and very soon, a bunch of mobile phones there too that can actually run the real hardware, and validate it, and test it out, so you can see that your model runs performant and economically enough in the cloud. And it can run on the edge devices-- >> You're a machine learning as a service. Would that be an accurate? >> That's part of it, because we're not doing the machine learning model itself. You come with a model and we make it deployable and make it ready to deploy. So, here's why it's important. Let me try. There's a large number of really interesting companies that do API models, as in API as a service. You have an NLP model, you have computer vision models, where you call an API and then point in the cloud. You send an image and you got a description, for example. But it is using a third party. Now, if you want to have your model on your infrastructure but having the same convenience as an API you can use our service. So, today, chances are that, if you have a model that you know that you want to do, there might not be an API for it, we actually automatically create the API for you. >> Okay, so that's why I get the DevOps agility for machine learning is a better description. Cause it's not, you're not providing the service. You're providing the service of deploying it like DevOps infrastructure as code. You're now ML as code. >> It's your model, your API, your infrastructure, but all of the convenience of having it ready to go, fully automatic, hands off. >> Cause I think what's interesting about this is that it brings the craftsmanship back to machine learning. Cause it's a craft. I mean, let's face it. >> Yeah. I want human brains, which are very precious resources, to focus on building those models, that is going to solve business problems. I don't want these very smart human brains figuring out how to scrub this into actually getting run the right way. This should be automatic. That's why we use machine learning, for machine learning to solve that. >> Here's an idea for you. We should write a book called, The Lean Machine Learning. Cause the lean startup was all about DevOps. >> Luis: We call machine leaning. No, that's not it going to work. (laughs) >> Remember when iteration was the big mantra. Oh, yeah, iterate. You know, that was from DevOps. >> Yeah, that's right. >> This code allowed for standing up stuff fast, double down, we all know the history, what it turned out. That was a good value for developers. >> I could really agree. If you don't mind me building on that point. You know, something we see as OctoML, but we also see at Madrona as well. Seeing that there's a trend towards best in breed for each one of the stages of getting a model deployed. From the data aspect of creating the data, and then to the model creation aspect, to the model deployment, and even model monitoring. Right? We develop integrations with all the major pieces of the ecosystem, such that you can integrate, say with model monitoring to go and monitor how a model is doing. Just like you monitor how code is doing in deployment in the cloud. >> It's evolution. I think it's a great step. And again, I love the analogy to the mainstream. I lived during those days. I remember the monolithic propriety, and then, you know, OSI model kind of blew it. But that OSI stack never went full stack, and it only stopped at TCP/IP. So, I think the same thing's going on here. You see some scalability around it to try to uncouple it, free it. >> Absolutely. And sustainability and accessibility to make it run faster and make it run on any deice that you want by any developer. So, that's the tagline. >> Luis Ceze, thanks for coming on. Professor. >> Thank you. >> I didn't know you were a professor. That's great to have you on. It was a masterclass in DevOps agility for machine learning. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> Congratulations, again. All right. OctoML here on theCube. Really important. Uncoupling the machine learning from the hardware specifically. That's only going to make space faster and safer, and more reliable. And that's where the whole theme of re:MARS is. Let's see how they fit in. I'm John for theCube. Thanks for watching. More coverage after this short break. >> Luis: Thank you. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here at re:MARS. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. It's the event where it's part of the "re:" series: re:MARS, re:Inforce, re:Invent. MARS stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. And a lot of conversation is all about AI machine learning. This one's about AI and business transformation. We've got Stepan Pushkarev CTO, CEO, Co-Founder of Provectus. Welcome to theCUBE. And Russ Lamb, eCommerce Retail Data Engineering Lead at PepsiCo, customer story. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> I love the practical customer stories because it brings everything to life. This show is about the future, but it's got all the things we want, we love: machine learning, robotics, automation. If you're in DevOps, or you're in data engineering, this is the world of automation. So what's the relationship? You guys, you're a customer. Talk about the relationship between you guys. >> Sure, sure. Provectus as a whole is a professional services firm, premier, a AWS partner, specializing in machine learning, data, DevOps. PepsiCo is our customer, our marquee customer, lovely customer. So happy to jointly present at this re:Invent, sorry, re:MARS. Anyway, Russ... >> I made that mistake earlier, by the way, 'cause re:Invent's always on the tip of my tongue and re:MARS is just, I'm not used to it yet, but I'm getting there. Talk about what are you guys working together on? >> Well, I mean, we work with Provectus in a lot of ways. They really helped us get started within our e-commerce division with AWS, provided a lot of expertise in that regard and, you know, just hands-on experience. >> We were talking before we came on camera, you guys just had another talk and how it's all future and kind of get back to reality, Earth. >> Russ: Get back to Earth. >> If we're on earth still. We're not on Mars yet, or the moon. You know, AI's kind of got a future, but it does give a tell sign to what's coming, industrial change, full transformation, 'cause cloud does the back office. You got data centers. Now you've got cloud going to the edge with industrial spaces, the ultimate poster child of edge and automation safety. But at the end of the day, we're still in the real world. Now people got to run businesses. And I think, you know, having you here is interesting. So I have to ask you, you know, as you look at the technology, you got to see AI everywhere. And the theme here, to me, that I see is the inflection point driving all this future robotics change, that everyone's been waiting for by the way, but it's like been in movies and in novels, is the machine learning and AI as the tipping point. This is key. And now you're here integrating AI into your company. Tell us your story. >> Well, I think that every enterprise is going to need more machine learning, more, you know, AI or data science. And that's the journey that we're on right now. And we've come a long way in the past six years, particularly with our e-commerce division, it's a really data rich environment. So, you know, going from brick and mortar, you know, delivering to restaurants, vending machines and stuff, it's a whole different world when you're, people are ordering on Amazon every couple minutes, or seconds even, our products. But they, being able to track all that... >> Can you scope the problem statement and the opportunity? Because if I just kind of just, again, I'm not, you're in, it's your company, you're in the weeds, you're at the data, you're everything, But it just seems me, the world's now more integration, more different data sources. You've got suppliers, they have their different IT back ends. Some are in the cloud, some aren't in the cloud. This is, like, a hard problem when you want to bring data together. I mean, API certainly help, but can you scope the problem, and, like, what we're talking about here? >> Well, we've got so many different sources of data now, right? So we used to be relying on a couple of aggregators who would pull all this data for us and hand us an aggregated view of things. But now we're able to partner with different retailers and get detail, granular information about transactions, orders. And it's just changed the game, changed the landscape from just, like, getting a rough view, to seeing the nuts and bolts and, like, all the moving parts. >> Yeah, and you see in data engineering much more tied into like cloud scale. Then you got the data scientists, more the democratization application and enablement. So I got to ask, how did you guys connect? What was the problem statement? How did you guys, did you have smoke and fire? You came in solved the problem? Was it a growth thing? How did this, how did you guys connect as a customer with Provectus? >> Yeah, I can elaborate on that. So we were in the very beginning of that journey when there was, like, just a few people in this new startup, let's call it startup within PepsiCo. >> John: Yeah. >> Calling like a, it's not only e-commerce, it was a huge belief from the top management that it's going to bring tremendous value to the enterprise. So there was no single use case, "Hey, do this and you're going to get that." So it's a huge belief that e-commerce is the future. Some industry trends like from brand-centric to consumer-centric. So brand, product-centric. Amazon has the mission to build the most customer-centric customer company. And I believe that success, it gets a lot of enterprises are being influenced by that success. So I remember that time, PepsiCo had a huge belief. We started building just from scratch, figuring out what does the business need? What are the business use cases? We have not started with the IT. We have not started with this very complicated migrations, modernizations. >> John: So clean sheet of paper. >> Yeah. >> From scratch. >> From scratch. >> And so you got the green light. >> Yeah. >> And the leadership threw the holy water on that and said, "Hey, we'll do this."? >> That's exactly what happened. It was from the top down. The CEO kind of set aside the e-commerce vision as kind of being able to, in a rapidly evolving business place like e-commerce, it's a growing field. Not everybody's figured it out yet, but to be able to change quickly, right? The business needs to change quickly. The technology needs to change quickly. And that's what we're doing here. >> So this is interesting. A lot of companies don't have that, actually, luxury. I mean, it's still more fun because the tools are available now that all the hyper scales built on their own. I mean, back in the day, 10 years ago, they had to build it all, Facebook. You didn't know, I had people on here from Pinterest and other companies. They had to build all of that from scratch. Now cloud's here. So how did you guys do this? What was the playbook? Take us through the AI because it sounds like the AI is core, you know, belief principle of the whole entire system. What did you guys do? Take me through the journey there. >> Yeah. Beyond management decisions, strategic decisions that has been made as a separate startup, whatever- >> John: That's great. >> So some practical, tactical. So it may sound like a cliche, but it's a huge thing because I work with many enterprises and this, like, "center of excellence" that does a nice technology stuff and then looks for the budget on the different business units. It just doesn't go anywhere. It could take you forever to modernize. >> We call that the Game of Thrones environment. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Nothing ever gets done 'till it blows up at the end. >> Here, these guys, and I have to admit, I don't want to steal their thunder. I just want to emphasize it as an external person. These guys just made it so differently. >> John: Yeah. >> They even physically sat in a different office in a WeWork co-working and built that business from scratch. >> That's what Andy Jackson talked about two years ago. And if you look at some of the big successes on AWS, Capital One, all the big, Goldman Sachs. The leadership, real commitment, not like BS, like total commitment says, "Go." But enough rope to give you some room, right? >> Yeah. I think that's the thing is, there was always an IT presence, right, overseeing what we were doing within e-commerce, but we had a lot of freedoms to make design choices, technology choices, and really accelerate the business, focus on those use cases where we could make a big impact with a technology choice. >> Take me through the stages of the AI transformation. What are some of the use cases and specific tactics you guys executed on? >> Well, I think that the supply chain, which I think is a hot topic right now, but that was one use case where we're using, like, data real time, real time data to inform our sales projections and delivery logistics. But also our marketing return on investment, I feel like that was a really interesting, complex problem to solve using machine learning, Because there's so much data that we needed to process in terms of countries, territories, products, like where do you spend your limited marketing budget when you have so many choices, and, using machine learning, boil that all down to, you know, this is the optimal choice, right now. >> What were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them in the early days to get things set up, 'cause it takes a lot of energy to get it going, to get the models. What were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them? >> Well, I think some of it was expertise, right? Like having a partner like Provectus and Stepan really helped because they could guide us, Stepan could guide us, give his expertise and what he knows in terms of what he's seen to our budding and growing business. >> And what were the things that you guys saw that you contributed on? And was there anything new that you had to do together? >> Yeah, so yeah. First of all, just a very practical tip. Yes, start with the use cases. Clearly talk to the business and say, "Hey, these are the list of the use cases" and prioritize them. So not with IT, not with technology, not with the migration thing. Don't touch anything on legacy systems. Second, get data in. So you may have your legacy systems or some other third party systems that you work with. There's no AI without data. Get all the pipelines, get data. Quickly boat strap the data lake house. Put all the pipelines, all the governance in place. And yeah, literally took us three months to get up and running. And we started delivering first analytical reports. It's just to have something back to business and keep going. >> By the way, that's huge, speed. I mean, this is speed. You go back and had that baggage of IT and the old antiquated systems, you'd be dragging probably months. Right? >> It's years, years. Imagine you should migrate SAP to the cloud first. No, you don't do don't need to do that. >> Pipeline. >> Just get data. I need data. >> Stream that data. All right, where are we now? When did you guys start? I want to get just going to timeline my head 'cause I heard three months. Where are we now? You guys threw it. Now you have impact. You have, you have results. >> Yeah. I mean that for our marketing ROI engine, we've built it and it's developed within e-commerce, but we've started to spread it throughout the organization now. So it's not just about the digital and the e-commerce space. We're deploying it to, you know, regionally to other, to Europe, to Latin America, other divisions within PepsiCo. And it's just grown exponentially. >> So you have scale to it right now? >> Yeah. Well- >> How far are you in now? What, how many years, months, days? >> E-commerce, the division was created six years ago, which is, so we've had some time to develop this, our machine learning capabilities and this use case particular, but it's increasingly relevant and expansion is happening as we speak. >> What are you most proud of? You look back at the impact. What are you most proud of? >> I think the relationship we built with the people, you know, who use our technology, right. Just seeing the impact is what makes me proud. >> Can you give an example without revealing any confidential information? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was an example from my talk about, I was approached recently by our sales team. They were having difficulty with supply chain, monitoring our fill rate of our top brands with these retailers. And they come up to me, they have this problem. They're like, "How do we solve it?" So we work together to find a data source, just start getting that data in the hands of people who can use it within days. You know, not talking like a long time. Bring that data into our data warehouse, and then surface the data in a tool they can use, you know, within a matter of a week or two. >> I mean, the transformation is just incredible. In fact, we were talking on theCUBE earlier today around, you know, data warehouses in the cloud, data meshes of different pros and cons. And the theme that came out of that conversation was data's a product now. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> And what you're kind of describing is, just gimme the product or find it. >> Russ: Right. >> And bring it in with everything else. And there's some, you know, cleaning and stuff people do if they have issues with that. But, if not, it's just bring it in, right? It's a product. >> Well, especially with the data exchanges now. AWS has a data exchange and this, I think, is the future of data and what's possible with data because you don't have to start from, okay, I've got this Excel file somebody's been working with on their desktop. This is a, someone's taken that file, put it into a warehouse or a data model, and then they can share it with you. >> John: So are you happy with these guys? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> You're actually telling the story. What was the biggest impact that they did? Was it partnering? Was it writing code, bringing development in, counseling, all the above, managed services? What? >> I think the biggest impact was the idea, you know, like being able to bring ideas to the table and not just, you know, ask us what we want, right? Like I think Provectus is a true partner and was able to share that sort of expertise with us. >> You know, Andy Jackson, whenever I interview on theCUBE, he's now in charge of all Amazon. But when he was at (inaudible). He always had to use their learnings, get the learnings out. What was the learnings you look back now and say, Hey, those were tough times. We overcome them. We stopped, we started, we iterated, we kept moving forward. What was the big learning as you look back, some of the key success points, maybe some failures that you overcome. What was the big learnings that you could share with folks out there now that are in the same situation where they're saying, "Hey, I'd rather start from scratch and do a reset." >> Yeah. So with that in particular, yes, we started this like sort of startup within the enterprise, but now we've got to integrate, right? It's been six years and e-commerce is now sharing our data with the rest of the organization. How do we do that, right? There's an enterprise solution, and we've got this scrappy or, I mean, not scrappy anymore, but we've got our own, you know, way of doing. >> Kind of boot strap. I mean, you were kind of given charter. It's a start up within a big company, I mean- >> But our data platform now is robust, and it's one of the best I've seen. But how do we now get those systems to talk? And I think Provectus has came to us with, "Here, there's this idea called data mesh, where you can, you know, have these two independent platforms, but share the data in a centralized way. >> So you guys are obviously have a data mesh in place, big part of the architecture? >> So it is in progress, but we know the next step. So we know the next step. We know the next two steps, what we're going to do, what we need to do to make it really, to have that common method, data layer. between different data products within organization, different locations, different business units. So they can start talking to each other through the data and have specific escalates on the data. And yeah. >> It's smart because I think one of the things that people, I think, I'd love to get your reaction to this is that we've been telling the story for many, many years, you have horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized domain solutions, you need machine learning that's smart, but you need a lot of data to help it. And that's not, a new architecture, that's a data plane, it's control plane, but now everyone goes, "Okay, let's do silos." And they forget the scale side. And then they go, "Wait a minute." You know, "I'm not going to share it." And so you have this new debate of, and I want to own my own data. So the data layer becomes an interesting conversation. >> Yeah, yes. Meta data. >> Yeah. So what, how do you guys see that? Because this becomes a super important kind of decision point architecturally. >> I mean, my take is that there has to be some, there will always be domains, right? Everyone, like there's only so much that you can find commonality across, like in industry, for example. But there will always be a data owner. And, you know, kind of like what happened with rush to APIs, how that enabled microservices within applications and being sharing in a standardized way, I think something like that has to happen in the data space. So it's not a monolithic data warehouse, it's- >> You know, the other thing I want to ask you guys both, if you don't mind commenting while I got you here, 'cause you're both experts. >> We just did a showcase on data programmability. Kind of a radical idea, but like data as code, we called it. >> Oh yeah. >> And so if data's a product and you're acting on, you've got an architecture and system set up, you got to might code it's programmable. You need you're coding with data. Data becomes like a part of the development process. What do you guys think of when you hear data as code and data being programmable? >> Yeah, it's a interesting, so yeah, first of all, I think Russ can elaborate on that, Data engineering is also software engineering. Machine learning engineering is a software. At the end of the day, it's all product. So we can use different terms and buzz words for that but this is what we have at the end of the day. So having the data, well I will use another buzz word, but in terms of the headless architecture- >> Yes. >> When you have a nice SDK, nice API, but you can manipulate with the data as your programming object to build reach applications for your users, and give it, and share not as just a table in Redshift or a bunch of CSV files in S3 bucket, but share it as a programmable thing that you can work with. >> Data as code. >> Yeah. This is- >> Infrastructure code was a revolution for DevOps, but it's not AI Ops so it's something different. It's really it's data engineering. It's programming. >> Yeah. This is the way to deliver data to your consumers. So there are different ways you can show it on a dashboard. You can show it, you can expose it as an API, or you can give it as an object, programmable interface. >> So now you're set up with a data architecture that's extensible 'cause that's the goal. You don't want to foreclose. You must think about that must keep you up at night. What's going to foreclose that benefit? 'Cause there's more coming. Right? >> Absolutely. There's always more coming. And I think that's why it's important to have that robust data platform to work from. And yeah, as Stepan mentioned, I'm a big believer in data engineering as software engineering. It's not some like it's not completely separate. You have to follow the best practices software engineers practice. And, you know, really think about maintainability and scalability. >> You know, we were riffing about how cloud had the SRE managing all those servers. One person, data engineering has a many, a one to many relationships too. You got a lot going on. It's not managing a database. It's millions of data points and data opportunity. So gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. And thanks for telling the story of Pepsi. >> Of course, >> And great conversation. Congratulations on this great customer. And thanks for >> coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, thank you. Thanks, Russ, would you like to wrap it up with the pantry shops story? >> Oh, yeah! I think it will just be a super relevant evidence of the agility and speed and some real world applicable >> Let's go. Close us out. >> So when, when the pandemic happened and there were lockdowns everywhere, people started buying things online. And we noticed this and got a challenge from our direct to consumer team saying, "Look, we need a storefront to be able to sell to our consumers, and we've got 30 days to do it." We need to be able to work fast. And so we built not just a website, but like everything that behind it, the logistics of supply chain aspects, the data platform. And we didn't just build one. We built two. We got pantry shop.com and snacks.com, within 30 days. >> Good domains! >> The domain broker was happy on that one. Well continue the story. >> Yeah, yeah. So I feel like that the agility that's required for that kind of thing and the like the planning to be able to scale from just, you know, an idea to something that people can use every day. And, and that's, I think.- >> And you know, that's a great point too, that shows if you're in the cloud, you're doing the work you're prepared for anything. The pandemic was the true test for who was ready because it was unforeseen force majeure. It was just like here it comes and the people who were in the cloud had that set up, could move quickly. The ones that couldn't. >> Exactly. >> We know what happened. >> And I would like to echo this. So they have built not just a website, they have built the whole business line within, and launched that successfully to production. That includes sales, marketing, supply chain, e-commerce, aside within 30 days. And that's just a role model that could be used by other enterprises. >> Yeah. And it was not possible without, first of all, right culture. And second, without cloud Amazon elasticity and all the tools that we have in place. >> Well, the right architecture allows for scale. That's the whole, I mean, you did everything right at the architecture that's scale. I mean, you're scaling. >> And we empower our engineers to make those choices, right. We're not, like, super bureaucratic where every decision has to be approved by the manager or the managers manager. The engineers have the power to just make good decisions, and that's how we move fast. >> That's exactly the future right there. And this is what it's all about. Reliability, scale agility, the ability to react and have applications roll out on top of it without long timeframes. Congratulations. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Appreciate it. All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay, you're watching theCUBE here at re:MARS 2020, I'm John Furrier. Stay tuned. We've got more coverage coming after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>I've got Mada Mykola here with me, commerce architect at PepsiCo Mada. Welcome to the program, >>Lisa. >>So we're going to be talking about the solution that you implemented, um, that helped with the global supply chain. So let's talk though, first about your role commerce architect. Help me understand that a little bit better. >>So Frito, uh, PepsiCo is pretty big. It's a conglomerate of multiple product lines. So I worked for Frito-Lay, which is basically all the salty snacks. And then we have, uh, the Quaker products as well in our portfolio. So I oversee all the architecture for all the commercial IOT solutions, uh, in the CFNA portfolio. >>Got it all the commercial lines. So we all know the last 18 months major challenges with the global supply chain component shortages. We've seen a huge increase in the cost of raw materials, um, limited labor, but you guys actually started to tackle this challenge before the pandemic happened. So talk to me about the catalyst that PepsiCo, what you saw to modernize field service and supply chain application. >>Yeah, so we have a pretty old system that our field force, our frontline users are using. So we have a world-class supply chain system where we go into the stores and place orders and deliver products, the us, and then we penetrate, I think, more than 95% of the households with our products. So we need to have a robust supply chain as well as a good frontline sales application, to be able to manage the orders and be able to deliver the products. Right? So the system that we have is almost 20 year old system running on a video data technology. There've been trying to replace that for a while now. And finally, we started this, uh, early last year to completely replace the solution with a brand new iPhone based app. Uh, and then that gives our frontline the ability to go place orders, do deliveries to retail execution in the store, like checking checkout, build displays. There are so much functionality that our RSRs or Franklin users do in the stores and this app enables them to do much more efficient. >>And we're going to break into that, but you mentioned you had a 20 year old technology. Talk to me about some of the challenges that that likely presented to those frontline workers. >>Yeah. I mean, there are multiple challenges for one, we cannot enable new business models. So business wants to come up with new ideas for, um, to be able to implement in the field, but with our system being so old, it's so hard to implement anything on that one. And then even the physical device is not scaling. We had a lot of memory issues, so it's time for it to kind of retire. And also the technology we use the 3g technologies retiring pretty soon at the next year. So we were definitely need to move to a new solution. And this is one of the most things we have to do, but right away. So that's where we started the project and we are in pilot phase right now. >>What would have been some of those negative consequences? Had you not undertaken the effort? I imagine from a competitive perspective, knowing how much competition is out there, what would some of those challenges have been if this had persisted? >>Yeah. So one is the stability of the application, right? So, uh, the frontline users have to spend more time because the app is not stable, the current one. So that reduces the efficiency of our Salesforce. Right? And then on the other hand, we also not able to put new features or new business models enable new business models on top of the existing ones. So we are losing out on some of them because of our outdated system. So that's one thing we want to solve with the new one. >>So this is really critical to really evolve PepsiCo's business at, at its baseline. Right? >>That's true. Yeah. It is very critical application that we're building and this will enable us to do a lot more things in future. And we can come up with new ideas, including like virtual reality or connecting to multiple systems. There are so many new ideas that we want to enable once we have this in place. >>Awesome. Talk to me about why Couchbase, and then tell us more about, you started to talk a little bit about the solution, but let's go ahead and dig in and unpack the actual solution that you implemented. >>Yeah. So this is, eh, we call it an ERP and a mobile device because it has so much functionality as a company three. Totally. We have been, uh, over a hundred years, uh, in this business, right. We have so many, uh, optimized process, uh, that we have that kind of led to some digital in the system because we want to do in a particular way, because that's the best way to do it as part of our business process. So what we're trying to do here is take that business process and also provide an app that will enhance it and then connect to more, more systems. So that's what we're trying to do here. And then on top of that one, we will replace all the existing peripherals that we use with the new technology, like Bluetooth and also, so that, uh, the, they are much more faster, and it's a lot more productive for our frontline force. >>Sounds like a lot of sales folks are going to be a lot more productive. Talk to me about where Couchbase is as an integral component to this new system. >>Yeah. So one of the key requirements for this app is an offline mode. What that means is, uh, one of our Salesforce who go from our system, uh, from our DC to all the stores, should be able to run the whole day without any, uh, major disruption, even if they're not connected, let's say because when they go into big stores, typically there's no connection. There are metal boxes. So the cellular reception is not there, but most of our work that we do from our frontline is within the store. So it has to be a full offline where we have to have all the data within the device, and we should be able to place artists create inventory that records or adjust inventory, and then create invoices. All the majority of the things that we do are in the store and they should be able to do without, um, the kind of connection. So that's where we explored multiple options and kind of zeroed in on Couchbase where we bring all the data into Couchbase based database on the device, and then sync it when there is connection, but there's no connection. We still have all the data on the device and we can go do all of our duties in the stores without any issues, even if it is not connected. >>So the sales folks can be in the stores with their mobile device, doing all the transactions that they need to do with the stores, regardless of if there's connectivity. Talk to me about what happens when they get back to connectivity in that and the Couchbase database sync. >>Yeah. And, uh, the other big thing we want is instant connect. I mean, when there's connectivity, we want instant sync with the backend, right? If there's new data that comes, we'll need that in the device at the same time, if I place an order, I want to send it back immediately to our backend systems for that our fulfillment stacks for those. So that's very critical when we have a lot of cutoff times for our artists. So we need artists as soon as we've placed to be going to the backend systems. So what happens when it gets connected, as soon as the sales folks come out of the store, or when within the store, they got connectivity, these codebase technology that we are using using the sync gateway immediately syncs the data back and forth. Uh, if there is any new data that's available. So that is key for us in this particular app. >>So our transactions happening in, in real time or near real time. >>Yeah. So the data flow happens in real time when this kind of gritty, but when it is not connected still, it doesn't have any issue with the actual transactions with the artists that can go complete anything that they would >>Got it. Okay. So there's no impediment there. In fact, it's a productivity enhancer. It sounds like for all of those sales folks out on the frontline TA. So, so millions of documents go through the system, tens of billions of dollars. Talk to me about the volume of data and the actual monetary value. That's traversing the system. >>Yeah. It's huge. Again, this is kind of weak. It's the lifeline of the company. The seals are always the life of any company, right? So most of the goes through our system. And, um, we're talking anywhere between hundreds of thousands of dollars that flow through back and forth, uh, between, uh, between the device and the server. So there's a lot of master data that comes like products place from customers, all that information that comes from the backend to the device and all the orders, inventory, and everything that gets created on the device gets flown back to the subtler. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's a very complex system. And also from the volume perspective, it's huge. So we had to build a massive infrastructure on the backend to be able to handle all this. One of the key feature is again, we have this massive data that we need to sync to the devices, but each device should only get the portion of the data that they want because a particular Salesforce only goes to a small set of 20 stores, let's say. So the data that we seem to that device is only for those 20 stores. So that's the key here. So Couchbase allows us to do that. The codebase sync, where we can subset the data into different portions and only send the data that is relevant for a particular device. >>So then from a, from a latency perspective, it must be pretty low latency, pretty fast to be able to get this data back to the device and to the sales person that is in the middle of a transaction. >>Yes. Uh, I mean, it's pretty, the sink is very fast. The Cosby's sink, especially user's web sockets. And we do continuous replicators where if I complete an order, the next instant it's on the stairwell. So it's, it's we observed the speeds improve a lot. So the technology that we are using users are things for a long, long time compared to code based. And that's another productivity gain for our Salesforce. >>What were some of the differentials? You mentioned some of the technology requirements that PepsiCo had in rearchitecting, the infrastructure, but what were some of the key technology differentiators that really made Couchbase stand out as the obvious choice? >>Yeah, so we, when we started this project, we all know the sink is the key for this whole project, because we thought that data going back and forth, we cannot really build a robust, um, uh, offline app. So we looked at multiple, uh, options, other providers that are doing the sink. And we also looked at building our own sink. Uh, in-house using API APIs, but then we did lots of, uh, performance testing across all the, uh, options that we had at that time. And then Ottawa cost base came above. All of them are pretty handle it. So obviously we can coach base takes care of the sink, and then we can focus on our business process. So we can go build all the business process and not worry about how we build a single. And then that is itself a big effort. So that's what caught me is prior to seeing instant sync engine. And then we were able to focus more on our, uh, the app application, the frontline application, the sales application, >>And those business processes. Let's talk about some of the business outcomes. We've mentioned a few already in our conversation, increased in productivity. The sales forces increased in that as well, but I imagine there's a lot of benefits for the end-user customer in terms of being able to get the transactions completed faster. What are some of those positive business outcomes that PepsiCo is seeing as a result of implementing Couchbase? >>Yeah. So you hit on a couple of them when the sink times are definitely a big factor with that will directly give more time for the sales folks to go either go to most stores or even they go to the existing stores, they can do more, spend more time with the customer merchandising and making sure everything is correct. So that's one also the new app users, uh, connect with a lot of new peripherals that are not available on the previous platform. Um, also the, uh, our folks are very, uh, enthusiastic about using a new app, right? So it's like coming into the 21st century for them using such an old lab for a long time. So a lot of things that they see, they can see the images of the bags while ordering, which was not a feature earlier. Some of them are small, but they make a huge impact on our users. >>Um, so yeah, I mean, and then this is just a start that we are doing. And then once we are able to completely implement this one, we have a lot more going into, in future. I was just talking about, we can do virtual reality or show them how to sell using what filter do. We can show a display to a store manager saying, Hey, I want to put a display here. And this is how it looks. They can show it on the phone that Dan just explaining and showing some paper images. So there's a lot of possibilities, >>A lot of improvements to the customer experience. It sounds like, it sounds like adoption is quite high for your folks who are used to 20 year old technology, probably being very, uh, excited that they have a modern app. But talk to me a little bit about the appetite of the organization to continue modernizing the application infrastructure and presuming going from older technology to that 21st century, like you talked about. >>Yeah. So in other parts, we are already modernized some of these. So we have been on the journey for the last four or five years building multiple digital platforms. So one of the example I can give is when COVID hit, there's a lot of disruption for everybody, for the consumers. So they are not able to find the products in the stores, but people are afraid to go to the stores to even buy products. So we reacted very quickly and opened a consumer of a website called snacks or calm, which Pepsi never sold it to the directly. We always go through our stores, but the first time we open the consumer channel and base powered some of it for the backend purpose. So this is not a mobile app, it's just a desktop app, but we already have been on the district has mission journey even before we quickly turned into COVID for the snacks.com. >>And similarly, we are, you are doing this for our retail execution portion of it, um, using this product. So, and then we'll be continuing to do this going forward, or to enable a lot of functionality for, uh, I mean, for all of our sales, as well as, uh, supply chain and other systems, so that we can be more efficient. We can be more elastic saying if there is more demand, our backend should be able to handle all that, uh, which was not the case before extra. Now we built a state of the art backend system on cloud. So there's a lot of transmission, digital transmission going on within PepsiCo. And I'm really proud to be part of this project so that we took this to the next level. And then this is just a start. We can do a lot more, >>Right? This is just the beginning. That sounds like a great transformation for a history company that we all, everybody knows PepsiCo and all of its products. But it sounds like when the pandemic hit, you had the infrastructure in place to be able to pivot quickly to launch that direct to consumer, which of course consumers, patients has been quite thin in the last year and a half. Talk to me a little bit about the impact to the overall organization as a result of being able to, to get more direct with those consumers. >>Yeah. So till now, again, we are, the business model is we sell to the stores and then go to the customer. So we'd never get a direct, uh, sense of what consumer, uh, liking is. I mean, we get through some surveys and stuff, but we don't have a direct channel with the consumer, which this particular product enabled us next.com. So we know the consumer behavior, how they, um, buying patterns, browsing patterns, which ones they like and including with geography. And also we learned a lot from a consumer behavior point of view for the project. And then we kept on enhancing. So one new thing we introduced was called multipack where the consumers can come and make their own market practices. They can say, okay, I need this many of this particular product, this product per I can make that multipack. And we ship them the customized market back. >>And it was such a huge hit that we are not able to even fulfill them so much demand was there for that one. So we had to revamp and then get back. And now it's a huge thing on our snacks that complex. So all of this is possible because we had a digital platform underneath that supports this kind of innovation. So the new business models are just coming to life in within weeks or even few months. And that's what we will be trying to do with the new platform that could billing for this app as well, where we'll bring in a lot of new business models. We have >>Excellent, a lot of, uh, transformation. It sounds like at PepsiCo in the last couple of years, I'd love the customization, that personalization route that you're going. I think that's going to be a huge hit for consumers. And as you said, there's a lot of demand letter. Thank you for joining me today, talking about how you are modernizing the field service and supply chain application, the impact it's making for end users for your customers and for the sales folks. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much >>From out of McCullough. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation.

>>Mhm >>Welcome to this preview of couch based connect online 2021. My name is Dave Volonte with the cube and we're here with couch based ceo matt cain matt. Good to see you again. Welcome >>Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >>We are super excited at the Cube to partner with Couch Base this year to share the news, the analysis from connect online 21. What can attendees expect from the event this year? What's the theme? What can people really take away? >>They were fired up, you know, there is no different. Our theme this year is modernized now and it's something that we're hearing from our customers across the world is they think about leveraging technology to get closer to their customers and at the top of every one of their strategic agendas is figuring out how to build the best applications to service our needs as our personal lives and in our business lives and we're really focused on talking about the technology that we uniquely architected to enable this that stands aspects of relational database technology and new capabilities, leveraging those people technology, putting that into an integrated platform and really supporting customers. And we love talking about what we built Dave but we love even more when our customers share what they've been doing with our platform, customers like Pepsi and Amadeus and American greetings, you're going to hear them and their development meant teams talk about how they have leverage couch base to solve some of the most fundamental application challenges and how that's really opening up new businesses for them in their end markets. >>Let's talk a little bit more mad about that, the modernized now. I mean the trends that we're seeing in in the market place, they were in motion before the pandemic. But digital digitization and modernization has really become a high priority. Talk about why in your view now is the time to modernize and what's the mandate for enterprises? >>Well look, I think digital transformation has been a focus point for some time and I think that's going to continue as we go forward. But I think as enterprise think about the challenges they have in front of them to successfully transform digitally, they may be thinking about the problem a little bit differently in light of current circumstances. Uh and what we're seeing is enterprises have the desire to innovate, but they may not always have the resources or the capabilities to do it at the place they want to. And so how do they approach this challenge first and foremost, they need a platform that can help bridge the legacy world and the new one that they can safely evolve applications and modernize, you know, workloads that were dependent on relational databases while putting them into new platforms. At the same time, they need people to do this work. So if I'm an democrats, almost an insatiable demand to build new applications, but I don't necessarily have all the people and teams and capability and skill sets needed to support that. So as a technology company, we've got to think through how do we help provide the tools that will open up more people's ability to contribute to that digital transformation leveraging things like sequel is the fact of language in the database technology allowing enterprises to repurpose workforces free up investment dollars, free up people to really focus on the next generation of properties that are going to change their businesses. And so I think the current economic conditions haven't changed the fact that digital transformation is the top of the priority list. If anything, that reinforced the urge with which enterprises need to go after this, but also the way that they need to do it. But I can't just continue to throw niche technologies of problems. I've really got to think about what kind of platforms tonight and then in the future and a couch base as the modern database for enterprise applications. This is what we're going to spend time talking about and helping customers understand the value that we can unlock for them as they invest in the couch based platform. >>Super relevant now since we last talked matt, he made some big moves, not the least of which is you're now a public company. We've been following that. But what's changed what's new product wise and maybe one of the fundamentals of the market that that your your customers and your culture or driving. >>Yeah, well let's talk about first, what's not changed? We continue to be long term oriented couch basically believe we're in truly what we call a generational market transition and the challenges in front of enterprises unparalleled. So too are the opportunities for enterprises that get this right? They will innovate and thriving in their respective markets. And so as a company, we pride ourselves in being maniacally focused at solving unmet, underserved needs in the world of databases. And really thinking through what technological challenges do we need to innovate on store, customers can take that technology and successful. That's not, that hasn't changed that, that won't change. We continue to be insanely customer focused and really studying those problems and making sure that we're adding value in everything we do from a product perspective services, how we show up to help our customers and that's really important. Um certainly as you said, it's a big milestone for the company step in the public market. We're very proud of what we've accomplished over our first decade or so of existence. But we truly believe that we've been built for this moment and that market transition that ever have referred to um that that movement into the public markets allows us to talk more broadly about all that we've built and how customers are taking advantage of our technology case in point is probably the biggest release in company history couch based server seven oh, so while we were busy taking a step into the public market, we also continue to innovate as I said and are very pleased to be a market with couch base 70 which fundamentally bridges for enterprise customers to move from relational to modern databases and do that in a single integrated platform. And we're going to talk about that connect in more detail and how application developers can re platform applications in a much more seamless way and then start to innovate in a way, you know, that they never have. So a ton of work underway. We've got some really exciting announcements which I think we'll talk about here in the second at least plant the seeds on those. But we're going to be really focused on the innovation that we've delivered up to this point because it's so fundamentally valuable to the enterprise customers we serve and couldn't be more excited to share the benefits of that. That's actually what we're going to help customers do as we go forward. >>Well, we see a lot of companies and as as we evaluated, you've hit critical mass in terms of how we think about it successful I. P. O. Your surpassed $100 million in revenue 500 plus customers talk about the opportunity for couch based to continue to grow. What's in store. What's the focus? >>Well, as I mentioned, we're going to we're going to continue to innovate and so you know, ahead of the conference. We're going to talk about some really important upcoming innovations and I'm not gonna steal too much of the thunder from the show, people are really pumped and putting that material together? We we focus a lot on ensuring that we have the best database in the market, particularly for enterprise applications. Uh and really thinking through the architecture that will support applications today and going forward and we've been really successful with that date. As you mentioned, we have not only a lot of enterprise customers and we're really proud of those customers would support what were even more proud of though. Dave is the mission critical nature the enterprise nature of those applications. These companies are truly running their businesses on applications powered by pouches as we go forward. We have almost unlimited potential for new opportunity in acquiring new customers. Um and we're really focused on that and evangelizing what we've done successfully with our existing base to new customers and their respective markets and we continue to acquire those and you know will successfully expand because of the power of our platform. We've done a lot to invest in our partner ecosystem. So you know we have many I. S. V. S. That are taking our solutions to market. We have G. S. I. S. That are building practices around couch base because our database provides capabilities that others don't and they can run their businesses and help their end customers transform with the power of couch face. But Dave what we like to talk about a couch bases, we have opportunities to really help customers once we get in. We think about many factors of growth. So when we support a customer with an application, what often happens is that application growth because the enterprises successful and they put more users in or they deployed a new new geography at the same time, they realize, wow, if I can support highly interactive, highly scalable distributed applications in this particular area, I have hundreds, if not thousands of those in my enterprise, so I can use the platform for that. Then one of the things that we focus on is giving more and more capabilities to developers to enhance the performance and the personalization of their applications I mentioned, we support the sequel query language, we've got operational analytics, we've embedded full text search, we have things like eventing all of these are elegantly architected features that allow developers to build great applications and the more that were successful in helping developers do that, you know, the more, the more the company is going to grow. Um and then on top of all that we couldn't be more excited about about cloud and couch based cloud from the very outset has been a cloud, native platform, are enterprises are running this and multi and hybrid cloud deployments, but what we really have an opportunity to do is help them and run more of the service of, of that cloud solution and we're gonna be talking a lot more uh you know, come come the show about some specifics around that offering and could be more excited about augmenting or portfolio with some new capabilities there >>lot to learn at this event. Tons of meat on the bone. Okay. Matt, we're gonna leave it right there. Couch based, connect online. It's a two day event, october 20th to the 21st. More than 80 sessions geared for architects, developers, business users, open source advocates. Now the easiest way to register, all you gotta do is go to couch base dot com. You'll see the link there. There's a hackathon with prizes. So start developing and win. And while you're there, check out the free downloads with a number of different deployment options. Couch based, connect 2021 modernized. Now we'll see you there. >>Mhm mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America. 2020. Virtual Brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with our ongoing coverage of Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con 2020 North America. Of course, it's virtual like everything else is in 2020 but we're excited to be back. It's a terrific show, and we're excited our next guest. So let's introduce him. And we've got Sam Warner, the VP of offering manager and business line executive for storage for IBM. Sam. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. >>And also joining us is Brent Compton. He's a senior director of data services for Redhead. Great. See you, Brent. >>Thank you. >>So let's let's jump into it. Cloud Native. Everything's about cloud native. Everything's about containers. Everything is about kind of container ization and flexibility. But then there's this thing in the back and called storage. We actually have toe keep this stuff and record this stuff and have data protection for this stuff in business resiliency love to jump into it, so lets you know where does storage fit within a container world? And how is the growth of containers and the adoption containers really had you rethink the way that you think about storage and how clients you think about stories saying, Let's start with you >>e mean, it's a great question. And first off, I'm really excited about another cube con. Uh, we did Europe now, uh, doing North America so very excited to be, you know, seeing all the you know, all the news and all the people talking about the advancements around kubernetes. And we're very excited about it now. You asked a very good question. Important question. We're seeing an acceleration of digital transformation, and the people that are going through this digital transformation are using containers to now modernize the rest of their infrastructure. The interesting thing about it, though, is those initiatives are being driven out of the application teams. The business lines in an organization, and a lot of them don't understand that there's a lot of complexity to this storage piece here. So the storage teams I talked to are all of a sudden getting these initiatives thrown on them or a kind of halfway their strategy. And they're scratching their heads, trying to figure out now how they can support these applications with persistent storage. Because that's not where containers started. They started with micro services, and now now they're in a quandary. They have to deliver a certain S L. A to their customers, and they're trying to figure out how they do it in this new environment, which in a lot of cases, has been designed outside of their scope. So they're seeing issues with data protection. Some of the kind of core things that they've been dealing with for years are now. They're now having to solve all over again. So that's what we're working on helping them with reinventing how storage is deployed to help them deliver the same level of security, availability and everything they have in the past. Uh, in these new environments, >>right? So, yeah, e say you've been involved in this for a long time. You know, you've worked in hyper converge. You've worked in big data. You know, the evolution of big data continues to change, as ultimately we want to get people the information to make good decisions, but we've gone through a lot of integrations over the years. So how is it different? You know? Now how is it different with containers? What can we finally do you as a as an architect that we couldn't do before? >>Infrastructure is code. That's, I think, one of the fundamental differences of the storage admin of yesteryear versus storage admin of today today, Azaz Sam mentioned As people are developing and deploying applications, those applications need to dynamically provisioned the infrastructure dynamically provisioned what they need from compute dynamically provisioned what they need from storage dynamically provisioned network paths and so that that that element of infrastructure is code. A dynamically provisioned infrastructure is very different from well from yesterday, when applications or teams needed to. Well, when they needed storage, they would you know, they would file a ticket and typically wait. Now they make an a p A. Now they make an A p. I call and storage is dynamically provisioned and provided to their application. >>But what what I think hard to understand for the layman. And maybe it's just me, right? I It's very easy to understand dynamic infrastructure around, um compute right, I'm Pepsi. I'm running it out for the Super Bowl. I need I know how much people are gonna hit by hit my site and it's kind of easy to understand. Dynamic provisioning around networking again for the same example. What's less easy to understand its dynamic provisioning for storage? It's one thing to say, you know, there's a there's a pool of storage resource is that I'm going to dynamically provisioned for this particular after this particular moment. But one of the whole things about the dynamic is not only is it available when you need it, but I could make it big, and conversely, I could make it smaller go away. I get that for servers, and I kind of get that for networking, supporting an application and that example I just talked about. But we can't It doesn't go away a lot of the time for storage, right? That's important data that's maybe feeding another process. There's all kinds of rules and regulations, So when you talk about dynamic infrastructure for storage, it makes a lot of sense for grabbing some to provision for some new application. But it's >>hard to >>understand in terms of true dynamics in terms of either scaling down or scaling up or turning off when I don't particularly need that much capacity or even that application right now, how does it work within storage versus No, just servers or I'm grabbing them and then I'm putting it back in the pool. >>Let me start on this one, and then I'm gonna hand it off to Brent. Um, you know, let's not forget, by the way, that enterprises have very significant investments in infrastructure and they're able to deliver six nines of availability on their storage. And they have d are worked out in all of their security, encryption, everything. It's already in place, and they're sure that they can deliver on their SLS. So they want to start with that. You have to leverage that investment. So first of all, you have to figure out how to automate that into the environment, that existing sand, and that's where things like uh, a P I s the container storage interface CS I drivers come in. IBM provides that across your entire portfolio, allowing you to integrate your storage into a kubernetes environment into an open shipped environment so that it can be automated, but you have to go beyond that and be able to extend that environment, then into other infrastructure, for example, into a public cloud. So with the IBM flash system, family with our spectrum virtualized software were actually able to deploy that storage layer not only on Prem on our award winning a race, but we can also do it in the cloud. So we allow you to take your existing infrastructure investments and integrate that into your communities environment and using things like danceable, fully automated environment. I'll get into data protection before we're done talking. But I do want Brent to talk a bit about how container native storage comes into that next as well. On how you can start building out new environments for, uh, for your applications. >>Yeah, What the two of you are alluding to is effectively kubernetes services layer, which is not storage. It consumes storage from the infrastructure, Assam said. Just because people deploy Kubernetes cluster doesn't mean that they go out and get an entirely new infrastructure for that. If they're deploying their kubernetes cluster on premises, they have servers. If they're deploying their kubernetes cluster on AWS or an azure on G C P. They have infrastructure there. Uh, what the two of you are alluding to is that services layer, which is independent of storage that can dynamically provisioned, provide data protection services. As I mentioned, we have good stuff to talk about their relative to data protection services for kubernetes clusters. But that's it's the abstraction layer or data services layer that sits on top of storage, which is different. So the basics of storage underneath in the infrastructure, you know, remain the same, Jeff. But the how that storage is provisioned and this abstraction layer of services which sits on top of the storage storage might be IBM flash system array storage, maybe E m c sand storage, maybe a W S E B s. That's the storage infrastructure. But this abstraction layer that sits on top this data services layer is what allows for the dynamic interaction of applications with the underlying storage infrastructure. >>And then again, just for people that aren't completely tuned in, Then what's the benefit to the application developer provider distributor with that type of an infrastructure behind And what can they do that they just couldn't do before? >>Well, I mean Look, we're, uh, e I mean, we're trying to solve the same problem over and over again, right? It's always about helping application developers build applications more quickly helps them be more agile. I t is always trying to keep up with the application developer and always struggles to. In fact, that's where the emergency cloud really came from. Just trying to keep up with the developer eso by giving them that automation. It gives them the ability to provision storage in real time, of course, without having open a ticket like friends said. But really, the Holy Grail here is getting to a developed once and deploy anywhere model. That's what they're trying to get to. So having an automated storage layer allows them to do that and ensure that they have access to storage and data, no matter where their application gets it >>right, Right, that pesky little detail. When I have to develop that up, it does have to sit somewhere and and I don't think storage really has gotten enough of of the bright light, really in kind of this app centric, developer centric world, we talk all the time about having compute available and and software defined networking. But you know, having this software defined storage that lives comfortably in this container world is pretty is pretty interesting. In a great development, I want to shift gears a >>little bit. Just one thing. Go >>ahead, >>plus one to Sam's comments. There all the application developer wants, they want an A P I and they want the same a p I to provision the storage regardless of where their app is running. The rest of the details they usually don't care about. Sure. They wanted to perform what not give him an A p I and make it the same regardless of where they're running the app. >>Because not only do they want to perform, they probably just presume performance, right? I mean, that's the other thing is that the best in class quickly becomes presumed baseline in a very short short period of time. So you've got to just you just got to just deliver the goods, right? They're gonna get frustrated and not be productive. But I wanted to shift gears up a little bit and talk about some of the macro trends. Right? We're here towards the end of 2020. Obviously, Cove It had a huge impact on business and a lot of different ways. And it's really evolved from March, this light switch moment. Everybody work from home, too. Now, this kind of extended time, that's probably gonna go on for a while. I'm just curious some of the things that you've seen with your customers not so much at the beginning, because that was that was a special and short period of time. But mawr, as we've extended and and are looking to, um, probably extended this for a while, you know, What is the impact of this increased work from home increase attack surface? You know, some of these macro things that we're seeing that cove it has caused and any other kind of macro trends beyond just this container ization that you guys were seeing impacting your world. Start with you, Sam. >>You know, I don't think it's actually changed what people were going to do or the strategy. What I've seen it do is accelerate things and maybe changed the way they're getting their, uh and so they're actually a lot of enterprises were running into challenges more quickly than they thought they would. And so they're coming to us and asking us to help them. Saw them, for example, backing up their data and these container environments as you move mission critical applications that maybe we're gonna move more slowly. They're realizing that as they've moved them, they can't get the level of data protection they need. And that's why actually we just announced it at the end of October. Updates to our modern data protection portfolio. It now is containerized. It could be deployed very easily in an automated fashion, but on top of that, it integrates down into the A P. I layer down into CSE drivers and allows you to do container where snapshots of your applications so you could do operational recovery. If there's some sort of an event you can recover from that you can do D R. And you can even use it for data migration. So we're helping them accelerate. So the biggest I think requests I'm getting from our customers, and how can you help us accelerate? And how can you help us fix these problems that we went running into as we tried to accelerate our digital transformation? >>Brent, Anyone that you wanna highlight? >>Mm. Okay. Ironically, one of my team was just speaking with one of the cruise lines, um, two days ago. We all know what's happened them. So if we just use them as an example, I'm clearly our customers need to do things differently now. So plus one to Sam's statement about acceleration on I would add another word to that which is agility, you know, frankly, they're having to do things in ways they never envisioned 10 months ago. So there need to cut cycle times to deploy effectively new ways of how they transact business has resulted in accelerated poll for these types of infrastructure is code technologies. >>That's great. The one that jumped in my mind. Sam, is you were talking. We've we've had a lot of conversations. Obvious security always comes up on baking security and is is a theme. But ransomware as a specific type of security threat and the fact that these guys not only wanna lock up your data, but they want to go in and find the backup copies and and you know and really mess you up so it sounds like that's even more important to have the safe. And we're hearing, you know, all these conversations about air gaps and dynamic air gaps and, you know, can we get air gaps and some of these infrastructure set up so that we can, you know, put put those backups? Um, and recovery data sets in a safe place so that if we have a ransomware issue, getting back online is a really, really important thing, and it seems to just be increasing every day. We're seeing things, you know, if you can actually break the law sometimes if you if you pay the ransom because where these people operate, there's all kind of weird stuff that's coming out of. Ransomware is a very specific, you know, kind of type of security threat that even elevates, you know, kind of business continuity and resiliency on a whole nother level for this one particular risk factor. When if you're seeing some of that as well, >>it's a great point. In fact, it's clearly an industry that was resilient to a pandemic because we've seen it increase things. Is organized crime at this point, right? This isn't the old days of hackers, you know, playing around this is organized crime and it is accelerating. And that's one thing. I'm really glad you brought up. It's an area we've been really focused on across our whole portfolio. Of course, IBM tape offers the best most of the actual riel air gapping, physical air gapping We could take a cartridge offline. But beyond that we offer you the ability to dio you know, different types of logical air gaps, whether it's to a cloud we support. In fact, we just announced Now the spectrum protect. We have support for Google Cloud. We already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud. So we give you the ability to do logical air gapping off to those different cloud environments. We give you the ability to use worm capability so you can put your backups in a vault that can't be changed. So we give you lots of different ways to do it. In our high end enterprise storage, we offer something called Safeguarded copy where we'll actually take data off line that could be recovered almost instantly. Something very unique to our storage that gives you, for the most mission critical applications. The fastest path recovery. One of things we've seen is some of our customers have done a great job creating a copy. But when the event actually happens, they find is gonna take too long to recover the data and they end up having to pay the ransom anyway. So you really have to think through an Indian strategy on we're able to help customers do a kind of health checks of their environment and figure out the right strategy. We have some offerings to help come in and do that for our customers. >>Shift gears a little bit, uh, were unanswerable fest earlier this year and a lot of talk about automation. Obviously, answer was part of the Red Hat family, which is part of the IBM family. But, you know, we're seeing Mawr and Mawr conversations about automation about, you know, moving the mundane and the air prone and all the things that we shouldn't be doing as people and letting people doom or high value stuff. When if you could talk a little bit about the role of automation, that the kind of development of automation and how you're seeing that, you know, impact your deployments, >>right? You want to take that one first? >>Yeah, sure. Um, s o the first is, um when you think about individual kubernetes clusters. There's a level of automation that's required there. I mean, that's the fundamental. I mean, back to the infrastructure is code that's inherently. That's automation. To effectively declare the state of what you want your application, your cluster to be, and that's the essence of kubernetes. You declare what the state is, and then you pass that declaration to kubernetes, and it makes it so. So there's the kubernetes level automation. But then there's, You know what happens for larger enterprises when you have, you know, tens or hundreds of kubernetes clusters. Eso That's an area of Jeff you mentioned answerable. Now that's an area of with, you know, the work, the red hats doing the community for multi cluster management, actually in the community and together with IBM for automating the management of multiple clusters. And last thing I'll touch on here is that's particularly important as you go to the edge. I mean, this is all well and good when you're talking about, you know, safe raised floor data center environments. But what happens when you're tens or hundreds or even thousands of kubernetes clusters are running in an oil field somewhere? Automation becomes not only nice to have, but it's fundamental to the operation. >>Yeah, but let me just add onto that real quick. You know, it's funny, because actually, in this cove it era, you're starting to see that same requirement in the data center in the core data center. In fact, I would say that because there's less bodies now in the data center, more people working remotely. The automation in need for automation is actually actually accelerating as well. So I think what you said is actually true for the core data center now as well, >>right? So I wanna give you guys the last word before before we close the segment. Um, I'm gonna start with you, Brent. Really, From a perspective of big data and you've been involved again in big data for a long time. As you look back, it kind of the data warehouse era. And then we had kind of this whole rage with the Hadoop era, and, you know, we just continue to get more and more sophisticated with big data processes and applications. But at the end of the day, still about getting the right data to the right person at the right time to do something about it. I wonder if if you can, you know, kind of reflect over that journey and where we are now in terms of this mission of getting, you know, the right data to the right person at the right time so they could make the right decision. >>I think I'll close with accessibility. Um, that Z these days, we you know, the data scientists and data engineers that we work with. The key problem that they have is is accessibility and sharing of data. I mean, this has been wonderfully manifest. In fact, we did some work with the province of Ontario. You could look that stop hashtag house my flattening eso the work with them to get a pool of data. Scientists in the community in the province of Ontario, Canada, toe work together toe understand how to track co vid cases s such so that government could make intelligent responses and policy based on based on the fax so that that need highlights the accessibility that's required from today's, you know, yesteryear. It was maybe, uh, smaller groups of individual data scientists working in silos. Now it's people across industry as manifest by that That need accessibility as well as agility. They need to be able to spin up an environment that will allow them to in this case, um, to develop and deploy inference models using shared data sets without going through years of design. So accessibility on back to the back to the the acceleration and agility that Sam talked about. So I'll close with those words >>That's great. And the consistent with the democratization of two is another word that we're here, you know, over and over again in terms of, you know, getting it out of the hands of the data scientists and getting it into the hands of the people who are making frontline business decisions every day. And Sam for you, for your clothes. I love for you Thio reflect on kind of the changing environment in terms of your requirements for the types of workloads that you now are, you know, looking to support. So it's not just taking care of the data center and relatively straightforward stuff. But you've got hybrid. You've got multi cloud, not to mention all the media, the developments in the media between tape and obviously flash, um, spinning, spinning drives. But you know, really, We've seen this huge thing with flash. But now, with cloud and the increased kind of autumn autonomy ization of of units to be able to apply big batches in small batches to particular workloads across all these different requirements. When if you could just share a little bit about how you guys are thinking about, you know, modernizing storage and moving storage forward. What are some of your what are some of your your priorities? What are you looking forward to, uh, to be able to deliver, You know, basically the stuff underneath all these other applications. I mean, applications basically is data whether you I and some in some computer on top. You guys something underneath the whole package? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, first of all, you know, back toe what Brent was saying, Uh, data could be the most valuable asset of an enterprise. You could give an enterprising, incredible, uh, competitive advantage as an incumbent if you could take advantage of that data using modern analytics and a I. So it could be your greatest asset. And it can also be the biggest inhibitor to digital transformation. If you don't figure out how to build a new type of modern infrastructure to support access to that data and support these new deployment models of your application. So you have to think that through. And that's not just for your big data, which the big data, of course, is extremely important and growing at incredible pace. All this unstructured data, You also have to think about your mission critical applications. We see a lot of people going through their transformation and modernization of S a p with move toe s four Hana. They have to think about how that fits into a multi cloud environment. They need to think about the life cycle of their data is they go into these new modern environments. And, yes, tape is still a very vibrant part of that deployment. So what we're working on an IBM has always been a leader in software defined storage. We have an incredible portfolio of capabilities. We're working on modernizing that software to help you automate your infrastructure. And sure, you can deliver enterprise class sls. There's no nobody's going to alleviate the requirements of having, you know, near perfect availability. You don't because you're moving into a kubernetes environment. Get a break on your downtime. So we're able to give that riel enterprise class support for doing that. One of the things we just announced that the end of October was we've containerized our spectrum scale client, allowing you now toe automate the deployment of your cluster file system through communities. So you'll see more and more of that. We're offering you leading modern native protection for kubernetes will be the first to integrate with OCP and open ship container storage for data protection. And our flashes from family will continue to be on the leading edge of the curve around answerable automation and C s I integration with who are already so we'll continue to focus on that and ensure that you could take advantage of our world class storage products in your new modern environment. And, of course, giving you that portability between on from in any cloud that you choose to run in >>exciting times. No, no shortage of job security for you, gentlemen, that's for sure. All right, Well, Brent, Sam, thanks for taking a few minutes and, uh, is great to catch up. And again. Congratulations on the success. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alrighty, Sammy's Brent. I'm Jeff, You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con North America 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host of the Cube, our 11th year covering V emeralds. Not in person. It's virtual. I'm with my coast, Dave. A lot, of course. Ah, guest has been on every year since the cubes existed. Sanjay Putin, who is now the chief operating officer for VM Ware Sanjay, Great to see you. It's our 11th years. Virtual. We're not in person. Usually high five are going around. But hey, virtual fist pump, >>virtual pissed bump to you, John and Dave, always a pleasure to talk to you. I give you more than a virtual pistol. Here's a virtual hug. >>Well, so >>great. Back at great. >>Great to have you on. First of all, a lot more people attending the emerald this year because it's virtual again, it doesn't have the face to face. It is a community and technical events, so people do value that face to face. Um, but it is virtually a ton of content, great guests. You guys have a great program here, Very customer centric. Kind of. The theme is, you know, unpredictable future eyes is really what it's all about. We've talked about covert you've been on before. What's going on in your perspective? What's the theme of your main talks? >>Ah, yeah. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you folks. We we felt as we thought, about how we could make this content dynamic. We always want to make it fresh. You know, a virtual show of this kind and program of this kind. We all are becoming experts at many Ted talks or ESPN. Whatever your favorite program is 60 minutes on becoming digital producers of content. So it has to be crisp, and everybody I think was doing this has found ways by which you reduce the content. You know, Pat and I would have normally given 90 minute keynotes on day one and then 90 minutes again on day two. So 180 minutes worth of content were reduced that now into something that is that entire 180 minutes in something that is but 60 minutes. You you get a chance to use as you've seen from the keynote an incredible, incredible, you know, packed array of both announcements from Pat myself. So we really thought about how we could organize this in a way where the content was clear, crisp and compelling. Thekla's piece of it needed also be concise, but then supplemented with hundreds of sessions that were as often as possible, made it a goal that if you're gonna do a break out session that has to be incorporate or lead with the customer, so you'll see not just that we have some incredible sea level speakers from customers that have featured in in our pattern, Mikey notes like John Donahoe, CEO of Nike or Lorry beer C I, a global sea of JPMorgan Chase partner Baba, who is CEO of Zuma Jensen Wang, who is CEO of video. Incredible people. Then we also had some luminaries. We're gonna be talking in our vision track people like in the annuity. I mean, one of the most powerful women the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, chairman, CEO Pepsi or Bryan Stevenson, the person who start in just mercy. If you watch that movie, he's a really key fighter for social justice and criminal. You know, reform and jails and the incarceration systems. And Malala made an appearance. Do I asked her personally, I got to know her and her dad's and she spoke two years ago. I asked her toe making appearance with us. So it's a really, really exciting until we get to do some creative stuff in terms of digital content this year. >>So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. We covered that with Pat Gelsinger, but the business performance has been very strong with VM. Where, uh, props to you guys, Where does this all tie together for in your mind? Because you have the transformation going on in a highly accelerated rate. You know, cov were not in person, but Cove in 19 has proven, uh, customers that they have to move faster. It's a highly accelerated world, a lot. Lots changing. Multi cloud has been on the radar. You got security. All the things you guys are doing, you got the AI announcements that have been pumping. Thean video thing was pretty solid. That project Monterey. What does the customer walk away from this year and and with VM where? What is the main theme? What what's their call to action? What's what do they need to be doing? >>I think there's sort of three things we would encourage customers to really think about. Number one is, as they think about everything in infrastructure, serves APS as they think about their APS. We want them to really push the frontier of how they modernize their athletic applications. And we think that whole initiative off how you modernized applications driven by containers. You know, 20 years ago when I was a developer coming out of college C, C plus, plus Java and then emerge, these companies have worked on J two ee frameworks. Web Logic, Be Aware logic and IBM Web Street. It made the development off. Whatever is e commerce applications of portals? Whatever was in the late nineties, early two thousands much, much easier. That entire world has gotten even easier and much more Micro service based now with containers. We've been talking about kubernetes for a while, but now we've become the leading enterprise, contain a platform making some incredible investments, but we want to not just broaden this platform. We simplified. It is You've heard everything in the end. What works in threes, right? It's sort of like almost t shirt sizing small, medium, large. So we now have tens Ooh, in the standard. The advanced the enterprise editions with lots of packaging behind that. That makes it a very broad and deep platform. We also have a basic version of it. So in some sense it's sort of like an extra small. In addition to the small medium large so tends to and everything around at modernization, I think would be message number one number two alongside modernization. You're also thinking about migration of your workloads and the breadth and depth of, um, er Cloud Foundation now of being able to really solve, not just use cases, you are traditionally done, but also new ai use cases. Was the reason Jensen and us kind of partner that, and I mean what a great company and video has become. You know, the king maker of these ai driven applications? Why not run those AI applications on the best infrastructure on the planet? Remember, that's a coming together of both of our platforms to help customers. You know automotive banking fraud detection is a number of AI use cases that now get our best and we want it. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, which takes the B c f e m A Cloud Foundation proposition to smart Knicks on Dell, HP Lenovo are embracing the in video Intel's and Pen Sandoz in that smart make architectural, however, that so that entire world of multi cloud being operative Phobia Macleod Foundation on Prem and all of its extended use cases like AI or Smart Knicks or Edge, but then also into the AWS Azure, Google Multi Cloud world. We obviously had a preferred relationship with Amazon that's going incredibly well, but you also saw some announcements last week from, uh, Microsoft Azure about azure BMR solutions at their conference ignite. So we feel very good about the migration opportunity alongside of modernization on the third priority, gentlemen would be security. It's obviously a topic that I most recently taken uninterested in my day job is CEO of the company running the front office customer facing revenue functions by night job by Joe Coffin has been driving. The security strategy for the company has been incredibly enlightening to talk, to see SOS and drive this intrinsic security or zero trust from the network to end point and workload and cloud security. And we made some exciting announcements there around bringing together MAWR capabilities with NSX and Z scaler and a problem black and workload security. And of course, Lassiter wouldn't cover all of this. But I would say if I was a attendee of the conference those the three things I want them to take away what BMR is doing in the future of APS what you're doing, the future of a multi cloud world and how we're making security relevant for distributed workforce. >>I know David >>so much to talk about here, Sanjay. So, uh, talk about modern APS? That's one of the five franchise platforms VM Ware has a history of going from, you know, Challenger toe dominant player. You saw that with end user computing, and there's many, many other examples, so you are clearly one of the top, you know. Let's call it five or six platforms out there. We know what those are, uh, and but critical to that modern APS. Focus is developers, and I think it's fair to say that that's not your wheelhouse today, but you're making moves there. You agree that that is, that is a critical part of modern APS, and you update us on what you're doing for that community to really take a leadership position there. >>Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point, David. We way seek to constantly say humble and hungry. There's never any assumption from us that VM Ware is completely earned anyplace off rightful leadership until we get thousands, tens of thousands. You know, we have a half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years 70 million virtual machines. But we have toe earn that right and containers, and I think there will be probably 10 times as many containers is their virtual machines. So if it took us 20 years to not just become the leader in in virtual machines but have 70 million virtual machines, I don't think it will be 20 years before there's a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform. Now, why, Why VM Where and why do you think we can win in their long term. What are we doing with developers Number one? We do think there is a container capability independent of virtual machine. And that's what you know, this entire world of what hefty on pivotal brought to us on. You know, many of the hundreds of customers that are using what was formerly pivotal and FDR now what's called Tan Xue have I mean the the case. Studies of what those customers are doing are absolutely incredible. When I listen to them, you take Dick's sporting goods. I mean, they are building curbside, pick up a lot of the world. Now the pandemic is doing e commerce and curbside pick up people are going to the store, That's all based on Tan Xue. We've had companies within this sort of world of pandemic working on contact, tracing app. Some of the diagnostic tools built without they were the lab services and on the 10 zoo platform banks. Large banks are increasingly standardizing on a lot of their consumer facing or wealth management type of applications, anything that they're building rapidly on this container platform. So it's incredible the use cases I'm hearing public sector. The U. S. Air Force was talking about how they've done this. Many of them are not public about how they're modernizing dams, and I tend to learn the best from these vertical use case studies. I mean, I spend a significant part of my life is you know, it s a P and increasingly I want to help the company become a lot more vertical. Use case in banking, public sector, telco manufacturing, CPG retail top four or five where we're seeing a lot of recurrence of these. The Tan Xue portfolio actually brings us closest to almost that s a P type of dialogue because we're having an apse dialogue in the in the speak of an industry as opposed to bits and bytes Notice I haven't talked at all about kubernetes or containers. I'm talking about the business problem being solved in a retailer or a bank or public sector or whatever have you now from a developer audience, which was the second part of your question? Dave, you know, we talked about this, I think a year or two ago. We have five million developers today that we've been able to, you know, as bringing these acquisitions earn some audience with about two or three million from from the spring community and two or three million from the economic community. So think of those five million people who don't know us because of two acquisitions we don't. Obviously spring was inside Vienna where went out of pivotal and then came back. So we really have spent a lot of time with that community. A few weeks ago, we had spring one. You guys are aware of that? That conference record number of attendees okay, Registered, I think of all 40 or 50,000, which is, you know, much bigger than the physical event. And then a substantial number of them attended live physical. So we saw a great momentum out of spring one, and we're really going to take care of that, That that community base of developers as they care about Java Manami also doing really, really well. But then I think the rial audience it now has to come from us becoming part of the conversation. That coupon at AWS re invent at ignite not just the world, I mean via world is not gonna be the only place where infrastructure and developers come to. We're gonna have to be at other events which are very prominent and then have a developer marketplace. So it's gonna be a multiyear effort. We're okay with that. To grow that group of about five million developers that we today Kate or two on then I think there will be three or four other companies that also play very prominently to developers AWS, Microsoft and Google. And if we're one among those three or four companies and remembers including that list, we feel very good about our ability to be in a place where this is a shared community, takes a village to approach and an appeal to those developers. I think there will be one of those four companies that's doing this for many years to >>come. Santa, I got to get your take on. I love your reference to the Web days and how the development environment change and how the simplicity came along very relevant to how we're seeing this digital transformation. But I want to get your thoughts on how you guys were doing pre and now during and Post Cove it. You already had a complicated thing coming on. You had multi cloud. You guys were expanding your into end you had acquisitions, you mentioned a few of them. And then cove it hit. Okay, so now you have Everything is changing you got. He's got more complex city. You have more solutions, and then the customer psychology is change. You got to spectrums of customers, people trying to save their business because it's changed, their customer behavior has changed. And you have other customers that are doubling down because they have a tailwind from Cove it, whether it's a modern app, you know, coming like Zoom and others are doing well because of the environment. So you got your customers air in this in this in this, in this storm, you know, they're trying to save down, modernized or or or go faster. How are you guys changing? Because it's impacted how you sell. People are selling differently, how you implement and how you support customers, because you already had kind of the whole multi cloud going on with the modern APS. I get that, but Cove, it has changed things. How are you guys adopting and changing to meet the customer needs who are just trying to save their business on re factor or double down and continue >>John. Great question. I think I also talked about some of this in one of your previous digital events that you and I talked about. I mean, you go back to the last week of February 1st week of March, actually back up, even in January, my last trip on a plane. Ah, major trip outside this country was the World Economic Forum in Davos. And, you know, there were thousands of us packed into the small digits in Switzerland. I was sitting having dinner with Andy Jassy in a restaurant one night that day. Little did we know. A month later, everything would change on DWhite. We began to do in late February. Early March was first. Take care of employees. You always wanna have the pulse, check employees and be in touch with them. Because the health and safety of employees is much more important than the profits of, um, where you know. So we took care of that. Make sure that folks were taking care of older parents were in good place. We fortunately not lost anyone to death. Covert. We had some covert cases, but they've recovered on. This is an incredible pandemic that connects all of us in the human fabric. It has no separation off skin color or ethnicity or gender, a little bit of difference in people who are older, who might be more affected or prone to it. But we just have to, and it's taught me to be a significantly more empathetic. I began to do certain things that I didn't do before, but I felt was the right thing to do. For example, I've begun to do 25 30 minute calls with every one of my key countries. You know, as I know you, I run customer operations, all of the go to market field teams reporting to me on. I felt it was important for me to be showing up, not just in the big company meetings. We do that and big town halls where you know, some fractions. 30,000 people of VM ware attend, but, you know, go on, do a town hall for everybody in a virtual zoom session in Japan. But in their time zone. So 10 o'clock my time in the night, uh, then do one in China and Australia kind of almost travel around the world virtually, and it's not long calls 25 30 minutes, where 1st 10 or 15 minutes I'm sharing with them what I'm seeing across other countries, the world encouraging them to focus on a few priorities, which I'll talk about in a second and then listening to them for 10 15 minutes and be, uh and then the call on time or maybe even a little earlier, because every one of us is going to resume button going from call to call the call. We're tired of T. There's also mental, you know, fatigue that we've gotta worry about. Mental well, being long term. So that's one that I personally began to change. I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia. You know, 40 50%. My life has travel. It takes a day out of your life on either end, your jet lag. And then even when you get to a Tokyo or Beijing or to Bangalore or the London, getting between sites of these customers is like a 45 minute, sometimes in our commute. Now I'm able to do many of these 25 30 minute call, so I set myself a goal to talk to 1000 chief security officers. I know a lot of CEOs and CFOs from my times at S A P and VM ware, but I didn't know many security officers who often either work for a CEO or report directly to the legal counsel on accountable to the audit committee of the board. And I got a list of these 1,002,000 people we called email them. Man, I gotta tell you, people willing to talk to me just coming, you know, into this I'm about 500 into that. And it was role modeling to my teams that the top of the company is willing to spend as much time as possible. And I have probably gotten a lot more productive in customer conversations now than ever before. And then the final piece of your question, which is what do we tell the customer in terms about portfolio? So these were just more the practices that I was able to adapt during this time that have given me energy on dial, kind of get scared of two things from the portfolio perspective. I think we began to don't notice two things. One is Theo entire move of migration and modernization around the cloud. I describe that as you know, for example, moving to Amazon is a migration opportunity to azure modernization. Is that whole Tan Xue Eminem? Migration of modernization is highly relevant right now. In fact, taking more speed data center spending might be on hold on freeze as people kind of holding till depend, emmick or the GDP recovers. But migration of modernization is accelerating, so we wanna accelerate that part of our portfolio. One of the products we have a cloud on Amazon or Cloud Health or Tan Xue and maybe the other offerings for the other public dog. The second part about portfolio that we're seeing acceleration around is distributed workforce security work from home work from anywhere. And that's that combination off workspace, one for both endpoint management, virtual desktops, common black envelope loud and the announcements we've now made with Z scaler for, uh, distributed work for security or what the analysts called secure access. So message. That's beautiful because everyone working from home, even if they come back to the office, needs a very different model of security and were now becoming a leader in that area. of security. So these two parts of the portfolio you take the five franchise pillars and put them into these two buckets. We began to see momentum. And the final thing, I would say, Guys, just on a soft note. You know, I've had to just think about ways in which I balance work and family. It's just really easy. You know what, 67 months into this pandemic to burn out? Ah, now I've encouraged my team. We've got to think about this as a marathon, not a sprint. Do the personal things that you wanna do that will make your life better through this pandemic. That in practice is that you keep after it. I'll give you one example. I began biking with my kids and during the summer months were able to bike later. Even now in the fall, we're able to do that often, and I hope that's a practice I'm able to do much more often, even after the pandemic. So develop some activities with your family or with the people that you love the most that are seeing you a lot more and hopefully enjoying that time with them that you will keep even after this pandemic ends. >>So, Sanjay, I love that you're spending all this time with CSOs. I mean, I have a Well, maybe not not 1000 but dozens. And they're such smart people. They're really, you know, in the thick of things you mentioned, you know, your partnership with the scale ahead. Scott Stricklin on who is the C. C so of Wyndham? He was talking about the security club. But since the pandemic, there's really three waves. There's the cloud security, the identity, access management and endpoint security. And one of the things that CSOs will tell you is the lack of talent is their biggest challenge. And they're drowning in all these products. And so how should we think about your approach to security and potentially simplifying their lives? >>Yeah. You know, Dave, we talked about this, I think last year, maybe the year before, and what we were trying to do in security was really simplified because the security industry is like 5000 vendors, and it's like, you know, going to a doctor and she tells you to stay healthy. You gotta have 5000 tablets. You just cannot eat that many tablets you take you days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. So ah, grand simplification has to happen where that health becomes part of your diet. You eat your proteins and vegetables, you drink your water, do your exercise. And the analogy and security is we cannot deploy dozens of agents and hundreds of alerts and many, many consoles. Uh, infrastructure players like us that have control points. We have 70 million virtual machines. We have 75 million virtual switches. We have, you know, tens of million's off workspace, one of carbon black endpoints that we manage and secure its incumbent enough to take security and making a lot more part of the infrastructure. Reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. And with that comes a grand simplification of both the labor involved in learning all these tools. Andi, eventually also the cost of ownership off those particular tool. So that's one other thing we're seeking to do is increasingly be apart off that education off security professionals were both investing in ah, lot of off, you know, kind of threat protection research on many of our folks you know who are in a threat. Behavioral analytics, you know, kind of thread research. And people have come out of deep hacking experience with the government and others give back to the community and teaching classes. Um, in universities, there are a couple of non profits that are really investing in security, transfer education off CSOs and their teams were contributing to that from the standpoint off the ways in which we can give back both in time talent and also a treasure. So I think is we think about this. You're going to see us making this a long term play. We have a billion dollar security business today. There's not many companies that have, you know, a billion dollar plus of security is probably just two or three, and some of them have hit a wall in terms of their progress sport. We want to be one of the leaders in cybersecurity, and we think we need to do this both in building great product satisfying customers. But then also investing in the learning, the training enable remember, one of the things of B M worlds bright is thes hands on labs and all the training enable that happened at this event. So we will use both our platform. We in world in a variety of about the virtual environments to ensure that we get the best education of security to professional. >>So >>that's gonna be exciting, Because if you look at some of the evaluations of some of the pure plays I mean, you're a cloud security business growing a triple digits and, you know, you see some of these guys with, you know, $30 billion valuations, But I wanted to ask you about the market, E v m. Where used to be so simple Right now, you guys have expanded your tam dramatically. How are you thinking about, you know, the market opportunity? You've got your five franchise platforms. I know you're very disciplined about identifying markets, and then, you know, saying, Okay, now we're gonna go compete. But how do you look at the market and the market data? Give us the update there. >>Yeah, I think. Dave, listen, you know, I like davinci statement. You know, simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication, and I think you've touched on something that which is cos we get bigger. You know, I've had the great privilege of working for two great companies. s a P and B M where the bulk of my last 15 plus years And if something I've learned, you know, it's very easy. Both companies was to throw these TLS three letter acronyms, okay? And I use an acronym and describing the three letter acronyms like er or s ex. I mean, they're all acronyms and a new employee who comes to this company. You know, Carol Property, for example. We just hired her from Google. Is our CMO her first comments like, My goodness, there is a lot of off acronyms here. I've gotta you need a glossary? I had the same reaction when I joined B. M or seven years ago and had the same reaction when I joined the S A. P 15 years ago. Now, of course, two or three years into it, you learn everything and it becomes part of your speed. We have toe constantly. It's like an accordion like you expanded by making it mawr of luminous and deep. But as you do that it gets complex, you then have to simplify it. And that's the job of all of us leaders and I this year, just exemplifying that I don't have it perfect. One of the gifts I do have this communication being able to simplify things. I recorded a five minute video off our five franchise pill. It's just so that the casual person didn't know VM where it could understand on. Then, when I'm on your shore and when on with Jim Cramer and CNBC, I try to simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify because the more you can talk and analogies and pictures, the more the casual user. I mean, of course, and some other audiences. I'm talking to investors. Get it on. Then, Of course, as you go deeper, it should be like progressive layers or feeling of an onion. You can get deeper. It's not like the entire discussion with Sanjay Putin on my team is like, you know, empty suit. It's a superficial discussion. We could go deeper, but you don't have to begin the discussion in the bowels off that, and that's really what we don't do. And then the other part of your question was, how do we think about new markets? You know, we always start with Listen, you sort of core in contact our borough come sort of Jeffrey Moore, Andi in the Jeffrey more context. You think about things that you do really well and then ask yourself outside of that what the Jason sees that are closest to you, that your customers are asking you to advance into on that, either organically to partnerships or through acquisitions. I think John and I talked about in the previous dialogue about the framework of build partner and by, and we always think about it in that order. Where do we advance and any of the moves we've made six years ago, seven years ago and I joined the I felt VM are needed to make a move into mobile to really cement opposition in end user computing. And it took me some time to convince my peers and then the board that we should by Air One, which at that time was the biggest acquisition we've ever done. Okay. Similarly, I'm sure prior to me about Joe Tucci, Pat Nelson. We're thinking about nice here, and I'm moving to networking. Those were too big, inorganic moves. +78 years of Raghu was very involved in that. The decisions we moved to the make the move in the public cloud myself. Rgu pack very involved in the decision. Their toe partner with Amazon, the change and divest be cloud air and then invested in organic effort around what's become the Claudia. That's an organic effort that was an acquisition fast forward to last year. It took me a while to really Are you internally convinced people and then make the move off the second biggest acquisition we made in carbon black and endpoint security cement the security story that we're talking about? Rgu did a similar piece of good work around ad monetization to justify that pivotal needed to come back in. So but you could see all these pieces being adjacent to the core, right? And then you ask yourself, Is that context meaning we could leave it to a partner like you don't see us get into the hardware game we're partnering with. Obviously, the players like Dell and HP, Lenovo and the smart Knick players like Intel in video. In Pensando, you see that as part of the Project Monterey announcement. But the adjacent seas, for example, last year into app modernization up the stack and into security, which I'd say Maura's adjacent horizontal to us. We're now made a lot more logical. And as we then convince ourselves that we could do it, convince our board, make the move, We then have to go and tell our customers. Right? And this entire effort of talking to CSOs What am I doing is doing the same thing that I did to my board last year, simplified to 15 minutes and get thousands of them to understand it. Received feedback, improve it, invest further. And actually, some of the moves were now making this year around our partnership in distributed Workforce Security and Cloud Security and Z scaler. What we're announcing an XDR and Security Analytics. All of the big announcements of security of this conference came from what we heard last year between the last 12 months of my last year. Well, you know, keynote around security, and now, and I predict next year it'll be even further. That's how you advance the puck every year. >>Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts. So now we have a couple minutes left. But we did pull the audience and the community to get some questions for you, since it's virtually wanted to get some representation there. So I got three questions for you. First question, what comes after Cloud and number two is VM Ware security company. And three. What company had you wish you had acquired? >>Oh, my goodness. Okay, the third one eyes gonna be the turkey is one, I think. Listen, because I'm gonna give you my personal opinion, and some of it was probably predates me, so I could probably safely So do that. And maybe put the blame on Joe Tucci or somebody else is no longer here. But let me kind of give you the first two. What comes after cloud? I think clouds gonna be with us for a long time. First off this multi cloud world, you just look at the moment, um, that AWS and azure and the other clouds all have. It's incredible on I think this that multi cloud from phenomenon. But if there's an adapt ation of it, it's gonna be three forms of cloud. People are really only focus today in private public cloud. You have to remember the edge and Telco Cloud and this pendulum off the right balance of workloads between the data center called it a private cloud. The public cloud on one end and the telco edge on the other end. I think we're in a really good position for workloads to really swing between all three of those locations. Three other part that I think comes as a sequel to Cloud is cloud native. All of the capabilities a serverless functions but also containers that you know. Obviously the one could think of that a sister topics to cloud but the entire world of containers. The other seat, uh, then cloud a cloud native will also be topics, but these were all fairly connected. That's how I'd answer the first question. A security company? Absolutely. We you know, we aspire to be one of the leading companies in cyber security. I don't think they will be only one. We have to show this by the wealth on breath of our customers. The revenue momentum we have Gartner ranking us or the analysts ranking us in top rights of magic quadrants being viewed as an innovator simplifying the stack. But listen, we weren't even on the radar. We weren't speaking of the security conferences years ago. Now we are. We have a billion dollar security business, 20,000 plus customers, really strong presences and network endpoint and workload and Cloud Security. The three Coppola's a lot more coming in Security analytics, Cloud Security distributed workforce Security. So we're here to stay. And if anything, BMR persist through this, we're planning for multi your five or 10 year timeframe. And in that course I mean, the competition is smaller. Companies that don't have the breadth and depth of the n words are Andy muscle and are going market. We just have to keep building great products and serving customer on the third man. There's so many. But I mean, I think Listen, when I was looking back, I always wondered this is before I joined so I could say the summit speculatively on. Don't you know, make this This is BMR. Sorry. This is Sanjay one's opinion. Not VM. I gotta make very, very clear. Well, listen, I would have if I was at BMO in 2012 or 2013. I would love to about service now then service. It was a great company. I don't even know maybe the company's talk, but then talk about a very successful company at that time now. Maybe their priorities were different. I wasn't at the company at the time, but I can speculate if that had happened, that would have been an interesting Now I think that was during the time of Paul Maritz here and and so on. So for them, maybe there were other priorities the company need to get done. But at that time, of course, today s so it's not as big of a even slightly bigger market cap than us. So that's not happening. But that's a great example of a good company that I think would have at that time fit very well with VM Ware. And then there's probably we don't look back and regret we move forward. I mean, I think about the acquisitions we have made the big ones. Okay, Nice era air watch pop in black. Pivotal. The big moves we've made in terms of partnership. Amazon. What? We're announcing this This, you know, this week within video and Z scaler. So you never look back and regret. You always look for >>follow up on that To follow up on that from a developer, entrepreneurial or partner Perspective. Can you share where the white spaces for people to innovate around vm Where where where can people partner and play. Whether I'm an entrepreneur in a garage or venture back, funded or say a partner pivoting and or resetting with Govind, where's the white spaces with them? >>I think that, you know, there's gonna be a number off places where the Tan Xue platform develops, as it kind of makes it relevant to developers. I mean, there's, I think the first way we think about this is to make ourselves relevant toe all of that ecosystem around the C I. C. D type apply platform. They're really good partners of ours. They're like, get lab, You know, all of the ways in which open source communities, you know will play alongside that Hash E Corp. Jay frog there number of these companies that are partnering with us and we're excited about all of their relevancy to tend to, and it's our job to go and make that marketplace better and better. You're going to hear more about that coming up from us on. Then there's the set of data companies, you know, con fluent. You know, of course, you've seen a big I p o of a snowflake. All of those data companies, we'll need a very natural synergy. If you think about the old days of middleware, middleware is always sort of separate from the database. I think that's starting to kind of coalesce. And Data and analytics placed on top of the modern day middleware, which is containers I think it's gonna be now does VM or play physically is a data company. We don't know today we're gonna partner very heavily. But picking the right set of partners been fluent is a good example of one on. There's many of the next generation database companies that you're going to see us partner with that will become part of that marketplace influence. And I think, as you see us certainly produce out the VM Ware marketplace for developers. I think this is gonna be a game changing opportunity for us to really take those five million developers and work with the leading companies. You know, I use the example of get Lab is an example get help there. Others that appeal to developers tie them into our developer framework. The one thing you learn about developers, you can't have a mindset. With that, you all come to just us. It's a very mingled village off multiple ecosystems and Venn diagrams that are coalescing. If you try to take over the world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, which is why I described. It's like, Listen, we want our developers to come to our conferences and reinvent and ignite and get the best experience of all those provide tools that coincide with everybody. You have to take a holistic view of this on if you do that over many years, just like the security topic. This is a multi year pursuit for us to be relevant. Developers. We feel good about the future being bright. >>David got five minutes e. >>I thought you were gonna say Zoom, Sanjay, that was That was my wildcard. >>Well, listen, you know, I think it was more recently and very fast catapult Thio success, and I don't know that that's clearly in the complete, you know, sweet spot of the anywhere. I mean, you know, unified collaboration would have probably put us in much more competition with teams and, well, back someone you always have to think about what's in the in the bailiwick of what's closest to us, but zooms a great partner. Uh, I mean, obviously you love to acquire anybody that's hot, but Eric's doing really well. I mean, Erica, I'm sure he had many people try to come to buy him. I'm just so proud of him as a friend of all that he was named to Time magazine Top 100. But what he's done is phenomenon. I think he could build a company that's just his important, his Facebook. So, you know, I encourage him. Don't sell, keep building the company and you'll build a company that's going to be, you know, the enterprise version of Facebook. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity to do this better than anybody else is doing. And you know, I'm as an immigrant. He's, you know, China. Born now American, I'm Indian born, American, assim immigrants. We both have a similar story. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from him, from on speed on speed and how to move fast, he tells me he learns a thing to do for me on scale. We teach each other. It's a beautiful friendship. >>We'll make sure you put in a good word for the Kiwi. One more zoom integration >>for a final word or the zoom that is the future Facebook of the enterprise. Whatever, Sanjay, Thank >>you for connecting with us. Virtually. It is a digital foundation. It is an unpredictable world. Um, it's gonna change. It could be software to find the operating models or changing you guys. We're changing how you serve customers with new chief up commercial customer officer you have in place, which is a new hire. Congratulations. And you guys were flexing with the market and you got a tailwind. So congratulations, >>John and Dave. Always a pleasure. We couldn't do this without the partnership. Also with you. Congratulations of Successful Cube. And in its new digital format, Thank you for being with us With VM world here on. Do you know all that you're doing to get the story out? The guests that you have on the show, they look forward, including the nonviable people like, Hey, can I get on the Cuban like, Absolutely. Because they look at your platform is away. I'm telling this story. Thanks for all you're doing. I wish you health and safety. >>I'm gonna bring more community. And Dave is, you know, and Sanjay, and it's easier without the travel. Get more interviews, tell more stories and tell the most important stories. And thank you for telling your story and VM World story here of the emerald 2020. Sanjay Poon in the chief operating officer here on the Cube I'm John for a day Volonte. Thanks for watching Cube Virtual. Thanks for watching.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>We're back in Las Vegas. UI path forward three. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Bobby Patrick is here. He's the COO of UI path. Welcome. Hi Dave. Good to see it to be here. Wow. Great to have the cube here again. Right? Q loves these hot shows like this. I mean this is, you've said Gardner hasn't done the fastest growing software segment you've seen in the data that we share from ETR. You guys are off the chart in terms of net score. It's happening. I hanging onto the rocket ship. How's it feel? Well it's crazy. I mean it's great. You all have seen some of the growth along the way too, right? I mean we had our first forward event less than two years ago and you know about 500 plus plus non UI path and people then go year later. It was Miami USY. >>There's probably a lot. Cube I think was Miami right yet and a, and that was a great event, but that was more in the 13 1400 range. This one's almost 3000 and the most amazing part about it was we had 8% attrition from the registrations. Yeah. That's never seen that we're averaging 18% of 20% for all of our, most of our events worldwide. But 8% the commitment is unbelievable. Even 18 to to 20% is very good. I mean normally you'll see 25 to sometimes as high as 50% yeah. It just underscores the heat. >> Well I think what's also great, other stats that you might find interesting. So over 50% of the attendees here are exec. Our senior executives, like for the first time we actually had S you know, C level executive CHRs and CEOs on stage. Right. You could feel the interest level. Now of course we want RPA developers at events too, right? >>But this show really does speak, I think to the bigger value propositions and the bigger business transformation opportunity from RPA. And I mean, you've come so far where no one knew RPA two years ago to the CIO of Morgan Stanley on stage, just warning raving about it. That's, we've come a long way in two years. >> Well, and I saw a lot of the banks here hovering around, you know, knocking on your door so they, they know they are like heat seeking missiles, you know, so, but the growth has been amazing. I mean I think ARR in 2017 was what, 25 million at this time. Uh, at the end of 17 it was 43 and 43 and 25 and now you're at 12 times higher now 1212 X solve X growth, which is the fastest growing software company. I think in that we know from one to 100 we were, we did that in 21 months and all that. >>And we had banks who now we're not really counting anymore and we're kind of, you know, now focus more on customer expansion. Even though we hit 5,000 customers, which we started the year at 2050 ish. We just crossed 5,000. I mean, so the number of customers is great, but there's no question. This conference is focused on scaling, helping them grow at enterprise wide with, with, with RPA. So I think our focus will be in to shift a bit, you know, to really customer expansion. Uh, and that's a lot of what this announcements, the product announcements were about a lot of what the theme here is about. We had four dozen customers on, on stage, you know, the Uber's of the world, the Amazons of the world. It's all about how they've been scaling. So that's the story now. Well, you know, we do a lot of these events and I go back to some of the, uh, when the cube first started, companies like Tablo, Dallas Blunck great service. >>Now, I mean, these you can, and when you talk to customers, first of all, it's easy to get customers to come talk about RPA. Yeah. And they're, they're all saying the same thing. I mean, Jeanne younger said she's never been more excited in her career from security benefit. But the thing is, Bobby, it's, I feel like they're, they're really just getting started. Yeah. I mean most of the use cases that you see are again, automating mundane task. We had one which was the American fidelity, which is a really bringing in AI. Right. But they're really just getting started. It's like one to 3% penetration. So what are your thoughts on that to kind of land and expand, if you will? I think, you know, look, last year we announced our vision of a robot for every person. At that point we had SNBC on stage and they were the one behind it. >>And they are an amazing story. Now we have a dozen or so that are onstage talking about a robot for every person like st and others. And so, but that, that, that's a pretty, pretty, pretty bold vision I think. Look, I think it's important to look at it both ways. Um, there's huge gold and applying RPA to solve real problems. There's a big opportunity, enterprise wide, no question. We've got that. But I look New York Foundling was on stage yesterday. We have New York Foundling is a 150 year old associate. Our charity in New York focused on child welfare, started by three fishers of charity. They focused on infants. And anyway, it's an amazing firm. Just the passion that New York family had on stage with Daniel yesterday was amazing. But what they flew here because for once they found a technology that actually makes a huge difference for them and what in their mission. >>So their first RPA operation was they have 850 clinicians every week. They spend four hours a week moving their contact, uh, a new contact data associate with child child issues from system to system to spreadsheet and paper to system, right? They use RPA and they now say for a 200,000 hours a year. But more importantly, those clinicians spend those four hours every week with children not moving. So I'm still taking, I think Daniel had a bit of a tear in his eye, hearing them talk about it on stage, but I'm still taken by, by the, by the sheer massive opportunity for RPA in, in a particular to solve some really amazing things. Now on a mass scale, a company can drive, you know, 10, 15, 20% productivity by every employee having a robot. Yes, that's true on a mass scale. They can completely transform their business, your transform customer experience, transform the workplace on a mass scale. >>And that, that is, that's a sea level GFC level goal and that's a big deal. But I love the stories that are very real. Um, and, and I think those are important to still do plug some great tech for good story. Look, tech gives, you know, the whole Facebook stuff and the fake news got beat up and it had Benny come out recently say, Hey, it's, it's not just about increasing the value to shareholders, you know, it's about tech for good and doing other things affecting lifestyle's life changing. And Michael Dell is another one. Now I've, I've, I've kind of said tongue in cheek, you know, show me the CEO misses is four quarters in a row and see if that holds up. But nonetheless, you love to see successful companies giving back. It seems to be, it's part of your, well look I've been part of hardware companies and I met you all through a few of them and others they have good noble causes but it was hard to really connect the dots. >>Yes there CPS underneath a number of these things. But I think judging by the emotional connection that these customers have on stage, right and these are the Walmarts and Uber's and others in the world judging by the employee and job satisfaction that they talk about the benefits there. I just, I my career, I have not seen that kind of real direct impact from you know, from B2B software for example on the lives of people both everyday at work but also just solving the solving, you know, help accelerate human achievement. Right. And so many amazing ways. We had the CEO of the U N I T shared services group on stage yesterday and they have a real challenge with, you know, with the growth of refugees worldwide and he would express them and they can't hit keep up. They don't have the funding, which is, you know, with everybody and, and Trump and others trying to hold back money. >>But they had this massive charter for of good, the only way they get there is through digital. The new CEO, the new head of the U N is a technology engineer. He came in and said, the way we solve this is with templates, with technology. And they decided, they said on stage yesterday that RPA and RPA has the path to AI and the greater, the greater new technologies and that's how they're going to do it. And it's just a, it's a really, it's, I think it's, it feels really great. You know, it's funny too, one of the things we've been talking about this week is people might be somewhat surprised that there's so much head room left for automation because the boy, 50 years of tech, Kevin, we automated everything. That's the other, but, and Daniel put forth the premise last night, it actually, technology is created more process problems or inefficiencies. >>So it's almost like tech has created this new problem. Can tech get us out of the problem? Well, essentially you think about all the applications we use in our lives, right? Um, you know, although people do have, you know, a Salesforce stack and sometimes in this SAP, the reality is they have a mix of a bunch of systems and then we add Slack to it and we add other tools and we add all the tools alone, have some great value. But from a process perspective of how we work everyday, right? How a business user might work at a call center, they have to interact then. And the reality is they're often interacting with old systems too because moving them is not easy, right? So now you've got old systems, new systems and, and really the only way to do that is to put a layer on top of the systems of engagement and the systems of record, right? >>A layer on top that's easy to actually build an application that goes between all of these different, these different applications, outlook, Excel, legacy systems and salesforce.com and so on and so on and, and build an app that solves a real problem, have it have outcomes quickly. And this is why, Dave, we unveiled the vision here that we believe that automation is the application. And when you begin to think about I could solve a problem now without requiring a bunch of it engineers who already are maxed out, right? Uh, I can solve a problem that can directly impact the businesses or directly impact customers. And I can do that on top of these old technologies by just dragging and dropping and using a designer tool like studio or studio X in a business user can do that. That's, that's a game changer. I think what's amazing is when you go to talk to a CIO who says, I've been automating for 20 years, you know, take up the ROI. >>Once they realize this is different, the light bulb goes off. We call it the automation first mindset. A light bulb goes off and you realize, okay, this is a very different whole different way of creating value for, for an organization. I think about how people weigh the way that people work today. You're constantly context switching. You're in different systems. Like you said, Slack, you're getting texts and you want to be responsive. You want to be real time. I know Jeff Frick who was the GM of the cube has got two giant screens right on his desk. I myself, I always have 1520 tabs open if I go, Oh you got so many tabs on my, yeah. Cause I'm constantly context switching, pulling things out of email, going back and forth and so and so. I'm starting to grok this notion of the automation is the app. >>At first I thought, okay, it's the killer app, but it's not about stitching things together with through API APIs. It's really about bringing an automation perspective across the organization. We heard it from Pepsi yesterday. Yeah, right. Sort of the fabric, the automation fabric throughout the organization. Now that's aspirational for most companies today, but that really is the vision. Well, I think you had Layla from Coca-Cola also on, right. And her V their vision there and they actually took the CDO role of the CIO and put them together. And they're realizing now that that transformation is driven by this new way of thinking. Yeah, I think, you know, look, we introduced a whole set of new brand new products and capabilities around scaling around helping build these applications quicker. I, I think, you know, fast forward one year from now, the, you know, the vision we outlined will be very obvious the way people interact with, you know, via UI path to build applications, assault come, the speed to the operate will be transformational and, and so, you know, and you see this conference hear me walk around. >>I mean you saw last year in the year before you see the year before, but it's, it's a whole, the speed at which we're evolving here, I think it's unprecedented. And so I'll talk a little bit about the market for has Crigler killer was awesome this morning. He really knows his stuff now. Last year I saw some data from him and said the market by 2020 4 billion, and I said, no way. It's going to be much larger than that. Gonna be 10 billion by 2020 I did Dave Volante fork, Becca napkin by old IDC day forecast. Now what he, what he showed today is data. It actually was 10 billion by 2020 because he was including services, the services, which is what I was including in my number as well, but the of it, which was so good for him now, but the only thing is he had this kind of linear growth and that's not how these rocket ship Marcus grow. >>They're more like an old guy for an S curve. You're going to get some steep part now, so I'd love to see like a longer term forecast because that it feels like that's how this is going to evolve. Right now it's like you've seated the base and you can just feel the momentum building and then I would expect you're going to see massive steep sort of exponential growth. Steeper. There may be, you know, nonlinear because that's how these markets go >> to come from the expansion potential, right? And none of our customers are more than 1% audit automated from an RPA perspective. So that shows you the massive opportunity. But back to the market site, data size, Craig and I and the other analysts, we talk often about this. I think the Tam views are very low and you'll look at our market share, let's just get some real data out there, right? >>Our market share in 2017 was 5% let's use Craig's linear data for now. You know, our market share this year is over 20% our market share applying, and I don't want to give the exact numbers as you don't provide guidance anymore, is substantially we're substantially gaining share now. I believe that's the reality of the market. I think because we know blue prisms numbers, we go four times faster than the every quarter automation. The world won't share their numbers. But you know, I can make some guesses, but either way I think, you know, I think we're gaining share on them significantly. I think, you know, Craig's not gonna want us to be 50% of the market two years, he's just not. And so he's going to have to figure out how to identify how to think. That brought more broadly about, about that market trend. He talked about it on stage today about how does he calculate the AI impact and the other pieces now the process mining now that now that we are integrating process mining into RPA, right? >>It's strategic component of that. How does that also involve the market? So I think you have both the expansion and the plot product portfolio, which drives it. And then you have the fact that customers are going to add more automations at faster pace and more robots and that's where the expansion really kicks in. And we often say, you know, look as a, as a, as a, as a company that, you know, one day we'll be public company, our ARR numbers. Very important. We do openly transparently share that. But you know, the other big metric will be, you know, dollar based net expansion rate that shows really how customers are expanding. I think that, I know it, our numbers, we haven't shared it yet. I know all the SAS companies, the top 10 I can tell you, you know we're higher than all of them. >>The market projections are low. And I think he knows it well. >> Speaking of Tam, and when we, I saw this with, with service now, now service now the core was it right? So the, the ROI was not as obvious with, with, with you guys, you're touching business process. And so, so in David Flory are way, way back, did an analysis of service and now he said, wow, the Tam is way being way under counted by everybody. That wall street analyst Gardner, it feels like the same here because there are so many adjacencies and just talk to the customers and you're seeing that the Tam could be enormous, much bigger than the whatever 16 billion a Daniel show, the other Danielson tangles, the guy's balls. He said, Oh that's 16 billion. That's you. I pass this data. And you know, we laugh, but I'm, I'm like listening. Say I wonder if he's serious cause this guy thinks big. >>I mean, who would've thought that he'd be at this point by now? And you're just getting started? Well, I think, you know, one thing I think is, you know, we're, we're, you know, we were a little bit kind of over a little less humble when we talked about things like valuation over the last few years. We were trying to show this market's real, you know, we want to now focus more on outcomes and things get a little less from around those numbers. And I think that shows the evolution of a company's maturity, um, that we, I think we're going through right now. Uh, you know, the outcomes of, you know, Walmart on stage saying, you know, their first robot that was, this was, this was two years ago, delivered 360,000 hours of capacity for them in, in, in, in, in HR, right? That, you know, I think those, that's where we're gonna be focused because the reality is if we can deliver these big outcomes and continue them and we can go company-wide deliver on the robot for every, every, every, every person, then you know, the numbers follow along with it. >>Well we saw some M and a this week as well, which again leads me to the larger Tam cause we had PD on, um, with Rudy and you can start to see how, okay now we're going to actually move into that vision that the guy from PepsiCo laid out this, this fabric of this automation fabric across the organization. So M and a is, is a part of that as well. That starts to open up new Tam. Opportunity does. And I think, you know, a process mind is a great example of a market that is pretty well known in Europe, not so much in the U S um, and there are really only a few players in that, in that market today. Look, we're going to do what we did in RPA. We're going to do the same thing. You're process mining. We're going to just say anything we're doing in it, not as democratization, you'll our strategy will be to go mass market with these technologies, make it very easy for accessibility for every single person in the case of process mining, every business analyst to be able to mind their processes for them and, and ultimately that flows through to drive faster implementations and then faster, faster outcomes. >>I think our approach, again, our approach to the business users, our approach to democratization, um, you know it's very different than our competitors. A lot of these low code companies, I won't name a number cause I don't remember our partners here at our conference. They're IT-focused their services heavy and, and you know, their growth rates I'll be at okay are 30% year over year in this market. That shouldn't be the case at all. I mean we're a 200 plus a year. We are still and we've got big numbers and we have a whole different approach to the market. I don't think people have figured it out yet, Dave. Exactly, exactly. The strategy behind which is, which is when you have business users, subject matter experts and citizen developers that can access our technology and build automations quickly and deliver value proof for their company. And you do that in mass scale. >>Right. And then you will now allow with our apps for your end users, I get a call center to engage with a robot as part of their daily operation that none of the other it vendors who are all kind of conventional thinking and that's not, our models are very different, which I think shows in our numbers and and, and the growth rates. Yeah. Well you bet on simplicity early on. In fact, when you join you iPad, you challenged me so you have some of your Wiki bond analysts go out. I remember head download our stuff and then try to download the competitors and they'll tell us, you know how easy it as well we were able to download UI path. We, we built some simple automations. We couldn't get ahold of the other other, other companies products we tried. We were told we'll go to the reseller or how much did you have to spend and okay so you bet on simplicity, which was interesting because Daniel last night kind of admitted, look, he tracked the audience. >>He said thank you for taking a chance on us because frankly a couple of years ago this wasn't fully baked right and and so, so I want to talk about last, the last topic is sort of one of the things Craig talked about was consolidation and I've been saying that all week and said this, this market is going to consolidate. You guys are a leader now you've got to get escape velocity cause the leader makes a lot of money and becomes, gets big. The number two does. Okay, number three man, everybody else and the big guys are starting to jump in as well. You saw SAP, you know, makes an announcement and you guys are specialists and so your thoughts on hitting escape velocity, I wouldn't say you're quite there yet. I want to see more on the ecosystem. There's maybe, who knows, maybe there's an IPO coming. I've predicted that there is, but your thoughts on achieving escape velocity and some of the metrics around there, whether it's customer adoption penetration, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, I mean we definitely don't have a timetable on an IPO, but we have investors, public investors and VCs that at some point are going to want, this is the reality of how, of how it works. Right. Um, you know, I think the, uh, you know, I think the numbers to focus right now are on around, you know, customer outcomes. I think the ecosystem is a good one. Right? You know, we have, I'd say the biggest ecosystem for us to date has been the SAP ecosystem. When we look at our advisory board members, for others, that's really where, where the action is. Supply chain management, ERP, you know, certainly CRM and others, we don't have a view that, so our competitors have, but we have chosen not to take money from our, from ecosystem companies because we don't, our customers here are building processes, all the automation across ecosystems. >>Right? So you know, we don't want to go bet on say just one like Salesforce or Workday. We want to help them across all the ecosystem now. So I think it's a little bit of a different strategy there. Look, I think the interesting thing is the SAP is the world. They bought a small company in France called contexture. They're trying to do this themselves. Microsoft, Microsoft didn't in Mark Benioff and Salesforce are asked on every earnings call now what are you doing for RPA? So they've got pressure. So maybe they invest in one of our competitors or maybe they, you'll take flow in Microsoft and expanded. I think we can't move fast enough because you know, I don't know if Microsoft has, I mean they're a great sponsor by the way. So I don't want to only be careful we swept with what I say. But you know, strategically speaking, these larger companies operate in 18 months, 12 1824 months kind of planning cycles. >>If he did that, he will never keep up with us. There's no one at any of our traditional large enterprise software companies that ever would have bet that we would come out and say that the best way to build applications right to solve problems will be through RPA. Either there'll be a layer on top of all their technologies that makes it easier than ever for business users to build applications and solve problems, that's going to scare them to death. Why? Because you don't have to move all your legacy systems anymore. Yes, you've got tons of databases, but guess what? Don't worry about it. Leave him alone. Stop spending money on ridiculous upgrades right now. Just build a new layer and I'm telling you I there. As they figured this out, they're going to keep looking back and say, Oh my God, why didn't we know? >>Why did we know there's it looked I hopefully we could all partner. We're going to try to go down that route, but there's something much bigger going on here and they haven't figured it out. Well, the SAP data is very interesting to me that I'm starting to connect the dots. I just did a piece on my breaking analysis and SAP, they thank you. They, they've acquired 31 companies over the last nine years, right? And they've not bit the bullet on integration the way Oracle had to with fusion. Right? And so as a result, there's this, they say throw everything into HANA. It's a memory that's not going to work from an integration standpoint, right? Automation is actually a way to connect, you know, the glue across all those disparate systems, right? And so that makes a lot of sense that you're having success inside SAP and there's no reason that can't continue. >>Why there's, you know, there's a number of major kind of trends we've outlined here. One of, uh, we call human in the loop. And you know, today, you know, when each, when an unattended robot could actually stop a process and instead of sending the exception to a, an it person who monitoring, say, orchestrator actually go to an inbox, a task and box of that business user in a call center or wherever, and that robot can go do something else because it's so, so efficient and productive. But once that human has to solve that problem, right, that robot or a robot will take that back on and keep going. This human and robot interaction, it doesn't exist today and we know we're rolling that out in our UI path apps. I think you know that that's kind of mind blowing and then when you add a, I can't go too far into our roadmap and strategy or when you added the app programming layer and you add data science, that's a little bit of a hint into where we're going because we're open and transparent. >>Our data science connection, it's, it's this platform here, this kind of, I'd like to still call it all RPA. I think that that's a good thing, but the reality is this platform does Tam. What it can do is nothing like it was a year ago and it won't be like where it is today. A year from now you've got the tiger by the tail, Bobby, you got work to do, but congratulations on all the success. It's really been great to be able to document this and cover it, so thanks for coming on the cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching the cube live from UI path forward three from Bellagio in Vegas right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas, 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We're joined by Cathy Tornbohm, she is the distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Very welcome, nice to be here. >> And Guy Kirkwood, he is the Chief Evangelist at UiPath. Thank you so much. >> Thanks Rebecca. >> So, we're hearing so much of these mantras, these catchphrases of UiPath. "automation first", "a robot for every person", "we're re-booting work", these are the theme's that Guy was touting up on the main stage, Cathy. Beyond that, I'd like to hear from you a little bit about what you're seeing in the RPA space at the moment. What are the trends and the themes that you think are most salient? >> I think the most fascinating thing about RPA right now is that it's really highlighting the problems the organizations have. All their accidents of history are really being brought up by RPA. And then you've got these digital darlings that they're trying to compete with, the Greenfield site kind of people. And some of those don't have beautiful back offices, but let's not go there for a minute. So, it, RPA is an opportunity for companies to link their digital dreams with their existing legacy nightmares. >> And those legacy nightmares include all of the things that Guy was talking about today: the drudgery, the dreariness, those mundane tasks that take up so much of our time. >> Absolutely, and really, if you think about it, in organizations, typically less than 15% of the applications that they're using have got some sort of application programming interface. So if you don't have a way of linking them, you end up with this long turn of applications that aren't linked together, with people literally being swivel-chair integration between the applications. >> Well, why can't you just string a bunch of API's together and automate that way? >> Well, in fact, there's a guy called Ian Barkin who works for Symphony, one of their organizations, it was set up to create automations for organizations. So one of the services businesses since been acquired by Sykes. And he describes it as process sediment, and it builds up in businesses in the same way that sedimentary rock builds up over millions of years. And digging through that, so that you can actually become more efficient is very difficult to do. So doing it on API level means you got to join up all those things individually. Whereas, using RPA, if system 'A' has a user interface, and system 'B' has a user interface, you can just use RPA. >> So, Cathy, you've been following process automation as a category for a number of years. Why RPA, why is it so hot, and why now? We've heard that it's the number one software category... >> Cathy: Fastest growing, yeah. Fastest growing, from Gartner. We've seen spending data that confirms that. Why now? (sighing) >> It's the digital competition that companies are facing, and the recognition that they cannot continue to be quite as bad at some of the things that they are bad at. So it's really that business transformation story back again, business process re-engineering, the same story that we had with BPO like ten years ago, but now, with robots instead. >> Yeah, it's interesting, I was at a, we had a show last weekend, it was the CEO of Suze, Suze... How do ya say it? Anyway, Suze, she said to me, "Well, you know, digital transformation's really about business transformation." And you kind of said the same thing. I mean, thoughts on that? >> I mean, you look at the start of the outsourcing market, the BPA market, twenty years ago. The very first deals were actually IT outsourcing deals that then transformed the business using IT as the enabler. So the first deal that I got involved with ever, in the outsourcing market, was Perot Systems with a British and Asian company. And we were putting in business process re-engineering consultants who actually transformed the business using IT as the enabler for that. There is no difference now, in fact one of the, one of the partners here, one of our original customers, actually put together a plan where we did the implementation, you know, soup to nuts, so that we could find out how we fit in to that whole transformation piece. And our team put together a whole package on all the learnings that we got out of that. And I had to laugh, because they're exactly the same things that every transformation program has had for the last thirty years. >> You know, if you look at kind of the history of certain segments, and I wonder if, Cathy, if you see RPA as one of them, like if you could've figured out who was implementing ERP the best, you didn't know SAP was going to become the leader, but if you could've figured out who was adopting ERP, you could've made a lot of money in the stock market, 'cause those companies had a huge productivity boost. Kind of same thing with Big Data, nobody really made any money in Big Data, so-called 'Big Data', a dupe. But the guys who applied it probably did pretty well. Do you see RPA as similar where the practitioners are going to actually be the ones that add more value to the industry than the new, the newly minted billionaires? >> It's almost the opposite. So the more RPA a company needs, it means the worse they did at managing their ERP in the first place. >> So they're kind of a mess? >> Yeah, yes. That need to be cleaned up, yeah. >> Yes, if you've got a hundred and twenty four ERP's that don't talk to each other, and you want to close your books in any kind of reasonable time frame, you're going to be a massive adopter of RPA, which basically means the more rubbish you are and activity, the more opportunity there is to automate more of it. >> So, what are the metrics that matter when you talk to your clients? >> Well, what I try and encourage clients to do is to really focus on business outcomes. So, much as Guy probably doesn't want me to say this, I don't really care how many 'scripts', aka robots, you've built, or how many run times you've deployed. What I care about is the business impact that you've managed to achieve. So, whatever KPI's are important to you, so are you managing to collect more revenue? Are you managing to make your customers happier because you're managing to decrease average handle times? or increase right first time activities. So anything that you're doing that actually improves the good old business metrics, is just going to be fantastic. So those are the sort of metrics that, really, companies should be focusing on. Not how many scripts they've built, that's absolutely pointless. >> I mean, are they focusing on that? I mean, when you... >> Yeah, lots of people are. >> Yeah? >> Yeah. >> In terms of ROI, we hear from customers that it has had them more accurate, they're more efficient, they're cost saving on human hours of the mundane tasks. But, when you were up on the main stage talking about how we're rebooting work, we're changing this moment, is it sparking the creativity, the imagination, the time spent on strategy in the more higher-level things? Is that, I mean that seems like that's the goal of return on investment. >> It is, within those organizations that are the most mature. So, what we're seeing, is the bifurcation, really, of the market between those organizations that are just starting and scaling up what they can, internal senses of excellence. Those organizations that are using the partners behind us. Those organizations that are using external parties to help them develop that. So Delight, for instance, they are sort of a managed service business. And instead of using people, they're using automation. So, Delight, by accident, has a BPA business in Spain, but then they'll turn that into an automation-heavy business and then providing that managed service. And then, the smartest customers, including SNBC, who we heard from yesterday, are actually turning their back office cost operations into a front office of revenue generator. Now, that is radically different from what we've seen prior. >> So Cathy, I got to ask you, when I was on a plane out here, somebody texted me a picture of the latest hype cycle. And they said, they knew I was going to UiPath, they said, "RPA has entered the trough of disillusionment." I said, "Oh, awesome, Gartner's, Cathy's coming on, and I can ask her about that." Well, what's your take on that? >> I think as Guy says, some people have already sailed through the trough, they've already gone through the challenges, or some of the challenges, and they've already found these fantastic productive things. I mean, we're estimating that people will save close to a million dollars for a large company, and just not having to do re-work of getting it wrong first time with re-keying that data. So, where there's some fantastic savings available, that you know, some of the ones have gone through the trough and done that, a lot of the other ones, they kind of, they don't understand the limitations of RPA and all those other partner tools that they need to put with it. So, don't understand it, can't handle unstructured data by itself. It needs a sister tool, so, what Gartner's talking about right now is this concept of hyper automation where you look across all the different activities that you would need to, sort of replace a person. So the people that are heading into the trough as sort of this second wave of adopters that Guy talked about, that will really struggle because they didn't understand the limitations in the first place. >> Well then, you know the, sometimes, things like the Magic Quadrant, and the trough of disillusionment, they're somewhat misunderstood sometimes, people, you know they see 'em, Gartner's very clever with the way it works things, but, so how should we think about that hype cycle? It's actually, in a way it's progress, isn't it? For an industry where they start... Entering that trough. >> Its, what Gartner says, is all industries have to go through that type of growing pains. And I think that we're seeing that, UiPath's expanded massively, and that's always a challenge for companies as they grow very rapidly. And as companies try and, as they say, take these wrong metrics. So I think things like UiPath buying ProcessGold is fantastic, it's a really, really good move for them. And I expect to see a lot of other process mining companies acquired, brought in to the RPA fold, because, there's four reasons why companies are going to go into this disillusionment, right? These are the main challenges with companies trying to use RPA properly. One is, they don't know what the processes are. So ProcessGold will give you a really good indication, they don't know about the microscopic level, and they don't know about the macro level. So things like digital twins will be something else that we would expect to see very closely partnered with companies like UiPath. And they don't know how to orchestrate their resources. So, other companies, like Innate, that can help you figure out how to do that will become... So its kind of like we're sort of breaking down a lot of what happened in other software categories and re-building them all up, in the way that the business can actually adopt them, hence, the AI Fabric sort of idea. So they don't know the processes, politics, people will lie to you about what they do all day, so they can sabotage your process, and there's a lot of silos within organizations that hate each other and throw things over the wall. So that all needs streamlining, and the more you can do across silos, the more successful any automation project would be. Then you've got, when you take a person out of a process, you take their eyes, their ears, the mouth, the nose. How are you going to replace that when you're trying to take them out, because you've got the keyboard fingers thing with the RPA tool? You need all these other activities replaced, replicated, supported. And then you've got the economics of production, so actually making sure that the scripts that you've built are actually worthwhile and are going to be cost-effective. It's something that we're studying at the moment. So you've got all these, all these different barriers, from all these different angles that are really going to push this thing into the trough for a little bit. And that's why it's great that RPA companies are looking at ways to mitigate that for their customers. >> Now, remember we said, as the understandings. So RPA is really good at dealing with structured data. Rule-spaced activities, deterministic things. That's why in regulatory, highly regulated environments, it's very effective, and the regulators love this sort of stuff. Because it's deterministic. When you look at AI, then we look at it in four ways. So you've got process understanding, which is the ProcessGold acquisition, you look at conversational understanding, 'cause ultimately robots are going to be controlled by voice. So you have to understand, the system has to understand that, let's say you're sitting in a bank, and the robot doesn't understand something, you say, "Okay, robot, stick that in the Well's account." It has to understand that Well's, in this case, means Well's Fargo. It does not mean a hole in the ground, water at the bottom, or a town in Somerset, in the UK, 'cause they're well's. So getting those ontologies correct is so important. So, that's conversational understanding. Document understanding. Because, as Cathy said, companies are still wading around in paper. So, understanding what those different documents are and how to action them is going to be really important. And finally, you're looking at visual understanding. So understanding and viewing things on the screen exactly the same way that humans do. So it's getting that combination right. >> So for RPA to live up to the hype, and there's a lot of hype, and it's a good thing, it's fun to track. It's got to go presumably beyond cleaning up the crime scene, if you will, to this new vision that you and Guy just laid out. What is the distance between, I dunno, sometimes I say 'paving the cow path', which gives you a nice hit, but as you say, it's 'cause companies... Ya know, they're messed up, to this vision of this, actually the guy from Pepsi today talked about it, this fabric of automation across the organization. How big of a gap is that? >> It's very different by every different company on the planet, really, in terms of their accidents of history, what their IT application landscape looks like, and what their business landscape looks like. And when you try and put the two things together, that's where you find the opportunities for any type of automation. >> Well come on, that's such an 'it depends' answer. (laughing) At the macro, will... In your expert opinion, will RPA live up to the hype? So many trends haven't, enterprise data warehousing, Big Data, Doob, all that stuff. You think RPA has the potential to crack through that. >> You mentioned a very good point. I think the most successful companies are the ones that actually will take the person that's managing the data and analytics of how their process is performing, and doing that with their automation strategy. And there are very few companies that've actually worked that out. They've still got totally two walls and they just meet up here at the CEO. So, unless companies actually take a more active business outcomes approach, and look at their end-to-end processes of order to cash and source to pay, these problems will carry on for some time. >> Well that's a great point, I mean, so it's data, it's machine intelligence, I guess Cloud for scale, you guys made a SAS announcement today, it's "automation first", to use your buzz word. >> Cathy: You need it all to come together. >> And it's really developing those best practices in your role as Chief Evangelist in helping understand what the most successful companies do, and then making sure that's implemented. >> Well that's why I spend more of my time listening than I do talking. Because the very nature of being a Chief Evangelist is the best job and the worst job title in the world. It's the best job because I spend my entire time talking to people like Cathy who know about what's happening within the market, and then feeding it back into our organization so we can make the right bets, so we can make the right acquisitions, but develop the right things. The bad thing about the job, is that I keep getting an inordinate number of people on LinkedIn saying, "So pleased that Jesus has entered your life." And I'm not that type of evangelist. (laughing) >> It's in the title. >> You know there's always this age-old debate in the industry of best of breed versus kind of a sweet approach. You see in SAP, for instance, acquired an RPA company, In Four talks about it. And then you get the specialist, UiPath. How do you see that shaking out, as the industry gets kind of more consolidated, how do you see a company like UiPath thriving, continuing to thrive? >> Gartner's going to predict coming in our new prediction series, but... Roughly 20 to 30% of enterprise adoption of AI, machine learning activities for process-based activities, will go through the RPA market. So, and with the IBPMS market, sort of combined together, that process management, because RPA has managed, cleverly, to capture the imagination of the business person. So, actually, there's a lot of IT departments that are talking to us about, how do we, how do we enshrine this activity, foreshadow IT, that's happening in the business, and make it successful, put governance plans in place so it will actually be successful in the way that it's actually now dealing with its own crime scene... (laughing) (mumbling) Its own rubbish, in a much better way. And I think that responsibility of business to understand how it can automate things and how it can manage things will really help a lot. So, I think the RPA players are well-placed to either be acquired into that bigger set of the established, large... Software providers, all to kind of keep blazing a trail for independence of the business. I'm not so sure about this idea that everybody should be programming their own scripts, I think that's a challenge. And I think the new interfaces will help mitigate some of the problems that we've seen with that approach, that hasn't been, haven't been very well done historically, so that's another area that will probably be a bit trough of disillusionment, but, actually, well-managed RPA projects have actually got a really good chance of delivering back very interesting benefits for businesses. >> Yeah, as a discreet innovation category, it does kind of feel that way, and often times, those markets are winner take most, the winner makes a ton of dough, number two makes a little bit of money, number three kind of breaks even, and everybody else gets consolidated or goes out of business, so, you guys go big or go home. That's kind of... Your posture. >> Tomorrow morning I'm doing, I'm doing my predictions for next year, and one of them is that the challenger RPA vendors, and indeed the service organizations that are small, are going to continue to consolidate and get acquired next year. So that's the 2020 prediction for us. >> Great. Well, Guy and Cathy, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great conversation. >> Oh, good, thank you. >> Thank you very much, indeed. Thanks Rebecca. >> Dave: Thanks you guys. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBES live coverage of UiPath. (techno music)

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Hello everyone and welcome to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward here at the Bellagio. I'm your host hosting alongside of Dave Volante. David's so great to be here with you. I'm so excited to get into this. See Rebecca, so we were, we would use came from the keynote. A lot of high profile UI path executives and important customers were on there too, but then this is the message is it's time to reboot work. It's time to reboot your business, transformed the customer experience, transform the employee experience. I'm wondering as someone who spent a lot of time at these kinds of conferences, and here's a lot of this, these, this kind of messaging, especially in this age of digital transformation, how compelling do you find this value proposition, this, this idea that RPA, robotics, processing automation can do these things? >>The first thing I would mention, Rebecca, is to me it's all about the customers. And you know, it's rare that you see a tech show start with the customers to actually do in the intro. I've seen it before. Nutanix actually does it at his shows, but it's, but it's quite rare because you know, the vendors want to put their message out, they want to control everything, and so they're very, very cautious about that. But, so we had three customers up on stage today doing the intro, which I thought was kind of cool. Tech shows, you know, a lot of smoke, a lot of mirrors and so forth. So you have to try to squint through that. I would say this, it's very clear that the age of automation is here. You know, people have been always concerned about automation for good reason. They're afraid that automation is gonna take away their jobs. >>Having said that, machines have always replace humans. We've talked about this a lot on the cube, but this is the first time in history that machines are replacing humans with cognitive tasks. So that's got to be scaring people a little bit. But when you come back and answer your question, when you talk to customers, they're really happy about software robots because they're doing, they're automating mundane tasks that these folks don't want to do on a day to day basis and they want to do other things. They want to get their weekends back. They don't want to just manually enter data from spreadsheets into applications and back and forth. And so from that standpoint, I think it is real and it is unique. You know, the big question is how much of this is transformational and is it really a path to AI something that UI path and others are really pointing towards and we're going to explore that, >>right? I mean in what you were just saying too is that that that the company's pitch is that we are freeing people. We are liberating them from the mundane, from the drudgery, from the data entry. And as you, as you pointed out, rightfully, a lot of the customers are saying, Oh no, it's giving our time. It's giving our employees time back to focus on the higher level tasks, the more creative aspects of their job. But, but I wonder if it is in fact a w what it really is doing. Two jobs. I mean I think that there was a really telling line in that Forbes profile of uh, Daniel Dina's who is the, the CEO of this company is founder of this company. The first ever bought billionaire exactly. Um, where it was an MIT professor quoted saying, you know, we always say to the companies that we say, give, give us your data and we'll tell you if it is in fact, uh, having this job killing effect. And he said, the companies don't want to give, give that up. >>Right? So now just look at the why is Daniel didn't as a billionaire, it will here, here, here's why. >>Yeah, walk, walk us through this. >>So UI path is up to 3,400 employees. 34 50 is the actual number. Now back in 2017, two years ago, this company did $25 million in annual recurring revenue. Now, ARR is a metric that's very important because you know, even though you book, let's say you book a $12,000 deal, you recognize that $1,000 a month over the 12 month period. So ARR is a very really important metric. So 25 million in 2017 my sources indicate that they'll do over 300 million this year in ARR. So we're talking about a 12 X plus increase in a two year period. They've raised $1 billion. One of their key competitors, automation anywhere has raised similar amounts of money. So they're talking about a couple of billion dollars raised just in the last couple of years. UI past valuation in March was $7 billion. So at that kind of back of napkin, and we're talking about a $10 billion valuation, Daniel obviously owns a lot of that. >>So 20% yeah. So it's, it's pretty substantial in terms of the market impact. Now valuations, as you all know, it's a fleeting metric, right? It comes in, it goes, but so the, but the landscape is very strong right now. It's really interesting to see how much customers are glomming onto this automation tailwind. The other comment I would make is let's lay out the sort of competitive landscape. UI path has gone from kind of a clear third in the marketplace to clear number one. I mean they're kind of separating from the pack, but there are others automation anywhere, blue prism and there are a number of legacy customers as well >>that that's what I wanted to ask you too, is that we have seen a few Microsoft and Google of course are, are, are partnered in their, in their customers, but they also are moving into this area themselves. So I mean will you will let UI path be able to maintain its competitive position as these very established and frankly very smart companies move into this area. Safety's >>another one. SAP bought an RPA company. It's a good question, but, so if you look at, let me start with this sort of underlying trend. If you look at the spending data, so we have access to the enterprise technology, research spending data and it shows the entire space is gaining share relative to other technology initiatives. So when you look at the data for UI path automation, anywhere blue prism, even legacy process automation companies like Pega systems, they're all actually from a spending standpoint attracting a lot of attention. So it's this rising tide lifts all ships. It's still somewhat early in terms of this next generation RPA if you will, you I-PASS advantage is simplicity. They are totally focused on this. You see this all the time. Do we go best of breed or do we go with a suite? So if Oracle comes up with an RPA solution, they throw it in for free, you know, does a customer take that? >>I think it comes down to what the business value is and that's something we're going to explore. It's not uncommon in detect industry that there's a first mover advantage or maybe it's a second mover advantage. You know, Facebook wasn't really first mover, but the one who really gets it right is kind of a winner take most. And so that's where a UI path is going like crazy right now. Trying to scale the company, raise a bunch of money. We saw this week a bunch of bankers sort of sniffing around. All the bankers are here cause they want their business. So I would expect there's some kind of IPO on the horizon, which I think they need to do to be, to your point to be able to compete with the big guys. So bottom line is they have to do it on a better product, more openness, moving faster and getting to scale. And I think they'll be able to reach escape velocity. I don't know if there's enough room for the big three. I would expect that given the spending climate is very good for everybody right now. I would expect within the next two to three years, some consolidation in this space. >>Well. So one of the things that you had just talked about with this next generation RPA, and that is exactly where we're going because these bots have got to become more durable, more smarter and more capable of handling complex tasks. We saw a number of new product announcements today. Oh, I might to get your thoughts and what you think about them and just whether or not they will have this transformational effect. Um, so, so yes, we have some new product announcements, some, some that democratize automation building that all you have to do is know how to run an Excel spreadsheet and you too can build an automation in your company. >>Yeah. It'll take a little bit of training though. >>I know. I think a better idea for those those demos is they should just pluck someone out of the audience and say, okay, you're going to do this. >>No, they would fail. I mean, let's say said, I remember the first time you learned Excel, I'm old enough to remember slash file, retrieve, paste, copy, whatever. You had to go through some training and we went through classes back in the eighties I think it's a similar here. I mean it's not overly complex. It's gonna have a low code theme, but you're right, UI path announced the number of new products. You know, we looked at this a couple of years ago, we went, we went out and we took the big three from the Forrester wave blue prism automation anywhere in UI path and we said, Hey, let's download them and start building some, some, some automations. While the only software we could get ahold of was UI path. Because as they say, they had kind of a simpler or more open model. The other guys were like, well, talk to a reseller is spend some money. >>And we were like, no, we just want to try it before we buy it. And we weren't able to get the other guy software. Now I think automation anywhere has made some strides in that regard in terms of simplification. You know, it's a copycat industry like the NFL. But so let's remember here we're talking about automating mundane tasks. Relatively simple automations. The customers are asking for things like more complex automations. How do we prioritize the automations? How do we figure out where, what's the best bang for the buck? How do we actually have attended bots because many of these are unintended. They'd like to have the human injected into the equation and that's pretty interesting because it brings forth this augmentation scenario that's everybody's talking about in AI and that starts to move us from sort of this tactical, I'm going to save some time on a use case specific or a technology specific automation to something that's more strategic that I can scale across my organization but right now people are saving money on this as a super hot space. As I say, all the bankers are trying to get in because they know some other ideas are coming down the road and the VCs I'm sure are gonna want the air exits. >>I want to talk to you about the leadership of this company. This is Daniel Dienes and you have interviewed him many times. Do minimun has as well. He he, he seems like a different kind of CEO. I mean, first of all, he is, he's a Romanian. Uh, he grew up, uh, behind the iron curtain. Uh, he was a professional bridge player for awhile, at least play competitive bridge player play competitive bridge and now he is a company headquartered in New York city. He still spends a lot of time in Bucharest but I'm curious to hear your thoughts about his leadership style and the kind of culture he's created at UI path and whether or not, because he's made some key hires from AWS, from Google, some, some of the more established tech players, whether or not he is, whether or not he'll be able to keep that startup culture, that startup mindset as the company becomes so much bigger. Well >>I think it's a concern and something that we want to ask about when you ask Daniel about, you know, how have you been able to do this? He'll talk about the mistakes that they made, how they sort of, they had a build it and you and they shall come mentality, which is kind of kind of old thinking these days and they sort of lucked into this RPA space. He also emphasize, emphasize as humble, and he's a very humble guy. I mean, you'll, you'll, you'll meet him I think last year he came on and you know, he's a developer. He had a tee shirt on. He's a coder right now. He's a billionaire coder. So maybe, maybe he'll, he'll dress up a little bit, but you know, maybe a fancy tee shirt, I don't know. Or maybe a collared shirt that says UI path on it. We'll see. >>But so they end, they want to move fast. They believe in openness there. They believe in transparency. I think those things worked in today's marketplace. People love the guy. I mean the customers love them. The employees love them. As you said, they're pulling people in from the hottest companies. Google, AWS. We, I got a on the shoulder today from, from a gentleman and I know from Google, he was in sales at Google. It's not me. There's no, Oh, I'm day three. And so people want to be part of this, this rocket ship. And I think it's gonna move very, very fast. Like I say, I think you're going to see some moves in the marketplace. I think you're going to see some exits and consolidations. We saw some M and a today UI path announced the acquisition of company called process gold that actually competes with a partner of UI path. So it's again, people are going to be on collision courses and they recently made another acquisition of a company called step shots and we're seeing some M and a, you know, relatively small MNA, but it's all about how can they transform from this little startup to this major player. To your point that can compete with the Microsofts and the SAP and the big whales of the world. >>And what do you think is his bigger selling point? Is it that it is transforming the employee experience, which as we know that that should not be discounted because an employee who is doing less mundane tasks able to focus on the more creative interesting parts of his or her job is a happier employee, happier your employees, more productive employee. A more productive employee means a healthier bottom line. So that's now funding to discount. Also the customer experience, as you said, which is clearly a huge top priority for this company. But, but I think the question is, is this technology now is a transformative enough? >>You know, as you asked that question, it kind of reminds me in a different way of a company that we've followed for years service now. When service now first came out, it was kind of doing what people saw as help desk, improving help desk, and they disrupted an industry and they made it better, which is kind of boring. It's kind of mundane, but actually having good it where you're not constantly down and you're not complaining and stuff's not falling through the cracks actually can be somewhat transformative. Kind of boring, but really important. And I see a similar sort of pattern here now the vision is, you know, a robot for every worker and the path to AI and we'll see. But right now the trans, the transformation is we're going to take away all this crap that you hate doing all these crap locations or mundane tasks and we're going to make your life better. >>And people workers want that and it's going to be in theory, a productivity boost as a result of that. That in and of itself, I think Rebecca can be transformative because it'll, it'll help with morale, it'll help with culture, it'll allow people to shift their emphasis on more strategic work and drive more value for the companies. And so, and I think companies that invest in RPA are, are seeing returns in terms of quality, just in terms of employee morale. You'll hear that from the customers that we talked to today. So I think in that sense it can be transformative like service now was now can it take the next step or is this really just paving the cow path? Is it just taking mundane known processes, automating them as opposed to really rethinking what process automation should look like. And that's some of the criticism of RPA and the RPA hype. And you know, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk to customers about that. We've got analysts from HFS coming on, Kathy from Gartner's coming on. So excited to hear their perspectives as well. >>Exactly. And I, I want to reiterate that point that you're absolutely right. Their question is should we actually think about redesigning the process itself rather than automating the, the the flawed process? >>Yeah, and I mean I guess part of me says yes strategically we should be doing that, but another part of me says, look, I don't have to change anything. And I think that's the big advantage of UI path and these other players is you can basically automate what you have today. You don't have to redesign the process because process redesign is a heavy lift. So if I don't have to do a heavy lift, if I can improve what I'm doing today and it works, yeah, it's the old, if it ain't broke, why fix it, but just improve it. I think that's a very powerful, I think the big question I have is, is that like a big hit of a step function or is it really transformative? I feel like today's tech is a step function, which is important. You're going to get that step function, but I think you're going to absorb that benefit fast and then people are going to say, okay, now what? >>Another good example is virtualization. When I first saw virtualization and the ability to spin up a server, my jaw dropped and went, Oh my God, I could spin up a server in five minutes and it used to take weeks, months to spin up a server. That's game changing. Nobody talks about virtualization anymore. It was a, you know, a five year absorption of productivity for it and now it's like, yeah, I've been there, done that. That's yesterday's news. I think the same thing is going to happen with today's RPA and the big question is can they cross that strategic chasm into what the gentleman from Pepsi, the executive from Pepsi was saying, this automation fabric across the enterprise as a, as a platform for automation and artificial intelligence. That's a big leap. These guys get big plans. Daniel Dienes is a big thinker, go big or go home. So I don't, I don't have the crystal ball on that, I think, but I think there's a decent opportunity given that there's enough attention on this business right now that it, that it could be transformed. >>All right, well, hopefully we'll know more at the end of these two days. Dave, I've, I'm looking forward to getting into with you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Volante. Stay tuned for more. You're watching the cube.

>> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering PagerDuty Summit '18. Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBe. We're at PagerDuty Summit at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square, historic venue. Our second time to this show, there's about 900 people here talking about kind of the future of dev ops, but going a lot further than dev ops. And we're excited to have a couple of CUBE alumni here at the conference from SignalFX. We've got Arjit Mukarji. >> Mukarji, yeah. >> Thank you. And Karthik Rao, co-founder and CEO of Signal FX. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So what do you do at PagerDuty Summit? >> Well we've been partners with PagerDuty for a long time now, we've known them since the very early days, we share a common investor. But we both operate very squarely in the same space, which is companies moving towards dev ops development and deployment methodologies, leveraging cloud and native architectures. We solve a different part of the problem around monitoring and observation and we partner with them very closely around incident management Once a problem is detected, we typically integrate in with PagerDuty and trigger whatever incident management paths that our customers are orchestrating by PagerDuty. So, it's been really an integral part of our entire work flow since we started the company. So we're very close partners with them. >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause Jen announced they have 300 integrations or 300+ integrations, whatever the number is, and to the outside looking in, it might look like a lot of those are competitive, like there's a lot of work flow and notification types of partners in that ecosystem, but in fact, lots of different people with lots of different slices of the pie. >> That is good. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's a really big problem space that everyone is trying to solve in this day and age. Some of our competitors are in that list, but you know we partner very closely with PagerDuty. As I mentioned earlier, our focus really is around problem detection and leveraging the most intelligent algorithms, statistical models in real time to detect patterns that are occurring in a production environment and triggering an alert, and typically we're integrating in with PagerDuty and PagerDuty deals with the human elements of once something has been detected, how do you manage that incident? How do you router to the appropriate people? One of the things that's really interesting as this world is changing towards these dev ops models is the number of people that have to get involved is substantially greater than it was before. In the old days, you would have an alert go into a knock and you have a specialist group of people with very specific runbooks because your software wasn't changing very often. In today's world, your software is changing sometimes on a daily basis, and it could be changing across dozens of teams, hundreds of teams in larger organizations. And so, there's a problem on the detection side because companies like SignalFX have to do a really great job of detecting problems as they emerge across these disparate teams, across a much, much, much, larger environment with much larger volumes of data and then companies like PagerDuty really have to deal with a far more complex set of requirements around making sure the right people get notified at the right time. And so they're two very different problems and we're very happy to- and have been partnering with them for a number of years now. >> And again, the complexity around the APIs where the app is running, there's so many levels now of new complexity compared to when it was just one app, running on one system, probably in your own data center, probably that you wrote, compared to this kind of API centric multi-cloud world that we live in today. >> That is exactly right because what's happening is our application architectures are changing 'cause we used to have these monoliths, we used to have three tiers and whatnot, and we're replacing that with the micro-services, loosely cabled systems, and whatnot. At the same time, the substrate on which we are running those services, those are also changing. Right, so instead of servers, now we have virtual machines, we have cloud distances and containers and pods and what-have-you. So in a way, we are sort of growing below too in some sense and so that's why sort of monitoring this kind of complex, more numerous environment is becoming a harder challenge. We're doing this for a good cause, because we want to move faster, we want to innovate faster, but at the same time, it's also making the established problems harder, which is sort of what requires newer tools, which sort of brings companies like us into the picture. >> Right, yep. And then just the shear scale, volume, number of data that's flowing through the pipes now on all these different applications is growing exponentially, right? We see time and time again, so it really begs for a smarter approach. >> Absolutely, I mean on two levels right? The number of minutes of software consumption is up exponentially, right? Since the smartphone came out in 2007, you've got billions of people connected to software now, connected all the time, so the load is up order sum magnitude which is driving, even if you didn't change the architectures, you would have to build out substantially more back-end systems, but now the architectures are changing as well, where every physical server is now parceled up into VMs which are parceled up into containers. And so the number of systems are also up by order sum magnitude. And so there's no possible way for a human to respond to individual alerts happening on individual systems, you're just going to drown in noise. So the requirements of this new world really are, you have to have an analytic spaced approach to monitoring and more automation, more intelligence around detecting the patterns that really matter. >> Right. Which is such a great opportunity for artificial intelligence, right, a machine learning. And we talk about it all the time, everyone wants to talk about those, kind of as a vendor-led something that you buy. Yeah, that's kind of okay, but really where the huge benefit is, companies like you guys and PagerDuty using that technology, integrated in with what you deliver on your core to do a much better job in this crazy increasing scale of volume that's run with these machines. >> Yes, because the systems are becoming so complex that even if you asked a human to go and set up the perfect monitoring or perfect alerting, et cetera, it might be quite a hard challenge, right? So, as a result sort of automation, computer intelligence, et cetera needs to be brought in to bear, because again, it's a more complex system, we need higher order systems that have dealed with them. >> Right. >> You are very, very right, yes. And that's a trend we are starting to see within the product, we are actually focusing a lot on sort of data science capabilities which too are sort of making them more and more sort of machine running and automation. In the future, we have capabilities in the product that can look at populations and identify outliers, look at cyclical problems and identify outliers again. So the idea is to make it easy for users to monitor a complex system without having to get into the guts, so to speak. >> Right. >> And to do it on various sorts of data, right? I think you have an interesting use case that we've been experimenting with recently. >> That's right. >> If you want to talk about that. >> Yeah, so I actually have a talk tomorrow, it's called "Interesting One." It's about monitoring social signals, monitoring humans. So we have these systems, we have these metrics platforms and they are quite generic, the tools that we have nowadays and are sort of available to us are quite powerful, and the set of inputs need not be isolated to what the computers are telling me. Why not look at other things, why not look at business signals? In my case, I'm going to talk about monitoring what the humans are doing on Slack as a way for me to know whether there's something of interest that's going on in my infrastructure, in my service that I need to be aware of, right? And you'll be shocked how surprisingly accurate it tends to be. It's just an interesting thing, and it makes one wonder what else is out there for us to sort of look at? Why confine ourselves, right? >> Right. It's funny because we hear about sentiment analysis in social media all the time, but more in the context of Pepsi or a big consumer brand that's trying to figure out how people feel. But to do it inside your own company on your own internal tool, like a Slack, that's a whole different level of insight. >> You'd be surprised at the number of companies that monitor Twitter to understand whether they have an adage. >> That's right. >> Yeah, because in this day and age, users are on Twitter within seconds if something is perceived to be slow, or something is perceived to be down, they're on Twitter. So there are all sorts of other interesting signals to potentially pull from. >> Right, right. Well and guess what, we were just at AT&T Spark yesterday and the 5G's coming and it's 100x more data'll be flowing through the mobiles, so the problem's not going to get any smaller any time soon. >> No. >> Absolutely. >> So what else have you guys been up to since we last spoke? Continuing to grow, making some interesting moves. >> Absolutely- >> Crossing oceans. >> We've been very, very busy, one of the big areas of investment for us has been international growth, so we've been investing quite a bit in Europe. We have just introduced an instance of our service that's based in a European data center. For a lot of our European-based clients, they prefer to have data locality, data residency within the European Union, so that's something new that we just introduced last month, continue to have a ton of momentum, outed AMIA, they're very much on the cloud journey, and embracing cloud and embracing dev ops, so it's really great to see that momentum out there. >> Right, and clearly with GDPR and those types of things, you have to have a presence for certain types of customers, certain types of data. Anything surprising in that move that you didn't expect or? >> No, I don't know, I'll let you. >> Not in that move, but it's just interesting to see how quickly some of these modern technologies are getting adopted and how- one of the things sort of we talk about a lot in our trade is ephemeral, right? So how things are short-lived nowadays, and you used to lease these servers that used to stay in your data center for three years, then you went to Amazon and you leased your instances, which probably lived for a few months or a few days, then they became containers, and the containers sometimes only for a few hours or for- you know. And then, if you think about serverless and whatnot, it's in a whole different level, and the amount of ephemeral that's going on, especially in the more cloud native companies, was a little bit of a surprise in the sense that, it actually poses a very interesting challenge in how do you monitor something that's changing so fast? And we had to have a lot of engineering put in to sort of make that problem more tractable for us. And it continues to be an area of investment. That to me, was something that was a little bit of a surprise when we started off. Much of this doctorization and coordinating was not yet in place, and so that was an interesting technical challenge as well as a surprise. >> Well I'm curious too as instances, right so there's the core instances that are running core businesses that don't change that much, but it's a promotion, it's a this or that, right? It's a spin up app and a spin down app. Are those even going up on the same infrastructure from the first time they do it to the second time they do it. I mean, how much are you learning that you can leverage as people are doing things differently over and over again as their objectives change, their applications change, they're going to go to market around that specific application. That's changing all the time as well. >> Yeah, so I think the challenge there is to sort of build, at least from a technical point of view, from SignalFX point of view, is build something that is versatile enough to handle these different use cases. We've got new use cases, new ways of doing things are going to continue to happen, probably going to keep on accelerating. So the challenge for us is good and bad, is how do we make a platform that is generic, that can be used for anything that may come down the pike, not only just now. At the second time, how do we innovate to continue to be up to speed with the latest of that's what's going on in terms of infrastructure trends, software delivery trends, and whatnot. Because if we're not able to do that, then that puts us sort of behind. >> Right, right. >> So it's a sort of lot of phonetic innovation, but it's also exciting at the same time. >> Right, right, right. And just the whole concept too, where I think what's best practice quickly becomes expected baseline really, really fast. I mean, what's cutting edge, innovative now unfortunately or fortunately, that become the benchmark by which everything else is measured overnight. That's the thing that just amazes me, what was magical yesterday is just expected, boring behavior today. Alright good, so as we get to the end of the year a lot of exciting stuff, you guys said you're going to be at Reinvent, we will see you there. Anything else that you're looking forward to over the next couple months? >> Just, we're really excited about Reinvent's big show for us, and we'll have some good announcements around the show. And yeah, looking forward to just continuing to do what we've been doing and deliver more rally to our customers. >> Love it, just keep working hard. >> Yep. >> Alright. Arjit, hope your throat gets better before your big talk tomorrow. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Alright, thanks for stopping by Karthik, it was great to see you. >> Great to see you. >> I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at PagerDuty Summit at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. Thanks for watching, see you next time.

from Las Vegas it's the queue covering VMworld 2018 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the cube here in Las Vegas at VMworld 2018 I'm Stu moon with a co-host John we're happy to welcome to the program believes the first time guests know woz Murr who is the senior vice president and general manager of EUC or end-user tutoring at VMware thanks so much for joining us yeah absolutely thrilled to be here great show this year ya know we do a lot of interviews but we don't have enough room for every single GM but we're excited we got a lot going on at this show I mean we've been watching since Sanjay got put in charge of that group of years ago big acquisitions like AirWatch so tell us the the big news yeah I mean there's there's several things that we know a great a great opportunity for us to showcase some of the big big opera leases with work space one you know that we're finding that customers you know really have loved our product for ios and android we've had a lot of customers doing virtual desktops virtual apps now with workspace one we've brought all of it together seamless where they can now manage iOS Android Windows 10 obviously huge in the market both physical and virtual all with one tool and now even Mac right one of the big initiatives we've seen as Mac is a choice right where where employees say hey you know I really want to use a Mac but you know obviously there's one or two windows apps that we have to bring to Mac to make it successful in the enterprise and so obviously workspace one really bringing that together I mean know what you were early in VMware and left for a while came back you've been kind of the art one of the architects of this thing I was at VMware and it's doing with history and EMC you know on the server storage side there was this explosive excitement around virtualization and then desktop virtualization VDI came in that's right and I don't you know we were joking before about the earth video your VDI but it's been there its I went there it's a it's been more of a slow burn but it's it's it's crazy now and it's working and it's here what has been I'm just kind of curious what has been your philosophy and where you want to take VMware now that these you know but with all these technologies super useful super valuable kind of and trance I mean to use some buzzwords transforming the workspace right and it's real so yeah you know the first and foremost you know I think one of the things that we've done is we've matured virtual desktops virtual applications is is really look at what are the right use cases that they come in right you know I think for a while it was every PC is gonna be replaced with virtual and and I think we've you know now seen where it makes sense it's a phenomenal technology right where we have you know folks working from home in sensitive data can we deliver that secure you know real-time experience so I think we've become a lot smarter the second thing is that heterogeneity is now everywhere right people want to work on all these different devices you know there's there's there's Windows and Mac and Chromebooks and and people really want to have that that ability to work anywhere on any platform that they choose you know CIOs are telling us that that they're having a hard time recruiting key talent if they don't give a you know users choice right and so virtualization now helps us it helps us do that a little bit more in a more sophisticated way the other thing is that now people can start to run these workloads a little simpler in the cloud right we introduced Verizon cloud now and SoftLayer and you know on VMC as well now with this you're right so now you're seeing all the tech titans come together say you know run it on your local laptop run it in the cloud so we really see a lot of synergies again bring it back to workspace born yeah I like that the discussion choice you mentioned a whole bunch of cloud tech I made a joke that you know they have both Coke and Pepsi in the solutions Expo you know you can choose your containerized beverage of choice that's right there but at the same time sometimes people don't understand is that when Dells in the mix with VMware Dell has you know some really good history with everything down to the desktop I think back to the wise acquisition absolutely like so what is that whole stack you know if you will look like when you put it together how does that fit yeah it Dell has been a fantastic partner you know we you know as passed out on stage you know we announced a partnership with HP last year Dell this year Dell has done a phenomenal job now with what's called Dell provisioning for workspace one where out of the box you can take a physical Dell PC power it up and go directly into that that local management you know that is managed over over-the-air that you deliver the right applications the right services the right security patch and one of the really interesting things as you know del command tools underlying the OS now can be all managed by workspace one you know you tie that to you know the solutions like del complete where you can get VDI in a whole stack with Dell now you can start to say you know bring together that that whole solution of physical laptops virtual you know really make sense to tie it all together with Dell as an overall provider of the complete solution for enterprise you know one of the interesting things in the cloud evolution last few years is the is the rise of GPUs right we know it's not just a box of x86 and your 616 I've got all these GPUs in the cloud that kind of boomerang straight back to the desktops and how how important is that and how can the workspace you know horizon horizon and workspace view is one of those things I wish we can have the one a couple of customers I talk to you today said you know I said how's it going you know just flat out you tell us the goods the bads and they said I have to say the horizon experience is amazing right and part of that I think is because we have that back-end GPU power that we've never had before where you know there's it literally is difficult to tell the difference between physical and virtual you know we have a lot of our customers some in an auto and anytime people are using CAD or healthcare where they're trying to do rendering of imagery they can now use these back-end GPUs to actually get that full fidelity experience so it's really been opening up the use cases and really making this a real solution for especially highly regulated environments that's super nice so I mean a lot of news product news right that came out anything that you're particularly excited about I want to highlight you know one of the the biggest things is what we call workspace one intelligence I mean every software company here is saying you know analytics and and the machine learning and you know and I'd love to bring it back to you some real-world scenarios you know one of the areas that we all know app compatibility right when we're going for that latest upgrade now with Windows 10 upgrading every six months or so we've been able to look at that and say you know which apps are going to be incompatible how do we go fix them before we do the rollout and that also comes back to user experience right guaranteeing that the users are going to have a great experience making sure that we get those patches down but doing it in a smart way so that we don't break the user experience at the end of the day I really do think that that is going to be a major thrust you know for much of the industry as we get you know bigger and better one of the the facts that I know it's a it's interesting to note just six months in for 150 billion events ingest at a month on this cloud service right and we're just at the very beginning so you're gonna see some numbers over the next coming quarters and months and just how we're able to improve experience really remediates security almost instantly you know be able to do things like you know get rid of the mundane tasks and start to automate out you know some of these these trivial things alright so no I talking to some of the community members and security came up and and specifically around to you see it was like okay NSX I understand but security should s be table stakes in this environment shouldn't be something else it seemed to be a little bit of frustration with how it how it is today you know what's your feet I think Pat really said it well is that that security has to be built in right has to be intrinsic into into what we're building you know one of the things that you've seen we have this solution called trust network where we're what we're trying to do is take the information that we're ingesting all these data points of mobile devices Mac Winton and now start to share that in a way that that partners like CrowdStrike carbon black Symantec McAfee checkpoint Palo Alto you know 11 different providers all looking at that and saying if I correlate your data with my data we are getting insights that we've never seen before right and the the interesting thing about it is that the difference is real-time remediation right you see an event and so for example think about it from from your iPhone right if you jailbreak your iPhone within 30 milliseconds we can say hey you know let's let's eliminate enterprise data leave your personal stuff alone right we don't we don't care we don't want to know but let's get enterprise data off now how about on Windows 10 the same same opportunity right something looks strange listen well you know you're authenticating on this laptop and somebody else is authenticating over in you know Europe let's just pump for a multi-factor right like hey something looks wrong let's take a real-time remediation that's the difference that's the new game-changer that we see in this new modern era is is this ability to see something and just start to go into a normal escalation path of something might be wrong let's let's actually taking that and take an action no want to give you the final takeaway you know you've you've been in this part of the market for a while it's gone through a lot of changes for people that hadn't looked at a little bit what's what's the takeaway you want them to have no I think first and foremost is that this is a journey right this isn't like ESX where you pop a CD into the ROM and hit power on and like all right we're ready to go this is one that we say you know every three months can we say how we're either improving user experience improving security or radically changing the cost paradigm of management right and that's where we say hey you want to roll it office 365 let's make that you know a goal for the next three months hey you want to you know you want to figure out how to improve access to every SAS application in your environment great that's next hey do you want to figure out you know how are you gonna get better insight to where cost is or you want to move workloads out to the cloud here's how we can help you do that that makes our or our partners our customers heroes every three months right getting out in front of that CIO and saying here's what we're delivering for the business there's real business value okay and just in case for our audience a a CD was a thing before he had that's right driver we could have been it was this physical world that we lived in as opposed to today it's more virtual and the clouds that's right thanks so much there's a pleasure to work with you John Troyer I'm Stu minimun stay with us more coverage here from VM roll 2018 thanks for watching the Q thanks a lot [Music]

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back here, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the crossroads, it's 101 and 92 in San Mateo, California. A lot of popular software companies actually started here, I can always think of the Siebel sign going up and we used to talk about the movement of Silicon Valley from the chips down in the South Bay and Sunnyvale, and intel, really to a lot of software here in the middle of the peninsula. We're excited to be here at SnapLogic's headquarters for Innovation Day, and our next guest is Craig Stewart, he's the VP of product management. Craig, great to see you. >> Thank you very much. Welcome. >> Absolutely So, we're talking about API's, and we go to a lot of tech shows and the API economy is something that's talked about all the time. But really that has evolved for a couple reasons. One, is the proliferation of Cloud services, and the proliferation of applications in the Cloud services. We all know if you go to Google Cloud Next or Amazon re:Invent, the logo slide of absent services available for these things is tremendous. Give us kind of an update, you've been involved in this space for a long time, how its evolving what you guys are are working on here at SnapLogic. >> What we've seen change of late, is that not only is there a requirement for our customers to build API's, but also to then allow those API's to be consumed by their partners and networks out there. As a part of that, they may need to have more management of those API's, then we provide. We're very good at creating API's with inbound and outbound payload, parameters, all of those things, so we can create those data services via our API's, but customers then need to have a requirement now to add some functionality around. What about when I have a thousand users of these, and I need to be able to throttle them and those kinds of things. What we've seen happening is there's been this space of the full lifecycle API management technologies, which have been available for some time, and amongst those we've had Google Apigee kind of being the benchmark of those with the Apigee Edge platform, and in fact what we've done in this latest release is we've provided engineered integration into that Apigee Edge platform so that the API's that we create, we can push those directly into the Apigee Edge platform for them to do the advanced authentication, the monetization, the developer platform around it to develop a portal, all of those kind of things. In addition to that, we've also added the functionality to generate the open API specification, Swagger, as it's known, and to be able to take that Swagger definition to having generated it, we can then actually drop it into the API gateways provided by all of the different Cloud vendors. Whether it's Amazon with their API gateway or the Aggre gateway, all you need to do is then take that generated Swagger definition, and this literally is a right-mouse button, "open" API, and it generates the file for you, from there just drop that into those platforms and now they can be actually managed in those services directly. >> I want to unpack API lifecycle management, cos just for a 101 for people that aren't familiar. We think of API's and we know applications or making calls, and it's, "I'm sending data from this app to that app, "and this is pulling information from that app to this app." That's all pretty straightforward, but what are some of the nuances in lifecycle management of API's that your typical person really hasn't fought through that are A, super important and only increasing in relevance as more and more of these systems are all tied together. >> The use of those API's, some of the things around them that those platforms provide is some advanced authentication. They may be using, wanting to use OWA two-factor authentication, those kind of things. They may want to do some protocol translation. Many customers may know how to consume a SOAP service... generally Legacy, these days-- >> So funny that SOAP is now Legacy (laughs) >> It just cracks me up. I remember, the hottest thing since sliced bread >> Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I still have the Microsoft Internet Explorer four T-shirt-- >> When it was 95 Box too, I'm sure. But that's another conversation for another day. (laughs) >> The management of those API's adding that functionality to do advanced authentication, to do throttling... If you have an API, you don't want all of your back end systems to suddenly be overwhelmed. >> Jeff: Right. Right. >> One of those things that those full lifecycle platforms can do is throttle so that you can say this user may have only 10 requests a minute or something like that, so that stops the back end system being overwhelmed in the event of a spike in usage. That helps with denial of service attacks and those kind of things where you're protecting the core systems. Other things that they can do is the monetization. If you want to atrially expose an API for partners to consume but you want to charge them on that basis, you want to have a way of actually tracking those things to then be able to monetize that and to provide the analytics and the billing on top of it. There's a number of those different aspects that the full lifecycle provides on top of what we provide which is the core API that we're actually creating. >> Right. Is it even feasible to plug an API into a Cloud-based service if your service isn't also Cloud-based cos as you're speaking and talking about spikes, clearly that's one of the huge benefits of Cloud, is that you have the ability to spike whether it's planned or unplanned to massive scale depending on what you're trying to do and to turn that back down. I would imagine (laughs) if your API is going through that platform and you're connecting to another application, and it's Pepsi running a promotion on Superbowl Sunday, hopefully your application is running in a very similar type of infrastructure. >> Absolutely. You do have to plan for that elastic scalability. And that's one of those things with the SnapLogic platform, is it has been built to be able to scale in that way. >> Right. Now there's a lot of conversation too around iPass and integration platforms as a service. How do you see that mapping back to more of a straightforward API integration. >> What we're talking about in terms of API integration here, and the things that we've just recently added, this is the consumption of our API's. The iPass platform that we actually provide consumes API's, all sorts of different API's, whether they're SOAP or REST and different native API's of different applications. That we do out of the box. That is what we are doing, is API integration. >> Right. >> The new functionality that we've introduced is this added capability to then manage those API's from external systems. That's particularly where those external systems go beyond the boundaries of a company's own domain. It's when they need to expose those API's to their partners, to other third parties that are going to want to consume those API's. That's where you need those additional layers of protection. Most customers actually use those API's internally within their organization, and they don't need that extra level of management. >> Right. Right. But I would imagine it's an increasingly important and increasingly common and increasingly prolific that the API integration and the API leverage is less and less inside the building and much much more outside the building. >> It is certainly going a lot more outside the building because customers are recognizing their data is an asset. >> Right. Right. Then having it be a Cloud broker, if you will, just adds a nice integration point that's standardized, has scale, has reliability, versus having all these point-to-point solutions. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I was going to say, As you look forward, I can't believe we're May 16 of 2018 already (laughs), the years halfway over, but what are you looking forward to next? What's kind of on the roadmap as this API economy continues to evolve, which is then going to increase the demands on those API's integration, those API's in management, as you said the lifecycle of the way all this stuff works together, what's kind of on the roadmap if we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? >> There's a lot of... settling down of what we've delivered that's going to take place, and on top of that, then the capabilities that we can add to add some additional capabilities that the customers want to use, even internally. Because even internally where they're not using a Cloud service, they have requirements to identify who in an organization is utilizing those things. So additional capabilities without having to go beyond the boundaries of the customers own domain. That's going to be some things like authentication, it's going to be some additional... Metrics of what's actually being used in those API's, the metrics on the API's themselves in terms of how are they performing, how frequently are they being called, and in addition to that, what's the response time on those things? So there's additional intelligence that we're going to be providing over and above the creation of the API's that we're looking to do for those customers, particularly inside the organization. >> It's very similar requirements but just different, right, because organizations, take a company like Boeing, or something, is actually not just one company, there's many, many organizations, you have all kinds of now with GDPR coming out, cut of data, privacy and management restrictions, so even if it's inside your four walls, all those measures, all those controls are still very very relevant. >> Very much so. Providing some additional capabilities around that is pretty important for us. >> Alright. Well Craig, you're sitting right on top of the API economy, so I think you'll keep busy for a little while. >> (laughs) That's for sure. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. >> Thank you. >> He's Craig Stewart, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching. (techno music)