(calm music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 from Las Vegas, Caesars Forum. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, we're going to unpack some really cool stuff next, in the next 10 minutes with you, Carl Perry joins us, the Director of Product Management at Snowflake, he's here to talk about Snowflake's new Unistore workloads, how it's driving the next phase of innovation, welcome to the program. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me, this is awesome. >> There's a ton of momentum here, I saw the the numbers from fiscal 23Q1, product revenue 394 million, 85% growth, a lot of customers here, the customer growth is incredible as well, talk to us about Unistore, what is it? Unpack it and how have the customers been influential in it's development? >> Yeah, so Unistore is a way for customers to take their transactional workloads, for their enterprise applications and now have them run on or be built on top of Snowflake and now, you have your transactional data, along with all of your historical data, so now you have a single unified platform for doing anything you need to do with your data, whether it's transactional, single row look-ups, we can do that, whether it's the analytical data across again, transactional and historical data in a single query, our customers are super excited about this. >> So, what are Hybrid Tables? Is that just an extension of external tables? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, Hybrid Tables are a new table-type that we've added to Snowflake and Hybrid Tables are really kind of just like another table with a couple of key differences, so number one is that Hybrid Tables provide fast, fine-grain read and write operations, so when you do something like a select star from customers where customer ID=832, that's going to return extremely fast, but on top of that same data, your transactional data, you can actually perform amazing analytical queries that return extremely fast and that's what Hybrid Tables at their core are. >> So, what does this mean for, so you're bringing that world of transaction and analytics together, what does it mean for customers? Walk us through Carl, an example of- >> Yeah, so it's great, so Adobe is a customer that is looking at using and leveraging Hybrid Tables today, and then more broadly Unistore, and frankly, Adobe has been an amazing customer since they started their journey, just really quickly, they're in phase three, the first phase was customers had data in Snowflake that they wanted to take advantage of with the Adobe Campaign Platform and so what they did is they built a connector basically into and being able to access customer data, and then they started to look at, "Well, this thing's working really well, let's try to leverage Snowflake for all our analytical needs." And so that was kind of phase two, and now phase three is like, look let's go and reimagine what we can do with the Adobe Campaign Platform by having both the transactional and analytical data in the same platform, so that they can really enable their customers to do personalization, ad campaign management, understanding the ethicacy of those things at a scale that they haven't been able to do before. >> Prior to this capability, they would what? Have to go outside of the Snowflake Data Cloud? And do something else? And then come back in? >> Exactly, right? So, they'd have a transactional system where all of the transactional state for what the customer was doing inside Adobe Campaign, setting up all their campaigns and everything, and that would be stored inside a database, right? And then they would need to ensure that, that data was moved over to Snowflake for further analytical purposes, right? You know you imagine the complexity that our customers have to manage every single day, a separate transactional system, an ETL pipeline to keep that data flowing and then Snowflake, right? And with Unistore, we really believe that customers will be able to remove that complexity from their lives and have that single platform that really makes their lives easier. >> I mean, they'll still have a transactional system, will they not? Or do you see a day where they sort of sunset that? >> I mean, there's a set of workloads that are not going to be the best choice today for Unistore and Hybrid Tables, right? And so we know that customers will continue to have their own transactional systems, right? And there's lots of transactional systems that customers rely and have entire applications, and systems built around, right? Right now with Hybrid Tables and Unistore, customers can take those enterprise applications, not consumer-facing applications and move them over to leverage Snowflake, and then really think about re-imagining how they can use their data that's both realtime transactional, as well as all the historical data without the need to move things between systems or use a ton of different services. >> The Adobe example that you just gave seems like, I loved how you described the phases they're in, they're discovering, it's like peeling the onion and just discovering more, and more, but what it sounds like is that Snowflake has enabled Adobe to transform part of it's business, how is Unistore positioned to be so transformational for your customers? >> Well, I mean I think there's a couple of things, so one, they have this like level of complexity today for a set of applications that they can completely stop worrying about, right? No need to maintain that separate transactional system for that again, enterprise application, no need to maintain that ETL pipeline, that's kind of like one step, the next step is, I mean all your data's in Snowflake, so you can start leveraging that data for insight and action immediately, there's no delay in being able to take advantage of that data, right? And then number three, which I think is the most compelling part is because it's part of Snowflake, you getting the benefit of Snowflake's entire ecosystem, whether it's first party capabilities like easy to manage and enforce really powerful governance, and security policies, right? Being able to take data from the market place and actually join it with my realtime transactional data, this is game-changing and then most importantly is the third-party ecosystem of partners who are building all these incredible solutions on top of Snowflake, I can't even begin to imagine what they're going to do with Hybrid Tables in Unistore. >> So, Carl I have to ask you, so I talked to a lot of customers and I talked to a lot of technology companies, explain, so Snowflake obviously was the first to separate compute from storage and you know the cloud, cloud database and then tons of investment came into that space, kind of follow you on, so that's cool, you reached escape velocity, awesome, but a lot of the companies that I talked to are saying, "We're converging transaction and analytics," I think (speaking softly) calls it HTAP or something, they came up with a name, explain the difference between what you're doing and what everybody else is doing, and why, what customer benefits you're delivering? >> Yeah, so I mean I think that's a really great question and to use the term you used HTAP, right? It's a industry understood term, really when people think about HTAP, what that is about is taking your transactional data that you have and enabling you to do fast analytical capabilities on that, and that's great, but there are a couple of problems that historical HTAP solutions have suffered from, so number one, that acceleration, that colander format of data is all in memory, so you're bound by the total amount of memory that you can use to accelerate the queries that you want to, so that's kind of problem one, this is not the approach that Snowflake is taking, most importantly, it's not just about accelerating queries on transactional data, whether it's a single-row lookup or a complex aggregate, it's about being able to leverage that data within the data cloud, right? I don't want to have a separate dataset on a transactional system or an HTAP system that can give me great analytics on transactional data and then I can't use it with all the other data that I have, it's truly about enabling the transformation with the data cloud and completely taking away silos, so that your data, whether it's realtime, whether it's historical, can be treated as a single dataset, this is the key thing that is different about Unistore, you can take the power of the data cloud, all of it, all of the partners, all the solutions and all the capabilities we continue to add, and leverage your data in ways that nobody's thought of possible before. >> Governance is a huge, huge component of that, right? So, in the press release, you have this statement, "As part of the Unistore Snowflake is introducing Hybrid Tables," you explained that, "Which offer fast, single-row operations and allow customers to build transactional business applications directly on Snowflake"- >> Yep. >> That's a little interesting tidbit, so you expect customers are going to build transactional applications inside the data cloud? And somewhat minimize the work that is going to be required by their existing transactional databases, correct? >> Exactly and I think, so let me say a couple things on this, right? So, first of all, there's a class of applications that will be able to just build on top of Hybrid Tables and run on Snowflake directly, for their transactional needs, I think what's super interesting here though is when you again start to talk about all your data, one example that we're going to walk through tomorrow in our talk is being able to do a transaction that updates data in a Hybrid Table and then updates data in a Standard Snowflake Table, and then either being able to atomically commit, or rollback that transaction, this is a transaction that's spanning multiple different table types inside Snowflake and you'll have consistency of either the rollback or the commit, this type of functionality doesn't exist elsewhere and being able to take, and build transactional applications with these capabilities, we think is transformative- >> And that's all going to happen inside the Snowflake Data Cloud, with all the capabilities and it's not like you know what you're doing with Dell and Pure, it's nice, but it's read-only, you can't you know add and delete, and do all that stuff, this is Native? First class citizen inside the database? >> Yep, just like other table types, you'll be able to take on and leverage the power of the data cloud as a normal table that you'd be able to use elsewhere. >> Got to ask you, your energy in the way that you're talking about this is fantastic, the transformation that it's going to be, how central it is to the product innovations that Snowflake is coming out with, what's been the feedback from customers? As there's so many thousands of folks here today, the keynote was standing in your room only, there was an overflow, what are you hearing on the floor here? >> Well, I mean, I think it was funny in the talk when I announced that primary keys are going to be required and enforced, and we got a standing ovation, I was like, "Wow, I didn't expect people to be so excited about primary key enforcement." I mean, what's been amazing both about the private preview and the feedback we're getting there, and then some of the early feedback we're getting from customers is that they want to understand and they're really thinking about like, "Wait, I can use Snowflake for all of this now?" And honestly I think that people are kind of like, "But wait, what would I do if I could have those applications running on Snowflake and not have to worry about multiple systems? Wait, I can combine it with all my historical data and anything that's in the data cloud, like what can I do?" Is the question they're asking and I think that this is the most fascinating thing, customers are going to build things they haven't been able to build before and I'm super excited to see what they do. >> But more specifically, my takeaway is that customers, actually application builders are going to be able to build applications that have data inherent to those apps, I mean John Furrier years ago said, "You know data is the new development kit." And it never happened the data, the data stack if you will separate from the application development stack, you're bringing those two worlds together, so what do you think the implications are of that? >> Well, I mean I think that we're going to dramatically simplify our customers lives, right? A thing that we focus on at Snowflake is relentless customer innovation, so we can make their lives better, so I mean frankly we talk to customers like, "Wait, I can do all this? Wait, are you sure that I'll be able to do this?" And we walk through what we can do, and what we can't do, and they really are like, "Wow, this could just dramatically simplify our lives and wait, what could we do with our data here?" And so, I think with the announcement of Unistore, and also all the Native app stuff that we're announcing today, I think we're really trying to enable customers and app developers there to think about, and being able to leverage Snowflake as their transactional system, the system of source, so I mean, I'm super excited about this, I came to Snowflake to work on this and I'm like, "Can't believe we get to talk about it." >> How do you, how, how? How does this work? What's the secret sauce behind it? Is it architecture or is it? >> Yeah, so I mean I think a big part of it is the architecture that we chose, so you know number one, a key product philosophy that we have at Snowflake is we have one product, we don't have many, we don't put the onus of complexity onto our customers and so building that into Snowflake is actually really hard, so underlying Hybrid Tables, which is the feature that powers Unistore is a row storage engine, a row-based storage engine, right? And then data is asynchronously copied over into a colander format and what this provides, because it's just another table that's deeply integrated with Snowflake is the compiler's completely aware of this, so you can write a query that spans multiple tables and take advantage of it, and we'll take over all the complexity, whether it needs to be a fast response to a single-row lookup, or it needs to aggregate and scan a ton of data, we'll make sure that we choose the right thing and provide you with the best performance that we have- >> You built that intelligence inside of that? >> Completely built in and amazing, but provided in a very simple fashion. >> You said you came to Snowflake to do this? How long ago was that? >> I came here a little over a year and a half. >> Okay, and had they started working on this obviously beforehand, or at least envisioning it, right? >> Yeah, this I mean, this is absolutely incredible, I have been working on this now for a year and a half, some of the team members have been working on it for more and it's incredible to finally be able to talk to customers and everybody about it, and for them to tell us what they're trying to do. I've already talked to a bunch of customers like, "Well wait, I could do this, or this, what about this scenario?" And it's awesome to hear their requirements, right? The thing that's been most amazing and you'll hear it in the talk tomorrow with Adobe who's been a great customer is like, "Customers give us insanely hard requirements." And what I love about this company is not, "Well, you know it's easier to do it this way." It's like, "No, how can we actually make their life easier?" And so, we really focus on doing that with Snowflake. >> And that's one of the things Frank talked about this morning with that mission alignment being critical there. So, it's in private preview now, when can folks expect to get their hands on it? >> Well, we don't have a date right now we're talking about, but you can go signup to be notified of the public preview when we get there, I think it's like snowflake.com/try-unistore, but we'll publish that later and you know if you're interested in the private preview, talk to your account team and we'll see if we can get you in. >> Carl, thank you so much for joining Dave and me in an action-packed 15 minutes, talking about the power of Unistore, what it's going to enable organizations to do and it sounds like you're tapping the surface, there's just so much more innovation that's to come, you're going to have to come back. >> Yes, that sounds awesome, thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Carl and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 from the show floor in Las Vegas, we're going to be right back with our next guest. (calm music)

(clicking) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Denver, Colorado. It's our first trip actually to Denver for theCUBE, so we're excited to be here. It's DJI AirWorks show. It's the second show they've ever had, about 500, 600 people here talking about the commercial applications for drone. There's no conversation really about consumer stuff here, the spark is not here. This is really about commercial applications for drones technology, the platform, the software. We're really excited about the keynote speaker today. He's Michael Perry. He's a Director of Strategic Partnerships for DJI. Michael, welcome. >> Thanks for having me, Jeff. Absolutely, and great job on the keynote. Really enthusiastic crowd. I think you pretty much had their wrapped attention the entire time. (laughs) So before we get into today, talk a little bit about why DJI has invested in this conference, and kind of what are your high level objectives in doing AirWorks. >> Yeah, so over the last several years we started seeing more and more maturity in how people are using drones for commercial work. Ultimately what we found though, is that a lot of these conversations were happening one to one, and often they were coming to DJI to have that conversation and then we'd connect them to somebody else in the network. Instead, a year ago, we decided, why don't we just connect everybody together so they can have those conversations directly? And that was a huge success. We had end users, developers, and dealers all coming together to think about how we can push forward the future of enterprise with drones. And this year, it's even bigger. We've now included not just end users and developers, but also training companies and financial service providers, hardware providers. Everyone's coming together to look at what's the future of this industry and how we can push it forward. >> Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So really the high light of verticals if you will, so agriculture, energy, construction, public safety, and infrastructure, and of course media as well, but those are really hardcore industrial sectors where you've already seen a lot of pretty advanced solutions, and you're really pushing the solution messaging as opposed to the point products or even talking about the drones themselves. >> Yeah, that's right. So I think if we had this conversation five years ago, we'd be trying to tell everybody why drones are so useful. That's no longer the issue. The question is, how can we take these drones and operate them at scale? How can we move them from an R&D project where everyone understands the value proposition, but how can we make sure that it's able to use by the guys in the field on a daily basis? And that's what everybody here in this room is here to decide. >> Now you guys take a really interesting approach. You've really broke the drone up into pieces. So you've got the actual platform itself, the thing that flies, and you guys have spent a lot of time and effort in letting it fly itself if you will, really, with instruction. Then there's the sensors, whether that be a camera, the axsensors, infrared, all type. I mean Hasselblad is here, one of the oldest camera companies around. And then there's the software, and you opened up your API both on the mobile device side, the control side, as well as, sounds like this year, even giving the raw access to the most fundamental sensor data. So that's a pretty bold kind of path to choose. How did that go down, and obviously the results are huge. You're building an ecosystem across all of those units. >> Yeah, when we started seeing the applications for drones in the commercial space, we ultimately realized that we can't develop end to end solutions for every application for drones. It's just too big. So what we started seeing is, hey, look, there's a company that already doing fantastic work in GIS mapping. Let's just enable them to use our platform. And ultimately we're starting to look at how we can use the base core of DJI technology as a platform for other people to build on top of, to really expand the potential of drones. And that's true for everybody here in this room. >> So now you've got really a wide range of platforms if you will, but the other thing that you announced today that I thought was pretty interesting, and I'm relatively new to this space, but getting beyond kind of the one person, one drone concept, and really enabling an enterprise operation. One of the guys was up talking about their customer, Komatsu, says, we love it, can you put 20,000 of these things in the air for us? >> Yeah, that's right. >> So that's a whole different way to think about your aerial assets if you will. I think back to the early military days, right? We didn't have an air force, right? It was part of the army. But to actually now have the ability to have kind of an aerial branch within your business process that feeds into your other business process, a very different way to think about the world. >> That's exactly right. So FlightHub is the answer to that exact question. If I'm a business and I want to operate drones at scale, how am I going to do that? So FlightHub does multiple things simultaneously. Allows you to see the live feeds from multiple drones. Allows you to assign tasks to individual drone pilots. Allows you to monitor all of the drones in your fleet and see how are they performing, where have they flown, what kind of missions are they optimized for, and use all of that information to be able to operate drones across an enterprise. >> Yeah, and then you talked about the other side of the equation, which is, investors still concerns about safety and privacy and this and that. And you're coming up with another product that's really for law enforcement and airports and those types of people so they have a better view of what's happening around there airspace that they're responsible for managing. Not really for the consumers or even for the operators, but really for more of the control and the trust if you will within this bigger ecosystem. >> That's exactly right. One of the barriers to broader adoption is the perception of drones, if there's drone flying by, whose drone is that? What is it doing? Is it doing the thing that it's supposed to be doing? Is there an accountability mechanism? So with AeroScope we've designed an easy to implement accountability mechanism for law enforcement, for airspace regulators, and between the two of them, they can start saying, hey, look, there's a category of drones that can just fly and we can make sure that they're not flying in anyway that's effecting safety or security, and if they are, then there's a follow up mechanism. >> Right, right. Okay, so I got to ask you a fun question. Of all the crazy applications that the ecosystem has delivered, what are some of your favorites that either just seem, wow, who would have ever thought of that, or just really leveraging the power of the platform in a way that, again, you would of never thought of on your own? >> Honestly, every week there's a new, exciting application. The one that always brings to mind though is the Ocean Alliance had a problem in that they need to collect information about whale pods in order to assess their health and their diet and how they're faring. The best way to do that is collecting whale snot. >> Jeff: Whale snot? >> Whale snot. So previously-- >> Jeff: Who knew whales had snot? >> Exactly, so previously they would row in dinghies next to whale pods as they breach, try to collect the snot as they go up the spout. Now they're using drones to do that. It's much more time efficient, allows them to better assess the health of the whales that they're trying conserve, and it also doesn't put the researchers in harm's way. >> Yeah, it's bad news for what's his name with the dirty job show because-- >> Yup. (laughs) >> Really the drones are taking a lot of these dirty jobs. It's really a safety issue when you're inspecting. I talked to somebody over coffee inspecting oil refineries. You don't have to send somebody up a 200 foot tower anymore. You can send the drone, use software, and you can get a better indication than you could from somebody that maybe missed a spot. >> Yeah, you can decrease the amount of hazardous work hours and increase the efficiency. You can not only do the inspection faster, but I can do it more frequently and get a bigger data set so that you can take that intelligence and make your business operate a lot more effectively. >> Alright, so the goals for 2018. What will be talking about at AirWorks 2018? >> I think next year you'll see a lot more mature applications within the different protocols that you've just mentioned. There're already software providers and hardware providers trying to address them, but I think today you'll start seeing all of those solutions coming together into one platform that can easily be sold and easily scaled in these business. So you'll probably see a lot more players here talking about that. >> Alright, well Michael, again, congratulations on the show. Congratulations on the keynote. Exciting times at DJI. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, Michael Ferry, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from DJI AirWorks. Thanks for watching. (clicking)

>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost, John Troyer. There's nothing we love more when we're at the User Conference is to actually be able to dig in and talk with the users. I want to welcome to the program Opal Perry who is a divisional CIO at Allstate. Did the keynote this morning. A really good community here. I know they were excited to hear your story and thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, it's great to be here with you. >> So Opal, we hear this term the digital transformation. Some people think it's just a buzz word but you talked in your keynote about the transformation that's going on in your world. Why don't you give us a quick overview of your role and what this transformation has been. >> Sure, so I've been with Allstate almost six years and I'm one of the vice presidents on the technology leadership team so we both work together as a whole team on initiatives that affect the entire enterprise. And then my particular day-to-day focus is Divisional CIO of Claims. We're a large insurer. The number publicly held insurer in the U.S. We support claims for auto, property, Allstate business insurance. It's a outstanding time to be in the business because there's just so much going on in technology. There's so many immersion areas and particularly when we are able to knit them together to serve our customers from insurance protection, restoration standpoint. It's really powerful. We do say and hear transformation so much that it feels sometimes like an overused term but I haven't found a better word for it yet because I think things really are transformative. We've been used to, for many years in the industry, change. Right, continuous improvement. We're always trying to change and get better. But what's happening now with this conversions of forces is truly transformative. We're not just replacing one way of doing things with a slightly improved way. We're changing the way people interact and serve the customer. >> And Opal, what was the driver for the change? Was there a pain point or competitive pressure? What drove this change? >> At Allstate, it's all about the customer opportunity. As I mentioned this morning, we've got 16 million customer households and that's just a tremendous responsibility and also a tremendous opportunity. To us, it was thinking about how do we bring the forces of this great 86-year-old company to bear and use the digital and technology changes emerging and really do that in support of giving our customer a better and better experience. How do we protect them? How do we restore them? >> As you are making this transformation to... We're here at the Cloud Foundry Summit, so interested in the Cloud Foundry story, how some of that decision process, obviously the tech is really cool, A. So was this coming out of the developers first, the technologists first or was it more of a needs analysis from the top-down that like a platform instead of technologies like Cloud Foundry? It could be what we need. >> It really came from a number of quarters but the tipping force was from our infrastructure area. As we looked like a lot of large companies do at what's the future of infrastructure, both in the data center, themes that have been emerging for many years in Cloud. There were a number of us that are leaders at Allstate that came from a banking background so we had seen previous era changes. Prior to Cloud Foundry been instantiated, I'd worked more in home-grown paths and seen that opportunity both from the developer but also from the infrastructure and so when Andy Zitney had joined us, he's with McKesson now, but he had joined and was our CTO for a period of time and had background from Chase and PayPal and various areas. He came in and build our platform team and really looked through their selection process, determined Cloud Foundry was a great option for us and something that we could grow with over time to start meeting the needs. But it was really an interest of saying hey, let's let infrastructure get out of the way, provide the foundation for the developers, and let the developers innovate great software for the business. But let's let the platform take care of things. He brought early awareness to a lot of those factors. >> Yeah, I think the joke is that nobody should be righting their own cryptographic software anymore (Stu chuckles). Nobody should be writing a distributed key-value ParaStore anymore. The Cloud Foundry people will tell you nobody should be writing their own platform anymore. That's hard enough, let somebody else take care of it. >> Yeah, maybe if you're a PhD student (interviewers chuckling) or researching the next great idea but in terms of being within an enterprise, whose primary role is to serve customers in a different way. Again, it just takes care of a lot of the lifting. That took a while when we introduced it for some people to understand. People would say to me why are you adding another layer? Getting them to understand the power of the abstraction and that's what we're really doing. We're lifting up above so we don't have to be worried so much about the exact infrastructure we're sitting on. >> That upscaling process that you're talking about, that training process. Both from the developer side and the operational side, there's a learning curve. Some people embrace it and some maybe not so much. Can you talk a little about how people have gotten trained up on the new skills, how you're helping people do that? >> Yes, in our platform team, it really started with Matt Curry who joined us a few years ago. He's a awesome engineer but also a great leader. He really set the tone culturally for the platform team to be learning environment and for people to share a lot. So a lot's really happened where he's led the hiring and training and seating of the platform team. From a developer perspective, when we looked across the enterprise and realized we've got a couple thousand developers that have worked for us for decades across different areas, we needed to do something more to reach scale more quickly. Initially, we were pairing with Pivotal and that was effective in getting some good results but we thought in order to make that scale and scale more quickly, we wanted to take a different approach. We partnered with Galvanize and brought in-house a 12-week bootcamp-style approach. >> Opal, one of the things that really resonated in your keynote, you talked about painting a picture as to how this technology really impacted your customers. There was a tree, there was a sun, there was your lab's environment and roots. Maybe if you could tease that out a little bit for us and explain how this technology really impacts your users. >> Yes, well, one I think in using that metaphor, it kind of acknowledges the environment is somewhat organic, right? The platform is still growing a lot, the ecosystem we're in, we have the chance to both contribute to the community and to take from it as it develops. To me, that's a really strong notion. The notion that particularly in leadership, we're kind of we're gardeners in a way, right? We're fostering the growth and so I thought that it's a really good example of thinking about as a tree or any plant really grows. It needs a variety of factors so I said our customers are like the sun to us, they're the reason for existing, and that's what we're all orbiting around. But the air represents all the business opportunity. The winds of change have been blowing mightily for years. The soil in which the tree is planted is like all the great Cloud Foundry instances. It's the training, it's the new role definition, it's the holistic program that really defines how we work as a digital product team. We put all that together and we need constant leadership support on a number of grounds to really make sure we take and cement the change. >> What about the developers? Where do they fit in this natural, organic analogy. >> They're the growing, thriving, strong plant itself. I think both. We aim for each individual product team and each individual, whether it's developer, product manager or designer to be continuously growing and using their creativity, discipline, strength, to bring us great business results. And then when you kind of back out and look at our network or product teams, that's a really important thing to me. An enterprise of our scale is very few breakthroughs will occur, I believe, because of a single digital product innovation. It's really in the ability to knit together different products to provide an end-to-end service or experience to the customer. >> How do you look at the public cloud? You know, Cloud Foundry allows? We were talking about BOSH, a multi-cloud environment. Where does your applications and deployments live today and how do you look at the public cloud? >> You know, we're still exploring some of the possibilities. Matt and his team have been very active looking. We started with on-premise installation for Cloud Foundry. And for myself, leading a development team, it's great as the platform is a look to kind of burst out into a multi-cloud environment. It'll be transparent to my team as long as we're operating to run on our Cloud Foundry instance, they can take us wherever we need to go. They've been doing a lot of work with our security team and other areas of the company to determine what's the right way to forge the path forward. I had a meeting with them Friday and they've got some great design things in the works. I think the next six moths to a year, are going to be looking at some real strong expansion of our cloud strategy. >> How does security fit into this whole picture? Obviously, a major concern for every CIO these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to us, we've taken a real security-first approach. We're been our CISO team has been working really closely with Matt and the Cloud engineers and they're just defining how do we want to segregate parts of our environment? How do we follow the principle of trust no one and build security in from the get-go? Again, it's a little bit like the platform itself. I'm confident when they get a solution in place, they'll minimize the burden on my developers and we can just have a security-first mindset but have a lot of the hygiene taken care of by the platform implementation. >> Again, something you don't want to differentiate on. You want to be built into the foundation, or the roots, maybe of our metaphor here. >> Opal: Yes. I heard ya. >> Opal, can you talk a little bit about the apps? Obviously, we've already used words like scale here today. Allstate's a big company. You've got lots of apps. Legacy apps, many different kinds of stacks, generations of technology. How are you choosing what ends up being is this greenfield or things that are being moved? How are you all looking at different applications inside the company? Where they live on which cloud and how they get modernized? >> We're lighting the business needs and strategy, really drive how we prioritize. It really is a matter of a lot, at this point, triage and prioritization. We've got a rich set of opportunities. When we're building new apps in-house, we're certainly looking to take a cloud-first approach. Again, a lot of that's within our own walls today but we know that with the Foundry, it offers us the option to burst out at a later date and leaves us some optionality. The Allstate Corporation, the Allstate brand of insurance is what's best known but in Claims, I also support we have a brand called Encompass Insurance so we're looking to provide support for multiple companies and build technology that can serve everyone. There are a lot of cases too, in an ecosystem like ours, where we're working with third party vendors and they're increasingly offering cloud-based solutions. Again, we do a lot of work with them from the security and compliance perspective to make sure that their strategy is consistent with ours. To make sure we take appropriate care of our customer data. And then I personally get really excited by the refactoring opportunities. I'm really fortunate in Claims that our core claims system was implemented just about 10 years ago. I call it legacy now, but it's not, (John chuckles) as far back to the dark ages as some of the other systems that you'll find within the walls of enterprises. It was build as our last big monolithic implementation and we've been doing decoupling there. So whenever we know we're going to do a decoupling, we look for what opportunity to implement new cloud native microservices and again just stand that up in our environment with the platform team. >> I wanted to ask also about culture and technology adoption. We're sitting here in the middle of Silicon Valley. This cloud phenomenon driven a lot from Silicon Valley. Sometimes people think this cloud native stuff, it's for startups, it's for the kids, it's for whatever. You're based in the Midwest and I also, I'm an Illinois boy myself. You get sometimes, kind of a inferiority complex about the coast, both coasts. But this does not seem to be a coastal phenomenon. This does not seem to be something that only a startup can learn. This is Allstate, a mature company and with a Midwestern base, can you kind of talk a little about was there anything about that in terms of people saying we can't do that here or that sort of thing? >> No, no, I mean, in fact, I think it's a global phenomenon. I was living for almost two years in Belfast, Northern Ireland. We have a division there, Allstate Northern Ireland and we saw a lot of Foundry activity among different companies there. Of course, there's a European summit every year, as well, so I think it's just good common sense. A lot of us, again, before Cloud Foundry came through were working with the different predecessor technologies and Spring and Vmware, you know various aspects and kind of knitting together which felt like reinventing the wheel. So it's just good business sense, good common sense when there's a solution that you can leverage. I think it's just like you were commenting earlier, right? If it's there and you can use it and you can allow the focus to be on what really differentiates you as a business to your customers. That's the way to go. >> Opal, the last question I have for you is there either commentary on any of the announcements that were made this week or are there any things that you're hoping really, for either Pivotal, the fFundation in general, your ecosystem that would make your life easier that's kind of on your to-do list from the vendor side? >> There's so much to take in. I think it's probably still going to take me a week to absorb all the implications. It's great to watch the dynamics going on. I think Microsoft joining the Foundation, that's a very good move 'cause we have so many different technologies within our enterprise so to understand how different vendors are working and playing together in some way is really good. I think Abbey and the Foundation, they've been fantastic about always soliciting input from members like us and members of the community about what we want to see. For me, it's always a big eye-to-word scale. Again, we're a huge enterprise. There are even larger enterprises here that have started running and when this really becomes the we all achieve the aspirational goals and it becomes the day-to-day backbone. It's just making sure this is really hardened to run at true enterprise weight. I think that the enterprise scale of the future is going to be even bigger than what it has been historically because with all these new products, we're driving an appetite towards greater and greater customer interaction. I saw that in banking ten years ago and I think we're going to see it in insurance more and more so we just want to know that we're all working together to get that strength and that power that the customer needs. >> Opal Perry, really appreciate you sharing Allstate's digital transformation with us and our audience, for John and myself. We'll be back with more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit. Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Opal: Thank you. (gentle lively music)

>>Good morning live from Chicago. It's the cube on the floor at Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, we're gonna be talking next in the segment with two alumni about what Red Hat and IBM are doing to give Ansible users AI superpowers. As one of our alumni guests said, just off the keynote stage, we're nearing an inflection point in ai. >>The power of AI with Ansible is really gonna be an innovative, I think an inflection point for a long time because Ansible does such great things. This segment's gonna explore that innovation, bringing AI and making people more productive and more importantly, you know, this whole low code, no code, kind of right in the sweet spot of the skills gap. So should be a great segment. >>Great segment. Please welcome back two of our alumni. Perry is here, the Chief scientist, IBM Research and IBM Fellow. And Tom Anderson joins us once again, VP and general manager at Red Hat. Gentlemen, great to have you on the program. We're gonna have you back. >>Thank you for having >>Us and thanks for joining us. Fresh off the keynote stage. Really enjoyed your keynote this morning. Very exciting news. You have a project called Project Wisdom. We're talking about this inflection point in ai. Tell the audience, the viewers, what is Project Wisdom And Wisdom differs from intelligence. How >>I think Project Wisdom is really about, as I said, sort of combining two major forces that are in many ways disrupting and, and really constructing many a aspects of our society, which are software and AI together. Yeah. And I truly believe it's gonna result in a se shift on how not just enterprises, but society carries forefront. And as I said, intelligence is, is, I would argue at least artificial intelligence is more, in some ways mechanical, if I may say it, it's about algorithms, it's about data, it's about compute. Wisdom is all about what is truly important to bring out. It's not just about when you bring out a, a insight, when you bring out a decision to be able to explain that decision as well. It's almost like humans have wisdom. Machines have intelligence and, and it's about project wisdom. That's why we called it wisdom. >>Because it is about being a, a assistant augmenting humans. Just like be there with the humans and, and almost think of it as behave and interact with them as another colleague will versus intelligence, which is, you know, as I said, more mechanical is about data. Computer algorithms crunch together and, and we wanna bring the power of project wisdom and artificial intelligence to developers to, as you said, close the skills gap to be able to really make them more productive and have wisdom for Ansible be their assistant. Yeah. To be able to get things for them that they would find many ways mundane, many ways hard to find and again, be an assistant and augmented, >>You know, you know what's interesting, I want to get into the origin, how it all happened, but interesting IBM research, well known for the deep tech, big engineering. And you guys have been doing this for a long time, so congratulations. But it's interesting here at this event, even on stage here event, you're starting to see the automation come in. So the question comes up, scale. So what happens, IBM buys Red Hat, you go raid the, the raid, the ip, Trevor Treasure trove of ai. I mean this cuz this is kind of like bringing two killer apps together. The Ansible configuration automation layer with ai just kind of a, >>Yeah, it's an amazing relationship. I was gonna say marriage, but I don't wanna say marriage cause I may be >>Last. I didn't mean say raid the Treasure Trobe, but the kind of >>Like, oh my God. An amazing relationship where we bring all this expertise around automation, obviously around IP and application infrastructure automation and IBM research, Richie and his team bring this amazing capacity and experience around ai. Bring those two things together and applying AI to automation for our teams is so incredibly fantastic. I just can't contain my enthusiasm about it. And you could feel it in the keynote this morning that Richie was doing the energy in the room and when folks saw that, it's just amazing. >>The geeks are gonna love it for sure. But here I wanna get into the whole evolution. Computers on computers, remember the old days thinking machines was a company generations ago that I think they've sold or went outta business, but self-learning, learning machines, computers, programming, computers was actually on your slide you kind of piece out this next wave of AI and machine learning, starting with expert systems really kind of, I'm almost say static, but like okay programs. Yeah, yeah. And then now with machine learning and that big debate was unsupervised, supervised, which is not really perfect. Deep learning, which now explores some things, but now we're at another wave. Take, take us through the thought there explaining what this transition looks like and why. >>I think we are, as I said, we are really at an inflection point in the journey of ai. And if ai, I think it's fair to say data is the pain of ai without data, AI doesn't exist. But if I were to train AI with what is known as supervised learning or or data that is labeled, you are almost sort of limited because there are only so many people who have that expertise. And interestingly, they all have day jobs. So they're not just gonna sit around and label this for you. Some people may be available, but you know, this is not, again, as I as Tom said, we are really trying to apply it to some very sort of key domains which require subject matter expertise. This is not like labeling cats and dogs that everybody else in the board knows there are, the community's very large, but still the skills to go around are not that many. >>And I truly believe to apply AI to the, to the word of, you know, enterprises information technology automation, you have to have unsupervised learning and that's the only way to skate. Yeah. And these two trends really about, you know, information technology percolating across every enterprise and unsupervised learning, which is learning on this very large amount of data with of course know very large compute with some very powerful algorithms like transformer architectures and others which have been disrupting the, the domain of natural language as well are coming together with what I described as foundation models. Yeah. Which anybody who plays with it, you'll be blown away. That's literally blown away. >>And you call that self supervision at scale, which is kind of the foundation. So I have to ask you, cuz this comes up a lot with cloud, cloud scale, everyone tells horizontally scalable cloud, but vertically specialized applications where domain expertise and data plays. So the better the data, the better the self supervision, better the learning. But if it's horizontally scalable is a lot to learn. So how do you create that data ops where it's where the machines are gonna be peaked to maximize what's addressable, but what's also in the domain too, you gotta have that kind of diversity. Can you share your thoughts on that? >>Absolutely. So in, in the domain of foundation models, there are two main stages I would say. One is what I'll describe as pre-training, which is think of it as the, the machine in this particular case is knowledgeable about the domain of code in general. It knows syntax of Python, Java script know, go see Java and so, so on actually, and, and also Yammel as well, which is obviously one would argue is the domain of information technology. And once you get to that level, it's a, it's almost like having a developer who knows all of this but may not be an expert at Ansible just yet. He or she can be an expert at Ansible but is not there yet. That's what I'll call background knowledge. And also in the, in the case of foundation models, they are very adept at natural language as well. So they can connect natural language to code, but they are not yet expert at the domain of Ansible. >>Now there's something called, the second stage of learning is called fine tuning, which is about this data ops where I take data, which is sort of the SME data in this particular case. And it's curated. So this is not just generic data, you pick off GitHub, you don't know what exists out there. This is the data which is governed, which we know is of high quality as well. And you think of it as you specialize the generic AI with pre-trained AI with that data. And those two stages, including the governance of that data that goes into it results in this sort of really breakthrough technology that we've been calling Project Wisdom for. Our first application is Ansible, but just watch out that area. There are many more to come and, and we are gonna really, I'm really excited about this partnership with Red Hat because across IBM and research, I think where wherever we, if there is one place where we can find excited, open source, open developer community, it is Right. That's, >>Yeah. >>Tom, talk about the, the role of open source and Project Wisdom, the involvement of the community and maybe Richard, any feedback that you've gotten since coming off stage? I'm sure you were mobbed. >>Yeah, so for us this is, it's called Project Wisdom, not Product Wisdom. Right? Sorry. Right. And so, no, you didn't say that but I wanna just emphasize that it is a project and for us that is a key word in the upstream community that this is where we're inviting the community to jump on board with us and bring their expertise. All these people that are here will start to participate. They're excited in it. They'll bring their expertise and experience and that fine tuning of the model will just get better and better. So we're really excited about introducing this now and involving the community because it's super nuts. Everything that Red Hat does is around the community and this is no different. And so we're really excited about Project Wisdom. >>That's interesting. The project piece because if you see in today's world the innovation strategy before where we are now, go back to say 15 years ago it was of standard, it's gotta have standard bodies. You can still innovate and differentiate, but yet with open source and community, it's a blending of research and practitioners. I think that to me is a big story here is that what you guys are demonstrating is the combination of research and practitioners in the project. Yes. So how does this play out? Cuz this is kind of like how things are gonna get done in the cloud cuz Amazon's not gonna just standardize their stack at at higher level services, nor is Azure and they might get some plumbing commonalities below, but for Project Project Wisdom to be successful, they can, it doesn't need to have standards. If I get this right, if I can my on point here, what do you guys think about that? React to that? Yeah, >>So I definitely, I think standardization in terms of what we will call ML ops pipeline for models to be deployed and managed and operated. It's like models, like any other code, there's standardization on DevOps ops pipeline, there's standardization on machine learning pipeline. And these models will be deployed in the cloud because they need to scale. The only way to scale to, you know, thousands of users is through cloud. And there is, there are standard pipelines that we are working and architecting together with the Red Hat community leveraging open source packages. Yeah. Is really to, to help scale out the AI models of wisdom together. And another point I wanted to pick up on just what Tom said, I've been sort of in the area of productizing AI for for long now having experience with Watson as well. The only scenario where I've seen AI being successful is in this scenario where, what I describe as it meets the criteria of flywheel of ai. >>What do I mean by flywheel of ai? It cannot be some research people build a model. It may be wowing, but you roll it out and there's no feedback. Yeah, exactly. Okay. We are duh. So what actually, the only way the more people use these models, the more they give you feedback, the better it gets because it knows what is right and what is not right. It will never be right the first time. Actually, you know, the data it is trained on is a depiction of reality. Yeah. It is not a reality in itself. Yeah. The reality is a constantly moving target and the only way to make AI successful is to close that loop with the community. And that's why I just wanted to reemphasize the point on why community is that important >>Actually. And what's interesting Tom is this is a difference between standards bodies, old school and communities. Because developers are very efficient in their feedback. Yes. They jump to patterns that serve their needs, whether it's self-service or whatever. You can kind of see what's going on. Yeah. It's either working or not. Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah. We get immediate feedback from the community and we know real fast when something isn't working, when something is working, there are no problems with the flow of data between the members of the community and, and the developers themselves. So yeah, it's, I'm it's great. It's gonna be fantastic. The energy around Project Wisdom already. I bet. We're gonna go down to the Project Wisdom session, the breakout session, and I bet you the room will be overflowed. >>How do people get involved real quick? Get, get a take a minute to explain how I would get involved. I'm a community member. Yep. I'm watching this video, I'm intrigued. This has got me enthusiastic. How do I get more confident with this opportunity? >>So you go to, first of all, you go to red hat.com/project Wisdom and you register your interests and you wanna participate. We're gonna start growing this process, bringing people in, getting ready to make the service available to people to start using and to experiment with. Start getting their feedback. So this is the beginning of, of a journey. This isn't the, you know, this isn't the midpoint of a journey, this is the begin. You know, even though the work has been going on for a year, this is the beginning of the community journey now. And so we're gonna start working together through channels like Discord and whatnot to be able to exchange information and bring people in. >>What are some of the key use cases, maybe Richie are starting with you that, that you think maybe dream use cases that you think the community will help to really uncover as we're looking at Project Wisdom really helping in this transformation of ai. >>So if I focus on let's say Ansible itself, there are much wider use cases, but Ansible itself and you know, I, I would say I had not realized, I've been working on AI for Good for long, but I had not realized the excitement and the power of Ansible community itself. It's very large, it's very bottom sum, which I love actually. But as I went to lot of like CTOs and CIOs of lot of our customers as well, it was becoming clear the use cases of, you know, I've got thousand Ansible developers or IT or automation experts. They write code all the time. I don't know what all of this code is about. So the, the system administrators, managers, they're trying to figure out sort of how to organize all of this together and think of it as Google for finding all of these automation code automation content. >>And I'm very excited about not just the use cases that we demonstrated today, that is beginning of the journey, but to be able to help enterprises in finding the right code through natural language interfaces, generating the code, helping Del us debug their code as well. Giving them predictive insights into this may happen. Just watch out for it when you deploy this. Something like that happened before, just watch out for it as well. So I'm, I'm excited about the entire life cycle of IT automation, Not just about at the build time, but also at the time of deployment. At the time of management. This is just a start of a journey, but there are many exciting use cases abound for Ansible and beyond. >>It's gonna be great to watch this as it unfolds. Obviously just announcing this today. We thank you both so much for joining us on the program, talking about Project wisdom and, and sharing how the community can get involved. So you're gonna have to come back next year. We're gonna have to talk about what's going on. Cause I imagine with the excitement of the community and the volume of the community, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Absolutely. >>This is absolutely exactly. You're excited about. >>Excellent. And you should be. Congratulations. Thank, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate your insights. Thank you. Thank >>You for having >>Us. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Barton and you're watching The Cube Lie from Chicago at Ansible Fest 22. This is day two of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of coop con cloud native con 2021. We're in person physical venom, John free hosted a Q a Dave Nicholson, my CO's and Emma Laney, who is our not so roving reporter unemployed, software engineer, unemployed comedian. Great to have you on the cube. >>Thank you for that list of credentials. >>You're doing great. I saw you're having some fun down there. We've got this new show or testing out called the grill. Here it is. Okay. Um, what's the focus, what's the story behind everything. >>Uh, the focus of the show is trying to have some fun with tech. You know, tech has a lot of self seriousness. Uh, there's a lot that's ripe to make fun of. We're also having fun. We're not trying to grill people in. We're not trying to roast them. Right? We're having people come through. They're sharing funny stories. We're having a contest to find the best man split nation of Kubernetes. Right now, I got to say, a woman is in the lead. Oh, she killed that contest, like called me, sweetie. And everything. It just proves that it's not about the man. You identify as it's about the condensation in your heart when it comes to mansplaining. >>Um, what is the best criteria that you, when you get a candidate for the mansplaining competition, what is the criteria? >>I mean, number one, we're looking for condensation. You get extra points for you, the phrase, well, actually we want a supercilious attitude. Uh, if you are partially into explaining it and then you stop yourself because you think you've used too technical of a term and then step it down, all of those gets you extra points in the mansplaining. >>Can I ask you, what's your biggest observation as you kind of look at this ecosystem? I mean, it's a big event, but it's, COVID postpone even in COVID people are wearing masks, not wearing masks. >>I mean, people are wearing masks for the most part. Uh, you know, I did love this, uh, red light, yellow light green light system. They came up with green, meaning please touch me. I've been inside for too long red meaning I still care about COVID yellow. You know, ask me, we'll figure it >>Out. All right. What's the funniest thing you've heard so far. >>The funniest thing I have to say, I asked someone what their favorite tech joke is. And he said it worked on my computer That really stirred up some memories. >>Oh man, we're in LA though. This is a great area. It's literally with the best comedians you could think of or work their way through the system. But with techno and everything is tech with gadgets and with like Kubernetes, I mean, it's, it's the material writes itself. I mean, >>Surely >>You must be having, >>Oh, I'm definitely having a ton of fun. Uh, I wouldn't say the material writes itself. I would say hire me to write material, but it is quite a fertile. >>Okay. What would you write for, uh, looking at the keynote today? Looking at the vibe here, obviously a lot of people show because they're remote, but visually it's a packed house here, but what's your first comedic view of the, as the fog lifts in this community? >>I have to say the thing that really stuck out to me from the keynote addresses was that people have not yet adjusted to being in person. There were some very, very delayed applause breaks where people realize they were not muted watching on a screen and you'd still go, oh, that's right. We should interact. Like God bless those speakers. It's uh, people have been inside for a long time. >>Um, part-time comedian too. I mean, co-hosting queue. Um, I don't, I, >>I don't find anything funny with technology. And I'm curious when you use the word supercilious, is that a, is that a comedic term? I, I, yes. >>I heard that before. It's the Latin form of super silly. Yeah. Which is my brand of comedy. >>So the mansplaining, I don't know if you need to like, woman's plane, some of this stuff to me, but I'll English >>Major Splain. Okay. Okay. Super silliest. >>It sounds super silly. So is it, is it, is it okay to have a ringer come in and attempt make an attempt at the mansplaining or >>Okay. A hundred >>Percent come in wearing it. >>I'm trying to make this a safe space for women at the conference. I'm the only woman you should be mansplaining to. I'm a martyr falling on the sword of mansplaining for all the great technical women at this conference. You slip that in >>And translate that. >>Of course, John, I don't know how to explain that to them more detailed. Um, what I love about the vibe is that this technical people they're snarky. If you get at their core, I mean, we were at the bar. Everyone was like totally leaning into like comedy and more fun because it's almost like they're bust out, come out of the closet and beat comedian. >>Oh, there is a broiling anger in the soul of every developer and every person who's worked on technology. And the question is going to be, can we get it on camera when they are not drunk, we're doing our >>Best to drink. These developers don't >>Think, oh, they do desperately. >>We saw a few partaking in the bar at the GTA merit and a lot going on. You had the, you know, they had warriors game going on. You have a lot of Dodgers were playing the giants. So pretty active bar scene for this crowd. >>Yeah, no, it was, uh, it was very fun. I personally was disappointed that the warriors are not actually staying in our hotel. You know, if this software thing doesn't work out, NBA wife is a possible second. >>And the Ritz Carlton was right behind us. You could be right there too. All right. So the grill is, uh, an experiment. We're having some fun with it, but the purpose is to just chill a bit. What's the, what would you say the goal of the show is for you? >>I'd say the goal is to get people to come out of their shells a little bit, to have some fun, to poke fun at some of the tendencies that we see in tech that we often don't bring up. You know, like I'm having so much fun with the man's pollination. Uh, I've lived it a bit. And my favorite is, uh, as I asked men to mansplain it to me, the panic in their eyes, that's my ultimate goal is just to make men afraid. >>And the panic is because they don't know if they're mansplaining all the time or actually purposely mansplaining is hard enough, but they do it naturally. Sorry. >>I have three daughters and I can't wait for them to see this stuff. I cannot >>Wait. That's going to be >>Great. Well, we have cooler gen Z. >>Well, we have t-shirts right. Let me see the t-shirts give everyone a quick, if you come on, this is day one of coupons. So if you do come on the show with the grill, I'm the t-shirt ferry. The grill is real. It's like the V the cubes version of the view, but >>Wow, just because I'm a woman, the, uh, the t-shirt is a big incentive. I'm sure a lot of people go to tech conferences don't get any free. T-shirts good. >>I got grilled by a net. Lilium, the cube at cube con con not cube >>Con. It's a medium rare grilling. >>I couldn't resist the view jokes. I know I'm in color. We'll keep our day jobs here in the comedian angle. We got to >>Believe that's true. Yes. When I look at the wavelengths of >>Light on that, I'm super stoked to have you try that. I think it's a great program, Greg. God. So you guys doing a great job, loved the vibe, love the energy, love the creativity, having some fun. See the poster one last time. And the idea is to have some fun, right? It's a tough time. We're all coming back from the pandemic, welcoming back from the pandemic. And this is just a fun way to kind of let the air out and have some fun. So thanks for everyone. Thank you so much for doing that. Thank you. All right. Cute coverage here. Coop gone. Cloud native con I'm John Perry, David Nicholson. Be back with more day, one coverage of three days after the short break.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we are here live at Magento Imagine 2019, our second time being back here with theCUBE and we're very excited to welcome Brittany Hodak to theCUBE, entrepreneur, customer engagement speaker, writer, co-founder of the Superfan Company. Brittany it's so exciting to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. >> So, you have an incredibly impressive background and I'm like where do we start? >> Thank you. >> So, here we are talking about customer experiences and how Magento and Adobe empower a lot of customer experiences. But you've written a ton of articles, over 350, you've been published in the Huff Post, Wall Street Journal, talk to us about your experiences with customer engagement, some of the things that you as a co-founder of the Superfan have discovered working with a variety of brands from Walmart to Katy Perry? >> Well, thank you so much for saying that. I always say that the biggest problem brands and entertainers have is often one that's not even on their radar at all. I talked to a lot of small and medium sized business owners and they say, You know, my big problem is people don't know who I am. I've got an awareness problem. I'm struggling to let people know who I am. And I really think my business would change if more people knew. And I said, You know, that's not the problem. You can always fix awareness. You can always spend money to get your message out there. Your big problem is apathy. Your problem is there are people who know and don't care. And you've got to figure out how to make people care. You've got to figure out how to connect your story with their story in a way that's meaningful, and in a way that's going to mean something in their lives because that's how you really start the fan engagement process. That's how you lay the groundwork for creating a culture of super fandom amongst your customers, that's really going to help you grow not just the business but a brand. >> Is it about having a more relevant messages or is it just finding those people that have a propensity to be a fan to the services that you provide? >> Well, it's understanding your uniqueness in a way that really makes your value proposition different from anybody else is. Once you understand your uniqueness and you're able to turn it into service of others, that's when you really you position yourself to be able to make the kind of difference that makes somebody want to be a super fan. And I always say, we've had the fortune of working with tons of celebrities, some of the biggest recording artists and superstars on the planet, and a lot of times people say to me, Oh, you know, it's easy when you're talking about being a super fan of Taylor Swift or being a super fan of Katy Perry, but, you know, I'm a plumber or I'm an electrician, how can I have super fans? And I say, By providing people the kindness service that changes their lives. I have an exterminator who I am a super fan of. His name is Scott and the reason I am a super fan of him is because he makes sure there are no brown recluse spiders in my house and I am absolutely terrified about recluse spiders. They are super evil creatures if you're not familiar with them, I encourage you not to google it. They're like nastiest little bug in the world. But you know to me that's super important because he's not just killing bugs, he's helping me feel safe in my home. So that's absolutely a vital service and finding the right guy to do that and the right guy to put my mind at ease and let me know there aren't going to be brown recluse spiders in my house is invaluable and because of that, like there's no way I would ever switch exterminators because Scott's my guy. And I know you know, I can text him 50 different pictures of critters and say, Is this okay, Is this okay? And he's going to get back to me and let me know. So, it's all about points of connection and finding ways to make your audience feel really valued, and connecting your story with their story. >> So, if you look at an exterminator versus a Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Walmart, are there similarities and what they need to do to deliver this service that's impacting lives? Or are there fundamental differences? >> There are some fundamental differences, but there's more overlap than you would think. And I always say, if you think about it like a Venn diagram, you've got your brand or your business, your service, your product, whatever it is that you're providing, and you've got your customers over here. Where the magic happens is that point of intersection, where your story overlaps with their story, that intersection, that's where super fandom happens. And I like to talk about something I call the four A's of super fandom. So, you can, I see a lot of people make the mistake of trying to talk to everybody the same way. So, whether somebody is encountering your brand for the very first time or has been your customer for a long time, using the same messaging for those people and that doesn't work. So, I talk a lot about the four A's. So, the first day is awareness. That's when somebody is first uncovering your brand, first interacting with your brand. The second a is action, that's when somebody is actually interacting with your brand for the first time. The third a is affinity. Those are the people who are fans of your brand. They've sort of bought into your why, these are the satisfied customers, I would say. And a lot of businesses stop there. They say, These are the people who are satisfied. These are the people who liked what I'm doing, they're buying from me. And that's a mistake that a lot of especially small and medium sized businesses make they sort of feel like, I've got these customers, I don't have to do anything else. They're not over delivering or over serving them which is a huge missed opportunity because if you do, you're able to convert people from that third A to the fourth a which is advocacy. And advocacy is where you want to get the majority of the people because those are your superfans so to speak, those are the ones who are out there sharing your story and your why with other people, helping refer new customers and new clients to you. So, I always say if you can get past the affinity, the people who are happy with you but not really talking about it and really make them feel valued. That's how you create advocates and advocacy is really the super secret sauce when you're talking about super fandom. >> So where should people get started to try to build super fandom within their client base? Is that really with the good customers that they already have, they try to get them to be advocates or I think most people spend so much time focusing on the fat end of the funnel as opposed to on the narrow end of the funnel and converting that transaction into a fan which is what it sounds like you're suggesting? >> Yeah, well, it's important to to focus on all parts of the funnel man, like I said that that awareness, that that fat of the top, you certainly need to be dealing with those people to get them further down. But the skinny part of the funnel is really where you want to make sure that people are continuing to drip out to the other side to make those referrals for you. So, absolutely focusing on everybody. One thing that I am always shocked I when I do consulting and work with small businesses and medium sized businesses, when I asked how much referral business they get, a lot of people don't know that number off the top of your head. So, if you're not tracking the amount of referrals, you absolutely need to know that as a metric, and the number one thing that you can do to increase the amount of referral business that you're getting is by asking your customers for referrals. It's so funny the amount of people who say, I hardly get any referral business at all. And I say, Well, when's the last time you asked? When's the last time that you went to one of your clients or your customers and said, I so appreciate your business. And I wonder if you know anybody in your network who could benefit from our product or service. And they say, oh I've never done that. But yeah, they wonder why they don't have any referrals so-- >> It seems like such an easy step but to your point, you're saying they're focusing on awareness, getting my brand, my service, my name out there, getting people to take action? >> Yes. >> And building that affinity and then I'm good, but that simply asking to make it a referral whether it's a yelp or something as simple as that seems like a pretty easy step. Strategically, how do you advise customers to get from that, take that if you look at it like a funnel like Jeff saying, take that group of affinity customers and convert some percentage to advocates, what's your strategy for helping a consumer brand or even a service provider, like an exterminator for actually making those conversions and then and then having that be a really kind of engine to drive referrals, to drive more leads to the top of that funnel? >> That's a great question. So, I like to talk about something I call the high five which is knowing the five most important people that have the potential to drive your business forward for the next quarter, the next year and the next five years. So, this is an actual list of five people. And any business owner hopefully can sit down and say, Here are the people that I need to really super serve in order to move my business forward. So knowing who those five people are, it could be an advisor, it could be an investor, it could be somebody you've never even met, maybe a thought leader whose thought that you really enjoy, that you think this person could really help me and open me up to a lot of people in their network if they knew who I was. Make a list of those five people, and then figure out how often you need to be doing something staying top of mind for those people. So for me, I like to make sure it's at least once every two weeks. So, sometimes it's as simple as sending an article and saying, Hey, I came across this article, I thought you would really love it, wanted to send it your way. Now and reality, did I just come across that article? No, I spent maybe an hour looking for the right article to forward that person. It's taking the time out to show them that they matter to you, so whether that's sending them a nice gift in the mail for no reason or a handwritten thank you note after they made an introduction for you. It's checking in on things, I always say, you should know what is important to the people who are important to you. You should know the teams that they follow, you should know their spouse, their children, the things that are happening in their lives so you can check in with them. And we live in an age where it's so easy to get information about anyone because all of us are putting content out there on the internet all the time about ourselves. So take the time to figure out what matters to those people who matter to you, and then stay top of mind, letting them know that they matter to you. So, like I said, for me, it's once every two weeks and I look at my list of five about every six months in terms of adding a couple of new people on maybe cycling some people off. But I've been doing this for four years. So, I have a list of 20 people. And I those are like my alums, some of the alumni of my high five, and I'm still extremely close with all of them. I still make sure that I'm trying to add value to them because having one person who's going to advocate for you could open the door for millions of dollars of revenue for you. So, it's just identifying who those people are, because to your point, it's impossible to sort of make everyone the most important person, it's impossible to take everyone at that third step and take them to the fourth step. So, rather than holistically thinking about it. I like to really drill in and say let's start with five. And if you've got 50 employees and you assign five people to each of those 50 employees to say make sure this vendor or make sure this customer, or make sure this partner feels very appreciated by you on a regular basis. You're going to, you really start to see the ROI very, very quickly in your business. >> So some of the trends, if we look at this we're all consumers of any kind of product service, we have this expectation, this growing expectation that we're going to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, have it delivered in an hour or a day, or so, we want to be able to have this experience on mobile, maybe started there, maybe finish it in the store, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that you recommend that the company with any product or service needs to get on board with, for example, this morning they were talking about progressive web apps and being able to deliver an experience where the person doesn't have to leave the app, or they can transact something like through Instagram. What are some of those top tools that you recommend to your broad client base. You got to get on board with like mobile, for example, right away. >> Yes, I was going to say the PWAs are absolutely critical, because I think we've all as consumers been in the situation of trying to load something on our phone, and it's five seconds goes by six seconds, I'm like forget about it. >> We're done. >> Yeah, I'm done, I'm over it. So PWAs is super important because it's all about putting your customer first and making things simple for them. The other thing is making sure that whatever system process you're using, everything needs to be connected. You can't be managing stuff across eight different platforms and expect for things not to fall through the cracks which is I'm learning so much here at Imagine and listening to all the best practices of people who are using Magento to manage every part of their business because something is seemingly minor as sending a confirmation email twice instead of once or having eight hours go by before the customer gets that, those types of things, say to a customer on a subliminal level, I'm not important, I don't matter, they're not putting me first. >> So just fan comes from fanatic. And there's great things about fans, and some times there's less great things about fans and we've seen a little bit of that here in terms of this really passionate community around Magento. And it was independent. And then it went to eBay and then it went back out of eBay. And now it's back in Adobe. And it's funny seeing the people that have been here for the whole journey. Part of that responsibility, if you're going to invite someone to be a fan is you have to let them participate, you have to let them contribute. And often which we're seeing, I guess, in Game of Thrones, I'm not a big fan, but if you get outside of kind of the realm of where the fans want things to go, it can also cause some conflict. So, how to people manage encouraging fans, really supporting fans, but at the same time not letting them completely knock their business off or hold the business back probably from places where the entrepreneur needs to still go? >> That's a great question. There was a really fascinating study that Viacom did a couple of years ago about fans. And especially in the under 35 sets, so millennials, gen Z. And the vast majority of people felt like fans have some ownership of the thing that they're a fan of. And that's a really interesting study in psychology to think about these people who feel the ownership. But you know, it's true. You mentioned Game of Thrones, that's a great example of seeing these fan bases who come up with names for themselves, and who are tweeting in real time about things that are happening. Magento a great example because open source has been such an important part of the culture and the history of the platform. These people feel in a very real sense this ownership. And you're right, I think sometimes that scares small business owners, medium sized business owners. They say, Well, we don't want to relinquish control. We don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we're upsetting people. And I would say, You're right, fan comes from the word fanatic. And that fanaticism, that passion is something you absolutely want. Because I would argue that a greater threat than that is what I was talking about earlier, which is apathy. You don't want people to be like, I don't care. And passion is of course, the opposite of apathy. And that's what you're looking for. So I would say, are you going to put yourself in a position where sometimes there could be a disagreement, you could upset somebody? Absolutely, but you those are the people, it's like if you're in a relationship with somebody and you have a fight that passion that's there is because there's care on both sides. You're both super engaged, you're both very passionate about your position. So, having a system in place to defuse that by saying, I hear you I understand where you're coming from, let's figure this out together, is part of the customer service staff that you've just got to prepare for. >> Can you using, sorry Brittany, using all this data that's available that Magento, Adobe et cetera can deliver and enable organizations to understand that and maybe even kind of marry those behaviors with apathy on one hand passion on the other and how do we get to that happy medium? >> Exactly, how do we get to the happy medium, what are the data points that matter? How are we, the idea of super fan means something different to every organization. So, part of it is uncovering what it is that really matters to you. I always say a super fan is somebody who over indexes and their affinity for a product, service, brand, entertainer, therefore increasing the chance that they're going to advocate on its behalf. So, thinking about, there could be people who are spending a lot of money with your brand who just aren't really that passionate about it. They're not going to tell people and that's fine. But those aren't the people who would be a quote unquote superfan, even though they may be spending a lot of money with you. So, it's figuring out what the markers are that are important to your brand or service. I work with a lot of brands on this because it really is different for everyone. But figuring out who those people are and then talking to them because this is something that, there's so much psychology around the why. Like why people behave the way we do that the consumer behavior, the internal and philosophical drives that are making us make the decisions that we make and the best way to uncover that is to talk to your customers because a lot of times you'll learn so much about your brand, you'll find so many things. I always love talking to recording artists about this, they put out a new song or a new album and in the fans find all these hidden messages >> Taylor is known for that. >> Always some-- >> Taylor is one of the best in the world. And a lot of times artists will say, Oh, yeah, like, I didn't do that on purpose but I'm totally going to take credit for it because these fans found it. And oh, yeah, of course, I meant to do that. So, you'll find that some of these customers understand your brand oftentimes better than you do which is a really fun thing. >> It's also just the ecosystem. You my favorite one always reference is Harley Davidson, guess how many brands get tattooed on people's arms, and just the whole ecosystem of other products that were built up around the motorcycle, and to support kind of that community they weren't getting any nickels necessarily if somebody sold a saddle bag or a leather jacket, or whatever but it was such and it still is, I think such a vibrant community again, and as evidence by you put a tattoo on your arm that it's something to strive for, not easy to get. >> Why we always say build a brand not a business because the brand are those things that people are connecting to. We were talking about NASA before we started filming. I'm a huge space geek and Lisa loves space having worked for NASA in the past and that's one of those things, I don't know this to be true but I got to believe NASA way outpaces like every other combined government agency in licensing. I mean, people walk around wearing NASA logos on everything >> I saw at least three of them this morning. >> Yeah, I mean, I bought in the last month, probably three different NASA licensed products. So I mean that's the passion that if you can connect to somebody on an emotional level and make your story part of their story. They want to represent it, they want to get that Harley tattooed on their arm. >> That emotional connection but also that personalization that's key? >> Yes. >> What's difference in from your perspective on a superfan versus an influencer? Are they one in the same? >> It's a great question. So, they a lot of times are one in the same and that same Viacom study that I mentioned earlier. Something like two thirds of people said that they consider themselves to be pop culture influencers which sounds like a lot. But if you think about it, pretty much everyone is an influencer and that's because for Nielsen, the most trusted recommendation is or the most trusted form advertising is a recommendation from a friend or a family member, 92% of people trust a recommendation from a friend or family member, which far outpaces every other form of advertising. So in a lot of ways, these micro influencers are the next wave of advertising. These advocates or these super fans are, I think in many ways an untapped well of resources for the fans who drill in and you mentioned Taylor Swift before. How many people listen to Taylor Swift for the first time because a friend suggested they listen to Taylor Swift. I would argue that lots and lots of people and Taylor said something to me years ago that like a former manager, or someone said to her, and that was, if you want to sell half a million albums, you're going to have to meet half a million people. That was said to her when she was like, 15, 16 years old and she thought, okay, yeah, I'm going to go meet half a million people. I'm going to be befriend them, I'm going to listen to their stories, I'm going to let them know what they say matters to me. And here we are, she sold, I don't know, 50, 60 million albums, however many she sold worldwide. And but that's really where it starts, that one to one connection. >> Seems to just kind of all go back to referral. And isn't that sort of the basic human connection? It's like, are we trying to over-complicate this with all these different tools that simply, even with hiring and tech or whatever industry, referrals are so much more important because you've got some sort of connection to a brand or a person or a product or service. >> You've got that connection, you've got somebody who's already very well qualified. And I like to talk about something that I call the wave method which the wave is a ritual hello, goodbye. How many times a day do you wave at people, countless. And virtually you say hello to tons of people everyday. People who are coming to one of your social pages, people who are engaging with your website. So I say, I encourage people to think about that hello and goodbye, that interaction. Think of a wave as an acronym and ask yourself, are you making everybody who's going to come into contact with you today feel welcomed? Is there something on your virtual site or in your real storefront. If you're a brick and mortar business that's going to make people feel welcomed? How are you making them feel like they belong? The A is appreciated, how are you letting those people know that they are appreciated by your business? I think I know I have often felt like I'm a number or I don't matter. Utility companies are notorious for this for making you feel like they don't really care if they have your business or not. Or they know perhaps that they're going to because there's not like a different water company you can you can use it your home. And that sucks, like we've all been made to feel like we weren't appreciated by somebody that we were doing a financial transaction with. So ask yourself, how can you make your potential and current customers feel appreciated? The V stands for validated, and one of the best quotes that I've ever come across is from Oprah. On her last episode, she was imparting some of the lessons that she had learned over the years of hosting her shows and she said she'd interviewed something like 30,000 people over the years, and they all wanted the same thing. And that was validation. They all want it to feel like they were important and their feelings mattered. I see you, I hear you what you're saying is important to me. So, validate your customers. One big mistake that I see people make all the time in customer service is when somebody has a complaint, having your rebuttal be like, Oh, I've never heard that before. Or it's 10,000 people haven't have had great experiences. That's absolutely the worst thing that you can ever say to somebody because you're bringing in other experiences that don't matter to them. It's a one to one conversation. It's a one to one relationship. So bringing in, that's like having a fight with your significant other and saying like, Well none of the women I dated before you ever had a problem with this, like how well is that going to go over? Like you don't want to bring in other experiences. So that V and wave validated >> And the E? >> and then the E is excited, making people feel excited because that passion, having people feel like you know you're excited that they're a customer of yours and you can bring something that's going to make their lives better is the most important key. >> Brittany, thank you so much. I could keep talking to ya. I wish we didn't end but we do, for sharing your experiences, your expertise, your recommendations on becoming any kind of brand with any product or service, generating the super fans. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was so great speaking with you guys today. >> Ditto. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this on theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas, thanks for watching.