you Wiki bon org this is the cube Silicon angles continuous production we're here at knowledge service now it's big used user conference that we'd be going this is day three for us we had a half day today but we've been meeting with a number of customers CIOs IT practitioners folks from kpn are here Petros L Stroh is the CIO of KPN and Martin the no blue is the person in charge of ServiceNow and manages that implementation at kpn Petra Martin welcome to the cube thank you thanks for having us good morning yeah it's it's our pleasure really appreciate you guys spending some time there let's start with kpn tell us more about kpn you are the dominant telecommunications provider in the Netherlands but tell us a little bit more about so kpn is actually quite important on the market of the Netherlands we focused mainly on fixed and wireless communication but also on IT solutions so customers we have over 45 million customers within the Netherlands and within the kpn we are serving around 26,000 employees so talk a little bit about what's happening in your your business I mean here you've got you know tremendous you know disruption and lots of competition but you still got a couple of big giant whales in the industry what's it like in your region so within our region what you see is this we are dominating the market quite heavily is the government is focusing on to get the monopolies down so we are struggling a lot getting other partners on the market and we have to serve them as well so it is a little bit of a hardest feel to working - yeah so there's a big hand it's sort of dictating some of the requirements that you have to comply to so what does that mean for your IT infrastructure what kind of pressures does that put on you so as we are dominating the infrastructure we need to allow our competitors to use our infrastructure so yeah we do that at the best serves as we can but it feels a little bit off I remember when we went to that the United States you have to bite your tongue and do it okay so let's let's get into the whole ServiceNow implementation well first of all is it if you've been to more multiple knowledge conferences or is this your first one so this is my first one for ServiceNow although it was two weeks ago I was also at the CA Technology event both in their Las Vegas as well so but I'm enjoying it a lot oh you spent a lot of time in less of a so so give me your impressions of the of the conference what do you think what I noticed and I'm not sure what Martha thinks of it but I taste a lot of fun and I really enjoy that their service now is really liking what they do they're really interesting and that gives me also a lot of energy and ideas what you could say utilize in the Netherlands yeah I'm also really impressed with the way it was organized it's good incredible you have 4,000 people who all can can drink and eat and and and and be in a conference room at the same time is incredible yeah the logistics were very good here the accommodations are very nice so and it's also a good mix of informal meetings meeting people in just in the hallways and having good conversations and good speeches as well and it's a good mix of CIOs and IT practice all right so let's get it to the service how long you guys been working with ServiceNow what was the catalyst to bring ServiceNow into your organization so we three years ago we started to work with ServiceNow so we have quite some experience at these states and a year ago we started to work with the self-service portal as well and I must say we started to become innovative using that kind of services okay so well what was the what was the catalyst to bring it in and how did you justify bringing it in so what we had in the in the previous time we had several systems that meant every time we had to unboard a customer it took several systems to work with so what we did is we decided within the company that we didn't want to develop our own software anymore so we were looking for the best breed of applications or suppliers that could help us to bring value to our business so one of the things what notified with ServiceNow is that they are first the best brief with this application area but also the relationship with ServiceNow is quite good because if you want a strategic partnership you need to focus both on also development and new functionalities and that's actually what we find in ServiceNow so how did it occur that you were able to bring in ServiceNow Petra it was that something that that you had a vision of was that someone like Martin brought it to your attention was that the CFO driving it how did that all come about and as I'm quite recently in the role but I know a little bit of history it was actually on the strategic level PP level where they decided we need to go into a another direction so together together with the CEO CFO etc decision has been made to go into a new direction and they finally select the service now for this part of business you feel like your executive management or RIT savvy man it's somewhat uncommon to have we keep hearing about the the Cobblers children but here you had a situation where the senior executives were pushing for something like this is that unique in your field and I think because our company is focusing both on telecommunication and IT they they know sometimes much more than we do so I think that is also part of of that job a bit of a blessing and a curse I think they know what they're talking about but that's also that the DAR says sometimes there's no even better yeah so there's there's no hiding enough to be dangerous and we need to make sure that we keep focus what we need to do and not interfering that then interfering us too much so that is quite a fat joke all right let's talk about the self-service capability that you've built it's describe what that is you seem you know very proud of it so I want to learn more about that yeah so we're quite proud on the self-service part of what we actually had started one year ago we started to build the self-service portal in which the customer has the possibility to find answers on their issues problem incidents etc and what makes it so unique is that actually customers who entered the self-service portal can find their answers directly they can do that 24 by 7 so as you know if you're Matt home and you work on your iPad you solution now and not tomorrow and what is also quite unique is that they uses from this community help each other and what does that mean is if you have an question and you go to the self-service parking don't find an answer you can accelerate your own no let's article goes to the service desk who make it qualified that it can enter into the system so the next time and other users has this question can find the right answer into this no its database so there's a social component of it now now where did that come from was that part of the service now capability if you guys build that no it's it's a it is part of the surface now capability but it was specifically thought up for this just to bring the cost down and to to keep it interactive weekly it's it's it's always strange to have people work with you and not being able to help each other but at night when evening they go home and write Wikipedia about other things so why not bring that action through the workplace so talk about the the clients that are on this using this self-service policy it's mostly internal clients but you also have external clients can you describe that so we have the customers who intern and you're using odd of course the people who have the office automation of workspace so they can use it for that one and actually this year we're going to bring also business applications to the knowledge articles so a 600 applications will be served by the self-service portal as well so that is mainly internal focus we have also external customers are over a thousand customers who also have the possibility to enter this self-service portal and find the answers on their questions and by the way we have reached this year that over ten percent of the incidents are actually solved by the users themselves and forty-one percent of customers who have a question to solve that answers on the self-service portal versa now what oversees what calling up sending an email nicely so that is amazing so it means the Service Desk can focus on the more complicated stuff where do you see those metrics going over time the idea of the self service desk is is that it will go up even beyond the 56 that's what we anticipate on so well when it gets to that level what happens you know to your business from a cost standpoint how does that you know how does that benefit can you quantify that in any way that is a little bit hard because we are in the way to find it out but for me as an idea responsibilities we always have to drive on cost so I'm I'm really looking forward to the cost is going down so what we did is we made an agreement with the service there's they promised us that a cost would go dramatically downsize and let's see what we will accomplish so maybe next year you can ask me what and so we we hear a lot of customers saying ok we start with incident and change and problem and we start building the CMDB yeah is that where you started and where are you on that journey that's that's where we started and that's where we're at now and we use the knowledge geoportal as well but we're always exploring other options ServiceNow is always expanding always always searching for new ways to to please their customers and our our vision on this is that we already paid for all those modules so why not use them so we're always exploring at the moment we're exploring the asset management module and we're exploring the vendor management module as well so you have existing tools to do things like vendor management and asset management how does that transition go how do you sort of bring on the new and tear down the old and how do you manage the disruption associated with that well it's it's of course always a life cycle and clothes driven sometimes certain things are just end of life cycle you have to replace them are you going to buy something new or are you going to buy or are you going to use something that is in sa P or in ServiceNow so that's that's always a choice you have to make can you go ahead so I think what is also quite important as I mentioned before we are always looking of the best-of-breed solutions what we do see is the Suites into ServiceNow we always look at them are they indeed the Best of Breed for that kind of specific services if not we will go for another solution if yes we will go for the service now and the second hand we're trying to influence ServiceNow as much as possible so they can actually change the modules into the way our customers are looking for so this brings up a very interesting discussion this whole best-of-breed versus integrated suite now you mentioned you use sa P there's a classic example sa PE the beauty of it is it's sort of big and you could do so many things with it but the problem is it's big uns how many things you could do with it it's complex so for instance if you want to do HR there might be some other packages so you your philosophy Petra is you guys want to be Best of Breed that's the the primary objective and then maybe secondarily is sort of the integrated suite is that right that's correct and so what we do is is for every process we are looking into application so no development on outside anymore we're looking for most of the times our solutions who are really Best of Breed in that kind of fur field so that is the idea now doesn't that somewhat defeat the purpose of sort of a single system of record or does you somehow integrate ServiceNow into maybe those other components yeah so we have a platform of several systems and we integrate them heavily so the CA technology which ServiceNow is heavily insert that and also sup we're looking into it how we can integrate that as well but that is quite a challenge yes the ServiceNow is our core and other systems are integrated in the ServiceNow fire bus now given that you're looking for sounds like you're really looking for SAS and off-the-shelf commercial software can I infer from that that you don't plan on developing a lot of your own applications you know we're hearing a lot about app creator and things like that or will you take advantage of those things so the app creation is definitely a field I'm interested in I because what I want is technology infrastructure should be a commodity everything seems working my customer these days want services they don't want technology so what I'm looking for is how can I keep up with the speed of my customers and therefore I'm looking for solutions outside of the market so we saw that presentation of threat with the application development and quite interested in that part that looks really promising so how do you so let's go back to the self-service for a bit because it's something that you guys are is somewhat unique in terms of what you're describing and it's quite a large scale when you think of self-service you think of things like you know Google and Facebook and Amazon do you feel like you're on the path to achieve that level of experience for your users I definitely think so and it's not because I'm saying it's my customer actually saying that and that is key important to me so we saw the satisfaction level of the customer went up and what we do also see is is the customer these days one 24/7 support so example you're coming home and your kid have problems with the iPad Mini I know how that % sure they go to my self-service for and it's fine and if they don't find the answer they can enter it into it so for me more open the better it is I have to serve each other yeah and you get learning from that that knowledge permeate so so how about things like single sign-on how do you handle that challenge we already incorporated single sign-on so it's not a problem for ServiceNow at the moment yeah we started that last year because what we saw is is people entering twice the system is not of their convenience so we started to enter that last year and I must say people are quite happy with it so tell me more about what the users are saying I'm interested in your client's experiences what kind of feedback have you received if it is a it's a good question you're asking there are double reaction first of all they are not aware of it so you need to make sure they get aware that there is a self-service portal so what we did we did a lot of communication and telling and broadcast in the world we have a new self-service portal once they get used to it is that quite happy with it and what you also see is this we're actually rewarding people to come to the self-service portal so every time they go that'll help someone they deserve points and in the net and say quite keen on getting points and I think based upon that the reactions became quite positive and they're quite upset if they can't find answer into the system so yeah I think that's positive I think users don't really care if they're using ServiceNow or something else they just wanted to work and and the ServiceNow is just it's just the means to an end I think that's a good thing he said it's actually not the tool it's actually the services of delivering and service and I was able to give us that possibility that's an interesting comment because you think about you think about sales force people sales people know they're in Salesforce now very sort of high degree of affinity there whereas ServiceNow it's invisible you're the you're the service and and that comes with the shell we put over it as well our self-service portal it gives us our own looking fuel so people don't have an idea they think they're on an internet sites probably yeah I love that philosophy ServiceNow seems to have they want to make you the heroes they don't want that's good okay we have time for one more question for each of you so petrol let me start with you from a cio perspective what advice would you give your CIO peers in terms of thinking about bringing in capabilities such as ServiceNow generally and specifically around self-service so my comment is what I do see is it's technology is a given for the customers the customers just want the serves and they want the best service that is so what I think you need to do is make sure your lights on is as it should be but focus so much more on the self-service so people can have the perception that they get what they want and they get it now and they get it whenever and the best kind of answers they're looking for so I think that's why you need to look for and with your own department you will not be able to do that anymore so you need partners to help you to be quick flexible and profiling to service your customer wants no marks on your in the front lines yeah making it all happen what advice would you give your fellow peers and practitioners I would say invest heavily in heavily in communication as well people process and especially the people part is very important if you're replacing all tools with new tools people always get a bit homesick and they want their all they want the old functionality back and you have to force them to get to give it to give it a chance and stay state state suit will be out of the box SAS solution don't go changing too much in the beginning and really give people the time and a chance to to get the note to get to know to get to know the new product yeah communicate those benefits I see I pet your Martin thank you very much for coming on and sharing the the kpn service now stories really pleasure meeting you both alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with the winner of the hackathon right after this this is the cube so like an angle we'll be back right after this word

>>Welcome back to HP discover 2021 My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes, virtual coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition, we're gonna dig into transformations the role of technology in the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it, H P. E. Has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years. So it makes a great example in case study and with me is rashmi kumari who is the senior vice president and C. I. O. At HP rashmi welcome come on inside the cube. >>Dave Nice to be here. >>Well, it's been almost a year since Covid changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CEO specifically and generally it has changed. I mean you got digital Zero Trust has gone from buzzword to >>mandate >>digital. Everybody was complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated remote work hybrid. How do you see it? >>Absolutely. As I said in the last discover that Covid has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the company's I. C. C. I O. S role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running that's become a table stick. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience engaged with our customers in different ways, but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end off the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the Covid. Covid hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another. A global company like H. B had to look into its supply chain differently. Had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together, But how to create the same level of collaboration coordination as well as delivery or faster uh goods and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So see I. O. And I. T. S. Role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to a different level of employee experience as well as enabling day to day operations of the company's. Ceos have realized that digital is the way to go forward. It does not matter what industry you are in and now see a as have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now, which is a technology company respective you are in oil and gas or mining or a technical product or a card or a mobility company. End of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. >>So I want to ask you about that because you've you've been a Ceo and uh you know, leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and where you know non technical technology, you know, selling to I. T. Companies and as you point out those worlds are coming together, everybody is a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the C. I. O. Because it would always seem to me that there was a difference between A C. I. O. And a tech company. You know what I mean by that? And the C. I. O. It's sort of every other company is those two worlds converging. >>Absolutely. And it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma to entertainment to utilities. Um And now at a technology company end of the day um The issues that I. T. Deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have a little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem. Even at H. B. Look I was fortunate um at H. B. Because of Antonio's leadership, we have topped out mandate to transform how we did business. And I talked about my next gen IT program in last year's cube interview. But at the same time while we were changing our customer partners experience from ordering to order processing to supply chain to finance. Uh We decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot it's pretty common if it was a technology company or non technology company at HP. We were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us now we are becoming as a service or a subscription company and I. T. Played a major role to enable that quote to cash experience. Which is very different than the traditional experience around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term. Um Digital exhaust which results into data which can result into better insight and you can not only Upsell cross l because now you have more data about your product usage, but first and the foremost give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, there are pills a sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies I. K which is a furniture manufacturer across the board. We have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider. And and remember when uh hp says edge to cloud platform as a service edges the product, the customers who we deal with and how do we get that? Help them get their data to understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis. Um and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that gets up, >>I think you've been HP now think around three years and I've been watching of course for decades. Hp. Hp then HP is I feel like it's entering now the sort of third phase of its transformation, your phase one was okay, we gotta figure out how to deal or or operate as a separate companies. Okay. That took some time and then it was okay. Now how do we align our resources and you know, what are the waves that we're gonna ride? And how do we how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place and and all in on as a service. And now it's like okay how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations. You talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question. So as I mentioned first your second phase which was becoming a stand alone company was the next N. I. T. Program very broad and um S. Four and 60 related ecosystem application. We're even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 100 20 billion company. We are 30 billion company. We need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line across the globe. And um we I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of next in I. T. Transformation where we have brought in new customer experience through low touch or not touch order pressing. A very strong as four capabilities. Where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together. And I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years. But at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do other management, supply chain and data and analytics platforms. We also made the pivot to go to as a service now for as a service and subscription selling. It needs a very different quote to Kazakh cash experience for our customers and that's where we had to bring in um platforms like brim to do um subscription building, convergent charging and a whole different way to address. But we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data and another X platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior um as well as how they're using our product a real time for our operations teams. >>Well they say follow the money in the cube. We love to say follow the day to day is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage business value. So you talk a little bit more about the role of data. I'm interested I'm interested in where I. T. Fits uh you know a lot of companies that have a Chief data officer or Ceo sometimes they're separate. Sometimes they they work you know for each other or Cdo works for C. I. O. How do you guys approach the whole data conversation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of C E O C I O S. Chief digital officers in many different companies. The way we have set it up here is do we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of uh technology and platform and data within I. T. Look. The way I see is that I call the term data torture if we have multiple data lakes, if we have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out of the source system, we end up with data swamps and it's very difficult to drive insights. It's very difficult to have a single version of truth. So HP had two pronged approach. First one was as part of this next gen i. T. Transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe. It's called entity Master Data and Product Master Data Program. These were very very difficult program. We are now happy to report that we can understand the customer from code stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system. It's been a tough journey but it was a effort well spent at the same time while we were building this message capability, we also invest the time in our analytics platform because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint. How do we link our data link to R. S. A. P. And Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team. At the same time, we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making an analytics they need around product, around customer, around their usage, around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward. So this creates efficiencies in the organization. If you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment. That's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes, the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization worked very, very closely to understand each other needs sometimes out of the possible where do we need the data processing? Is it at the edge? Is it in the cloud? What's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward? And they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us give us superior results. And I have done data analytics in many different companies. This model works where you have focused on insight and analytics without because data without insight is of no value, but at the same time you need clean data. You need efficient, fast platforms to process that insight at the functional nonfunctional requirements that are business partners have and that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently. As of now, >>I want to ask you a kind of a harder maybe it's not harder question. It's a weird question around single version of the truth because it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications workloads that require that single version of the truth. The operational systems, the transaction systems, the HR the salesforce. Clearly you have to have a single version of the truth. I feel like however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product. And it's early days in that. But I want to and maybe not the right question for HP. But I wonder if you see it with in your ecosystems where where it's it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics gotta have that nail down data quality, everything else. But then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom. They need more latitude to create. Are you seeing that? And maybe you can help me put that into context. >>Uh, that's a great question. David. I'm glad you asked it. So I think tom Davenport who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data. I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality. It's all that most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving company's operations incrementally because you have very clean that I have very good understanding of how my territories are doing, how my customers are doing how my products are doing. How am I meeting my sls or how my financials are looking? There's no room for failure in that area. The other area is though, which works on the same set of data. It's not a different set of data, but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new ones and customers or new business models that we go with. The way we have done it is we do take this data take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space. But that's this entire data available to our business leader, not real time because the need is not as real time because they're doing more what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics. And we work very closely with business in its we educate them. We tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their with their analytics. I think as we talk about hindsight insight and foresight hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available. >>Thank you for that. That's interesting discussion. You know digital transformation. It's a journey and it's going to take many years. A lot of ways, not a lot of ways 2020 was a forced March to digital. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and you really didn't have much time to plan. So now organizations are stepping back saying, okay let's really lean into our strategy the journey and along the way there's gonna be blind spots, there's bumps in the road when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations? That's a great question. >>Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer term view on this topic. Right in what's top of my mind um recently is the whole topic of E. S. G. Environmental, social and governance. Most of the companies have governance in place, right? Because they are either public companies or they're under some kind of uh scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or what not. Even if you're a startup, you need to do things with our customers and what not. It has been there for companies. It continues to be there. We the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance, right privacy, right governance in in in place. Now we'll talk about cyber security. I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space. However, we have the set up within our companies to be able to handle that challenge. Now, when we go to social, what happened last year was really important. And now as each and every company, we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that. And not only the bigger companies leaders at our level, I would say that Between last March and this year, I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic, which was all virtual, but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity, which is also very big objective for h P E. And Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in us at the world Economic forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity, remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities. If we want to continue to be successful in this world too, create innovative products and services, we need to sell it to the broader cross section of populations and to be able to do that, we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that um, equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people. Hp has taken many initiatives and so are many companies. I feel like uh, The momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important. I'm also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones, as you know, in the bay area to create better delivery methods of food or products. Right. The third piece, which is environmental, is extremely important as well as we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental HP recently published its living Progress report. We have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions, we help our customers, um, through those processes. Again, if we do, if our planet is on fire, none of us will exist, right. So we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better. And I'm happy to report, I myself as a person, solar panels, battery electric cars, whatever I can do, but I think something more needs to happen right where as an individual I need to pitch in, but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof, which again creates a different kind of uh waste going forward. So when you ask me about disruptions, I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have E. S. G. Top of their mind and think of products and services from that perspective, which creates equal opportunity for people, which creates better environment sustainability going forward. And, you know, our customers are investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause uh for for bigger cross section of companies, and I'm most of the time very happy to share with my C I. O cohort around how are H. P E F s capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy, how much e waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills are green capabilities, How it reduces the evils going forward as well as our sustainability initiatives, which can help other, see IOS to be more um carbon neutral going forward as well. >>You know, that's a great answer, rashmi, thank you for that because I gotta tell you hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about E S G. But that was a very substantive, thoughtful response that I think, I think tech companies in particular are have to lead in our leading in this area. So I really appreciate that sentiment. I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber. It's obviously, you know, escalated in, in the news the last several months. It's always in the news, but You know, 10 or 15 years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire. Now we realize, hey, they're gonna get in, it's how you handle it. Cyber has become a board level topic, you know? Years ago there was a lot of discussion, oh, you can't have the sec ops team working for the C. I. O. Because that's like the Fox watching the Henhouse, that's changed. Uh it's been a real awakening, a kind of a rude awakening. So the world is now more virtual, you've gotta secure physical uh assets. I mean, any knucklehead can now become a ransomware attack, er they can, they can, they can buy ransomware as a services in the dark, dark web. So that's something we've never seen before. You're seeing supply chains get hacked and self forming malware. I mean, it's a really scary time. So you've got these intellectual assets, it's a top priority for organizations. Are you seeing a convergence of the sea? So roll the C. I. O. Roll the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations. >>This is a great question. And this was a big discussion at my public board meeting a couple of days ago. It's as as I talk about many topics, if you think digital, if you think data, if you think is you, it's no more one organizations, business, it's now everybody's responsibility. I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago where Somebody has compared cyber to 9-11-type scenario that if it happens for a company, that's the level of impact you feel on your on your operations. So, you know, all models are going to change where C so reports to see IO at H P E. We are also into products or security and that's why I see. So is a peer of mine who I worked with very closely who also worked with product teams where we are saving our customers from a lot of pain in this space going forward. And H. B. E. Itself is investing enormous amount of efforts in time in coming out of products which are which are secured and are not vulnerable to these types of attacks. The way I see it is see So role has become extremely critical in every company and the big part of that role is to make people understand that cybersecurity is also everybody's responsibility. That's why in I. T. V. Propagate def sec ups. Um As we talk about it, we are very very careful about picking the right products and services. This is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing. You have to continuously looking at cyber security architecture, you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our companies stay secure The training, not only for individual employees around anti phishing or what does cybersecurity mean, but also to the executive committee and to the board around what cybersecurity means, what zero trust means, but at the same time doing drive ins, we did it for business continuity and disaster recovery. Before now at this time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared as you mentioned. And we all say in tech community, it's always if not when no company can them their chest and say, oh, we are fully secured because something can happen going forward. But what is the readiness for something that can happen? It has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic or earthquake or a natural disaster. And assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when when something like this happen. So I'm here's believer in the framework of uh protect, detect, govern and respond um as these things happen. So we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody is aware of the part that they play day today but at the same time when some event happen and making sure we do very periodic reviews of I. T. And cyber practices across the company. There is no more differentiation between I. T. And O. T. That was 10 years ago. I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of I. T. And guess what happened? Wanna cry and Petra and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected. So if it's a technology it needs to be protected. That's the mindset. People need to go with invest in education, training, um awareness of your employees, your management committee, your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happen. See it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data, our customers operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our products and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens, >>Russian, very generous with your time. Thank you so much for coming back in the CUBA is great to have you again. >>Thank you. Dave was really nice chatting with you. Thanks >>for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HP discover 21 This is Dave Volonte, you're watching the virtual cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Be right back. >>Mm hmm, mm.

>>Mhm >>Yes, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm lisa martin excited about this conversation. It's combining my background in life sciences with technology. Please welcome Mike Tarsa Lee, the chief scientific officer at Tetra Science. Mike I'm so excited to talk to you today. >>Thank you lisa and thank you very much to the cube for hosting us. >>Absolutely. So we talk about cloud and data all the time. This is going to be a very interesting conversation especially because we've seen events of the last what are we on 14 months and counting have really accelerated the need for drug discovery and really everyone's kind of focused on that. But I want you to talk with our audience about Tetra science, Who you guys are, what you do and you were founded in 2014. You just raised 80 million in series B but give us an idea of who you are and what you do. >>Got it. Tetro Science, what are we? We are digital plumbers and that may seem funny but really we are taking the world of data and we are trying to resolve it in such a way that people can actually pipe it from the data sources they have in a vendor agnostic way to the data targets in which they need to consume that data. So bringing that metaphor a little bit more to life sciences, let's say that you're a chemist and you have a mass spec and an NMR and some other piece of technology and you need all of those to speak the same language. Right? Generally speaking, all of these are going to be made by different vendors. They're all going to have different control software and they're all going to have slightly different ways of sending their data in. Petro Science takes those all in. We bring them up to the cloud or cloud native solution. We harmonize them, we extract the data first and then we actually put it into what we call our special sauce are intermediate data schema to harmonize it. So you have sort of like a picture and a diagram of what the prototypical mass spec or H P. L. C. Or cell counting data should look like. And then we build pipelines to export that data over to where you need it. So if you need it to live in an L. N. Or a limb system or in a visualization tool like spot fire tableau. We got you covered. So again we're trying to pipe things from left to right from sources to targets and we're trying to do it with scientific context. >>That was an outstanding description. Data plumbers who have secret sauce and never would have thought I would have heard that when I woke up this morning. But I'm going to unpack this more because one of the things that I read in the press release that just went out just a few weeks ago announcing the series B funding, it said that that picture science is pioneering a $300 billion dollar Greenfield data market and operating this is what got my attention without a direct cloud native and open platform competitor. Why is that? >>That's right. If you look at the way pharma data is handled today, even those that long tend to be either on prem solutions with a sort of license model or a distribution into a company and therefore maintenance costs, professional services, etcetera. Or you're looking at somebody who is maybe cloud but their cloud second, you know, they started with their on prem journey and they said we should go and build out some puppies, we should go to the cloud migrate. However, we're cloud first cloud native. So that's one first strong point. And the second is that in terms of data harmonization and in terms of looking at data in a vendor agnostic way, um many companies claim to do it. But the real hard test of this, the metal, what will say is when you can look at this with the Scientific contextual ization we offer. So yes, you can collect the data and put it on a cloud. Okay great. Yes. You may be able to do an extract, transform and load and move it to somewhere else. Okay. But can you actually do that from front to back while retaining all the context of the data while keeping all of the metadata in the right place? With veracity, with G XP readiness, with data fidelity and when it gets over to the other side can somebody say oh yeah that's all the data from all the H. P. L. C. S we control. I got it. I see where it is. I see where to go get it, I see who created it. I see the full data train and validation landscape and I can rebuild that back and I can look back to the old raw source files if I need to. Um I challenge someone to find another direct company that's doing that today. >>You talk about that context and the thing that sort of surprises me is with how incredibly important scientific discovery is and has been for since the beginning of time. Why is why has nobody come out in the last seven years and tried to facilitate this for life sciences organizations. >>Right. I would say that people have tried and I would say that there are definitely strides being made in the open source community, in the data science community and inside pharma and biotech themselves on these sort of build motif, right. If you are inside of a company and you understand your own ontology and processes while you can probably design an application or a workflow using several different tools in order to get that data there. But will it be generally useful to the bioscience community? One thing we pride ourselves on is when we product eyes a connector we call or an integration, we actually do it with a many different companies, generic cases in mind. So we say, OK, you have an h p l C problem over at this top pharma, you have an HPC problem with this biotech and you have another one of the C R. O. Okay. What are the common points between all of those? Can we actually distill that down to a workflow? Everyone's going to need, for example a compliance workflow. So everybody needs compliance. Right. So we can actually look into an empower or a unicorn operation and we can say, okay, did you sign off on that? Did it come through the right way? Was the data corrupted etcetera? That's going to be generically useful to everybody? And that's just one example of something we can do right now for anybody in bio pharma. >>Let's talk about the events of the last 14 months or so mentioned 10 X revenue growth in 2020. Covid really really highlighted the need to accelerate drug discovery and we've seen that. But talk to me about some of the things that Tetra science has seen and done to facilitate that. >>Yeah, this past 14 months. I mean um I will say that the global pandemic has been a challenge for everyone involved ourselves as well. We've basically gone to a full remote workforce. Um We have tried our very best to stay on top of it with remote collaboration tools with vera, with GIT hub with everything. However, I'll say that it's actually been some of the most successful time in our company's history because of that sort of lack of any kind of friction from the physical world. Right? We've really been able to dig down and dig deep on our integrations are connections, our business strategy. And because of that, we've actually been able to deliver a lot of value to customers because, let's be honest, we don't actually have to be on prem from what we're doing since we're not an on prem solution and we're not an original equipment manufacturer, we don't have to say, okay, we're going to go plug the thing in to the H. P. L. C. We don't have to be there to tune the specific wireless protocols or you're a W. S. Protocols, it can all be done remotely. So it's about building good relationships, building trust with our colleagues and clients and making sure we're delivering and over delivering every time. And then people say great um when I elect a Tetra solution, I know what's going right to the cloud, I know I can pick my hosting options, I know you're going to keep delivering more value to me every month. Um Thanks, >>I like that you make it sound simple and that actually you bring up a great point though that the one of the many things that was accelerated this last year Plus is the need to be remote that need to be able to still communicate, collaborate but also the need to establish and really foster those relationships that you have with existing customers and partners as everybody was navigating very, very different challenges. I want to talk now about how you're helping customers unlock the problem that is in every industry data silos and point to point integration where things can talk to each other, Talk to me about how you're helping customers like where do they start with? Touch? Where do you start that? Um kind of journey to unlock data value? >>Sure. Journey to unlock data value. Great question. So first I'll say that customers tend to come to us, it's the oddest thing and we're very lucky and very grateful for this, but they tend to have heard about what we've done with other companies and they come to us they say listen, we've heard about a deployment you've done with novo Nordisk, I can say that for example because you know, it's publicly known. Um so they'll say, you know, we hear about what you've done, we understand that you have deep expertise in chromatography or in bio process. And they'll say here's my really sticky problem. What can you do here? And invariably they're going to lay out a long list of instruments and software for us. Um we've seen lists that go up past 2000 instruments. Um and they'll say, yeah, they'll say here's all the things we need connected, here's four or five different use cases. Um we'll bring you start to finish, we'll give you 20 scientists in the room to talk through them and then we to get somewhere between two and four weeks to think about that problem and come back and say here's how we might solve that. Invariably, all of these problems are going to have a data silos somewhere, there's going to be in Oregon where the preclinical doesn't see the biology or the biology doesn't see the screening etcetera. So we say, all right, give us one scientist from each of those, hence establishing trust, establishing input from everybody. And collaboratively we'll work with, you will set up an architecture diagram, will set up a first version of a prototype connector, will set up all this stuff they need in order to get moving, we'll deliver value upfront before we've ever signed a contract and will say, is this a good way to go for you? And they'll say either no, no, thank you or they'll say yes, let's go forward, let's do a pilot a proof of concept or let's do a full production rollout. And invariably this data silos problem can usually be resolved by again, these generic size connectors are intermediate data schema, which talks and moves things into a common format. Right? And then also by organizationally, since we're already connecting all these groups in this problem statement, they tend to continue working together even when we're no longer front and center, right? They say, oh we set up that thing together. Let's keep thinking about how to make our data more available to one another. >>Interesting. So culturally, within the organization it sounds like Tetra is having significant influences their, you know, the collaboration but also data ownership. Sometimes that becomes a sticky situation where there are owners and they want to read retain that control. Right? You're laughing? You've been through this before. I'd like to understand a little bit more though about the conversation because typically we're talking about tech but we're also talking about science. Are you having these technical conversations with scientists as well as I. T. What is that actual team from the customer perspective look >>like? Oh sure. So the technical conversation and science conversation are going on sometimes in parallel and sometimes in the same threat entirely. Oftentimes the folks who reach out to us first tend to be the scientists. They say I've got a problem, you know and and my research and and I. T. Will probably hear about this later. But let's go. And then we will invariably say well let's bring in your R. And D. I. T. Counterparts because we need them to help solve it right? But yes we are usually having those conversations in parallel at first and then we unite them into one large discussion. And we have varied team members here on the Tetris side we have me from science along with multiple different other PhD holders and pharma lifers in our business who actually can look at the scientific use cases and recommend best practices for that and visualizations. We also have a lot of solutions architects and delivery engineers who can look at it from the how should the platform assemble the solution and how can we carry it through? Um And those two groups are three groups really unite together to provide a unified front and to help the customer through and the customer ends up providing the same thing as we do. So they'll give us on the one call, right? Um a technical expert, a data and QA person and a scientist all in one group and they'll say you guys work together to make sure that our orders best represented here. Um And I think that that's actually a really productive way to do this because we end up finding out things and going deeper into the connector than we would have otherwise. >>It's very collaborative, which is I bet those are such interesting conversations to be a part of it. So it's part of the conversation there helping them understand how to establish a common vision for data across their organization. >>Yes, that that tends to be a sort of further reaching conversation. I'll say in the initial sort of short term conversation, we don't usually say you three scientists or engineers are going to change the fate of the entire orig. That's maybe a little outside of our scope for now. But yes, that first group tends to describe a limited solution. We help to solve that and then go one step past and then they'll nudge somebody else in the Oregon. Say, do you see what Petra did over here? Maybe you could use it over here in your process. And so in that way we sort of get this cultural buy in and then increased collaboration inside a single company. >>Talk to me about some customers that you've worked with it. Especially love to know some of the ones that you've helped in the last year where things have been so incredibly dynamic in the market. But give us an insight into maybe some specific customers that work with you guys. >>Sure. I'd love to I'll speak to the ones that are already on our case studies. You can go anytime detector science dot com and read all of these. But we've worked with Prelude therapeutics for example. We looked at a high throughput screening cascade with them and we were able to take an instrument that was basically unloved in a corner at T. Can liquid handler, hook it up into their Ln. And their screening application and bring in and incorporate data from an external party and do all of that together and merge it so they could actually see out the other side a screening cascade and see their data in minutes as opposed to hours or days. We've also worked as you've seen the press release with novo Nordisk, we worked on automating much of their background for their chromatography fleet. Um and finally we've also worked with several smaller biotechs in looking at sort of in stan shih ation, they say well we've just started we don't have an L. N. We don't have a limbs were about to buy these 50 instruments. Um what can you do with us and we'll actually help them to scope what their initial data storage and harmonization strategy should even be. Um so so we're really man, we're at everywhere from the enterprise where its fleets of thousands of instruments and we're really giving data to a large amount of scientists worldwide, all the way down to the small biotech with 50 people who were helping add value there. >>So big range there in terms of the data conversation, I'm curious has have you seen it change in the last year plus with respect to elevating to the C suite level or the board saying we've got to be able to figure this out because as we saw, you know, the race for the Covid 19 vaccine for example. Time to value and and to discovery is so critical. Is that C suite or board involved in having conversations with you guys? >>It's funny because they are but they are a little later. Um we tend to be a scientist and user driven um solution. So at the beginning we get a power user, an engineer or a R and D I. T. Person in who really has a problem to solve. And as they are going through and developing with us, eventually they're going to need either approval for the time, the resources or the budget and then they'll go up to their VP or their CIA or someone else at the executive level and say, let's start having more of this conversation. Um, as a tandem effort, we are starting to become involved in some thought leadership exercises with some larger firms. And we are looking at the strategic aspect through conferences, through white papers etcetera to speak more directly to that C suite and to say, hey, you know, we could fit your industry for dato motif. And then one other thing you said, time to value. So I'll say that the Tetro science executive team actually looks at that as a tract metric. So we're actually looking at driving that down every single week. >>That's outstanding. That's a hard one to measure, especially in a market that is so dynamic. But that time to value for your customers is critical. Again, covid sort of surfaced a number of things and some silver linings. But that being able to get hands on the day to make sure that you can actually pull insights from it accelerate facilitate drug discovery. That time to value there is absolutely critical. >>Yeah. I'll say if you look at the companies that really, you know, went first and foremost, let's look at Moderna right? Not our customer by the way, but we'll look at Madonna quickly as an example as an example are um, everything they do is automated, right? Everything they do is cloud first. Everything they do is global collaboration networks, you know, with harmonized data etcetera. That is the model we believe Everyone's going to go to in the next 3-5 years. If you look at the fact that Madonna went from sequence to initial vaccine in what, 50, 60 days, that kind of delivery is what the market will become accustomed to. And so we're going to see many more farmers and biotechs move to that cloud first. Distributed model. All data has to go in somewhere centrally. Everyone has to be able to benefit from it. And we are happy to help them get >>Well that's that, you know, setting setting a new record for pace is key there, but it's also one of those silver linings that has come out of this to show that not only was that critical to do, but it can be done. We have the technology, we have the brain power to be able to put those all user would harmonize those together to drive this. So give me a last question. Give me an insight into some of the things that are ahead for Tetra science the rest of this year. >>Oh gosh, so many things. One of the nice parts about having funding in the bank and having a dedicated team is the ability to do more. So first of course our our enterprise pharma and BioPharma clients, there are plenty more use cases, workflows, instruments. We've just about scratch the surface but we're going to keep growing and growing our our integrations and connectors. First of all right we want to be like a netflix for connectors. You know we just want you to come and say look do they have the connector? No well don't worry. They're going to have it in a month or two. Um so that we can be basically the almost the swiss army knife for every single connector you can imagine. Then we're going to be developing a lot more data apps so things that you can use to derive value from your data out. And then again, we're going to be looking at helping to educate everybody. So how is cloud useful? Why go to the system with harmonization? How does this influence your compliance? How can you do bi directional communication? There's lots of ways you can use. Once you have harmonized centralized data, you can do things with it to influence your order and drive times down again from days and weeks, two minutes and seconds. So let's get there. And I think we're going to try doing that over the next year. >>That's awesome. Never a dull moment. And I, you should partner with your marketing folks because we talked about, you talked about data plumbing the secret sauce and becoming the netflix of connectors. These are three gems that you dropped on this this morning mike. This has been awesome. Thank you for sharing with us what teacher science is doing, how you're really helping to fast track a lot of the incredibly important research that we're all really um dependent on and helping to heal the world through data. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Haley says I'm a real quickly. It's a team effort. The entire Tetro science team deserves credit for this. I'm just lucky enough to be able to speak to you. So thank you very much for the opportunity. >>And she about cheers to the whole touch of science team. Keep up the great work guys. Uh for mike Roselli, I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. >>Mhm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of enterprise data automation an event Siri's brought to you by Iot. Tahoe. >>Okay, we're back. Welcome back to data Automated. A J ahora is CEO of I o Ta ho, JJ. Good to see you. How have things in London? >>Big thing. Well, thinking well, where we're making progress, I could see you hope you're doing well and pleasure being back here on the Cube. >>Yeah, it's always great to talk to. You were talking enterprise data automation. As you know, with within our community, we've been pounding the whole data ops conversation. Little different, though. We're gonna We're gonna dig into that a little bit. But let's start with a J how you've seen the response to Covert and I'm especially interested in the role that data has played in this pandemic. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think everyone's adapting both essentially, um, and and in business, the customers that I speak to on day in, day out that we partner with, um they're busy adapting their businesses to serve their customers. It's very much a game of and showing the week and serve our customers to help their customers um, you know, the adaptation that's happening here is, um, trying to be more agile, kind of the most flexible. Um, a lot of pressure on data. A lot of demand on data and to deliver more value to the business, too. Serve that customer. >>Yeah. I mean, data machine intelligence and cloud, or really three huge factors that have helped organizations in this pandemic. And, you know, the machine intelligence or AI piece? That's what automation is all about. How do you see automation helping organizations evolve maybe faster than they thought they might have to >>Sure. I think the necessity of these times, um, there's there's a says a lot of demand doing something with data data. Uh huh. A lot of a lot of businesses talk about being data driven. Um, so interesting. I sort of look behind that when we work with our customers, and it's all about the customer. You know, the mic is cios invested shareholders. The common theme here is the customer. That customer experience starts and ends with data being able to move from a point that is reacting. So what the customer is expecting and taking it to that step forward where you can be proactive to serve what that customer's expectation to and that's definitely come alive now with they, um, the current time. >>Yes. So, as I said, we've been talking about data ops a lot. The idea being Dev Ops applied to the data pipeline. But talk about enterprise data automation. What is it to you and how is it different from data off? >>Yeah, Great question. Thank you. I am. I think we're all familiar with felt more more awareness around. So as it's applied, Teoh, uh, processes methodologies that have become more mature of the past five years around devil that managing change, managing an application, life cycles, managing software development data about, you know, has been great. But breaking down those silos between different roles functions and bringing people together to collaborate. Andi, you know, we definitely see that those tools, those methodologies, those processes, that kind of thinking, um, landing itself to data with data is exciting. We're excited about that, Andi shifting the focus from being I t versus business users to you know who are the data producers. And here the data consumers in a lot of cases, it concert in many different lines of business. So in data role, those methods those tools and processes well we look to do is build on top of that with data automation. It's the is the nuts and bolts of the the algorithms, the models behind machine learning that the functions. That's where we investors our R and D and bringing that in to build on top of the the methods, the ways of thinking that break down those silos on injecting that automation into the business processes that are going to drive a business to serve its customers. It's, um, a layer beyond Dev ops data ops. They can get to that point where well, I think about it is, Is the automation behind the automation we can take? I'll give you an example. Okay, a bank where we did a lot of work to do make move them into accelerating that digital transformation. And what we're finding is that as we're able to automate the jobs related to data a managing that data and serving that data that's going into them as a business automating their processes for their customer. Um, so it's it's definitely having a compound effect. >>Yeah, I mean I think that you did. Data ops for a lot of people is somewhat new to the whole Dev Ops. The data ops thing is is good and it's a nice framework. Good methodology. There is obviously a level of automation in there and collaboration across different roles. But it sounds like you're talking about so supercharging it, if you will, the automation behind the automation. You know, I think organizations talk about being data driven. You hear that? They have thrown around a lot of times. People sit back and say, We don't make decisions without data. Okay? But really, being data driven is there's a lot of aspects there. There's cultural, but it's also putting data at the core of your organization, understanding how it effects monetization. And, as you know, well, silos have been built up, whether it's through M and a, you know, data sprawl outside data sources. So I'm interested in your thoughts on what data driven means and specifically Hi, how Iot Tahoe plays >>there. Yeah, I'm sure we'll be happy. That look that three David, we've We've come a long way in the last four years. We started out with automating some of those simple, um, to codify. Um, I have a high impact on organization across the data, a data warehouse. There's data related tasks that classify data on and a lot of our original pattern. Senai people value that were built up is is very much around. They're automating, classifying data across different sources and then going out to so that for some purpose originally, you know, some of those simpler I'm challenges that we have. Ah, custom itself, um, around data privacy. You know, I've got a huge data lake here. I'm a telecoms business. I've got millions of six subscribers. Um, quite often the chief data office challenges. How do I cover the operational risk? Where, um, I got so much data I need to simplify my approach to automating, classifying that data. Recent is you can't do that manually. We can for people at it. And the the scale of that is is prohibitive, right? Often, if you had to do it manually by the time you got a good picture of it, it's already out of date. Then, starting with those those simple challenges that we've been able to address, we're then going on and build on that to say, What else do we serve? What else do we serve? The chief data officer, Chief marketing officer on the CFO. Within these times, um, where those decision makers are looking for having a lot of choices in the platform options that they say that the tooling they're very much looking for We're that Swiss army. Not being able to do one thing really well is is great, but more more. Where that cost pressure challenge is coming in is about how do we, um, offer more across the organization, bring in those business lines of business activities that depend on data to not just with a T. Okay, >>so we like the cube. Sometimes we like to talk about Okay, what is it? And then how does it work? And what's the business impact? We kind of covered what it is but love to get into the tech a little bit in terms of how it works. And I think we have a graphic here that gets into that a little bit. So, guys, if you bring that up, I wonder if you could tell us and what is the secret sauce behind Iot Tahoe? And if you could take us through this slot. >>Sure. I mean, right there in the middle that the heart of what we do It is the intellectual property. Yeah, that was built up over time. That takes from Petra genius data sources Your Oracle relational database, your your mainframe. If they lay in increasingly AP eyes and devices that produce data and that creates the ability to automatically discover that data, classify that data after it's classified them have the ability to form relationships across those different, uh, source systems, silos, different lines of business. And once we've automated that that we can start to do some cool things that just puts a contact and meaning around that data. So it's moving it now from bringing data driven on increasingly well. We have really smile, right people in our customer organizations you want do some of those advanced knowledge tasks, data scientists and, uh, quants in some of the banks that we work with. The the onus is on, then, putting everything we've done there with automation, pacifying it, relationship, understanding that equality policies that you apply to that data. I'm putting it in context once you've got the ability to power. A a professional is using data, um, to be able to put that data and contacts and search across the entire enterprise estate. Then then they can start to do some exciting things and piece together the tapestry that fabric across that different systems could be crm air P system such as s AP on some of the newer cloud databases that we work with. Snowflake is a great Well, >>yes. So this is you're describing sort of one of the one of the reasons why there's so many stove pipes and organizations because data is gonna locked in the silos of applications. I also want to point out, you know, previously to do discovery to do that classification that you talked about form those relationship to glean context from data. A lot of that, if not most of that in some cases all that would have been manual. And of course, it's out of date so quickly. Nobody wants to do it because it's so hard. So this again is where automation comes into the the the to the idea of really becoming data driven. >>Sure. I mean the the efforts. If we if I look back, maybe five years ago, we had a prevalence of daily technologies at the cutting edge. Those have said converging me to some of these cloud platforms. So we work with Google and AWS, and I think very much is, as you said it, those manual attempts to try and grasp. But it is such a complex challenge at scale. I quickly runs out of steam because once, um, once you've got your hat, once you've got your fingers on the details Oh, um, what's what's in your data estate? It's changed, you know, you've onboard a new customer. You signed up a new partner, Um, customer has no adopted a new product that you just Lawrence and there that that slew of data it's keeps coming. So it's keeping pace with that. The only answer really is is some form of automation. And what we found is if we can tie automation with what I said before the expertise the, um, the subject matter expertise that sometimes goes back many years within an organization's people that augmentation between machine learning ai on and on that knowledge that sits within inside the organization really tends to involve a lot of value in data? >>Yes, So you know Well, a J you can't be is a smaller company, all things to all people. So your ecosystem is critical. You working with AWS? You're working with Google. You got red hat. IBM is as partners. What is attracting those folks to your ecosystem and give us your thoughts on the importance of ecosystem? >>Yeah, that's that's fundamental. So I mean, when I caimans, we tell her here is the CEO of one of the, um, trends that I wanted us to to be part of was being open, having an open architecture that allowed one thing that was nice to my heart, which is as a CEO, um, a C I O where you've got a budget vision and you've already made investments into your organization, and some of those are pretty long term bets. They should be going out 5 10 years, sometimes with CRM system training up your people, getting everybody working together around a common business platform. What I wanted to ensure is that we could openly like it using ap eyes that were available, the love that some investment on the cost that has already gone into managing in organizations I t. But business users to before So part of the reason why we've been able to be successful with, um, the partners like Google AWS and increasingly, a number of technology players. That red hat mongo DB is another one where we're doing a lot of good work with, um, and snowflake here is, um it's those investments have been made by the organizations that are our customers, and we want to make sure we're adding to that, and they're leveraging the value that they've already committed to. >>Okay, so we've talked about kind of what it is and how it works, and I want to get into the business impact. I would say what I would be looking for from from this would be Can you help me lower my operational risk? I've got I've got tasks that I do many year sequential, some who are in parallel. But can you reduce my time to task? And can you help me reduce the labor intensity and ultimately, my labor costs? And I put those resources elsewhere, and ultimately, I want to reduce the end and cycle time because that is going to drive Telephone number R. A. Y So, um, I missing anything? Can you do those things? And maybe you could give us some examples of the tiara y and the business impact. >>Yeah. I mean, the r a y David is is built upon on three things that I mentioned is a combination off leveraging the existing investment with the existing state, whether that's home, Microsoft, Azure or AWS or Google IBM. And I'm putting that to work because, yeah, the customers that we work with have had made those choices. On top of that, it's, um, is ensuring that we have you got the automation that is working right down to the level off data, a column level or the file level so we don't do with meta data. It is being very specific to be at the most granular level. So as we've grown our processes and on the automation, gasification tagging, applying policies from across different compliance and regulatory needs, that an organization has to the data, everything that then happens downstream from that is ready to serve a business outcome. It could be a customer who wants that experience on a mobile device. A tablet oh, face to face within, within the store. I mean game. Would you provision the right data and enable our customers do that? But their customers, with the right data that they can trust at the right time, just in that real time moment where decision or an action is being expected? That's, um, that's driving the r a y two b in some cases, 20 x but and that's that's really satisfying to see that that kind of impact it is taking years down to months and in many cases, months of work down to days. In some cases, our is the time to value. I'm I'm impressed with how quickly out of the box with very little training a customer and think about, too. And you speak just such a search. They discovery knowledge graph on DM. I don't find duplicates. Onda Redundant data right off the bat within hours. >>Well, it's why investors are interested in this space. I mean, they're looking for a big, total available market. They're looking for a significant return. 10 X is you gotta have 10 x 20 x is better. So so that's exciting and obviously strong management and a strong team. I want to ask you about people and culture. So you got people process technology we've seen with this pandemic that processes you know are really unpredictable. And the technology has to be able to adapt to any process, not the reverse. You can't force your process into some static software, so that's very, very important. But the end of the day you got to get people on board. So I wonder if you could talk about this notion of culture and a data driven culture. >>Yeah, that's that's so important. I mean, current times is forcing the necessity of the moment to adapt. But as we start to work their way through these changes on adapt ah, what with our customers, But that is changing economic times. What? What we're saying here is the ability >>to I >>have, um, the technology Cartman, in a really smart way, what those business uses an I T knowledge workers are looking to achieve together. So I'll give you an example. We have quite often with the data operations teams in the companies that we, um, partnering with, um, I have a lot of inbound enquiries on the day to day level. I really need this set of data they think it can help my data scientists run a particular model? Or that what would happen if we combine these two different silence of data and gets the Richmond going now, those requests you can, sometimes weeks to to realize what we've been able to do with the power is to get those answers being addressed by the business users themselves. And now, without without customers, they're coming to the data. And I t folks saying, Hey, I've now built something in the development environment. Why don't we see how that can scale up with these sets of data? I don't need terabytes of it. I know exactly the columns and the feet in the data that I'm going to use on that gets seller wasted in time, um, angle to innovate. >>Well, that's huge. I mean, the whole notion of self service and the lines of business actually feeling like they have ownership of the data as opposed to, you know, I t or some technology group owning the data because then you've got data quality issues or if it doesn't line up there their agenda, you're gonna get a lot of finger pointing. So so that is a really important. You know a piece of it. I'll give you last word A J. Your final thoughts, if you would. >>Yeah, we're excited to be the only path. And I think we've built great customer examples here where we're having a real impact in in a really fast pace, whether it helping them migrate to the cloud, helping the bean up their legacy, Data lake on and write off there. Now the conversation is around data quality as more of the applications that we enable to a more efficiently could be data are be a very robotic process automation along the AP, eyes that are now available in the cloud platforms. A lot of those they're dependent on data quality on and being able to automate. So business users, um, to take accountability off being able to so look at the trend of their data quality over time and get the signals is is really driving trust. And that trust in data is helping in time. Um, the I T teams, the data operations team, with do more and more quickly that comes back to culture being out, supply this technology in such a way that it's visual insensitive. Andi. How being? Just like Dev Ops tests with with a tty Dave drops putting intelligence in at the data level to drive that collaboration. We're excited, >>you know? You remind me of something. I lied. I don't want to go yet. It's OK, so I know we're tight on time, but you mentioned migration to the cloud. And I'm thinking about conversation with Paula from Webster Webster. Bank migrations. Migrations are, you know, they're they're a nasty word for for organizations. So our and we saw this with Webster. How are you able to help minimize the migration pain and and why is that something that you guys are good at? >>Yeah. I mean, there were many large, successful companies that we've worked with. What's There's a great example where, you know, I'd like to give you the analogy where, um, you've got a lot of people in your teams if you're running a business as a CEO on this bit like a living living grade. But imagine if those different parts of your brain we're not connected, that with, um, so diminish how you're able to perform. So what we're seeing, particularly with migration, is where banks retailers. Manufacturers have grown over the last 10 years through acquisition on through different initiatives, too. Um, drive customer value that sprawl in their data estate hasn't been fully dealt with. It sometimes been a good thing, too. Leave whatever you're fired off the agent incent you a side by side with that legacy mainframe on your oracle, happy and what we're able to do very quickly with that migration challenges shine a light on all the different parts. Oh, data application at the column level or higher level if it's a day late and show an enterprise architect a CDO how everything's connected, where they may not be any documentation. The bright people that created some of those systems long since moved on or retired or been promoted into so in the rose on within days, being out to automatically generate Anke refreshed the states of that data across that man's game on and put it into context, then allows you to look at a migration from a confidence that you did it with the back rather than what we've often seen in the past is teams of consultant and business analysts. Data around this spend months getting an approximation and and a good idea of what it could be in the current state and try their very best to map that to the future Target state. Now, without all hoping out, run those processes within hours of getting started on, um well, that picture visualize that picture and bring it to life. You know, the Yarra. Why, that's off the bat with finding data that should have been deleted data that was copies off on and being able to allow the architect whether it's we're working on gcb or migration to any other clouds such as AWS or a multi cloud landscape right now with yeah, >>that visibility is key. Teoh sort of reducing operational risks, giving people confidence that they can move forward and being able to do that and update that on an ongoing basis, that means you can scale a J. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing your insights and your experience is great to have >>you. Thank you, David. Look towards smoking in. >>Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We're here with data automated on the Cube. This is Dave Volante and we'll be right back. Short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> from Seattle Washington It's the Q covering AWS Imagine brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back there, buddy Geoffrey here with the Cube. We're in downtown Seattle Day Ws Imagine Edie, you event. It's their education event and every education Everything from K through 12. The higher education community College Retraining after service is a really great show. It's a second year. We're happy to be here. We've got somebody has come all the way from Spain to talk about his very special company. It's Ignasi. Nuclear is he is >> the CEO of click dot edu. Yeah, nice. You see? Welcome. >> Thank you are way really pleased to be with you. >> Great. So tell us, kind of what is clicky? Do you What? What is kind of your core value? >> It's ah, platform that makes all the things that the school needs seeing atleast in Spain. So it's a miss system also on elements also the communication with the family that Petra is Ah Wei Tau financial the school and also a lot of things that they are related on >> right? And you've been around for a while. So when did the company started? How was kind of some basic numbers on how many customers do you have? Could you operate in a lot of countries? A lot of schools? >> The as we have schools working with us already in all of Spain, Also in Chile, Colombia, Arneson, UK. On also in a little country in Europe that is called Andorra. So we're really happy because you have more than 1,000,000 off users working with us. >> 1,000,000. Congratulations. And is it mainly do you specialize between, say, K through 12 or higher education? Or we're kind of all over the place? >> Yes, we're focusing K 12 schools. So the one off the important parts are the communication with parents on dhe to follow all the things that the student. That's >> right. So you guys have a very special thing that you're announcing here at the show is really focusing on Alexa for K through 12 which nobody else is doing. That's really something unique that you guys, How did you get in that? What did you see in voice communication and Alexa that you couldn't do in the platform before that? You really saw the opportunity? >> Yes. All the people say is that >> the future or the present Now is the voice on all we will communicate by boys in the future over Internet. You see a lot off young guys doing all the things my boys know, right? Texting, etcetera. So we thought that it could be a nice idea that the communication between parents and also for a students to the school and be on in the other way, could be could be by boys. So we imagine how to do >> it on. We did it. It's really knew. >> When did you start it? When did you start that project? >> This project we began three months ago, >> three months ago. So, >> yeah, it's really, really knew the boy's idea, right? It was in >> a show that I have seen. Ah ah, law. A lot of people were talking about that, but there were, at least in Spain, in the Spanish. Nothing about so with it, we can be the first. So >> we leave. That's >> great. So before we turn the >> cameras on, we're talking about some of the issues that you have in one of the ones is integration to all these systems because, you know, I have kids. I might have multiple kids in a couple different grades. You have kids and a fine looking for access on their homework or their test scores. You know he's got integrate with all those different back ends to keep things private. But you're kind of in a good spot because your system is the one that's on the back end, right? Yeah, so that worked pretty well. And then the other piece, he talked about his two way voice. I don't think a lot of people think in voice communication, yet it's still more of an ask and get a reply asking and get a reply. But you guys are actually pushing notice vacations from the school, out to the families using voice. How's that working out? You know what are some of the use cases? Yeah, >> it's like it's like the parent can ask Toe elixir, for example, What's a home or for tomorrow for one of your son or daughter on DA on The Echo tell you about that. So it's really impressive, because in that moment the system goes to the school system to get that information on our system. Yeah, on Alexa translating voice So it's It's It's funny >> I just think it's funny that I get e mails from all my digital assistants telling me, suggesting things that I should ask them because it's really not native yet as as an interface to work with these machines. But, well, he's mentioned that the young people voices much more natural. So I wonder if there's been some surprises or some things you didn't expect in terms of people comfort level with voice as a way to communicate with me. >> Say, I think it's, ah most natural way also for us that we are not not if but off course. So we communicate better by boys and writing or texting. So, so off course. It's the future because it's another away. So the use off that systems goes up because off that. So I think it's the most the most thing that for for causes more surprising, >> right? And so will you guys supply the Alexa? It's for people's homes. Or is it something they can tap into their existing Alexa Yeah, >> uh, usually, ah, the case for using that is in your home or else on your phone so you can install licks on your phone and you can ask them. I'll see if the UK fun ankle, >> but handle it. But how do I look? How do I hook my existing echo? Yeah, yes, I bought into the school system. >> Yes, because sometimes some universities are They pulled their A coin. I don't know in the university, or but you can use your echo that you are using it for other things. Listen, music me Listen, missing music or whatever >> and you >> can use the >> same. Yeah, you can. You >> only have to, like, download an >> app for >> your phone. There >> is more less is the same us Alexa to >> install, click in the Web or a skill that it's cow. It's called right, and then you >> have it. So what's next? What's on the road? Map on the voice specifically, Where do you see this kind of evolving over the next little while? >> Yes, our our next goal in the parties that they can use the teachers in the school. The boy systems also so for doing what they do every day in ah Maur writing or whatever, we can do it by voice. For example, interview with the parents, a transcript or, for example, to say that somebody hasn't come to the school or toe tell to the Transportacion that something is company. These kind of things is what we are. Imagine it's in our next things that we will do it with voice. >> It'll be Lexa in the classroom, hoping, thinking, Yeah, right. What about privacy? I would imagine knows funny. In the early days of Cloud, security was a was was not good of the show stopper. People were concerned about 10 years later. Now security is a strength of cloud, right? It's probably more secure than most people's data centers or disgruntled employees. I would imagine privacy and security. This is probably pretty top of mind in the school district as well as a lot of personal information. Are they comfortable? Do they kind of get the security of cloud and cloud infrastructure, or is that still sticking point? >> You know that in Europe there are really strict low of our protection off that right, so we are really concerned about that. So we are talking with the school's what kindof systems. They will be comfortable because you want to use it, so we'll have to find >> the clue to do that. But It's really >> important, I think, all over the world, but in the stage or in Europe who are really concerned about that. So we'll see how to find it. But we can create a private skill, right? Yes, because there are birds shown off, Alexa, that is for business. So you can create your provide things on. You don't have to be for that. Somebody's listening. You >> right? All right. So the last last question here at the conference and you come last year? >> No. So what do >> you know? Just your impressions of the conference Has it nice to be with a bunch of like minded, you know, kind of forward thinking educators because because education doesn't always get the best reputation being kind of forward looking. But here you're surrounded. So I just wonder you could share some of your thoughts of the of the event so far. Yeah, >> I think this guy no five ins give you more motivation on you. Increase your you're way t to see that there are a lot of people that is pushing to innovate and do the things different. So really, really interesting to goto some machine learning. Ah, suppose is shown about California. What? They are doing that right? So I'm really interested. >> Good. Get all right. Look Nazi. Thanks for taking a few minutes. And, uh, congratulations on that project. That's really crazy. Thank >> you for your interest in. >> All right, >> Jeff, you're watching the Cube. Where it aws Imagine in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering artists. A conference twenty nineteen brought to you by for scout. >> Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube were in the force caboose that Arcee and Mosconi center forty thousand people walking around talking about security is by far the biggest security of it in the world. We're excited to be here. And welcome back a Cube. Alumni has been playing in the security space for a very long time. He's Bradman bury the GDP from Booz Allen >> Hamilton. Brad, great to see you. >> Hey, thanks for having me here today. Absolutely. Yeah. I've, uh I've already walked about seven miles today, and, uh, just glad to be here to have >> a conversation. Yeah, the fit bitten. The walking trackers love this place, right? You feel your circles in a very short period of time. >> I feel very fit fit after today. So thank >> you. But it's pretty interesting rights, >> and you're in it. You're in a position where you're >> advising companies, both government and and commercial companies, you know, to come into an environment like this and just be overwhelmed by so many options. Right? And you can't buy everything here, and you shouldn't buy everything here. So how do you help? How do you hope your client's kind of navigate this crazy landscape. >> It's interesting, so you mentioned forty thousand people. Aziz, you see on the show, should share room floor behind us, Thousands of product companies, and, frankly, our clients are confused. Um, you know, there's a lot of tools, lot technologies. There's no silver bullet, and our clients are asking a couple of fundamental problem. A couple of fundamental questions. One. How effective in mine and then once them effective, you know, how can I be more efficient with my cyber pretty spent? >> So it's funny, effective. So how are they measuring effective, Right? Because that's a that's a kind of a changing, amorphous thing to target as well. >> That's I mean, that's that's That's the that's the key question in cybersecurity is how effective my, you know, there's lots of tools and technologies. We do a lot of instant response, but commercially and federally and in general, when looking at past reaches, its not a problem. In most cases, everyone has the best of the best and tools and technologies. But either they're drowning in data on DH or the tools aren't configured properly, so you know we're spending a lot of time helping our client's baseline their current environment. Help them look at their tool configurations, help them look at their screw. The operation center helping them figure out Can they detect the most recent threats? And how quickly can we respond? >> Right? And then how did they prioritize? That's the thing that always amazes me, because then you can't do everything right. And and it's fascinating with, you know, the recent elections and, you know, kind of a state funded threats. Is that what the bad guys are going on going after? Excuse me? Isn't necessarily your personal identifying information or your bank account, but all kinds of things that you may not have thought were that valuable yesterday, >> right? I mean, you know, it's funny. We talk a lot about these black swan events, and so you look at not Petra and you know what? Not Pecchia. There was some companies that were really hit in a very significant way, and, you know, everyone, everyone is surprised, right and way. See it time after time, folks caught off guard by, you know, these unanticipated attack vectors. It's a big problem. But, you know, I think you know, our clients are getting better. They're starting to be more proactive. There start. They're starting to become more integrated communities where they're taking intelligence and using that to better tune and Taylor there screw the operation programs. And, you know, they're starting to also used take the tools and technologies in their environment, better tie them and integrate them with their operational processes and getting better. >> Right. So another big change in the landscape. You said you've been coming here for years. Society, right? And yeah. And it's just called Industrial. I owe to your Jean. Call it. Yeah. And other things. A lot more devices should or should not be connected. Well, are going to be connected. They were necessarily designed to be connected. And you also work on the military side as well. Right? And these have significant implications. These things do things, whether it's a turbine, whether it's something in the hospital, this monitoring that hard or whether it's, you know, something in a military scenarios. So >> how are you seeing >> the adoption of that? Obviously the benefits far out way you know, the potential downfalls. But you gotta protect for the downfall, >> you know? Yo, Tio, we've u o T is one of the most pressing cyber security challenges that our client's case today. And it's funny. When we first started engaging in the OT space, there was a big vocabulary mismatch. You had thesis, Oh, organizations that we're talking threat actors and attack vectors, and then you had head of manufacturing that we're talking up time, availability and reliability and they were talking past each other. I think now we're at an attorney point where both communities air coming together to recognize that this is a really an imminent threat to the survival of their organization and that they've got to protect they're ot environment. They're starting by making sure that they have segmentation in place. But that's not enough. And you know, it's interesting when we look into a lot of the OT environments, you know, I call it the Smithsonian of it. And so, you know, I was looking at one of our client environments and, you know, they had, Ah, lot of Windows and T devices like that's great. I'm a Windows NT expert. I was using that between nineteen ninety four in nineteen ninety six, and you know, I mean, it's everybody's favorite vulnerability. Right on Rodeo. I'm your guy. So, you know, one of the challenges that we're facing is how do you go into these legacy environments that have very mission critical operations and, you know, integrates cyber security to protect and ensure their mission. And so we're working with companies like for Scott, you know, that provide Asian agent lis capabilities, that that allow us to better no one understand what's in the environment and then be able to apply policies to be able to better protect and defend them. But certainly it's a major issue that everyone's facing. We spent a lot of time talking about issues in manufacturing, but but think about the utilities. Think about the power grid. Think about building control systems. H back. You know, I was talking to a client that has a very critical mission, and I asked them all like, what's your biggest challenge? You face today? And I was thinking for something. I was thinking they were going to be talking about their mission control system. Or, you know, some of some of the rial, you know, critical critical assets they have. But what he said, My biggest challenge is my, my age back, and I'm like, really, He's like my age back goes down, My operation's gonna be disrupted. I'm going out to Coop halfway across the country, and that could result in loss of life. It's a big issue. >> Yeah, it's wild. Triggered all kinds. I think Mike earlier today said that a lot of a lot of the devices you don't even know you're running in tea. Yeah, it's like a little tiny version of Inti that's running underneath this operating system that's running this device. You don't even know it. And it's funny. You talked about the HBC. There was a keynote earlier today where they talk about, you know, if a data center HBC goes down first. I think she said, sixty seconds stuff starts turning off, right? So, you know, depending on what that thing is powering, that's a pretty significant data point. >> Yeah, you know, I think where we are in the journey and the OT is, you know, we started by creating the burning platform, making sure that there was awareness around hate. There is a problem. There is a threat. I think we've moved beyond that. WeII then moved into, you know, segmenting the BOT environment, A lot of the major nation state attacks that we've seen started in the enterprise and move laterally into the OT environment. So we're starting to get better segmentation in place. Now we're getting to a point where we're moving into, you know, the shop floors, the manufacturing facilities, the utilities, and we're starting Teo understand what's on the network right in the world This has probably been struggling with for years and have started to overcome. But in the OT environment, it's still a problem. So understanding what's connected to the network and then building strategy for how we can really protecting defendant. And the difference is it's not just about protecting and defending, but it's insuring continuity of mission. It's about being resilient, >> right and being able to find if there's a problem down the problem. I mean, we're almost numb. Tow the data breach is right there in the paper every day. I mean, I think Michael is really the last big when everyone had a connection fit down. Okay, it's another another data breach. So it's a big It's a big issue. That's right. So >> one of the things you talked about last time we had >> John was continuous diagnostic and mitigation. I think it's a really interesting take that pretty clear in the wording that it's not. It's not by something, put it in and go on vacation. It was a constant, an ongoing process, and I have to really be committed to >> Yeah, you know, I think that, you know, our clients, the federally and commercially are moving beyond compliance. And if you rewind the clock many years ago, everyone was looking at these compliance scores and saying Good to go. And in reality, if you're if you're compliant, you're really looking in the rear view mirror. And it's really about, you know, putting in programs that's continually assessing risk, continuing to take a continues to look at your your environment so that you can better understand what are the risks, one of the threats and that you can prioritize activity in action. And I think the federal government is leading the way with some major programs. I got a VHS continuous diagnostic in mitigation where they're really looking Teo up armor dot gov and, you know, really take a more proactive approach. Teo, you know, securing critical infrastructure, right? Just >> curious because you you kind >> of split the fence between the federal clients and the commercial clients. Everybody's, you know, kind of points of view in packs away they see the world. >> What if you could share? >> Kind of, maybe what's more of a federal kind of centric view that wasn't necessarily shared on the commercial side of they prioritize. And what's kind of the one of the commercial side that the feds are missing? I assume you want to get him both kind of thinking about the same thing, but there's got to be a different set of priorities. >> Yeah, you know, I think after some of the major commercial breaches, Way saw the commercial entities go through a real focused effort. Teo, take the tools that they have in the infrastructure to make sure that they're better integrated. Because, you know, in this mass product landscape, there's lots of seems that the adversaries livin and then better tie the tooling in the infrastructure with security operations and on the security operation side, take more of an intelligence driven approach, meaning that you're looking at what's going on out in the wild, taking that information be able to enrich it and using that to be more proactive instead of waiting for an event to pop up on the screen hunt for adversaries in your network. Right now, we're seeing the commercial market really refining that approach. And now we're seeing our government clients start to adopt an embrace commercial. Best practices. >> Write some curious. I love that line. Adversaries live in the scene. Right? We're going to an all hybrid world, right? Public cloud is kicking tail. People have stuff in public, cloud their stuff in their own cloud. They have, you know, it's very kind of hybrid ecosystems that sounds like it's making a whole lot of scenes. >> Yeah, you know, it. You know, just went Just when we think we're getting getting there, you know, we're getting the enterprise under control. We've got asset management in place, You know. We're modernizing security operations. We're being Mohr Hunt driven. More proactive now the attacks services expanding. You know, earlier we talked about the OT environment that's introducing a much broader and new attack service. But now we're talking about cloud and it's not just a single cloud. There's multiple cloud providers, right? And now we're not. Now we're talking about software is a service and multiple software's of service providers. So you know, it's not just what's in your environment now. It's your extended enterprise that includes clouds. So far is the service. Excuse me, ot Io ti and the problem's getting much more complex. And so it's going to keep us busy for the next couple of years. I think job security's okay, I think where I think we're gonna be busy, all >> right, before I let you go, just kind of top trends that you're thinking about what you guys are looking at a za company as we had in twenty >> nineteen, you know, a couple of things. You know, Who's Alan being being deeply rooted in defense and intelligence were working, Teo, unlocking our tradecraft that we've gained through years of dealing with the adversary and working to figure out howto better apply that to cyber defense. Things like advanced threat hunting things like adversary red teaming things like being able to do base lining to assess the effectiveness of an organisation. And then last but not least, a i a. I is a big trend in the industry. It's probably become one of the most overused but buzzwords. But we're looking at specific use cases around artificial intelligence. How do you, you know better Accelerate. Tier one tier, two events triaging in a sock. How do you better detect, you know, adversary movement to enhance detection in your enterprise and, you know, eyes, you know, very, you know, a major major term that's being thrown out at this conference. But we're really looking at how to operationalize that over the next three to five years, >> right? Right. And the bad guys have it too, right? And never forget tomorrow's Law. One of my favorite, not quoted enough laws, right, tend to overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long term, maybe today's buzzword. But three to five years A I's gonna be everywhere. Absolutely. Alright. Well, Brad, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day is done by. Good >> to see you again. All right, >> all right. He's Brad. I'm Jeff. You're watching. The Cube were in Arcee conference in downtown San Francisco. Thanks >> for watching. We'LL see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering InterConnect 2017 brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE coverage of their cloud and big data event Watson Analytics, and IoT Cloud. It's theCUBE coverage for three days. A lot of great interviews. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Scott Francis, an entrepreneur, CEO, co-founder of BP3. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Great to have an entrepreneur on because you've been, in your business, you co-founded it, built it form the ground up, >> Scott: Right. >> Hundreds of employees. Now, over 100 employees. >> Scott: Right. >> IBM partner, great story. >> Yeah, we started with just two of us 10 years ago. And, we'll have our 10th anniversary in May this year. >> John: Congratulations. So take us through the, you know, state of the art. I mean, go back 10 years ago. You've actually provisioned your own servers. You actually had to load routers and networking gear. That's like, I'd say a tax of at least 100K in just gear. And then you've got the ISP chart, all that stuff. >> Right, well the economics have totally changed, right? For us and for our customers, and I think the main benefit is you can get to business value so much faster now and spend less money that's sort of wasted spend, right? >> So take a minute and talk about what you guys do and what your role is here. And then I want to get into some of the things that are changing the market place, that people are seizing opportunities around, certainly around processing and new innovations. So, give us a quick update on who you guys are, and your role here today. >> Yeah, so our focus is on business process and decision management. And, you know, our experience is that it is foundational technology and foundational aspect to almost everything you're hearing going on, right? Whether it's block chain or cognitive, or moving to the cloud. What are their key considerations? How does it impact my business process? How does it impact my operations? How does it impact my decisions? So we feel like in our space, we're right at the sweet spot of what all our customers are worried about. And when we hear them talk about block chain, we know we've got a process problem we've got to address. And when we hear about moving to the cloud, we better address all the Halo applications around that, application that's moving to the cloud and make sure they're all addressed and part of the new business process. >> It's interesting, the whole decoupling of existing systems models >> Right. >> Is really kind of what I see as the micro trend over the past six years, and like you mentioned, foundational building blocks is key, right? >> Scott: Right. So that's key. And, so let's take this to the next level. I want to ask you a question because I think this is something we see all the time on theCUBE when we do interviews, is that technology now is so much different. In the old days it was, we knew the process. >> Scott: Right. >> And we don't really know the technology. Let's go automate that accounting, blah, blah, blah. You know we saw that, ERPs, CRM, all those vendors. Now it's, I have technology, I don't know what the process is going to be because some new, big data analytics people changed the insight, and changed the value chain, or changed the business model, one tweak radically will disrupt proven, process which no one wants to change. Whoa, you know, so there's now a real factor. Give us some insight and color around how that goes down, because someone has an insight, they want to roll it in and implement it. It changes the entire process flow. >> Right, well the key thing is, having an insight as a single person in a process is one issue, but rolling it out across a Fortune 500 company is a whole other proposition, right? You've got regulatory issues and compliance issues, and customer experience issues that you've got to work through. And all those accommodations may be there. The value prop may be there, but you've got to work through it. You can't, you know, at a billion dollar organization, you can't just change it for that, you have to work all that out. >> John: So what's the playbook? >> Yeah, so the playbook is when we have an insight, what we talk to customers about is you've got all these tools now to arrive at insights you couldn't get to before, or by the time you got to them, you're doing your analytics over data that's six months old. Okay, now I have an insight about what would've worked six months ago. The difference is with cognitive and machine learning algorithms, and the analytics you have available today, and the access to the data, those insights are available now. We have to re-architect the processes to reflect that and to let me make new decisions within that operational context. >> Go ahead. >> Operationalizing those insights. Go ahead, finish your thought. >> Well the data first thing that you talked about is key. We just had our big data event. It's look in value in conjunction with strata hadoop was data in motion and badge are working together now to your point, the times series of data is relevant in the time you need it, right? >> Scott: Right. >> Not yesterday. So this brings up the question of, Okay, you've got some spark thing going on. I see IBM has got spark, that's cool. But now, how do you get into the app, right? To developers? I'm a developer. I'm a coder. Do I need to be a wrangler, data wrangler, or data scientist, to make that happen? So this is the conversation people are trying to figure out. What's your perspective on that? >> I think a lot of the tools that are, that are available now, basically made a common coder, right? Has a decent chance OF that competing with their data scientist friends. There's a different level of expertise, obviously, for the data scientist. But much like in business process, you know years ago, you had to get your lean six black belt, and you really had to study it to get good at it, and really master statistics, and I've got tools that will run the statistics for you, right? So you don't have to master the statistics but you've got to collect the right data, you have to engage in the business. So I think you see a sort of, democratization of data science, right? With the tools that are available now. >> Talk a little bit more about decision management. Go back to the mid-2000s and the Harvard Business Review is writing articles that gut feel trumps, you know, paralysis, analysis, paralysis by analysis every time. That's seemingly changed but what specifically has changed in regards to operationalizing those insights? >> Well I think they're a couple of things that are interesting. If you look at how processes were traditionally designed, you know, before BPM came along, BPM and decision management tools came along, just write the code. Build your application. And when you wanted to change the decision, well you had to find where that was modeled in the code, and edit the code, right? And that was a challenging proposition. The guys that wrote it might have moved to other projects. So how do you figure it out? >> So gut feel was faster. >> Yeah, and BPM, and OEM, you know, gave us tools for managing those things. BPM in terms of process, having a diagram that a mere mortal can understand and find the right context for whenever that decision gets made. And decision management to mange rule sets and the interactions between these rules in a more codified way that again, mere mortals can understand, right? So you don't have to go hunting through code. We're looking at a model, a representative model. I think the change now with machine learning, with cognitive computing, the real time access to data is that you have to really rethink your processes and allow those decisions to be altered in real time, not later, six months later, when I'm doing a revamp of the process as a separate, sort of institutional operation but actually as I'm running my process. We design it to accommodate the idea that as we're collecting data we're going to learn and get better, and actually affect those decisions, or recommend a different decision to the person whose Johnny-on-the-spot. >> Are you finding that the business impact is that your customers, the consumers of this sort of new way of doing decision management are seeing things that they wouldn't have seen before, or is it more greater conviction and faster time to everybody pulling the same direction? >> Well, I think for sure they're seeing things they haven't seen before. We're surfacing data that they just didn't have access to before in a timely fashion. And in the context of their process which was always a difficult thing to do in traditional systems, right? For any of your traditional ERP, or CRM system, the notion of where you are in your cross functional process may not be present. Today you have that context. You have the real time access to it. That really changes the nature of what you're seeing. I think the other bit is, yeah, the action ability, right? How easy it is to turn that insight into an action. >> And have you seen any effect on the politics of decision making, because we all know the P and L manager whose the strong voice in the organization, he or she is going to pull data that supports their business case. Have you been able to, sort of, neutralize that sometimes damaging effect in organizations? >> Yeah, well, I think in the cycle of the economic cycle, you know, if we rewind five or six years ago, almost every project we engage with with a customer is about operational controls, reducing costs, trying to produce the same result with fewer resources, right? And that has shifted dramatically over the last few years. The last two years it's been almost entirely about capturing revenue. >> Dave: Opportunistic, yeah. >> Serving new revenue streams without having to hire as much to support it. It's much more about revenue capture and customer experience. And I think that reflects the stage we're in in the cycle. >> Dave: Is that a bubbling cater? I hope it reflects a good long term view. >> Dave: I hope so too. >> You know, but it's interesting. There's a customer speaking here at InterConnect today, StubHub, about their customer experience. And they BPM to manage their customer experience, and back in 2009, 2010, when everybody was pulling back, and they were all focused on cost containment. You know, I recall StubHub was working on how to make their customer experience better. It's kind of interesting, right? And they've done very well over the years, right? So I think that value system in that culture really pays off over time, but you have to really mean it. If you're just swinging back and forth with the ebb and flow of the economy, then I think it's very difficult. >> Well, if you're doubling down when everybody else is sitting on their hands, you're going to get a competitive. >> It's a great opportunity, right? >> So, talk a little bit more about the IBM connection. What's going on in InterConnect, and what's the relationship there? >> Well, IBM is our best partner. You know, we've been partnered very closely with IBM ever since they acquired Lombardi which was our company that we came out of back in 2007. And that has become, you know, the heart of the IBM, BPM portfolio. And we work with their business process products, decision management, as well as cognitive and blue mix. So we're in the mix with IBM in a big way, and I think this conference is a great opportunity for us to not only reconnect with folks from IBM, but also with our customers who tend to come to this conference as well. So it's a great opportunity for us. >> So specifically you're leveraging IBM tooling, sort of. >> That's right. >> Repackaging that in your solutions for your clients. >> Right. So we are a reseller. We're also OEM IBM software, and we do delivery work for IBM customers. So, it's kind of a trifecta. >> You started this company 10 years ago. We love this start up story. Tell us, you and your colleagues started. Tell us your start up story and how you go to where you are now. >> Well we were, you know, we would meet up at a coffee shop, right? And get together and kind of talk about, you know, the fact that it felt like there was a big opportunity out there. >> Dave: This is in Austin. >> Yeah in Austin. My co-founder and I, you know, we were working at Lombardi but we felt like there was an opportunity to build a great services firm in our space, right? In this business process space, that there was a lot of untapped potential. And as we met and talked about it, we just got the bug that we needed to go out and do it. And when we started the company, you know. It was just the two of us initially. We bootstrapped the firm. Last summer, for the first time, we actually raised money, outside capital, to help fund the growth. >> Dave: 10 years then. >> Yeah, yeah. But all that time we self funded which was a great experience. A great learning experience. Certainly lost some sleep over the years. But, you know, there is an aspect of kind of putting the band back together. You know, hiring people we really enjoyed working with in previous lives, previous jobs, and putting together a killer team to go after it. >> So the decision to take outside capital, maybe talk a little bit about that because that's probably wasn't an easy one, or maybe it was, I don't know. >> No, I think, you know, what we've been fortunate to do is we've taken some calculated risks over time, right? We used to only operate in the United States. We acquired a business in London to expand to Europe. And now a third of our business is in Europe. But those risks, you can put the whole company at risk taking a chance like that. And so it occurred to us, after taking a few of those calculated risks and winning that maybe we should hedge our bets a little bit and have some more capital to work with, and have a good financial partner that if we were engaged in that kind of discussion, someone who could help, both advise and also possibly fund if we got into that situation. And so, we took an investment from Petra Capital based out of Nashville. They're a great growth equity firm, and they invest in healthcare and tech start ups, like ourselves. And so we got some great people on the board as a result. Mike Simmons from T2 Systems, and Jeff Rich from another capital investment firm. These guys have been operators. They've run companies much bigger than ours but they've also been in the mix at our size. So we've got some great outcomes out of taking that investment. >> So you've been cashflow positive since the early days. You had to be. Is it the plan to continue to do that, or do you make gasoline in the fire type investments? >> You know, I think it's cultural, right? I know there's a lot of business models where there's actually some good since in the running and not worrying about profit for awhile, but I also think you need to develop habits and our business serving enterprise customers, I think they deserve to know that we're being responsible with our money, with how we spend, with how we grow, and that we have a responsible level of growth. We could spend more and grow faster at the same type of process. >> John: At the risk of service. >> But at the risk of service quality for our customers and that's not worth it for us because ultimately, it's the repeat business with customers that really drives our growth long term. >> We feel the same way, obviously self funded. You know I'd say Silicon Valley is a story like that. Heirarchy of entrepreneurs and it's well known that the number one position is self funded growth without outside capital. It's a lot harder. No offense to my VC funded friends. It's a lot harder to do it from the ground up than just get other people's money. So tier one is do it yourself, which you guys are in. Get some capital, grow that and have an exit. Three, try and fail, or four, work for a company. (laughs) >> I think the key thing is it takes patience. If you're going to do it yourself and self fund it, you know, let the business fund itself, not just throw in your own personal money, but actually make the business fund itself. You have to have a lot of patience to stick with it. And I think whether by hook or crook, we picked a space that afforded us some of that patience, right? >> Yeah, you get rewarded for innovation. You get awarded for good service delivery. >> We feel like business is a human endeavor, right? So a good business process and good decisions are going to be problems that our children will face, not just us. >> And they're going to get more exciting for you as processes get automated with machine learning and AI right here on the doorstep, and Devops exploding with IoT coming on full line. It's going to change the game big time. >> Yeah, and I can't remember who said it but someone just yesterday was saying, you know, "It's not so much about automation "as it is about augmentation." And I really think that's true. I think if you automate out all the mundane, what's left is the stuff that's really interesting, right? And that's kind of how we view our job is to automate all the stuff that's getting in the way of highly skilled people doing their job taking care of their customers. >> I always love the story when IBM super computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. You've heard this a million times. Kasparov didn't just say, "All right we're done." He created a competition, and he beat the computer, and now the greatest chess player in the world is a combination of human and machine. So it's that creativity, that common atoria factor that's drives the machine. >> It's actually better than the machine only, right? >> The creativity is going to change the game. Scott Francis, entrepreneur, founder, co-founder and CEO of BP3 in Austin. Thanks for joining us, appreciate it. More live coverage here. Stay with us, theCube is at IBM Interconnect here in Las Vegas. More great interviews after this short break. (upbeat techno music)