>> TheCUBE presents Ignite 22 brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everyone. We're glad you're with us. This is theCUBE live at Palo Alto Ignite 22 at the MGM Grant in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, day one of our coverage. We've had great conversations. The cybersecurity landscape is so interesting Dave, it's such a challenging problem to solve but it's so diverse and dynamic at the same time. >> You know, Lisa theCUBE started in May of 2010 in Boston. We called it the chowder event, chowder and Lobster. It was a EMC world, 2010. BJ Jenkins, who's here, of course, was a longtime friend of theCUBE and made the, made the transition into from, well, it's still data, data to, to cyber. So >> True. And BJ is back with us. BJ Jenkins, president Palo Alto Networks great to have you back on theCUBE. >> It is great to be here in person on theCube >> Isn't it great? >> In Vegas. It's awesome. >> And we can tell by your voice will be, will be gentle. You, you've been in Vegas typical Vegas occupational hazard of losing the voice. >> Yeah. It was one of the benefits of Covid. I didn't lose my voice at home sitting talking to a TV. You lose it when you come to Vegas. >> Exactly. >> But it's a small price to pay. >> So things kick off yesterday with the partner summit. You had a keynote then, you had a customer, a CISO on stage. You had a keynote today, which we didn't get to see. But talk to us a little bit about the lay of the land. What are you hearing from CISOs, from CIOs as we know security is a board level conversation. >> Yeah, I, you know it's been an interesting three or four months here. Let me start with that. I think, cybersecurity in general is still front and center on CIOs and CISO's minds. It has to be, if you saw Wendy's presentation today and the threats out there companies have to have it front and center. I do think it's been interesting though with the macro uncertainty. We've taken to calling this year the revenge of the CFO and you know these deals in cybersecurity are still a top priority but they're getting finance and procurements, scrutiny which I think in this environment is a necessity but it's still a, you know, number one number two imperative no matter who you talked to, in my mind >> It was interesting what Nikesh was saying in the last conference call that, hey we just have to get more approvals. We know this. We're, we're bringing more go-to-market people on board. We, we have, we're filling the pipeline 'cause we know they're going to split up deals big deals go into smaller chunks. So the question I have for you is is how are you able to successfully integrate those people so that you can get ahead of that sort of macro transition? >> Yeah I, you know, I think there's two things I'd say about uncertain macro situations and Dave, you know how old I am. I'm pretty old. I've been through a lot of cycles. And in those cycles I've always found stronger companies with stronger value proposition separate themselves actually in uncertain, economic times. And so I think there's actually an opportunity here. The message tilts a little bit though where it's been about innovation and new threat vectors to one of you have 20, 30, 40 vendors you can consolidate become more effective in your security posture and save money on your TCOs. So one of the things as we bring people on board it's training them on that business value proposition. How do you take a customer who's got 20 or 30 tools take 'em down to 5 or 10 where Palo is more central and strategic and be able to demonstrate that value. So we do that through, we're making a huge investment in our people but macroeconomic times also puts some stronger people back on the market and we're able to incorporate them into the business. >> What are the conditions that are necessary for that consolidation? Like I would imagine if you're, if you're a big customer of a big, you know, competitor of yours that that migration is going to be harder than if you're dealing with lots of little point tools. Do those, do those point tools, are they sort of is it the end of the subscription? Is it just stuff that's off the books now? What's, the condition that is ripe for that kind of consolidation? >> Look, I think the challenge coming into this year was skills. And so customers had all of these point products. It required a lot more human intervention as Nikesh was talking about to integrate them or make them work. And as all of us know finding people with cybersecurity skills over the last 12 months has been incredibly hard. That drove, if you know, if you think about that a CIO and a CISO sitting there going, I have all all this investment in tools. I don't have the people to operate 'em. What do I need to do? What we tried to do is elevate that conversation because in a customer, everybody who's bought one of those, they they bought it to solve a problem. And there's people with affinity for that tool. They're not just going to say I want to get consolidated and give up my tool. They're going to wrap their arms around it. And so what we needed to do and this changed our ecosystem strategy too how we leverage partners. We needed to get into the CIO and CISO and say look at this chaos you have here and the challenges around people that it's, it's presenting you. We can help solve that by, by standardizing, consolidating taking that integration away from you as Nikesh talked about, and making it easier for your your high skill people to work on high skill, you know high challenges in there. >> Let chaos reign, and then reign in the chaos. >> Yes. >> Andy Grove. >> I was looking at some stats that there's 26 million developers but less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. >> Talked about that skills gap and what CISOs and CIOs are facing is do you consider from a value prop perspective Palo Alto Networks to be a, a facilitator of helping organizations deal with that skills gap? >> I think there's a short term and a long term. I think Nikesh today talked about the long term that we'll never win this battle with human beings. We're going to have to win it with automation. That, that's the long term the short term right here and now is that people need people with cybersecurity skills. Now what we're trying to do, you know, is multifaceted. We work with universities to standardize programs to develop skills that people can come into the marketplace with. We run our own programs inside the company. We have a cloud academy program now where we take people high aptitude for sales and technical aptitude and we will put them through a six month boot camp on cloud and they'll come out of that ready to really work with the leading experts in cloud security. The third angle is partners, right, there are partners in the marketplace who want to drive their business into high services areas. They have people, they know how to train. We give them, we partner with them to give them training. Hopefully that helps solve some of the short-term gaps that are out there today. >> So you made the jump from data storage to security and >> Yeah. >> You know, network security, all kinds of security. What was that like? What you must have learned a lot in the last better part of a decade? >> Yeah. >> Take us through that. >> You know, so the first jump was from EMC. I was 15 years there to be CEO of Barracuda. And you know, it was interesting because EMC was, you know large enterprise for the most part. At Barracuda we had, you know 250,000 small and mid-size enterprises. And it was, it's interesting to get into security in small and mid-size businesses because, you know Wendy today was talking about nation states. For small and mid-size business, it's common thievery right? It's ransomware, it's, and, those customers don't have, you know, the human and financial resources to keep up with the threat factor. So, you know, Nikesh talked about how it's taken 'em four and a half years to get into cybersecurity. I remember my first week at Barracuda, I was talking with a customer who had, you know, breached data shut down. There wasn't much bitcoin back then so it was just a pure ransom. And I'm like, wow, this is, you know, incredible industry. So it's been a good, you know, transition for me. I still think data is at the heart of all of this. Right? And I have always believed there's a strong connection between the things I learned growing up at EMC and what I put into practice today at Palo Alto Networks. >> And how about a culture because I, you know I know have observed the EMC culture >> Yeah. >> And you were there in really the heyday. >> Yeah. >> Right? Which was an awesome place. And it seems like Palo Alto obviously, different times but you know, similar like laser focus on solving problems, you know, obviously great, you know value sellers, you know, you guys aren't the commodity >> Yeah. For Product. But there seemed to be some similarities from afar. I don't know Palo Alto as well as I know EMC. >> I think there's a lot. When I joined EMC, it was about, it was 2 billion in in revenue and I think when I left it was over 20, 20, 21. And, you know, we're at, you know hopefully 5, 5 5 in revenue. I feel like it's this very similar, there's a sense of urgency, there's an incredible focus on the customer. you know, Near and Moche are definitely different individuals but the both same kind of disruptive, Israeli force out there driving the business. There are a lot of similarities. I, you know, the passion, I feel privileged as a, you know go to market person that I have this incredible portfolio to go, you know, work with customers on. It's a lucky position to be in, but very I feel like it is a movie I've seen before. >> Yeah. And but, and the course, the challenges from the, the target that you're disrupting is different. It was, you know, EMC had a lot of big, you know IBM obviously was, you know, bigger target whereas you got thousands of, you know, smaller companies. >> Yes. >> And, and so that's a different dynamic but that's why the consolidation play is so important. >> Look at, that's why I joined Palo Alto Networks when I was at Barracuda for nine years. It just fascinated me, that there was 3000 plus players in security and why didn't security evolve like the storage market did or the server market or network where working >> Yeah, right. >> You know, two or three big gorillas came to, to dominate those markets. And it's, I think it's what Nikesh talked about today. There was a new problem in best of breed. It was always best of breed. You can never in security go in and, you know, say, Hey it's good I saved us some money but I got the third best product in the marketplace. And there was that kind of gap between products. I, believe in why I joined here I think this is my last gig is we have a chance to change that. And this is the first company as I look from the outside in that had best of breed as, you know Nikesh said 13 categories. >> Yeah. >> And you know, we're in the leaders quadrant and it's a conversation I have with customers. You don't have to sacrifice best of breed but get the benefits of a platform. And I, think that resonates today. I think we have a chance to change the industry from that viewpoint. >> Give us a little view of the voice of the customer. You had, was it Sabre? >> Yeah. >> That was on >> Scott Moser, The CISO from Sabre. >> Give us a view, what are you hearing from the voice of the customer? Obviously they're quite a successful customer but challenges, concerns, the partnership. >> Yeah. Look, I think security is similar to industries where we come up with magic marketing phrases and, you know, things to you know, make you want to procure our solutions. You know, zero trust is one. And you know, you'll talk to customers and they're like, okay, yes. And you know, the government, right? Joe, Joe Biden's putting out zero trust executive orders. And the, the problem is if you talk to customers, it's a journey. They have legacy infrastructure they have business drivers that you know they just don't deal with us. They've got to deal with the business side who's trying to make the money that keeps the, the company going. it's really helped them draw a map from where they're at today to zero trust or to a better security architecture. Or, you know, they're moving their apps into the cloud. How am I going to migrate? Right? Again, that discussion three years ago was around lift and shift, right? Today it's about, well, no I need cloud native developed apps to service the business the way I want to, I want to service it. How do I, so I, I think there's this element of a trusted partner and relationship. And again, I think this is why you can't have 40 or 50 of those. You got to start narrowing it down if you want to be able to meet and beat the threats that are out there for you. So I, you know, the customers, I see a lot of 'em. It's, here's where I'm at help me get here to a better position. And they know it's, you know Scott said in our keynote today, you don't just, you know have layer three firewall policies and decide, okay tomorrow I'm going to go to layer seven. That, that's not how it works. Right? There's, and, and by the way these things are a mission critical type areas. So there's got to be a game plan that you help customers go through to get there. >> Definitely. Last question, my last question for you is, is security being a board level conversation I was reading some stats from a survey I think it was the what's new in Cypress survey that that Palo Alto released today that showed that while significant numbers of organizations think they've got a cyber resiliency playbook, there's a lot of disconnect or lack of alignment at the boardroom. Are you in those conversations? How can you help facilitate that alignment between the executive team and the board when it comes to security being so foundational to any business? >> Yeah, it's, I've been on three, four public company boards. I'm on, I'm on two today. I would say four years ago, this was a almost a taboo topic. It was a, put your head in the sand and pray to God nothing happened. And you know, the world has changed significantly. And because of the number of breaches the impact it's had on brand, boards have to think about this in duty of care and their fiduciary duty. Okay. So then you start with a board that may not have the technical skills. The first problem the security industry had is how do I explain your risk profile in a way you can understand it. I'm, I'm on the board of Generac that makes home generators. It's a manufacturing, you know, company but they put Wifi modules in their boxes so that the dealers could help do the maintenance on 'em. And all of a sudden these things were getting attacked. Right? And they're being used for bot attacks. >> Yeah. >> Everybody on their board had a manufacturing background. >> Ah. >> So how do you help that board understand the risk they have that's what's changed over the last four years. It's a constant discussion. It's one I have with CISOs where they're like help us put it in layman's terms so they understand they know what we're doing and they feel confident but at the same time understand the marketplace better. And that's a journey for us. >> That Generac example is a great one because, you know, think about IOT Technologies. They've historically been air gaped >> Yes. >> By design. And all of a sudden the business comes in and says, "Hey we can put wifi in there", you know >> Connect it to a home Wifi system that >> Make our lives so much easier. Next thing you know, it's being used to attack. >> Yeah. >> So that's why, as you go around the world are you discerning, I know you were just in Japan are you discerning significant differences in sort of attitudes toward, towards cyber? Whether it's public policy, you know things like regulation where you, they don't want you sharing data, but as as a cyber company, you want to share that data with you know, public and private? >> Look it, I, I think around the world we see incredible government activity first of all. And I think given the position we're in we get to have some unique conversations there. I would say worldwide security is an imperative. I, no matter where I go, you know it's in front of everybody's mind. The, on the, the governance side, it's really what do we need to adapt to make sure we meet local regulations. And I, and I would just tell you Dave there's ways when you do that, and we talk with governments that because of how they want to do it reduce our ability to give them full insight into all the threats and how we can help them. And I do think over time governments understand that we can anonymize the data. There's, but that, that's a work in process. Definitely there is a balance. We need to have privacy, we need to have, you know personal security for people. But there's ways to collect that data in an anonymous way and give better security insight back into the architectures that are out there. >> All right. A little shift the gears here. A little sports question. We've had some great Boston's sports guests on theCUBE right? I mean, Randy Seidel, we were talking about him. Peter McKay, Snyk, I guess he's a competitor now but you know, there's no question got >> He got a little funding today. I saw that. >> Down round. But they still got a lot of money. Not of a down round, but they were, but yeah, but actually, you know, he was on several years ago and it was around the time they were talking about trading Brady. He said Never trade Brady. And he got that right. We, I think we can agree Brady's the goat. >> Yes. >> The big question I have for you is, Belichick. Do you ever question Has your belief in him as the greatest coach of all time wavered, you know, now that- No. Okay. >> Never. >> Weigh in on that. >> Never, he says >> Still the Goat. >> I'll give you my best. You know, never In Bill we trust. >> Okay. Still. >> All right >> I, you know, the NFL is a unique property that's designed for parody and is designed, I mean actively designed to not let Mr. Craft and Bill Belichick do what they do every year. I feel privileged as a Boston sports fan that in our worst years we're in the seventh playoff spot. And I have a lot of family in Chicago who would kill for that position, by the way. And you know, they're in perpetual rebuilding. And so look, and I think he, you know the way he's been able to manage the cap and the skill levels, I think we have a top five defense. There's different ways to win titles. And if I, you know, remember in Brady's last title with Boston, the defense won us that Super Bowl. >> Well thanks for weighing in on that because there's a lot of crazy talk going on. Like, 'Hey, if he doesn't beat Arizona, he's got to go.' I'm like, what? So, okay, I'm sometimes it takes a good good loyal fan who's maybe, you know, has >> The good news in Boston is we're emotional fans too so I understand you got to keep the long term long term in mind. And we're, we're in a privileged position in Boston. We've got Celtics, we've got Bruins we've got the Patriots right on the edge of the playoffs and we need the Red Sox to get to work. >> Yeah, no, you know they were last, last year so maybe they're going to win it all like they usually do. So >> Fingers crossed. >> Crazy worst to first. >> Exactly. Well you said, in Bill we trust it sounds like from our conversation in BJ we trust from the customers, the partners. >> I hope so. >> Thank you so much BJ, for coming back on theCUBE giving us the lay of the land, what's new, the voice of the customer and how Palo Alto was really differentiated in the market. We always appreciate your, coming on the show you >> Honor and privilege seeing you here. Thanks. >> You may be thinking that you were watching ESPN just now but you know, we call ourselves the ESPN at Tech News. This is Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante and our guest. You're watching theCUBE, the Leader and live emerging in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back the cube's coverage of UI path forward. Five. And we're live. Dave Velante with Dave Nicholson. AJ Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California dmv. Welcome Jay. Good to see you. >>Thank you. >>Good to see you. Wow, you, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to going to conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Sluman put up a slide. People ho hanging out, waiting outside the California dmv. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're gonna get it to your taste >>Of it. Yeah, very happy >>Customer, obviously transform the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that that automation has played a role in that. But first of all, tell us about yourself, your role and what's going on at the dmv. >>Sure. Myself, a j Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the dmv. Somewhat of i, one would say a made up title, but Governor's office asked me, Okay, we need help. And that's what >>Your title though? >>Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well we are doing business and technology transformation. So that's, that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the dmv. Before that I was in private sector for 25 years, decided first time to give back cuz I was mostly doing public sector consulting. So here I am. >>Okay. So you knew the industry and that's cool that you wanted to give back because I mean obviously you just, in talking off camera, you're smart, you're very cogent and you know, a lot of times people in the private sector, they don't want to go work in the, in the public sector unless they're, unless they're power crazy, you know? Anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great. I mean, take >>It from here. Yeah. Well, am I gonna be, I'm, because I'm from California, I was just, I was just, you know, we >>Got a dual case study >>Eloquently about, about the, the, the change that's happened just in, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about, about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office. Just as an >>Example. Yeah, what's the story? >>Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about dmv, you as a customer. It means a lot because we have been very deliberately working towards solving all customer po pain points, whether it's in person experiences, online call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey, myself and director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time with the goal of making Department of Mo no motor vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industries. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but we are working towards it. So for, for our in person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we wanna make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place. >>All that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the weight line. So that's number one. Creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you are not as a DMV customer. During Covid, the goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or a email or a text or a, or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? >>So we were able to accomplish that while Covid was going on, while the riots were going on. Those of your, you know about that, we, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? You, we could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than less than four. >>And the pandemic was an accelerant to this was, was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it? Or were, had you already started on the >>Well, we were >>Ready. I mean you, but you came on right? Just about just before the pandemic. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start at, I was already working with u UI paths and we had come up with design patterns that we gonna take this journey for all DMV channels with using UiPath. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking, I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. >>So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, >>It's a, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots to the service fulfillment. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my, my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel. If you call in the DMV number in California, you'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it. But also when you are saying, Yep, I wanna do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. How >>Many DMVs are in the state? >>Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. >>Okay. So and then you're, you're creating a digital overlay that's right >>To all of >>That, right? >>Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing automation, can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing, but then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians or technicians virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician. So that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. >>When was the last time you walked into a bank? >>Oh man. >>I mean, is that where we're going here where you just don't have to >>Go into the branch and that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to have to, unless you really want to, We actually set up these personas. One of them was high touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time. I wanna like quickly finish this work off hours 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have weekends, HR complaint, they don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me, 24 >>By seven. And what's the scope of your, like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense? >>Sure. So right now we are sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point, well, we have saved 8.8 million just using the bots overall savings. If you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million so far in that particular channel bots. I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And >>How many bots are we talking about? >>So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 >>Bots? >>Well, no, there's more bots I wanna say. So we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Yeah. >>Wow. Okay. So you, you asked the question about, you know, when was the last time someone was in a bank? The last time I was in a bank it was to deposit, you know, more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car from me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off a loan with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier and it shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. Yes. Right. But, but I, I have a, I have a question for you on, on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of give it us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? Can >>You, so well you as a Californian and you as a taxpayer, you as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money Okay. That the DMV spending on providing services, Right. Both are benefits to you. Sure. So bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You gotta fill this form out, you gotta fill this other form out and you gotta go to dmv. Oh by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We are calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data, right? There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this. Right. Even dates could be wrong, names could be wrong fields, maybe incomplete and such. >>So we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels, which are accelerated by bot. So we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data, bots do the validation, they also verify the information, give you real time feedback or near real time feedback that hey, this is what you need to change. This is when you need to verify. So all the business rules are in the bot. And then once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems, which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So there is a third cohort of Californians, which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button, which will have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now you're saving time, you're also saving the effort and the attention loss of serving the best. >>Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So I'm thinking about real id, I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was gonna be months to get to the dmv. So I ended up going through a aaa, had to get all these documents, I uploaded all the documents. Of course when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully I had backup copies. But it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with real ID and what role bots play? >>Yeah, sure. So with real id, what we are doing today and what I, what we'll be doing in the future, so I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are aligning most of the work to be done upfront by the customer. Because real ID is a complex transaction. You've gotta have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information, it needs to match our records. And then you show up to the field office. And by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers. And that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile our customer travels to the DMV office, which averages to about 13 miles. In my calculation for average customer, it's a dollar spent in carbon footprint in the time lost in the technician time trying to triage out some other things. So you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. >>Yeah. An amazing frustration, Yes. >>That has to come back and, and our customer satisfaction scores, which we really like to track, goes down right away. So in general, for real, id, what we have been, what we have done is created bunch of self-service channels, which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security verify, you know, what's your passport about? We look at your picture and we verify that yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wives. Right? Or not a picture of a dog. And it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So we wanna make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our, for our employees, and we have zero returns required when employees, where customer shows up, which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process. And we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency, as you can imagine. And bots are at the tail end of it, committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. >>That's a great story. I mean, really congratulations and, and I guess I'll leave it. Last question is, where do you want to take this? What's the, what's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is it, is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? >>Sure. So there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in, which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire dmv, bring them from 90 60, bringing us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field off his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right? For our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022 in the future. They're continue gonna continue to service. I think it's one thing that was talked about by the previous sessions today that we, they, they're looking at empowering the employees to do their own work back office work also in a full automation way and self-power them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're gonna look for. But also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market market plan using the bot. >>Outstanding. Well thanks so much for sharing your, your story and, and thanks for helping Dave. >>Real life testimony. I never, never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California dmv. Here I am and it's legit. Yeah, >>Well done. Can I, can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? >>Good to, well actually we have, we have been working with state of New York, Massachusetts, Nevara, Arizona. So goal is to share but also learn from >>That. Help us out, help us out. >>But nice to be here, >>Great >>To have you and looking for feedback next time you was at dmv. >>All right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Get that, fill out that NPS score. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Valante for Dave Nicholson. Forward five UI customer conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to the CUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 22, live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Nicholson is back with me. Welcome back to the set. We're pleased to welcome William Bell as our next guest. The executive vice president of products at Phoenix NAP. William, welcome to the CUBE. Welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you, thank you so much. Happy to be here. >> Talk to us a little, and the audience a little bit about Phoenix NAP. What is it that you guys do? Your history, mission, value prop, all that good stuff. >> Absolutely, yeah. So we're global infrastructures as a service company, foundationally, we are trying to build pure play infrastructure as a service, so that customers that want to adopt cloud infrastructure but maybe don't want to adopt platform as a service and really just, you know, program themselves to a specific API can have that cloud adoption without that vendor lock in of a specific platform service. And we're doing this in 17 regions around the globe today. Yeah, so it's just flexible, easy. That's where we're at. >> I like flexible and easy. >> Flexible and easy. >> You guys started back in Phoenix. Hence the name. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of the company in the last decade. >> Yeah, 100%. We built a data center in Phoenix expecting that we could build the centralized network access point of Phoenix, Arizona. And I am super proud to say that we've done that. 41 carriers, all three hyperscalers in the building today, getting ready to expand. However, that's not the whole story, right. And what a lot of people don't know is we founded an infrastructure as a service company, it's called Secured Servers no longer exists, but we founded that company the same time and we built it up kind of sidecar to Phoenix NAP and then we merged all of those together to form this kind of global infrastructure platform that customers can consume. >> Talk to us about the relationship with VMware. Obviously, here we are at VMware Explore. There's about seven... We're hearing 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are ready to be back to hear from VMware and it's partner ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that we have this huge history with VMware that maybe a lot of people don't know. We were one of the first six, the SPPs in 2011 at the end of the original kind of data center, whatever, vCloud data center infrastructure thing that they did. And so early on, there was only 10 of us, 11 of us. And most of those names don't exist anymore. We're talking, Terramark, Blue Lock, some of these guys. Good companies, but they've been bought or whatnot. And here's plucky Phoenix NAP, still, you know, offering great VMware cloud services for customers around the globe. >> What are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the market today where customers are in this multi-cloud world? You know this... I love the theme of this event. The center of the multi-cloud universe. Customers are in that by default. How do you help them navigate that and really unlock the value of it? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's about helping customers understand what applications belong where. We're very, very big believers both in the right home. But if you drill down on that right home for right applicator or right application, right home, it's more about the infrastructure choices that you're making for that application leads to just super exciting optimizations, right. If you, as an example, have a large media streaming business and you park it in a public called hyperscaler and you just eat those egress fees, like it's a big deal. Right? And there are other ways to do that, right. If you need a... If your application needs to scale from zero cores to 15,000 cores for an hour, you know, there are hyperscalers for that, right. And people need to learn how to make that choice. Right app, right home, right infrastructure. And that's kind of what we help them do. >> It's interesting that you mentioned the concept of being a pure play in infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah. >> At some point in the past, people would have argued that infrastructure as a service only exists because SaaS isn't good enough yet. In other words, if there's a good enough SaaS application then you don't want IaaS because who wants to mess around with IaaS, infrastructures as a service. Do you have customers who look at what they're developing as so much a core of what their value proposition is that they want to own it? I mean, is that a driving factor? >> I would challenge to say that we're seeing almost every enterprise become a SaaS company. And when that transition happens, SaaS companies actually care a lot about the cost basis, efficiency, uptime of their application. And ultimately, while they don't want to be in the data center business anymore, it doesn't mean that they want to pay someone else to do things that they feel wholly competent in doing. And we're seeing this exciting transition of open source technologies, open source platforms becoming good enough that they don't actually have to manage a lot of things. They can do it in software and the hardware's kind of abstracted. But that actually, I would say is a boon for infrastructure as a service, as an independent thing. It's been minimized over the years, right. People talk about hyperscalers as being cloud infrastructure companies and they're not. They're cloud platform companies, right. And the infrastructure is high quality. It is easy to access and scale, right, but it's ultimately, if you're just using one of those hyperscalers for that infrastructure, building VMs and doing a bunch of things yourself, you're not getting the value out of that hyperscaler. And ultimately that infrastructure's very expensive if you look at it that way. >> So it's interesting because if you look at what infrastructure consists of, which is hardware and software-- >> Yeah. >> People who said, eh, IaaS as is just a bridge to a bright SaaS future, people also will make the argument that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. I imagine that you are doing a lot of optimization with both hardware and stuff like the VMware cloud stack that you deploy as a VCPP partner. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So to talk about that. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, you agree. I mean, if I were to just pose a question to you, does hardware still matter? Does infrastructure still matter? >> Way more than people think. >> Well, there you go. So what are you doing in that arena, specifically with VCPP? >> Yeah, absolutely. And so I think a good example of that, right, so last VMworld in person, 2019, we showcased a piece of technology that we had been working with Intel on for about two years at the time which was Intel persistent memory DC, persistent memory. Right? And we launched the first VMware cloud offering to have Intel DC persistent memory onboard. So that customers with the VMs that needed that technology could leverage it with the integrations in vSphere 6.7 and ultimately in seven more, right. Now I do think that was maybe a swing and a miss technology potentially but we're going to see it come back. And that specialized infrastructure deployment is a big part of our business, right. Helping people identify, you know, this application, if you'd have this accelerator, this piece of infrastructure, this quality of network can be better, faster, cheaper, right. That kind of mentality of optimization matters a lot. And VMware plays a critical role in that because it still gives the customer the operational excellence that they need without having to do everything themselves, right. And our customers rely on that a lot from VMware to get that whole story, operationally efficient, easy to manage, automated. All those things make a lot of difference to our VMware customers. >> Speaking of customers, what are you hearing, if anything, from customers, VMware customers that are your joint customers about the Broadcom acquisition? Are they excited about it? Are they concerned about it? And how do you talk about that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that everyone that's in the infrastructure business is doing business with Broadcom, all right. And we've had so many businesses that we've been engaged with that have ultimately been a acquiree. I can say that this one feels different only in the size of the acquisition. VMware carries so much weight. VMware's brand exceeds Broadcom's brand, in my opinion. And I think ultimately, I don't know anything that's not public, right-- >> Well, they rebranded. By the way, on the point of brand, they rebranded their software business, VMware. >> Yeah. I mean, that's what I was going to say. That was the word on the street. I don't know if there's beneficial. Is that a-- >> Well, that's been-- >> But that's the word, right? >> That's what they've said. Well, but when a Avago acquired Broadcom they said, "we'll call ourselves Broadcom." >> Absolutely. Why wouldn't you? >> So yeah. So I imagine that what's been reported is likely-- >> Likely. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think that makes a ton of sense and we can start to see even more great intellectual property in software. That's where, you know, all of these businesses, CA, Symantec, VMware and all of the acquisitions that VMware has made, it's a great software intellectual property platform and they're going to be able to get so much more value out of the leadership team that VMware has here, is going to make a world of difference to the Broadcom software team. Yeah, so I'm very excited, you know. >> It's a lot of announcements this morning, a lot of technical product announcements. What did you hear in that excites you about the evolution of VMware as well as the partnership and the value in it for your customers? >> You know, one of our fastest growing parts of our business is this metal as a service infrastructure business and doing very, very... Using very specific technologies to do very interesting things, makes a big difference in our world and for our customers. So anything that's like smartNICs, disaggregated hypervisor, accelerators as a first class citizen in VMware, all that stuff makes the Phoenix NAP story better. So I'm super excited about that, right. Yeah. >> Well, it's interesting because VCPP is not a term that people who are not insiders know of. What they know is that there are services available in hyperscale cloud providers where you can deploy VMware. Well, you know, VMware cloud stack. Well, you can deploy those VMware cloud stacks with you. >> Absolutely. >> In exactly the same manner. However, to your point, all of this talk about disaggregation of CPU, GPU, DPU, I would argue with it, you're in a better position to deploy that in an agile way than a hyperscale cloud provider would be and foremost, I'm not trying to-- >> No, yeah. >> I'm not angling for a job in your PR department. >> Come on in. >> But the idea that when you start talking about something like metal as a service, as an adjunct or adjacent to a standard deployment of a VMware cloud, it makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah. >> Because there are people who can't do everything within the confines of what the STDC-- >> Yes. >> Consists of. >> Absolutely. >> So, I mean... Am I on the right track? >> No, you are 100% hitting it. I think that that point you made about agility to deliver new technology, right, is a key moment in our kind of delivery every single year, right. As a new chip comes out, Intel chip or Accelerator or something like that, we are likely going to be first to market by six months potentially and possibly ever. Persistent memory never launched in public cloud in any capacity but we have customers running on it today that is providing extreme value for their business, right. When, you know, the discreet GPUs coming from the just announced Flex series GPU from Intel, you're likely not going to see them in public cloud hyperscalers quickly, right. Over time, absolutely. We'll have them day one. Isolate came out, you could get it in our metal as a service platform the morning it launched on demand, right. Those types of agility points, they're not... Because they're hyperscale by nature. If they can't hyperscale it, they're not doing it, right. And I think that that is a very key point. Now, as it comes in towards VMware, we're driving this intersection of building that VCF or VMware cloud foundation which is going to be a key point of the VMware ecosystem. As you see this transition to core based licensing and some of the other things that have been talked about, VMware cloud foundation is going to be the stack that they expect their customers to adopt and deliver. And the fact that we can automate that, deliver it instantaneously in a couple of hours to hardware that you don't need to own, into networks you don't need to manage, but yet you are still in charge, keys to the kingdom, ready to go, just like you're doing it in your own data center, that's the message that we're driving for. >> Can you share a customer example that you think really just shines a big flashlight on the value that you guys are delivering? >> We definitely, you know, we had the pleasure of working with Make-A-Wish foundation for the last seven years. And ultimately, you know, we feel very compelled that every time we help them do something unique, different or what not, save money, that money's going into helping some child that's in need, right. And so we've done so many things together. VMware has stepped up as the plate over the years, done so many things with them. We've sponsored stuff. We've done grants, we've done all kinds of things. The other thing I would say is we are helping the City of Hope and Translational Genomics Research Institute on sequencing single cell RNA so that they can fight COVID, so that they can build cure, well, not cures but build therapies for colon cancer and things like that. And so I think that, you know, this is a driving light for us internally is helping people through efficiency and change. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for more stories like that. We're looking... If you have a need, we're looking for people to come to us and say, "this is my problem. This is what this looks like. Let us see if we can find a solution that's a little bit different, a little bit out of the box and doesn't have to change your business dramatically." Yeah. >> And who are you talking to within customers? Is this a C level conversation? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say that we would love it to be... I think most companies would love to have that, you know, CFO conversation with every single customer. I would say VPs of engineering, increasingly, especially as we become more API centric, those guys are driving a lot of those purchasing decisions. Five years ago, I would've said director of IT, like director of IT. Now today, it's like VP of engineering, usually software oriented folks looking to deliver some type of application on top of a piece of hardware or in a cloud, right. And those guys are, you know, I guess, that's even another point, VMware's doing so much work on the API side that they don't get any credit for. Terraform, Ansible, all these integrations, VMware doing so much in this area and they just don't get any credit for it ever, right. It's just like, VMware's the dinosaur and they're just not, right. But that's the thing that people think of today because of the hype of the hyperscaler. I think that's... Yeah. >> When you're in customer conversations, maybe with prospects, are you seeing more customers that have gone all in on a hyperscaler and are having issues and coming to you guys saying help, this is getting way too expensive? >> Yeah, I think it's the unexpected growth problem or even the expected growth problem where they just thought it would be okay, but they've suffered some type of competitive pressure that they've had to optimize for and they just didn't really expect it. And so, I think that increasingly we are finding organizations that quickly adopted public cloud. If they did a full digital transformation of their business and then transformation of their applications, a lot of them now feel very locked in because every application is just reliant on x hyperscaler forever, or they didn't transform anything and they just migrated and parked it. And the bills that are coming in are just like, whoa like, how is that possible? We are typically never recommending get out of the public cloud. We are just... It's not... If I say the right home for the right application, it's by default saying that there are right applications for hyperscalers. Parking your VMware environment that you just migrated to a hyperscaler, not the right application. You know, I would love you to be with me but if you want to do that, at least go to VMC on AWS or go to OCVS or GCVE or any of those. If that's going to go with a Google or an Amazon and that's just the mandate and you're going to move your applications, don't just move them into native. Move them into a VMware solution and then if you still want to make that journey, that full transformation, go ahead and make it. I would still argue that that's not the most efficient way but, you know, if you're going to do anything, don't just dump it all into cloud, the native hyperscaler stuff. >> Good advice. >> So what do typical implementations look like with you guys when you're moving on premises environments into going back to the VCPP, STDC model? >> Absolutely. Do you have people moving and then transforming and re-platforming? What does that look like? What's the typical-- >> Yeah. I mean, I do not believe that anybody has fully made up their mind if exactly where they want to be. I'm only going to be in this cloud. It's an in the close story, right. And so even when we get customers, you know, we firmly believe that the right place to just pick up and migrate is to a VCPP cloud. Better cost effectiveness, typically better technology, you know service, right. Better service, right. We've been part of VMware for 12 years. We love the technology behind VMC's, now AWS is fantastic, but it's still just infrastructure without any help at all right, right. They're going to be there to support their technology but they're not going to help you with the other stuff. We can do some of those things. And if it's not us, it's another VCPP provider that has that expertise that you might need. So yes, we help you quickly, easily migrate everything to a VMware cloud. And then you have a decision point to make. You're happy where you are, you are leveraging public cloud for a certain applications. You're leveraging VMware cloud offerings for the standard applications that you've been running for years. Do you transform them? Do you keep them? What do you do? All those decisions can be made later. But I stress that repurchasing all your hardware again, staying inside your colo and doing everything yourself, it is for me, it's like a company telling me they're going to build a data center for themselves, single tenant data center. Like no one's doing that, right. But there are more options out there than just I'm going to go to Azure, right. Think about it. Take the time, assess the landscape. And VMware cloud providers as a whole, all 17,000 of us or whatever across the globe, people don't know that group of individuals of the companies is the third or fourth potentially largest cloud in the world. Right? That's the power of the VMware cloud provider ecosystem. >> Last question for you as we wrap up here. Where can the audience go to learn more about Phoenix NAP and really start test driving with you guys? >> Absolutely. Well, if you come to phoenixnap.com, I guarantee you that we will re-target you and you can click on a banner later if you don't want to stay there. (Lisa laughs) But yeah, phoenixnap.com has all the information that you need. We also put out tons of helpful content. So if you're looking for anything technology oriented and you're just, "I want to upgrade to Ubuntu," you're likely going to end up on a phoenixnap.com website looking for that. And then you can find out more about what we do. >> Awesome, phoenixnap.com. William, thank you very much for joining Dave and me, talking about what you guys are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve as the world continues to evolve at a very dynamic pace. We appreciate your insights. >> Absolutely, thank you so much >> For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the CUBE live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Dave and I will be joined by a guest consultant for our keynote wrap at the end of the day in just a few minutes. So stick around. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Man: We're good. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS Summit NYC. We're in New York City, been here all day. Lisa Martin, John Furrier, talking with AWS partners ecosystem folks, customers, AWS folks, you name it. Next up, one of our alumni, rejoins us. Please welcome Anshu Sharma the co-founder and CEO of Skyflow. Anshu great to have you back on theCube. >> Likewise, I'm excited to be back. >> So I love how you guys founded this company. Your inspiration was the zero trust data privacy vault pioneered by two of our favorites, Apple and Netflix. You started with a simple question. What if privacy had an API? So you built a data privacy vault delivered as an API. Talk to us, and it's only in the last three and a half years. Talk to us about a data privacy vault and what's so unique about it. >> Sure. I think if you think about all the key challenges we are seeing in our personal lives when we are dealing with technology companies a lot of anxiety is around what happens to my data, right? If you want to go to a pharmacy they want to know not just your health ID number but they want to know your social security number your credit card number, your phone number and all of that information is actually useful because they need to be able to engage with you. And it's true for hospitals, health systems. It's true for your bank. It's true for pretty much anybody you do business with even an event like this. But then question that keeps coming up is where does this data go? And how is it protected? And the state of the art here has always been to keep kind of, keep it protected when it's in storage but almost all the breaches, all the hacks happen not because you've steal somebody's disc, but because someone enters through an API or a portal. So the question we asked was we've been building different shapes of containers for different types of data. You don't store your logs in a data warehouse. You don't store your analytical data in a regular RDBMS. Similarly, you don't store your passwords and usernames you store them in identity systems. So if PI is so special why isn't it a container that's used for storing PII? So that's how the idea of Pii.World came up. >> So you guys just got a recent funding, a series B financing which means for the folks out there that don't know the inside baseball, must people do, means you're doing well. It's hard to get that round of funding means you're up and growing to the right. What's the differentiator? Why are you guys so successful? Why the investment growth, what's the momentum driver? >> So I think in some ways we took one of the most complex problems, data privacy, like half the people can't even describe like, does data privacy mean like I have to be GDPR compliant or does it actually mean I'm protecting the data? So you have multiple stakeholders in any company. If you're a pharma company, you may have a chief privacy officer, a data officer, this officer, that officer, and all of these people were talking and the answer was buy more tools. So if you look around behind our back, there's probably dozens of companies out there. One protecting data in an API call another protecting data in a database, another one data warehouse. But as a CEO, CTO, I want to know what happens to my social security number from a customer end to end. So we said, if you can radically simplify the whole thing and the key insight was you can simplify it by actually isolating and protecting this data. And this architecture evolved on its own at companies like Apple and other places, but it takes dozens of engineers for those companies to build it out. So we like, well, the pattern will makes sense. It logically kind is just common sense. So instead of selling dozens of tools, we can just give you a very simple product, which is like one API call, you know, protect this data... >> So like Stripe is for a plugin for a financial transaction you plug it into the app, similar dynamic here, right? >> Exactly. So it's Stripe for payments, Twilio for Telephony. We have API for everything, but if you have social security numbers or pan numbers you still are like relying on DIY. So I think what differentiated us and attracted the investors was, if this works, >> It's huge. every company needs it. >> Well, that's the integration has become the key thing. I got to ask you because you mentioned GDPR and all the complexities around the laws and the different regulations. That could be a real blocker in a wet blanket for innovation. >> Anshu: Yes. >> And with the market we're seeing here at, at your Summit New York, small event. 10,000 people, more people here than were at Snowflake Summit as an example. And they're the hottest company in data. So this small little New York event is proven that that world is growing. So why should this wet blanket, these rules slow it down? How do you balance it? 'Cause that's a concern. If you checking all the boxes you're never actually building anything. >> So, you know, we just ran into a couple of customers who still are struggling with moving from the data center to AWS Cloud. Now the fact that here means they want to but something is holding them back. I also met the AI team of Amazon. They're doing some amazing work and they're like, the biggest hindrance for them is making customers feel safe when they do the machine learning. Because now you're opening up the data sets to more people. And in all of those cases your innovation basically stops because CSO is like, look you can't put PII in the cloud unprotected. And with the vault architecture we call it privacy by architecture. So there's a term called privacy by design. I'm like what the, is privacy by design, right? >> John: It's an architecture. (John laughing) >> But if you are an architecture and a developer like me I was like, I know what architecture is. I don't know what privacy by design is. >> So you guys are basically have that architecture by design which means foundational based services. So you're providing that as a service. So other people don't have to build the complex. >> Anshu: Exactly. >> You know that you will be Apple's backend team to build that privacy with you you get all that benefit. >> Exactly. And traditionally, people have had to make compromises. If you encrypt the data and secure it, then you can't use it. Using a proprietary polymorphic encryption technology you can actually have your cake and eat it to. So what that means for customers is, if you want to protect data in Snowflake or REDshare, use Skyflow with it. We have integrations to databases, to data lakes, all the common workflow tools. >> Can you give us a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Skyflow is delivering? >> Well, I'll give you two examples. One in the FinTech space, one in the health space. So in the FinTech space this is a company called Nomi Health. They're a large payments processor for the health insurance market. And funnily enough, their CTO actually came from Goldman Sachs. He actually built apple card. (John laughing) Right? That if we all have in our phones. And he saw our product and he's like, for my new company, I'm going to just use you guys because I don't want to go hire 20 engineers. So for them, we had a HIPAA compliant environment a PCI compliant environment, SOC 2 compliant environment. And he can sleep better at night because he doesn't have to worry what is my engineer in Poland or Ukraine doing right now? I have a vault. I have rules set up. I can audit it. Everything is logged. Similarly for Science 37, they run clinical trials globally. They wanted to solve data residency. So for them the problem was, how do I run one common global instance? When the rules say you have to break everything up and that's very expensive. >> And so I love this. I'm a customer. For them a customer. I love it. You had me at hello, API integration. I love it. How much does it cost? What's it going to cost me? How do I need to think about my operationalizing? 'Cause I know with an API, I can do that. Am I paying by the usage, by the drink? How do I figure out? >> So we have programs for startups where it's really really inexpensive. We get them credits. And then for enterprises, we basically have a platform fee. And then based on the amount of data PII, we charge them. We don't nickel and dime the customers. We don't like the usage based model because, you don't know how many times you're going to hit an API. So we usually just based on the number of customer records that you have and you can hit them as many time as you want. There's no API limits. >> So unlimited record based. >> Exactly. that's your variable. >> Exactly. We think about you buying odd zero, for example, for authentication you pay them by the number of active users you have. So something similar. >> So you run on AWS, but you just announced a couple of new GTM partners, MuleSoft and plan. Can you talk to us about, start with MuleSoft? What are you doing and why? And the same with VLA? >> Sure. I mean, MuleSoft was very interesting customers who were adopting our products at, you know, we are buying this product for our new applications but what about our legacy code? We can't go in there and add APIs there. So the simplest way to do integration in the legacy world is to use an integration broker. So that's where MuleSoft integration came out and we announced that. It's a logical place for you to swap out real social security numbers with, you know, fake ones. And then we also announced a partnership with SnowFlake, same thing. I think every workload as it's moving to the cloud needs some kind of data protection with it. So I think going forward we are going to be announcing even more partnerships. So you can imagine all the places you're storing PII today whether it's in a call center solution or analytics solution, there's a PII story there. >> Talk about the integration aspect because I love the momentum. I get everything makes secure the customers all these environments, integrations are super important to plug into. And then how do I essentially operate you on my side? Do I import the records? How do you connect to my environment in my databases? >> So it's really, really easy when you encrypt the data and use Skyflow wall, we create what is called a format preserving token, which is essentially replacing a social security number with something that looks like an SSN but it's not. So that there's no schema changes involved. You just have to do that one time swap over and then in terms of integrations, most of these integrations are prebuilt. So Snowflake integration is prebuilt. MuleSoft integration is prebuilt. We're going to announce some new ones. So the goal is for off the table in platforms like Snowflake and MuleSoft, we prebuilt all the integrations. You can build your own. It takes about like a day. And then in terms of data import basically it's the same standard process that you would use with any other data store. >> Got to ask you about data breaches. Obviously the numbers in 2021 were huge. We're seeing so much change in the cyber security landscape ransomware becoming a household word, a matter of when but not if... How does Skyflow help organizations protect themselves or reduce the number of breaches so that they are not the next headline? >> You know, the funny thing about breaches is again and again, we see people doing the same mistakes, right? So Equifax had a breach four years ago where a customer portal, you know, no customer support rep should have access to a 100 million people's data. Like is that customer agent really accessing 100 million? But because we've been using legacy security tools they either give you access or don't give you access. And that's not how it's going to work. Because if I'm going to engage with the pharmacy and airline they need to be able to use my data in multiple different places. So you need to have fine grain controls around it. So I think the reason we keep getting breaches is cybersecurity industry is selling, 10s of billions of dollars worth of tools in the name of security but they cannot be applied at a fine grain level enough. I can't say things like for my call center agent that's living in Phoenix, Arizona they can only verify last four digits, but the same call center worker in Philippines can't even see that. So how do you get all that granular control in place? Is really why we keep seeing data breaches. So the Equifax breach, the Shopify breach the Twitter breaches, they're all the same. Like again and again, it's either an inside person or an external person who's gotten in. And once you're in and this is the whole idea of zero trust as you know. Once you're in, you can access all the data. Zero trust means that you don't assume that you actually isolate PII separately. >> A lot of the cybersecurity issues as you were talking about, are people based. Somebody clicking on something or gaining access. And I always talk to security experts about how do you control for the people aspect besides training, awareness, education. Is Skyflow a facilitator of that in a way that we haven't seen before? >> Yeah. So I think what ends up happening is, people even after they have breaches, they will lock down the system that had the breach, but then they have the same data sitting in a partner database, maybe a customer database maybe a billing system. So by centralizing and isolating PII in one system you can then post roles based access control rules. You can put limitations around it. But if you try to do that across hundreds of DS bases, you're just not going to be able to do it because it's basically just literally impossible, so... >> My final question for you is on, for me is you're here at AWS Summits, 10,000 people like I said. More people here than some big events and we're just in New York city. Okay. You actually work with AWS. What's next for you guys as you got the fresh funding, you guys looking for more talent, what's your next mountain you're going to climb? Tell us what's next for the company. Share your vision, put a plug in for the company. >> Well, it's actually very simple. Today we actually announced that we have a new chief revenue officer who's joining us. Tammy, she's joined us from LaunchDarkly which is it grew from like, you know, single digits to like over nine digits in revenue. And the reason she's joining Skyflow is because she sees the same inflection point hitting us. And for us that means more marketing, more sales, more growth in more geographies and more partnerships. And we think there's never been a better time to solve privacy. Literally everything that we deal with even things like rove evade issues eventually ties back into a issue around privacy. >> Lisa: Yes. >> AWS gets the model API, you know, come on, right? That's their model. >> Exactly. So I think if you look at the largest best companies that have been built in the last 20 years they took something that should have been simple but was not. There used to be Avayas of the world, selling Telephony intel, Twilio came and said, look an API. And we are trying to do the same to the entire security compliance and privacy industry is to narrow the problem down and solve it once. >> (indistinct) have it. We're going to get theCube API. (Lisa laughing) That's what we're going to do. All right. >> Thank you so much. >> Awesome. Anshu, thank you for joining us, talking to us about what's new at Skyflow. It sounds like you got that big funding investment. Probably lots of strategic innovation about to happen. So you'll have to come back in a few months and maybe at next reinvent in six months and tell us what's new, what's going on. >> Last theCube interview was very well received. People really like the kind of questions you guys asked. So I love this show and I think... >> It's great when you're a star like you, you got good market, great team, smart. I mean, look at this. I mean, what slow down are we talking about here? >> Yeah. I don't see... >> There is no slow down on the enterprise. >> Privacy's hot and it's incredibly important and we're only going to be seeing more and more of it. >> You can talk to any CIO, CSO, CTO or the board and they will tell you there is no limit to the budget they have for solving the core privacy issues. We love that. >> John: So you want to move on to building? >> Lisa: Obviously that must make you smile. >> John: You solved a big problem. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. Anshu, thank you again. Congrats on the momentum and we'll see you next time and hear more on the evolution of Skyflow. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live from New York City at AWS Summit NYC 22. We'll be right back with our next guest. So stick around. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell technologies, world 2022. We're live in Vegas. Very happy to be here. Uh, this is the cubes multi-year coverage. This is year 13 for covering either, you know, EMC world or, uh, Dell world. And now of course, Dell tech world. My name is Dave Volante and I'm here with longtime Cub alum cube guest, Steve Kenon, the storage Alchemist, who's, uh, Beckett, Dell, uh, and his data protection role. And Tony Bryson is the chief information security officer of the town of Gilbert town in Arizona. Most, most towns don't have a CISO, but Tony, we're a thrilled, you're here to tell us that story. How did you become a CISO and how does the town of Gilbert have a CISO? >>Well, thank you for having me here. Uh, believe it or not. The town of Gilbert is actually the fourth largest municipality in Arizona. We serve as 281,000 citizens. So it's a fairly large enterprise. We're a billion dollar enterprise. And it got to the point where the, uh, cybersecurity concerns were at such a point that they elected to bring in their first chief information security officer. And I managed to, uh, be the lucky gentleman that got that particular position. >>That's awesome. And there's a, is there a CIO as well? Are you guys peers? Do you, how what's the reporting structure look like? >>We have a chief technology officer. Okay. I report through his office mm-hmm <affirmative> and then he reports, uh, directly to the town executive. >>So you guys talk a lot, you I'm sure you present a lot to the, to the board or wherever the governance structure is. Yeah, >>We do. I, I do quarterly report outs to the, I report through to the town council. Uh, let them know exactly what our cyber security posture is like, the type of threats that we're facing. As a matter of fact, I have to do one when I return to, uh, Gilbert from this particular conference. So really looking forward to that one, cuz this is an interesting time to be in cyber security. >>So obviously a sea. So Steve is gonna say, cyber's the number one priority, but I would say the CTO is gonna say the, say the same thing I would say the board is gonna say the same thing. I would also say Steve, that, uh, cyber and cyber resilience is probably the number one topic here at the show. When you walk around and you see the cyber demonstrations, the security demonstrations, they're packed, it's kind of your focus. Um, it's a good call. >>Yeah. <laugh> I'm the luckiest guy in storage, right? <laugh> um, yeah, there hasn't I in the last 24 months, I don't think that there's been a, a meeting that I've been to with a customer, no matter who's in the room where, uh, cyber resiliency, cybersecurity hasn't come up. I mean, it is, it is one of the hot topics in last night. I mean, Michael was just here. Uh, Michael Dell was just here last night. He came into the showroom floor, he came back, he took a look at what we were offering for cyber capabilities and was impressed. And, and so, so that's really good. >>Yeah. So I noticed, you know, when I talked to a lot of CIOs in particular, they would tell me that the pre pandemic, their cyber resiliency was very Dr. Focused, right. They really, it really wasn't an organizational resilience. It was a, if there's an oh crap moment, they could get it back in theory. And they sort of rethought that. Do you see you that amongst your peers, Tony? >>I think so. I think that people are quickly starting to understand that you just can't focus on, in, on protecting yourself from something that you think may never happen. The reality is that you're likely to see some type of cyber event, so you better be prepared for it. And you protect yourself against that. So plan for resiliency plan with making sure that you have the right people in place that can take that challenge on, because it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when >>I would imagine. Well, Steve, you and I have talked about this, that, you know, the data protection business used to be, we used to call it backup in recovery and security, which is a whole different animal, but they're really starting to come together. It's kind of an Adjay. I, I know you've got this, uh, Maverick report that, that you want to talk about. What, what is that as a new Gartner research? I, I'm not familiar with it. >>Yeah. So it's some very interesting Gartner research and what I think, and I'd be curious to, Tony's take on, especially after that last question is, you know, a lot of people are, are spending a lot of money to keep the bad actors out. Right. And Gardner's philosophy on this whole, um, it's, it's, you're going to get hacked. So embrace the breach, that's their report. Right. So what they're suggesting is you're spending a lot of money, but, but we're witnessing a lot of attacks still coming in. Are you prepared to recover that when it happens? Right. And so their philosophy is it's time to start thinking about the recovery aspects of, you know, if, if they're gonna get through, how do you handle that? Right. >>Well, so you got announcements this week, big one of the big four, I guess, or big five cyber recovery vault. It's been, you're enhancing that you guys are talking things like, you know, air gaps and so forth. Give us the overview of the news there. >>Yeah. So there's, uh, cyber recovery vault for AWS for the cloud. There is, uh, a lot of stuff we're doing with, uh, cyber recovery vault for, uh, Aw, uh, Azure also, right along with the cyber sense technology, which is the technology that scans the data. Once it comes in from the backup to ensure that it clean and can be recovered and you can feel confident that your recoveries look good, right? So now, now you can do that OnPrem, or you can do it through a colo. You can do it with in the cloud, or you can, uh, ask Dell technologies with our apex business services to help provide cyber recovery services wherever for you at your co at yet OnPrem or for you from the cloud. So it's kind of giving the customer, allowing them to keep that freedom of choice of how they want to operate, but provide them those same recovery capabilities. >>So Tony, give us paint us a picture without giving away too much for the bad guys. How, how you approach this, maybe are you using some of these products? What's your sort of infrastructure look like? >>Yeah. Without giving away the state secrets, um, we are heavily invested in the cyber recovery vault and cyber sense. Uh, it plays heavily in our strategy. We wanna make sure we have a safe Harbor for our data. And that's something that, that the Dell power protect cyber recovery vault provides to us. Uh, we're exceptionally excited about the, the development that's going on, especially with apex. We're looking at that, and that has really captured our imagination. It could be a game changer for us as a town because we're, we're a small organization transitioning to a midsize organization and what apex provides and what the Dell cyber recovery vault provides to us. Putting those two together gives us the elasticity we need as a small organization to expand quickly and deal with our internal data concerns. >>So cyber recovery as a service is what you're interested in. Let me ask you a question. Are you interested in a managed service or are you interested in managing it yourself? >>That's a great question, personally. I would prefer that we went with managed services. I think that from a manager's perspective, you get a bigger bang for the buck going with managed services. You have people that work with that technology all the time. You don't have to ramp people up and develop that expertise in house. You also then have that peace of mind that you have more people that are doing the services and it acts as a force multiplier for you. So from a dollar and cents perspective, it's the way that you want to go. When I start talking to my internal people, of course, there's that, that sense of fear that comes with the unknown and especially outsourcing that type of critical infrastructure, the there's some concern there, but I think that with education, with exposure, to some of the things that we get from the managed service, it makes sense for everybody to go that >>Route and, and you can, I presume sort of POC it and then expand it and then get more comfortable with it and then say, okay, when it's hardened and ready now, this is the, the Def facto standard across the organization. >>I suspect we'll end up in a hybrid environment to begin with where we'll some assets on site, and then we'll have some assets in the cloud. And that's again, where apex will be that, that big linchpin for us and really make it all work. How >>Important are air gaps? >>Oh, they're incredibly, incredibly, uh, needed right now. You cannot have true data of security without having an air gap. A lot of the ransomware that we see moves laterally through your organization. So if you have, uh, all your data backed up in the same data center that your, your backups and your primary data sources are in odds are they're all gonna get owned at the same time. So having that air gap solution in there is critical to having the peace of mind that allows the CISO to sleep at night. >>I always tell my crypto and NFT readers, this doesn't apply to data centers. You gotta air back air, air gap, your crypto, you know, when you're NFT. So how do you guys Steve deal with, with air gap? Can you explain the solutions? >>So in the, in the cyber recovery vault itself, it is driven through, uh, you've got one, uh, power protect, uh, appliance on one, one side in your data center, and then wherever your, your, your vaulted area is, whether it be a colo, whether it be on pre wherever it might be. Uh, we create a connection between between the two that is one directional, right? So we send the data to that vault. We call it the vault and, you know, we replicate a copy of your backup data. Once it lives over there, we make a copy of that data. And then what we do is with the cyber sense technology that Tony was talking about, we scan that data and we validate it against, with a whole cyber sense is built on IML machine learning. We look at a couple hundred different kind of profiles that come through and compare it to the, to the day before as backup and the day before that and understand kind of what's changing. >>And is it changing the right way? Right? Like there might be some reasons it it's supposed to change that way. Right. But things that look anomalous, we send up a warning when we let the people know that, you know, whoever's monitoring, something's going on. You might want to take a look. And then based on that, if there's whatever's happening in the environment, we have the ability to then recover that data back to the, to the original system. You can use the vault as a, as a clean room area, if you want to send people to it, depending on kind of what's going on in, in, in your main data center. So there's a lot of things we do to protect that. Do >>You recommend, like changing the timing of when you take, you know, snapshots or you do the same time every day, it's gotta create different patterns or >>I'll tell you that's, that's one thing to keep the, keep the hackers on their tow, right? It it's tough to do operationally, right? Because you kind that's processes. But, but the reality is if you really are that, uh, concerned about attacks, that makes a lot of sense, >>Tony, what's the CISOs number one challenge today? >>Uh, I, it has to be resilience. It has to be making sure your organization that if or when they get hit, that you're able to pick the pieces back up and get the operation back up as quickly and efficiently as possible. Making sure that the, the mission critical data is immediately, uh, recoverable and be able to be put back into play. >>And, and what's the biggest challenge or best practice in terms of doing that? Obviously the technology, the people, the process >>Right now, I would probably say it's it's people, uh, we're going through the, the, um, a period of, of uncertainty in the marketplace when it comes to trying to find people. So it is difficult to find the right people to do certain things, which is why managed services is so important to an organization of our size and, and what we're trying to do, where we are, are incorporating such big ideas. We need those manager services because we just can't find the bodies that can do some of this work. >>You got an interesting background, you a PhD in psychology, you're an educator, you're a golf pro and you're a CISO. I I've never met anybody like you, Tony <laugh>. So, thanks for coming on, Steve, give you the last word. >>Well, I think I, I think one of the things that Tony said, and I wanted to parlay this a little bit, uh, from that Gartner report, I even talked about people is so critical when it comes to cyber resiliency and that sort of thing. And one of the things I talked about in that embraced the breach report is as you're looking to hire staff for your environment, right, you wanna, you know, a lot of people might shy away from hiring that CSO that got fired because they had a cyber event. Right, right. Oh, maybe they didn't do their job. But the reality is, is those folks, because this is very new. I mean, of course we've been talking about cyber for a couple of years, but, but getting that experience under your belt and understanding what happens in the event. I mean, there are a lot of companies that run things like cyber ranges, resiliency, ranges to put people through the paces of, Hey, this is what have happens when an event happens and are you prepared to respond? I think there's a big set of learning lessons that happens when you go through one of those events and it helps kind of educate the people about what's needed. >>It's a great point. Failure used to mean fire right in this industry. And, and today it's different. The adversary is very well armed and quite capable and motivated that learning even during, even when you fail, can be applied to succeed in the future or not fail, I guess there's no such thing as success in your business. Guys. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks very >>Much. >>All right. And thank you for watching the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. This is Dave Valenti. We'll be back with John furrier, Lisa Martin and David Nicholson. Two days of wall to wall coverage left. Keep it with us.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're now going to go into the customer panel. And we'd like to welcome Angelo Fausti, who's software engineer at the Vera C Rubin Observatory, and Caleb Maclachlan, who's senior spacecraft operations software engineer at Loft Orbital. Guys, thanks for joining us. You don't want to miss folks, this interview. Caleb, let's start with you. You work for an extremely cool company. You're launching satellites into space. Cause doing that is highly complex and not a cheap endeavor. Tell us about Loft Orbital and what you guys do to attack that problem? >> Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me here, by the way. So Loft Orbital is a company that's a series B startup now. And our mission basically is to provide rapid access to space for all kinds of customers. Historically, if you want to fly something in space, do something in space, it's extremely expensive. You need to book a launch, build a bus, hire a team to operate it, have big software teams, and then eventually worry about a lot of very specialized engineering. And what we're trying to do is, change that from a super specialized problem that has an extremely high barrier of access to a infrastructure problem. So that it's almost as simple as deploying a VM in AWS or GCP, as getting your programs, your mission deployed on orbit, with access to different sensors, cameras, radios, stuff like that. So that's kind of our mission. And just to give a really brief example of the kind of customer that we can serve. There's a really cool company called Totum labs, who is working on building an IoT constellation, for Internet of Things. Basically being able to get telemetry from all over the world. They're the first company to demonstrate indoor IoT, which means you have this little modem inside a container. A container that you track from anywhere on the world as it's going across the ocean. So it's really little. And they've been able to stay small startup that's focused on their product, which is that super crazy, complicated, cool radio, while we handle the whole space segment for them, which just, before Loft was really impossible. So that's our mission is, providing space infrastructure as a service. We are kind of groundbreaking in this area, and we're serving a huge variety of customers with all kinds of different missions, and obviously, generating a ton of data in space that we've got to handle. >> Yeah, so amazing, Caleb, what you guys do. I know you were lured to the skies very early in your career, but how did you kind of land in this business? >> Yeah, so I guess just a little bit about me. For some people, they don't necessarily know what they want to do, early in their life. For me, I was five years old and I knew, I want to be in the space industry. So I started in the Air Force, but have stayed in the space industry my whole career and been a part of, this is the fifth space startup that I've been a part of, actually. So I've kind of started out in satellites, did spend some time in working in the launch industry on rockets. Now I'm here back in satellites. And honestly, this is the most exciting of the different space startups that I've been a part of. So, always been passionate about space and basically writing software for operating in space for basically extending how we write software into orbit. >> Super interesting. Okay, Angelo. Let's talk about the Rubin Observatory Vera C. Rubin, famous woman scientists, Galaxy guru, Now you guys, the observatory are up, way up high, you're going to get a good look at the southern sky. I know COVID slowed you guys down a bit. But no doubt you continue to code away on the software. I know you're getting close. You got to be super excited. Give us the update on the observatory and your role. >> All right. So yeah, Rubin is state of the art observatory that is in construction on a remote mountain in Chile. And with Rubin we'll conduct the large survey of space and time. We are going to observe the sky with eight meter optical telescope and take 1000 pictures every night with 3.2 gigapixel camera. And we're going to do that for 10 years, which is the duration of the survey. The goal is to produce an unprecedented data set. Which is going to be about .5 exabytes of image data. And from these images will detect and measure the properties of billions of astronomical objects. We are also building a science platform that's hosted on Google Cloud, so that the scientists and the public can explore this data to make discoveries. >> Yeah, amazing project. Now, you aren't a Doctor of Philosophy. So you probably spent some time thinking about what's out there. And then you went on to earn a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics. So this is something that you've been working on for the better part of your career, isn't it? >> Yeah, that's right. About 15 years. I studied physics in college, then I got a PhD in astronomy. And I worked for about five years in another project, the Dark Energy survey before joining Rubin in 2015. >> Yeah, impressive. So it seems like both your organizations are looking at space from two different angles. One thing you guys both have in common, of course, is software. And you both use InfluxDB as part of your data infrastructure. How did you discover InfluxDB, get into it? How do you use the platform? Maybe Caleb, you can start. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the first company that I extensively used InfluxDB in was a launch startup called Astra. And we were in the process of designing our first generation rocket there and testing the engines, pumps. Everything that goes into a rocket. And when I joined the company, our data story was not very mature. We were collecting a bunch of data in LabVIEW. And engineers were taking that over to MATLAB to process it. And at first, that's the way that a lot of engineers and scientists are used to working. And at first that was, like, people weren't entirely sure that, that needed to change. But it's something, the nice thing about InfluxDB is that, it's so easy to deploy. So our software engineering team was able to get it deployed and up and running very quickly and then quickly also backport all of the data that we've collected thus far into Influx. And what was amazing to see and it's kind of the super cool moment with Influx is, when we hooked that up to Grafana, Grafana, is the visualization platform we use with influx, because it works really well with it. There was like this aha moment of our engineers who are used to this post process kind of method for dealing with their data, where they could just almost instantly, easily discover data that they hadn't been able to see before. And take the manual processes that they would run after a test and just throw those all in Influx and have live data as tests were coming. And I saw them implementing crazy rocket equation type stuff in Influx and it just was totally game changing for how we tested. And things that previously it would be like run a test, then wait an hour for the engineers to crunch the data and then we run another test with some changed parameters or a changed startup sequence or something like that, became, by the time the test is over, the engineers know what the next step is, because they have this just like instant game changing access to data. So since that experience, basically everywhere I've gone, every company since then, I've been promoting InfluxDB and using it and spinning it up and quickly showing people how simple and easy it is. >> Yeah, thank you. So Angelo, I was explaining in my open that, you know you could add a column in a traditional RDBMS and do time series. But with the volume of data that you're talking about in the example that Caleb just gave, you have to have a purpose built time series database. Where did you first learn about InfluxDB? >> Yeah, correct. So I worked with the data management team and my first project was the record metrics that measure the performance of our software. The software that we use to process the data. So I started implementing that in our relational database. But then I realized that in fact, I was dealing with time series data. And I should really use a solution built for that. And then I started looking at time series databases and I found InfluxDB, that was back in 2018. Then I got involved in another project. To record telemetry data from the telescope itself. It's very challenging because you have so many subsystems and sensors, producing data. And with that data, the goal is to look at the telescope harder in real time so we can make decisions and make sure that everything's doing the right thing. And another use for InfluxDB that I'm also interested, is the visits database. If you think about the observations, we are moving the telescope all the time and pointing to specific directions in the sky and taking pictures every 30 seconds. So that itself is a time series. And every point in the time series, we call that visit. So we want to record the metadata about those visits in InfluxDB. That time series is going to be 10 years long, with about 1000 points every night. It's actually not too much data compared to the other problems. It's really just the different time scale. So yeah, we have plans on continuing using InfluxDB and finding new applications in the project. >> Yeah and the speed with which you can actually get high quality images. Angelo, my understanding is, you use InfluxDB, as you said, you're monitoring the telescope hardware and the software. And just say, some of the scientific data as well. The telescope at the Rubin Observatory is like, no pun intended, I guess, the star of the show. And I believe, I read that it's going to be the first of the next gen telescopes to come online. It's got this massive field of view, like three orders of magnitude times the Hubble's widest camera view, which is amazing. That's like 40 moons in an image, and amazingly fast as well. What else can you tell us about the telescope? >> Yeah, so it's really a challenging project, from the point of view of engineering. This telescope, it has to move really fast. And it also has to carry the primary mirror, which is an eight meter piece of glass, it's very heavy. And it has to carry a camera, which is about the size of a small car. And this whole structure weighs about 300 pounds. For that to work, the telescope needs to be very compact and stiff. And one thing that's amazing about its design is that the telescope, this 300 tons structure, it sits on a tiny film of oil, which has the diameter of human hair, in that brings an almost zero friction interface. In fact, a few people can move this enormous structure with only their hands. As you said, another aspect that makes this telescope unique is the optical design. It's a wide field telescope. So each image has, in diameter, the size of about seven full moons. And with that we can map the entire sky in only three days. And of course, during operations, everything's controlled by software, and it's automatic. There's a very complex piece of software called the scheduler, which is responsible for moving the telescope and the camera. Which will record the 15 terabytes of data every night. >> And Angelo, all this data lands in InfluxDB, correct? And what are you doing with all that data? >> Yeah, actually not. So we're using InfluxDB to record engineering data and metadata about the observations, like telemetry events and the commands from the telescope. That's a much smaller data set compared to the images. But it is still challenging because you have some high frequency data that the system needs to keep up and we need to store this data and have it around for the lifetime of the project. >> Hm. So at the mountain, we keep the data for 30 days. So the observers, they use Influx and InfluxDB instance, running there to analyze the data. But we also replicate the data to another instance running at the US data facility, where we have more computational resources and so more people can look at the data without interfering with the observations. Yeah, I have to say that InfluxDB has been really instrumental for us, and especially at this phase of the project where we are testing and integrating the different pieces of hardware. And it's not just the database, right. It's the whole platform. So I like to give this example, when we are doing this kind of task, it's hard to know in advance which dashboards and visualizations you're going to need, right. So what you really need is a data exploration tool. And with tools like chronograph, for example, having the ability to query and create dashboards on the fly was really a game changer for us. So astronomers, they typically are not software engineers, but they are the ones that know better than anyone, what needs to be monitored. And so they use chronograph and they can create the dashboards and the visualizations that they need. >> Got it. Thank you. Okay, Caleb, let's bring you back in. Tell us more about, you got these dishwasher size satellites are kind of using a multi tenant model. I think it's genius. But tell us about the satellites themselves. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have in space, some satellites already. That, as you said, are like dishwasher, mini fridge kind of size. And we're working on a bunch more that are a variety of sizes from shoe box to I guess, a few times larger than what we have today. And it is, we do shoot to have, effectively something like a multi tenant model where we will buy a bus off the shelf, the bus is, what you can kind of think of as the core piece of the satellite, almost like a motherboard or something. Where it's providing the power, it has the solar panels, it has some radios attached to it, it handles the altitude control, basically steers the spacecraft in orbit. And then we build, also in house, what we call our payload hub, which is has all any customer payloads attached, and our own kind of edge processing sort of capabilities built into it. And so we integrate that, we launch it, and those things, because they're in low Earth orbit, they're orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes. That's seven kilometers per second, which is several times faster than a speeding bullet. So we've got, we have one of the unique challenges of operating spacecraft in lower Earth orbit is that generally you can't talk to them all the time. So we're managing these things through very brief windows of time. Where we get to talk to them through our ground sites, either in Antarctica or in the North Pole region. So we'll see them for 10 minutes, and then we won't see them for the next 90 minutes as they zip around the Earth collecting data. So one of the challenges that exists for a company like ours is, that's a lot of, you have to be able to make real time decisions operationally, in those short windows that can sometimes be critical to the health and safety of the spacecraft. And it could be possible that we put ourselves into a low power state in the previous orbit or something potentially dangerous to the satellite can occur. And so as an operator, you need to very quickly process that data coming in. And not just the the live data, but also the massive amounts of data that were collected in, what we call the back orbit, which is the time that we couldn't see the spacecraft. >> We got it. So talk more about how you use InfluxDB to make sense of this data from all those tech that you're launching into space. >> Yeah, so we basically, previously we started off, when I joined the company, storing all of that, as Angelo did, in a regular relational database. And we found that it was so slow, and the size of our data would balloon over the course of a couple of days to the point where we weren't able to even store all of the data that we were getting. So we migrated to InfluxDB to store our time series telemetry from the spacecraft. So that thing's like power level voltage, currents counts, whatever metadata we need to monitor about the spacecraft, we now store that in InfluxDB. And that has, you know, now we can actually easily store the entire volume of data for the mission life so far, without having to worry about the size bloating to an unmanageable amount. And we can also seamlessly query large chunks of data, like if I need to see, for example, as an operator, I might want to see how my battery state of charge is evolving over the course of the year, I can have a plot in an Influx that loads that in a fraction of a second for a year's worth of data, because it does, you know, intelligent. I can intelligently group the data by citing time interval. So it's been extremely powerful for us to access the data. And as time has gone on, we've gradually migrated more and more of our operating data into Influx. So not only do we store the basic telemetry about the bus and our payload hub, but we're also storing data for our customers, that our customers are generating on board about things like you know, one example of a customer that's doing something pretty cool. They have a computer on our satellite, which they can reprogram themselves to do some AI enabled edge compute type capability in space. And so they're sending us some metrics about the status of their workloads, in addition to the basics, like the temperature of their payload, their computer or whatever else. And we're delivering that data to them through Influx in a Grafana dashboard that they can plot where they can see, not only has this pipeline succeeded or failed, but also where was the spacecraft when this occurred? What was the voltage being supplied to their payload? Whatever they need to see, it's all right there for them. Because we're aggregating all that data in InfluxDB. >> That's awesome. You're measuring everything. Let's talk a little bit about, we throw this term around a lot, data driven. A lot of companies say, Oh, yes, we're data driven. But you guys really are. I mean, you got data at the core. Caleb, what does that what does that mean to you? >> Yeah, so you know, I think, the clearest example of when I saw this, be like totally game changing is, what I mentioned before it, at Astra, were our engineers feedback loop went from a lot of, kind of slow researching, digging into the data to like an instant, instantaneous, almost, Seeing the data, making decisions based on it immediately, rather than having to wait for some processing. And that's something that I've also seen echoed in my current role. But to give another practical example, as I said, we have a huge amount of data that comes down every orbit, and we need to be able to ingest all that data almost instantaneously and provide it to the operator in near real time. About a second worth of latency is all that's acceptable for us to react to. To see what is coming down from the spacecraft and building that pipeline is challenging, from a software engineering standpoint. Our primary language is Python, which isn't necessarily that fast. So what we've done is started, in the in the goal being data driven, is publish metrics on individual, how individual pieces of our data processing pipeline, are performing into Influx as well. And we do that in production as well as in dev. So we have kind of a production monitoring flow. And what that has done is, allow us to make intelligent decisions on our software development roadmap. Where it makes the most sense for us to focus our development efforts in terms of improving our software efficiency, just because we have that visibility into where the real problems are. At sometimes we've found ourselves, before we started doing this, kind of chasing rabbits that weren't necessarily the real root cause of issues that we were seeing. But now, that we're being a bit more data driven, there, we are being much more effective in where we're spending our resources and our time, which is especially critical to us as we scaled from supporting a couple of satellites to supporting many, many satellites at once. >> So you reduce those dead ends. Maybe Angela, you could talk about what sort of data driven means to you and your team? >> Yeah, I would say that having real time visibility, to the telemetry data and metrics is crucial for us. We need to make sure that the images that we collect, with the telescope have good quality and that they are within the specifications to meet our science goals. And so if they are not, we want to know that as soon as possible, and then start fixing problems. >> Yeah, so I mean, you think about these big science use cases, Angelo. They are extremely high precision, you have to have a lot of granularity, very tight tolerances. How does that play into your time series data strategy? >> Yeah, so one of the subsystems that produce the high volume and high rates is the structure that supports the telescope's primary mirror. So on that structure, we have hundreds of actuators that compensate the shape of the mirror for the formations. That's part of our active updated system. So that's really real time. And we have to record this high data rates, and we have requirements to handle data that are a few 100 hertz. So we can easily configure our database with milliseconds precision, that's for telemetry data. But for events, sometimes we have events that are very close to each other and then we need to configure database with higher precision. >> um hm For example, micro seconds. >> Yeah, so Caleb, what are your event intervals like? >> So I would say that, as of today on the spacecraft, the event, the level of timing that we deal with probably tops out at about 20 hertz, 20 measurements per second on things like our gyroscopes. But I think the core point here of the ability to have high precision data is extremely important for these kinds of scientific applications. And I'll give you an example, from when I worked on the rockets at Astra. There, our baseline data rate that we would ingest data during a test is 500 hertz, so 500 samples per second. And in some cases, we would actually need to ingest much higher rate data. Even up to like 1.5 kilohertz. So extremely, extremely high precision data there, where timing really matters a lot. And, I can, one of the really powerful things about Influx is the fact that it can handle this, that's one of the reasons we chose it. Because there's times when we're looking at the results of firing, where you're zooming in. I've talked earlier about how on my current job, we often zoom out to look at a year's worth of data. You're zooming in, to where your screen is preoccupied by a tiny fraction of a second. And you need to see, same thing, as Angelo just said, not just the actual telemetry, which is coming in at a high rate, but the events that are coming out of our controllers. So that can be something like, hey, I opened this valve at exactly this time. And that goes, we want to have that at micro or even nanosecond precision, so that we know, okay, we saw a spike in chamber pressure at this exact moment, was that before or after this valve open? That kind of visibility is critical in these kinds of scientific applications and absolutely game changing, to be able to see that in near real time. And with a really easy way for engineers to be able to visualize this data themselves without having to wait for us software engineers to go build it for them. >> Can the scientists do self serve? Or do you have to design and build all the analytics and queries for scientists? >> I think that's absolutely from my perspective, that's absolutely one of the best things about Influx, and what I've seen be game changing is that, generally, I'd say anyone can learn to use Influx. And honestly, most of our users might not even know they're using Influx. Because the interface that we expose to them is Grafana, which is generic graphing, open source graphing library that is very similar to Influx zone chronograph. >> Sure. >> And what it does is, it provides this, almost, it's a very intuitive UI for building your query. So you choose a measurement, and it shows a drop down of available measurements, and then you choose the particular field you want to look at. And again, that's a drop down. So it's really easy for our users to discover it. And there's kind of point and click options for doing math, aggregations. You can even do like, perfect kind of predictions all within Grafana. The Grafana user interface, which is really just a wrapper around the API's and functionality that Influx provides. So yes, absolutely, that's been the most powerful thing about it, is that it gets us out of the way, us software engineers, who may not know quite as much as the scientists and engineers that are closer to the interesting math. And they build these crazy dashboards that I'm just like, wow, I had no idea you could do that. I had no idea that, that is something that you would want to see. And absolutely, that's the most empowering piece. >> Yeah, putting data in the hands of those who have the context, the domain experts is key. Angelo is it the same situation for you? Is it self serve? >> Yeah, correct. As I mentioned before, we have the astronomers making their own dashboards, because they know exactly what they need to visualize. And I have an example just from last week. We had an engineer at the observatory that was building a dashboard to monitor the cooling system of the entire building. And he was familiar with InfluxQL, which was the primarily query language in version one of InfluxDB. And he had, that was really a challenge because he had all the data spread at multiple InfluxDB measurements. And he was like doing one query for each measurement and was not able to produce what he needed. And then, but that's the perfect use case for Flux, which is the new data scripting language that Influx data developed and introduced as the main language in version two. And so with Flux, he was able to combine data from multiple measurements and summarize this data in a nice table. So yeah, having more flexible and powerful language, also allows you to make better a visualization. >> So Angelo, where would you be without time series database, that technology generally, may be specifically InfluxDB, as one of the leading platforms. Would you be able to do this? >> Yeah, it's hard to imagine, doing what we are doing without InfluxDB. And I don't know, perhaps it would be just a matter of time to rediscover InfluxDB. >> Yeah. How about you Caleb? >> Yeah, I mean, it's all about using the right tool for the job. I think for us, when I joined the company, we weren't using InfluxDB and we were dealing with serious issues of the database growing to a an incredible size, extremely quickly. And being unable to, like even querying short periods of data, was taking on the order of seconds, which is just not possible for operations. So time series database is, if you're dealing with large volumes of time series data, Time series database is the right tool for the job and Influx is a great one for it. So, yeah, it's absolutely required to use for this kind of data, there is not really any other option. >> Guys, this has been really informative. It's pretty exciting to see, how the edge is mountain tops, lower Earth orbits. Space is the ultimate edge. Isn't it. I wonder if you could two questions to wrap here. What comes next for you guys? And is there something that you're really excited about? That you're working on. Caleb, may be you could go first and than Angelo you could bring us home. >> Yeah absolutely, So basically, what's next for Loft Orbital is more, more satellites a greater push towards infrastructure and really making, our mission is to make space simple for our customers and for everyone. And we're scaling the company like crazy now, making that happen. It's extremely exciting and extremely exciting time to be in this company and to be in this industry as a whole. Because there are so many interesting applications out there. So many cool ways of leveraging space that people are taking advantage of and with companies like SpaceX, now rapidly lowering cost of launch. It's just a really exciting place to be in. And we're launching more satellites. We're scaling up for some constellations and our ground system has to be improved to match. So there is a lot of improvements that we are working on to really scale up our control systems to be best in class and make it capable of handling such large workloads. So, yeah. What's next for us is just really 10X ing what we are doing. And that's extremely exciting. >> And anything else you are excited about? Maybe something personal? Maybe, you know, the titbit you want to share. Are you guys hiring? >> We're absolutely hiring. So, we've positions all over the company. So we need software engineers. We need people who do more aerospace specific stuff. So absolutely, I'd encourage anyone to check out the Loft Orbital website, if this is at all interesting. Personal wise, I don't have any interesting personal things that are data related. But my current hobby is sea kayaking, so I'm working on becoming a sea kayaking instructor. So if anyone likes to go sea kayaking out in the San Francisco Bay area, hopefully I'll see you out there. >> Love it. All right, Angelo, bring us home. >> Yeah. So what's next for us is, we're getting this telescope working and collecting data and when that's happened, it's going to be just a delish of data coming out of this camera. And handling all that data, is going to be a really challenging. Yeah, I wonder I might not be here for that I'm looking for it, like for next year we have an important milestone, which is our commissioning camera, which is a simplified version of the full camera, is going to be on sky and so most of the system has to be working by then. >> Any cool hobbies that you are working on or any side project? >> Yeah, actually, during the pandemic I started gardening. And I live here in Two Sun, Arizona. It gets really challenging during the summer because of the lack of water, right. And so, we have an automatic irrigation system at the farm and I'm trying to develop a small system to monitor the irrigation and make sure that our plants have enough water to survive. >> Nice. All right guys, with that we're going to end it. Thank you so much. Really fascinating and thanks to InfluxDB for making this possible. Really ground breaking stuff, enabling value at the edge, in the cloud and of course beyond, at the space. Really transformational work, that you guys are doing. So congratulations and I really appreciate the broader community. I can't wait to see what comes next from this entire eco system. Now in the moment, I'll be back to wrap up. This is Dave Vallante. And you are watching The cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> If it weren't for Pat Gelsinger, Intel's future would be a disaster. Even with his clear vision, fantastic leadership, deep technical and business acumen, and amazing positivity, the company's future is in serious jeopardy. It's the same story we've been telling for years. Volume is king in the semiconductor industry, and Intel no longer is the volume leader. Despite Intel's efforts to change that dynamic With several recent moves, including making another go at its Foundry business, the company is years away from reversing its lagging position relative to today's leading foundries and design shops. Intel's best chance to survive as a leader in our view, will come from a combination of a massive market, continued supply constraints, government money, and luck, perhaps in the form of a deal with apple in the midterm. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR." In this "Breaking Analysis," we'll update you on our latest assessment of Intel's competitive position and unpack nuggets from the company's February investor conference. Let's go back in history a bit and review what we said in the early 2010s. If you've followed this program, you know that our David Floyer sounded the alarm for Intel as far back as 2012, the year after PC volumes peaked. Yes, they've ticked up a bit in the past couple of years but they pale in comparison to the volumes that the ARM ecosystem is producing. The world has changed from people entering data into machines, and now it's machines that are driving all the data. Data volumes in Web 1.0 were largely driven by keystrokes and clicks. Web 3.0 is going to be driven by machines entering data into sensors, cameras. Other edge devices are going to drive enormous data volumes and processing power to boot. Every windmill, every factory device, every consumer device, every car, will require processing at the edge to run AI, facial recognition, inference, and data intensive workloads. And the volume of this space compared to PCs and even the iPhone itself is about to be dwarfed with an explosion of devices. Intel is not well positioned for this new world in our view. Intel has to catch up on the process, Intel has to catch up on architecture, Intel has to play catch up on security, Intel has to play catch up on volume. The ARM ecosystem has cumulatively shipped 200 billion chips to date, and is shipping 10x Intel's wafer volume. Intel has to have an architecture that accommodates much more diversity. And while it's working on that, it's years behind. All that said, Pat Gelsinger is doing everything he can and more to close the gap. Here's a partial list of the moves that Pat is making. A year ago, he announced IDM 2.0, a new integrated device manufacturing strategy that opened up its world to partners for manufacturing and other innovation. Intel has restructured, reorganized, and many executives have boomeranged back in, many previous Intel execs. They understand the business and have a deep passion to help the company regain its prominence. As part of the IDM 2.0 announcement, Intel created, recreated if you will, a Foundry division and recently acquired Tower Semiconductor an Israeli firm, that is going to help it in that mission. It's opening up partnerships with alternative processor manufacturers and designers. And the company has announced major investments in CAPEX to build out Foundry capacity. Intel is going to spin out Mobileye, a company it had acquired for 15 billion in 2017. Or does it try and get a $50 billion valuation? Mobileye is about $1.4 billion in revenue, and is likely going to be worth more around 25 to 30 billion, we'll see. But Intel is going to maybe get $10 billion in cash from that, that spin out that IPO and it can use that to fund more FABS and more equipment. Intel is leveraging its 19,000 software engineers to move up the stack and sell more subscriptions and high margin software. He got to sell what he got. And finally Pat is playing politics beautifully. Announcing for example, FAB investments in Ohio, which he dubbed Silicon Heartland. Brilliant! Again, there's no doubt that Pat is moving fast and doing the right things. Here's Pat at his investor event in a T-shirt that says, "torrid, bringing back the torrid pace and discipline that Intel is used to." And on the right is Pat at the State of the Union address, looking sharp in shirt and tie and suit. And he has said, "a bet on Intel is a hedge against geopolitical instability in the world." That's just so good. To that statement, he showed this chart at his investor meeting. Basically it shows that whereas semiconductor manufacturing capacity has gone from 80% of the world's volume to 20%, he wants to get it back to 50% by 2030, and reset supply chains in a market that has become important as oil. Again, just brilliant positioning and pushing all the right hot buttons. And here's a slide underscoring that commitment, showing manufacturing facilities around the world with new capacity coming online in the next few years in Ohio and the EU. Mentioning the CHIPS Act in his presentation in The US and Europe as part of a public private partnership, no doubt, he's going to need all the help he can get. Now, we couldn't resist the chart on the left here shows wafer starts and transistor capacity growth. For Intel, overtime speaks to its volume aspirations. But we couldn't help notice that the shape of the curve is somewhat misleading because it shows a two-year (mumbles) and then widens the aperture to three years to make the curve look steeper. Fun with numbers. Okay, maybe a little nitpick, but these are some of the telling nuggets we pulled from the investor day, and they're important. Another nitpick is in our view, wafers would be a better measure of volume than transistors. It's like a company saying we shipped 20% more exabytes or MIPS this year than last year. Of course you did, and your revenue shrank. Anyway, Pat went through a detailed analysis of the various Intel businesses and promised mid to high double digit growth by 2026, half of which will come from Intel's traditional PC they center in network edge businesses and the rest from advanced graphics HPC, Mobileye and Foundry. Okay, that sounds pretty good. But it has to be taken into context that the balance of the semiconductor industry, yeah, this would be a pretty competitive growth rate, in our view, especially for a 70 plus billion dollar company. So kudos to Pat for sticking his neck out on this one. But again, the promise is several years away, at least four years away. Now we want to focus on Foundry because that's the only way Intel is going to get back into the volume game and the volume necessary for the company to compete. Pat built this slide showing the baby blue for today's Foundry business just under a billion dollars and adding in another $1.5 billion for Tower Semiconductor, the Israeli firm that it just acquired. So a few billion dollars in the near term future for the Foundry business. And then by 2026, this really fuzzy blue bar. Now remember, TSM is the new volume leader, and is a $50 billion company growing. So there's definitely a market there that it can go after. And adding in ARM processors to the mix, and, you know, opening up and partnering with the ecosystems out there can only help volume if Intel can win that business, which you know, it should be able to, given the likelihood of long term supply constraints. But we remain skeptical. This is another chart Pat showed, which makes the case that Foundry and IDM 2.0 will allow expensive assets to have a longer useful life. Okay, that's cool. It will also solve the cumulative output problem highlighted in the bottom right. We've talked at length about Wright's Law. That is, for every cumulative doubling of units manufactured, cost will fall by a constant percentage. You know, let's say around 15% in semiconductor world, which is vitally important to accommodate next generation chips, which are always more expensive at the start of the cycle. So you need that 15% cost buffer to jump curves and make any money. So let's unpack this a bit. You know, does this chart at the bottom right address our Wright's Law concerns, i.e. that Intel can't take advantage of Wright's Law because it can't double cumulative output fast enough? Now note the decline in wafer starts and then the slight uptick, and then the flattening. It's hard to tell what years we're talking about here. Intel is not going to share the sausage making because it's probably not pretty, But you can see on the bottom left, the flattening of the cumulative output curve in IDM 1.0 otherwise known as the death spiral. Okay, back to the power of Wright's Law. Now, assume for a second that wafer density doesn't grow. It does, but just work with us for a second. Let's say you produce 50 million units per year, just making a number up. That gets you cumulative output to $100 million in, sorry, 100 million units in the second year to take you two years to get to that 100 million. So in other words, it takes two years to lower your manufacturing cost by, let's say, roughly 15%. Now, assuming you can get wafer volumes to be flat, which that chart showed, with good yields, you're at 150 now in year three, 200 in year four, 250 in year five, 300 in year six, now, that's four years before you can take advantage of Wright's Law. You keep going at that flat wafer start, and that simplifying assumption we made at the start and 50 million units a year, and well, you get to the point. You get the point, it's now eight years before you can get the Wright's Law to kick in, and you know, by then you're cooked. But now you can grow the density of transistors on a chip, right? Yes, of course. So let's come back to Moore's Law. The graphic on the left says that all the growth is in the new stuff. Totally agree with that. Huge term that Pat presented. Now he also said that until we exhaust the periodic table of elements, Moore's Law is alive and well, and Intel is the steward of Moore's Law. Okay, that's cool. The chart on the right shows Intel going from 100 billion transistors today to a trillion by 2030. Hold that thought. So Intel is assuming that we'll keep up with Moore's Law, meaning a doubling of transistors every let's say two years, and I believe it. So bring that back to Wright's Law, in the previous chart, it means with IDM 2.0, Intel can get back to enjoying the benefits of Wright's Law every two years, let's say, versus IDM 1.0 where they were failing to keep up. Okay, so Intel is saved, yeah? Well, let's bring into this discussion one of our favorite examples, Apple's M1 ARM-based chip. The M1 Ultra is a new architecture. And you can see the stats here, 114 billion transistors on a five nanometer process and all the other stats. The M1 Ultra has two chips. They're bonded together. And Apple put an interposer between the two chips. An interposer is a pathway that allows electrical signals to pass through it onto another chip. It's a super fast connection. You can see 2.5 terabytes per second. But the brilliance is the two chips act as a single chip. So you don't have to change the software at all. The way Intel's architecture works is it takes two different chips on a substrate, and then each has its own memory. The memory is not shared. Apple shares the memory for the CPU, the NPU, the GPU. All of it is shared, meaning it needs no change in software unlike Intel. Now Intel is working on a new architecture, but Apple and others are way ahead. Now let's make this really straightforward. The original Apple M1 had 16 billion transistors per chip. And you could see in that diagram, the recently launched M1 Ultra has $114 billion per chip. Now if you take into account the size of the chips, which are increasing, and the increase in the number of transistors per chip, that transistor density, that's a factor of around 6x growth in transistor density per chip in 18 months. Remember Intel, assuming the results in the two previous charts that we showed, assuming they were achievable, is running at 2x every two years, versus 6x for the competition. And AMD and Nvidia are close to that as well because they can take advantage of TSM's learning curve. So in the previous chart with Moore's Law, alive and well, Intel gets to a trillion transistors by 2030. The Apple ARM and Nvidia ecosystems will arrive at that point years ahead of Intel. That means lower costs and significantly better competitive advantage. Okay, so where does that leave Intel? The story is really not resonating with investors and hasn't for a while. On February 18th, the day after its investor meeting, the stock was off. It's rebound a little bit but investors are, you know, they're probably prudent to wait unless they have really a long term view. And you can see Intel's performance relative to some of the major competitors. You know, Pat talked about five nodes in for years. He made a big deal out of that, and he shared proof points with Alder Lake and Meteor Lake and other nodes, but Intel just delayed granite rapids last month that pushed it out from 2023 to 2024. And it told investors that we're going to have to boost spending to turn this ship around, which is absolutely the case. And that delay in chips I feel like the first disappointment won't be the last. But as we've said many times, it's very difficult, actually, it's impossible to quickly catch up in semiconductors, and Intel will never catch up without volume. So we'll leave you by iterating our scenario that could save Intel, and that's if its Foundry business can eventually win back Apple to supercharge its volume story. It's going to be tough to wrestle that business away from TSM especially as TSM is setting up shop in Arizona, with US manufacturing that's going to placate The US government. But look, maybe the government cuts a deal with Apple, says, hey, maybe we'll back off with the DOJ and FTC and as part of the CHIPS Act, you'll have to throw some business at Intel. Would that be enough when combined with other Foundry opportunities Intel could theoretically produce? Maybe. But from this vantage point, it's very unlikely Intel will gain back its true number one leadership position. If it were really paranoid back when David Floyer sounded the alarm 10 years ago, yeah, that might have made a pretty big difference. But honestly, the best we can hope for is Intel's strategy and execution allows it to get competitive volumes by the end of the decade, and this national treasure survives to fight for its leadership position in the 2030s. Because it would take a miracle for that to happen in the 2020s. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to David Floyer for his contributions to this research. Always a pleasure working with David. Stephanie Chan helps me do much of the background research for "Breaking Analysis," and works with our CUBE editorial team. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to get the word out. And thanks to SiliconANGLE's editor in chief Rob Hof, who comes up with a lot of the great titles that we have for "Breaking Analysis" and gets the word out to the SiliconANGLE audience. Thanks, guys. Great teamwork. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast wherever you listen. Just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast." You'll want to check out ETR's website @etr.ai. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You could always get in touch with me on email, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante, and comment on my LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE Insights, Powered by ETR." Have a great week. Stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone welcome to theCube special presentation of the Unstoppable Domains partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube. We have here, Cube alumni, Sandy Carter, SVP and channel chief of Unstoppable Domains. Sandy, great to see you. Congratulations on your new assignment. Exciting new company, and thanks for coming on for the showcase. >> Well, thank you, John. It's so fun to always be here with you through all my companies, it's really great. Thanks for having me. >> Well, it's been pretty amazing what's going on in the world right now. We just had the past Super Bowl which is the biggest event in the world around advertising, a lot of Web 3.0, crypto, blockchain, decentralized applications. It's here, it's mainstream. We've talked off camera many times around the shifts in technology, cloud computing. We're now with Web 3.0 and some are even saying Web 4.0. (Sandy laughs) A lot of technology programmers, people who are building new things are all in the Web 3.0 world. It's really going mainstream. So what's your view on that? I see you're in it too. You're leading it. >> I am in it too. And it's so exciting to be at the verge of the next technology trend that's out there. And I'm really excited about this one, John because this is all about ownership. It's about members not users. It's quite fascinating to be honest. >> What is Web 3.0? What is Web 3.0? Define it for us 'cause you have a good knack for putting things in the perspective. People want to know what does this Web 3.0? What does it mean? >> Okay, great. That's a great question. In fact, I have just a couple of slides because I'm a visual learner. So I don't know if you guys could pop up just a couple of slides for us. So first to me, Web 3.0 is really all about this area of ownership and that's whether it's in gaming or art or even business applications today. In fact, let me show you an example. If you go to the next slide, you will see like with Twitter, and John, you and I were there, I was the first person to onstage announce that we were going to do tweets during a major event. And of course I started on Twitter back in 2008, pretty early on. And now the valuation of Twitter is going up, I got a lot of value and I helped to attract a lot of those early users. But my value was really based on the people, building my network, not based on that monetary valuation. So I really wasn't an owner. I was a user of Twitter and helped Twitter to grow. Now, if you go with me to the next slide you'll see just a little bit more about what we're talking about here and I know this is one of your favorites. So Web 1.0 was about discovery. We discovered a lot of information. Web 2.0 was about reading the information but also contributing with that two-way dialogue with social but Web 3.0 is now all about membership, not being a user but being a member and therefore having an ownership stake in the power of what's coming. And I think this is a big differential, John, if I had to just nail one thing. This would be the big differential. >> That's awesome. And I love that slide because it goes to the progression. Most people think of web 1.0 data, the worldwide web, web pages, browsers, search engines, Web 2.0, better interfaces. You got mobile, you got social networks. And then it got messy, bots and misinformation, users of the product being used by the companies. So clearly Web 3.0 is changing all that and I think the ownership thing is interesting because you think about it, we should own our data. We should have a data wallet. We should have all that stored. So this is really at the heart of what you guys are doing. So I think that's a great way to put it. I would ask you what's your impression when people you talk to in the mainstream industry that aren't in Web 3.0 that are coming in, what's their reaction? What do they think? What do they see? >> Well, a lot of what I see from Web 2.0 folks is that they don't understand it, first of all. They're not sure about it. And I always like to say that we're in the early days of Web 3.0. So we're in that dial up phase. What was that? Was that AOL? Remember that little that they used to make? >> (laughs) You've got mail. >> Yeah, you've got mail. That's right. That's where we are today with Web 3.0. And so it is early days and I think people are looking for something they can hang their hat on. And so one of the things that we've been working on are what would be the elements of Web 3.0? And if you could take me to one more slide and this will be my last slide, but again, I'm a very visual person. I think there are really five basic assumptions that Web 3.0 really hangs its hat on. The first is decentralization, or I say at least partially decentralized because today we're building on Web 2.0 technology and that is okay. Number two is that digital identity. That identity you just talked about, John where you take your identity with you. You don't have identity for Twitter, an identity for LinkedIn, an identity for a game. I can take my identity today, play a game with it, bank with it, now move on to a Metaverse with it, the same identity. The other thing we like to say is it's built on blockchain and we know that blockchain is still making a lot of improvements but it's getting better and better and better. It's trustless, meaning there's no in between party. You're going direct, user, member to institution, if you would. So there's no bank in between, for example. And then last but not least, it's financially beneficial for the people involved. It's not just that network effect that you're getting, it's actually financially beneficial for those folks. All five of those give us that really big push towards that ownership notion. >> One thing I would point out, first of all, great insight, I would also add and and love to get your reaction to it, and this is a great lead into the news, but there's also a diversity angle because this is a global phenomenon, okay? And it's also a lot of young cultural shift happening with the younger generation, but also technologists from all ages are participating and all genders. Everything's coming together. It's a melting pot. It's a global... This is like the earth is flat moment for us. This is an interesting time. What's your reaction to them? >> Absolutely and I believe that the more diverse the community can be, the more innovative it will be. And that's been proven out by studies, by McKenzie and Deloitte and more. I think this is a moment for Web 3.0 to be very inclusive. And the more inclusive that Web 3.0 is, the bigger the innovation and the bigger the power and the bigger that dream of ownership will become a reality. So I'm 100% with you on the diversity angle for sure. >> So big new news tomorrow launching. This is super exciting. First of all, I love the acronym, but I love the news. Take us through the big announcement that you're having. >> Yeah. So John, we are so excited. We have over 55 different companies joining together to form Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, or we call it WOW3. Unstoppable WOW3. And the mission is really clear and very inclusive. The first is that we want to make Web 3.0 accessible for everyone. The second is we don't want to just say we want it accessible for everyone, we want to help with that first step. We're going to be giving away $10 million worth of domains from Unstoppable which we believe is that first step into Web 3.0. And then we're going to be action oriented. We don't want to just say we're going to help you get started or just say that Web 3.0 is accessible, we're going to launch education, networking, and events. So for example, we've got our first in person event that will occur at South by Southwest. Our first virtual event will occur on March 8th which is International Women's Day and there'll be two components of it. One is an hour YouTube Live so that people can come in and ask questions and then we've got a 24 hour Twitter space. So almost every half an hour or every hour on the hour, you're going to have these amazing women talk to you about what is DeFi? What is minting? What is Web 3.0 all about? Why gaming in Web 3.0? I mean, it's just going to be phenomenal. And in that we want to support each other as we're moving forward. This whole concept of from the very beginning, we want Web 3.0 to be diverse. >> And I want to also point out that you've got some activities on the March 8th International Women's Day but it's always every day in this community because it's a community. So this whole idea of community inclusion continues every day. Talk about those activities you're having on March 8th. Can you share what's happening on International Women's Day? >> Yeah, so first we're going to have a YouTube Live where we're going to go in detail into what is Web 3.0? What is DeFi? What is an NFT and why do they exist? Then we're going to have this 24 hour Twitter spaces where we've got all these different guest speakers from the 55 different companies that are supporting the initiative. We're also going to launch a list of the 100 most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're going to do that twice a year. And we decided John not to do the top women, but the women that are inspirational, who are pioneering the trail, who are having an impact. And so we want it to be a community. So it's 100 of the most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're also setting up a Web 3.0 Women's Speakers Bureau. So I cannot tell you, John, how many time people will call me up and they'll be like, "We really want you to speak here." And when I really get down to it, they really want me because I'm a woman that can speak about Web 3.0 but there are so many women who can do this. And so I wanted to have a place where everybody could come and see how many different diverse people we have that could speak out this. >> Yeah, and that's a great thing because there are a lot of women who can speak on this. They just have to have their voices found. So there's a lot of discovery in that format. Is there any plans to go beyond? You mentioned some workshops, what other things... Can you give another quick highlight of the things else you're doing post the event? >> Yeah, so one of the big things post the event is working with Girls in Tech, and I know you know Adriana. We are going to host on their platform. They have a platform for mentoring. We're going to host a track for Web 3.0 and during International Women's Day, we're going to auction off some NFTs that will contribute to that mentoring platform. So we've got folks like Lazy Lions and Bella and Deadheads that are going to donate NFTs. We'll auction those off and then that will enable the ongoing platform of Girls in Tech to have that mentoring that will be available for the next generation. We'll also do events, both virtually through Twitter spaces and other means as well as in-person events. I just mentioned at South by Southwest which I'm really looking forward to. We're going to have our first in-person event on March the 12th. It's going to be a brunch. A lot of the women told me, John, that they go to all these Web 3.0 or crypto events and everything's like a frat party in the evening. And they're like, "Why can't we just have a nice brunch and sit down and talk about it?" (John laughs) So at South by Southwest that is exactly what we're going to do. We're going to have a brunch and we're going to sit down and talk about it with all of these companies. And John, one of the things that's amazing to me is that we have over 55 companies that are all coming together to support this initiative. To me, that was just overwhelming. I was hoping to get about 20 companies and so far we have 55. So I'm feeling so excited and so empowered by what I see as the potential for this group. >> Yeah, well, first of all, congratulations. That's a really great thing you're doing. If you need place on theCube to post those videos, if you can get copies, we'd be glad to share them as well 'cause it's super important to get all the great minds out there that are working on Web 3.0 and have them showcased. I got to ask you now that you're in the trenches now, doing all this great work. What are some of the buzzwords that people should know about in Web 3.0? You mentioned to five main pillars as well as the ownership, the paradigm shift, we got that. What are some of the buzzword that people should know about? How would you rank those? >> Well, I think there are a couple. Let's see. I mean, one is if you think about it, what is a decentralized application? Some people call them Dapps. Dapps, you'll hear that a lot. And a decentralized application just means that you are leveraging and using multiple forms. There's no centralization of the back end. So everything is decentralized or moving around. Another is the gas fee. This comes up a lot, many people think, "Oh yeah, I put gas in my car." But a gas fee in Web 3.0 is you're actually paying for those decentralized computers that you're using. So in a centralized land, a company owns those computers. In a decentralized land, since you're using all these different assets, you've got to pay for them and that's what the gas fee is for. The gas fee is to pay for those particular types of solutions. And many of these terms that we're talking about minting, what is an NFT, we'll be explaining all of these terms on International Women's Day in that 24 hour Twitter space as well. >> We'll look forward to that Twitter space. We'll share as well. In the Web 3.0 world, when you look at it, when you look at what Unstoppable's doing, it's a paradigm shift. You laid it out there. What is the bottom line? What's the most practical thing people are doing with the domains? 'Cause it is definitely headroom in terms of capability, single sign on, you own your own data, integrating into wallet and decentralized applications and creating this new wave just like the web. More web pages, better search. More pages, the search has to get better, flywheel kicking in. What's the flywheel for Unstoppable? >> Well, I think the flywheel is the really around digital identity. It's why I came to Unstoppable because I believe that the data about you should be owned by you and that identity now travels with you. It's your wallet, it's your healthcare data, it's your educational records, and it's more. So in the future, that digital identity is going to become so much more important than it is today. And oh my gosh, John, it's going to be used in so many different ways that we can't even imagine it now. So for me, I think that digital identity and it really puts that ownership right in the hands of the members, not in anyone else's hands, a company, a government, et cetera. It puts the ownership of that data in your hands. >> I just love these big waves, these shifts, because you mentioned healthcare. Imagine an NFT is that sign on where you don't have to worry about all these HIPAA regulations. You can just say, "Here's me. Here's who I'm trusted." And they don't even know my name, but they know it's trusted. >> And everything just trickles down from there. >> That's right. >> And all the databases are called. It's all immutable. I got my private key. It unlocks so much potential in a new way. Really is amazing. >> I agree. And even just think about education. I was with Arizona State University and so my daughter took some classes at a community college and I wanted to get those classes and have those credits available for her university. How hard is that? Just to get that education and everything is paper and I had to physically sign, I had to physically mail it. It was pretty crazy. So now imagine that your digital identity contains all of your degrees, all of the skills that you've gone through all of your experiences, John. You told me before the show, all different experiences that you have that I didn't know about. I'm sure a lot of people didn't. What if you had that piece of you that would be available that you could use it at any time. >> It's locked in LinkedIn. There's a silo. Again, I'm a huge believer in silo busting going on. This new generation is not going to tolerate experiences that don't fit their mission. They want to have liberation on their data. They don't want to be the product. They want to have the value. >> That's right. >> And then broker that value for services and be able to be horizontally scalable and pop around from place to place without logging in again or having that siloed platform have the data like LinkedIn. You mentioned my resume's on basically LinkedIn, but I got webpages. I got some stories. I got videos. I'm all over the place. I need an NFT. >> And just think about LinkedIn, John. You could say that you graduated from Yale and didn't even graduate from Yale because nobody double checks that but in a wallet, if Yale actually sent that information in so you could verify it. It's that verification that's done over the blockchain, that immutable verification that I find to be very powerful. And John, we were just chatting with some companies earlier today that are Web 2.0 companies and they're like, "Oh, okay. All this is just for people? It's just for consumers?" And I was like, "No, this is for B2B. You've got to start thinking about this as a company." So for example, if you're a company today, how are you going to entice users to let you see some of their data? How are you going to look at ownership when it might be done via a dow and maybe a part of a piece of art, a part of a company, a part of real estate, like Parcel who you guys are going to talk to later on. Look at how that is going to change the world. It's going to change the way funds are raised. It's going to change the way you buy carbon credits, the way you buy art. If you're a consumer company, think about games and endgame economics. People are now playing game that money is real and your brand could be positioned. Have you thought about that? >> Yeah, I think that point you mentioned earlier about Twitter being the user, you had some personal connection, we didn't monetize it. Now with Web 3.0, you own it. One of the things that I see happening and it's coming out a lot of the Unstoppable interviews as well as what we're seeing in the marketplace is that the communities are part owners of the talent of whether it's an artist, a music artist, could be theCube team. The communities are part of the fabric of the overall group ownership. So you're starting to see you mentioned dows, okay? It's one kind of it. So as users become in control of their data and owning it, they're also saying, "Hey I want to be part of someone else." Artists are saying, " Be my stockholder. Own my company." >> That's right. >> So you start to see ownership concept not just be about the individual, it's about the groups. >> Right. And it's about companies too. So I'm hoping that as part of our Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, we do have several companies who have joined us that are what I would say, traditionally Web 2.0 companies, trying to go over the chasm into Web 3.0. And I do think it's really important that companies of all types and sizes start looking at the implication of that ownership model and what that does. So for example, it's a silly one, but a simple one. I bought a Lazy Lion. It was actually part of my signing bonus, which is also interesting. My signing bonus was an NFT and now my Lazy Lion, I now own that Lazy Lion but the artist also gets a potential percentage of that. I can put my Lazy Lion on a t-shirt. I could name a store after my Lazy Lion because now it's mine. I own it. I own that asset. And now myself and the artists are teamed together. We're like a joint venture together. It's fascinating new models and there are so many of them. After ETHDenver, I was reading some of the key takeaways. And I think the biggest key takeaway was that this space is moving so fast with so much new information that you really have to pick one or two things and just go really deep so that you really understand them versus trying to go so wide that you can't understand everything at one time and to keep up it's a mission today to keep up. >> That interesting example about the Lazy Lion, the artist in relationship with you, that's a smart contract. There's no law firm doing that. It's the blockchain. Disintermediation is happening. >> It's trustless. Back to those five things we talked about. It's on the blockchain, it's decentralized at least partially, it's a digital identity, it's financially beneficial to you and it's trustless. That's what that is. It's a smart contract. There's no in between >> Can't change. It's immutable. Can't hack. Once it's on the blockchain, you're good to go. Sandy, well, congratulations. Great to see you. Unstoppable Women of Web3, WOW3. Great acronym. We're going to support you. We're going to put you on our March 8th site we're putting together. Great to have you on. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the big news. >> Thank you so much, John. Great to be on. >> Okay, this is theCube coverage of Unstoppable Domain partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, here with Sandy Carter. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone welcome to theCube special presentation of the Unstoppable Domains partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube. We have here, Cube alumni, Sandy Carter, SVP and channel chief of Unstoppable Domains. Sandy, great to see you. Congratulations on your new assignment. Exciting new company, and thanks for coming on for the showcase. >> Well, thank you, John. It's so fun to always be here with you through all my companies, it's really great. Thanks for having me. >> Well, it's been pretty amazing what's going on in the world right now. We just had the past Super Bowl which is the biggest event in the world around advertising, a lot of Web 3.0, crypto, blockchain, decentralized applications. It's here, it's mainstream. We've talked off camera many times around the shifts in technology, cloud computing. We're now with Web 3.0 and some are even saying Web 4.0. (Sandy laughs) A lot of technology programmers, people who are building new things are all in the Web 3.0 world. It's really going mainstream. So what's your view on that? I see you're in it too. You're leading it. >> I am in it too. And it's so exciting to be at the verge of the next technology trend that's out there. And I'm really excited about this one, John because this is all about ownership. It's about members not users. It's quite fascinating to be honest. >> What is Web 3.0? What is Web 3.0? Define it for us 'cause you have a good knack for putting things in the perspective. People want to know what does this Web 3.0? What does it mean? >> Okay, great. That's a great question. In fact, I have just a couple of slides because I'm a visual learner. So I don't know if you guys could pop up just a couple of slides for us. So first to me, Web 3.0 is really all about this area of ownership and that's whether it's in gaming or art or even business applications today. In fact, let me show you an example. If you go to the next slide, you will see like with Twitter, and John, you and I were there, I was the first person to onstage announce that we were going to do tweets during a major event. And of course I started on Twitter back in 2008, pretty early on. And now the valuation of Twitter is going up, I got a lot of value and I helped to attract a lot of those early users. But my value was really based on the people, building my network, not based on that monetary valuation. So I really wasn't an owner. I was a user of Twitter and helped Twitter to grow. Now, if you go with me to the next slide you'll see just a little bit more about what we're talking about here and I know this is one of your favorites. So Web 1.0 was about discovery. We discovered a lot of information. Web 2.0 was about reading the information but also contributing with that two-way dialogue with social but Web 3.0 is now all about membership, not being a user but being a member and therefore having an ownership stake in the power of what's coming. And I think this is a big differential, John, if I had to just nail one thing. This would be the big differential. >> That's awesome. And I love that slide because it goes to the progression. Most people think of web 1.0 data, the worldwide web, web pages, browsers, search engines, Web 2.0, better interfaces. You got mobile, you got social networks. And then it got messy, bots and misinformation, users of the product being used by the companies. So clearly Web 3.0 is changing all that and I think the ownership thing is interesting because you think about it, we should own our data. We should have a data wallet. We should have all that stored. So this is really at the heart of what you guys are doing. So I think that's a great way to put it. I would ask you what's your impression when people you talk to in the mainstream industry that aren't in Web 3.0 that are coming in, what's their reaction? What do they think? What do they see? >> Well, a lot of what I see from Web 2.0 folks is that they don't understand it, first of all. They're not sure about it. And I always like to say that we're in the early days of Web 3.0. So we're in that dial up phase. What was that? Was that AOL? Remember that little that they used to make? >> (laughs) You've got mail. >> Yeah, you've got mail. That's right. That's where we are today with Web 3.0. And so it is early days and I think people are looking for something they can hang their hat on. And so one of the things that we've been working on are what would be the elements of Web 3.0? And if you could take me to one more slide and this will be my last slide, but again, I'm a very visual person. I think there are really five basic assumptions that Web 3.0 really hangs its hat on. The first is decentralization, or I say at least partially decentralized because today we're building on Web 2.0 technology and that is okay. Number two is that digital identity. That identity you just talked about, John where you take your identity with you. You don't have identity for Twitter, an identity for LinkedIn, an identity for a game. I can take my identity today, play a game with it, bank with it, now move on to a Metaverse with it, the same identity. The other thing we like to say is it's built on blockchain and we know that blockchain is still making a lot of improvements but it's getting better and better and better. It's trustless, meaning there's no in between party. You're going direct, user, member to institution, if you would. So there's no bank in between, for example. And then last but not least, it's financially beneficial for the people involved. It's not just that network effect that you're getting, it's actually financially beneficial for those folks. All five of those give us that really big push towards that ownership notion. >> One thing I would point out, first of all, great insight, I would also add and and love to get your reaction to it, and this is a great lead into the news, but there's also a diversity angle because this is a global phenomenon, okay? And it's also a lot of young cultural shift happening with the younger generation, but also technologists from all ages are participating and all genders. Everything's coming together. It's a melting pot. It's a global... This is like the earth is flat moment for us. This is an interesting time. What's your reaction to them? >> Absolutely and I believe that the more diverse the community can be, the more innovative it will be. And that's been proven out by studies, by McKenzie and Deloitte and more. I think this is a moment for Web 3.0 to be very inclusive. And the more inclusive that Web 3.0 is, the bigger the innovation and the bigger the power and the bigger that dream of ownership will become a reality. So I'm 100% with you on the diversity angle for sure. >> So big new news tomorrow launching. This is super exciting. First of all, I love the acronym, but I love the news. Take us through the big announcement that you're having. >> Yeah. So John, we are so excited. We have over 55 different companies joining together to form Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, or we call it WOW3. Unstoppable WOW3. And the mission is really clear and very inclusive. The first is that we want to make Web 3.0 accessible for everyone. The second is we don't want to just say we want it accessible for everyone, we want to help with that first step. We're going to be giving away $10 million worth of domains from Unstoppable which we believe is that first step into Web 3.0. And then we're going to be action oriented. We don't want to just say we're going to help you get started or just say that Web 3.0 is accessible, we're going to launch education, networking, and events. So for example, we've got our first in person event that will occur at South by Southwest. Our first virtual event will occur on March 8th which is International Women's Day and there'll be two components of it. One is an hour YouTube Live so that people can come in and ask questions and then we've got a 24 hour Twitter space. So almost every half an hour or every hour on the hour, you're going to have these amazing women talk to you about what is DeFi? What is minting? What is Web 3.0 all about? Why gaming in Web 3.0? I mean, it's just going to be phenomenal. And in that we want to support each other as we're moving forward. This whole concept of from the very beginning, we want Web 3.0 to be diverse. >> And I want to also point out that you've got some activities on the March 8th International Women's Day but it's always every day in this community because it's a community. So this whole idea of community inclusion continues every day. Talk about those activities you're having on March 8th. Can you share what's happening on International Women's Day? >> Yeah, so first we're going to have a YouTube Live where we're going to go in detail into what is Web 3.0? What is DeFi? What is an NFT and why do they exist? Then we're going to have this 24 hour Twitter spaces where we've got all these different guest speakers from the 55 different companies that are supporting the initiative. We're also going to launch a list of the 100 most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're going to do that twice a year. And we decided John not to do the top women, but the women that are inspirational, who are pioneering the trail, who are having an impact. And so we want it to be a community. So it's 100 of the most inspirational women of Web 3.0. We're also setting up a Web 3.0 Women's Speakers Bureau. So I cannot tell you, John, how many time people will call me up and they'll be like, "We really want you to speak here." And when I really get down to it, they really want me because I'm a woman that can speak about Web 3.0 but there are so many women who can do this. And so I wanted to have a place where everybody could come and see how many different diverse people we have that could speak out this. >> Yeah, and that's a great thing because there are a lot of women who can speak on this. They just have to have their voices found. So there's a lot of discovery in that format. Is there any plans to go beyond? You mentioned some workshops, what other things... Can you give another quick highlight of the things else you're doing post the event? >> Yeah, so one of the big things post the event is working with Girls in Tech, and I know you know Adriana. We are going to host on their platform. They have a platform for mentoring. We're going to host a track for Web 3.0 and during International Women's Day, we're going to auction off some NFTs that will contribute to that mentoring platform. So we've got folks like Lazy Lions and Bella and Deadheads that are going to donate NFTs. We'll auction those off and then that will enable the ongoing platform of Girls in Tech to have that mentoring that will be available for the next generation. We'll also do events, both virtually through Twitter spaces and other means as well as in-person events. I just mentioned at South by Southwest which I'm really looking forward to. We're going to have our first in-person event on March the 12th. It's going to be a brunch. A lot of the women told me, John, that they go to all these Web 3.0 or crypto events and everything's like a frat party in the evening. And they're like, "Why can't we just have a nice brunch and sit down and talk about it?" (John laughs) So at South by Southwest that is exactly what we're going to do. We're going to have a brunch and we're going to sit down and talk about it with all of these companies. And John, one of the things that's amazing to me is that we have over 55 companies that are all coming together to support this initiative. To me, that was just overwhelming. I was hoping to get about 20 companies and so far we have 55. So I'm feeling so excited and so empowered by what I see as the potential for this group. >> Yeah, well, first of all, congratulations. That's a really great thing you're doing. If you need place on theCube to post those videos, if you can get copies, we'd be glad to share them as well 'cause it's super important to get all the great minds out there that are working on Web 3.0 and have them showcased. I got to ask you now that you're in the trenches now, doing all this great work. What are some of the buzzwords that people should know about in Web 3.0? You mentioned to five main pillars as well as the ownership, the paradigm shift, we got that. What are some of the buzzword that people should know about? How would you rank those? >> Well, I think there are a couple. Let's see. I mean, one is if you think about it, what is a decentralized application? Some people call them Dapps. Dapps, you'll hear that a lot. And a decentralized application just means that you are leveraging and using multiple forms. There's no centralization of the back end. So everything is decentralized or moving around. Another is the gas fee. This comes up a lot, many people think, "Oh yeah, I put gas in my car." But a gas fee in Web 3.0 is you're actually paying for those decentralized computers that you're using. So in a centralized land, a company owns those computers. In a decentralized land, since you're using all these different assets, you've got to pay for them and that's what the gas fee is for. The gas fee is to pay for those particular types of solutions. And many of these terms that we're talking about minting, what is an NFT, we'll be explaining all of these terms on International Women's Day in that 24 hour Twitter space as well. >> We'll look forward to that Twitter space. We'll share as well. In the Web 3.0 world, when you look at it, when you look at what Unstoppable's doing, it's a paradigm shift. You laid it out there. What is the bottom line? What's the most practical thing people are doing with the domains? 'Cause it is definitely headroom in terms of capability, single sign on, you own your own data, integrating into wallet and decentralized applications and creating this new wave just like the web. More web pages, better search. More pages, the search has to get better, flywheel kicking in. What's the flywheel for Unstoppable? >> Well, I think the flywheel is the really around digital identity. It's why I came to Unstoppable because I believe that the data about you should be owned by you and that identity now travels with you. It's your wallet, it's your healthcare data, it's your educational records, and it's more. So in the future, that digital identity is going to become so much more important than it is today. And oh my gosh, John, it's going to be used in so many different ways that we can't even imagine it now. So for me, I think that digital identity and it really puts that ownership right in the hands of the members, not in anyone else's hands, a company, a government, et cetera. It puts the ownership of that data in your hands. >> I just love these big waves, these shifts, because you mentioned healthcare. Imagine an NFT is that sign on where you don't have to worry about all these HIPAA regulations. You can just say, "Here's me. Here's who I'm trusted." And they don't even know my name, but they know it's trusted. >> And everything just trickles down from there. >> That's right. >> And all the databases are called. It's all immutable. I got my private key. It unlocks so much potential in a new way. Really is amazing. >> I agree. And even just think about education. I was with Arizona State University and so my daughter took some classes at a community college and I wanted to get those classes and have those credits available for her university. How hard is that? Just to get that education and everything is paper and I had to physically sign, I had to physically mail it. It was pretty crazy. So now imagine that your digital identity contains all of your degrees, all of the skills that you've gone through all of your experiences, John. You told me before the show, all different experiences that you have that I didn't know about. I'm sure a lot of people didn't. What if you had that piece of you that would be available that you could use it at any time. >> It's locked in LinkedIn. There's a silo. Again, I'm a huge believer in silo busting going on. This new generation is not going to tolerate experiences that don't fit their mission. They want to have liberation on their data. They don't want to be the product. They want to have the value. >> That's right. >> And then broker that value for services and be able to be horizontally scalable and pop around from place to place without logging in again or having that siloed platform have the data like LinkedIn. You mentioned my resume's on basically LinkedIn, but I got webpages. I got some stories. I got videos. I'm all over the place. I need an NFT. >> And just think about LinkedIn, John. You could say that you graduated from Yale and didn't even graduate from Yale because nobody double checks that but in a wallet, if Yale actually sent that information in so you could verify it. It's that verification that's done over the blockchain, that immutable verification that I find to be very powerful. And John, we were just chatting with some companies earlier today that are Web 2.0 companies and they're like, "Oh, okay. All this is just for people? It's just for consumers?" And I was like, "No, this is for B2B. You've got to start thinking about this as a company." So for example, if you're a company today, how are you going to entice users to let you see some of their data? How are you going to look at ownership when it might be done via a dow and maybe a part of a piece of art, a part of a company, a part of real estate, like Parcel who you guys are going to talk to later on. Look at how that is going to change the world. It's going to change the way funds are raised. It's going to change the way you buy carbon credits, the way you buy art. If you're a consumer company, think about games and endgame economics. People are now playing game that money is real and your brand could be positioned. Have you thought about that? >> Yeah, I think that point you mentioned earlier about Twitter being the user, you had some personal connection, we didn't monetize it. Now with Web 3.0, you own it. One of the things that I see happening and it's coming out a lot of the Unstoppable interviews as well as what we're seeing in the marketplace is that the communities are part owners of the talent of whether it's an artist, a music artist, could be theCube team. The communities are part of the fabric of the overall group ownership. So you're starting to see you mentioned dows, okay? It's one kind of it. So as users become in control of their data and owning it, they're also saying, "Hey I want to be part of someone else." Artists are saying, " Be my stockholder. Own my company." >> That's right. >> So you start to see ownership concept not just be about the individual, it's about the groups. >> Right. And it's about companies too. So I'm hoping that as part of our Unstoppable Women of Web 3.0, we do have several companies who have joined us that are what I would say, traditionally Web 2.0 companies, trying to go over the chasm into Web 3.0. And I do think it's really important that companies of all types and sizes start looking at the implication of that ownership model and what that does. So for example, it's a silly one, but a simple one. I bought a Lazy Lion. It was actually part of my signing bonus, which is also interesting. My signing bonus was an NFT and now my Lazy Lion, I now own that Lazy Lion but the artist also gets a potential percentage of that. I can put my Lazy Lion on a t-shirt. I could name a store after my Lazy Lion because now it's mine. I own it. I own that asset. And now myself and the artists are teamed together. We're like a joint venture together. It's fascinating new models and there are so many of them. After ETHDenver, I was reading some of the key takeaways. And I think the biggest key takeaway was that this space is moving so fast with so much new information that you really have to pick one or two things and just go really deep so that you really understand them versus trying to go so wide that you can't understand everything at one time and to keep up it's a mission today to keep up. >> That interesting example about the Lazy Lion, the artist in relationship with you, that's a smart contract. There's no law firm doing that. It's the blockchain. Disintermediation is happening. >> It's trustless. Back to those five things we talked about. It's on the blockchain, it's decentralized at least partially, it's a digital identity, it's financially beneficial to you and it's trustless. That's what that is. It's a smart contract. There's no in between >> Can't change. It's immutable. Can't hack. Once it's on the blockchain, you're good to go. Sandy, well, congratulations. Great to see you. Unstoppable Women of Web3, WOW3. Great acronym. We're going to support you. We're going to put you on our March 8th site we're putting together. Great to have you on. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the big news. >> Thank you so much, John. Great to be on. >> Okay, this is theCube coverage of Unstoppable Domain partner showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, here with Sandy Carter. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

Upbeat Music >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Day 2 of our coverage. We've been getting a lot of really great perspectives on automation and how it is impacting, significantly, every industry. We're pleased to have, from the keynote stage, Junaid Amed, the corporate Vice President of Finance at Applied Materials. He's going to talk us through why you have a why-can't-we-automate-it-all attitude. Junaid, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >> So you have a really aggressive strategy for digital transformation automation led digital transformation. Your keynote this morning was great. It was, I just thought, strategically, it was so well thought out. And then, when you got up here before we went live, you started talking about how fast the time frame was. >> Yes. >> Give the audience an overview of the strategy, what you're aiming to do and how quickly you're expecting to see change. >> Yeah, absolutely. So when we set out, when we launched about two and a half years ago, the company had doubled in size the prior five years. We were looking for it to double again. We were honest with ourselves, with the CFO and the finance leadership team, could we support the new wave of growth? And the answer is no. Okay, what do we do? We knew we had to do something, not just more things but take a complete new view on things. That's how this whole initiative got incubated. And we took a bold approach. We said, we don't want just to cover the next five years, let's cover the next 20 years. Set ourselves up to make sure we do this right for the company and for our people. So, we basically set some very ambitious goals. Which is, the key KPI that we set at our true north is, we're going to get 50 % of finance work effort, all oriented around decision support. That's what helps move the needle for the company. Sure, we have our responsibilities to close the books, to do all the transactional stuff, to do all the reporting stuff. We will do that. But that can't be the mainstay anymore. That's just table stakes. And the business is screaming for this. It's just that we didn't have the levers and the tools to be able to do it. To pivot. But given the technological advancements, we said, "This is possible now." And that's- >> I think we have to set the table here with your industry. Because you started your journey to PA automation in 2019. >> Yes. >> You participate in one of the most challenging, if not the most challenging, industry on the planet. >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Everybody, I don't know, maybe not the insiders but everybody else missed, absolutely no, the insiders missed it too. What was the impact of the pandemic, right? And now, chips are every part of our lives. We've got this massive chip shortage. And you know, Wall Street missed it. They said, "Oh, sell Applied Materials. Sell every semiconductor company." And then they realized, "Oh wow," kind of late into the cycle, that this is like a multi-year, perhaps a decade long transition to, maybe this never ending demand, who knows? So that's the backdrop of your business. That was driving it. What was it like inside your company? >> So Dave, you know, what we could see, obviously we couldn't predict the pandemic. We could see long term growth, right? Really tangible market inflection on the back of AI big data. If you want to say where we made a big bet as a company? We went all in on AI. Right? We believed in that growth, at a time when I think not everyone was so convinced. Okay, is this going to be- How strong is this going to hit us? So, we had the benefit of going all in on AI and saying this is another big computing wave. The next big wave of computing. Coming off of mobile and social media. And Gary Dickerson, our CEO, bet the company that we're going to enable this growth. This is real. This is going to touch the whole global economy. So yes, that's a bet, a successful bet, the company made. No one could foresee what would the pandemic do but we had the good fortune of saying we were reacting to the growth, that we were committed to service. And we knew we had to get ahead of it. So we quickly organized and got finance, our organization well positioned to successfully support the company. Now, we got hit with the pandemic. Luckily for us, we're proactive and then, you know what we did? We accelerated. >> So your move to automation was an offensive move- >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Not a panic move to respond to a pandemic. >> Hundred percent. What do investors want? Operating leverage. Operating leverage. >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, right now all the models have a certain baseline. Size of company, complexity. Okay, you need a certain amount of leverage coming out of this model. The models are going to change. Those that don't change ahead of the models, they're going to play catch up. It's not a fun ride. We wanted to be ahead. >> Well, I mean, talk about operating leverage. You're a company with what? 120+ Billion dollar market cap. You've got a 20+ Billion dollar revenue and you sell extremely expensive equipment. >> Extremely. >> And then a 5X revenue multiple. That's a trailing revenue multiple. I mean that's, that's impressive. That's operating leverage. >> Yes and but the bar keeps moving. You've got to stay ahead, right? You've got to be a leader. We're a leader. We've been a leader for five decades. It's the leadership mindset, I would say, in the company and our leadership team, that really propelled us towards this. The leadership of our CFO, Dan Durn, who invested. He made a bet. No one, you know, now we're sitting here, over almost 300,000 hours automated. We didn't have the playbook when we did it. >> You created the playbook. >> We created the playbook. >> Talk to me about the appetite, because obviously aggressive leadership, bold leadership, talk to me about the appetite to be able to be able to transform so quickly. Such that when, as Dave said, you're on the offensive, such that when the pandemic came, you leveraged that as an accelerator of what you've already been doing. Because culturally, that's challenging for folks to get on board to. How did you do that? >> I have to say, it is challenging. And it's at time's it feels counter-intuitive. We were going through the pandemic. We were having a large M&A integration happening, okay and we're transforming finance. And we're a resource constrained organization. Then you tell your people, "We've got more work to do. Transformation." And you're like, "Is that the right thing to do? Isn't everyone going to leave?" But when you dig deep, you say, "How do you get mind share?" How do you, first of all, you have to get people to see the value and then you have to make sure you do it fast enough, where they want to stick around. It's counter-intuitive. "Hey, we're going to launch this new platform. It's going to take three and half years. All right everyone, we're going to do this." What happens? People are like, in-out. Okay yeah, it'll come, we'll deal with it. Then instead, you say, "Hey, we're going to transform the way we plan. Completely. Top to bottom. 10 months. We're going to do it. Here's what you're going to be at your hands- Here's what you're going to have at your disposal in 10 months, all right? Oh, by the way, we're just showing you the high level. You get to really design. What do you want?" Now, when you have credibility, street cred with your organization, and you come out and say, "I'm going to give you top to bottom agility around forecasting and you get to have input on what you really want." Now people get excited. Like, "Oh, I'm going to work 25% more but wait a second, I'm really excited about what I get at the end of 10 months." >> So, the world was betting several years ago on the consolidation of fabs. "Oh, that's bad for Applied Materials." The exact opposite happened. You know, ARM changed the model, WAYFA volume's going through the roof. Now Intel is basically following that playbook, which is wonderful, they're breaking ground in Arizona. Which is, you have these massive tailwinds behind you. So I'm interested in how you forecast that and what role automation plays in that forecasting. >> Well, if you think about it, the fundamental demand isn't changing. Capacity has to go in. People think, wait a second, so and so is going to build less or whatever, The capacity, maybe geographically, is going to get dispersed out but it still has to go in. So I think it doesn't change the fundamental demand statement. Then, how does automation play into- I just thing that the fundamental nature and pace of business is changing. For us. And our customers are going through the same. So we have to be more reactive, we have to be able to respond to their needs. That whole thing cascades down into the organization. All the way deep into finance analyst forecasting, right? So, if everyone has to work off a weekly, monthly, quarterly cadence, you're too slow. Too late. Doesn't matter how good your plan is. It's old. It's stale. We're moving into a time and era where everything happens realtime. It always happened realtime but we just never had the tools to react realtime. Now, we have realtime business performance, enterprise grade dashboards. Any minute of the day you can see what the revenue forecast is, what the margin associated with that is. Yes, when we get into the official commit cycle everything firms up but it's not the big crank, right? You're fine tuning the knobs now. Which is great. What do you want in a plan? You want greater optionality. Is there a perfect plan? Of course there isn't. What is the North Star of forecasting? Give me as much options as- viable options and then let me decide. Because there's trade-offs. There's no one perfect plan. But you were limited. It just took too long to put a plan together. So you had very small degrees of freedom around it. Viable plans. We're changing all of that. >> This might be out of your swim lane but you had a slide up today and it had the IT in the middle- >> Yes. >> So technology's fundamental. And then, you had the elephant. The Hadoop elephant in the room. So I have to ask you, you guys announced this thing earlier this year called AI to the power of X, actionable insights. I remember reading about it, it's like you're collecting data across all the estate. So I'm like, wow this is a data company. Becoming a data company. So we've been talking a lot and of course the CFO purview is the reporting and I get that. The close, daily close, virtual close, all that. But then there's this whole line-of-business data play. >> Yes. >> And I'm wondering how automation fits there. I mean, that's got to be part of the vision. >> Yeah. Now, I can't speak to the capabilities you're talking to but we are leveraging some of that infrastructure, right? We have amazing IT organization. I have to say, we within Applied, we're a latecomer. From a product, customer product standpoint, already there is so much AI work being done. So we had the benefit of leveraging some of their capabilities for finance, when we launched Agile Finance. There is a lot going on over there. I think we actually enhanced that by introducing these RPA capabilities. And we did so from partnering with, I wouldn't say partnering, IT co-piloted this with us. Fundamentally co-piloted this, okay. And now, IT is taking it to other organizations. And they're taking it to product, they're taking it to operation, they're taking it to sales. So it will have a role. Hundred percent. But they're obviously starting, over the past three to six months is when they got started. So the answer is yes, for sure but I can't speak to exactly how it plays into that specific technology. >> But you addressed the dynamic. Which is, it started in a quick wind part of the company, finance. >> Yes. >> Which is logical. That's where I first introduced RPA a decade ago. A CFO conference, right? Then that now applies to the rest of the business. They're talking about operating leverage- >> Fundamental. Yeah. Hundred percent. >> How do you get that buy-in? How do you get finance and how do you get IT to work with finance, such that IT becomes a catalyst in all these downstream reactions to get this going across the company? >> Important question. >> Well they work for you. >> They don't. >> Oh they don't. >> They don't work for us. They work for me. I'm a customer of theirs. >> Okay. >> The first person that I needed to convince that we were serious and we're going to do it is the CIO. Okay, so you ask how do you get IT bought in? Well first thing, you have to get them in the tent. This is not about, "Oh, can you go do this for me? I need this from you. Can you do that?" Too slow, okay? This RPA, especially RPA, fundamentally, is such a, it's a technology that really needs to get embedded throughout the IT operating model. So you really need IT co-piloting this with you. This is how we did it. We said we're going to learn together. This is a must have for finance. We believe strongly this is going to become a must have for the enterprise but we're going to make the investment. In that must have for the enterprise, IT has to play the roll, right? So we started this together and we learned together and they've been fundamental in our being able to get to scale in 12 months. >> How do you federate governance? Who in the organization, what part of the organization owns governance, if you will? >> Yeah. So we created, established an RPA COE. They own the governance, the policies, the processes. Then, obviously there's a role to play for the business side. So we finance a business organization to them and there's roles to play. We actually, like I showed today in the presentation, there's multiple other players across the enterprise that have to vet these automations, right? Especially in finance. We have to be SOX compliant, we have to be data privacy compliant. We set all of those processes up. So, multiple parties have to engage but engage in an efficient way. >> We're seeing the CFO role emerge. I think of you as a CFO. I mean, I just use that umbrella, emerge as an innovator. I see this all of the place now, especially in Silicon Valley. You look at a company like Snowflake, I don't know if you know Mike Scarpelli but he kind of changed the world of software in some ways. So you're seeing very innovative CFOs emerge, that are technology savvy, they understand the operating leverage, we've used that term several times today, that you can get out of technology. It just reminds me, I don't know how long ago it was when Nick Carr wrote the book Does IT Matter. It seems like technology has never been more important. Along with people and process, of course, but in terms of creating that operating leverage, it's really a key part of the equation, the playbook going forward. >> I think it is a mindset change. We're trying to drive mindset change, right? But it's also, I think, come about because I think technology has become more friendly to non IT people. I think that's a fundamental driver. All these SaaS platforms in the market place, right? What did they design for? Business users. Of course IT has a very prominent role in that whole process and supporting it and implementing it. But the target audience is business users. What was the target audience for ERP? IT. Okay. Fundamental, the technology is changing by design and you're seeing now the impact of that. Where, "Hey wait, I can do this. I can do this by myself." Okay. IT always has been and will be a very important partner. They will service your data needs. This is how we're setting up the collaboration, right? But we really want the finance users to be able to iterate, model, analyze on the fly, in the moment. And they need to do it alone. >> Self serve, yeah. >> That's it. >> Self serve in realtime. I think one of the things, you mentioned it this morning, you mentioned it on our program and one of the things we've learned in the pandemic, that realtime and access to realtime data is no longer a nice-to-have. >> Yes. >> It's really a business critical element of any industry. >> Hundred percent. >> When do you think you'll put crypto on your balance sheet? I ask all the CFOs. >> He's been asking everyone that. >> There's an easy answer. I'm not authorized to answer. Above my pay grade. >> That's a good answer. >> That's good. >> Junaid, thank you so much for joining us. Talking to us about the transformation at Applied Materials, how you're partnering with UiPath to achieve that and the aggressive strategy that you've set out and congratulations on the success of it. We'll look forward to see what's going on in the next couple years. >> Great story. >> Of course. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Day two of our coverage. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich and today we'll highlight the best cybersecurity solution. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike and Jennifer Dvorak information security architect for the State of Arizona. Thank you so much for being with me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yep, thank you. >> Perfect. Well you know obviously a really wild year with COVID and it certainly pushed a lot of boundaries. Cyber security resiliency also a hot topic as ransomware really spiked up. How have you addressed this concern and really accelerated this push with COVID-19 in the backdrop? I'd love it if either one of you would just like to jump in here. >> Well, CrowdStrike was one of our initiatives for 2020 and it was significantly increased, accelerated due to COVID. So we had to roll out in a matter of weeks when we had a matter of months previously and it really provided us the visibility that we needed for folks taking their computers home. We had no way of triaging any of our incidents when the computers were at home. So rolling out CrowdStrike as quickly as possible it gave us remote access, it gave us visibility and that was huge for our organization. >> Tina, if you could weigh in on this as well, that would be terrific. >> Sure absolutely. And you know, Jen with the State of Arizona is one of our premier customers but across the board with the 2021 global threat report that we issue each year, what we saw there was a fourfold increase in the number of intrusions. So to your point about the threat activity and it's not getting better. So what CrowdStrike is on a mission to do is stop regions and protect organizations against these bad actors so that they're, that we minimize disruptions. It's really been tremendous to see and build a ecosystem from a platform approach that started with visibility on the end point that Jen was just alluding to. >> And Jennifer, I'd love to get your insight how the public sector and the private sector can work better in tandem with each other in order to protect customers and also communities against ransomware attacks and other kinds of cybersecurity threats that we've seen coming from Russia for instance. >> Certainly so our state CISO Tim Roemer, he has definitely encouraged us to make partners with our private vendors. So that's one of his strategic initiatives and we really want partners in the private sector. We want folks that are going to come alongside us and help us with our security goals. And CrowdStrike has been one of those vendors. We don't want to just spend money and then the vendor runaway, we want somebody that's going to be with us every step of the way. We've had some incidents this past year and CrowdStrike was the first team to alert us because it was a different agency or a different part of our organization that we don't typically work with a lot. And that was really helpful because we were able to act quickly and address the issues that arose. So just having somebody that's looking out for your best interests and being a true partner is what we're really looking for. And that's the only way that we can circumvent these ransomware attacks. >> And Tina I'd love it if you'd weigh in as well. How do you see your role in this effort to protect the public evolving now in 2021? >> So I love that question and especially with the role of my role brand new in COVID interestingly enough, to create this bi-directional executive alignment with our customers and our internal teams and overall at CrowdStrike our goal, as I said is to stop breaches and it's really to bring, to minimize the frustration that comes sometimes with rolling out security tools. I've been at this a long time and tools like CrowdStrike are really game changers for security teams that are really about protecting organizations. And essentially what we do is we brought a single platform where when it, when the, when our software is deployed to an organization across their laptops, desktops, server and cloud infrastructure, we were born in the cloud kind of before it was cool and now we serve more than 11,000 customers. And that threat activity goes to a single AWS instance where we look across all of the threat activity. And then when we see activity in one area, we can protect all of our customers. That's the power of the cloud. >> Perfect and I'd love Jennifer's insights here too. What steps are you taking now to keep the public protected and the state cyber ready? >> And I like Tina's point about being born in the cloud. So State of Arizona is a cloud first state. We are also looking for solutions in the cloud, and I think by leveraging cloud solutions, we're able to be more nimble. We're able to pivot our approach to security and address anything that comes up more quickly. So being cloud first, even though it's, it wasn't embraced initially, I think that it's something that we've been driving towards and looking for more partners that support that cloud first initiative that we have. >> And Tina what's top of mind? What are some of the key initiatives that your team and teams are going to be focused on in the years ahead? What's the next phase for cybersecurity? >> Great question and we've talked quite a bit about the end point but where we're headed and really where we've invested heavily the last couple of years and we'll continue moving forward is now that we have, we've brought this game-changing visibility to our security teams on the end point of each one of the systems in their environment where we've expanded the platform to now include cloud services like I mentioned. Now include indicators of misconfigurations which are so detrimental to teams working in a hybrid cloud environment. And then we've also moved into the identity protection space. And essentially what we're doing there is the same thing we've been doing to protect workloads coming from desktops and laptops across the country and around the world and moved to a model where we're also in a zero trust principles way looking for threat activity coming in through identities, through people logging into these systems and doing the same real-time continuous monitoring and taking proactive action to protect organizations where we see malicious activity. >> Terrific, well, in light of COVID-19, we saw a big spike in ransomware and I'd love to hear specifically from Tina why do we need trusted partners rather than software vendors in this fight? >> You know, it's so important to get out in front of all of the adversaries and most recently that we've seen huge growth in the e-crime actors that are taking advantage of the tools that are unfortunately in the market today, sometimes even free that allow them to hold organizations hostage. And the reason that's so important to partner with organizations and companies like CrowdStrike, is that we've been thinking ahead and we are designed in a way to stop an individual, a breach or adversary attack from occurring but we've been watching how their adversary works and now we can see their activity very early on before they have a chance to gain a foothold in an organization's server or laptop or even a phone or a tablet. And really what we're doing is we're providing protection so that it doesn't even need to move to an analyst to do further review. We just stop it right at the gate before it causes harm. And the reason that this is so important probably is obvious, but we're about making sure that the organizations like the State of Arizona can continue on their business and without these kinds of disruptions. So we haven't designed against one particular adversary but we really designed an approach that works across them all because we've been watching so closely how they move through environments for years. And we use the power of artificial intelligence delivered from the cloud to protect against all things including ransomware. >> Right it's really an evolving process. You constantly have to be vigilant for the next threat. Now I'd love to hear how you see things change with your tech partners and providers at the moment. >> So from a CrowdStrike perspective, we aim to be absolutely the best in class for the products and services that we provide whether that's your products that you can purchase like our endpoint solutions or whether that's services like our 24/7 threat hunting teams or Falcon Complete Teams that basically serve as an extension of an organization's team. But it's absolutely critical that we move this direction and not try to be the best at everything and instead partner. So we have extensive partnerships with Zscaler and Proofpoint and so many others, Okta. I mean the list goes on and on with now hundreds. And we also have a CrowdStrike store. So once you're a customer we've reduced the friction to taking on and trying out new modules, either from us or new options that maybe you haven't considered before from our trusted partners, much like the AWS marketplace we've got the CrowdStrike store and it's a growing set of partnerships where we build those integrations. So, my prior life I was the CISO for Arizona State University most recently. And we spend an awful lot of time integrating these solutions in a CrowdStrike. We're about building those integrations so that the teams within the organizations that can get on to doing innovative things within their space, rather than having to spend all their time tying these technologies together. >> Yeah now shifting to Jennifer late last year we learned that suspected Russian hackers broke into the US government agencies including a county in Arizona. So what measures has the State of Arizona put in place now to ensure that something like that won't happen again or that at least the state is very vigilant and ready to protect citizens and the government against these threats? >> We're definitely partnering with products like or vendors like CrowdStrike. That's what we, we're looking to extend those partnerships. And not only that we're developing our information sharing program across state, local and territorial governments. So we're looking to partner with the cities, the counties. Cybersecurity is a team sport. Cybersecurity is, it takes everyone. It takes the whole state working together. And that's one of the things that we've been trying to build. So working in conjunction with the state fusion center, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, we've been working to do more indicators of compromise sharing, any intelligence that we've been gathering from these counties that maybe did have an incident or a breach. We want to make sure that the information is disseminated to everyone so that we can be stronger and protect against it. Additionally, we we're always looking for grants that we can extend so that we're able to extend our products that we use to some of the smaller cities and towns and counties so that they can leverage some of the same technologies like CrowdStrike in their environments at a fraction of the cost or paid for by a grant. >> Terrific, well, Tina how does your experience as a CrowdStrike customer now come into play in your current role? >> Well, how's it come into play? Well, I think that it makes it really easy for me to be a liaison internally and help internal teams understand what it's like to sit as a CISO or as a CIO or deputy CIO. And to understand the kinds of challenges that these teams are (indistinct) these leaders of these teams are facing as they're moving forward with their innovation agenda while making sure to make sure that they're gaining those operational efficiencies that are so important today and wowing their customers all the while, right? So I think really what I bring to it is that level of experience to make sure that the voices of our customers are heard internally and that we continue to build products and services that make sense for the needs of our customers additional capabilities. Like we just released Falcon X Recon is an example of one of our newer capabilities where we're basically looking at their deep and dark web activity and bringing that together in the single platform, single event console that we've leveraged for years now. And in highlighting that activity many, in many cases, pre breach. So before you'd ever see it hit your, in your organization's operational environment, we would detect it through that service. So, I think it's those, all those things combined. >> Terrific well, CrowdStrike won a number of key accolades this year, and I was curious, Tina what you attribute to this huge success. >> Well, I have to tell you that I've been in the security space for far too long. And what I can say is that until CrowdStrike came along, there wasn't a solution, a security solution that we could get software running on an end point that wasn't just frustrating across the board. There were conflicts with other software running or the software would work great for one platform but it wouldn't work for the other. So we really have this new approach. And I think that that's what's made us, in fact I'm sure it's certainly what made me a wildly happy customer is that staff, faculty, employees, if we hadn't told them the software was being rolled out, they wouldn't have even noticed. You know it doesn't impact the machines and it's really provided this amazing experience and bringing all that with 150 different adversary groups that we track and we take that on for the customers and just bring visibility for the immediate things they need to take action on. I think those are all of the things that got us to this point in building out this platform is going to be really amazing to see in the years to come as we expand across other areas within the security space, either developing our own or really driving partnerships to make it easier for our customers. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, I pulled up the stat here for us to examine because I think it's really important for our viewers to understand just how important cybersecurity is and how it's going to be even more important for customers and for the private citizens and public citizens. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cyber crime costs will grow by 15% per year reaching 10.5 trillion by 2025. That's just in about four years. And not only that, cyber crime will become the third largest economy in the world after the United States and China. So, I mean, it's really terrific that you're stepping up. You know just if you could both, perhaps Jennifer can go first and then Tina, what are the key lessons that you have for even the federal government to take a more proactive stance against these threats? >> Well, I think it's clear that this is a very lucrative venture, business venture. It's treated like a business venture by these criminal actors and they have a formula and it works. So I don't see that it's going to be changing anytime soon. And it's also not something that is highly sophisticated, highly technical. It's very easy. It's very much phishing, you know, users clicking on emails and vulnerabilities and environments. It's really a very easy formula that they continue to repeat. So I think until the federal government has more ways to recoup some of these ransomware payments, or we're able to stop some of these ransomware as a service products from being used, I think it's going to continue. So we're defenders so we need to make sure that we're ready for anything that comes and using products that keep us safe is really the best way and training our users. >> Terrific and Tina? >> Thank you. So we are so passionate about making sure that our customers can sleep better at night. When it comes down to tips it really comes back to the basics in many regards but the basics are sometimes really hard to do. So they sound simple, but they aren't so easy to do. And it's basics like making sure your systems are patched. Every organization has just a growing number of devices and pieces of software and infrastructure and all of those things need to be patched nearly immediately to stay out in front of today's adversaries. And Jen's right, Some are sophisticated, some are not but the reality is if we leave those windows open, we will have adversaries, oh, you know walk into our house if you will. So the basics like that also making sure that you have great backups, right? So if you do run into an instance of a ransomware where your systems are locked that you have the ability to recover quickly, being proactive and making sure that you have the partnership arrangement ahead of time is a third really important thing to do. Many organizations now have IRR retainers that they, incident response retainers that you can use proactively in years where you don't find yourself on your heels in a reactive situation but then it's there when you need it. Sometimes it's hard to find great services when there are the flood of ransomware attacks like we've seen in recent months. And then lastly, and I should have started with this 'cause it's the most important part, train your people. It's so important to make sure that security is just a culture, a part of the culture, just like you lock your car and you lock your house. Making sure that you're thinking about those things that will help keep you safe and your organization safe. >> Really excellent points. Thank you both so much for your insights. That was Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike, as well as Jennifer Dvorak, information security architect for the State of Arizona. Again, really appreciate your insights. This was a fantastic conversation with you. And that's all for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards or in this session of that. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and see you very soon. (bright music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM. Think the digital experience I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us manager of ECM solutions at auto owners insurance company, Ryan, welcome to the program. Thank you. And Michelle Christianson is here as well. VP of enterprise report management practice at end choice, Michelle. It's good to have you on the program. Thank you. Thank you. So let's, let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of and choice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about auto owners company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders, but give us an overview of auto owners insurance. >>Sure. So I don't want to said insurance is an insurance company. That's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Um, just by our name being auto owners insurance, which is how we started. Um, we write all personal lines, commercial lines and also have a life insurance company, >>So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about end choice. I know this, you guys are an IBM gold business partner, but this is end choices first time on the cubes. So give us a background. Sure, sure. Great. So in choice are an IBM gold business partner. Uh, we have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas, um, Austin, Texas, and, uh, Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM digital business automation space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped, uh, through the years. And we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM solutions. And talk to me a little bit Michelle, about how it is that you work with with, um, auto owners. >>So we assisted auto owners recently in their digital transformation journey and they were, uh, dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get for moving forward, you know, provided better customer satisfaction, um, experience, um, for their clients agents. And so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM digital business automation portfolio. Excellent client. Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about auto owners, your relationship with IBM and choice and how is it helping you to address some, the challenges in the market today? >>Sure. So I don't know if this has a long-term relationship with IBM. Um, originally starting back as we go as a mainframe customer and then, you know, more recently, um, helping us with different modern technology initiatives. Uh, they were instrumental in the nineties when we created our initial web offerings. And then more recently they've been helping us with our digital business automation, which has helped us to, um, mature our content, offering it. >>So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM. Right. And you mentioned the nineties, ah, a time when we didn't have to wear a mask on our faces. So a couple of decades it goes back. Yeah. >>Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that back, you know, back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things, >>Uh, the seventies, another good time. All right. So Michelle had talked to me a little bit about what end choices doing with IBM solutions to help auto owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said, this is a company that was founded in 1916. And I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation a lot harder than it sounds well. That's correct. Just as I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategies, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like auto owners, um, with their journey by first realizing, um, their existing, existing, digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need. And then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and process. And finally we re-invent, um, their strategic offering with modern capabilities. >>So we're focused on technologies like RPA machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure. So any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go forward. So this offers us, our clients, um, smarter and more into intuitive interfaces, creating basically a better user experience and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know, we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we reinvent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice have ha has helped auto owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern. And I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >>Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at auto owners with IBM. Um, when I started the team about seven years ago, we originally started using file NATS and data cap and case manager and content aggregator, um, as our first, um, movement from a traditional, um, platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform. And that helped us a lot to improve our business process, um, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable more recently, we've been working with Michelle and the team on our, um, migration to a content management on demand platform. And that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills, um, to our agents and customers, um, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are, um, important, um, for our customers to be able to see it to, um, engage from, with auto owners in a, in a digital era. >>So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that is that, is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents. So a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how, um, that like content manager on demand, for example, and what you're doing with ETF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >>Sure. So, uh, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management management on demand journey. Um, one is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Um, specifically some functionality around searching and searchability of our content, um, that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, um, ability to implement, uh, records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, um, as well as, um, some different options to be able to present the content, uh, to our customers and agents in a, in a better and more modern way. Um, and I'm choices role rolling that has really been, sorry, guide us on that journey, um, to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >>Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about hybrid cloud AI data, a big theme of, uh, IBM think is your, how is enChoice using hybrid cloud and AI, you mentioned some of the ways, but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like auto owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. Well, sure, sure. So, um, of course with the Calpec offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the cloud Pak for automation, um, several of those offerings are, some of them are, um, uh, built specifically to, uh, survive or to, to, um, be hosted in a hybrid environment. And as we working with auto owners, um, transforming their platforms going forward, for example, they just invested in, in a, um, a, uh, I just lost the word here. I, they just invested in a new platform mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. >>So, um, Ryan mentioned, uh, some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers and a particular, um, that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, um, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to management manage it. And of course, um, just that whole, um, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner. Um, we work with, uh, these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those? Um, it's great to take advantage of the new stuff, but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. >>And, um, so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those excellent leading edge. Ran, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, uh, sorry. Uh, an insurance company from the early 19 hundreds moving into the using container technology. I'll have stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about hybrid cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from, from your policy holders. >>Yeah, for sure. So, uh, first and foremost, um, we were a red hat open shift, uh, customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform. Um, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to, uh, move to cloud pack, um, and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. Um, at the end of last year, we updated our license thing so that we can move in that direction and we're starting to, um, deploy, um, digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform, which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability. Um, just a lot of ease of use things, um, for my team, um, to make their jobs easier, but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. Um, there's also a number of products that are in the, um, containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing, um, the same a couple, um, and those are both things that we're looking at auto owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents, um, to continue to grow the business >>Very forward-thinking uh, awesome Ryan, thanks for sharing with us. What auto insurance or auto owners insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how, how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from end choices perspective in terms of your digital transformation. Um, well we have been a hundred percent focus on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and, uh, and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey. Um, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know, helping transform our clients experience such that, you know, customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. >>So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients, we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. That is good. It sounds like the last year has been, uh, very fruitful for you. And I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM solutions, the transformation that you're both of your companies are on, and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. Thank you. Thank you for Rand Dunnings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM. Think that digital experience.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante >> The latest Arm Neoverse announcement further cements our opinion that it's architecture business model and ecosystem execution are defining a new era of computing and leaving Intel in it's dust. We believe the company and its partners have at least a two year lead on Intel and are currently in a far better position to capitalize on a major waves that are driving the technology industry and its innovation. To compete our view is that Intel needs a new strategy. Now, Pat Gelsinger is bringing that but they also need financial support from the US and the EU governments. Pat Gelsinger was just noted as asking or requesting from the EU government $9 billion, sorry, 8 billion euros in financial support. And very importantly, Intel needs a volume for its new Foundry business. And that is where Apple could be a key. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this week's weekly bond Cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis will explain why Apple could be the key to saving Intel and America's semiconductor industry leadership. We'll also further explore our scenario of the evolution of computing and what will happen to Intel if it can't catch up. Here's a hint it's not pretty. Let's start by looking at some of the key assumptions that we've made that are informing our scenarios. We've pointed out many times that we believe Arm wafer volumes are approaching 10 times those of x86 wafers. This means that manufacturers of Arm chips have a significant cost advantage over Intel. We've covered that extensively, but we repeat it because when we see news reports and analysis and print it's not a factor that anybody's highlighting. And this is probably the most important issue that Intel faces. And it's why we feel that Apple could be Intel's savior. We'll come back to that. We've projected that the chip shortage will last no less than three years, perhaps even longer. As we reported in a recent breaking analysis. Well, Moore's law is waning. The result of Moore's law, I.e the doubling of processor performance every 18 to 24 months is actually accelerating. We've observed and continue to project a quadrupling of performance every two years, breaking historical norms. Arm is attacking the enterprise and the data center. We see hyperscalers as the tip of their entry spear. AWS's graviton chip is the best example. Amazon and other cloud vendors that have engineering and software capabilities are making Arm-based chips capable of running general purpose applications. This is a huge threat to x86. And if Intel doesn't quickly we believe Arm will gain a 50% share of an enterprise semiconductor spend by 2030. We see the definition of Cloud expanding. Cloud is no longer a remote set of services, in the cloud, rather it's expanding to the edge where the edge could be a data center, a data closet, or a true edge device or system. And Arm is by far in our view in the best position to support the new workloads and computing models that are emerging as a result. Finally geopolitical forces are at play here. We believe the U S government will do, or at least should do everything possible to ensure that Intel and the U S chip industry regain its leadership position in the semiconductor business. If they don't the U S and Intel could fade to irrelevance. Let's look at this last point and make some comments on that. Here's a map of the South China sea in a way off in the Pacific we've superimposed a little pie chart. And we asked ourselves if you had a hundred points of strategic value to allocate, how much would you put in the semiconductor manufacturing bucket and how much would go to design? And our conclusion was 50, 50. Now it used to be because of Intel's dominance with x86 and its volume that the United States was number one in both strategic areas. But today that orange slice of the pie is dominated by TSMC. Thanks to Arm volumes. Now we've reported extensively on this and we don't want to dwell on it for too long but on all accounts cost, technology, volume. TSMC is the clear leader here. China's president Xi has a stated goal of unifying Taiwan by China's Centennial in 2049, will this tiny Island nation which dominates a critical part of the strategic semiconductor pie, go the way of Hong Kong and be subsumed into China. Well, military experts say it was very hard for China to take Taiwan by force, without heavy losses and some serious international repercussions. The US's military presence in the Philippines and Okinawa and Guam combined with support from Japan and South Korea would make it even more difficult. And certainly the Taiwanese people you would think would prefer their independence. But Taiwanese leadership, it ebbs and flows between those hardliners who really want to separate and want independence and those that are more sympathetic to China. Could China for example, use cyber warfare to over time control the narrative in Taiwan. Remember if you control the narrative you can control the meme. If you can crawl the meme you control the idea. If you control the idea, you control the belief system. And if you control the belief system you control the population without firing a shot. So is it possible that over the next 25 years China could weaponize propaganda and social media to reach its objectives with Taiwan? Maybe it's a long shot but if you're a senior strategist in the U S government would you want to leave that to chance? We don't think so. Let's park that for now and double click on one of our key findings. And that is the pace of semiconductor performance gains. As we first reported a few weeks ago. Well, Moore's law is moderating the outlook for cheap dense and efficient processing power has never been better. This slideshows two simple log lines. One is the traditional Moore's law curve. That's the one at the bottom. And the other is the current pace of system performance improvement that we're seeing measured in trillions of operations per second. Now, if you calculate the historical annual rate of processor performance improvement that we saw with x86, the math comes out to around 40% improvement per year. Now that rate is slowing. It's now down to around 30% annually. So we're not quite doubling every 24 months anymore with x86 and that's why people say Moore's law is dead. But if you look at the (indistinct) effects of packaging CPU's, GPU's, NPUs accelerators, DSPs and all the alternative processing power you can find in SOC system on chip and eventually system on package it's growing at more than a hundred percent per annum. And this means that the processing power is now quadrupling every 24 months. That's impressive. And the reason we're here is Arm. Arm has redefined the core process of model for a new era of computing. Arm made an announcement last week which really recycle some old content from last September, but it also put forth new proof points on adoption and performance. Arm laid out three components and its announcement. The first was Neoverse version one which is all about extending vector performance. This is critical for high performance computing HPC which at one point you thought that was a niche but it is the AI platform. AI workloads are not a niche. Second Arm announced the Neoverse and two platform based on the recently introduced Arm V9. We talked about that a lot in one of our earlier Breaking Analysis. This is going to performance boost of around 40%. Now the third was, it was called CMN-700 Arm maybe needs to work on some of its names, but Arm said this is the industry's most advanced mesh interconnect. This is the glue for the V1 and the N2 platforms. The importance is it allows for more efficient use and sharing of memory resources across components of the system package. We talked about this extensively in previous episodes the importance of that capability. Now let's share with you this wheel diagram underscores the completeness of the Arm platform. Arms approach is to enable flexibility across an open ecosystem, allowing for value add at many levels. Arm has built the architecture in design and allows an open ecosystem to provide the value added software. Now, very importantly, Arm has created the standards and specifications by which they can with certainty, certify that the Foundry can make the chips to a high quality standard, and importantly that all the applications are going to run properly. In other words, if you design an application, it will work across the ecosystem and maintain backwards compatibility with previous generations, like Intel has done for years but Arm as we'll see next is positioning not only for existing workloads but also the emerging high growth applications. To (indistinct) here's the Arm total available market as we see it, we think the end market spending value of just the chips going into these areas is $600 billion today. And it's going to grow to 1 trillion by 2030. In other words, we're allocating the value of the end market spend in these sectors to the marked up value of the Silicon as a percentage of the total spend. It's enormous. So the big areas are Hyperscale Clouds which we think is around 20% of this TAM and the HPC and AI workloads, which account for about 35% and the Edge will ultimately be the largest of all probably capturing 45%. And these are rough estimates and they'll ebb and flow and there's obviously some overlap but the bottom line is the market is huge and growing very rapidly. And you see that little red highlighted area that's enterprise IT. Traditional IT and that's the x86 market in context. So it's relatively small. What's happening is we're seeing a number of traditional IT vendors, packaging x86 boxes throwing them over the fence and saying, we're going after the Edge. And what they're doing is saying, okay the edge is this aggregation point for all these end point devices. We think the real opportunity at the Edge is for AI inferencing. That, that is where most of the activity and most of the spending is going to be. And we think Arm is going to dominate that market. And this brings up another challenge for Intel. So we've made the point a zillion times that PC volumes peaked in 2011. And we saw that as problematic for Intel for the cost reasons that we've beat into your head. And lo and behold PC volumes, they actually grew last year thanks to COVID and we'll continue to grow it seems for a year or so. Here's some ETR data that underscores that fact. This chart shows the net score. Remember that's spending momentum it's the breakdown for Dell's laptop business. The green means spending is accelerating and the red is decelerating. And the blue line is net score that spending momentum. And the trend is up and to the right now, as we've said this is great news for Dell and HP and Lenovo and Apple for its laptops, all the laptops sellers but it's not necessarily great news for Intel. Why? I mean, it's okay. But what it does is it shifts Intel's product mix toward lower margin, PC chips and it squeezes Intel's gross margins. So the CFO has to explain that margin contraction to wall street. Imagine that the business that got Intel to its monopoly status is growing faster than the high margin server business. And that's pulling margins down. So as we said, Intel is fighting a war on multiple fronts. It's battling AMD in the core x86 business both PCs and servers. It's watching Arm mop up in mobile. It's trying to figure out how to reinvent itself and change its culture to allow more flexibility into its designs. And it's spinning up a Foundry business to compete with TSMC. So it's got to fund all this while at the same time propping up at stock with buybacks Intel last summer announced that it was accelerating it's $10 billion stock buyback program, $10 billion. Buy stock back, or build a Foundry which do you think is more important for the future of Intel and the us semiconductor industry? So Intel, it's got to protect its past while building his future and placating wall street all at the same time. And here's where it gets even more dicey. Intel's got to protect its high-end x86 business. It is the cash cow and funds their operation. Who's Intel's biggest customer Dell, HP, Facebook, Google Amazon? Well, let's just say Amazon is a big customer. Can we agree on that? And we know AWS is biggest revenue generator is EC2. And EC2 was powered by microprocessors made from Intel and others. We found this slide in the Arm Neoverse deck and it caught our attention. The data comes from a data platform called lifter insights. The charts show, the rapid growth of AWS is graviton chips which are they're custom designed chips based on Arm of course. The blue is that graviton and the black vendor A presumably is Intel and the gray is assumed to be AMD. The eye popper is the 2020 pie chart. The instant deployments, nearly 50% are graviton. So if you're Pat Gelsinger, you better be all over AWS. You don't want to lose this customer and you're going to do everything in your power to keep them. But the trend is not your friend in this account. Now the story gets even gnarlier and here's the killer chart. It shows the ISV ecosystem platforms that run on graviton too, because AWS has such good engineering and controls its own stack. It can build Arm-based chips that run software designed to run on general purpose x86 systems. Yes, it's true. The ISV, they got to do some work, but large ISV they have a huge incentives because they want to ride the AWS wave. Certainly the user doesn't know or care but AWS cares because it's driving costs and energy consumption down and performance up. Lower cost, higher performance. Sounds like something Amazon wants to consistently deliver, right? And the ISV portfolio that runs on our base graviton and it's just going to continue to grow. And by the way, it's not just Amazon. It's Alibaba, it's Oracle, it's Marvell. It's 10 cents. The list keeps growing Arm, trotted out a number of names. And I would expect over time it's going to be Facebook and Google and Microsoft. If they're not, are you there? Now the last piece of the Arm architecture story that we want to share is the progress that they're making and compare that to x86. This chart shows how Arm is innovating and let's start with the first line under platform capabilities. Number of cores supported per die or, or system. Now die is what ends up as a chip on a small piece of Silicon. Think of the die as circuit diagram of the chip if you will, and these circuits they're fabricated on wafers using photo lithography. The wafers then cut up into many pieces each one, having a chip. Each of these pieces is the chip. And two chips make up a system. The key here is that Arm is quadrupling the number of cores instead of increasing thread counts. It's giving you cores. Cores are better than threads because threads are shared and cores are independent and much easier to virtualize. This is particularly important in situations where you want to be as efficient as possible sharing massive resources like the Cloud. Now, as you can see in the right hand side of the chart under the orange Arm is dramatically increasing the amount of capabilities compared to previous generations. And one of the other highlights to us is that last line that CCIX and CXL support again Arm maybe needs to name these better. These refer to Arms and memory sharing capabilities within and between processors. This allows CPU's GPU's NPS, et cetera to share resources very often efficiently especially compared to the way x86 works where everything is currently controlled by the x86 processor. CCIX and CXL support on the other hand will allow designers to program the system and share memory wherever they want within the system directly and not have to go through the overhead of a central processor, which owns the memory. So for example, if there's a CPU, GPU, NPU the CPU can say to the GPU, give me your results at a specified location and signal me when you're done. So when the GPU is finished calculating and sending the results, the GPU just signals the operation is complete. Versus having to ping the CPU constantly, which is overhead intensive. Now composability in that chart means the system it's a fixed. Rather you can programmatically change the characteristics of the system on the fly. For example, if the NPU is idle you can allocate more resources to other parts of the system. Now, Intel is doing this too in the future but we think Arm is way ahead. At least by two years this is also huge for Nvidia, which today relies on x86. A major problem for Nvidia has been coherent memory management because the utilization of its GPU is appallingly low and it can't be easily optimized. Last week, Nvidia announced it's intent to provide an AI capability for the data center without x86 I.e using Arm-based processors. So Nvidia another big Intel customer is also moving to Arm. And if it's successful acquiring Arm which is still a long shot this trend is only going to accelerate. But the bottom line is if Intel can't move fast enough to stem the momentum of Arm we believe Arm will capture 50% of the enterprise semiconductor spending by 2030. So how does Intel continue to lead? Well, it's not going to be easy. Remember we said, Intel, can't go it alone. And we posited that the company would have to initiate a joint venture structure. We propose a triumvirate of Intel, IBM with its power of 10 and memory aggregation and memory architecture And Samsung with its volume manufacturing expertise on the premise that it coveted in on US soil presence. Now upon further review we're not sure the Samsung is willing to give up and contribute its IP to this venture. It's put a lot of money and a lot of emphasis on infrastructure in South Korea. And furthermore, we're not convinced that Arvind Krishna who we believe ultimately made the call to Jettisons. Jettison IBM's micro electronics business wants to put his efforts back into manufacturing semi-conductors. So we have this conundrum. Intel is fighting AMD, which is already at seven nanometer. Intel has a fall behind in process manufacturing which is strategically important to the United States it's military and the nation's competitiveness. Intel's behind the curve on cost and architecture and is losing key customers in the most important market segments. And it's way behind on volume. The critical piece of the pie that nobody ever talks about. Intel must become more price and performance competitive with x86 and bring in new composable designs that maintain x86 competitive. And give the ability to allow customers and designers to add and customize GPU's, NPUs, accelerators et cetera. All while launching a successful Foundry business. So we think there's another possibility to this thought exercise. Apple is currently reliant on TSMC and is pushing them hard toward five nanometer, in fact sucking up a lot of that volume and TSMC is maybe not servicing some other customers as well as it's servicing Apple because it's a bit destructive, it is distracted and you have this chip shortage. So Apple because of its size gets the lion's share of the attention but Apple needs a trusted onshore supplier. Sure TSMC is adding manufacturing capacity in the US and Arizona. But back to our precarious scenario in the South China sea. Will the U S government and Apple sit back and hope for the best or will they hope for the best and plan for the worst? Let's face it. If China gains control of TSMC, it could block access to the latest and greatest process technology. Apple just announced that it's investing billions of dollars in semiconductor technology across the US. The US government is pressuring big tech. What about an Apple Intel joint venture? Apple brings the volume, it's Cloud, it's Cloud, sorry. It's money it's design leadership, all that to the table. And they could partner with Intel. It gives Intel the Foundry business and a guaranteed volume stream. And maybe the U S government gives Apple a little bit of breathing room and the whole big up big breakup, big tech narrative. And even though it's not necessarily specifically targeting Apple but maybe the US government needs to think twice before it attacks big tech and thinks about the long-term strategic ramifications. Wouldn't that be ironic? Apple dumps Intel in favor of Arm for the M1 and then incubates, and essentially saves Intel with a pipeline of Foundry business. Now back to IBM in this scenario, we've put a question mark on the slide because maybe IBM just gets in the way and why not? A nice clean partnership between Intel and Apple? Who knows? Maybe Gelsinger can even negotiate this without giving up any equity to Apple, but Apple could be a key ingredient to a cocktail of a new strategy under Pat Gelsinger leadership. Gobs of cash from the US and EU governments and volume from Apple. Wow, still a long shot, but one worth pursuing because as we've written, Intel is too strategic to fail. Okay, well, what do you think? You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or comment on my LinkedIn post. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts so please subscribe wherever you listen. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey analysis. And I want to thank my colleague, David Floyer for his collaboration on this and other related episodes. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Good afternoon and welcome back to our audience here in Asia pacific This is Sandeep again uh from my home studio in Singapore, I hope you found the session to be insightful. I thought it was a key takeaway in terms of how you know the the world is going through a massive transformation, driven by underpinning the workload optimized solutions around up by round of security, 3 60 degree security. As Neil Mcdonald talked about underpinned by the scale, you know, whether you're on exa scale, compute public cloud or on the edge and that's kind of underpinning the digital transformation that our customers are going to go through. I have two special guests with me. Uh let me just quickly introduce them Santos restaurant martin who uh is the Managing director for intel in A P. K. And Dorinda Kapoor, Managing Director for HB Initial pacific So, good afternoon, both you gentlemen. >>Good afternoon. >>So Santos. My first question is to you, first of all, a comment, you know, the passion at which uh, pad Kill Singer talked through the four superpowers. That was amazing. You know, I could see that passion comes through the screen. You know, I think everybody in the audience could relate with that. We are like, you know, as you know, on the words of the launch, the gentle plus by power, but it's isolate processor from intel, what are you seeing and what do our customers should expect improvements, especially with regard to the business outcomes. >>Yeah, So first of all, thank you so much for having me in this session and, and as you said, Sandeep, I mean, you could really see how energized we are. And you heard that from pad as well. Uh, so we launched the third gen, intel, Xeon processors or isolate, you know about a couple of weeks ago and I'm sure, you know, there's lots of benefits that you get in these new products. But I thought what I'll do is I'll try and summarize them in three key buckets. The first one is about the performance benefits that these new products bring in. The 2nd 1 is the value of platforms and I think the last pieces about the partnerships and how it makes deployment really easy and simple for our customers. Let me start with the first one which is about performance and the and the big jump that we're staying. It's about a 46% performance, increased generation over generation. It's flexible, it's optimized performance from the edge to the cloud where you would see about 1.5 to 1.7 X improvements on key war clouds like the cloud five G I O D HPC and AI that are so critical all around us. It's probably the only data center processor that has built in A I acceleration that helps with faster analytics. It's got security optimist on intel SGX that basically gives you a secure on cliff when when sensitive data is getting transacted and it also has crypto acceleration that reduces any performance impact because of the pervasive encryption that we have all around us. Now The second key benefit is about platform and if you remember when we launch sky lake in 2017, we laid out a strategy that said that we are here to help customers >>move, >>store and process data. So it's not just the CPU that we announced with the third genitals, jOHn Announcements. We also announce products like the obtained persistent memory, 200 cds That gives you about a 32 higher memory bandwidth and six terabytes of memory capacity on stock. It the obtain S S D S, the intel internet, 800 cities adapter that gives you about 200 Gbps per port, which means you can move data much more faster and you have the intellectual X F P G s that gives you about a double the better fabric performance for what? Which means if there's key workloads that you want to go back and offloaded to a to a steak or a specific uh CPU then you have the F P G s that can really help you there Now. What does the platform do for our customers? It helps them build higher application and system level performance that they can all benefit from the last b which is the partnerships area is a critical one because we've had decades of experience of solution delivery with a broad ecosystem and with partners like HP and we build elements like the Intel select solution and the market ready solution that makes it so much more easier for our customers to deploy with Over 50 million Xeon scalable processes that is shipped around the world. A billion Xeon cores that are powering the cloud since 2013 customers have really a proven solution that they can work with. So in summary, I want you to remember the three key piece that can really >>help you be >>successful with these new products, the performance uplifted, you get generation over generation, the platform benefits. So it's not just the CPU but it's things around that that makes the system and the application work way better. And then the partnerships that give you peace of mind because you can go deploy proven solutions that you can go and implement in your organization and serve your customers better. >>Thanks. Thanks thanks and Tosha for clearly outlining, you know, the three PS and kind of really resonates well. Um, so let me just uh turn over you know, to Dorinda there in the hot, you know, there's a lot of new solutions, you're our new treaties that santos talked about security, you get a lot of performance benefits and yet our customers have to go through a massive amount of change from a digital transformation perspective in order that they take all the advantages in state competitive. We're using HP Iran addressing the needs for the challenges of our customers and how we really helping them accelerate their transformation journey. >>Yeah, sure. Sandeep, thanks a lot for the question. And you are right. Most of the businesses actually need to go uh digital transformation in order to stay relevant in the current times. And in fact actually COVID-19 has further accelerated the pace of digital transformation for uh most of our customers. And actually the digital transformation is all about delivering differentiated experiences and outcomes at the age by converting data collected from multiple different sources to insights and actions. So we actually an HP believe that enterprise of the future is going to be eight centric data driven and cloud enabled And with our strategy of providing H2 cloud platform and having a complete portfolio of uh software, networking computer and the storage solutions both at the age and court uh to of course collect, transmit secure, analyze and store data. I believe we are in the best position to help our customers start and execute on their transformation journey. Now reality is various enterprises are at different stages of their transformation journey. You know, uh we in HP are able to help our customers who are at the early stage or just starting the transformation journey to to help build their transformation broad maps with the help of our advisory teams and uh after that helped them to execute on the same with our professional services team. While for the customers who are already midway in the transformation journey, we have been helping them to differentiate themselves by delivering workload optimized solutions which provide latency, flexibility and performance. They need to turn data into insights and innovations to help their business. Now, speaking of the workload optimized solutions, HP has actually doubled down in this area with the help of our partners like Intel, which powers our latest Gentlemen plus platform. This brings more compute power, memory and storage capacity which our customers need as they process more data and solve more complex challenges within their business. >>Thank you. Thanks. And er in there I think that's really insightful. Hopefully you know our customer base, I will start joined in here, can hear that and take advantage of you know, how HP is helping you know, fast track the exploration. I come back to you something you don't like during the talk about expanding capacities and we saw news about you know Intel invest $20 billion dollars or so, something like that in terms of you know, adding capacities or manufacturing. So I'd like to hear from your perspective, you know how this investments which intel is putting is a kind of a game changer, how you're shaping the industry as we move forward. >>Yeah, I mean as we all know, I think there's accelerated demand for semiconductors across the world digitization especially in an environment that we're that we're going through has really made computing pervasive and it's it's becoming a foundation of every industry and our society, the world just needs more semiconductors. Intel is in a unique position to rise to that occasion and meet the growing demand for semiconductors given our advanced manufacturing scale that we have. So the intel foundry services and the that you mentioned is is part of the Intel's new I. D. M. Torrado strategy that Bad announced which is a differentiated winning formula that will really deliver the new era of innovation, manufacturing and product leadership. We will expand our manufacturing capacity as you mentioned with that 20 billion investments and building to fabs in Arizona. But there's more to come in the year ahead and these fans will support the expanding requirements of our current products and also provide committed capacity for our foundry customers. Our foundry customers will also be able to leverage our leading edge process, the treaty packaging technology, a world class I. P. Portfolio. So >>I'm really really >>excited. I think it's a truly exciting time for our industry. The world requires more semiconductors and Intel is stepping in to help build the same. >>Fantastic, fantastic. Thank you. Some potion is really heartening to know and we really cherish the long partnership, HP and Intel have together. I look forward that you know with this gentleman plus launch and the partnership going forward. You know, we have only motivation and work together. Really appreciate your taking the time and joining and thank you very much for joining us. >>Thank you. >>Thanks. >>Okay, so with that I will move on to our second segment and in white, another special guest and this is Pete Chambers who is the managing director for A N D N A P K. Good afternoon Pete. You can hear us Well >>I can. Thank you. Sandy, Great to be >>here. Good and thanks for joining me. Um I thought I just opened up, you know, like a comment around the 19 world Records uh, am D. N. H. We have together and it's a kind of a testament to the joint working model and relationship and the collaboration. And so again, really thank you for the partnership. We have any change. Uh, let me just quickly get to the first question. You know, when it comes to my mind listening over to what Antonio and Liza were discussing, you know, they're talking about there's a huge amount of flow of data. You know, the technology and the compute needs to be closer to where the data is being generated and how is A. M. D. You know, helping leverage some of those technologies to bring feature and benefits and driving outcome for customers here in asia. >>Yeah, as lisa mentioned, we're now in a high performance computing mega cycle driven by cloud computing, digital transformation five DNA. Which means that everyone needs and wants more computer IDC predicts that by 20 23/65 percent of the impact GDP will be digitized. So there's an inflection coming with digital transformation at the fall, businesses are ever increasingly looking for trusted partners like HP and HP and and to help them address and adapt to these complex emerging technologies while keeping their IT infrastructure highly efficient, you know, and is helping enable this transformation by bringing leadership performance such as high court densities, high PC and increased I. O. But at the same time offering the best efficiency and performance for what all third gen Epic. CPU support 100 and 28 lanes of superfast PC for connectivity to four terabytes of memory and multiple layers of security. You know, we've heard from our customers that security continues to be a key consideration, you know? And he continues to listen. And with third gen, Epic, we're providing a multitude of security features such as secure root of trust at the bios level which we work very closely with HP on secure encrypted virtualization, secure memory encryption and secure nested paging to really giving the customers confidence when designing Epic. We look very closely at the key workloads that our customers will be looking to enable. And we've designed Epic from the ground up to deliver superior experience. So high performance computing is growing in this region and our leadership per socket core density of up to 64 cause along with leading IO and high memory bandwidth provides a compelling solution to help solve customers most complex computational problems faster. New HP Apollo 6500 and 10 systems featuring third gen, Epic are also optimist for artificial intelligence capabilities to improve training and increased accuracy and results. And we also now support up to eight and instinct accelerators. In each of these systems, hyper converged infrastructure continues to gain momentum in today's modern data center and our superior core density helps deliver more VMS per CPU supported by a multitude of security virtualization features to provide peace of mind and works very closely with industry leaders in HD like HP but also Nutanix and VM ware to help simplify the customers infrastructure. And in recent times we've seen video. I have a resurgence as companies have looked to empower their remote employee remote employees. Third gen, Epic enables more video sessions per CPU providing a more cost optimized solution, simply put Epics higher core density per CPU means customers need fewer service. That means less space required, lower power and cooling expenditure and as a result, a tangibly lower total cost of ownership add to this the fact, as you mentioned that Andy Epic with HP of 19 world records across virtualization, energy efficiency, decision support, database workloads, etc. And service side java. And it all adds up to a very strong value proposition to encourage Cdos to embark on their next upgrade cycle with HP and Epic >>Interstate. Thank you Peter and really quite insightful. And I've just done that question over to Narendra Pete talked about great new technologies, new solution, new areas that are going to benefit from these technology enhancements at the same time. You know, if I'm a customer, I look at every time we talk about technology, you know, you need to invest and where is you know, the bigger concern for customers always wears this money will come from. So I want to uh, you know, uh, the if you share your insights, how is actually helping customers to be able to implement these technology solutions, giving them a financial flexibility so that they can drive business outcomes. >>Yes, and the very important point, you know, from how HP is able to help our customers from their transformation. Now, reality is that most of the traditional enterprises are being challenged by this new digital bond businesses who have no doubt of funding and very low expectation of profitability. But in reality, majority of the capital of these traditional enterprises has uh tied up in their existing businesses as they do need to keep current operations running while starting their digital transformation at the same time. This of course creates real challenges and funding their transformation. Now with HP, with our Green Lake Cloud services, we are able to help customers fund their transformation journey. Were instead of buying up front, customers pay only for what they consume as the scale. We are not only able to offer flexible consumption model for new investments but are also able to help our customers, you know, for monetize their capital, which is tied up in the old ICT infrastructure because we can buy back that old infrastructure and convert that into conception of frank. So while customers can continue to use those assets to run their current business and reality is HIV is the leader in the this as a service space and probably the only vendor to be able to offer as a service offering for all of our portfolio. Uh, if you look at the ideas prediction, 70 of the applications are not ready for public cloud and will continue to run in private environments in addition. And everybody talked about the beef for a I and you know, HPC as well as the edge and more and more workloads are actually moving to the edge where the public cloud will have for less and less a role to play. But when you look at the customers, they are more and more looking for a cloud, like business model for all the workloads, uh, that they're running outside the public cloud. Now, with our being like offering, we are able to take away all the complexity from customers, allowing them to run the workloads wherever they want. That means that the edge in the data center or in the cloud and consume in the way they want. In other words, we're able to provide cloud, like experience anytime, anywhere to our customers. And of course, all these Green Lake offerings are powered by our latest compute capabilities that HP has to offer. >>Thank you. Thank you, surrender. That's really, really, very insightful. I have a minute or two, so let me try to squeeze another question from your feet, you know, MD is just now introduced the third generation of epics and congratulations on that. How are you seeing that? Excellent. Helping you accelerate in this growth, in the impact? Uh, you know, the geography as as such. >>Sure, great question. And as I mentioned, you know, third gen Epic with me and and once again delivers industry leading solutions, bending the curve on performance efficiency and TCO helping more than ever to deliver along with HP the right technologies for today and tomorrow. You know, in the service space, it's not just about what you can offer today. You need to be able to predictably deliver innovation over the long term. And we are committed to doing just that, you know, and strategy is to focus on the customer. We continue to see strong growth both globally and in a pack in HPC cloud and Web tech manufacturing, Fc telco and public and government sectors are growth plan is focused on getting closer to our customers directly, engaging with HP and our partners and the end customer to help guide them on the best solution and assist them in solving their computing pain points cost effectively. A recent example of this is our partnership with palsy supercomputing center in Australia, where HP and M. D will be helping to provide some 200,000 cause across 1600 nodes and over 750 radio on instinct accelerators empowering scientists to solve today's most challenging problems. We have doubled ourselves and F8 teams in the region over the past year and will continue to invest in additional customer facing sales and technical people through 2021, you know, and has worked very closely with HP to co design and co developed the best technologies for our customers needs. We joined forces over seven years ago to prepare for the first generation of Epic at launch and you fast forward to today and it's great to see that HP now has a very broad range of Andy Epic servers spanning from the edge two extra scale. So we are truly excited about what we can offer the market in partnership with HP and feel that we offer a very strong foundation of differentiation for our channel partners to address their customers need to accelerate accelerate their digital transformation. Thank you. Sandy, >>thank you. Thanks Peter. And really it's been amazing partnering with the NDP here and thanks for your sponsorship on that. And together we want to work with you to create another 19 world records right from here in the issue. Absolutely. So with that we are coming to the end of the event. Really thanks for coming pete and to our audience here because the pig is being a great a couple of hours. I hope you all found these sessions very, very insightful. You heard from our worldwide experts as to where, you know, divorce, moving in terms of the transformation, what your hp is bringing to our compute workload optimized solutions which are going to go from regardless of what scale of computing you're using and wrapped around 3 60 security and then offer truly as a service experience. But before you drop off, I would like to request you to please scan the QR code you see on your screen and fill in the feedback form we have, you know, lucky draw for some $50 worth of vultures for the five lucky winners today. So please click up your phone and, you know, spend a minute or two and give us a feedback and thank you very much again for this wonderful day. And I wish everybody a great day. Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us, Manager of ECM Solutions at Auto-Owners Insurance Company, Ryan, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. And Michelle Christensen is here as well, VP of Enterprise Report Management Practice at enChoice, Michelle, it's good to have you on the program. >> Thank you. Thank you. So let's, Ryan let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of enChoice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about Auto-Owners Company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders but give us an overview of Auto-Owners Insurance. >> Sure. So Auto-Owners Insurance is an insurance company that's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Despite our name being Auto-Owners Insurance, which is how we started, we write all personal lines, commercial lines, and also have a life insurance company. >> So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about enChoice. I know this, you guys are an IBM Gold Business Partner but this is enChoice's first time on the Cube, so give us a background. >> Sure, sure, great. So enChoice are an IBM Gold Business Partner. We have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas of Austin, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton, Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM Digital Business Automation Space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped through the years and we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM Solutions. >> And talk to me a little bit Michelle about how it is that you work with with Auto-Owners. >> So we assisted Auto-Owners recently in their digital transformations journey and they were dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get moving forward, you know provide a better customer satisfaction experience for their client's agents, and so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on-demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM Digital Business Automation Portfolio. >> Excellent, Ryan Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. >> Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about Auto-Owners, your relationship with IBM and enChoice and how is it helping you to address some of the challenges in the market today? >> Sure. So Auto-Owners has a long-term relationship with IBM originally starting back years ago as a mainframe customer and then, you know more recently helping us with different modern technology initiatives. They were instrumental in the nineties when we redid our initial web offerings, and then more recently they've been helping us with our Digital Business Automation which has helped us to mature our content offering at Owners. >> So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM, Ryan, and then you mentioned the nineties at a time when we didn't have to wear masks on our faces. (laughing) So a couple of decades it goes back, yeah? >> Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that, that, you know back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things. >> The seventies, another good time. (laughing) All right. So Michelle, talk to me a little bit about what enChoice is doing with IBM Solutions to help Auto-Owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said this is a company that was founded in 1916, and I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation. It's a lot harder than it sounds. >> Well, that's correct. Yes. As I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategy, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like Auto-Owners with their journey, by first realizing their existing digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need, and then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and processizations and finally we re-invent their strategic offering with modern capabilities. So we're focused on technologies like RPA, machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure, so any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go for it. So this offers us, our clients smarter and more intuitive interfaces creating basically a better user experience, and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. >> Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we re-invent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice has helped Auto-Owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern, and I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >> Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at Auto-Owners with IBM. When I started the team about seven years ago we originally started using file NATS and data cap, and case manager, and content aggregator as our first movement from a traditional platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform, and that helped us a lot to improve our business process, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable. More recently, we've been working with Michelle and the enChoice team on our migration to a content management on-demand platform, and that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills to our agents and customers, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are important for our customers to be able to see it, to engage with Auto-Owners in a, in a digital era. >> So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that, is that is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents, so a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how that like content manager on-demand, for example and what you're doing with ECF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >> Sure. So, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management on-demand journey. One is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided, and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Specifically, some functionality around searching and searchability of our content that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, ability to implement records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, as well as some different options to be able to present the content to our customers and agents in a in a better and more modern way and enChoice's role in that has really been to guide us on that journey to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >> Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about Hybrid Cloud AI Data a big theme of IBM Think this year. How is enChoice using Hybrid Cloud and AI? You mentioned some of the other ways but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like Auto-Owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. >> Well, sure, sure. So of course with the Cloud Pak offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the Cloud Pak for automation, several of those offerings are some of them are built specifically to survive or to to be hosted in a hybrid environment, and as we're working with Auto-Owners transforming their platforms going forward for example, they just invested in, in a, a I just lost the word here. They just invested in a, a new platform, mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats, and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. So Ryan mentioned some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers in a particular that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to manage it. And of course, just that whole, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner, we work with these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those. It's great to take advantage of the new stuff but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. And so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs, tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those. >> Excellent leading edge. Ryan, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, sorry an insurance company from the early 1900's moving into the using container technology. I love stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about Hybrid Cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation, and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from from your policy holders. >> Yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, we were a Red Hat OpenShift customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to move to a Cloud Pak and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. At the end of last year, we updated our licensing so that we can move in that direction, and we're starting to deploy digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability, just a lot of ease of use things for my team to make their jobs easier but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. There's also a number of products that are in the containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing to name a couple. And those are both things that we're looking at Auto-Owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents to continue to grow the business. >> Very forward-thinking, awesome Ryan. Thanks for sharing with us what Auto-Owners Insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from enChoice's perspective in terms of your digital transformation. >> Well, we have been a hundred percent focused on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know helping transform our client's experience such that you know customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. >> That is good. It sounds like the last year has been very fruitful for you, and I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes. I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM Solutions, the transformation that both of your companies are on and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for Ryan Dennings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think The Digital Experience. (upbeat music)