>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In our 2020 predictions post, we said that organizations would begin to operationalize their digital transformation experiments and POCs. We also said that based on spending data that cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike and Okta were poised to rise above the rest in 2020, and we even said the S&P 500 would surpass 3,700 this year. Little did we know that we'd have a pandemic that would make these predictions a virtual lock, and, of course, COVID did blow us out of the water in some other areas, like our prediction that IT spending would increase plus 4% in 2020, when in reality, we have a dropping by 4%. We made a number of other calls that did pretty well, but I'll let you review last year's predictions at your leisure to see how we did. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Erik Bradley of ETR is joining me again for this Breaking Analysis, and we're going to lay out our top picks for 2021. Erik, great to see you. Welcome back. Happy to have you on theCUBE, my friend. >> Always great to see you too, Dave. I'm excited about these picks this year. >> Well, let's get right into it. Let's bring up the first prediction here. Tech spending will rebound in 2021. We expect a 4% midpoint increase next year in spending. Erik, there are a number of factors that really support this prediction, which of course is based on ETR's most recent survey work, and we've listed a number of them here in this slide. I wonder if we can talk about that a little bit, the pace of the vaccine rollout. I've called this a forced march to COVID, but I can see people doubling down on things that are working. Productivity improvements are going to go back into the business. People are going to come back to the headquarters and that maybe is going to spur infrastructure on some pent-up demand, and work from home, we're going to talk about that. What are your thoughts on this prediction? >> Well, first of all, you weren't wrong last year. You were just, (laughs) you were just delayed. Just delayed a little bit, that's all. No, very much so. Early on, just three months ago, we were not seeing this optimism. The most recent survey, however, is capturing 4%. I truly believe that still might be a little bit mild. I think it can go even higher, and that's going to be driven by some of the things you've said about. This is a year where a lot of spending was paused on machine learning, on automation, on some of these projects that had to be stopped because of what we all went through. Right now, that is not a nice to have, it's a must have, and that spending is going quickly. There's a rapid pace on that spending, so I do think that's going to push it and, of course, security. We're going to get to this later on so I don't want to bury the lede, but with what's happening right now, every CISO I speak to is not panicked, but they are concerned and there will definitely be increased security spending that might push this 4% even higher. >> Yeah, and as we've reported as well, the survey data shows that there's less freezing of IT, there are fewer layoffs, there's more hiring, we're accelerating IT deployments, so that, I think, 34% last survey, 34% of organizations are accelerating IT deployments over the next three months, so that's great news. >> And also your point too about hiring. I was remiss in not bringing that up because we had layoffs and we had freezes on hiring. Both of that is stopping. As you know, as more head count comes in, whether that be from home or whether that be in your headquarters, both of those require support and require spending. >> All right, let's bring up the next prediction. Remote worker trends are going to become fossilized, settling in at an average of 34% by year-end 2021. Now, I love this chart, you guys. It's been amazingly consistent to me, Erik. We're showing data here from ETR's latest COVID survey. So it shows that prior to the pandemic, about 15 to 16% of employees on average worked remotely. That jumped to where we are today and well into the 70s, and we're going to stay close to that, according to the ETR data, in the first half of 2021, but by the end of the year, it's going to settle in at around 34%. Erik, that's double the pre-pandemic numbers and that's been consistent in your surveys over the past six month, and even within the sub-samples. >> Yeah, super surprised by the consistency, Dave. You're right about that. We were expecting the most recent data to kind of come down, right? We see the vaccines being rolled out. We kind of thought that that number would shift, but it hasn't, it has been dead consistent, and that's just from the data perspective. What we're hearing from the interviews and the feedback is that's not going to change, it really isn't, and there's a main reason for that. Productivity is up, and we'll talk about that in a second, but if you have productivity up and you have employees happy, they're not commuting, they're working more, they're working effectively, there is no reason to rush. And now imagine if you're a company that's trying to hire the best talent and attract the best talent but you're also the only company telling them where they have to live. I mean, good luck with that, right? So even if a few of them decide to make this permanent, that's something where you're going to really have to follow suit to attract talent. >> Yeah, so let's talk about that. Productivity leads us to our next prediction. We can bring that up. Number three is productivity increases are going to lead organizations to double down on the successes of 2020 and productivity apps are going to benefit. Now, of course, I'm always careful to cautious to interpret when you ask somebody by how much did productivity increase. It's a very hard thing to estimate depending on how you measure it. Is it revenue per employee? Is it profit? But nonetheless, the vast majority of people that we talk to are seeing productivity is going up. The productivity apps are really the winners here. Who do you see, Erik, as really benefiting from this trend? This year we saw Zoom, Teams, even Webex benefit, but how do you see this playing out in 2021? >> Well, first of all, the real beneficiaries are the companies themselves because they are getting more productivity, and our data is not only showing more productivity, but that's continuing to increase over time, so that's number one. But you're 100% right that the reason that's happening is because of the support of the applications and what would have been put in place. Now, what we do expect to see here, early on it was a rising tide lifted all boats, even Citrix got pulled up, but over time you realize Citrix is really just about legacy applications. Maybe that's not really the virtualization platform we need or maybe we just don't want to go that route at all. So the ones that we think are going to win longer term are part of this paradigm shift. The easiest one to put out as example is DocuSign. Nobody is going to travel and sit in an office to sign a paper ever again. It's not happening. I don't care if you go back to the office or you go back to headquarters. This is a paradigm shift that is not temporary. It is permanent. Another one that we're seeing is Smartsheet. Early on it started in. I was a little concerned about it 'cause it was a shadow IT type of a company where it was just spreading and spreading and spreading. It's turned out that this, the data on Smartsheet is continuing to be strong. It's an effective tool for project management when you're remotely working, so that's another one I don't see changing anytime. The other one I would call out would be Twilio. Slightly different, yes. It's more about the customer experience, but when you look at how many brick and mortar or how many in-person transactions have moved online and will stay there, companies like Twilio that support that customer experience, I'll throw out a Qualtrics out there as well, not a name we hear about a lot, but that customer experience software is a name that needs to be watched going forward. >> What do you think's going to happen to Zoom and Teams? Certainly Zoom just escalated this year, a huge ascendancy, and Teams I look at a little differently 'cause it's not just video conferencing, and both have done really, really well. How do you interpret the data that you're seeing there? >> There's no way around it, our data is decelerating quickly, really quickly. We were kind of bullish when Zoom first came out on the IPO prospects. It did very well. Obviously what happened in this remote shift turned them into an absolute overnight huge success. I don't see that continuing going forward, and there's a reason. What we're seeing and hearing from our feedback interviews is that now that people recognize this isn't temporary and they're not scrambling and they need to set up for permanency, they're going to consolidate their spend. They don't need to have Teams and Zoom. It's not necessary. They will consolidate where they can. There's always going to be the players that are going to choose Slack and Zoom 'cause they don't want to be on Microsoft architecture. That's fine, but you and I both know that the majority of large enterprises have Microsoft already. It's bundled in in pricing. I just don't see it happening. There's going to be M&A out there, which we can talk about again soon, so maybe Zoom, just like Slack, gets to a point where somebody thinks it's worthwhile, but there's a lot of other video conferencing out there. They're trying to push their telephony. They're trying to push their mobile solutions. There's a lot of companies out there doing it, so we'll see, but the current market cap does not seem to make sense in a permanent remote work situation. >> I think I'm inferring Teams is a little different because it's Microsoft. They've got this huge software estate they can leverage. They can bundle. Now, it's going to be interesting to see how and if Zoom can then expand its TAM, use its recent largesse to really enter potentially new markets. >> It will be, but listen, just the other day there was another headline that one of Zoom's executives out in China was actually blocking content as per directed by the Chinese government. Those are the kind of headlines that just really just get a little bit difficult when you're running a true enterprise size. Zoom is wonderful in the consumer space, but what I do is I research enterprise technology, and it's going to be really, really difficult to make inroads there with Microsoft. >> Yep. I agree. Okay, let's bring up number four, prediction number four. Permanent shifts in CISO strategies lead to measurable share shifts in network security. So the remote work sort of hyper-pivot, we'll call it, it's definitely exposed us. We've seen recent breaches that underscore the need for change. They've been well-publicized. We've talked a lot about identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security, and so as a result, we've seen the upstarts, and just a couple that we called, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler has really benefited and we expect them to continue to show consistent growth, some well over 50% revenue growth. Erik, you really follow this space closely. You've been focused on microsegmentation and other, some of the big players. What are your thoughts here? >> Yeah, first of all, security, number one in spending overall when we started looking and asking people what their priority is going to be. That's not changing, and that was before the SolarWinds breach. I just had a great interview today with a CISO of a global hospitality enterprise to really talk about the implications of this. It is real. Him and his peers are not panicking but pretty close, is the way he put it, so there is spend happening. So first of all, to your point, continued on Okta, continued on identity access. See no reason why that changes. CrowdStrike, continue. What this is going to do is bring in some new areas, like we just mentioned, in network segmentation. Illumio is a pure play in that name that doesn't have a lot of citations, but I have watched over the last week their net spending score go from about 30 to 60%, so I am watching in real time, as this data comes in in the later part of our survey, that it's really happening Forescout is another one that's in there. We're seeing some of the zero trust names really picking up in the last week. Now, to talk about some of the more established names, yeah, Cisco plays in this space and we can talk about Cisco and what they're doing in security forever. They're really reinventing themselves and doing a great job. Palo Alto was in this space as well, but I do believe that network and microsegmentation is going to be something that's going to continue. The other one I'm going to throw out that I'm hearing a lot about lately is user behavior analytics. People need to be able to watch the trends, compare them to past trends, and catch something sooner. Varonis is a name in that space that we're seeing get a lot of adoptions right now. It's early trend, but based on our data, Varonis is a name to watch in that area as well. >> Yeah, and you mentioned Cisco transitioning, reinventing themselves toward a SaaS player. Their subscription, Cisco's security business is a real bright spot for them. Palo Alto, every time I sit in on a VENN, which is ETR's proprietary roundtable, the CISOs, they love Palo Alto. They want to work, many of them, anyway, want to work with Palo Alto. They see them as a thought leader. They seem to be getting their cloud act together. Fortinet has been doing a pretty good job there and especially for mid-market. So we're going to see this equilibrium, best of breed versus the big portfolio companies, and I think 2021 sets up as a really interesting battle for those guys with momentum and those guys with big portfolios. >> I completely agree and you nailed it again. Palo Alto has this perception that they're really thought leaders in the space and people want to work with them, but let's not rule Cisco out. They have a much, much bigger market cap. They are really good at acquisitions. In the past, they maybe didn't integrate them as well, but it seems like they're getting their act together on that. And they're pushing now what they call SecureX, which is sort of like their own full-on platform in the cloud, and they're starting to market that, I'm starting to hear more about it, and I do think Cisco is really changing people's perception of them. We shall see going forward because in the last year, you're 100% right, Palo Alto definitely got a little bit more of the sentiment, of positive sentiment. Now, let's also realize, and we'll talk about this again in a bit, there's a lot of players out there. There will probably be continued consolidation in the security space, that we'll see what happens, but it's an area where spending is increasing, there is a lot of vendors out there to play with, and I do believe we'll see consolidation in that space. >> Yes. No question. A highly fragmented business. A lack of skills is a real challenge. Automation is a big watch word and so I would expect, which brings us, Erik, to prediction number five. Can be hard to do prediction posts without talking about M&A. We see the trend toward increased tech spending driving more IPOs, SPACs and M&A. We've seen some pretty amazing liquidity events this year. Snowflake, obviously a big one. Airbnb, DoorDash, outside of our enterprise tech but still notable. Palantir, JFrog, number of others. UiPath just filed confidentially and their CEO said, "Over the next 12 to 18 months, I would think Automation Anywhere is going to follow suit at some point." Hashicorp was a company we called out in our 2020 predictions as one to watch along with Snowflake and some others, and, Erik, we've seen some real shifts in observability. The ELK Stack gaining prominence with Elastic, ChaosSearch just raised 40 million, and everybody's going after 5G. Lots of M&A opportunities. What are your thoughts? >> I think if we're going to make this a prediction show, I'm going to say that was a great year, but we're going to even have a better year next year. There is a lot of cash on the balance sheet. There are low interest rates. There is a lot of spending momentum in enterprise IT. The three of those set up for a perfect storm of more liquidity events, whether it be continued IPOs, whether it could be M&A, I do expect that to continue. You mentioned a lot of the names. I think you're 100% right. Another one I would throw out there in that observability space, is it's Grafana along with the ELK Stack is really making changes to some of the pure plays in that area. I've been pretty vocal about how I thought Splunk was having some problems. They've already made three acquisitions. They are trying really hard to get back up and keep that growth trajectory and be the great company they always have been, so I think the observability area is certainly one. We have a lot of names in that space that could be taken out. The other one that wasn't mentioned, however, that I'd like to mention is more in the CDN area. Akamai being the grandfather there, and we'll get into it a little bit too, but CloudFlare has a huge market cap, Fastly running a little bit behind that, and then there's Limelight, and there's a few startups in that space and the CDN is really changing. It's not about content delivery as much as it is about edge compute these days, and they would be a real easy takeout for one of these large market cap names that need to get into that spot. >> That's a great call. All right, let's bring up number six, and this is one that's near and dear to my heart. It's more of a longer-term prediction and that prediction is in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are going to re-architect their big data platforms, and the premise here is we're seeing a rapid shift to cloud database and cross-cloud data sharing and automated governance. And the prediction is that because big data platforms are fundamentally flawed and are not going to be corrected by incremental improvements in data lakes and data warehouses and data hubs, we're going to see a shift toward a domain-centric ownership of the data pipeline where data teams are going to be organized around data product or data service builders and embedded into lines of business. And in this scenario, the technology details and complexity will become abstracted. You've got hyper-specialized data teams today. They serve multiple business owners. There's no domain context. Different data agendas. Those, we think, are going to be subsumed within the business lines, and in the future, the primary metric is going to shift from the cost and the quality of the big data platform outputs to the time it takes to go from idea to revenue generation, and this change is going to take four to five years to coalesce, but it's going to begin in earnest in 2021. Erik, anything you'd add to this? >> I'm going to let you kind of own that one 'cause I completely agree, and for all the listeners out there, that was Dave's original thought and I think it's fantastic and I want to get behind it. One of the things I will say to support that is big data analytics, which is what people are calling it because they got over the hype of machine learning, they're sick of vendors saying machine learning, and I'm hearing more and more people just talk about it as we need big data analytics, we need 'em at the edge, we need 'em faster, we need 'em in real time. That's happening, and what we're seeing more is this is happening with vendor-agnostic tools. This isn't just AWS-aligned. This isn't just GCP-aligned or Azure-aligned. The winners are the Snowflakes. The winners are the Databricks. The winners are the ones that are allowing this interoperability, the portability, which fully supports what you're saying. And then the only other comment I would make, which I really like about your prediction, is about the lines of business owning it 'cause I think this is even bigger. Right now, we track IT spending through the CIO, through the CTO, through IT in general. IT spending is actually becoming more diversified. IT spending is coming under the purview of marketing, it's coming under the purview of sales, so we're seeing more and more IT spending, but it's happening with the business user or the business lines and obviously data first, so I think you're 100% right. >> Yeah, and if you think about it, we've contextualized our operational systems, whether it's the CRM or the supply chain, the logistics, the business lines own their respective data. It's not true for the analytics systems, and we talked about Snowflake and Databricks. I actually see these two companies who were sort of birds of a feather in the early days together, applying Databricks machine learning on top of Snowflake, I actually see them going in diverging places. I see Databricks trying to improve on the data lake. I see Snowflake trying to reinvent the concept of data warehouse to this global mesh, and it's going to be really interesting to see how that shakes out. The data behind Snowflake, obviously very, very exciting. >> Yeah, it's just, real quickly to add on that if we have time, Dave. >> Yeah, sure. >> We all know the valuation of Snowflake, one of the most incredible IPOs I've seen in a long time. The data still supports it. It still supports that growth. Unfortunately for Databricks, their IPO has been a little bit more volatile. If you look at their stock chart every time they report, it's got a little bit of a roller coaster ride going on, and our most recent data for Databricks is actually decelerating, so again, I'm going to use the caveat that we only have about 950 survey responses in. We'll probably get that up to 1,300 or so, so it's not done yet, but right now we are putting Databricks into a category where we're seeing it decelerate a little bit, which is surprising for a company that's just right out of the gate. >> Well, it's interesting because I do see Databricks as more incremental on data lakes and I see Snowflake as more transformative, so at least from a vision standpoint, we'll see if they can execute on that. All right, number seven, let's bring up number seven. This is talking about the cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The battle to define hybrid and multi-cloud is going to escalate in 2021. It's already started and it's going to create bifurcated CIO strategies. And, Erik, spending data clearly shows that cloud is continuing its steady margin share gains relative to on-prem, but the definitions of the cloud, they're shifting. Just a couple of years ago, AWS, they never talk about hybrid, just like they don't talk about multi-cloud today, yet AWS continues now to push into on-prem. They treat on-prem as just another node at the edge and they continue to win in the marketplace despite their slower growth rates. Still, they're so large now. 45 billion or so this year. The data is mixed. This ETR data shows that just under 50% of buyers are consolidating workloads, and then a similar, in the cloud workloads, and a similar percentage of customers are spreading evenly across clouds, so really interesting dynamic there. Erik, how do you see it shaking out? >> Yeah, the data is interesting here, and I would actually state that overall spend on the cloud is actually flat from last year, so we're not seeing a huge increase in spend, and coupled with that, we're seeing that the overall market share, which means the amount of responses within our survey, is increasing, certainly increasing. So cloud usage is increasing, but it's happening over an even spectrum. There's no clear winner of that market share increase. So they really, according to our data, the multi-cloud approach is happening and not one particular winner over another. That's just from the data perspective that various do point on AWS. Let's be honest, when they first started, they wanted all the data. They just want to take it from on-prem, put it in their data center. They wanted all of it. They never were interested in actually having interoperability. Then you look at an approach like Google. Google was always about the technology, but not necessarily about the enterprise customer. They come out with Anthos which is allowing you to have interoperability in more cloud. They're not nearly as big, but their growth rate is much higher. Law of numbers, of course. But it really is interesting to see how these cloud players are going to approach this because multi-cloud is happening whether they like it or not. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up multi-cloud in a context of what the data's showing 'cause I would agree we're, and particularly two areas that I would call out in ETR data, VMware Cloud on AWS as well as VM Cloud Foundation are showing real momentum and also OpenStack from Red Hat is showing real progress here and they're making moves. They're putting great solutions inside of AWS, doing some stuff on bare metal, and it's interesting to see. VMware, basically it's the VMware stack. They want to put that everywhere. Whereas Red Hat, similarly, but Red Hat has the developer angle. They're trying to infuse Red Hat in throughout everybody's stack, and so I think Red Hat is going to be really interesting to, especially to the extent that IBM keeps them, sort of lets them do their own thing and doesn't kind of pollute them. So, so far so good there. >> Yeah, I agree with that. I think you brought up the good point about it being developer-friendly. It's a real option as people start kicking a little bit more of new, different developer ways and containers are growing, growing more. They're not testing anymore, but they're real workloads. It is a stack that you could really use. Now, what I would say to caveat that though is I'm not seeing any net new business go to IBM Red Hat. If you were already aligned with that, then yes, you got to love these new tools they're giving you to play with, but I don't see anyone moving to them that wasn't already net new there and I would say the same thing with VMware. Listen, they have a great entrenched base. The longer they can kick that can down the road, that's fantastic, but I don't see net new customers coming onto VMware because of their alignment with AWS. >> Great, thank you for that. That's a good nuance. Number eight, cloud, containers, AI and ML and automation are going to lead 2021 spending velocity, so really is those are the kind of the big four, cloud, containers, AI, automation, And, Erik, this next one's a bit nuanced and it supports our first prediction of a rebound in tech spending next year. We're seeing cloud, containers, AI and automation, in the form of RPA especially, as the areas with the highest net scores or spending momentum, but we put an asterisk around the cloud because you can see in this inserted graphic, which again is preliminary 'cause the survey's still out in the field and it's just a little tidbit here, but cloud is not only above that 40% line of net score, but it has one of the higher sector market shares. Now, as you said, earlier you made a comment that you're not necessarily seeing the kind of growth that you saw before, but it's from a very, very large base. Virtually every sector in the ETR dataset with the exception of outsourcing and IT consulting is seeing meaningful upward spending momentum, and even those two, we're seeing some positive signs. So again, with what we talked about before, with the freezing of the IT projects starting to thaw, things are looking much, much better for 2021. >> I'd agree with that. I'm going to make two quick comments on that, one on the machine learning automation. Without a doubt, that's where we're seeing a lot of the increase right now, and I've had a multiple number of people reach out or in my interviews say to me, "This is very simple. These projects were slated to happen in 2020 and they got paused. It's as simple as that. The business needs to have more machine learning, big data analytics, and it needs to have more automation. This has just been paused and now it's coming back and it's coming back rapidly." Another comment, I'm actually going to post an article on LinkedIn as soon as we're done here. I did an interview with the lead technology director, automation director from Disney, and this guy obviously has a big budget and he was basically saying UiPath and Automation Anywhere dominate RPA, and that on top of it, the COVID crisis greatly accelerated automation, greatly accelerated it because it had to happen, we needed to find a way to get rid of these mundane tasks, we had to put them into real workloads. And another aspect you don't think about, a lot of times with automation, there's people, employees that really have friction. They don't want to adopt it. That went away. So COVID really pushed automation, so we're going to see that happening in machine learning and automation without a doubt. And now for a fun prediction real quick. You brought up the IT outsourcing and consulting. This might be a little bit more out there, the dark horse, but based on our data and what we're seeing and the COVID information about, you said about new projects being unwrapped, new hiring happening, we really do believe that this might be the bottom on IT outsourcing and consulting. >> Great, thank you for that, and then that brings us to number nine here. The automation mandate is accelerating and it will continue to accelerate in 2021. Now, you may say, "Okay, well, this is a lay-up," but not necessarily. UiPath and Automation Anywhere go public and Microsoft remains a threat. Look, UiPath, I've said UiPath and Automation Anywhere, if they were ready to go public, they probably would have already this year, so I think they're still trying to get their proverbial act together, so this is not necessarily a lay-up for them from an operational standpoint. They probably got some things to still clean up, but I think they're going to really try to go for it. If the markets stay positive and tech spending continues to go forward, I think we can see that. And I would say this, automation is going mainstream. The benefits of taking simple RPA tools to automate mundane tasks with software bots, it's both awakened organizations to the possibilities of automation, and combined with COVID, it's caused them to get serious about automation. And we think 2021, we're going to see organizations go beyond implementing point tools, they're going to use the pandemic to restructure their entire business. Erik, how do you see it, and what are the big players like Microsoft that have entered the market? What kind of impact do you see them having? >> Yeah, completely agree with you. This is a year where we go from small workloads into real deployment, and those two are the leader. In our data, UiPath by far the clear leader. We are seeing a lot of adoptions on Automation Anywhere, so they're getting some market sentiment. People are realizing, starting to actually adopt them. And by far, the number one is Microsoft Power Automate. Now, again, we have to be careful because we know Microsoft is entrenched everywhere. We know that they are good at bundling, so if I'm in charge of automation for my enterprise and I'm already a Microsoft customer, I'm going to use it. That doesn't mean it's the best tool to use for the right job. From what I've heard from people, each of these have a certain area where they are better. Some can get more in depth and do heavier lifting. Some are better at doing a lot of projects at once but not in depth, so we're going to see this play out. Right now, according to our data, UiPath is still number one, Automation Anywhere is number two, and Microsoft just by default of being entrenched in all of these enterprises has a lot of market share or mind share. >> And I also want to do a shout out to, or a call out, not really a shout out, but a call out to Pegasystems. We put them in the RPA category. They're covered in the ETR taxonomy. I don't consider them an RPA vendor. They're a business process vendor. They've been around for a long, long time. They've had a great year, done very, very well. The stock has done well. Their spending momentum, the early signs in the latest survey are just becoming, starting to moderate a little bit, but I like what they've done. They're not trying to take UiPath and Automation Anywhere head-on, and so I think there's some possibilities there. You've also got IBM who went to the market, SAP, Infor, and everybody's going to hop on the bandwagon here who's a software player. >> I completely agree, but I do think there's a very strong line in the sand between RPA and business process. I don't know if they're going to be able to make that transition. Now, business process also tends to be extremely costly. RPA came into this with trying to be, prove their ROI, trying to say, "Yeah, we're going to cost a little bit of money, but we're going to make it back." Business process has always been, at least the legacies, the ones you're mentioning, the Pega, the IBMs, really expensive. So again, I'm going to allude to that article I'm about to post. This particular person who's a lead tech automation for a very large company said, "Not only are UiPath and AA dominating RPA, but they're likely going to evolve to take over the business process space as well." So if they are proving what they can do, he's saying there's no real reason they can't turn around and take what Appian's doing, what IBM's doing and what Pega's doing. That's just one man's opinion. Our data is not actually tracking it in that space, so we can't back that, but I did think it was an interesting comment for and an interesting opportunity for UiPath and Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, it's always great to hear directly from the mouths of the practitioners. All right, brings us to number 10 here. 5G rollouts are going to push new edge IoT workloads and necessitate new system architectures. AI and real-time inferencing, we think, require new thinking, particularly around processor and system design, and the focus is increasingly going to be on efficiency and at much, much lower costs versus what we've known for decades as general purpose workloads accommodating a lot of different use cases. You're seeing alternative processors like Nvidia, certainly the ARM acquisition. You've got companies hitting the market like Fungible with DPAs, and they're dominating these new workloads in the coming decade, we think, and they continue to demonstrate superior price performance metrics. And over the next five years they're going to find their way, we think, into mainstream enterprise workloads and put continued pressure on Intel general purpose microprocessors. Erik, look, we've seen cloud players. They're diversifying their processor suppliers. They're developing their own in-house silicon. This is a multi-year trend that's going to show meaningful progress next year, certainly if you measure it in terms of innovations, announcements and new use cases and funding and M&A activity. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, there's a lot there and I think you're right. It's a big trend that's going to have a wide implication, but right now, it's there's no doubt that the supply and demand is out of whack. You and I might be the only people around who still remember the great chip famine in 1999, but it seems to be happening again and some of that is due to just overwhelming demand, like you mentioned. Things like IoT. Things like 5G. Just the increased power of handheld devices. The remote from work home. All of this is creating a perfect storm, but it also has to do with some of the chip makers themselves kind of misfired, and you probably know the space better than me, so I'll leave you for that on that one. But I also want to talk a little bit, just another aspect of this 5G rollout, in my opinion, is we have to get closer to the edge, we have to get closer to the end consumer, and I do believe the CDN players have an area to play in this. And maybe we can leave that as there and we could do this some other time, but I do believe the CDN players are no longer about content delivery and they're really about edge compute. So as we see IoT and 5G roll out, it's going to have huge implications on the chip supply. No doubt. It's also could have really huge implications for the CDN network. >> All right, there you have it, folks. Erik, it's great working with you. It's been awesome this year. I hope we can do more in 2021. Really been a pleasure. >> Always. Have a great holiday, everybody. Stay safe. >> Yeah, you too. Okay, so look, that's our prediction for 2021 and the coming decade. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. You'll find it. We publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you got to check out etr.plus. It's where all the survey action is. Definitely subscribe to their services if you haven't already. You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)

>>Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this session. I feel honored to be invited to speak here today. And I also appreciate entity research Summit members for organ organizing and giving this great opportunity. Please let me give a quick introduction. First, I'm a Takashi from Marvin American population, and I'm leading technology scouting and global ation with digital health companies such as Business Alliance and Strategically Investment in North America. And since we started to focus on this space in 2016 our team is growing. And in order to bring more new technologies and services to Japan market Thesis year, we founded the new service theories for digital health business, especially, uh, in medical diagnosis space in Japan. And today I would like to talk how health care has been transformed for my micro perspective, and I hope you enjoy reasoning it. So what's happened since the US identify the first case in the middle of January, As everyone knows, unfortunately, is the damaged by this pandemic was unequal amongst the people in us. It had more determined tal impact on those who are socially and economically vulnerable because of the long, long lasting structural program off the U. S. Society and the Light Charity about daily case rating elevator country shows. Even in the community, the infection rate off the low income were 4.5 times higher than, uh, those of the high income and due to czar straight off the Corvette, about 14 million people are unemployed. The unique point off the U. S. Is that more than 60% of insurance is tied with employment, so losing a job can mean losing access to health care. And the point point here is that the Corvette did not create healthcare disparity but, uh nearly highlighted the underlying program and necessity off affordable care for all. And when the country had a need to increase the testing capacity and geographic out, treat the pharmacies and retails joined forces with existing stakeholders more than 90% off the U. S Corporation live within five miles off a community pharmacy such as CVS and Walgreen, so they can technically provide the test to everyone in all the community. And they also have a huge workforce memory pharmacist who are eligible to perform the testing scale, and this very made their potential in community based health care. Stand out and about your health has provided on alternative way for people to access to health care. At affordable applies under the unusual setting where social distancing, which required required mhm and people have a fear of infection. So they are afraid to take a public transportacion and visit >>the doctor the same thing supplied to doctor and the chart. Here is a number of total visit cranes by service type after stay at home order was issued across the U. S. By Ali April patient physical visits to doctor's offices or clinics declined by ALAN 70%. On the other hand, that share, or telehealth, accounted for 25% of the total total. Doctor's visit in April, while many states studied to re opening face to face visit is gradually recovering. And overall Tele Health Service did not offset the crime. Physician Physical doctor's visit and telehealth John never fully replace in person care. However, Telehealth has established a new way to provide affordable care, especially to vulnerable people, and I don't explain each player's today. But as an example, the chart shows the significant growth of the tell a dog who is one of the largest badger care and tell his provider, I believe there are three factors off paradox. Success under the pandemic. First, obviously tell Doc could reach >>the job between those patients and doctors. Majority of the patients who needed to see doctors who are those who have underlying health conditions and are high risk for Kelowna, Bilis and Secondary. They showed their business model is highly scalable. In the first quarter of this year, they moved quickly to expand their physical physicians network to increase their capacity and catch up growing demand. To some extent, they also contributed to create flexible job for the doctors who suffered from Lydia's appointment and surgery. They utilized. There are legalism to maximize the efficiency for doctors and doing so, uh, they have university maintained high quality care at affordable applies Yeah, and at the same time, the government recognize the body of about your care and de regulated traditional rules to sum up she m s temporary automated to pay a wide range of tell Her services, including hospital visit and HHS temporarily waived hip hop minorities for telehealth cases and they're changed allowed provider to use communication tools such as facetime and the messenger. During their appointment on August start, the government issued a new executive order to expand tell his services beyond the pandemic. So the government is also moving to support about your health care. So it was a quick review of the health care challenges and somewhat advancement in the pandemic. But as you understand, since those challenges are not caused by the pandemic, problems will stay remain and events off this year will continuously catalyze the transformation. So how was his cherished reshaped and where will we go? The topic from here can be also applied to Japan market. Okay, I believe democratization and decentralization healthcare more important than ever. So what does A. The traditional healthcare was defined in a framework over patient and a doctor. But in the new normal, the range of beneficiaries will be expanded from patient to all citizens, including the country uninsured people. Thanks to the technology evolution, as you can download health management off for free on iTunes stores while the range of the digital health services unable everyone to participate in new health system system. And in this slide, I put three essential element to fully realize democratization and decentralization off health care, health, literacy, data sharing and security, privacy and safety in addition, taken. In addition, technology is put at the bottom as a foundation off three point first. Health stimulus is obviously important because if people don't understand how the system works, what options are available to them or what are the pros and cons of each options? They can not navigate themselves and utilize the service. It can even cause a different disparity. Issue and secondary data must be technically flee to transfer. While it keeps interoperability ease. More options are becoming available to patient. But if data cannot be shared among stakeholders, including patient hospitals in strollers and budget your providers, patient data will be fragmented and people cannot yet continue to care which they benefited under current centralized care system. And this is most challenging part. But the last one is that the security aspect more players will involving decentralized health care outside of conventional healthcare system. So obviously, both the number of healthcare channels and our frequency of data sharing will increase more. It's create ah, higher data about no beauty, and so, under the new health care framework, we needed to ensure patient privacy and safety and also re examine a Scott write lines for sharing patient data and off course. Corbett Wasa Stone Catalyst off this you saved. But what folly. Our drivers in Macro and Micro Perspective from Mark Lowe. The challenges in healthcare system have been widely recognized for decades, and now he's a big pain. The pandemic reminded us all the key values. Misha, our current pain point as I left the church shores. Those are increasing the population, health sustainability for doctors and other social system and value based care for better and more affordable care. And all the elements are co dependent on each other. The light chart explained that providing preventive care and Alan Dimension is the best way threes to meet the key values here. Similarly, the direction of community based care and about your care is in line with thes three values, and they are acting to maximize the number of beneficiaries form. A micro uh, initiative by nonconventional players is a big driver, and both CBS and Walmart are being actively engaged in healthcare healthcare businesses for many years. And CBS has the largest walking clinic called MinuteClinic, Ottawa 1100 locations, and Walmart also has 20 primary clinics. I didn't talk to them. But the most interesting things off their recent innovation, I believe, is that they are adjusted and expanded their focus, from primary care to community health Center to out less to every every customer's needs. And CBS Front to provide affordable preventive health and chronic health monitoring services at 1500 CBS Health have, which they are now setting up and along a similar line would Mark is deploying Walmart Health Center, where, utilizing tech driven solutions, they provide affordable one stop service for core healthcare. They got less, uh, insurance status. For example, more than 40% of the people in U. S visit will not every big, so liberating the huge customer base and physical locations. Both companies being reading decentralization off health care and consumer device company such as Apple and Fitbit also have helped in transform forming healthcare in two ways. First, they are growing the boundaries between traditional healthcare and consumer product after their long development airport available, getting healthcare device and secondary. They acted as the best healthcare educators to consumers and increase people's healthcare awareness because they're taking an important role in the enhancement, health, literacy and healthcare democratization. And based on the story so far, I'd like to touch to business concept which can be applied to both Japan and the US and one expected change. It will be the emergence of data integration plot home while the telehealth. While the healthcare data data volume has increased 15 times for the last seven years and will continuously increase, we have a chance to improve the health care by harnessing the data. So meaning the new system, which unify the each patient data from multiple data sources and create 360 degrees longitudinal view each individual and then it sensitized the unified data to gain additional insights seen from structure data and unable to provide personal lives care. Finally, it's aggregate each individual data and reanalyzed to provide inside for population health. This is one specific model I envision. And, uh, health care will be provided slew online or offline and at the hospital or detail store. In order to amplify the impact of health care. The law off the mediator between health care between hospital and citizen will become more important. They can be a pharmacy toe health stand out about your care providers. They provide wide range of fundamental care and medication instruction and management. They also help individuals to manage their health care data. I will not explain the details today, but Japan has similar challenges in health care, such as increasing healthcare expenditure and lack of doctors and care givers. For example, they people in Japan have physical physician visit more than 20 times a year on average, while those in the U. S. On >>the do full times it sounds a joke, but people say because the artery are healthy, say visit hospitals to see friends. So we need to utilize thes mediators to reduce cost while they maintained social place for citizens in Japan, the government has promoted, uh, usual family, pharmacist and primary doctors and views the community based medical system as a policy. There was division of dispensing fees in Japan this year to ship the core load or pharmacist to the new role as a health management service providers. And so >>I believe we will see the change in those spaces not only in the U. S, but also in Japan, and we went through so unprecedented times. But I believe it's been resulting accelerating our healthcare transformation and creating a new business innovation. And this brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you for your attention and hope you could find something somehow useful for your business. And if you have any questions >>or comments, please for you feel free to contact me.

>>Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this session. I feel honored to be invited to speak here today. And I also appreciate entity research Summit members for organ organizing and giving this great opportunity. Please let me give a quick introduction. First, I'm a Takashi from Marvin American population, and I'm leading technology scouting and global ation with digital health companies such as Business Alliance and Strategically Investment in North America. And since we started to focus on this space in 2016 our team is growing. And in order to bring more new technologies and services to Japan market Thesis year, we founded the new service theories for digital health business, especially, uh, in medical diagnosis space in Japan. And today I would like to talk how health care has been transformed for my micro perspective, and I hope you enjoy reasoning it. So what's happened since the US identify the first case in the middle of January, As everyone knows, unfortunately, is the damaged by this pandemic was unequal amongst the people in us. It had more determined tal impact on those who are socially and economically vulnerable because of the long, long lasting structural program off the U. S. Society and the Light Charity about daily case rating elevator country shows. Even in the community, the infection rate off the low income were 4.5 times higher than, uh, those of the high income and due to czar straight off the Corvette, about 14 million people are unemployed. The unique point off the U. S. Is that more than 60% of insurance is tied with employment, so losing a job can mean losing access to health care. And the point point here is that the Corvette did not create healthcare disparity but, uh nearly highlighted the underlying program and necessity off affordable care for all. And when the country had a need to increase the testing capacity and geographic out, treat the pharmacies and retails joined forces with existing stakeholders more than 90% off the U. S Corporation live within five miles off a community pharmacy such as CVS and Walgreen, so they can technically provide the test to everyone in all the community. And they also have a huge workforce memory pharmacist who are eligible to perform the testing scale, and this very made their potential in community based health care. Stand out and about your health has provided on alternative way for people to access to health care. At affordable applies under the unusual setting where social distancing, which required required mhm and people have a fear of infection. So they are afraid to take a public transportacion and visit >>the doctor the same thing supplied to doctor and the chart. Here is a number of total visit cranes by service type after stay at home order was issued across the U. S. By Ali April patient physical visits to doctor's offices or clinics declined by ALAN 70%. On the other hand, that share, or telehealth, accounted for 25% of the total total. Doctor's >>visit in April, while many states studied to re opening face to face visit is gradually recovering. And overall Tele Health Service did not offset the crime. Physician Physical doctor's visit and telehealth John never fully replace in person care. However, Telehealth has established a new way to provide affordable care, especially to vulnerable people, and I don't explain each player's today. But as an example, the chart shows the significant growth of >>the tell a dog who is one of the largest badger care and tell his provider, I believe there are three factors off paradox. Success under the pandemic. First, obviously tell Doc could reach >>the job between those patients and doctors. Majority of the patients who needed to see doctors who are those who have underlying health conditions and are high risk for Kelowna, Bilis and Secondary. They showed their business model is highly scalable. In the first quarter of this year, they moved quickly to expand their physical physicians network to increase their capacity and catch up growing demand. To some extent, they also contributed to create flexible job for the doctors who suffered from Lydia's appointment and surgery. They utilized. There are legalism to maximize the efficiency for doctors and doing so, uh, they have university maintained high quality care at affordable applies Yeah, and at the same time, the government recognize the body of about your care and de regulated traditional rules to sum up she m s temporary automated to pay a wide range of tell Her services, including hospital visit and HHS temporarily waived hip hop minorities for telehealth cases and they're changed allowed provider to use communication tools such as facetime and the messenger. During their appointment on August start, the government issued a new executive order to expand tell his services beyond the pandemic. So the government is also moving to support about your health care. So it was a quick review of the health care challenges and somewhat advancement in the pandemic. But as you understand, since those challenges are not caused by the pandemic, problems will stay remain and events off this year will continuously catalyze the transformation. So how was his cherished reshaped and where will we go? The topic from here can be also applied to Japan market. Okay, I believe democratization and decentralization healthcare more important than ever. So what does A. The traditional healthcare was defined in a framework over patient and a doctor. But in the new normal, the range of beneficiaries will be expanded from patient to all citizens, including the country uninsured people. Thanks to the technology evolution, as you can download health management off for free on iTunes stores while the range of the digital health services unable everyone to participate in new health system system. And in this slide, I put three essential element to fully realize democratization and decentralization off health care, health, literacy, data sharing and security, privacy and safety in addition, taken. In addition, technology is put at the bottom as a foundation off three point first. Health stimulus is obviously important because if people don't understand how the system works, what options are available to them or what are the pros and cons of each options? They can not navigate themselves and utilize the service. It can even cause a different disparity. Issue and secondary data must be technically flee to transfer. While it keeps interoperability ease. More options are becoming available to patient. But if data cannot be shared among stakeholders, including patient hospitals in strollers and budget your providers, patient data will be fragmented and people cannot yet continue to care which they benefited under current centralized care system. And this is most challenging part. But the last one is that the security aspect more players will involving decentralized health care outside of conventional healthcare system. So obviously, both the number of healthcare channels and our frequency of data sharing will increase more. It's create ah, higher data about no beauty, and so, under the new health care framework, we needed to ensure patient privacy and safety and also re examine a Scott write lines for sharing patient data and off course. Corbett Wasa Stone Catalyst off this you saved. But what folly. Our drivers in Macro and Micro Perspective from Mark Lowe. The challenges in healthcare system have been widely recognized for decades, and now he's a big pain. The pandemic reminded us all the key values. Misha, our current pain point as I left the church shores. Those are increasing the population, health sustainability for doctors and other social system and value based care for better and more affordable care. And all the elements are co dependent on each other. The light chart explained that providing preventive care and Alan Dimension is the best way threes to meet the key values here. Similarly, the direction of community based care and about your care is in line with thes three values, and they are acting to maximize the number of beneficiaries form. A micro uh, initiative by nonconventional players is a big driver, and both CBS and Walmart are being actively engaged in healthcare healthcare businesses for many years. And CBS has the largest walking clinic called MinuteClinic, Ottawa 1100 locations, and Walmart also has 20 primary clinics. I didn't talk to them. But the most interesting things off their recent innovation, I believe, is that they are adjusted and expanded their focus, from primary care to community health Center to out less to every every customer's needs. And CBS Front to provide affordable preventive health and chronic health monitoring services at 1500 CBS Health have, which they are now setting up and along a similar line would Mark is deploying Walmart Health Center, where, utilizing tech driven solutions, they provide affordable one stop service for core healthcare. They got less, uh, insurance status. For example, more than 40% of the people in U. S visit will not every big, so liberating the huge customer base and physical locations. Both companies being reading decentralization off health care and consumer device company such as Apple and Fitbit also have helped in transform forming healthcare in two ways. First, they are growing the boundaries between traditional healthcare and consumer product after their long development airport available, getting healthcare device and secondary. They acted as the best healthcare educators to consumers and increase people's healthcare awareness because they're taking an important role in the enhancement, health, literacy and healthcare democratization. And based on the story so far, I'd like to touch to business concept which can be applied to both Japan and the US and one expected change. It will be the emergence of data integration plot home while the telehealth. While the healthcare data data volume has increased 15 times for the last seven years and will continuously increase, we have a chance to improve the health care by harnessing the data. So meaning the new system, which unify the each patient data from multiple data sources and create 360 degrees longitudinal view each individual and then it sensitized the unified data to gain additional insights seen from structure data and unable to provide personal lives care. Finally, it's aggregate each individual data and reanalyzed to provide inside for population health. This is one specific model I envision. And, uh, health care will be provided slew online or offline and at the hospital or detail store. In order to amplify the impact of health care. The law off the mediator between health care between hospital and citizen will become more important. They can be a pharmacy toe health stand out about your care providers. They provide wide range of fundamental care and medication instruction and management. They also help individuals to manage their health care data. I will not explain the details today, but Japan has similar challenges in health care, such as increasing healthcare expenditure and lack of doctors and care givers. For example, they people in Japan have physical physician visit more than 20 times a year on average, while those in the U. S. On the do full times it sounds a joke, but people say because the artery are healthy, say visit hospitals to see friends. So we need to utilize thes mediators to reduce cost while they maintained social place for citizens in Japan, the government has promoted, uh, usual family, pharmacist and primary doctors and views the community based medical system as a policy. There was division of dispensing fees in Japan this year to ship the core load or pharmacist to the new role as a health management service providers. And so I believe we will see the change in those spaces not only in the U. S, but also in Japan, and we went through so unprecedented times. But I believe it's been resulting accelerating our healthcare transformation and creating a new business innovation. And this brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you for your attention and hope you could find something somehow useful for your business. And if you have any questions >>or comments, please for you feel free to contact me. Thank you.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> As you may recall, coming into the second part of 2019 we reported, based on ETR Survey data, that there was a narrowing of spending on emerging tech and an unplugging of a lot of legacy systems. This was really because people were going from experimentation into operationalizing their digital initiatives. When COVID hit, conventional wisdom suggested that there would be a flight to safety. Now, interestingly, we reported with Eric Bradley, based on one of the Venns, that a lot of CIOs were still experimenting with emerging vendors. But this was very anecdotal. Today, we have more data, fresh data, from the ETR Emerging Technology Study on private companies, which really does suggest that there's a notable decline in experimentation, and that's affecting emerging technology vendors. Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Once again, Sagar Kadakia is joining us. Sagar is the Director of Research at ETR. Sagar, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you again. Thanks for having me, Dave. >> So, it's really important to point out, this Emerging Tech Study that you guys do, it's different from your quarterly Technology Spending Intention Survey. Take us through the methodology. Guys, maybe you could bring up the first chart. And, Sagar, walk us through how you guys approach this. >> No problem. So, a lot of the viewers are used to seeing a lot of the results from the Technology Spending Intention Survey, or the TSIS, as we call it. That study, as the title says, it really tracks spending intentions on more pervasive vendors, right, Microsoft, AWS, as an example. What we're going to look at today is our Emerging Technology Study, which we conduct biannually, in May and November. This study is a little bit different. We ask CIOs around evaluations, awareness, planned evaluations, so think of this as pre-spend, right. So that's a major differentiator from the TSIS. That, and this study, really focuses on private emerging providers. We're really only focused on those really emerging private companies, say, like your Series B to Series G or H, whatever it may be, so, two big differences within those studies. And then today what we're really going to look at is the results from the Emerging Technology Study. Just a couple of quick things here. We had 811 CIOs participate, which represents about 380 billion in annual IT spend, so the results from this study matter. We had almost 75 Fortune 100s take it. So, again, we're really measuring how private emerging providers are doing in the largest organizations. And so today we're going to be reviewing notable sectors, but largely this survey tracks roughly 356 private technologies and frameworks. >> All right, guys, bring up the pie chart, the next slide. Now, Sagar, this is sort of a snapshot here, and it basically says that 44% of CIOs agree that COVID has decreased the organization's evaluation and utilization of emerging tech, despite what I mentioned, Eric Bradley's Venn, which suggested one CIO in particular said, "Hey, I always pick somebody in the lower left "of the magic quadrant." But, again, this is a static view. I know we have some other data, but take us through this, and how this compares to other surveys that you've done. >> No problem. So let's start with the high level takeaways. And I'll actually kind of get into to the point that Eric was debating, 'cause that point is true. It's just really how you kind of slice and dice the data to get to that. So, what you're looking at here, and what the overall takeaway from the Emerging Technology Study was, is, you know, you are going to see notable declines in POCs, of proof-of-concepts, any valuations because of COVID-19. Even though we had been communicating for quite some time, you know, the last few months, that there's increasing pressure for companies to further digitize with COVID-19, there are IT budget constraints. There is a huge pivot in IT resources towards supporting remote employees, a decrease in risk tolerance, and so that's why what you're seeing here is a rather notable number of CIOs, 44%, that said that they are decreasing their organization's evaluation and utilization of private emerging providers. So that is notable. >> Now, as you pointed out, you guys run this survey a couple of times a year. So now let's look at the time series. Guys, if you bring up the next chart. We can see how the sentiment has changed since last year. And, of course, we're isolating here on some of larger companies. So, take us through what this data means. >> No problem. So, how do we quantify what we just saw in the prior slide? We saw 44% of CIOs indicating that they are going to be decreasing their evaluations. But what exactly does that mean? We can pretty much determine that by looking at a lot of the data that we captured through our Emerging Technology Study. There's a lot going on in this slide, but I'll walk you through it. What you're looking at here is Fortune 1000 organizations, so we've really isolated the data to those organizations that matter. So, let's start with the teal, kind of green line first, because I think it's a little bit easier to understand. What you're looking at, Fortune 1000 evaluations, both planned and current, okay? And you're looking at a time series, one year ago and six months ago. So, two of the answer options that we provide CIOs in this survey, right, think about the survey as a grid, where you have seven answer options going horizontally, and then 300-plus vendors and technologies going vertically. For any given vendor, they can essentially indicate one of these options, two of them being on currently evaluating them or I plan to evaluate them in six months. So what you're looking at here is effectively the aggregate number, or the average number of Fortune 1000 evaluations. So if you look into May 2019, all the way on the left of that chart, that 24% roughly means that a quarter of selections made by Fortune 1000 of the survey, they selected plan to evaluate or currently evaluating. If you fast-forward six months, to the middle of the chart, November '19, it's roughly the same, one in four technologies that are Fortune 1000 selected, they indicated that I plan or am currently evaluating them. But now look at that big drop off going into May 2020, the 17%, right? So now one out of every six technologies, or one out of every selections that they made was an evaluation. So a very notable drop. And then if you look at the blue line, this is another answer option that we provided CIOs: I'm aware of the technology but I have no plans to evaluate. So this answer option essentially tracks awareness levels. If you look at the last six months, look at that big uptick from 44% to over 50%, right? So now, essentially one out of every two technologies, or private technologies that a CIO is aware of, they have no plans to evaluate. So this is going to have an impact on the general landscape, when we think about those private emerging providers. But there is one caveat, and, Dave, this is what you mentioned earlier, this is what Eric was talking about. The providers that are doing well are the ones that are work-from-home aligned. And so, just like a few years ago, we were really analyzing results based on are you cloud-native or are you Cloud-aligned, because those technologies are going to do the best, what we're seeing in the emerging space is now the same thing. Those emerging providers that enable organizations to maintain productivity for their employees, essentially allowing their employees to work remotely, those emerging providers are still doing well. And that is probably the second biggest takeaway from this study. >> So now what we're seeing here is this flight to perceive safety, which, to your point, Sagar, doesn't necessarily mean good news for all enterprise tech vendors, but certainly for those that are positioned for the work-from-home pivot. So now let's take a look at a couple of sectors. We'll start with information security. We've reported for years about how the perimeter's been broken down, and that more spend was going to shift from inside the moat to a distributed network, and that's clearly what's happened as a result of COVID. Guys, if you bring up the next chart. Sagar, you take us through this. >> No problem. And as you imagine, I think that the big theme here is zero trust. So, a couple of things here. And let me just explain this chart a little bit, because we're going to be going through a couple of these. What you're seeing on the X-axis here, is this is effectively what we're classifying as near term growth opportunity from all customers. The way we measure that effectively is we look at all the evaluations, current evaluations, planned evaluations, we look at people who are evaluated and plan to utilize these vendors. The more indications you get on that the more to the top right you're going to be. The more indications you get around I'm aware of but I don't plan to evaluate, or I'm replacing this early-stage vendor, the further down and on the left you're going to be. So, on the X-axis you have near term growth opportunity from all customers, and on the Y-axis you have near term growth opportunity from, really, the biggest shops in the world, your Global 2000, your Forbes Private 225, like Cargill, as an example, and then, of course, your federal agencies. So you really want to be positioned up and to the right here. So, the big takeaway here is zero trust. So, just a couple of things on this slide when we think about zero trust. As organizations accelerate their Cloud and Saas spend because of COVID-19, and, you know, what we were talking about earlier, Dave, remote work becomes the new normal, that perimeter security approach is losing appeal, because the perimeter's less defined, right? Apps and data are increasingly being stored in the Cloud. That, and employees are working remotely from everywhere, and they're accessing all of these items. And so what we're seeing now is a big move into zero trust. So, if we look at that chart again, what you're going to see in that upper right quadrant are a lot of identity and access management players. And look at the bifurcation in general. This is what we were talking about earlier in terms of the landscape not doing well. Most security vendors are in that red area, you know, in the middle to the bottom. But if you look at the top right, what are you seeing here? Unify ID, Auth0, WSO2, right, all identity and access management players. These are critical in your zero trust approach, and this is one of the few area where we are seeing upticks. You also see here BitSight, Lucideus. So that's going to be security assessment. You're seeing VECTRA and Netskope and Darktrace, and a few others here. And Cloud Security and IDPS, Intrusion Detection and Prevention System. So, very few sectors are seeing an uptick, very few security sectors actually look pretty good, based on opportunities that are coming. But, essentially, all of them are in that work-from-home aligned security stack, so to speak. >> Right, and of course, as we know, as we've been reporting, buyers have options, from both established companies and these emerging companies that are public, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler. We've seen the work-from-home pivot benefit those guys, but even Palo Alto Networks, even CISCO, I asked (other speaker drowns out speech) last week, I said, "Hey, what about this pivot to work from home? "What about this zero trust?" And he said, "Look, the reality is, yes, "a big part of our portfolio is exposed "to that traditional infrastructure, "but we have options for zero trust as well." So, from a buyer's standpoint, that perceived flight to safety, you have a lot of established vendors, and that clearly is showing up in your data. Now, the other sector that we want to talk about is database. We've been reporting a lot on database, data warehouse. So, why don't you take us through the next graphic here, if you would. >> Sagar: No problem. So, our theme here is that Snowflake is really separating itself from the pack, and, again, you can see that here. Private database and data warehousing vendors really continue to impact a lot of their public peers, and Snowflake is leading the way. We expect Snowflake to gain momentum in the next few years. And, look, there's some rumors that IPOing soon. And so when we think about that set-up, we like it, because as organizations transition away from hybrid Cloud architectures to 100% or near-100% public Cloud, Snowflake is really going to benefit. So they look good, their data stacks look pretty good, right, that's resiliency, redundancy across data centers. So we kind of like them as well. Redis Labs bring a DB and they look pretty good here on the opportunity side, but we are seeing a little bit of churn, so I think probably Snowflake and DataStax are probably our two favorites here. And again, when you think about Snowflake, we continue to think more pervasive vendors, like Paradata and Cloudera, and some of the other larger database firms, they're going to continue seeing wallet and market share losses due to some of these emerging providers. >> Yeah. If you could just keep that slide up for a second, I would point out, in many ways Snowflake is kind of a safer bet, you know, we talk about flight to safety, because they're well-funded, they're established. You can go from zero to Snowflake very quickly, that's sort of their mantra, if you will. But I want to point out and recognize that it is somewhat oranges and tangerines here, Snowflake being an analytical database. You take MariaDB, for instance, I look at that, anyway, as relational and operational. And then you mentioned DataStax. I would say Couchbase, Redis Labs, Aerospike. Cockroach is really a... EValue Store. You've got some non-relational databases in there. But we're looking at the entire sector of databases, which has become a really interesting market. But again, some of those established players are going to do very well, and I would put Snowflake on that cusp. As you pointed out, Bloomberg broke the story, I think last week, that they were contemplating an IPO, which we've known for a while. >> Yeah. And just one last thing on that. We do like some of the more pervasive players, right. Obviously, AWS, all their products, Redshift and DynamoDB. Microsoft looks really good. It's just really some of the other legacy ones, like the Teradatas, the Oracles, the Hadoops, right, that we are going to be impacted. And so the claw providers look really good. >> So, the last decade has really brought forth this whole notion of DevOps, infrastructure as code, the whole API economy. And that's the piece we want to jump into now. And there are some real stand-outs here, you know, despite the early data that we showed you, where CIOs are less prone to look at emerging vendors. There are some, for instance, if you bring up the next chart, guys, like Hashi, that really are standing out, aren't they? >> That's right, Dave. So, again, what you're seeing here is you're seeing that bifurcation that we were talking about earlier. There are a lot of infrastructure software vendors that are not positioned well, but if you look at the ones at the top right that are positioned well... We have two kind of things on here, starting with infrastructure automation. We think a winner here is emerging with Terraform. Look all the way up to the right, how well-positioned they are, how many opportunities they're getting. And for the second straight survey now, Terraform is leading along their peers, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack. And they're leading their peers in so many different categories, notably on allocating more spend, which is obviously very important. For Chef, Puppet and SaltStack, which you can see a little bit below, probably a little bit higher than the middle, we are seeing some elevator churn levels. And so, really, Terraform looks like they're kind of separating themselves. And we've got this great quote from the CIO just a few months ago, on why Terraform is likely pulling away, and I'll read it out here quickly. "The Terraform tool creates "an entire infrastructure in a box. "Unlike vendors that use procedural languages, "like Ants, Bull and Chef, "it will show you the infrastructure "in the way you want it to be. "You don't have to worry about "the things that happen underneath." I know some companies where you can put your entire Amazon infrastructure through Terraform. If Amazon disappears, if your availability drops, load balancers, RDS, everything, you just run Terraform and everything will be created in 10 to 15 minutes. So that shows you the power of Terraform and why we think it's ranked better than some of the other vendors. >> Yeah, I think that really does sum it up. And, actually, guys, if you don't mind bringing that chart back up again. So, a point out, so, Mitchell Hashimoto, Hashi, really, I believe I'm correct, talking to Stu about this a little bit, he sort of led the Terraform project, which is an Open Source project, and, to your point, very easy to deploy. Chef, Puppet, Salt, they were largely disrupted by Cloud, because they're designed to automate deployment largely on-prem and DevOps, and now Terraform sort of packages everything up into a platform. So, Hashi actually makes money, and you'll see it on this slide, and things, Vault, which is kind of their security play. You see GitLab on here. That's really application tooling to deploy code. You see Docker containers, you know, Docker, really all about open source, and they've had great adoption, Docker's challenge has always been monetization. You see Turbonomic on here, which is application resource management. You can't go too deep on these things, but it's pretty deep within this sector. But we are comparing different types of companies, but just to give you a sense as to where the momentum is. All right, let's wrap here. So maybe some final thoughts, Sagar, on the Emerging Technology Study, and then what we can expect in the coming month here, on the update in the Technology Spending Intention Study, please. >> Yeah, no problem. One last thing on the zero trust side that has been a big issue that we didn't get to cover, is VPN spend. Our data is pointing that, yes, even though VPN spend did increase the last few months because of remote work, we actually think that people are going to move away from that as they move onto zero trust. So just one last point on that, just in terms of overall thoughts, you know, again, as we cover it, you can see how bifurcated all these spaces are. Really, if we were to go sector by sector by sector, right, storage and block chain and MLAI and all that stuff, you would see there's a few or maybe one or two vendors doing well, and the majority of vendors are not seeing as many opportunities. And so, again, are you work-from-home aligned? Are you the best vendor of all the other emerging providers? And if you fit those two criteria then you will continue seeing POCs and evaluations. And if you don't fit that criteria, unfortunately, you're going to see less opportunities. So think that's really the big takeaway on that. And then, just in terms of next steps, we're already transitioning now to our next Technology Spending Intention Survey. That launched last week. And so, again, we're going to start getting a feel for how CIOs are spending in 2H-20, right, so, for the back half of the year. And our question changes a little bit. We ask them, "How do you plan on spending in the back half year "versus how you actually spent "in the first half of the year, or 1H-20?" So, we're kind of, tighten the screw, so to speak, and really getting an idea of what's spend going to look like in the back half, and we're also going to get some updates as it relates to budget impacts from COVID-19, as well as how vendor-relationships have changed, as well as business impacts, like layoffs and furloughs, and all that stuff. So we have a tremendous amount of data that's going to be coming in the next few weeks, and it should really prepare us for what to see over the summer and into the fall. >> Yeah, very excited, Sagar, to see that. I just wanted to double down on what you said about changes in networking. We've reported with you guys on NPLS networks, shifting to SD-WAN. But even VPN and SD-WAN are being called into question as the internet becomes the new private network. And so lots of changes there. And again, very excited to see updated data, return of post-COVID, as we exit this isolation economy. Really want to point out to folks that this is not a snapshot survey, right? This is an ongoing exercise that ETR runs, and grateful for our partnership with you guys. Check out ETR.plus, that's the ETR website. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Sagar, thanks so much for coming on. Once again, great to have you. >> Thank you so much, for having me, Dave. I really appreciate it, as always. >> And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> The isolation economy has created substantial momentum for certain cybersecurity companies, notably, as of the big stock market sell off on June 11th, relative to our last cyber report, which we did in February, the S and P 500, and the NASDAQ are off 11% and 3% respectively. But the valuations of three companies that we cited as four-star firms in our February cyber report are up significantly. In particular, Okta's valuation is up 34% since our last look in February. CrowdStrike, almost 50%, and Zscaler over 60%. Yet several other companies that were named as four-star players have really either tracked the S and P or even performed more poorly, despite still showing decent strength and spending momentum based on survey data from ETR. Welcome, everybody, to this week's Wickibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. My name is Dave Vellante and in this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our cybersecurity outlook and try to answer several questions, such as what has changed in the cybersecurity landscape. since our last report. Much has, as you know, Has the isolation economy created a permanent shift in security spend, or are these upticks just anomalies? What can we learn from the ETR spending data, and is the divergence and valuations amongst security leaders justified? Let's start by taking a look at what has changed since our last cyber report. Now, we produce this just ahead of the RSA conference in February, and one of the last physical conferences. So there's some big changes going on in the market. We really want to understand, are they systematic? In other words, are there fundamental changes to the system and its underlying principles, and by many accounts, the answer appears to be yes. Recently I listened in to a number of CSOs. of it was a call with ETR's Eric Bradley. And we heard the executives echo some of the themes that we've been discussing previously. It was notion of the work-from-home pivot, creating a focus on things like zero trust networks, changes in identity and access management, and way more focus on cloud, and of course, as a service, really reducing reliance on traditional firewalls and appliances that would reside in organizations' data centers. You know, we've gone from a world where digital transformation was an important strategic initiative to one where if you weren't digital, you largely couldn't transact business. Now, people are, the question they have is that is the longterm viability of VPNs makes sense? And even things like SD-WAN are being called into question, as corporate offices are empty and the internet is becoming the new private network. Now, one thing that hasn't changed is there are still a lot of technologies in this space. And that seems to be continuing as buyers need solutions to problems quickly to plug holes, and on balance IT budgets, they are contracting, so most companies still have to justify security spending based on the amount of risk reduction versus the cost. Of course, it's easier to justify for securing remote workers. So what I want to do now is take a pause and let's look back at some of the ETR data that we shared back in February. Now remember, this data is from the January ETR survey, ETR surveys organizations once every quarter. And if you recall, we keyed on two key metrics, some of our favorite metrics. Net Score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and Market Share, which measures pervasive per, sorry, pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, as you might recall, the left most chart here shows the cyber players and we sorted them by Net Score. The right hand side, that sorts those companies on Shared N, which measures the number of mentions of that company within the cybersecurity sector. Now, at the time, we named several four-star companies, actually we started this last year when we initiated coverage in the security space. These four-star security firms, really based on their rankings within both of those metrics, Net Score and Shared N. So you could see the four stars, Microsoft, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoint, Okta, CrowdStrike, and we added Zscaler as new, and then CyberArk. And we gave Cisco and Fortinet two stars, as they were kind of on the cusp. Now let's look at some of these companies from the April survey that ETR did. So this chart shows a subset of the vendors that we showed before. Now remember, this survey was taken at the height of the lockdown, from kind of early part of March to the early part of April. Budgets were under immense pressure. Nonetheless, look at Microsoft, Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Zscaler all held up pretty evenly. CrowdStrike also held steadily and maintain a very high level. Okta dipped somewhat, but from a pretty high level as well. Only Proofpoint is one of the ones that showed decline notably from 48% to a 40% Net Score relative to the chart I showed earlier. Now, SailPoint didn't make the four-star cut because it doesn't have the presence in the dataset, but it's Net Score is solid, and the Shared N jumped from 66 last survey to 88 in the latest checkpoint. So this identity and access management player, it seems to be one to watch. We'll come back to that in future episodes. Now let's plot some of these players in context, you know, using this two-dimensional axis that we often show. This chart shows that that view that we like to share. It plots Net Score, or spending velocity, on the Y axis, and then market share on the X axis. Remember, our market share is calculated by dividing the number of mentions for a company by the total number of mentions within that sector. So it's not like true IDC market share, it's market share within the survey. So you can see here a continued theme of Microsoft momentum, very high Net Score, or high Net Score and big presence. We plotted IBM and Dell EMC, which is really the legacy RSA business, just for context. And these are two companies with strong security brands, but as you can see, they're really not the giants that they used to be in cybersecurity software. So a couple of points on this graphic. CrowdStrike really jumps out as the momentum play on this chart. And that's really no surprise given its focus on endpoint security and the pivot to work-from-home. Okta has a focus on cloud-based identity management and they continue to show very strong. And CyberArk, with a focus on privileged access is also very important in this remote worker environment. We'll talk about that some more later. And you can see Zscaler, quite strong and steady from the last survey, but that company saw some of the biggest action in the stock market, which we're going to try to explain in a moment. Proofpoint, we talked about a deceleration in Net Score, but they're right in the mix as is Fortinet. Now finally, Palo Alto, you know, they remain strong. And Cisco, like many of its businesses, very credible with a Net Score that's decent and a large market presence as always. Now, as we've reported, security is one of the brightest spots in that Cisco portfolio. So the big takeaway from the ETR data is that despite the pandemic, cybersecurity software has held up very well from a spending standpoint. But now let's look a little bit deeper into what's happening in the stock market with these firms. And first as we know, there's a clear disconnect between what's happening in financial markets and the fundamentals of the economy. You know, Wall Street versus Main Street is kind of that narrative. And within the security sector, there's also a dissonance between companies, and we want to discuss that next. Here's an updated chart that we showed in February from our last cybersecurity episode. It compares the performance of the S and P 500 and the NASDAQ as of February 19th, with the performance of four-star cyber players from that date to Thursday, June 11th, the day that saw an 1800 point drop in the Dow. So some of the steam has been let out of the market, but the story really isn't going to change that much. First, the S and P is off 11% since that time, but the NAS is only off of 3%, tech heavy. But look at the deltas of our four-star companies. Let me start with Splunk. I didn't show Splunk earlier on the charts, but the value metrics of Splunk, they really haven't moved much since our February report. Splunk's Net Score was down somewhat in the sector, but remember, Splunk does more than just security. It's really becoming a critical big data player in analytics. I think people maybe don't like the tepid 2% revenue growth that Splunk showed, but remember Splunk is transitioning to an ARR model, an annual recurring revenue model, and that's going to take some time. It acquired SignalFx late last year to give it a stronger SaaS play in monitoring, and of course the analytics. I like Splunk, just like Adobe and Tableau had to make a similar transition, and ultimately they powered through it because they're great companies with really loyal customers, and I think that really does apply to Splunk. Let's take a look now at Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. Now, you might remember in our last security update, we spent a fair amount of time explaining the valuation divergence between Palo Alto and Fortinet due to some of the cloud challenges that Palo Alto was facing, even some of the sales motions. So we said Fortinet at the time had done a better job transitioning to a cloud, but Palo Alto really had a good quarter. It beat earnings revenue, and it gave guidance, and the stock moved up very nicely. But then it ran into resistance, and you can see it's a tracking about what the S and P 500 over this period of time. And you can see the revenue multiples show the valuations divergence between those two companies. It's even more stark. So you've got Fortinet's kind of holding firm, and Palo Alto, dipping a little bit. Now, let me make some comments here. I mean, I like Palo Alto Networks. Not only are they solid in the ETR dataset, despite the COVID pandemic, but anecdotal evidence in discussions with IT leaders suggests that organizations want to do business with Palo Alto. They're really considered a thought leader in the space. And I personally, I think they're going to do very well this decade. So now maybe there's some technical aspects going on with the stock. I'm not really qualified to address that. But they clearly saw some resistance despite bouncing on the strong quarter. Just couldn't hold. Now, let me skip over the green box, and I want to quickly comment on the last two here. I'm going to start with CyberArk. They are underperforming, this group, even though you would think with the focus on privileged access security, they'd do well in this environment. And they beat last quarter, but they suspended guidance, and they cited exposure to some hard hit industries on their earnings call. And as well, it just is interesting, the company is aggressively hiring. And so that increased op ex substantially. The thing in management is confidence, you know, what do they know that the street doesn't know? And they're just being cautious, you know, but they are taking a valuation hit as a result. We'll see how that plays out. Now, Proofpoint has also taken a valuation hit in our period of analysis back from February to now, despite beating estimates last quarter. You know, maybe not as strong as a work-from-home play, but again, a beat in this environment is definitely a positive. Now I want to come back to the three key companies highlighted in the green, Okta, CrowdStrike and Zscaler. Zscaler, remember, we added new in February to our four-star list, which we initiated last year. The valuation of these three companies has soared since the pandemic, and they've reported tailwinds as a result of the new reality. Okta with its identity management focus, CrowdStrike with endpoint, and Zscaler with its security cloud, are all seeing momentum. And it makes sense that these three are very focused and they're aligned with our remote worker economy, and of course, a shift to the cloud. As well, they all beat earnings and management had a pretty sanguine outlook going forward. But I want to call your attention to the revenue multiples of these three companies and take a look and compare them to their peers. You know, are these justified? Well, as I said before, there's really a difference between the stock market and what's happening in the real world today. So I would say, you know, I want to see these companies continue to outperform their estimates, and their strong guidance. And frankly, at these revenue multiples, I'd expect, you know, even higher growth rates of, especially from Okta and Zscaler. So we'll see. The point is, the market's exuberance, it's really based on future expectations. And I do think there was a bit of, you know, FOMO, fear of missing out, at play here with investors hopping on the bandwagon. Remember, look, the data from ETR shows that these companies are pretty strong, and of course, much of the stock action is based on performance relative to earnings estimates. So we'll see if this can continue. I mean, to me, it does feel a little frothy even after that recent sell off. All right, let's wrap up. So the disconnect between financial markets and the real world economy, it creates uncertainty in the market. So you got to be cautious, really, if, especially if you're chasing momentum. I just want to say, I know a lot of young investors who reach out to me and they comment to me in these segments. And look, I'm not qualified to tell you where to invest. I just report on the fundamentals and I try to tie in financial trends, and market trends, of course, But you got to do your own research, you know, be patient, do your dollar cost averaging thing. You got a long life to live. Now, the after COVID AC economy and the remote work-from-home momentum will not be a rising tide that's going to lift all ships in this segment. But there's no doubt that CSOs are rethinking cyber. We've said for years that protecting the perimeter was going to change as the main focus. And it has to a degree. But I'll tell ya, I think the mindset has changed more in the last 90 days than in the previous three years. The scourge of VPNs, and even the efficacy of SD-WAN are being called into question as security technologies that exploit the internet and cloud appear to be very sensible to CSOs and have momentum. You know, we're also seeing more collaboration between organizational boundaries, and even many CIOs are becoming much more involved in security as their line of business tends. And even some CSOs reporting it to CIO's. As we've said many times, cyber has become and will continue to be a board level agenda item and topic. On near term, we really don't see the fragmentation of the products that we've talked about for years changing. If anything, the shiny new security tools, you know, might even increase granularity in the marketplaces organizations, they can't just unplug their legacy infrastructure as much as they they'd like to. But longer term, there will be more consolidation in this market, as the whales are going to buy companies to fill holes in their lines. I mean, look at VMware, there's a good example of a company we really haven't talked about trying to elbow its way into the security space. And the cloud, as well, was going to attack some of the problems of complexity, which in part stems from too many tools, and that will foster some of this collaboration expectation. Okay, well, that's it for this week. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts. So please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. So check that out and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can email me as well, at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. We'll see you next time. (mellow digital music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. >>I path Hi. Welcome back to this special R p A drill down with support from you. I path You're watching The Cube. My name is Dave Volante and Bobby CMO. You know I passed Bobby. Good to see you again. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi, Dave. It's great to see you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on the Cube and even in the virtual format, this is really exciting. >>So, you know, last year at forward, we talked about the possibility of a downturn. Now nobody expected this kind of downturn. But we talked about that. Automation was likely something that was going to stay strong even in the downturn. We were thinking about potential recession or an economic downturn. Stock market dropped, but nothing like this. How are you guys holding up in this posted 19 pandemic? What are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah, we certainly we're not thinking of a black swan or rhino or whatever we call this, but, you know, it's been a pretty crazy couple of months for everybody. You know, when When this first started, we were like everybody else. Not sure how it impact our business. The interesting thing has been that you're in code. It actually brought a reality check through. A lot of companies and organizations realize that it's very few tools to respond quickly, right? Bond with, you know, cost pressures that we're urgent or preserving revenue, perhaps, or responding to Ah, strange resource is, you know, in all centers, or or built to support. You know, the surge in in, um, in the healthcare community. And so r p a became one of those tools that quickly waas knowledge and adopted. And so we went out two months ago to go find those 1st 1st use cases. Talk about him, then. You know, 1st 30 days we had 50 in production, right? Companies, you know, great organizations like Cleveland Clinic, right? You know where they use their parking lot? Give the first tests the swab tests, right of, uh, well, who have proven right? You know, they had a line of 88 hours by, you know, putting a robot in place in two days. They got that line down by 80 or 90% right? It is a huge hit as we see that kind of a kind of benefit all across right now in the world. Right now we have. We were featured in The Wall Street Journal recently with nurses and a large hospital system in Ireland called Matter. The nurses said in the interview that, you know they have. They were able to free up time to be a patient's right, which is what they're there for, anyway, thanks to robots during this during this emergency. So I think you know, it's it's definitely raise The awareness that that this technology is provides an amazing time to value, and that's it's pretty unprecedented in the world of B two B software. >>I want to share some data with you in our community is the first time we've we've shown this. Guys would bring up the data slide, and so this is ah, chart that e. T are produced. There's enterprise technology research. They go out of reporter. They survey CIOs and I T practitioners and a survey in different segments and the use of methodology Net score. And this is sort of how method how Net scores derived. And so what this chart shows is the percent of customers that responded there were about 125 You I path customers that responded. Are you adopting new U I path? Are you increasing spending in 2020? Are you planning on flat spending or decreasing spending? Are you replacing the platform of beacons? And so basically, we take the green, uh, subtract the read from the green, and that gives us net score. But the point is that Bobby abouts about 80% of your customers are planning to spend Maurin 2020 than they spent in 2019 and only about 6% of planning on spending less, which is fairly astounding. I mean, we've been reporting on this for a while in the heat nous in the in the automation market generally and specifically. But are you seeing this in the marketplace? And maybe you could talk about why? >>Well, we just finished our first fiscal quarter into the end of April, and we're still privately held, so we can be, uh, find some insights of our company, but yeah, the the pace of our business picked up actually in in the mark. April timeframe. Um, customer adoption, large customer adoption. Um, the number of new new companies and new logos were at a record high. And, you know, we're entering into this quarter now, and we have some 20 plus $1,000,000 deals that are like that. It closed, right? I mean, that's probably a 30% increase Versus what? How many we have today alone. Right? So our business, you know, is is now well over 400 million and air are we ended last year, 3 60 and the growth rate continues fast. I think you know what's interesting is that the pace of the recode world was already fast, right? The the luxury of time has kind of disappeared. And so people are thinking about, you know, they don't have they can't wait now, months and years for digital transformation. They have to do things in days and days and days and weeks. And and that's where our technology really comes into play. Right? And and and it actually is also coming to play well in the world of the remote workforce. Reality two of the ability for remote workers to get trained while they're home on automation to build automation pipelines to to build automation. Now, with our latest release, you can download our podcast, capture and report what you're doing, and it basically generates the process definition document and the sample files, which allow for faster implementation by our center of excellence. So what's really happening here? We see it is a sense of urgency coming out of this. Prices are coming down the curve. Hopefully, now this is of urgency that our customers are facing in terms of how they respond, you know, and respond digitally to helping their business out. And it varies a lot by industry, our state and local business was really thinking was not going to be the biggest laggard of any industry picked up in a significant way in the last couple of months, New York State, with Governor Cuomo, became a big customer of ours. There's a quote from L. A County, see Iot that I've got here. They just employed us. It's public, this quote, he said. Deputy CIO said Price is always the mother of invention. We can always carry forward the good things they're coming out of this crisis situation. He's referring to our P A is being a lesson. They learned hearing this, that they're going to carry forward. And so we see this state of Oklahoma became a customer and others. So I think that's that's what we're seeing kind of a broad based. It's worldwide. >>You're really organizations can't put it off anymore. I think you're right. It sort of brought forward the future into the present. Now you mentioned 360 million last year. We had forecast 350 million was pretty good for you guys released, so it's happy about that. But so obviously still a strong trajectory. You know, it might have been higher without without covert. We'll never know, but sort of underscores the strength of the space. Um, and February you guys, there was an article that so you're essentially Theo Dan, Daniel Hernandez was quoted. Is that on hold now? Are you guys still sort of thinking about pressing forward or too early to say right? >>Yeah. I mean, I think I think the reality is we have a very, very strong business. We've raised, you know, significant money from great investors, some of which are the leading VCs in the world. and also that the public company investors and, you know, we have, ah, aggressive plan. We have an aggressive plan to build out our platform for hyper automation to continue. The growth path is now becoming the center of companies of I, T and Digital Strategies, not on the side. Right. And so to do that, you know, we're gonna want capital to help fuel our our our ambitions and fuel Our ability to serve our customers and public markets is probably a very, very logical one. As Daniel mentioned in a in a A recent, uh, he's on Bloomberg that he definitely sees. That is ah, maybe accelerating that, You know, we're late Last year, we started focusing on sustainable growth as a company and operational regular. These are important things in addition to having strong growth that, you know, a long term company has to have in place. And I can tell you, um, I'm really excited about the fact that we, you know, we operate very much like a public company. Now, internally, we you know, we do draft earnings releases that aren't public yet, and we do mock earnings, earnings calls, and we have hired Thomas Hansen is runs our chief revenue officer with storage backgrounds. And so you're gonna interview as well. These are these are these are the best of the best, right? That joint, they're joined this company, they're joining alongside the arm Kalonzo the world that are part of this company. And so I think, Yeah, I think it's an AR It's likely. And and it's gonna We're here to be a long term leader in this decade of automation. >>Well, and one of the other things that we forecast on our breaking analysis we took a look at the total available market kind of like into it. Early days of service Now is you know, people were really not fully understanding the market and chillin C it is is quite large, so video. So when we look at the competition, you know, you guys, if I showed you the same wheel with automation anywhere, it would also look strong. You know, some of the others, maybe not a strong but still stronger than many of the segments. I mean, for instance, you know, on Prem hardware. You know, compared with that and you know the automation space in general across the board is very, very strong. So I wonder if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you guys differentiate from the competition. How you see that? >>Yeah, I think you know, we've We've come a long way in the last three years, right? In terms of becoming the market leader, having the highest market share, we're very open and transparent about our numbers with We've long had the vision of a robot. Every person, uh, and and we've been delivering on that on on that vision and ah, building out a platform that helps companies, you know, transform digitally enterprise wide. Right. So, you know, I don't see any of our competitors with a platform for hyper automation like this. We have an incredible focus on the ability to help people actually find the ideas, build the pipeline, score the pipelines and integrate those with the automation center of excellence. Right? We have the ability now with our latest release to help test automation testers now not only in the world of art A but actually take robotic robots and and architecture into doing test automation. The traditional test automation market in a much better and faster way So you know, we're innovating at a pace that that it is, I think, much faster than I don't. I don't know automation anywhere. I won't share any their numbers. You know, who knows what the numbers are. We have guesses, but I'm fairly certain that we continue to gain share on them. But you know, what's most important is customer adoption, and we've also seen a number of customers switch from some of our competitors to us. Our competitors are undercapitalized and middle. Invest in R and D. This is an investment area, really build a platform out from our competitors have architectures that are hard to upgrade, right? This has been a big source of pain for companies that have been on our competitors. Where upgrades are difficult requires them to retest every time where our upgrades are very rolling, you know, are very smooth. We have an insider program which you know, I don't think any of our competitors have. If you go inside that you had pat that your customer every single bit every single review betting, private preview, public preview and general availability, you can provide feedback on and the customers can score up new ideas. They drive our our roadmap. Right. And this is I think we operate differently. I think our growth is a is a good indication of that. And, you know, and there are new competitors like Microsoft. But I think you know, you know, medium or long term, you know, they're gonna make effort around our, um and you know, they're behind the, um, automation is really hard. The buried entry here is not it's not. Not easy. And we're going to keep me on that platform, play out, and I think that's ah, that's what makes us so different. Um and ah, you know, we have the renewal numbers, retention numbers, expansion numbers and and the revenue numbers to improve that, uh, you know, we're number one. >>Well, so I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, and you're right. You guys are really focused, you know, you automation anywhere really focused on this space, and you shared with us how you differentiate there. But as you point out Microsoft, they sort of added on I had talked to Allan, preferably the day from paga. You know, those guys don't position themselves as our PC, but they have r p A. I talked to, you know, our mutual friend Robert Young John the other day, right? They're piling onto this this trend, right? So why not? Right, It's it's ah, it's hot. But so, you know, clearly you guys are innovating there. I want to talk about your vision before we get into the latest product release two things that I would call out the term hyper automation with, I think is the Gartner term. And then it will probably stick. And then this this idea of a robot for every person How would you describe your vision? >>Yeah, I mean, we think that robots can and improve, you know, the the lives of of or pers everywhere, right? We think in every every function, every role. And we see that already, the job satisfaction and the people don't want to do the mundane, repetitive work, right? The new hires coming out of college, you know, they're gonna be excel and sequel server. We're no longer the tools of productivity. For them, it's it's your path. We have business. Schools that have committed top tier business schools have committed to deploying your path or to putting you're passing every force in the school these students are graduating with the right path is their most important skill going into companies. And they're gonna expect to be able to use robots within their companies in their daily lives. A swell. So, you know, we have customers today that are rolling out a robot for every person you know. We had Ah, Conoco Phillips on just earlier in our launch, talking about citizen developers, enabling says, developer armies of developers and growing enterprise wide. See, Intel was on as well from Singapore, the large telco. They're doing the exact same thing. So I think you know, I think this is this is this is this is about broad based digital transformation. Everybody participating And what happens is the leading companies to do this, you know, they're going to get the benefit of benefits out of it. It can reinvest that productivity, benefits and data science and analytics and serving customers and in, you know, and and, ah, new product ideas. And so, you know, this is this. You know, automation is going to fuel now the ability for companies to really differentiate and serve their customers better. And it's only needed enterprise wide view on it that you really maximizing. Take Amazon, for example, a great customer during during this prices. You know, they're trying to hire hundreds of thousands of people, right? Help in the fact that in their in their distribution centers elsewhere, this all served demand to help people who like you and I home or ordering things that we need, right? Well, they're use your path robots all throughout their HR hr on boarding HR recruiting HR administration And so helping them has been a big during this prices surge of robots is helping them actually hire workers. You know another example of Schneider Electric and amazing customer of ours. They're bringing their plants, their manufacturing facilities, implants back online faster by using robots to help manage the PPE personal protective equipment in the plant allow people workers to get back to work faster. Right? So what's happening is is, you know in that in those cases is your different examples of robots and different functions, right? In all cases, it's about helping grow a company faster. It's about helping protect workers. It's about helping getting revenue machines back up and running after Kobe is going to be critical to get back to work faster. So I'm I'm really excited about the fact that as people think about automation across the organization, the number of ideas and Aaron opportunities for improvement are are we're just starting to tap that potential. >>Well, this is why I think the vision is so important because you're talking about things that are transformative. Now, as you well know, one of the criticisms of RPS. So you have people, the suppliers and just yeah, we, you know, looking at mundane tasks, just automating mundane tasks like sometimes paving the cow path and say, you're very much aware of that criticism. But if I look at the recent announcements, you're really starting to build out that vision that you just talked about. They're really four takeaways. You sort of extending the core PAP platform, injecting AI end some or and more automation end to end automation really taken that full lifestyles lifecycle systems view and the last one is sort of putting it talks to the robot. For every person that sort of citizen automation, if you will, that sort of encompasses your product announcements. So it wasn't just sort of a point Announcement really is a underscores the platform. I wonder if you could just What do we need to know about you guys? Just that out. >>So we think about how we think about the rolls back to a division of robots person how automation can help different roles. And so this product launch $20 for this large scale launch that you just articulated, um, impacts in a fax and helps many different kinds of new roles Certainly process analysts now who examined processes, passes performance improvements. You know, they're a user of our process mining solution in our past. Find a solution that helps speed on our way. Arpaio engine, no testers and quality engineers. Now they can actually use studio pro and actually used test robots are brand new, and our new test manager is sort of the orchestration and management of test executions. Now they can participate in in leveraged power of robots and what they do as well. And we kind of think about that, you know, kind of across the board in our organization across the platform. They can use tools like you have path insights in Europe. If you're an analyst or your, uh ah. B I, this intelligence person really know what's going on with robots in terms of our wife for my organization and provide that up to the, you know, sea levels in the board of directors in real time. So I think that's that's the big part. Here is we're bringing, and we're helping bring in many, many different kinds of roles different kinds of people. Data scientist. You mentioned AI. Now data scientists can build a model. The models applied to ai fabric an orchestrator. It's drag and drop by our developer in studio, and now you can turn, you know, a a mundane, rules based task right into an experience based ones where a robot can help make a decision right. Based on experience and data, they can tweak and tune that model and data scientists can interact, you know, with the automation is flowing through your path. So I think that's how we think about it, right? You know, one of the great new capabilities, as well as the ability to engage line workers, dispatch out workers If you're a telco or or retail story retail store workers you know the robots can work with humans out in the field. We've got one real large manufacturer with 18,000 drivers in a DST direct store delivery scenario. And you know the ability for them to interact with robots and help them do their job in the field. Our customers better after the list data entry and data manipulation, multiple systems. So I this is this makes us very unique in our vision and in our execution. And again, I don't I have not heard of a single ah example by competitors that has any kind of a vision or articulation to be able to help a company enterprise wide and, you know, with the speed and the and the full, full vision that we have. >>Okay, so you're not worried about downturns. You can't control black swans Anyway, you're not worried about the competition. It feels like you know, you're worried about what you're worried about. You want about growing too fast. Additionally, deploying the the capital that you've raised. What worries you? >>Yeah. You know, we're paranoid or paranoid company, right? And when it comes to the market and and trying to drive, I think we've done a lot to help actually push the rock up the hill in terms of really, really driving our market, building the market, and we want to continue that right and not let up. So there's this kind of desire to never let up, right? Well, we always remind ourselves we must work harder, must work harder. We must work harder. And that's that's That's sort of this this mentality around ourselves, by the smartest people. Hire the smartest people you work with our customers, our customers are priority. Do that with really high excellence and really high sincerity that it comes through and everything that we do, you know, to build a world class operation to be, you know, Daniel DNS. When I first met him, he said, You know, I really want to be the enemy of the great news ecology company that serve customers really well. And it was amazing things for society, and and, you know, we're on that track, but we've got, you know, we're in the in the in the early innings. So, you know, making sure that we also run our business in a way that, um, you know, uh, is ready to be Ah, you know, publicly successful company on being able to raise new sources of capital to fund our ambitions and our ideas. I mean, you saw the number of announcements from our 24 release. It reminded me of an AWS re invent conference, where it's just innovation, innovation, innovation, innovation. And these are very real. They're not made up mythical announcements that some of our competitors do about launching some kind of discovery box doesn't exist, right? These are very real with real customers behind them, and and so you know, just doing that with the same level of tenacity. But being, you know, old, fast, immersed and humble, which are four core culture values along the way and not losing that Azeri grow. That's that's something we talk about maintaining that culture that's super critical to us. >>Everybody's talking about Okay, What What's gonna be permanent? Postpone it. I was just listening to Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, and she was saying that, you know, prior to Covic, they had data that showed that the top 25% of companies that have leaned into digital transformation were outperforming. You know, the balance of their peers, and I know question now that the the rest of that base really is going to be focused on automation. Automation is is really going to be one of those things that is high, high priority now and really for the next decade and beyond. So, Bobby, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and supporting us in this in this r p. A drill down. Really appreciate it, >>Dave. It's always a pleasure as always. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Alright. And thank you for watching everybody. Dave Volante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching the cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the release show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Valenti, welcome back to our RPA Drill Down. Ted Kummert is here he is Executive Vice President for Products and Engineering at UiPath. Ted, thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Dave, it's great to be here, thanks so much. >> Dave your background is pretty interesting, you started as a Silicon Valley Engineer, they pulled you out, you did a huge stint at Microsoft. You got experience in SAS, you've got VC chops with Madrona. And at Microsoft you saw it all, the NT, the CE Space, Workflow, even MSN you did stuff with MSN, and then the all important data. So I'm interested in what attracted you to UiPath? >> Yeah Dave, I feel super fortunate to have worked in the industry in this span of time, it's been an amazing journey, and I had a great run at Microsoft it was fantastic. You mentioned one experience in the middle there, when I first went to the server business, the enterprise business, I owned our Integration and Workflow products, and I would say that's the first I encountered this idea. Often in the software industry there are ideas that have been around for a long time, and what we're doing is refining how we're delivering them. And we had ideas we talked about in terms of Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, Workflow. The ways to efficiently able somebody to express the business process in a piece of software. Bring systems together, make everybody productive, bring humans into it. These were the ideas we talked about. Now in reality there were some real gaps. Because what happened in the technology was pretty different from what the actual business process was. And so lets fast forward then, I met Madrona Venture Group, Seattle based Venture Capital Firm. We actually made a decision to participate in one of UiPath's fundraising rounds. And that's the first I really came encountered with the company and had to have more than an intellectual understanding of RPA. 'Cause when I first saw it, I said "oh, I think that's desktop automation" I didn't look very close, maybe that's going to run out of runway, whatever. And then I got more acquainted with it and figured out "Oh, there's a much bigger idea here". And the power is that by really considering the process and the implementation from the humans work in, then you have an opportunity really to automate the real work. Not that what we were doing before wasn't significant, this is just that much more powerful. And that's when I got really excited. And then the companies statistics and growth and everything else just speaks for itself, in terms of an opportunity to work, I believe, in one of the most significant platforms going in the enterprise today, and work at one of the fastest growing companies around. It was like almost an automatic decision to decide to come to the company. >> Well you know, you bring up a good point you think about software historically through our industry, a lot of it was 'okay here's this software, now figure out how to map your processes to make it all work' and today the processes, especially you think about this pandemic, the processes are unknown. And so the software really has to be adaptable. So I'm wondering, and essentially we're talking about a fundamental shift in the way we work. And is there really a fundamental shift going on in how we write software and how would you describe that? >> Well there certainly are, and in a way that's the job of what we do when we build platforms for the enterprises, is try and give our customers a new way to get work done, that's more efficient and helps them build more powerful applications. And that's exactly what RPA does, the efficiency, it's not that this is the only way in software to express a lot of this, it just happens to be the quickest. You know in most ways. Especially as you start thinking about initiatives like our StudioX product to what we talk about as enabling citizen developers. It's an expression that allows customers to just do what they could have done otherwise much more quickly and efficient. And the value on that is always high, certainly in an unknown era like this, it's even more valuable, there are specific processes we've been helping automate in the healthcare, in financial services, with things like SBA Loan Processing, that we weren't thinking about six months ago, or they weren't thinking about six months ago. We're all thinking about how we're reinventing the way we work as individuals and corporations because of what's going on with the coronavirus crisis, having a platform like this that gives you agility and mapping the real work to what your computer state and applications all know how to do, is even more valuable in a climate like that. >> What attracted us originally to UiPath, we knew Bobby Patrick CMO, he said "Dave, go download a copy, go build some automations and go try it with some other companies". So that really struck us as wow, this is actually quite simple. Yet at the same time, and so you've of course been automating all these simple tasks, but now you've got real aspiration, you're glomming on to this term of Hyperautomation, you've made some acquisitions, you've got a vision, that really has taken you beyond 'paving the cow path' I sometimes say, of all these existing processes. It's really trying to discover new processes and opportunities for automation, which you would think after 50 or whatever years we've been in this industry, we'd have attacked a lot of it, but wow, seems like we have a long way to go. Again, especially what we're learning through this pandemic. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I'd say Hyperautomation. It's actually a Gartner term, it's not our term. But there is a bigger idea here, built around the core automation platform. So let's talk for a second just what's not about the core platform and then what Hyperautomation really means around that. And I think of that as the bookends of how do I discover and plan, how do I improve my ability to do more automations, and find the real opportunities that I have. And how do I measure and optimize? And that's a lot of what we delivered in 20.4 as a new capability. So let's talk about discover and plan. One aspect of that is the wisdom of the crowd. We have a product we call Automation Hub that is all about that. Enabling people who have ideas, they're the ones doing the work, they have the observation into what efficiencies can be. Enabling them to either with our Ask Capture Utility capture that and document that, or just directly document that. And then, people across the company can then collaborate eventually moving on building the best ideas out of that. So there's capturing the crowd, and then there's a more scientific way of capturing actually what the opportunities are. So we've got two products we introduced. One is process mining, and process mining is about going outside in from the, let's call it the larger processes, more end to end processes in the enterprise. Things like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, helping you understand by watching the events, and doing the analytics around that, where your bottle necks, where are you opportunities. And then task mining said "let's watch an individual, or group of individuals, what their tasks are, let's watch the log of events there, let's apply some machine learning processing to that, and say here's the repetitive things we've found." And really helping you then scientifically discover what your opportunities are. And these ideas have been along for a long time, process mining is not new. But the connection to an automation platform, we think is a new and powerful idea, and something we plan to invest a lot in going forward. So that's the first bookend. And then the second bookend is really about attaching rich analytics, so how do I measure it, so there's operationally how are my robots doing? And then there's everything down to return on investment. How do I understand how they are performing, verses what I would have spent if I was continuing to do them the old way. >> Yeah that's big 'cause (laughing) the hero reports for the executives to say "hey, this is actually working" but at the same time you've got to take a systems view. You don't want to just optimize one part of the system at the detriment to others. So you talk about process mining, which is kind of discovering the backend systems, ERP and the like, where the task mining it sounds like it's more the collaboration and front end. So that whole system thinking, really applies, doesn't it? >> Yeah. Very much so. Another part of what we talked about then, in the system is, how do we capture the ideas and how do we enable more people to build these automations? And that really gets down to, we talk about it in our company level vision, is a robot for every person. Every person should have a digital assistant. It can help you with things you do less frequently, it can help you with things you do all the time to do your job. And how do we help you create those? We've released a new tool we call StudioX. So for our RPA Developers we have Studio, and StudioX is really trying to enable a citizen developer. It's not unlike the art that we saw in Business Intelligence there was the era where analytics and reporting were the domain of experts, and they produced formalized reports that people could consume. But the people that had the questions would have to work with them and couldn't do the work themselves. And then along comes ClickView and Tableau and Power BI enabling the self services model, and all of a sudden people could do that work themselves, and that enabled powerful things. We think the same arch happens here, and StudioX is really our way of enabling that, citizen developer with the ideas to get some automation work done on their own. >> Got a lot in this announcement, things like document understanding, bring your own AI with AI fabric, how are you able to launch so many products, and have them fit together, you've made some acquisitions. Can you talk about the architecture that enables you to do that? >> Yeah, it's clearly in terms of ambition, and I've been there for 10 weeks, but in terms of ambition you don't have to have been there when they started the release after Forward III in October to know that this is the most ambitious thing that this company has ever done from a release perspective. Just in terms of the surface area we're delivering across now as an organization, is substantive. We talk about 1,000 feature improvements, 100's of discreet features, new products, as well as now our automation cloud has become generally available as well. So we've had muscle building over this past time to become world class at offering SAS, in addition to on-premises. And then we've got this big surface area, and architecture is a key component of how you can do this. How do you deliver efficiently the same software on-premises and in the cloud? Well you do that by having the right architecture and making the right bets. And certainly you look forward, how are companies doing this today? It's really all about Cloud-Native Platform. But it's about an architecture such that we can do that efficiently. So there is a lot about just your technical strategy. And then it's just about a ton of discipline and customer focus. It keeps you focused on the right things. StudioX was a great example of we were led by customers through a lot of what we actually delivered, a couple of the major features in it, certainly the out of box templates, the studio governance features, came out of customer suggestions. I think we had about 100 that we have sitting in the backlog, a lot of which we've already done, and really being disciplined and really focused on what customers are telling. So make sure you have the right technical strategy and architecture, really follow your customers, and really stay disciplined and focused on what matters most as you execute on the release. >> What can we learn from previous examples, I think about for instance SQL Server, you obviously have some knowledge in it, it started out pretty simple workloads and then at the time we all said "wow, it's a lot more powerful to come from below that it is, if a Db2, or an Oracle sort of goes down market", Microsoft proved that, obviously built in the robustness necessary, is there a similar metaphor here with regard to things like governance and security, just in terms of where UiPath started and where you see it going? >> Well I think the similarities have more to do with we have an idea of a bigger platform that we're now delivering against. In the database market, that was, we started, SQL Server started out as more of just a transactional database product, and ultimately grew to all of the workloads in the data platform, including transaction for transactional apps, data warehousing and as well as business intelligence. I see the same analogy here of thinking more broadly of the needs, and what the ability of an integrated platform, what it can do to enable great things for customers, I think that's a very consistent thing. And I think another consistent thing is know who you are. SQL Server knew exactly who it had to be when it entered the database market. That it was going to set a new benchmark on simplicity, TCO, and that was going to be the way it differentiated. In this case, we're out ahead of the market, we have a vision that's broader than a lot of the market is today. I think we see a lot of people coming in to this space, but we see them building to where we were, and we're out ahead. So we are operating from a leadership position, and I'm not going to tell you one's easier that the other, and both you have to execute with great urgency. But we're really executing out ahead, so we've got to keep thinking about, and there's no one's tail lights to follow, we have to be the ones really blazing the trail on what all of this means. >> I want to ask you about this incorporation of existing systems. Some markets they take off, it's kind of a one shot deal, and the market just embeds. I think you guys have bigger aspirations than that, I look at it like a service now, misunderstood early on, built the platform and now really is fundamental part of a lot of enterprises. I also look at things like EDW, which again, you have some experience in. In my view it failed to live up to a lot of it's promises even though it delivered a lot of value. You look at some of the big data initiatives, you know EDW still plugs in, it's the system of record, okay that's fine. How do you see RPA evolving? Are we going to incorporate, do we have to embrace existing business process systems? Or is this largely a do-over in your opinion? >> Well I think it's certainly about a new way of building automation, and it's starting to incorporate and include the other ways, for instance in the current release we added support for long running workflow, it was about human workflow based scenarios, now the human is collaborating with the robot, and we built those capabilities. So I do see us combining some of the old and new way. I think one of the most significant things here, is also that impact that AI and ML based technologies and skills can have on the power of the automations that we deliver. We've certainly got a surface area that, I think about our AI and ML strategy in two parts, that we are building first class first party skills, that we're including in the platform, and then we're building a platform for third parties and customers to bring their what their data science teams have delivered, so those can also be a part of our ecosystem, and part of automations. And so things like document understanding, how do I easily extract data from more structured, semi-structured and completely unstructured documents, accurately? And include those in my automations. Computer vision which gives us an ability to automate at a UI level across other types of systems than say a Windows and a browser base application. And task mining is built on a very robust, multi layer ML system, and the innovation opportunity that I think just consider there, you know continue there. You think it's a macro level if there's aspects of machine learning that are about captured human knowledge, well what exactly is an automation that captured where you're capturing a lot of human knowledge. The impact of ML and AI are going to be significant going out into the future. >> Yeah, I want to ask you about them, and I think a lot of people are just afraid of AI, as a separate thing and they have to figure out how to operationalize it. And I think companies like UiPath are really in a position to embed UI into applications AI into applications everywhere, so that maybe those folks that haven't climbed on the digital bandwagon, who are now with this pandemic are realizing "wow, we better accelerate this" they can actually tap machine intelligence through your products and others as well. Your thoughts on that sort of narrative? >> Yeah, I agree with that point of view, it's AI and ML is still maturing discipline across the industry. And you have to build new muscle, and you build new muscle and data science, and it forces you to think about data and how you manage your data in a different way. And that's a journey we've been on as a company to not only build our first party skills, but also to build the platform. It's what's given us the knowledge that to help us figure out, well what do we need to include here so our customers can bring their skills, actually to our platform, and I do think this is a place where we're going to see the real impact of AI and ML in a broader way. Based on the kind of apps it is and the kind of skills we can bring to bear. >> Okay last question, you're ten weeks in, when you're 50, 100, 200 weeks in, what should we be watching, what do you want to have accomplished? >> Well we're listening, we're obviously listening closely to our customers, right now we're still having a great week, 'cause there's nothing like shipping new software. So right now we're actually thinking deeply about where we're headed next. We see there's lots of opportunities and robot for every person, and that initiative, and so we're launched a bunch of important new capabilities there, and we're going to keep working with the market to understand how we can, how we can add additional capability there. We've just got the GA of our automation cloud, I think you should expect more and more services in our automation cloud going forward. I think this area we talked about, in terms of AI and ML and those technologies, I think you should expect more investment and innovation there from us and the community, helping our customers, and I think you will also see us then, as we talked about this convergence of the ways we bring together systems through integrate and build business process, I think we'll see a convergence into the platform of more of those methods. I look ahead to the next releases, and want to see us making some very significant releases that are advancing all of those things, and continuing our leadership in what we talk about now as the Hyperautomation platform. >> Well Ted, lot of innovation opportunities and of course everybody's hopping on the automation bandwagon. Everybody's going to want a piece of your RPA hide, and you're in the lead, we're really excited for you, we're excited to have you on theCUBE, so thanks very much for all your time and your insight. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks Dave, great to spend this time with you. >> All right thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Velanti for theCUBE, and our RPA Drill Down Series, keep it right there we'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming instrumental music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the Release Show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Every body welcome back, to this special presentation, theCUBE has been covering the RPA space for quite some time. UiPath just had recently a huge launch, and Daniel Dines, as the CEO and founder of UiPath, has set forth the vision, of a robot for every person. (Giggles) pretty substantial goals that he has. And Brandon Node is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Product at UiPath. Brandon, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So that is a really ambitious goal. And, we're going to poke at that a little bit, and ask you to sort of defend it. Give us some proof points and help us understand sort of why you guys are so confident in this vision. You guys obviously the leader in RPA, growing like crazy, you've shared some metrics, very transparent. So we'd love to have these transparent and open honest computation. So I'm going to start with just sort of the basic, I mean, people understand RPA, just as in terms of automating a lot of mundane tasks, these tasks, you know, are often very repetitive or rules based. They're sort of interacting with existing applications. Now, in the early days of RPA, these are stable legacy apps with people sitting in front of a screen. So I guess my first question to you is, you know, some of the criticisms of RPA have been that if the app changes, you know, the robot breaks. So, first of all, is that the correct way to be thinking about the state of RPA. Today, is that an outdated view? And let's get into it so we can understand how we achieve robot for every person. >> Your thought sure. So I think it's a fair point in that RPA, by definition is built on top of applications. And it's always been the case that you need to be in coordination with your release teams with the application teams to understand what's happening there. Do I think it's a fair statement on where the industry is? I don't think so I think that is a small component of what the center of excellence looks at. And when you look at RPA, at scale today, there are many considerations governance, change management training, things that make these companies successful and these companies that are embracing it as part of their strategic plan for digital transformation. So for sure, it's a part of the story. But I would say, it's just a small part, the bigger part of the story is really about how you bring RPA into the culture. And that's what I think we'll talk about some more with the robot for every person. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, and I want to get back into that sort of how you make RPA strategic but before we get there, so a lot of people have said. Okay, you know're your interacting with existing legacy applications stable. There's no problem, you kind of sort of refuted that. But a lot of people also talk about a point into the API economy that API's are really a way that your platform or other your competitors platform can interact with applications. And that begins to sort of widen the opportunity, sort of modernize both infrastructure and applications. Where do where does the API economy, the whole equation? >> Sure. When you look at RPA, we shouldn't look at it as just a narrow set of implementations. RPA is capable of connecting directly to API's directly to it interfaces to you know, mouse and click style integrations as well as deeper levels, connecting directly to the lower levels of the application bypassing the mouse and keyboard entirely. So think about RPA, not just as keyboard and mouse automations, but also benefiting from all of those API's that exists, also being able to span the full spectrum of automation. >> So I want to talk sometimes I joke, you know, tongue in cheek, it's sort of a pejorative, I say, hey, RPA sometimes paves the cow path. But you know, what if my cow path works, and I can pave it and allows me to go faster and automate. So what? There's other opportunities I can I can attack. So my question is, where are you seeing people really applying RPA today, and how rapidly are they going forward? You know, really transforming. You mentioned digital transformation. And you guys announced a ton of product getting into it where do you see them in terms of glomming on to some of those more strategic areas >> Yeah, absolutely. So we've had lots of conversation around what the right methodology is for RPA, kind of like you said, should I just automate the process as it is? Or should I break down the process, assess it, re-engineer it and then automate? And the answer is, we have customers all over the spectrum. And there's a lot to be said for automating the process as is, if a robot can do it in a minute and a half as is. But if I re engineer it, it can do it in a minute flat. Where's your time best spent? And I think the biggest consideration that companies need to have right now with regard to automation is just really around opportunity costs. If I can automate a process as is and put my re-engineering team on to a bigger problem, that's going to get a bigger lift for the organization. ploy those people there, right? So what you end up having is this kind of mosaic of opportunities. How much does it cost to automate? How much does it cost to re engineer? What's my benefit going to be from that automation or from that re engineering, and now you have different tools that you can apply to your backlog. So, for sure, RPA can automate things as it is as is as well as do take that re-engineering approach and make sure that you are getting the most out of that automation. In terms of the strategic nature of it. Again, all over the map. You know, we've always said automate the mundane automate the repeatable. I was a customer before I was an employee, some of my automations were actually my most critical things, the things that I couldn't let fall through the cracks under any circumstances. So while they were maybe relatively easy for a human To do the compliance pick up that I had the guaranteed delivery pick up that I had, to me made it worth it. >> How does artificial intelligence address some of this in terms of, of making RPA more strategic. In one hand, it is going to inject some, simplicity into the process. On the other hand, you know, people cerned about AI, where does it fit? In? What form does it take? Is it natural language processing? Is it? Is it actually taking actions like systems of agency? How should we think about that? >> Sure. I think about it as, again, a spectrum. You know, so many of these questions, there's not a single answer. There. It's really about what you want to accomplish and how you're going to approach it. So for instance, let's say I'm a company and I want to build the next best action AI model or ML model. right, I'm going to start with the data that I have from my operation. So I may want to use RPA. To help extract data out of processes the build repository that I'm going to build my, my model off of, or let's say I, you know, we have customers that are implementing complex models to help with with their customers. And they have those models being surfaced through RPA. So now I have the model, but I want a human to review it before it takes action. I can surface that in an attended automation in a form or something that's pre built that gives the agent guidance on what to do. And then at the fully autonomous side, you have AI and ML models attached to chat bots that are hooked into RPA processes that can service customers in real time. >> You know, I want to ask you about sort of Product versus platforms in their, their book, the second Machine Age Andy McAfee and Erik brynjolfsson MIT professors years ago sort of laid out, they said products or platforms beat products. And I think a lot of the criticisms of EA around point products, you guys made a big deal. In your your last release, you didn't really talk specifically about this. But to me, my one of my takeaways is, you're building out a platform, you talked about a spectrum. You know, you've got, you know, studio x versus low code, you've got your studio, which is for RPA developers, you got Studio Pro, for hardcore, you know what to do quality assurance, so you've really got a spectrum of capabilities. So it strikes me that one of the ways in which you get to a robot for every person is that you've got a platform that can evolve, you know, with the market. And I wonder if you could sort of talk about that and really try to plug it into that vision that Daniel set out a couple years ago. >> Absolutely. You know, to be honest, this always been a blessing and a curse for us, right? When you install UiPath, you have all of these tools, all of these capabilities. And you've got some places that you can start immediately we place a number of pre existing code bases and modules up on our marketplace. For instance, we have sample code that you can use that we provide. But still, you need to take the platform and customize it for your applications for your business. And when we talk about the platform mindset, really what our primary goal is, is to build something robust enough, flexible enough, reliable enough that any company can use it within their operations. And you see that that's borne out on our customer list that we publish. And we talked about, you have every industry covered, every region covered, and and that's our Challenge is really to make something robust enough to be everywhere, but intuitive and understandable enough that anyone can pick an entry point and begin to use that platform. >> So when we talk about a robot for every person, I want to know better definition around a person we talking about every worker, or is it even more sort of ambitious. >> More ambitious, because it's not just a worker, an employee, it includes students, teachers, take the broadest definition. And think about how taking advantage of automation or being able to write your own automations is beneficial. There's, there's no limit my son is in first grade. He's taking a class right now as part of his curriculum, on the basics of coding. He's doing loops and retries and step based algorithm. Islamic teaching, this is something that's ubiquitous, this applies to everybody. >> That's awesome. Scary at the same time. [Laughter] So I'm talking about this idea of bringing your own AI to the equation. You guys referenced that a little bit of your kind of fabric approach. But can you clarify sort of how you see that playing out? >> This goes straight back to the platform concept, right? If it's the case, that you already have an existing model, and I talk to customers almost daily, who have some form of intelligence existing within their platform today, right? It could be a model that helps with payment processing. Could be that next best action model, right? Data science has been on its own rocket ship for the past couple decades. And by now, most enterprise companies already have models that they're using. Or somewhere or something, we don't want to come in and say, rebuild that model with us. We're not a takeout company. We're an integration company. So we want you to be able to use those existing models, connect them directly to orchestrator. And once it's connected to orchestrator, that means that your developers can access those models directly within the automations that they're writing. So the ability to attach what you already have, those assets that you've already been working on, and make it one click, one drag and drop accessible to your developers is huge. >> It is huge. I mean, I think that's you can observe markets, the ones that have less friction in terms of, you know, their deployments tend to have greater adoption, you're not asking people to rip and replace. This is really sort of additive and you can get some quick wins. I want to come back to mentioned, you know, security, you mentioned that you've got to be in sync with your your teams. What's the right regime? I'm particularly interested in the security and compliance piece because a lot of times users when they hear it security, compliance governance, they go slow me down, say no. How do you help square that circle? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And it's funny because the narrative has changed so much. A year and a half ago, we were educating people on you know, the fact that robots won't go rogue, they won't. All of a sudden just start doing things that you haven't told him to do or haven't programmed in. Right. It was very much a fear of the unknown. I don't have those conversations anymore. Now the conversations with customers are really around. I will enable people to build around automations. I wanted to democratize RPA but I don't want people to automate things. That I don't want them to, for instance, I have a legacy database, it has a limited amount of bandwidth of capacity. So if all of my developers hit that database at once, I could slow down the the access to that database. So maybe I want to blacklist that from my development environments, because that's off limits for automation. And from our standpoint, we're completely okay with this. We want customers to use RPA for the right tools for their organization and give them the ability to build governance into the development tools and into the overall framework, so that it's very much in line with what their expectations. >> Brandon, I really appreciate you helping me wrap up this sort of RPA market analysis, the post UI path, Folks, you can you can DM me @DaveVellante or hit me on Twitter, and you know, love to hear your comment. UiPath as I've said, very open and transparent in the organization, go hit them up, challenge them as I have. Brandon again, thanks so much for for coming on theCUBE and helping us with this program. >> Great. Thanks for having me. It's always great to be here. All right, you're welcome. And thank you everybody for watching Dave volante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. 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>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. I path everyone. Welcome back. This is Dave Vellante for the human. We've been covering the r P a market now for quite some time. Yeah, I pastor said this huge announcement. Then we're gonna update you on the space. As you know, we've been quantifying this with our partners at ET are one of the areas that you I path is obviously focused on talking about scaling. If you wanna win in r p. A. You got a scale you want to scale. You gotta have cloud, though. Eric Metaphor is here. He's the director of product management. That you either path, We're gonna talk Cloud. Tara. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Didn't get to see you as well. >>Yes. So you know, you guys have this huge announcement. Um, there are really four major components, if you will. That you extended the core platform. You talked about more automation? More ai smarter robots. The whole end to end. When you guys talk about the what? Sometimes it gets a little buzz, wordy, but that hyper automation, it's got to be end end. You've got to take a systems view, and then you got to put the tools in the hands of regular people. If you want to have a robot for every person, it's got to be simple. You've got to democratize uh, R p A. So my question is, where does the cloud fit into all this? >>You know, the cloud is the one that wraps it all up together. So for us, it's very important to make it easy for people to start instantly. You when you when you start to decide that you want to do in investment in r P A. And you really want to get started very quickly. And the second thing is, you eventually want to grow that are being investment, and the cloud makes it super easy for you to scale out of it. So Cloud makes it easy for you to start instantly and scaling. >>You think about the cloud you know, kind of started with. I guess it's sort of started with Salesforce back in 1999 kind of pre cloud. But certainly, you know so many functions and software areas have been cloud ified. You saw it with the email. You certainly where you start with I t s m. Which was kind of a heavy lift. You certainly see it with With HR. You seen it with data protection and backup. You see, do you see r p A. Is kind of the next big wave of cloud ification. >>Well, I absolutely think that cloud is gonna be very big in our be a. So from our perspective, when you start thinking about are you really thinking about automation? You want your automation is the light up and to save you money and to cut time for you and the investment thing that's going to remind what's going through your mind is not setting up infrastructure and, you know, configuring machines and selling software to make our p possible that the cloud makes it super easy for you to just cut down that I t infrastructure investment and go right ahead into what you really care about, which is the automation. So I think it's gonna be big that we allow you to just go directly to automation. I want RB start thinking about automation for good infrastructure lead that blood. >>So there's obviously you hear a lot of narrative in the marketplace about Cloud Cloud native. You see some companies or dogmatic will never do on had Frank's loop in a little while ago. So we're not doing our friend. That's Ah, that's a halfway house. You guys have taken a different approach, obviously started on Prem and now you're moving to the cloud. What? What's your philosophy on that? You know, Why wouldn't everybody do Cloud >>makes sense. So for us, we're very pragmatic about We believe that customers are different stages in their cloud adoption. Some people are extremely cloud friendly and have already put in place at plans for making sure that everything is already in the cloud. There are companies that are cloud native. They were born in the cloud that if you go a nascent install a piece of software in the local server, they would just laugh at you. So that's on one end of the spectrum and you want to make sure that those people can take full capability of our. On the other hand, there are people who are still, you know, coming from on Prem servers who are trying to move to the cloud to have plans to move to the cloud who would like to try some components in the CLI. But they still have some legacy systems that exist on Prem or a lot of systems that exist, and we want to make sure that those people are also able to take care of our key. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are industries or some companies and some industries that just are not ready for the cloud at all. And from our perspective, we want to democratize our key. We want our P available for everyone. So it is our philosophy that we're going to give you a multitude of the women options. If you want on Prem all the way, we got it. If you want cloud all the way we got, you want the hybrid assistant, We got it. We're just going to make it possible for you. And the deployment choice is your choice >>and the experience on Prem and Cloud. It's substantially identical. Would you say it's completely identical? What? What's the Delta? >>That is absolutely one of our goals. It is absolutely a gore for Google for you. I have to make sure that if you are an on Prem customer and you are starting to use some cloud, that your experiences seamless between on premises and in the cloud if you are a cloud customer and you have some components that still exist on Prem, if you want to use them, is very important for us that you have that common experience between both. So our software is designed with a common experience of the core, and it's actually the same software that runs from a user experience perspective in the cloud and on premises. Now, obviously, a lot of the infrastructure is different than a lot of the security aspects are different. But the user experience itself is, you know, consistently the same and intentionally that way. >>So when people talk about cloud or not, this is often site, you know, several things. Clearly, Layton sees a factor. If your data lives on, you know, on Prem, maybe you want to do things on Prem. There's local laws, data sovereignty. Uh, there's there's corporate edicts. Okay, we're not going to the cloud now. Maybe with Covad, that's that's changing somewhat, but so what are you hearing from customers just in terms of the rationale on Prem versus Cloud Hybrid. What are some of the decision points? >>Those are all good points, Dave. That's exactly the kind of stuff that we hear from our customers. So I think the main things that we hear in terms of cloud is about security people rightfully. So. When you start talking about cloud that they start asking, Can I really trust you as a vendor? With my data, I'm giving you my sales data. I'm giving you my HR data. I mean, this is some confidential information. Can I really trust you with that data? So that's one thing we absolutely, I start taking care off with large focus on security, and I can definitely dive deeper into that if you want. In addition to that, privacy and data sovereignty and where data lives is a big deal. So from our perspective, we host your data as an enterprise customer in three different locations. We host demand. We have servers in the United States. We have servers in Europe. We have servers in Japan, and as a customer you get to choose where data lives and we keep it the way you thoughts s so that kind of helps with data sovereignty because some countries, as you mentioned or some cos there's mentioned really have strict rules about that. Also, that helps with the legacy aspect. So if you're a customer in Japan, you would really prefer to use our Japan Data Center as opposed to a You know, your it's simple. >>The customers care, like where your cloud infrastructure lives. Are they asking you about that? They did they? Did they probe you on that? I mean specifically in terms of your cloud partner, like maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Absolutely. People definitely care about who we use and where the data is going to lie. And so from our perspective, for example, we're partnered with Microsoft and all our infrastructures. They don't Microsoft Azure, and, uh, we use data centers from Microsoft Azure through the whole start stuff, and that's a really good for multiple reads as it provides some very good uptime and reliability guarantees. In addition to that, they have service around the world that we can utilize so that we can expect, for example, for a next frontier becomes for example, in Australia, New Zealand. Then we want to create a reason they're being on top of Azure really allows us to go and spend that off pretty quickly and help customers that way. >>So we don't want things about Cloud is you can you can experiment very cheaply and you can fail fast and then iterating. So one of the things that struck me about your announcement was your community edition. I always look for, you know, Is there a community edition? Is that in addition, free for life? Is it neutered? In other words, can I actually do anything with it? Um, so I was happy to see that you guys had that. And also happy to see I mean, you've got I think it's early days for you, but I think that you have 200 enterprise customers, two orders of magnitude greater than that from the community edition. Did I get that right? >>That's great. Yes, absolutely. So when you think about the automation, cloud comes into play. But we have a community, the one for community, and that is the free version. And it's as you said, it's not like a pretrial or three limited time or something. It was just free as in free, free forever. We're gonna keep it to you. That's all you need. Just use it. No questions asked. You know, be happy with it. And the community edition actually is, is a fully functional product, and it allows you to do to get to attended robots one unattended robot and you get the option of connecting up the studio to two studios for designing animations. Work with those s so it's it's it allows it. That's all your automation needs, like small automation needs. Just go ahead and use it. If you're a small company or an individual or a small team, just use the community edition and you want to use that production. That's fine. No problem. That's all you need to go for it, then the and we have tens of thousands of community customers that are actively using the product. I'm not talking about the people that have ever signed up on left. Those are a lot more than that, but I'm talking about actually actively using the product. We've got tens of thousands of users as they're using it every month and built on that same infrastructure comes our Enterprise Edition, and the Enterprise edition is a basically the same infrastructure. But it adds a number of capabilities that are useful for a larger enterprise, of course, the most important of which is an uptime guarantee. So, you know, with the community edition, obviously we keep the service. Often we have very good response times, but with enterprise, you actually get enough time guarantee. In addition to that, you get access to our sport. They have a dedicated support team that works 24 7 around the clock and multiple reasons, and you get guaranteed response times with the mass away. On top of that, you get to be able to purchase is many robots as you want, and the list goes on and on and on. And it's very easy to go. Like you said, from playing with community, working with community, using that doing a trial, it's instinct as well. You just click a button, and all of a sudden, now you have five robots that each night that you can use for 60 days, and from there you can just go ahead and buy. >>We'll talk more about the uptime guarantee is that basically Azure s l A. So the data layer on top of that, you know, what are we measuring there? You could add some color. >>Absolutely. A startup and guarantee is built on top of azure, obviously. But we provide our own uptime guarantee regardless of what happens in the underlying system. Eso From our perspective, we guarantee that the service is going to be out at a specific amount of time. So we measure the number of minutes every month that the service should actually be up. And we measure the number of ministers service experiences, any kind of downtime. And we measure down. I'm in multiple ways. So we do outside in testing. Or, you know, if you're a customer, are you able to reach our service or not that we do incredible detail the monitoring and reporting on the life off our service itself from inside and And we look at any minute, any of those the services that we use underlying services are not responding to customers, and we count those down as well. So and we guarantee that there's a specific number of minutes that the service will be down, and that's >>it. And So if I understand it, you're really taking an application. You It's not the light on the server. It's It's the it's Can I get to you as a customer? Yeah. My state, my service, your >>perspective. Are you able to reach our service and do what you're expected to do with it? That's what you as a customer, really care about and in turn, that's the right way for us to be measuring up. >>And if I don't? If you don't hit, that s L. A. What? I get re credit. So how does that >>work? Absolutely, we have in our agreements and provision for penalties on the outside, we don't hit that escalate. And similarly for support. You know, if you call support, you're guaranteed depending on the severity of the issue on the back of contract that sport. Uh, you know how many minutes it takes us for somebody to be engaged with you on that issue? And we have very good numbers and hitting. That s L. A. And if we don't? They're also penalties on the outside for that. I think this is a real enterprise services you'd expect. >>Yeah, Great. I want to get to take some examples. You've got a couple 100 customers I think you mentioned should hopefully was up and running very quickly. I think you had some other examples, but but what can you share with us in terms of actual experience that your customers have seen? >>Absolutely. So we were thinking a very measured and careful approach, actually launching our service. So even though our service literally just launched last week fully to the world, we have actually been enabling enterprise customers we've been. We started a private preview with four customers and back in April of last year. And then we extended that to a public preview for any customer to try our service, as is no payment but also no guarantees. Back in the day, I want to say June of last year and then it took us all the way to December to feel comfortable that the services of the place where when we launch it, customers are going to get an excellent quality. And that's when we did a what we call a limited availability where we started on boarding enterprise customers step by step. We started with 10. We went to 50. We went to 100 now we have a couple 100 customers that already signed up, using the enterprise product every day as a guaranteed service and getting that Sele's that we've promised. So this was the time when we said, You know what? I think we've definitely been meeting our SL A's for five months running. Now we feel very comfortable lunch the rest, >>even if it's anecdotal. Have you discerned appreciable change in people's attitude toward cloud as a result of over? >>Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's just the aspect of working from home and having a lot of people just not available either demand infrastructure or demand servers made. A lot of people think about what is the best way to continue to run on information while they're at it. And obviously there's nothing easier than granting access to someone in the cloud to access a service from home. Then, if you were to bring them access to an on premise service with BP and all that stuff, and then if you want the provisioning new robots and machines and you have to do that again on premises, you know it's it's it's a lot more complicated. So a lot of customers are really starting to look at the cloud so many of the conversations that we would have, obviously we come in and they would ask us about the capabilities of our system. They would ask about security that ask a lot of things and those discussions, you know, anywhere between, you know, a few days to sometimes a few months. You know, some customers is just a great for those. The volume of customers that's asking about cloud is definitely increasing good for us. Obviously the number of deals were signed exalts increasing. But most importantly, I think that the number of customers that are benefiting from the value of starting instantly like cloud scale easily in the cloud. And you mentioned the example of Chipotle. And while that was engagement that we had obviously for the core of it, you know, they were very impressed with what they were able to do with The came in and falling and team had budgeted about two weeks to get started and set up everything so that they can build on top of that in their automation. And they, they chose wisely, do start in the cloud and As a result, they were done and all set up in one day. So it is definitely a huge difference between what you're able to get in the cloud person. So what you're doing? >>Well, you have passed all about automation. And and so is the cloud. The superpowers of this decade Cloud data A You guys were, you know, at the heart of all those Eric. Thanks so much for coming on the cube in explaining sort of your cloud angle. Really Appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Alright? And thank you for watching everybody. More coverage on the r p. A market analysis digging into your past recent announcement stable people want to have right back right after this short break. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Automation is being viewed as increasingly strategic by business executives. A prominent example can be seen in the form of robotic process automation, RPA. Despite the pandemic, RPA continues to show strong growth in the market, and that's really confirmed in the survey data from our partner, ETR. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this special presentation from the CUBE team with support from UI Path. Earlier this month UI Path had a big launch event and today we're going to provide some perspective and analysis of the market. We're also going to interview some of the UI Path execs to get a better understanding of the market trends and the competitive environment. Let me lay out the program. It's going to start with my independent, unsponsored breaking analysis segment. This is pure editorial. In this first video we're going to discuss some of the RPA challenges and early issues that customers had with RPA. And we're going to update you on the market, we're going to look at the latest ETR spending data. We have some comments on the competition. And we're particularly going to focus on of course, UI path, but also automation anywhere, Blue Prism, and we even have some thoughts on Pega Systems. Now you can go to wikibond.com and read the full analysis of that breaking analysis. It's also on siliconangle.com if you really want more details on this data. After that, we have four UI Path execs that we interview including the CMO, Bobby Patrick, Ted Cumert their new head of products. He's going to talk to us about software development and platform architectures. And then we also interview Terek Madcore about RPA in the cloud. And then we're going to close with Brandon Knott. And I'm going to push Brandon a little bit on how much of that UI Path vision, i/e a robot for every person. How much of that is real, how much of that is marketing hype, and what can we expect going forward in terms of that adoption? So thanks for watching everybody. I hope you enjoy the program.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation we've been reporting that the Kovan pandemic has created a bifurcated IT spending outlook legacy on print on-prem infrastructure in traditional software licensing models they're giving away two approaches that enable more flexibility in business agility automation initiatives that reduce human labor labor that's not value add has really been gaining traction for the past 18 months the pandemic has only accelerated to focus on such efforts and robotic process automation or RPA along with machine intelligence have been the beneficiaries relative to other segments of the IT stack welcome to this week's wiki Vaughn cube insights powered by ETR my name is Dave Volante and in this breaking analysis we're gonna update you on the latest demand picture for the red-hot RP a sector will also focus on two main areas today first we're gonna review the basics of the RP a space for those that may not be as familiar with the market next we'll share with you the spending data and outlook in the RT ARPA space from ETR and we're really dig into the kovat impact on this market segment and take a look at the competitive outlook we're gonna pay particular attention to the leaders in this space and then we're gonna wrap up so let me start with kind of the RPI basics if you're not familiar with our PA here's what you really need to know happy hour PA gained traction by taking software robots and pointing them at existing applications to mimic human behavior and automate repeatable and well understood processes keyboard behavior that is now a challenge with early RPA implementations is that most customers chose to point these bots at legacy backend office systems now that the open emails and fill out forms and the like so that's great because it digitizes processes around legacy systems awesome ROI but the problem is that these bots will they interact with a user interface of that application and many of these apps they really don't have an API so any change in data or the interface breaks the automation down now more recently automations are interacting to apps through api's that makes them less brittle but of course you know the quality of api's as you well know will vary so enter your machine intelligence into the equation there's been a lot of discussion around the intersection of our PA and AI and that's allowed organizations to automate more processes that do so in a way that takes an augmentation approach using things like natural language processing or speech recognition and machine learning to iterate and improve automations and you know this trend holds a lot of promise and is a lot of talk about it in the marketplace particularly in the form of really trying to understand which processes to automate and where the best ROI can be achieved for organization but it's important to note it's really still early days with this AI intersection nonetheless investors you know they're ahead of the game they've they've poured money into this space as we've been reporting now for you know well over a year or two uipath an automation anywhere have raised close to two billion dollars and have been growing very very rapidly we're gonna talk more about that existing players like blue prism they've actually benefited from the automation tailwind and other you know process business process players take for example like Pegasus Toombs I mean they started in the early 80s they've added our PA to their platform as have many others by the way including Microsoft who has barely been trying to crack into this market for a while in fact Microsoft just bought a small company called soft emotive and to really try to shore up its RP a game but you know just a quick aside in our view Microsoft is their well behind the leaders it's gonna take years for them to get where the leaders are today yeah but it's Microsoft so you don't want to ignore them now the big buzzword here is hyper automation evidently it's a torrent a coin term coined by Gartner and uipath has picked up on this in a big way and so is automation anywhere now those both those companies are in hyper growth so it plays more established companies for example pega yeah they look at the term differently you know of course their vision is Rp a is a small portion of their their their vision these established firms they want to incorporate their business process automation z' that have been built over decades into a systems view of the organization using existing platforms the upstarts of course they want to build from new platforms what's really happening in the marketplace and like in many situations is this emergence of a hybrid you know quasi-equilibrium here we saw this in mainframes who certainly you know saw it in middleware enterprise data warehouses and we've seen it in the cloud you know where most companies don't just throw away the investments that they've made in legacy systems now they're stable they're operationalized and rather what they do is they overlay the more modern technologies and they kind of create an abstraction layer of their business that incorporates the old and the new but the growth is much much higher in the new as we know it and that leads me to the TAM the total available market let's look at the RPM you know we think the TAM expansion opportunity is pretty substantial we put this chart together awhile back that really underscores that the progression of our PA from you know simple BOTS automating back-office functions to really infusing automations in virtually all applications you know if you expand the definition beyond our PA software into the broader automation opportunities the other thing about it this this could be a much much larger than depicted here maybe well over a hundred billion dollar Tam as a I powered automation becomes fundamental to every organization in their operating model anyway it's a big opportunity and the data suggests that it's growing rapidly so let's turn to the data let's look at the spending and bring ETR into the equation so which technologies are showing new adoptions in tech on balance the tech sector has done pretty well despite this pandemic at the time of this video the Nasdaq Composite is up about a point and a half year to date and as we know from previous surveys that heading into 2020 there was a pullback in a narrowing of new technology adoptions as organizations began to operationalize their digital initiatives and place bets this chart shows new adoptions across three survey dates the gray is April last year the blue is January which is pre-pandemic really and the survey of more than 1,200 IT buyers is really the latest one which is the April so this survey took place at the height of the US lockdown and you can see look at all PA it's got 22% new adoptions what does that mean it means that 22% of the customers in the survey we're planning our PA spend there that are planning for our PA spend are planning new adoptions now that's a figure that says hi as machine learning and artificial intelligence and of course as we said these two technologies are increasingly playing a role together so our PA adoptions more than containers more than videoconferencing which has had this tailwind from work from home and more than cloud more than mobile device management so it's really one of the hottest sectors in terms of new adoptions now let's look at some of the players in our PA and try to really better understand their positions here's a chart that uses the two primary met work net metrics that we've been sharing over the past year net score or spending momentum is on the y-axis and market share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set is on the x-axis the chart plots are PA players in the et our data set and you can see uipath in automate anyway our the to market leaders they show both spending momentum and market awareness then you see blue prism and peg is in there and the rest of the pack and I'll say this about pegye systems I recently spoke to their CEO Alan trifler he's an amazing self-made billionaire he's got a great business you know peg that really doesn't see you know itself anyway as an RPA play and I don't either our PA is really a small part of their story but they're in the data set and certainly automation related so it's what's showing but it's a bit of an oranges and tangerines comparison now notice in the upper right of this chart you can see that the net scores are in the green shade and there's a little bit of red in there but remember net score is a simple metric sort of like Net Promoter Score in PS it subtracts customer spending less from those spending more and that's the difference and you can see very very strong net scores for both uipath in automation anywhere and I'm gonna discuss that more in a moment but there's lots of green in the chart and even pega or as I said it's really not an RPA specialist they've got a solid net score now let's look at a time series of this net score in the spending momentum what we do here is this chart takes the three leaders uipath automation anywhere and blue prism and it plots their net scores over time goes all the way back to the January 18 survey now let me make a couple of points here uipath in automation anywhere 70% plus net scores is very impressive and amongst the highest in the data set even though you see some of the Lawson momentum in the UI path line and the convergence with automation anywhere they're both very very strong and you can see in the upper right you can see the shared end which is an indicator of the presence of the company in the data set how many response is out of the 1200 plus so you might say well wait a minute you I passed the I had they had layoffs last fall and automation anywhere they more recently just recently had layoffs how can they show such strength well I make a few points first fast-growing companies like this that have raised you know nearly a billion dollars each they've got investors to serve and they're going to course-correct when they feel like there's some slack in the system yet to me it's not a sign of fundamental trouble second both of these companies are going to continue to invest heavily on research and development uipath has 60 openings on its website mostly in engineering automation anywhere they only have nine openings but I would expect both companies to up their engineering hiring especially given the Microsoft acquisition today third remember this is not an indicator of the amount of money spent in absolute dollars rather it looks at spending momentum of the doll in dollar terms as well if you were to cut the data by larger companies let's say the Fortune 1000 where the average contract values are higher you'd see that you I pass a net score jumps to 77% automation anywhere would drop into the 60s and blue prison would stay about the same where it is today today so let's look for example in the global 2000 so we'll expand that notion of a fortune 1000 let's go to the global 2000 where there's more of an end slice and you can see the picture changes from the overall data sample this chart shows the net scores in the global 2000 where the ends are more than 25 responses across all the three surveys gray as last April blue was January yellow is April 2020 and you can see the year-on-year decline and the modest step down during the the Colvin lockdown which again surveyed in April but still very elevated net scores for uipath and automation anywhere and respectable for the other so the point is Co vyd has not really crushed the RPA market I mean if anything is witnessed by the new adoptions it's maybe it's certainly better off than most IT sectors now let's dig into the net scores of the two leaders a little bit more uipath and automation anywhere remember net scores of very important metric and I want to spend the moment explaining how we use it you see this wheel chart this red green gray it really shows how the net score method is applied now we've taken the UI path example from the April survey net score works by asking buyers relative to last year are you adopting new that's the 28% are you increasing spend by 6 percent or greater that's 51 percent are you expecting flat spending that's 15 percent or a decrease in spend of 6 percent or more or finally are you replacing the vendor checking them out so look at this you can see for UI path added up 79 percent of respondents expect to increase spending in 2020 relative to 2019 and again remember this survey was taken at the height of the kovat lockdown let me show you the data for automation anywhere same exact methodology 72 percent of automation anywhere a customer's plan to spend more only 1 percent plan to spend less with zero replacements so very strong fundamentals as it relates to spending momentum for both UI path and automation anywhere now how is presents or what we call market share in the data set changing on a year-on-year basis well this is the last data point that I want to show and it relates to that metric of market share which again is the measure of pervasiveness it's calculated by dividing the number of mentions of a vendor in a sector by the total mentions of that sector in this case RP a and this chart shows the year-on-year change in customer growth comparing market share from the April 20 survey with that from the April 19 data and you can see the yellow line at 11% is the sector average uipath has the fastest growth automation anywhere is growing faster than the market average and blue prism is below the average now this looks back to last year and it'll be interesting to see how this picture changes with the next survey based on what we're seeing with the next net scores which is a forward-looking metric all right let's wrap so we're seeing that the bifurcated market is high that the automation trend generally is real and that the RP a drill down specifically shows us an example in action we think that kovat 919 not hit these numbers would actually be higher by maybe as much as 10% but in the near near to mid term we would expect a pretty fast return to normal patterns of demand if I put normal and air quotes for our PA in fact you know we don't expect a real v-shaped recovery across the board but our PA is you know one of those areas where we actually may see such a rebound the pandemic really underscores the need to accelerate digital transformations our PA we think is going to be a central player in that movie along with AI the cloud all right we have to leave it there for now so remember these episodes they're all available as podcasts just all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts please subscribe to the series would appreciate that and check out ETR dot plus for all the data I also publish a full report every week on wiki bound comm tons of data there as well and Silicon angle comm has all the news and I published there alright this is Dave Volante thanks for watching this episode of the cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time [Music]

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Analysis from company earnings reports and costumer survey data, continues to show that Microsoft Azure and GCP are closing the gap on AWS's cloud dominance. Now, while reporting definitions of the cloud remain fuzzy, it's very clear that clouds steady march into the stronghold of on-premises computing continues. The global Coronavirus pandemic has only strengthen the cloud's position in the overall market place. Now, as you might recall, we reported last week, the story of the haves and the have nots, and that's playing out in several sectors. And in this breaking analysis we're going to take a closer look at the big three cloud players, and we'll do a brief investigation of AWS specifically in a short drill down. Welcome everyone, to theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Today we're going to try to really accomplish three things. First, we want to quantify how the cloud is impacting the on-prem business. As we enter this decade, let's take a snapshot of some of the vendors that are well positioned, and maybe some of those that are facing greater head winds. The second thing we want to do, is we want to update you on the latest market share data for the big three cloud players. And then finally, I want to dig into the business of AWS in a little bit more depth to see where they're seeing the most strengthen, and where, perhaps, maybe there are some cracks in their substantial armor. Now, let's look at the IT landscape where we are in 2020. The first data point that we want to share, really tells a familiar story, and really drafts off the theme that we've set for the past several weeks, which is the bifurcation in the marketplace. Now, if you take a look at this chart what's really showing is ETR's version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, but it uses survey data to plot the vendors. So in the y-axis is the metric of it, net score, which is a measurement of spending momentum. And just to review, each quarter ETR surveys more than 1,200 CIOS and IT professionals, and asks them, essentially are they spending more or less on a particular supplier. And what we do is we subtract the less from the more, and the remainder is the net score. So it's sort of like NPS, and I'll go into that a little bit later. But that's the vertical axis. Now the x-axis is called market share. You know, it's really not market share, like IDC measures, rather it's a measure of pervasiveness in the survey and it's calculated by dividing the mentions of a particular company by the total mentions in the overall survey. And you see that's plotted on the horizontal axis. So several points here that I want to note. First is remember, this is April survey data, so for more than 1200 buyers, and you can see we've plotted several companies, including the big three cloud players. You got Microsoft and AWS in the upper right and Google with much lower presence but decent spending momentum. And we've plotted a number of other enterprise players, including several on-prem leaders, like Dell EMC, IBM, Oracle, and Cisco. And we've also included some of the companies that are showing real promise from a momentum standpoint, and penetration. These are business models that we like, and they include Snowflake, the analytic database disruptor, UiPath, who's the RPA specialist, Okta and CrowdStrike who are really killing it in security and Datadog who provides cloud monitoring services. And as you can see, we've superimposed in the upper right a table showing the net scores and market shares for each of the companies. And the story here very clearly quantifies that cloud is winning, and we think it's likely to continue to grow fast and penetrate the enterprise. Now, as we've reported many times, downturns tend to be good for cloud. But the on-prem leaders, you know, as you can see by Cisco's position, for example, they're not going to just roll over. And we'll be covering winning strategies for legacy players in a later segment. But let me just say this, if you're a customer with a lot of on-prem infrastructure, and you're building out data centers, unless you're a big cloud provider, you're probably going to be in the wrong side of history here. Okay. Let's take a closer look at the big three. I want to update you on their IaaS and PaaS numbers as best we can. All recently reported earnings, and this chart shows the data for each of the companies. Now as you can see, each of them has substantial businesses with AWS by far the largest, GCP is growing the fastest. What's notable is that AWS in 2018 was 2.7 x larger than Azure, and today that delta is under two x based on our q1 estimates. And it's just about two X on a trailing 12 month basis. Now, I got to caution you that the AWS numbers are the cleanest AWS reports religiously an easy to understand revenue and operating profit number for its cloud business, every quarter. Microsoft and Google are much fuzzier. You know, for example, you read through Microsoft's 10-K reports and you'll see that their intelligent cloud revenue comprises public and private clouds, hybrid, SQL Server, Windows Server, System Center, GitHub, enterprise support and consulting services and, oh yeah, Azure. So we have to estimate how much of that hairball is actually comparable directly to AWS. Now, Google similarly just started breaking out its cloud revenue in bundles more than just IaaS and PaaS into its cloud numbers. Now, having said that, both Microsoft and Google, they do give little tidbits like Hansel and Gretel of guidance in the form of growth rates or commentary on growth rates in their respective IaaS and PaaS businesses, ie, Azure and GCP. So this is our best estimate, given all that is reported and what we know from survey data. Now, I also want to point out that these clouds are, they're really different in quality and they have different fits for different use cases. For example, Microsoft is building out a cloud really to support it's huge install base of customers, and really make it easy for them to tap into the Microsoft Cloud services, but it may not be the most robust cloud, as has been widely reported in analyzed in the press. You know, Microsoft is struggling to provide adequate capacity for its customers. It's kind of using the COVID-19 pandemic as a bit of a heat shield on this issue. Microsoft put out a blog post essentially saying that it'll, it'll prioritize first responders, health workers, and essential businesses during the COVID 19 pandemic, oh, and Teams customers. So okay, that's one of those caveat emptor situations, you know, if you're not one of these camps, you know, or frankly, maybe if you are. But it's unquestionable that Microsoft has strong momentum across its vast portfolio, including cloud. And really that's what I want to get into next. So let's take a look at some data, we've been reporting for quite some time based on the ETR surveys, that the big cloud players, you know, have very, very strong momentum as measured by net scores. So what this chart shows is the most recent survey results, again, more than 1,200, it buyers 1,269 to be exact. And you can see broadly that all the big three are well on green for net scores as we show in the upper right hand box, and well over 50% net scores for all three, and Microsoft Azure is in the 70% range. So a very, very strong demand across the board. Now remember, ETR is asking buyers to comment on the areas with which they are familiar. So a buyer might be interpreting cloud to include all those things in Microsoft and Google that may not be directly comparable to the AWS responses, but it doesn't matter. The point is, they all have momentum, and you can see, you know, even though there's a slight dip in the most recent survey, you know, which ran during the peak of the shutdown in the US. So even there's a small dip relative to other parts of the survey, cloud is very, very strong. Now, let's dig into the data a bit more, and take a look at the Fortune 500 drill down. So of course, this is an indicator of larger companies. And you can see AWS overtakes Azure in this segment by a small margin, you know, noting the same caveats that I mentioned earlier. But the strength of the net scores for all three is meaningful as they all increased within these larger buying basis. Now let's take a look at this next chart, if we extend that cut, to include the Fortune 1000, you can see here that all three companies again, continue to show strength. But you know, there's a convergence, which really says to me that this multi cloud picture that's emerged, and that CIOs are really now starting to see that whether it's through M and A, or maybe it was shadow IT or whatever, they're faced with a variety of choices that are increasingly viable. And despite my previously and sometimes snarky comments that multi cloud has been more of a symptom of multi vendor versus a clear CIO strategy, that maybe is perhaps beginning to change, especially as they're asked to clean up what I've often called as the crime scene. Now, I want to close by taking a little bit of a closer look at the AWS business specifically. And I want to come back to this notion of net score and explain it a little bit. So what we show here on this wheel chart is really a breakdown of responses across more than 600 AWS customers in the April survey, remember again, this survey ran at the height of the lockdown in the US. It's a global survey well over 100 responses outside of the United States. But really, what's relevant here is the strength of the AWS business overall. This chart shows how net score is essentially derived, ETR asked customers, are you adopting new? Are you increasing spend meaning, increasing by 6% or more? Are you keeping spending flat? Or are you decreasing spending by more than 6%? Or are you chucking the platform i.e. replacement? So look at this, we're talking about nearly 70% of customers spending more in 2020 on AWS than they spent last year, and only 4% are spending less. That's pretty impressive for a player with a $38 billion business. Now the next data point I want to share really shows where the action is across the AWS portfolio, so let's take a look at this. The chart here shows the responses from an end of more than 700 and the net score, or spending momentum, across the AWS portfolio with a comparison across three survey dates, last April, January 2020, and April 2020. And as you can see the very elevated spending momentum across most of the AWS key business lines, including cloud functions, data warehouse, which is EDW, etc, AI and machine learning, workspaces with the work from home pivot. And, you know, there are some areas that are maybe less robust, but nothing in the red zone, red zone, meaning, you know, net scores would be like below, let's say 25% net score. And as you can see, there's really nothing close to that in the AWS portfolio. So you're seeing a very strong momentum for AWS, you know, specifically, and of course, the cloud in general. Now, as I said, the pandemic has been been good for cloud, downturns generally are a tailwind. So if you're building data centers, it's probably not a good use of capital, you know, so server huggers, beware. There's an attractiveness more so than ever with this COVID-19 pandemic of that dial up, dial down service. Watch for software companies starting to use that model, whereas today, they often try to lock you into a, you know, one year or a two year or three year license. Increasingly, we're seeing companies investigate and actually go to market with a true cloud model. Okay, thanks for watching this episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Remember, these breaking analysis segments are all available as podcasts. You check out siliconangle.com, I publish there weekly, they have all the news, I also published on Wikibon. So don't forget to check out etr.plus, as well get in touch with me @dvellante. Or you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Stay safe everybody, and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(light techno music) >> Hello and welcome to our special Mobile World Congress '1, #MWC17. I'm John Furrier inside theCUBE Studio breaking down all the analysis we're going to be covering at Mobile World Congress. We kind of know some news is coming out, that's Monday and Tuesday all day coverage. We're here with @rUvreuv, Reuv Cohen, an entrepreneur I've known for years. Going back to when we first met in the cloud days back in '08 timeframe, '09, when dev ops was really the beginning of the movement. You've been an entrepreneur, you've sold multiple companies, multi-time successful entrepreneur. But you've been deep in the cloud game. Welcome to theCUBE special coverage of Mobile World Congress. >> Thanks for inviting me, I'm happy to be here. >> The other thing, too, is we just tried to get the Periscope thing working so we have our little Periscopes going here. But this is really the media landscape that's going to be one of the themes at Mobile World Congress that certainly will be front and center. These service providers have to have a business model. And media entertainment has been on their to-do list. Just a lot of the plumbing hasn't gotten done. And the new trend that's going to be really front and center is AI. We were joking about that. But seriously, you're doing a lot of discussions around AI. And then Intel's 5G now, which they pre-announced this week, prior to Mobile World Congress with 5G. Their positioning is a step-up game changer. So you got 5G overlay network, you have real plumbing that's getting done with NFV, Network Functions Virtualization. You have the app market exploding. Will the service providers ever make it? Will the telco's actually figure out a business model? >> Well, you know, they're always the pipes, and you're always going to need pipes. There's an endless amount of opportunities for those people figuring out what to do with those pipes. I don't know, this is the question we've been asked for 20 years. Do they want to be more than dumb pipes, right? >> Well, they've yet to find a business model. I mean, I think one of the things, I was looking at the Intel announcement, was, is 5G a technology looking for a problem, or does it really actually create a step-up function in terms of capability. I mean 4G is just an evolution of 3G, LTE is getting some speeds there. But, I mean, my family hits their caps on all the data we're doing. People are hitting their data caps, we need more data. So the question is, is that going to be ready for prime time? Your thoughts on? >> Well, there's almost like a Moore's law of data, right. The more data you have available to use, the more things you can do with it. You know, Periscope's a prime example. Now they're doing a whole variety of different video-related things, Facebook lives, there's a YouTube lives, everyone wants to do live. And all that requires massive amounts of data, especially if you want to do high definition related things. We were actually trying to set up a Periscope before the broadcast this morning. And one of the first things that became apparent was we had to limit our bit rate to 800 kilobits, which is relatively small when you think about it. >> Yeah, that's the bandwidth issues. I mean, at the end of the day it comes down to the last miles, we always say. But let's get into some of the analysis of Mobile World Congress and let's get down under the hood. Is could truly ready for prime time? And when I say cloud, I mean, obviously, full-stack infrastructure because network virtualization has been one of those kind of shifting sands, if you will. NFV has been one of those things that's been kind of evolving. OpenStack is seen to be much more of a telco use case at some of the OpenStack summits we've covered. Your thoughts on the progress of cloud-ready telcos? >> You know it comes down to, if you're going to build an application, whether you're an enterprise, whether you're an individual developer or something in between, you're probably not going to build it in your own data center. Whether that's a closet in the back of your office, or your own... You're probably going to go and build something that's quick and fast and efficient. And that really is starting to look like things that are server-less, things that are event-driven and that isn't really sitting in your own data center anymore. >> So what's your take on the ecosystem? Do you think that the ecosystem play for the Mobile World Congress is going to shift at all? I mean, I was commenting to Dave Vellante just last week and Jeff Frick, here on theCUBE team that CES, which we don't go to anymore because it's gotten too big. But this year we did cover it here in the studio like we're doing with Mobile World Congress. It just seems that CES is no longer a consumer electronics show, it's more of a car show. Autonomous vehicles are, obviously, front and center, that's the glam, that's the eye candy. Mobile World Congress doesn't seem to be a device show anymore, or it's shifting away. Last year Mark Zuckerberg gave the keynote speech, and you saw that shift. What's Mobile World Congress turning into, in your opinion? >> It's an app show. So, where CES still sort of has this focus on the actual physical things that you can touch and build. The mobile apps of the world are now the things that dominate mobility. Is a phone interesting? Not really. (John laughs) What you do on your phone is definitely interesting. >> It's interesting to look at also, and talking to folks about, Mobile World Congress is one of those shows, it's a biz dev show, too. A lot of people who fly over to Barcelona don't really go for the pure content. There's more business deals going on. All the top executives of the big technology companies go there. Your thoughts on landscape of the vendors out there that are suppliers to this new consumerized market. You see deals happening that you think would be interesting? Where do you see the formation of the industry lining up? Obviously, some things have to get done at a technical level. 5G's great, great hope for that. But some companies are trying to transform look at Cisco, companies like Cisco, companies like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, VM Ware, AWS, Google, Intel, Qualcomm. I mean there seems to be a feeling of posturing and a reef-set, if you will. >> 2017, so far, is shaping up to be the year of Snapchat, if you ask me. With a pending IPO they're saying that their revenues are going to be increasing 5x. It looks like everything we've been talking about, the app-based world, is sort of culminating in this Snapchat thing. So the question is, is Snapchat going to live up to all the hype that's surrounding them as this sort of, next generation of you know, the next Facebook, the next Google, the next whatever. >> Well it's interesting, Snapchat brings up the conversation of, the people who have their head in the sand versus people who are riding this wave. Facebook was totally pooh-pooh'ed during the IPO. I remember leading up to the IPO, it was like, oh my God, there's no way they can do it. They can never be the next Google, that was kind of the comparison. Google was compared to Microsoft, and then Facebook was compared to Google. And then everyone was like, no frickin' way that's going to happen. Why would anyone want to seed that company? It's a social net for college kids, and now some adults are coming on. And then look what happened, so the world changed. Snapchat's the same way, so it's interesting, it's not what you think. The core competency shifts and the user consumption becomes democratized. So the question is, what does Snapchat mean for telcos? Does that mean that they're just pipes? What do they do? How do they get in front of this? You got Netflix, you got Amazon out there with, now, the video stuff. >> People want content and they want it fast, they want it in high quality and they want it on the go. So, yeah it is the question. I think that the challenge that a lot of these telco's are having is the fact that they still have a bit of a monopoly in many parts of the world and they use that monopoly to inflict quite a bit of pain. So it's, I don't think that's something that they're going to be able to get away with very much longer. >> So what's your take on AI? Since you've been doing a lot of AI. And obviously, AI's been around. In the 80's when I got my CS degree, LISP was out there, neural networks, object-oriented programming was hitting the scene. You know, you had this kind of mind-set, and it was still, AI was this elusive academic mental model and some coding. Now it's all the rage, when you look at autonomous vehicles and you look at IOT, drones, a new landscape is here, connected consumer. Your thoughts on where AI, is it, right now, certainly it's hyped, we all agree on that. >> There's been several iterations of AI over the last 40 years. Every time technology appears you hear about AI. In the 70's you saw things like Space Odyssey and there was this rush to AI-related activities around the first generation of computing. Then that sort of, we realized it wasn't really possible and it disappeared for 25 years. Then it reemerged in your early days of internet, oh, it was still too early. (John laughs) So now 15, 20 years later, again, we are in this, another dawn of AI. But there is some critical differences. Now there are tooling that allows you to do the sorts of things that we had only dreamt of before, whether it's natural language processing, generation of information and other various forms of analytics. So all these things are culminating in these opportunities that were really never possible until now, including things like cloud computing. >> Machine learning certainly is the center of that. I love the machine learning rates. But machine learning's been around for a long time as well. I mean machine learning isn't necessarily new, it's mostly software that has to do with algorithms. But now you have data to compute. This is the new thing, right? Data's available and you got tons to compute. >> Yeah, it was hard >> Yeah. >> It was really, really hard. And anyone that's actually tried to go out and do a machine learning system, neural net, realized quite quickly that you had to be a phD to figure out how to use these tools. So now all these tools are being put together into platforms and end-user applications. So no longer do I have to go and try to put together a Lego, you know, erector set of stuff. I can go, I can get mostly everything I need to solve a problem and I can be off to the races quite quickly. >> So what's your up work you're doing now, Reuv? You've been an entrepreneur, give us the latest update on what's in your world right now. You were, obviously, instrumental in a lot of cloud ventures and, obviously, you've been in the industry, certainly as an influencer as well, you've got the little blue check on Twitter, which I don't have yet. Twitter rejected me twice, I got to get to the... Stu has it, Stu Miniman on our team. In all seriousness, this is a new world and you're on the front lines both as a media producer, you've got a great podcast, but also you're in the industry. Where is cloud going and where's that top of the stack action because that really is, you mentioned apps, that's where the action is right now. What do you see happening and what are you up to these days? >> Well, you know, a couple areas. One of the things they don't tell you is, after you sell your business, you lose a little bit of your purpose. (laughs) Personal problem, for sure, but. >> You make some good cash. >> Yeah, exactly. Put it in the bank there, bank some cash. >> Yeah, so after Anomaly and Virtual Stream exited there was this period where I get to do things that I want to do. And investing in other start ups was, you know, the thing that apparently, you do. I focused heavily on AI-related companies. Actually I just recently did an investment in a company called Zoom.AI, which is really doing some cool stuff around enterprise-focused AI work. Also, I've got a day job as well outside that. I recently joined a company here in San Jose that focuses on security for containerized environments. So, sort of policy-based security, very low level stuff. >> At the orchestration layer, or at the docker layer or where would you...? >> It's at, it's even lower than that. It essentially orchestrates the policy around things like system calls and networking itself. So, rather than having to focus on the complexities of all the various parts of an environment, what we do is we basically say, hey, look at the tags that exist and things like Kubernetes. And then those tags define the policies in which things can communicate with one another. Let's say it's a layer three network, or what has read or write access to the system calls themselves. >> Is that a new company for you, that you guys launched? >> Well, we're in the process of launching. >> So stealth? >> It's stealthy, I'm telling you about it right now. (both laugh) >> What's the name? >> Appareto. >> Appareto, so there it is. We're launching on theCUBE here, on Periscope, pre-recorded for our Mobile World Congress special coverage. Alright so this is, basically, this is the cloud native goes to full scale cloud, for apps. >> Exactly, so containers, we've come full circle. Anyone that's been around for a while knows containers is certainly not a new trend. Solaris, you know, 25 years ago doing containers. The implementation of it around micro-services and the tooling around dev ops and docker and other various Kubernetes-types deployments have made it much more readily attainable, in terms of using it within an enterprise or a run of the mill application. >> We were talking with a lot of folks leading up to Mobile World Congress prep for our special coverage and micro-services comes up heavily, and micro-services as an integration layer. And one of the things that we're seeing, I want to get your thoughts on this, is you see IBM just announced this week here in San Francisco at their IBM Connect event, oh, it's our Lotus Domino and Verved, which is their collaborative software. But the key to all this collaborative software, even to the Oracle's of the world and to Amazon, is integration with third party apps. And micro-services and containers become a critical component of that. So, for entrepreneurs and/or app developers, a new kind of third party developer is emerging and they need to integrate. What is the role micro-services play in all of this? This is a really key point, because this will point right at the telcos. Because whoever can embrace an ecosystem of app developers from an integrations standpoint will win, in my opinion. Your thoughts, do you see it in the same way? And how does micro-services and all this stuff play into that? >> Well, there's two... >> It's the glue layer? >> Yeah, it's the glue. Lego is, again, is kind of the thing that pops in my mind. There are these two, sort of, battling schools of thought. One is micro-services which allows you to easily plug and play these various components. The other is server-less, these things that are very event-driven, they're transient. They allow you to, again, act as a kind of glue that puts everything together. One's based on, predominantly, the idea of containers which is kind of a lightweight OS. And the other is basically saying, I don't need an OS. All I need is the functions that I need, when I need them, and I put them together and I'm off to the races. I think that most applications aren't ready for a whole choice of just doing one or the other, it's kind of a combination. So the exciting thing now, is you can do what used to take weeks or months, in a matter of days with these types of technologies. >> So your final thought on Mobile World Congress. What do you expect to see in the hype cycle noise and where's the signal? Where do you see this event happening, what's your thoughts? >> I think we're going to see a lot more in the focus of things like media and convergence. I think video-related activities is certainly going to remain to be hot. I think the tooling around enabling that type of high definition video focus is going to be a priority for a lot of these companies and the tooling around that will be a priority. >> We're here with Reuv breaking down the Mobile World Congress analysis and preview and all of what's happening in the news. Obviously, Intel, with the 5G, big announcement. I think they raised the curtain early. Obviously, they're competing with Qualcomm which has a different licensing agreement than Intel. Which is, you know, you see Apple as a big customer of Qualcomm and Intel. Interesting because as the price of the hardware goes down the chip guys want more cash, Qualcomm wants more cash than Intel. Very interesting dynamic, I think this ecosystem is going to be something that's going to watch. I think there's going to be a battle. I'm predicting that at Mobile World Congress we'll see a battle of the ecosystem. You're going to see whoever can make the market and shift the game, will be the winner. Reuv, thanks for spending the time, appreciate it. This is SiliconANGLE broadcasting here in Palo Alto for Mobile World Congress '17, special coverage. Thanks for watching. (light techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to the Cube's coverage of International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE series of profiles around leaders in the tech industry sharing their stories, advice, best practices, what they're doing in their jobs their vision of the future, and more importantly, passing it on and encouraging more and more networking and telling the stories that matter. Our next guest is a great executive leader talking about how to lead in challenging times. Krista Satterthwaite, who is Senior Vice President and GM of Mainstream Compute. Krista great to see you're Cube alumni. We've had you on before talking about compute power. And by the way, congratulations on your BPT and Black Professional Tech Network 2023 Black Tech Exec of the Year Award. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate it. And thanks for having me. >> I knew I liked you the first time we were doing interviews together. You were so smart and so on top of it. Thanks for coming on. >> No problem. >> All kidding aside, let's get into it. You know, one of the things that's coming out on these interviews is leadership is being showcased and there's a network effect happening in the industry and you're starting to see people look and hear stories that they may or may not have heard before or news stories are coming out. So, one of the things that's interesting is that also in the backdrop of post pandemic, there's been a turn in the industry a little bit, there's a little bit of headwind in certain areas, some tailwinds in cloud and other areas. Compute, your area is doing very well. It could be challenging. And as a leader, has the conversation changed? And where are you at right now in the network of folks you're working with? What's the mood? >> Yeah, so actually I, things are much better. Obviously we had a chip shortage last year. Things are much, much better. But I learned a lot when it came to going through challenging times and leadership. And I think when we talk to customers, a lot of 'em are in challenging situations. Sometimes it's budget, sometimes it's attracting and retaining talent and sometimes it's just demands because, it's really exciting that technology is behind everything. But that means the demands on IT are bigger than ever before. So what I find when it comes to challenging times is that there's really three qualities that are game changers when it comes to leading and challenging times. And the first one is positivity. People have to feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel to make sure that, their attitudes stay up, that they stay working really really hard and they look to the leader for that. The second one is communication. And I read somewhere that communication is leadership. And we had a great example from our CEO Antonio Neri when the pandemic hit and everything shut down. He had an all employee meeting every week for a month and we have tens of thousands of employees. And then even after that month, we had 'em very regularly. But he wanted to make sure that everybody heard from, him his thoughts had all the updates, knew how their peers were doing, how we were helping customers. And I really learned a lot from that in terms of communicating and communicating more during tough times. And then I would say the third one is making sure that they are informed and they feel empowered. So I would say a leader who is able to do that really, really stands out in a challenging time. >> So how do you get yourself together? Obviously you the chip shortage everyone knows in the industry and for the folks not in the tech industry, it was an economic potential disaster, because you don't get the chips you need. You guys make servers and technology, chips power everything. If you miss a shipment, it could cause a lot of backlash. So Cisco had an earnings impact. It has impact to the business. When do you have that code red moment where it's like, okay, we have to kind of put the pause and go into emergency mode. And how do you handle that? >> Well, you know, it is funny 'cause when it, when we have challenges, I come to learn that people can look at challenges and hard work as a burden or a mission and they behave totally different. If they see it as a burden, then they're doing the bare minimum and they're pointing fingers and they're complaining and they're probably not getting a whole lot done. If they see it as a mission, then all of a sudden they're going above and beyond. They're working really hard, they're really partnering. And if it affects customers for HPE, obviously we, HPE is a very customer centric company, so everyone pays attention and tries to pitch in. But when it comes to a mission, I started thinking, what are the real ingredients for a mission? And I think it's important. I think it's, people feel like they can make an impact. And then I think the third one is that the goal is clear, even if the path isn't, 'cause you may have to pivot a lot if it's a challenge. And so when it came to the chip shortage, it was a mission. We wanted to make sure that we could ship to customers as quickly as possible. And it was a mission. Everybody pulled together. I learned how much our team could pull off and pull together through that challenge. >> And the consequences can be quantified in economics. So it's like the burn the boats example, you got to burn the boats, you're stuck. You got to figure out a solution. How does that change the demands on people? Because this is, okay, there's a mission it they're not, it's not normal. What are some of those new demands that arise during those times and how do you manage that? How do you be a leader? >> Yeah, so it's funny, I was reading this statement from James White who used to be the CEO of Jamba Juice. And he was talking about how he got that job. He said, "I think it was one thing I said that really convinced them that I was the right person." And what he said was something like, "I will get more out of people than nine out of 10 leaders on the planet." He said, "Because I will look at their strengths and their capabilities and I will play to their passions." and their capabilities and I will play their passions. and getting the most out people in difficult times, it is all about how much you can get out of people for their own sake and for the company's sake. >> That's great feedback. And to people watching who are early in their careers, leading is getting the best out of your team, attitude. Some of the things you mentioned. What advice would you give folks that are starting to get into the workforce, that are starting to get into that leadership track or might have a trajectory or even might have an innate ability that they know they have and they want to pursue that dream? >> Yeah so. >> What advice would you give them? >> Yeah, what I would say, I say this all the time that, for the first half of my career I was very job conscious, but I wasn't very career conscious. So I'd get in a role and I'd stay in that role for long periods of time and I'd do a good job, but I wasn't really very career conscious. And what I would say is, everybody says how important risk taking is. Well, risk taking can be a little bit of a scary word, right? Or term. And the way I see it is give it a shot and see what happens. You're interested in something, give it a shot and see what happens. It's kind of a less intimidating way of looking at risk because even though I was job conscious, and not career conscious, one thing I did when people asked me to take something on, hey Krista, would you like to take on more responsibility here? The answer was always yes, yes, yes, yes. So I said yes because I said, hey I'll give it a shot and see what happens. And that helped me tremendously because I felt like I am giving it a try. And the more you do that, the the better it is. >> It's great. >> And actually the the less scary it is because you do that, a few times and it goes well. It's like a muscle that builds. >> It's funny, a woman executive was on the program. I said, the word balance comes up a lot. And she stopped and said, "Let's just talk about balance for a second." And then she went contrarian and said, "It's about not being unbalanced. It's about being, taking a chance and being a little bit off balance to put yourself outside your comfort zone to try new things." And then she also came up and followed and said, "If you do that alone, you increase your risk. But if you do it with people, a team that you trust and you're authentic and you're vulnerable and you're communicating, that is the chemistry." And that was a really good point. What's your reaction? 'Cause you were talking about authentic conversations good communications with Antonio. How does someone get, feel, find that team and do you agree with it? And what was your, how would you react to that? >> Yes, I agree with that. And when it comes to being authentic, that's the magic and when someone isn't, if someone's not really being themselves, it's really funny because you can feel it, you can sense it. There's kind of a wall between you and them. And over time people won't be able to put their finger on it, but they'll feel a distance from you. But when you're authentic and you share who you are, what you find is you find things in common with other people. 'Cause you're sharing more of who you are and it's like, oh, I do that too. Oh, I'm interested in that too. And build the bonds between people and the authenticity. And that's what people crave. They want people to be authentic and people can tell when you're authentic and when you're not. >> Is managing and leading through a crisis a born talent or can you learn it? >> Oh, definitely learned. I think that we're born knowing nothing and I once read people are nurtured into greatness and I think that's true. So yeah, definitely learned. >> What are some examples that can come out of a tough time as folks may look at a crisis and be shy away from it? How do they lean into it? What advice would you give folks? How do you handle it? I mean, everyone's got different personality. Okay, they get to a position but stepping through that door. >> Yeah, well, I do this presentation called, "10 things I Wish I Knew Earlier in my Career." And one of those things is about the growth mindset and the growth mindset. There's a book called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck and the growth mindset is all about learning and not always having to know everything, but really the winning is in the learning. And so if you have a growth mindset it makes you feel better about everything because you can't lose. You're winning because you're learning. So when I've learned that, I started looking at things much differently. And when it comes to going through tough times, what I find is you're exercising muscles that you didn't even know you had, which makes you stronger when the crisis is over, obviously. And I also feel like you become a lot a much more creative when you're in challenging times. You're forced to do things that you hadn't had to do before. And it also bonds the team. It's almost like going through bootcamp together. When you go through a challenge together it bonds you for life. >> I mean, you could have bonding, could be trauma bonding or success bonding. People love to be on the success side because that's positive and that's really the key mindset. You're always winning if you have that attitude. And learnings is also positive. So it's not, it's never a failure unless you make it. >> That's right, exactly. As long as you learn from it. And that's the name of the game. So, learning is the goal. >> So I have to ask you, on your job now, you have a really big responsibility HPE compute and big division. What's the current mindset that you have right now in your career, where you're at? What are some of the things on your mind that you think about? We had other, other seniors leaders say, hey, you know I got the software as my brain and the hardware's my body. I like to keep software and hardware working together. What is your current state of your career and how you looking at it, what's next and what's going on in your mind right now? >> Yeah, so for me, I really want to make sure that for my team we're nurturing the next generation of leadership and that we're helping with career development and career growth. And people feel like they can grow their careers here. Luckily at HPE, we have a lot of people stay at HPE a long time, and even people who leave HPE a lot of times they come back because the culture's fantastic. So I just want to make sure I'm contributing to that culture and I'm bringing up the next generation of leaders. >> What's next for you? What are you looking at from a career personal standpoint? >> You know, it's funny, I, I love what I'm doing right now. I'm actually on a joint venture board with H3C, which is HPE Joint Venture Company. And so I'm really enjoying that and exploring more board service opportunities. >> You have a focus of good growth mindset, challenging through, managing through tough times. How do you stay focused on that North star? How do you keep the reinforcement of the mission? How do you nurture the team to greatness? >> Yeah, so I think it's a lot of clarity, providing a lot of clarity about what's important right now. And it goes back to some of the communication that I mentioned earlier, making sure that everybody knows where the North Star is, so everybody's focused on the same thing, because I feel like with the, I always felt like throughout my career I was set up for success if I had the right information, the right guidance and the right goals. And I try to make sure that I do that with my team. >> What are some of the things that you could share as we wrap up here for the folks watching, as the networks increase, as the stories start to unfold more and more on digital like we're doing here, what do you hope people walk away with? What's working, what needs work, and what is some things that people aren't talking about that should be discussed publicly? >> Do you mean from a career standpoint or? >> For career? For growing into tech and into leadership positions. >> Okay. >> Big migration tech is now a wide field. I mean, when I grew up, broke into the eighties, it was computer science, software engineering, and three degrees in engineering, right? >> I see huge swath of AI coming. So many technical careers. There's a lot more women. >> Yeah. And that's what's so exciting about being in a technical career, technical company, is that everything's always changing. There's always opportunity to learn something new. And frankly, you know, every company is in the business of technology right now, because they want to closer to their customers. Typically, they're using technology to do that. Everyone's digitally transforming. And so what I would say is that there's so much opportunity, keep your mind open, explore what interests you and keep learning because it's changing all the time. >> You know I was talking with Sue, former HP, she's on a lot of boards. The balance at the board level still needs a lot of work and the leaderships are getting better, but the board at the seats at the table needs work. Where do you see that transition for you in the future? Is that something on your mind? Maybe a board seat? You mentioned you're on a board with HPE, but maybe sitting on some other boards? Any, any? >> Yes, actually, actually, we actually have a program here at HPE called the Board Ready Now program that I'm a part of. And so HPE is very supportive of me exploring an independent board seat. And so they have some education and programming around that. And I know Sue well, she's awesome. And so yes, I'm looking into those opportunities right now. >> She advises do one no more than two. The day job. >> Yeah, I would only be doing one current job that I have. >> Well, kris, it was great to chat with you about these topics and leadership and challenging times. Great masterclass, great advice. As SVP and GM of mainstream compute for HPE, what's going on in your job these days? What's the most exciting thing happening? Share some of your work situations. >> Sure, so the most exciting thing happening right now is HPE Gen 11, which we just announced and started shipping, brings tremendous performance benefit, has an intuitive operating experience, a trusted security by design, and it's optimized to run workloads so much faster. So if anybody is interested, they should go check it out on hpe.com. >> And of course the CUBE will be at HPE Discover. We'll see you there. Any final wisdom you'd like to share as we wrap up the last minute here? >> Yeah, so I think the last thing I'll say is that when it comes to setting your sights, I think, expecting it, good things to happen usually happens when you believe you deserve it. So what happens is you believe you deserve it, then you expect it and you get it. And so sometimes that's about making sure you raise your thermostat to expect more. And I always talk about you don't have to raise it all up at once. You could do that incrementally and other people can set your thermostat too when they say, hey, you should be, you should get a level this high or that high, but raise your thermostat because what you expect is what you get. >> Krista, thank you so much for contributing to this program. We're going to do it quarterly. We're going to do getting more stories out there, so we'll have you back and if you know anyone with good stories, send them our way. And congratulations on your BPTN Tech Executive of the Year award for 2023. Congratulations, great prize there and great recognition for your hard work. >> Thank you so much, John, I appreciate it. >> Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of National Woodman's Day. I'm John Furrier, stories from the front lines, management ranks, developers, all there, global coverage of international events with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Valente with theCUBE, and one of the most gratifying aspects of my role as a host of "theCUBE TV" is I get to cover a wide range of topics. And quite often, we're able to bring to our program a level of expertise that allows us to more deeply explore and unpack some of the topics that we cover throughout the year. And one of our favorite topics, of course, is data. Now, in 2021, after being in isolation for the better part of two years, a group of industry analysts met up at AWS re:Invent and started a collaboration to look at the trends in data and predict what some likely outcomes will be for the coming year. And it resulted in a very popular session that we had last year focused on the future of data management. And I'm very excited and pleased to tell you that the 2023 edition of that predictions episode is back, and with me are five outstanding market analyst, Sanjeev Mohan of SanjMo, Tony Baer of dbInsight, Carl Olofson from IDC, Dave Menninger from Ventana Research, and Doug Henschen, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Now, what is it that we're calling you, guys? A data pack like the rat pack? No, no, no, no, that's not it. It's the data crowd, the data crowd, and the crowd includes some of the best minds in the data analyst community. They'll discuss how data management is evolving and what listeners should prepare for in 2023. Guys, welcome back. Great to see you. >> Good to be here. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. (Tony and Dave faintly speaks) >> All right, before we get into 2023 predictions, we thought it'd be good to do a look back at how we did in 2022 and give a transparent assessment of those predictions. So, let's get right into it. We're going to bring these up here, the predictions from 2022, they're color-coded red, yellow, and green to signify the degree of accuracy. And I'm pleased to report there's no red. Well, maybe some of you will want to debate that grading system. But as always, we want to be open, so you can decide for yourselves. So, we're going to ask each analyst to review their 2022 prediction and explain their rating and what evidence they have that led them to their conclusion. So, Sanjeev, please kick it off. Your prediction was data governance becomes key. I know that's going to knock you guys over, but elaborate, because you had more detail when you double click on that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Dave, for having us on the show today. And we self-graded ourselves. I could have very easily made my prediction from last year green, but I mentioned why I left it as yellow. I totally fully believe that data governance was in a renaissance in 2022. And why do I say that? You have to look no further than AWS launching its own data catalog called DataZone. Before that, mid-year, we saw Unity Catalog from Databricks went GA. So, overall, I saw there was tremendous movement. When you see these big players launching a new data catalog, you know that they want to be in this space. And this space is highly critical to everything that I feel we will talk about in today's call. Also, if you look at established players, I spoke at Collibra's conference, data.world, work closely with Alation, Informatica, a bunch of other companies, they all added tremendous new capabilities. So, it did become key. The reason I left it as yellow is because I had made a prediction that Collibra would go IPO, and it did not. And I don't think anyone is going IPO right now. The market is really, really down, the funding in VC IPO market. But other than that, data governance had a banner year in 2022. >> Yeah. Well, thank you for that. And of course, you saw data clean rooms being announced at AWS re:Invent, so more evidence. And I like how the fact that you included in your predictions some things that were binary, so you dinged yourself there. So, good job. Okay, Tony Baer, you're up next. Data mesh hits reality check. As you see here, you've given yourself a bright green thumbs up. (Tony laughing) Okay. Let's hear why you feel that was the case. What do you mean by reality check? >> Okay. Thanks, Dave, for having us back again. This is something I just wrote and just tried to get away from, and this just a topic just won't go away. I did speak with a number of folks, early adopters and non-adopters during the year. And I did find that basically that it pretty much validated what I was expecting, which was that there was a lot more, this has now become a front burner issue. And if I had any doubt in my mind, the evidence I would point to is what was originally intended to be a throwaway post on LinkedIn, which I just quickly scribbled down the night before leaving for re:Invent. I was packing at the time, and for some reason, I was doing Google search on data mesh. And I happened to have tripped across this ridiculous article, I will not say where, because it doesn't deserve any publicity, about the eight (Dave laughing) best data mesh software companies of 2022. (Tony laughing) One of my predictions was that you'd see data mesh washing. And I just quickly just hopped on that maybe three sentences and wrote it at about a couple minutes saying this is hogwash, essentially. (laughs) And that just reun... And then, I left for re:Invent. And the next night, when I got into my Vegas hotel room, I clicked on my computer. I saw a 15,000 hits on that post, which was the most hits of any single post I put all year. And the responses were wildly pro and con. So, it pretty much validates my expectation in that data mesh really did hit a lot more scrutiny over this past year. >> Yeah, thank you for that. I remember that article. I remember rolling my eyes when I saw it, and then I recently, (Tony laughing) I talked to Walmart and they actually invoked Martin Fowler and they said that they're working through their data mesh. So, it takes a really lot of thought, and it really, as we've talked about, is really as much an organizational construct. You're not buying data mesh >> Bingo. >> to your point. Okay. Thank you, Tony. Carl Olofson, here we go. You've graded yourself a yellow in the prediction of graph databases. Take off. Please elaborate. >> Yeah, sure. So, I realized in looking at the prediction that it seemed to imply that graph databases could be a major factor in the data world in 2022, which obviously didn't become the case. It was an error on my part in that I should have said it in the right context. It's really a three to five-year time period that graph databases will really become significant, because they still need accepted methodologies that can be applied in a business context as well as proper tools in order for people to be able to use them seriously. But I stand by the idea that it is taking off, because for one thing, Neo4j, which is the leading independent graph database provider, had a very good year. And also, we're seeing interesting developments in terms of things like AWS with Neptune and with Oracle providing graph support in Oracle database this past year. Those things are, as I said, growing gradually. There are other companies like TigerGraph and so forth, that deserve watching as well. But as far as becoming mainstream, it's going to be a few years before we get all the elements together to make that happen. Like any new technology, you have to create an environment in which ordinary people without a whole ton of technical training can actually apply the technology to solve business problems. >> Yeah, thank you for that. These specialized databases, graph databases, time series databases, you see them embedded into mainstream data platforms, but there's a place for these specialized databases, I would suspect we're going to see new types of databases emerge with all this cloud sprawl that we have and maybe to the edge. >> Well, part of it is that it's not as specialized as you might think it. You can apply graphs to great many workloads and use cases. It's just that people have yet to fully explore and discover what those are. >> Yeah. >> And so, it's going to be a process. (laughs) >> All right, Dave Menninger, streaming data permeates the landscape. You gave yourself a yellow. Why? >> Well, I couldn't think of a appropriate combination of yellow and green. Maybe I should have used chartreuse, (Dave laughing) but I was probably a little hard on myself making it yellow. This is another type of specialized data processing like Carl was talking about graph databases is a stream processing, and nearly every data platform offers streaming capabilities now. Often, it's based on Kafka. If you look at Confluent, their revenues have grown at more than 50%, continue to grow at more than 50% a year. They're expected to do more than half a billion dollars in revenue this year. But the thing that hasn't happened yet, and to be honest, they didn't necessarily expect it to happen in one year, is that streaming hasn't become the default way in which we deal with data. It's still a sidecar to data at rest. And I do expect that we'll continue to see streaming become more and more mainstream. I do expect perhaps in the five-year timeframe that we will first deal with data as streaming and then at rest, but the worlds are starting to merge. And we even see some vendors bringing products to market, such as K2View, Hazelcast, and RisingWave Labs. So, in addition to all those core data platform vendors adding these capabilities, there are new vendors approaching this market as well. >> I like the tough grading system, and it's not trivial. And when you talk to practitioners doing this stuff, there's still some complications in the data pipeline. And so, but I think, you're right, it probably was a yellow plus. Doug Henschen, data lakehouses will emerge as dominant. When you talk to people about lakehouses, practitioners, they all use that term. They certainly use the term data lake, but now, they're using lakehouse more and more. What's your thoughts on here? Why the green? What's your evidence there? >> Well, I think, I was accurate. I spoke about it specifically as something that vendors would be pursuing. And we saw yet more lakehouse advocacy in 2022. Google introduced its BigLake service alongside BigQuery. Salesforce introduced Genie, which is really a lakehouse architecture. And it was a safe prediction to say vendors are going to be pursuing this in that AWS, Cloudera, Databricks, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce now, IBM, all advocate this idea of a single platform for all of your data. Now, the trend was also supported in 2023, in that we saw a big embrace of Apache Iceberg in 2022. That's a structured table format. It's used with these lakehouse platforms. It's open, so it ensures portability and it also ensures performance. And that's a structured table that helps with the warehouse side performance. But among those announcements, Snowflake, Google, Cloud Era, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, all embraced Iceberg. But keep in mind, again, I'm talking about this as something that vendors are pursuing as their approach. So, they're advocating end users. It's very cutting edge. I'd say the top, leading edge, 5% of of companies have really embraced the lakehouse. I think, we're now seeing the fast followers, the next 20 to 25% of firms embracing this idea and embracing a lakehouse architecture. I recall Christian Kleinerman at the big Snowflake event last summer, making the announcement about Iceberg, and he asked for a show of hands for any of you in the audience at the keynote, have you heard of Iceberg? And just a smattering of hands went up. So, the vendors are ahead of the curve. They're pushing this trend, and we're now seeing a little bit more mainstream uptake. >> Good. Doug, I was there. It was you, me, and I think, two other hands were up. That was just humorous. (Doug laughing) All right, well, so I liked the fact that we had some yellow and some green. When you think about these things, there's the prediction itself. Did it come true or not? There are the sub predictions that you guys make, and of course, the degree of difficulty. So, thank you for that open assessment. All right, let's get into the 2023 predictions. Let's bring up the predictions. Sanjeev, you're going first. You've got a prediction around unified metadata. What's the prediction, please? >> So, my prediction is that metadata space is currently a mess. It needs to get unified. There are too many use cases of metadata, which are being addressed by disparate systems. For example, data quality has become really big in the last couple of years, data observability, the whole catalog space is actually, people don't like to use the word data catalog anymore, because data catalog sounds like it's a catalog, a museum, if you may, of metadata that you go and admire. So, what I'm saying is that in 2023, we will see that metadata will become the driving force behind things like data ops, things like orchestration of tasks using metadata, not rules. Not saying that if this fails, then do this, if this succeeds, go do that. But it's like getting to the metadata level, and then making a decision as to what to orchestrate, what to automate, how to do data quality check, data observability. So, this space is starting to gel, and I see there'll be more maturation in the metadata space. Even security privacy, some of these topics, which are handled separately. And I'm just talking about data security and data privacy. I'm not talking about infrastructure security. These also need to merge into a unified metadata management piece with some knowledge graph, semantic layer on top, so you can do analytics on it. So, it's no longer something that sits on the side, it's limited in its scope. It is actually the very engine, the very glue that is going to connect data producers and consumers. >> Great. Thank you for that. Doug. Doug Henschen, any thoughts on what Sanjeev just said? Do you agree? Do you disagree? >> Well, I agree with many aspects of what he says. I think, there's a huge opportunity for consolidation and streamlining of these as aspects of governance. Last year, Sanjeev, you said something like, we'll see more people using catalogs than BI. And I have to disagree. I don't think this is a category that's headed for mainstream adoption. It's a behind the scenes activity for the wonky few, or better yet, companies want machine learning and automation to take care of these messy details. We've seen these waves of management technologies, some of the latest data observability, customer data platform, but they failed to sweep away all the earlier investments in data quality and master data management. So, yes, I hope the latest tech offers, glimmers that there's going to be a better, cleaner way of addressing these things. But to my mind, the business leaders, including the CIO, only want to spend as much time and effort and money and resources on these sorts of things to avoid getting breached, ending up in headlines, getting fired or going to jail. So, vendors bring on the ML and AI smarts and the automation of these sorts of activities. >> So, if I may say something, the reason why we have this dichotomy between data catalog and the BI vendors is because data catalogs are very soon, not going to be standalone products, in my opinion. They're going to get embedded. So, when you use a BI tool, you'll actually use the catalog to find out what is it that you want to do, whether you are looking for data or you're looking for an existing dashboard. So, the catalog becomes embedded into the BI tool. >> Hey, Dave Menninger, sometimes you have some data in your back pocket. Do you have any stats (chuckles) on this topic? >> No, I'm glad you asked, because I'm going to... Now, data catalogs are something that's interesting. Sanjeev made a statement that data catalogs are falling out of favor. I don't care what you call them. They're valuable to organizations. Our research shows that organizations that have adequate data catalog technologies are three times more likely to express satisfaction with their analytics for just the reasons that Sanjeev was talking about. You can find what you want, you know you're getting the right information, you know whether or not it's trusted. So, those are good things. So, we expect to see the capabilities, whether it's embedded or separate. We expect to see those capabilities continue to permeate the market. >> And a lot of those catalogs are driven now by machine learning and things. So, they're learning from those patterns of usage by people when people use the data. (airy laughs) >> All right. Okay. Thank you, guys. All right. Let's move on to the next one. Tony Bear, let's bring up the predictions. You got something in here about the modern data stack. We need to rethink it. Is the modern data stack getting long at the tooth? Is it not so modern anymore? >> I think, in a way, it's got almost too modern. It's gotten too, I don't know if it's being long in the tooth, but it is getting long. The modern data stack, it's traditionally been defined as basically you have the data platform, which would be the operational database and the data warehouse. And in between, you have all the tools that are necessary to essentially get that data from the operational realm or the streaming realm for that matter into basically the data warehouse, or as we might be seeing more and more, the data lakehouse. And I think, what's important here is that, or I think, we have seen a lot of progress, and this would be in the cloud, is with the SaaS services. And especially you see that in the modern data stack, which is like all these players, not just the MongoDBs or the Oracles or the Amazons have their database platforms. You see they have the Informatica's, and all the other players there in Fivetrans have their own SaaS services. And within those SaaS services, you get a certain degree of simplicity, which is it takes all the housekeeping off the shoulders of the customers. That's a good thing. The problem is that what we're getting to unfortunately is what I would call lots of islands of simplicity, which means that it leads it (Dave laughing) to the customer to have to integrate or put all that stuff together. It's a complex tool chain. And so, what we really need to think about here, we have too many pieces. And going back to the discussion of catalogs, it's like we have so many catalogs out there, which one do we use? 'Cause chances are of most organizations do not rely on a single catalog at this point. What I'm calling on all the data providers or all the SaaS service providers, is to literally get it together and essentially make this modern data stack less of a stack, make it more of a blending of an end-to-end solution. And that can come in a number of different ways. Part of it is that we're data platform providers have been adding services that are adjacent. And there's some very good examples of this. We've seen progress over the past year or so. For instance, MongoDB integrating search. It's a very common, I guess, sort of tool that basically, that the applications that are developed on MongoDB use, so MongoDB then built it into the database rather than requiring an extra elastic search or open search stack. Amazon just... AWS just did the zero-ETL, which is a first step towards simplifying the process from going from Aurora to Redshift. You've seen same thing with Google, BigQuery integrating basically streaming pipelines. And you're seeing also a lot of movement in database machine learning. So, there's some good moves in this direction. I expect to see more than this year. Part of it's from basically the SaaS platform is adding some functionality. But I also see more importantly, because you're never going to get... This is like asking your data team and your developers, herding cats to standardizing the same tool. In most organizations, that is not going to happen. So, take a look at the most popular combinations of tools and start to come up with some pre-built integrations and pre-built orchestrations, and offer some promotional pricing, maybe not quite two for, but in other words, get two products for the price of two services or for the price of one and a half. I see a lot of potential for this. And it's to me, if the class was to simplify things, this is the next logical step and I expect to see more of this here. >> Yeah, and you see in Oracle, MySQL heat wave, yet another example of eliminating that ETL. Carl Olofson, today, if you think about the data stack and the application stack, they're largely separate. Do you have any thoughts on how that's going to play out? Does that play into this prediction? What do you think? >> Well, I think, that the... I really like Tony's phrase, islands of simplification. It really says (Tony chuckles) what's going on here, which is that all these different vendors you ask about, about how these stacks work. All these different vendors have their own stack vision. And you can... One application group is going to use one, and another application group is going to use another. And some people will say, let's go to, like you go to a Informatica conference and they say, we should be the center of your universe, but you can't connect everything in your universe to Informatica, so you need to use other things. So, the challenge is how do we make those things work together? As Tony has said, and I totally agree, we're never going to get to the point where people standardize on one organizing system. So, the alternative is to have metadata that can be shared amongst those systems and protocols that allow those systems to coordinate their operations. This is standard stuff. It's not easy. But the motive for the vendors is that they can become more active critical players in the enterprise. And of course, the motive for the customer is that things will run better and more completely. So, I've been looking at this in terms of two kinds of metadata. One is the meaning metadata, which says what data can be put together. The other is the operational metadata, which says basically where did it come from? Who created it? What's its current state? What's the security level? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The good news is the operational stuff can actually be done automatically, whereas the meaning stuff requires some human intervention. And as we've already heard from, was it Doug, I think, people are disinclined to put a lot of definition into meaning metadata. So, that may be the harder one, but coordination is key. This problem has been with us forever, but with the addition of new data sources, with streaming data with data in different formats, the whole thing has, it's been like what a customer of mine used to say, "I understand your product can make my system run faster, but right now I just feel I'm putting my problems on roller skates. (chuckles) I don't need that to accelerate what's already not working." >> Excellent. Okay, Carl, let's stay with you. I remember in the early days of the big data movement, Hadoop movement, NoSQL was the big thing. And I remember Amr Awadallah said to us in theCUBE that SQL is the killer app for big data. So, your prediction here, if we bring that up is SQL is back. Please elaborate. >> Yeah. So, of course, some people would say, well, it never left. Actually, that's probably closer to true, but in the perception of the marketplace, there's been all this noise about alternative ways of storing, retrieving data, whether it's in key value stores or document databases and so forth. We're getting a lot of messaging that for a while had persuaded people that, oh, we're not going to do analytics in SQL anymore. We're going to use Spark for everything, except that only a handful of people know how to use Spark. Oh, well, that's a problem. Well, how about, and for ordinary conventional business analytics, Spark is like an over-engineered solution to the problem. SQL works just great. What's happened in the past couple years, and what's going to continue to happen is that SQL is insinuating itself into everything we're seeing. We're seeing all the major data lake providers offering SQL support, whether it's Databricks or... And of course, Snowflake is loving this, because that is what they do, and their success is certainly points to the success of SQL, even MongoDB. And we were all, I think, at the MongoDB conference where on one day, we hear SQL is dead. They're not teaching SQL in schools anymore, and this kind of thing. And then, a couple days later at the same conference, they announced we're adding a new analytic capability-based on SQL. But didn't you just say SQL is dead? So, the reality is that SQL is better understood than most other methods of certainly of retrieving and finding data in a data collection, no matter whether it happens to be relational or non-relational. And even in systems that are very non-relational, such as graph and document databases, their query languages are being built or extended to resemble SQL, because SQL is something people understand. >> Now, you remember when we were in high school and you had had to take the... Your debating in the class and you were forced to take one side and defend it. So, I was was at a Vertica conference one time up on stage with Curt Monash, and I had to take the NoSQL, the world is changing paradigm shift. And so just to be controversial, I said to him, Curt Monash, I said, who really needs acid compliance anyway? Tony Baer. And so, (chuckles) of course, his head exploded, but what are your thoughts (guests laughing) on all this? >> Well, my first thought is congratulations, Dave, for surviving being up on stage with Curt Monash. >> Amen. (group laughing) >> I definitely would concur with Carl. We actually are definitely seeing a SQL renaissance and if there's any proof of the pudding here, I see lakehouse is being icing on the cake. As Doug had predicted last year, now, (clears throat) for the record, I think, Doug was about a year ahead of time in his predictions that this year is really the year that I see (clears throat) the lakehouse ecosystems really firming up. You saw the first shots last year. But anyway, on this, data lakes will not go away. I've actually, I'm on the home stretch of doing a market, a landscape on the lakehouse. And lakehouse will not replace data lakes in terms of that. There is the need for those, data scientists who do know Python, who knows Spark, to go in there and basically do their thing without all the restrictions or the constraints of a pre-built, pre-designed table structure. I get that. Same thing for developing models. But on the other hand, there is huge need. Basically, (clears throat) maybe MongoDB was saying that we're not teaching SQL anymore. Well, maybe we have an oversupply of SQL developers. Well, I'm being facetious there, but there is a huge skills based in SQL. Analytics have been built on SQL. They came with lakehouse and why this really helps to fuel a SQL revival is that the core need in the data lake, what brought on the lakehouse was not so much SQL, it was a need for acid. And what was the best way to do it? It was through a relational table structure. So, the whole idea of acid in the lakehouse was not to turn it into a transaction database, but to make the data trusted, secure, and more granularly governed, where you could govern down to column and row level, which you really could not do in a data lake or a file system. So, while lakehouse can be queried in a manner, you can go in there with Python or whatever, it's built on a relational table structure. And so, for that end, for those types of data lakes, it becomes the end state. You cannot bypass that table structure as I learned the hard way during my research. So, the bottom line I'd say here is that lakehouse is proof that we're starting to see the revenge of the SQL nerds. (Dave chuckles) >> Excellent. Okay, let's bring up back up the predictions. Dave Menninger, this one's really thought-provoking and interesting. We're hearing things like data as code, new data applications, machines actually generating plans with no human involvement. And your prediction is the definition of data is expanding. What do you mean by that? >> So, I think, for too long, we've thought about data as the, I would say facts that we collect the readings off of devices and things like that, but data on its own is really insufficient. Organizations need to manipulate that data and examine derivatives of the data to really understand what's happening in their organization, why has it happened, and to project what might happen in the future. And my comment is that these data derivatives need to be supported and managed just like the data needs to be managed. We can't treat this as entirely separate. Think about all the governance discussions we've had. Think about the metadata discussions we've had. If you separate these things, now you've got more moving parts. We're talking about simplicity and simplifying the stack. So, if these things are treated separately, it creates much more complexity. I also think it creates a little bit of a myopic view on the part of the IT organizations that are acquiring these technologies. They need to think more broadly. So, for instance, metrics. Metric stores are becoming much more common part of the tooling that's part of a data platform. Similarly, feature stores are gaining traction. So, those are designed to promote the reuse and consistency across the AI and ML initiatives. The elements that are used in developing an AI or ML model. And let me go back to metrics and just clarify what I mean by that. So, any type of formula involving the data points. I'm distinguishing metrics from features that are used in AI and ML models. And the data platforms themselves are increasingly managing the models as an element of data. So, just like figuring out how to calculate a metric. Well, if you're going to have the features associated with an AI and ML model, you probably need to be managing the model that's associated with those features. The other element where I see expansion is around external data. Organizations for decades have been focused on the data that they generate within their own organization. We see more and more of these platforms acquiring and publishing data to external third-party sources, whether they're within some sort of a partner ecosystem or whether it's a commercial distribution of that information. And our research shows that when organizations use external data, they derive even more benefits from the various analyses that they're conducting. And the last great frontier in my opinion on this expanding world of data is the world of driver-based planning. Very few of the major data platform providers provide these capabilities today. These are the types of things you would do in a spreadsheet. And we all know the issues associated with spreadsheets. They're hard to govern, they're error-prone. And so, if we can take that type of analysis, collecting the occupancy of a rental property, the projected rise in rental rates, the fluctuations perhaps in occupancy, the interest rates associated with financing that property, we can project forward. And that's a very common thing to do. What the income might look like from that property income, the expenses, we can plan and purchase things appropriately. So, I think, we need this broader purview and I'm beginning to see some of those things happen. And the evidence today I would say, is more focused around the metric stores and the feature stores starting to see vendors offer those capabilities. And we're starting to see the ML ops elements of managing the AI and ML models find their way closer to the data platforms as well. >> Very interesting. When I hear metrics, I think of KPIs, I think of data apps, orchestrate people and places and things to optimize around a set of KPIs. It sounds like a metadata challenge more... Somebody once predicted they'll have more metadata than data. Carl, what are your thoughts on this prediction? >> Yeah, I think that what Dave is describing as data derivatives is in a way, another word for what I was calling operational metadata, which not about the data itself, but how it's used, where it came from, what the rules are governing it, and that kind of thing. If you have a rich enough set of those things, then not only can you do a model of how well your vacation property rental may do in terms of income, but also how well your application that's measuring that is doing for you. In other words, how many times have I used it, how much data have I used and what is the relationship between the data that I've used and the benefits that I've derived from using it? Well, we don't have ways of doing that. What's interesting to me is that folks in the content world are way ahead of us here, because they have always tracked their content using these kinds of attributes. Where did it come from? When was it created, when was it modified? Who modified it? And so on and so forth. We need to do more of that with the structure data that we have, so that we can track what it's used. And also, it tells us how well we're doing with it. Is it really benefiting us? Are we being efficient? Are there improvements in processes that we need to consider? Because maybe data gets created and then it isn't used or it gets used, but it gets altered in some way that actually misleads people. (laughs) So, we need the mechanisms to be able to do that. So, I would say that that's... And I'd say that it's true that we need that stuff. I think, that starting to expand is probably the right way to put it. It's going to be expanding for some time. I think, we're still a distance from having all that stuff really working together. >> Maybe we should say it's gestating. (Dave and Carl laughing) >> Sorry, if I may- >> Sanjeev, yeah, I was going to say this... Sanjeev, please comment. This sounds to me like it supports Zhamak Dehghani's principles, but please. >> Absolutely. So, whether we call it data mesh or not, I'm not getting into that conversation, (Dave chuckles) but data (audio breaking) (Tony laughing) everything that I'm hearing what Dave is saying, Carl, this is the year when data products will start to take off. I'm not saying they'll become mainstream. They may take a couple of years to become so, but this is data products, all this thing about vacation rentals and how is it doing, that data is coming from different sources. I'm packaging it into our data product. And to Carl's point, there's a whole operational metadata associated with it. The idea is for organizations to see things like developer productivity, how many releases am I doing of this? What data products are most popular? I'm actually in right now in the process of formulating this concept that just like we had data catalogs, we are very soon going to be requiring data products catalog. So, I can discover these data products. I'm not just creating data products left, right, and center. I need to know, do they already exist? What is the usage? If no one is using a data product, maybe I want to retire and save cost. But this is a data product. Now, there's a associated thing that is also getting debated quite a bit called data contracts. And a data contract to me is literally just formalization of all these aspects of a product. How do you use it? What is the SLA on it, what is the quality that I am prescribing? So, data product, in my opinion, shifts the conversation to the consumers or to the business people. Up to this point when, Dave, you're talking about data and all of data discovery curation is a very data producer-centric. So, I think, we'll see a shift more into the consumer space. >> Yeah. Dave, can I just jump in there just very quickly there, which is that what Sanjeev has been saying there, this is really central to what Zhamak has been talking about. It's basically about making, one, data products are about the lifecycle management of data. Metadata is just elemental to that. And essentially, one of the things that she calls for is making data products discoverable. That's exactly what Sanjeev was talking about. >> By the way, did everyone just no notice how Sanjeev just snuck in another prediction there? So, we've got- >> Yeah. (group laughing) >> But you- >> Can we also say that he snuck in, I think, the term that we'll remember today, which is metadata museums. >> Yeah, but- >> Yeah. >> And also comment to, Tony, to your last year's prediction, you're really talking about it's not something that you're going to buy from a vendor. >> No. >> It's very specific >> Mm-hmm. >> to an organization, their own data product. So, touche on that one. Okay, last prediction. Let's bring them up. Doug Henschen, BI analytics is headed to embedding. What does that mean? >> Well, we all know that conventional BI dashboarding reporting is really commoditized from a vendor perspective. It never enjoyed truly mainstream adoption. Always that 25% of employees are really using these things. I'm seeing rising interest in embedding concise analytics at the point of decision or better still, using analytics as triggers for automation and workflows, and not even necessitating human interaction with visualizations, for example, if we have confidence in the analytics. So, leading companies are pushing for next generation applications, part of this low-code, no-code movement we've seen. And they want to build that decision support right into the app. So, the analytic is right there. Leading enterprise apps vendors, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, they're all building smart apps with the analytics predictions, even recommendations built into these applications. And I think, the progressive BI analytics vendors are supporting this idea of driving insight to action, not necessarily necessitating humans interacting with it if there's confidence. So, we want prediction, we want embedding, we want automation. This low-code, no-code development movement is very important to bringing the analytics to where people are doing their work. We got to move beyond the, what I call swivel chair integration, between where people do their work and going off to separate reports and dashboards, and having to interpret and analyze before you can go back and do take action. >> And Dave Menninger, today, if you want, analytics or you want to absorb what's happening in the business, you typically got to go ask an expert, and then wait. So, what are your thoughts on Doug's prediction? >> I'm in total agreement with Doug. I'm going to say that collectively... So, how did we get here? I'm going to say collectively as an industry, we made a mistake. We made BI and analytics separate from the operational systems. Now, okay, it wasn't really a mistake. We were limited by the technology available at the time. Decades ago, we had to separate these two systems, so that the analytics didn't impact the operations. You don't want the operations preventing you from being able to do a transaction. But we've gone beyond that now. We can bring these two systems and worlds together and organizations recognize that need to change. As Doug said, the majority of the workforce and the majority of organizations doesn't have access to analytics. That's wrong. (chuckles) We've got to change that. And one of the ways that's going to change is with embedded analytics. 2/3 of organizations recognize that embedded analytics are important and it even ranks higher in importance than AI and ML in those organizations. So, it's interesting. This is a really important topic to the organizations that are consuming these technologies. The good news is it works. Organizations that have embraced embedded analytics are more comfortable with self-service than those that have not, as opposed to turning somebody loose, in the wild with the data. They're given a guided path to the data. And the research shows that 65% of organizations that have adopted embedded analytics are comfortable with self-service compared with just 40% of organizations that are turning people loose in an ad hoc way with the data. So, totally behind Doug's predictions. >> Can I just break in with something here, a comment on what Dave said about what Doug said, which (laughs) is that I totally agree with what you said about embedded analytics. And at IDC, we made a prediction in our future intelligence, future of intelligence service three years ago that this was going to happen. And the thing that we're waiting for is for developers to build... You have to write the applications to work that way. It just doesn't happen automagically. Developers have to write applications that reference analytic data and apply it while they're running. And that could involve simple things like complex queries against the live data, which is through something that I've been calling analytic transaction processing. Or it could be through something more sophisticated that involves AI operations as Doug has been suggesting, where the result is enacted pretty much automatically unless the scores are too low and you need to have a human being look at it. So, I think that that is definitely something we've been watching for. I'm not sure how soon it will come, because it seems to take a long time for people to change their thinking. But I think, as Dave was saying, once they do and they apply these principles in their application development, the rewards are great. >> Yeah, this is very much, I would say, very consistent with what we were talking about, I was talking about before, about basically rethinking the modern data stack and going into more of an end-to-end solution solution. I think, that what we're talking about clearly here is operational analytics. There'll still be a need for your data scientists to go offline just in their data lakes to do all that very exploratory and that deep modeling. But clearly, it just makes sense to bring operational analytics into where people work into their workspace and further flatten that modern data stack. >> But with all this metadata and all this intelligence, we're talking about injecting AI into applications, it does seem like we're entering a new era of not only data, but new era of apps. Today, most applications are about filling forms out or codifying processes and require a human input. And it seems like there's enough data now and enough intelligence in the system that the system can actually pull data from, whether it's the transaction system, e-commerce, the supply chain, ERP, and actually do something with that data without human involvement, present it to humans. Do you guys see this as a new frontier? >> I think, that's certainly- >> Very much so, but it's going to take a while, as Carl said. You have to design it, you have to get the prediction into the system, you have to get the analytics at the point of decision has to be relevant to that decision point. >> And I also recall basically a lot of the ERP vendors back like 10 years ago, we're promising that. And the fact that we're still looking at the promises shows just how difficult, how much of a challenge it is to get to what Doug's saying. >> One element that could be applied in this case is (indistinct) architecture. If applications are developed that are event-driven rather than following the script or sequence that some programmer or designer had preconceived, then you'll have much more flexible applications. You can inject decisions at various points using this technology much more easily. It's a completely different way of writing applications. And it actually involves a lot more data, which is why we should all like it. (laughs) But in the end (Tony laughing) it's more stable, it's easier to manage, easier to maintain, and it's actually more efficient, which is the result of an MIT study from about 10 years ago, and still, we are not seeing this come to fruition in most business applications. >> And do you think it's going to require a new type of data platform database? Today, data's all far-flung. We see that's all over the clouds and at the edge. Today, you cache- >> We need a super cloud. >> You cache that data, you're throwing into memory. I mentioned, MySQL heat wave. There are other examples where it's a brute force approach, but maybe we need new ways of laying data out on disk and new database architectures, and just when we thought we had it all figured out. >> Well, without referring to disk, which to my mind, is almost like talking about cave painting. I think, that (Dave laughing) all the things that have been mentioned by all of us today are elements of what I'm talking about. In other words, the whole improvement of the data mesh, the improvement of metadata across the board and improvement of the ability to track data and judge its freshness the way we judge the freshness of a melon or something like that, to determine whether we can still use it. Is it still good? That kind of thing. Bringing together data from multiple sources dynamically and real-time requires all the things we've been talking about. All the predictions that we've talked about today add up to elements that can make this happen. >> Well, guys, it's always tremendous to get these wonderful minds together and get your insights, and I love how it shapes the outcome here of the predictions, and let's see how we did. We're going to leave it there. I want to thank Sanjeev, Tony, Carl, David, and Doug. Really appreciate the collaboration and thought that you guys put into these sessions. Really, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> All right, this is Dave Valente for theCUBE, signing off for now. Follow these guys on social media. Look for coverage on siliconangle.com, theCUBE.net. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat sparkling music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent. We are live from the show floor here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, here with my cohost John Furrier on theCUBE. John, end of day three. You're smiling. >> Yeah. >> You're still radiating energy. Is it, is it the community that's keeping your, your level up? >> It's just all the action. We've got a great special guest joining us for the first time on theCUBE. It's going to be great and Serverless wave is hitting. More and more Serverless embedded into the like, things like analytics, are going to make things tightly integrated. You can see a lot more kind of tightly coupled but yet still cohesive elements together being kind of end-to-end, and again, the, the zero-ELT vision is soon to be here. That and security, major news here at Amazon. Of course, this next segment is going to be awesome, about the modernization journey. We're going to hear a lot about that. >> Yeah, we are, and our next guest is also an extraordinarily adventurous one. Please welcome Joe from Arc XP. Thank you so much for being here. >> Thanks for having me. >> Savannah: How this show going for you? >> It's been great and you know, it's the end of the day but there's so much great energy at the show this year. >> Savannah: There really is. >> It's great walking the halls, seeing the great engineers, the thought leaders, including this session. So, it's been really a stimulating time. >> What do you do at Arc, what do you, what's your role? >> So, I'm Vice President of Technology and Product Development. I recently joined Arc to lead all the product development teams. We're an experience platform, so, in that platform we have content tools, we have delivery tools, we have subscription tools. It's a really exciting time in all those spaces. >> John: And your customer base is? >> Our customers today started with publishers. So, Arc XP was built for the Washington Post's internal needs many years ago and word got out about how great it was, built on top of the AWS tech stack and other publishers came and started licensing the software. We've moved from there to B2C commerce as well as enterprise scenarios. >> I think that's really interesting and I want to touch on your background a little bit here. You just mentioned the Washington Post. You have a background in broadcast. What was it, since you, since you are fresh, what was it that attracted you to Arc? What made you say yes? >> Yeah, so I spent a little under 10 years building the Associated Press Broadcast Newsroom Tools, some of them that you have used for many years, and you know, one of the things that was really exciting about joining ARC, was they were cloud native and they were cloud native from the start and so that really gave them a leg up with how quickly they could innovate, and now we see developers here at re:Invent be able to do custom Lambdas and new extensibility points in a way that, really, no one else can do in the CMS space >> Which, which is very exciting. Let's talk a little bit about your team and the development cycle. We've touched a lot on the economic uncertainty right now. How are things internally? What's the culture pulse? >> Yeah, so the return to work has been a thing for us, just like- >> Savannah: Are you back in office? >> All of them. We actually have a globally distributed team, and so, if you happen to be lucky enough to be in Washington, DC or Chicago or some of our other centers, there's an opportunity to be in the office, but most of our engineers work remotely. One of the exciting things we did earlier this year was ARC week. We brought everyone to DC to see each other face-to-face, and that same energy you see at re:Invent, was there in person with our engineers. >> I believe that. So, I'm a marketer by trade. I love that you're all about the digital experience. Are you creating digital- I mean everyone needs some sort of digital experience. >> Joe: Yes. >> Every company is a technology company now. Do you work across verticals? You see more niche or industry specific? >> Yeah, so we began with a very large vertical of media and broadcast. >> Savannah: There's a couple companies in that category. >> There's a couple big ones out there. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And actually their challenges are really high volume production of great digital storytelling, and so, solving their problems has enabled us to have a platform that works for anyone that needs to tell a story digitally, whether it's a commerce site, corporate HR department. >> Savannah: Which is everyone, right? >> Virtually everyone needs to get their story out today. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And so we have gone to a bunch of other verticals and we've seen the benefits of having that strong, cloud-based platform offer the scale that all storytellers need. >> What are some of the challenges today that aren't, that weren't there a decade ago or even five years ago? We see a lot of media companies looking at the business model innovations, changing landscapes omnichannel distribution, different formats. What's some of the challenges that's going on in content? >> So, you know, content challenges include both production of content and delivery of that content through a great experience. So different parts of ARC focus on those problems and you got to monetize it as well, but what I'd say is unique to Arc and the challenge we talk to our customers about a lot is multi-format production. So, it's not just about one channel. >> Savannah: Right. It's about telling a story and having it go across multi-channels, multi-sites, and having the infrastructure both technically and in the workflow tools, is super critical for our customers and it is a challenge that we receive well. >> A lot of AI is coming into the conversation here. Data, AI, publishing, video, user generated content. It's all data. >> Absolutely, yep. >> It's all data. >> Joe: It's an immense amount of data. >> How do you look at the data plane or the data layer, the data aspect of the platform and what are some of the customers leaning into or are kicking the tires around? What are some of the trends, and what are some of the core issues you see? >> Yeah, so I've spent a lot of time in data ML and analytics looking at giant data sets, and you know, when you look at CMS systems and experience platforms, the first class that it's in, is really the, the documents themselves. What is the story you're saying? But where the rich data is that we can analyze is user behaviors, global distribution of content, how we optimize our CDN and really give a personal experience to the reader, but beyond that, we see a lot of advantages in our digital asset management platform, which is for video, audio, photos, all kinds of media formats, and applying AIML to do detection, suggest photos that might be appropriate based on what a journalist or a marketer is writing in their story. So, there's a lot of opportunities around that sort of data. >> What are some of the business model changes that you're seeing? 'Cause remember we're in digital, Page view advertising has gone down, subscription firewalls on blogs. You got things like Substack emerging. Journalists are kind of like changing. I've seen companies go out of business, some of the media companies or change, some of the small ones go out of business, the bigger ones are evolving. What are some of the business model enablements that you guys see coming, that a platform could deliver, so that a company can value their content, and their talent? >> For sure. I mean this is a perennial question in the media space, right? It's been going on for two decades. >> I was going to say we're- >> Right. >> So it's like- >> Joe: Right, and so we've seen that play out- >> John: Little softball for you. >> Really for almost every format. It's a softball, but- >> It's day three. >> How are we addressing that? You know what, first and foremost, you got to do great storytelling, so, we have tools for that, but then presenting that story, and a great experience no matter what device you're on, that's going to be critical no matter how you're monetizing it, and so, you know, we have customers that go very ad heavy. We also have a subscription platform that can do that built into our infrastructure. >> 50 million plus registered users, correct? >> Yeah, it's unbelievable to scale. Really, Arc is a growth story, and so we went from serving the Washington Post needs, to over 2000 sites today, across 25 countries. >> Very- >> How do we get to that? How do we get that audience if we want to? Can we join that network? Is it a network of people? >> I love that question. >> Of people that are using Arc XP? >> Yeah. >> Actually, we recently launched a new effort around our community, so I think they actually had a meeting yesterday, and so that's one way to get involved, but as you said, everyone needs to have a site and tell great stories. >> Yeah. >> So, we see a wide appeal for our platform, and what's unique about ARC, is it's truly a SaaS model. This is delivered via SaaS, where we take care of all of the services, over a hundred Amazon services, behind the scenes- >> Wow. >> Built into Arc. We manage all of that for our customers, including the CDN. So, it's not as though as our customers have to be making sure the site is up, we've got teams to take care of that 24/7 >> Great value proposition and a lot of need for this, people doing their own media systems themselves. What's the secret sauce to your success? If you had to kind of look at the technology? I see serverless is a big part of it on the EDB stack. What's the, what's the secret sauce? >> I think the secret sauce comes from the roots that Arc has in the Washington Post >> You understand it. >> And some of the most challenging content production workflows anywhere in the world, and I've spent a lot of time, in many newsrooms. So, I think that knowledge, the urgency of what it takes to get a story out, the zero tolerance for the site going down. That DNA really enables our engineers to do great solutions. >> Talk about understanding your user. I mean that that's, and drinking the Kool-Aid, but in a totally amazing way. One of the other things that stuck out to me in doing my research is not only are you a service used, now, by 50 million subscribers, but beyond that, you pride yourself on being a turnkey solution. Folks can get Arc up and running quite quickly. Correct? >> For sure. So, one of the things we built into Arc XP is something called Themes, which has a bunch of pre-built blocks, that our customers don't have to end up with a custom codebase when they've developed a new experience platform. That's not a good solution, of every site be a custom codebase. We're a product with extensibility hooks. >> Savannah: Right. >> That really enables someone to get started very quickly, and that also includes bringing in content from other platforms into Arc, itself. So that journey of migrating a site is really smooth with our toolset. >> What's the history of the company? Is it, did it come from the Washington Post or was that it's original customer? What's the DNA of the firm? >> Yeah, so it was originally built by the Washington Post for the Washington Post. So, designed by digital storytellers, for storytelling. >> Savannah: And one of the largest media outlets out there. >> So, that's that "DNA", the "special sauce". >> Yeah, yeah. >> So that's where that connection is. >> That really is where it comes through. >> John: Awesome. Congratulations on- >> Now today, you know, those roots are still apparent, but we've been very responsive to other needs in the markets around commerce. There's a whole other set of DNA we've brought in, experts in understanding different systems for inventory management, so we can do a great experience on top of some of those legacy platforms. >> My final question, before we go to the challenge- >> Savannah: To the challenge. >> Is, what's next? What's on the roadmap as you look at the technology and the teams that you're managing? What's some of the next milestone or priorities for your business? >> So, it is really about growth and that's the story of Arc XP, which has driven our technology decisions. So, our choice to go serverless was driven by growth and need to make sure we had exceptional experience but most importantly that our engineers could be focused on product development and responding to what the market needed. So, that's why I'd say next year is about, it's enabling our engineers to keep up with the scaling business but still provide great value on the roadmap. >> And it's not like there's ever going to be a shortage of content or stories that need to be told. So I suspect there's a lot of resilience in what you're doing. >> And we hope to be inspired with new ways of telling stories. >> Yeah. >> So if you're in the Washington Post or other media outlets. >> John: Or theCUBE. >> Joe: Or theCUBE. >> Savannah: I know, I was just- >> There's just great formats out there. >> Best dev meeting, let's chat after, for sure. >> Exactly, that's what I've been thinking the whole time. I'm sure the wheels are turning over on this side- >> So great to have you on. >> In a lot of different ways. So, we have a new tradition here at re:Invent, where we are providing you with an opportunity for quite a sizzle reel, Instagram video, 30 second, thought leadership soundbite. What is your hot take, key theme or most important thing that you are thinking about since we're here at this year's show? >> I would say it's the energy that's building in the industry, getting back together, the collaboration, and how that's resulting in us using new technologies. You know, the conversation's no longer about shifting to the cloud. We all have huge infrastructure, the conversation's about observability, how do we know what's going in? How do we make sure we're getting the most value for our customers with those, that technology set. So, I think the energy around that is super exciting. I've always loved building products. So, next year think it's going to be a great year with that, putting together these new technologies. >> I think you nailed it. The energy really is the story and the collaboration. Joe, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. Arc is lucky to have you and we'll close with one personal anecdote. Favorite place to sail? >> Favorite place to sail. So, I lived in the Caribbean for many years, as we were talking about earlier >> None of us are jealous up here at all. >> And so my favorite place to sail would be in the British Virgin Islands, which was closed during Covid but is now back open, so, if any you've had a chance to go to the BVI, make some time, hop on Catamaran, there's some great spots. >> Well, I think you just gave us a catalyst for our next vacation, maybe a team off-site. >> Bucket list item, of course. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, Let's bring everyone together. >> Here we go. I love it. Well Joe, thanks so much again for being on the show. We hope to have you back on theCUBE again sometime soon, and thank all of you for tuning in to this scintillating coverage that we have here, live from the AWS re:Invent show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. This is theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)