>> the CUBE presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to the CUBE'S coverage day one, Dell Technologies World 2022 live from The Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante. We've been here the last couple of hours. You can hear probably the buzz behind me. Lots of folks here, we're think around seven to eight thousand folks in this solution expo, the vibe is awesome. We've got two guests helping to round out our day one coverage. Ryan Fournier joins us, senior director of product management Edge Solutions at Dell Technologies. And MuneyB Minttazuddin vice president of Edge Computing at VMware. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Oh, glad to be here. >> Yeah. >> Isn't it great to be here in person? >> Oh man, yes. >> The vibe, the vibe of day one is awesome. >> Yes. >> Oh yeah. >> I think it's fantastic. >> Like people give energy off to each other, right? >> Absolutely. So lots of some good news coming out today so far on day one. Let's talk about, Ryan let's start with you. With Edge, it's not new. We've been talking about it for a while, but what are some of the things that are new? What are some of the key trends that you are seeing that are driving changes at the Edge? >> Great, good question. We've been talking to a lot of customers. Okay, a lot of the customers you know, the different verticals really find that is a common theme happening around a massive digital transformation and really based on the pandemic, okay. Which caused some acceleration in some, but also not, but many are kind of laggers left behind. And one primary reason is the culture of the OT, IT, you know, lack of barriers or something like that. The OT is obviously the business outcomes, okay. Focused where the IT is more enabling the function and it'll take retail. For example, that's accelerated a significant usage of an in-store frictionless experience, okay. As well as supply chain automation, warehousing logistics, connected inventory, a lot of the new use cases in this new normal post that pandemic. It's really that new retail operating landscape. >> Consumers we are so demanding, we want the same experience that we have online and we want that in the store and that's really driving a lot of this out of consumer demand. >> Oh yeah, no. I think, you know, retail you know, the way you shop for milk and bread change during the pandemic, right? There was pre-pandemic. The online shopping in the United States was only 5%, but during the pandemic and afterwards that's going to caught up to 25, 30%. That's huge. How do you bring new processes in? How do you create omnichannel consumer experiences where online well as physical are blended together? Becomes a massive challenge for the retailers. So yes, Edge has been there for a long time. Innovation hasn't happened, but a simple credit card swipe When you used to pre-pandemic, just to go do your checkout now has become into a curbside pickup. Integration with like, it's just simple payment card processing is not complicated like, you know, crazy. So people are forced to go in a way and that's happening in manufacturing because they're supply chain issues, could be not. So a lot of that has accelerated this investment and what's kind of driving Edge Computing is if everything ran out of the cloud, then you almost need infinite bandwidth. So suddenly people are realizing that everything runs out of cloud. I can't process my video analytics in a store. That's a lot of video, right? >> So we often ask ourselves, okay, who's going to win the edge? You know, we have that conversation. The cloud guys? VMware? You know, Dell? How are they going to go at it? And so to your point, you're not going to do a round trip to the cloud too expensive, too slow. Now cloud guys will try to bring their cloud basically on prem or out to the edge. You're kind of bringing it from the data center. So how do you see that evolution? >> No, great question. As the edge market happens, right? So there's market data now which says enterprise edge workloads in the next five years are going to be the fastest growing workloads. But then you have different communities coming to solve that problem. Like you just said, John is, you know, hyperscalers are going, Hey, all of the new workloads were built on us, let's bring them to the edge. Data center workloads move to the edge. >> Now important community here are, you know, Telcos and Service Providers because they have assets that are highly distributed at the edge. However, they're networking assets like cell towers and stuff like that. There's opportunity to convert them into computer and storage assets. So you can provide edge computing POPs. So you're seeing a convergence of lot of industry segments, traditional IT, hyperscalers, telcos, and then OT like Ryan pointed out is naturally transforming itself. There's almost this confluence of this pot where all these different technologies need to come together. From VMware and Dell perspective, our mission is a multi-cloud edge. We want to be able to support multi-cloud services because you've heard this multiple times, is at the edge consumers and customers will require services from all the hyperscalers. They don't want buy a one hyperscaler suit to suit solution. They want to mix and match. So not bound. We want be multi-cloud south bound to support IT and OT environments. So that becomes our value proposition in the middle. >> Yep. >> So Ryan, you were talking about that IT, OT schism. And we talk about that a lot. I wonder if you could help us parse that a little bit, because you were using, for instance retail, as an example. Sometimes I think about in the industrial. >> And I think the OT people are kind of like having an engineering mindset. Don't touch my stuff. Kind of like the IT guys too, but different, you know. So there's so much opportunity at the edge. I wonder how you guys think about that? How you segment it? How you prioritize it? Obviously retail telco are big enough. >> Yep. >> That you can get your hands around them, but then there's to your point about all this data that's going to going to compute. It's going to come in pockets. And I wonder how you guys think about that schism and the other opportunity. >> Yeah, out there. It's also a great question, you know, in manufacturing. There's the true OT persona. >> Yeah. >> Okay, and that really is focused on the business outcomes. Things like predictive maintenance use cases, operational equipment effectiveness, like that's really around bottleneck analysis, and the process that go through that. If the plant goes down, they're fine, okay. They can still work on their own systems, but they're not needing that high availability solution. But they're also the decision makers and where to buy the Edge Computing, okay. So we need to talk more to the OT persona from a Dell perspective, okay. And to add on to Ryan, right. So industrial is an interesting challenge, right? So one of the things we did, and this is VMware and Dell working together at vMware it was virtual. We announced something called edge compute stack. And for the first time in 23 years of vMware history, we made the hypervisor layer real-time. >> Yep. >> What that means is in order to capture some of these OT workloads, you need to get in and operate it between the industrial PC and the program of logical controllers at a sub millisecond performance level, because now you're controlling robotic arms that you cannot miss a beat. So we actually created this real time functionality. With that functionality in the last six months, we've been able to virtualize PLCs, IPCs. So what I'm getting at is we're opening up an entire wide space of operational technology workloads, which we was not accessible to our market for the last 20 plus years. >> Now we're talking. >> Yeah. And that allows us that control plane infrastructure to edge compute. There's purpose built for edge allows us to pivot and do other solutions like analytics with the adoption of AI Analytics with our recent announcement of Deep North, okay. That provides that in store video analytics functionality. And then we also partner with PTC based on a manufacturing solution, working with that same edge compute stack. Think of that as that control plane, where again, like I said, you can pivot off a different solutions. Okay, so we leverage PTCs thing works. >> So, okay, great. So I wanted to go to that. So real-time's really interesting. >> 'Cause most of much of AI today is modeling done in the cloud. >> Yes. >> The real opportunity is real time inferencing at the edge. >> You got it. >> Okay, now this is why this gets so interesting. And I wonder if Project Monterey fits into this at all. because I feel like so why did Intel win? Intel won, it crushed all the Unix systems out there because it had PC volumes. And the edge volume's going to dwarf anything we've ever seen before. >> Yeah. >> So I feel like there's this new cocktail, you guys describe this convergence and this mixture and it's unknown. What's going to happen? That's why Project Monterey is so interesting. >> Of course. >> Yeah. >> Right? Because you're bringing together kind of hedging a lot of bets and serving a lot of different use cases. Maybe you could talk about where that might fit here. >> Oh absolutely. So the edge compute stack is made up of vSphere, Tanzu, which is vSphere's you know, VM container and Tanzu's our container technology and vSphere contains Monterey in it, right. And we've added vSAN a for storage at the edge. And connectivity is SD-WAN because a lot of the times it's far location. So you're not having a large footprint, you have one or two hoses, it's more wide area, narrow area. So the edge compute stack supports real-time, non-real-time time workloads. VMs and containers, CPU GPU, right. >> NPU, accelerators, >> NPU, DPU all of them, right. Because what you're dealing with here is that inferencing real time, because to Ryan's point, when you're doing predictive maintenance, you got to pick these signals up in like milliseconds. >> Yes. >> So we've gone our stack down to microseconds and we pick up and inform because if I can save this predictive maintenance in two seconds, I save millions of dollars in you know, wastage of product, right? >> And you may not even persist that data, right? You might just let it go, I mean, how much data does Tesla save? Right? I mean. >> You're absolutely right. A lot of the times, all you're doing is this volume of data coming at you. You're matching it to an inferencing pattern. If it doesn't match, you just drop, right. It's not persistent, but the moment you hit a trigger, immediately everything lights go off, you're login, you're applying outcome. So like super interesting at the edge. >> And the compute is going to go through the roof. So yeah, my premise is that, you know, general purpose x86 running SAP is not going to be the architecture for the edge. >> You're absolutely right. >> Going to be low cost, low power, super performance. 'Cause when you combine the CPU, GPU, NPU, you're going to blow away the performance that we've ever seen on the curves. >> There's also a new application pattern. I've called out something called edge-native applications. We went through this client-server architecture era. We built all this, you know, a very clear in architecture. We went through cloud native where everything was hyperscaled in the cloud. Both of the times we optimize our own compute. >> Yeah. >> At the edge, we got to optimize our owns data because it's not ephemeral compute that you have in hyperscale compute space, you have ephemeral data you got to deal with. So a new nature of application workloads are emerging. We call it edge-native apps. >> Yep. >> And those have very different characteristics, you know, to client server apps or you know, cloud native apps, which is amazing. It's driven by data analysts like developers, not like dot net Java developers. It's actually data analysts who are trying to mine this with fast patents and come out with outcomes, right? >> Yeah, I love that edge-native apps Lisa, that's a new term for me. >> Right, just trademark it on me. I made made it up. (panel laughing) >> Can you guys talk about a joint customer that you've really helped to dramatically transform in the last six months? >> You want to shout or I can go-- >> I think my industry is fine. >> Yeah, yeah. So, you know, at VMworld we talked about Oshkosh, which is again, like in the manufacturing space, we have retailers and manufacturers and we also brought in, you know, Proctor and Gamble and et cetera, et cetera, right? So the customers look at us jointly because you know edge doesn't happen in its own silo. It's a continuum from the data center to the cloud, to the edge, right. There's the continuum exists. So if only edge was in its own silo, you would do things. But the key thing about all of this, there's no right place, it's about that workload placement. Where do I place the workload for the most optimal business outcome? Now for real-time applications, it's at the edge. For non-real-time stuff it could be in the data center, it could be in a cloud. It doesn't really matter, where VMware and Dell strengths comes in with Oshkosh or all of those folks. We have the end-to-end. From you want place it in the data center, You want to place it in your charge to public cloud, You want to derive some of these applications. You want to place it at the far edge, which is a customer prem or a near edge, which is a telco. We've done joint announcements with telcos, like South Dakota Telecom, where we've taken their cell towers and converted them into compute and storage. So they can actually store it at the near edge, right. So this is 5G solutions. I also own the 5G part of the vMware business, but doesn't matter. Compute network storage, we got to find the right mix for placing the workload at the right place. >> You call that the near edge. I think of it as the far edge, but that's what you mean, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Way out there in the (mumbles), okay. >> It's all about just optimizing operations, reducing cost, increasing profitability for the customer. >> So you said edge, not its own silo. And I agree. >> it's not a silo. Is mobile a valid sort of example or a little test case because when we developed mobile apps, it drove a lot of things in the data center and in the cloud. Is that a way to think of about it as opposed to like PCs work under their own silo? Yeah, we connect to the internet, but is mobile a reasonable proxy or no? >> Mobile is an interesting proxy. When you think about the application again, you know, you got a platform by the way, you'll get excited by this. We've got mobile developers, mobile device manufacturers. You can count them in your fingers. They want to now have these devices sitting in factory floors because now these devices are so smart. They have sensors, temperature controls. They can act like these multisensory device at the edge, but the app landscape is quite interesting. I think John, where you were going was they have a very thin shim app layer that can be pushed from anywhere. The, the notion of these edge-native applications could be virtual machines, could be containers, could be, you know, this new thing called Web Assembly Wasm, which is a new type of technology, very thin shim layer which is mobile like app layer. But you know, all of these are combination of how these applications may get expressed. The target platforms could be anywhere from mobile devices to IOT gateways, to IOT devices, to servers, to, you know, massive data centers. So what's amazing is this thing can just go everywhere. And our goal is consistent infrastructure, consistent operations across the board. That's where VMware and Dell win together. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, excellent. And I was just talking to a customer today, a major airline manufacturer, okay. About their airport and the future with the mobile device just being frictionless, okay, no one wants to touch anything anymore. You can use your mobile device to do your check-in and you've got to you avoid kiosks, okay. So they're trying to figure out how to get rid of the kiosk. Now you need a kiosk for like checking baggage, okay. You can't get in the way of that, but at least that frictionless experience, for that airport in the future, but it brings in some other issues. >> It does, but I like the sound of that. Last question guys, where can customers go to learn more information about the joint solutions? >> So you can go to like our public websites obviously search on edge. And if you hear at the show, there's a lot of hands on labs, okay. There's a booth over there. A lot of Edge Solutions that we offer. >> Yeah, no, this is I guess as Ryan pointed our websites have these. We've had a lot of partnership in announcements together because you know, one of the things as we've expressed, manufacturing, retail, you know, when you get in the use cases, they involve ISPs, right? So they you know, they bring the value of you know, not just having a horizontal AI platform. We like opinionated models of fraud detection. So we're actually working with ecosystem of partners to make this real. >> So we may even hear more. >> The rich vertical solution, I call it the ISVs. They enrich our vertical solutions. >> Right. >> Oh, WeMo is going to be revolutionary. >> All right, can't wait. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me today and talking about what Dell and vMware are doing together and helping retailers manufacturers really convert the edge to incredible success. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. Thanks Lisa, thanks John for having us. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE. We are wrapping up day one of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. We'll be back tomorrow, John Farrer and Dave Nicholson will join us. We'll see you then. (soft music)

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path >>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube. We are here with UI path at forward for I'm Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante and a lovely setting at the Bellagio. We're going to be talking about automation from the CFO's perspective. Our next guest is our jet guard group financial officer at landmark group, or just welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. Thank >>You. Before we dig into your transformation strategy and how automation is a key to that, help the audience understand a little bit about landmark. >>Absolutely. So landmark is one of the largest, uh, non-food primarily retailer in the middle east and Asia, India, and now increasingly in Southeast Asia. So we've got about 50 brands, uh, more than half of them, which are homegrown our own brands and some franchise brands. So about 2,200 stores, uh, across 20 countries, 55,000 employees. Um, so 30 million square feet of retail space >>They company. When was the company founded, >>Uh, 48 years ago, >>Legacy institution you were mentioning before we went live that you guys have been working with UI path since 2017. So talk to me about that legacy institution, embracing cloud digital transformation and automation as a, from a visionary strategic perspective. >>Yeah. So look, I mean, you know, you get so many technologies that are being thrown at you. So I would say you have packed or robotic process automation was just another one like that. So I wouldn't say it was like part of a grand strategy. You know, it comes as it looks like, Hey, this is cool. You know, in the, in the back office, when somebody showed me first 10 desks with nobody sitting on them, it's kind of spooky. So he said, Hey, this, this looks very interesting. So it started off like that, but then it has just grown because we've stayed with it. So we've amongst things in the early part of your parts customers and, and it's been phenomenal, you know, what, uh, what we're able to do with, uh, with, uh, robotic process automation. Uh, I mean, you know, I've been in this industry with my past employers, like Proctor and gamble and Cadbury, Schweppes, and all, and essentially we used to follow the part of, you know, you eliminate all the non-value add you, then try and automate whatever your ERP system, then all allowed you to automate. >>Then what's left, you consolidate, and then you find the right shore, right. It can be offshore or wherever. So that was the sequence. But I think a lot could not be automated because there are huge gaps in the systems that are being offered and you have a mosaic of systems, every company will have. Right. Um, and then we would end up doing lot more offshore or, you know, other kinds of tactics, but then once RPA showed up on the scene, it's suddenly disrupted everything because now whatever the systems can do, or when you have to move data from one system to the other or make sense out of it, that's where this technology sits. And so that's, so that's very, I, you know, we've now got a pretty large, uh, robotic process automation practice. And, and, you know, we are touching started with finance and now we are pretty much enterprise wide. So all the, >>These technologies are coming together, automation, RPA, cloud AI, they're all sort of converging. And as a retailer, I'm curious as to what your cloud strategy is and how that fits and all, there's always a lot of sensitivity from retailers that don't want to be on Amazon, maybe some do. And they say, Hey, we've, we've we compete in other ways, what's your posture in that? >>So we've also been an early adopter of cloud, both. If I talk within the UI path thing, we were, I think the first ones to put it on the cloud, because we just saw, even before you are part, uh, we saw how people could tamper with it, you know, attended robots, you know, on the desktop one. So we went on the cloud and that was good, uh, way back. But overall, the company also has a very pro you know, Val defined cloud strategy. So we are, you know, pretty much all a large part of our systems are on the cloud with Azure. >>Yeah. So, which makes sense, right. As a retailer, go, go with Azure, plus somebody, Microsoft, you know, X, such a lot of Microsoft expertise out there that you can leverage. And I got to ask you because everybody's freaked out on wall street about power automate, you know, competing with UI path. And I've told people they kind of different parts of the spectrum, but I've talked to a lot of customers this week. So yeah, we use both. We use UI path for end-to-end automation. We use power automate for a lot of our personal productivity stuff. How do you guys, do you use, uh, the power automate? How do you see those two? Yeah, >>No, I think, look, it's inevitable. A lot of technologies will keep evolving. I think Microsoft is a fantastic company. I mean, the way they perfected teams right in time, you know, and pretty, always hit, uh, a year before COVID hit teams was not ready, you know? So I think I know power automate is good. We use it, but not as you know, it's not ready for enterprise wide. So I think more, I'm not an expert in power automate yet. Um, you know, what, it kind of seemed more like when it's linked to the office automation versus linking major enterprise wide or >>Which is really where you're headed. Yeah. Talk about the results that you've seen, the higher you're measuring the return and the whole business case. When you evaluate it as CFO, >>See it being a CFO, I wear two hats. Right. I'm trying to help digital transformation. Although I must say I'm not the only one our company has. Every function is these days talking digital. Right. Because it's almost like table stakes. Yeah. Uh, you, you can't be in business a leader and we are like a leader in all the markets we are, and there's no choice, but to be fully digital. Right. Uh, but being a CFO absolutely. You know, you do look at the hard dollars. Right. Um, and initially when you're pushing any technology to any functional head or your colleague or the CEO or the board, they do want to see the dollars because a lot of softwares talk about the soft benefits. Um, I think they gotta pay for themselves. So I think it's like, yes, if I can get the hard dollars and then I can demonstrate softer benefits, whether it is the quality of work, less errors, better compliance, right. >>Or I think employee, uh, work work-life balance, right. I mean, in, in, uh, we are, uh, in a growing company we've been growing for the last four decades and there's a constant struggle to help colleagues maintain better work life balance. So I think once the basic return is off the table, everyone's talking about the quality of work enabling. And I think now we've, we are proudly talking, you know, that, Hey, we've got a lot of people, um, we've hired them. But what we are using of them is their fingers, their eyes, ears, and that's about it. Can we now get them to use their brain? So it's like, Hey, it's a freebie. You got so many people let's start using the gray matter. And that's, I think what this technology does, it takes away the Gronk and you can then tell them, Hey, analyze the data, look at it, better business outcomes. And I think that's where the real value is. >>That is, so we've heard a lot about time saved hours saved. That's kind of the key, a key metric. And you look at that as hard dollars. How, how do you translate that to the income statement? >>So, so let's put it, uh, you know, I was looking at applied science, applied materials presentation, and they had a 150,000 hours saved. Uh, I just did our math. I mean, so we've so far saved 342,000 hours per annum removed out of the system. Right. But I would say not all I can say, I took them to the bottom line. So probably 70% of that, because the rest is probably gone back to people doing more value added stuff. >>So how does it hit the income statement? Is it hit it as new revenue or cost savings or savings reduction in >>Yeah. Or are you don't hire as many as you needed to? Uh, >>Yes. That's the missing link. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Is I was going to need to hire or what 1,100 people hire 10 or whatever it is. Okay. Now I'm sorry. Does that, is that, does that get into a debate? Like, cause I can see a lot of people, if we don't do this, we're going to, you know, and then as a CFO, you might say let's defend that a little bit. >>Seek cost avoidance is always debated. Yep. And that's why I said, as long as you can prove that the hard dollars taken to the bottom line are visible and you can put your finger on them, then people become more comfortable saying, okay, as long as you know, I've got my payback, I've got something I can, you know, make sure that my cost line is not going up because it's very easy to do, you know, kind of say, Hey look, all this soft benefits and now your cost has also gone up. So I think once the, the, the hard dollars that you can bank are out of the way, then you can talk about costs avoided, and then you can talk about the softer benefits. Are there, there is no doubt because you try and what we do is we tell people if they're in a cell, okay, we'll shut, shut it down. >>I say, Hey, wait, well, right then, you know, but so you have four years of data on this, so you can prove it. And by the way, soft dollars are where the real money is. I don't mean to denigrate that, but I get into a lot of discussions with CFO's like, okay, show me the hard dollars first and then the hard, the soft dollars or telephone numbers. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think I look at it as an inverted pyramid. Yeah. Where you start with the cost saved, which is the smaller part of the pyramid. And then you get speed, right. Because speed is actually a big thing, which is very difficult to measure. Right? I mean, I'll give you an example in none of our largest markets, right. In the middle of COVID, they announced all products that are being imported, which is for us about 80,000 of them, um, uh, need to have a whole bunch of compliance forms on the government portal, import certifications. And you got like a month to do all that work. So now you'll get an army of 20, 30 people train them. We did nothing. We built the barns and we were ready ahead of competition. And I think, and, and life continues. Now the supply chain officer will sign on the dotted line for you saying he would have had to hire 30 people. And he, it's not easy to hire suddenly, but we were compliant and, and now that's cost avoided. But I would say a big business benefit because we were the first ones to have all our products compliant with the market requirements. That's a >>Great example. >>I think about some of the IDC data that was, did you see that that was presented this morning, looking at, you know, the positive outlook as, as RPA being a jobs creator over time. Talk to me a little bit about how you've navigated that through the organization and even done upskilling of some of those folks so that they're not losing, but they're gaining. >>I think there is, you know, you have to take all these projections with a pinch of salt, you know, I mean, saying you will, the world will save $150 billion and all, I mean, if you add all the soft dollars. Yes. But in reality, you know, I lose joke about it. If you take all the technology initiatives in a company and you add all the MPVs and that they have submitted, that would be larger than the market cap of the company. >>It's true. All the projects add up to more value. >>I think, I think, you know, we don't get carried away by these major projections, but I think some of it is true. I mean, you know, I kind of talk about the Luddites, right? I mean, when the first, you know, weaving machines game in, in Northern England, near Manchester and these Luddites, they were called, they were going around breaking down these machines because they were supposed to take away jobs. Now reality is a lot of people did lose jobs who could not make the transition, could not retrain themselves. It is inevitable. It will happen. But over time I would say yes, there have been lot more employment. So I think both go hand in hand. Um, but yes, the more one can help retrain people, get them to, you know, say, Hey, you don't need to spend the rest of your life. Copy pasting and just doing data entry. Uh, you can look at the data and make sense out of it. How much >>Of that was a part of your strategic vision years ago? >>I think years ago we knew it, but it was more, let's get these, you know, simple. When you have hundreds of people in a, in a back office, how do I get them to do more work or have slate or meet my, you know, my productivity goals? I would say it starts with that. Okay. Uh, if you start, uh, deep down because I, I am, you know, I believe in technology, I knew it, it would happen that we would eventually go from, let's say, robotic process automation to intelligent process automation. Right. Which is coming for us. It's we are able to see it, you try and sell that as the lead in and people shut down >>Because they're seen by intelligent process automation. W what do you mean? And, and >>So it's look, if I've got, uh, my robots and the tech, the RP infrastructure, which is processing whole bunch of transactions right now, if I'm able to add in some machine learning or AI, or what have you on top of it, and then I can read the patterns I can, for example, you know, we, we now have built on top of all the various security in our payment systems. If you've got a bot, which then does a final check, which goes and checks the history of that particular vendor as to what is the typical payments being done to that. And then it flags, if it's V out and it stops the payment, for example, right? So, or it goes and does a whole bunch of tests. We're building constantly building tools. So that's kind of, you know, a bit more intelligent than just a simple copy paste or, or doing a transaction >>Because why that's their job or because they it's a black box. They don't know how that decision is made. Or >>I think a lot of these have been sold previously similar technologies and things that would be, you know, the next best thing since sliced water and people have lost fit. So you got to show them the money and then take them along the journey. If you go too fast and try and give this whole, you know, people are smart enough and it, it turns them off. >>It's one of the failures of the tech industry is the broken promises. I can, I can rattle many off >>Cultural shift. It is. It is. How did you help facilitate that? See, I mean, we, we took, you know, the bottoms up and top down approach, uh, you know, the top down was, uh, I have my whole leadership team and as a joke, we locked them up in the boardroom and we got them to build bonds a long ago. And we said, let each of you, you know, download your bank statement and send yourself, uh, you know, if you say any transaction above 10,000, whatever, um, send, send an email to yourself. So as simple as that, or download the electricity bill and, and send it to your wife, you know, something like that. And half of them were able to build a bot in that couple of hours. The other half looked at it, and obviously are, you know, many of them are not as tech savvy, but it helped build the kind of it's aha moment three years ago that, wow, you know, I can build a bot. Um, for some people it was like, oh, they taught these metallic 10 bots are going to walk into the room. >>I love it. The bottom who's responsible for governance. >>So we've got a, we've got a team across it and finance. Um, I mean, somehow I have kind of, you know, created the skunkworks team. The S the center of excellence sits with me. Um, uh, but overall it's a combination and they now run governance, uh, you know, 24 7, >>Uh, you know, sorry, I got to get my crypto question. I ask every CFO's, when are you going to put crypto in the balance sheet? I know I'm teasing, but what you see companies doing this? Has it ever come up in conversation? Is it sort of tongue in cheek joke? Or what do you make of the crypto? >>Yeah, I think personally I'm a big believer, uh, but not for, uh, for a company. I think the, the benefit case of a company, we are not that, you know, we have enough other face too, you know? Um, uh, I think, uh, it's a bit further out for a company to start taking balance sheet position because that's then a speculation, right? Because, so I'm a believer in the benefit of the blockchain technology. We actually did a blockchain experiment a couple of years ago, moving goods, uh, from China to Dubai and also making the payments through a blockchain to, um, so we see huge benefits. We are working with our bankers on certain other initiatives, but I think on the balance sheet sounds like speculation and use of capital. So yeah, if it brings efficiency, if it brings transparency, which is what blockchains do, uh, I think absolutely it's, it is here to stay >>Last question. And then the last 30 seconds, or so for your peers in any industry who are it was, we saw some of the stats yesterday, the amount of percentage of processes that are automateable that aren't automated. What's your advice, recommendations to peers about pulling automation into their digital transformation strategy? >>I think, um, digital transformation can be hugely aided and accelerated if you first put RPLs, because that is the layer, which goes between the humans and whatever technology is out there or whatever you keep buying. So I think because they will be in every area, new technologies coming up, it's better to put RPA first because you can then get more benefit from whatever other technologies you're bolting on. So I would say it's a predecessor to your broader digital transformation, rather than just a part of it. >>Got it. A predecessor, or just thank you for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what you're, how you're transforming landmark. Good luck in your presentation this afternoon. I'm sure a lot of folks will get some great takeaways from your talk. >>Thank you so much. It's been >>Great. Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas UI path forward for it. We'll be right back after a break.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled. Brought to you by biz ops Coalition. Hey, welcome back your body, Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the busy ops manifesto unveiling its been in the works for a while. But today is the day that it actually kind of come out to the to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, Why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe, is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author on professor at Babson College. We could go on. He's got a lot of great titles and and really illuminate airy in the area of big data and analytics. Thomas, great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Happy to be here with you. Great. >>So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn post. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address long term issues, Uh, in how technology works within businesses. Biz ops. What did you see in biz ops? That that kind of addresses one of these really big long term problems? >>Well, yeah. The long term problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and I t people between business objectives and the i t. Solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think, since the beginning of information technology, and sadly, it hasn't gone away. And so busy ops is new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework. Eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with a nightie capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with, like, Dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around a agile software development and the theory that we want to embrace change that that changes okay on. We wanna be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that, and that's been happening in the software world for for 20 plus years. What's taking so long to get that to the business side because the pace of change is change on the software side. You know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no P R D S and M R. D s and big giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. Took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and i t. There was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston University developed, I think more than 20 years ago. But, you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's, um you know, time for another serious attempt at it, >>right? And do you think doing it this way right with the bizarre coalition, you know, getting a collection of of kind of like minded individuals and companies together and actually even having a manifesto which were making this declarative statement of principles and values. You think that's what it takes to kind of drive this, you know, kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in in production in the field. >>I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think a coalition is a good idea, and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out. What you see is the key principles of the idea, and that makes it much easier for everybody. Toe I understand and act on. >>Yeah, I I think it's just it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the of the values as well as as the the principles and and the values, you know. Business outcomes, matter, trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four and then learn, responded pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly. But obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are. But you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy. Yeah, And a big piece of this is data analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. And informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the many stages of analytics. Onda. How has that's evolved over over time? You know, it is You think of analytics and machine learning driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that? What's that think for you? What does that make you? You know, start to think Wow, this is This is gonna be pretty significant. >>Yeah, well, you know, this has been a long term interest of mine. Um, the last generation of a I I was very interested in expert systems. And then e think more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision making using, um, what was available then, which is rule based approaches. But, you know, this address is an issue that we've always had with analytics and ai. Um, you know, we tended Thio refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions with now contemporary ai tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think, at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data. We want most of those I think, to be at least, um, recommended, if not totally made by analgesic rhythm or an AI based system, and that, I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions. And in most organizations, >>you know, I think I think you just answered my next question before I Before I asked it. You know, we had Dr Robert Gates on the former secretary of Defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions, and he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems that actually had an automated trigger on it, We're on the North Korean South Korea border. Um, everything else that you said had to go through some person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us that more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time both as the the data to support that as well as our comfort level, Um, enables us to turn mawr mawr actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, I suggested we need data, and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of the that data. You know, most machine learning models, at least in business, are supervised, and that means we need tohave labeled outcomes in the in the training data. But you know, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that were finding out quite frequently these days is that the data that we have a do not reflect you know what it's like to do business in a pandemic. I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff Cam at Wake Forest University. We call it Data Science Quarantined and it we interviewed somebody who said, You know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Our models may be have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have toe make sure that the data from the past and you know that's all we have, of course, is a good guide toe. You know what's happening in the present and in the future, as far as we understand it. >>Yeah, I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020 was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight. But it turned out 2020 the year we found out we actually know nothing and everything >>we thought we d >>o. But I wanna I wanna follow up on that because, you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now. We're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold, fold or double down, and And I can't think of, um or, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops. When now your whole portfolio strategy, um, needs to really be questioned. And, you know, you have to be really well executing on what you are holding. What you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment? >>Well, yeah, And I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine was a senior executive at gen. Packed, and I used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could You could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio. Digital projects you need to think about. Well, um, given some constraints on resource is and a difficulty economy for a while. Which of our projects do we wanna keep going on Pretty much the way we were for and which ones, um, are not that necessary anymore. You see a lot of that in a I because we had so many pilots. Somebody told me, You know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare Airport in a I, um and then the the ones that involve double down there, even mawr Important to you, they are. You know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic on digital projects. It's more and more important for customers to be ableto interact with you digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want toe cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them, get them done faster and better. >>Another. Another thing I came up in my research that that you quoted um, was was from Jeff. Bezos is talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly but meaning fleeing, improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which which gets way too much buzz but really applied, applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the biz ops manifesto is calling it out in this particular process. But I just love to get your perspective. As you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that a G laugh. Li, the former CEO of Proctor and Gamble, used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those, he said. In your tenure as CEO, those air probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because you don't have much data about them. Your you know, only making them a few times and in part because they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future that the best human decision makers have. Um, but in general, I think where they I The projects that are working well are you know what I call the low hanging fruit ones? The some people even report to refer to it as boring A. I so you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it Thio bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain. Companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but a I, as you suggest, is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. Um, it's not so good at the at the really big Moonshots like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well, what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. We made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not gonna be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't wanna be driving around on, um in that very much, unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic. And you know that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny. Bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago. They had a startup around contract management, and I'm like and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, You know how How could you possibly built off around contract management? It's language. It's legalese. It's very specific. He's like Jeff. We just need to know where's the contract and when does it expire? And who's the signatory? And he built a business on those you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts from people's drawers and files and homes and Lord only knows so it's really interesting as you said. These kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you could extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah, I mean, if you're Amazon, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important toe have some kind of billion dollar projects, and he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to what a I has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on based on data. >>Right? So, Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before before you let Ugo on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not not the vast majority of your publications. And that's the new way toe work, you know, as as the pandemic hit in mid March, right? And we had this light switch moment. Everybody had to work from home, and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not gonna be going back to work for a while, and so we're going to continue on this for a while, and then even when it's not what it is now, it's not gonna be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder and I know you, you tease. You're working on a a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way, uh, toe work and and and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess, >>Yeah, this was an interest of mine. I think. Back in the nineties, I wrote an article called a co authored an article called Two Cheers for the Virtual Office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge than some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical, and we said to cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings and, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's it's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly, um a A good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. Um, will have, um, time when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and toe jump on airplanes. Thio, Thio, give every little sales call or give every little presentation we just have to really narrow down. What are the circumstances, where face to face contact really matters and when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work on finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next and make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. Yeah, >>I think such such a huge opportunity as you just said, because I forget the stats on how often were interrupted with notifications between email text, slack asana, salesforce The list goes on and on. So, you know, t put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention. And you've written a you know, a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic will say for another day. You know, it really begs. It really begs for some assistance because, you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's the future that we're looking for. >>Great. Totally. Alright, >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I got to dig into the library. It's very long song. I might started the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time. And, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right, take care. Alright. East, Tom. I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Thanks for watching the Cube. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled. Brought to you by biz ops Coalition. Hey, welcome back your body, Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the busy ops manifesto unveiling its been in the works for a while. But today is the day that it actually kind of come out to the to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, Why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe, is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author on professor at Babson College. We could go on. He's got a lot of great titles and and really illuminate airy in the area of big data and analytics. Thomas, great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Happy to be here with you. Great. >>So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn post. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address long term issues, Uh, in how technology works within businesses. Biz ops. What did you see in biz ops? That that kind of addresses one of these really big long term problems? >>Well, yeah. The long term problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and I t people between business objectives and the i t. Solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think, since the beginning of information technology, and sadly, it hasn't gone away. And so busy ops is new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework. Eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with a nightie capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with, like, Dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around a agile software development and the theory that we want to embrace change that that changes okay on. We wanna be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that, and that's been happening in the software world for for 20 plus years. What's taking so long to get that to the business side because the pace of change is change on the software side. You know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no P R D S and M R. D s and big giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. Took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and i t. There was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston University developed, I think more than 20 years ago. But, you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's, um you know, time for another serious attempt at it, right? >>And do you think doing it this way right with the bizarre coalition, you know, getting a collection of of kind of like minded individuals and companies together and actually even having a manifesto which were making this declarative statement of principles and values. You think that's what it takes to kind of drive this, you know, kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in in production in the field. >>Well, you know, the manifesto approach worked for Karl Marx and communism. So maybe it'll work. Here is Well, now, I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think a coalition is a good idea, and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out. What you see is the key principles of the idea, and that makes it much easier for everybody. Toe I understand and act on. >>Yeah, I I think it's just it's really interesting having you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the of the values as well as as the the principles and and the values, you know, business outcomes, matter, trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four and then learn responded Pivot, It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are. But you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy. Uh, and a big piece of this is data analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. And informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the many stages of analytics Onda how that's evolved over over time. You know, it is you think of analytics and machine learning driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that? What's that think for you? What does that make you? You know, start to think Wow, this is this is gonna be pretty significant. >>Yeah, well, you know, this has been a long term interest of mine. Um, the last generation of a I I was very interested in expert systems. And then e think more than 10 years ago I wrote an article about automated decision making using, um, what was available then, which is rule based approaches. But, you know, this address is an issue that we've always had with analytics and ai. Um, you know, we tended Thio refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions with now contemporary ai tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think, at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data. We want most of those I think, to be at least, um, recommended, if not totally made by analgesic rhythm or an AI based system, and that I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions in in most organizations. >>You know, I think I think you just answered my next question before I before I asked it. You know, we had Dr Robert Gates on the former secretary of Defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions, and he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems that actually had an automated trigger on it, We're on the North Korea and South Korea border. Everything else, as you said, had to go through some person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, Um, enables us to turn Maura Maura actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, I suggested we need data and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, most machine learning models, at least in business, are supervised, and that means we need tohave labeled outcomes in the in the training data. But, you know, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that the the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that the data that we have do not reflect. You know what it's like to do business in it. Pandemic it. I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff Cam at Wake Forest University. We call it Data Science quarantined, and we interviewed somebody who said, You know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Our models may be have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have toe, make sure that the data from the past and you know, that's all we have, of course, is a good guide toe. You know what's happening in the present and and the future as far as we understand it. >>Yeah, I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020 is finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight. But it turned out 2020 the year we found out we actually know nothing and everything way. But I wanna I wanna follow up on that because, you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now. We're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold, fold or double down and and I can't think of, um or, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops. When now your whole portfolio strategy, um, needs to really be questioned. And, you know, You have to be really well, executing on what you are holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, And I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine who's a senior executive at gen. Packed. And I used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could You could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects you need to think about. Well, um, given some constraints on resource is and a difficulty economy for a while. Which of our projects do we wanna keep going on Pretty much the way we were And which ones, um, are not that necessary anymore. You see a lot of that in a I because we had so many pilots, somebody for me, you know, we've got more pilots around here, then O'Hare airport in a I, um and then the the ones that involve double down there, even mawr Important to you, they are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic on digital projects, it's more and more important for customers to be ableto interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want toe cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them, get them done faster and better. >>Another. Another thing that came up in my research that that you quoted, um, was was from Jeff. Bezos is talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly but meaning fleeing, improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which which gets way too much buzz but really applied, applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value and, you know, the biz ops. Uh, manifesto is calling it out in this particular process, but I just love to get your perspective. As you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions? Uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that a g laugh Li, the former CEO of Proctor and Gamble, used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those, he said. In your tenure as CEO, those air probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times, and in part because they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future that the best human decision makers have. Um, but in general, I think where they I the projects that are working well are you know what I call the low hanging fruit ones? The some people even report to refer to it as boring A I so you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it Thio bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain. Companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but a I, as you suggest, is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. Um, it's not so good at the at the really big Moonshots like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well, what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. We made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't wanna be driving around on, um in that very much, unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic. And you know that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny. Bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago. They had a startup around contract management, and I'm like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and and cloud proliferation. I said, You know how How could you possibly built off around contract management? It's language. It's legalese. It's very specific. He's like Jeff. We just need to know where's the contract and when does it expire? And who's a signatory? And he built a business on those you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts from People's drawers and files and homes, and Lord only knows So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you could extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah, I mean, if you're Amazon, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important toe have some kind of billion dollar projects, and he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to what a I has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on based on data. >>Right? So, Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before before you let Ugo on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not not the vast majority of your publications. And that's the new way toe work, you know, as as the pandemic hit in mid March, right? And we had this light switch moment. Everybody had to work from home, and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up well you know, Now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not gonna be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while, and then even when it's not what it is now, it's not gonna be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder and I know you, you tease. You're working on a a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way. Uh, toe work and and and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah, This was an interest of mine. I think back in the nineties, I wrote an article called Ah Co authored an article called Two Cheers for the Virtual Office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and we said to cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings and, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface. But you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly a a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. We'll have, um, time when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and toe jump on airplanes. Thio, Thio give every little mhm, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. We just have to really narrow down. What are the circumstances, where face to face contact really matters and when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have a I based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, We need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next and make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence oven, a isis some, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. Yeah, >>I think such such a huge opportunity as you just said, because I forget the stats on how often were interrupted with notifications between email text, slack asana, salesforce The list goes on on and on. So, you know, t put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention. And you've written a you know, a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic will say for another day. You know, it really begs. It really begs for some assistance because, you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's the future that we're looking for. >>Great totally alright, >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I gotta dig into the library. It's very long song. I might started the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time. And, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right, take care. Alright. He's Tom. I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Thanks for watching. The Cube will see you next time.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with the cube. This is a special week it's Grace Hopper week, and Grace Hopper is the best name in tech conferences. The celebration of women in computing, and we've been going there for years we're not there this year, but one of the themes that comes up over and over at Grace Hopper is women and girls need to see women in positions that they can envision themselves being in someday. That is a really important piece of the whole diversity conversation is can I see people that I can role model after and I just want to bring up something from a couple years back from 2016 when we were there, we were there with Mimi Valdez, Christina Deoja and Dr. Jeanette Epps, Dr. Jeanette Epps is the astronaut on the right. They were there talking about "The Hidden Figures" movie. If you remember it came out 2016, it was about Katherine Johnson and all the black women working at NASA. They got no credit for doing all the math that basically keep all the astronauts safe and they made a terrific movie about it. And Janet is going up on the very first Blue Origin Space Mission Next year. This was announced a couple of months ago, so again, phenomenal leadership, black lady astronaut, going to go into space and really provide a face for a lot of young girls that want to get into that and its clearly a great STEM opportunity. So we're excited to have four terrific women today that well also are the leaders that the younger women can look up to and follow their career. So we're excited to have them so we're just going to go around. We got four terrific guests, our first one is Annabel Chang, She is the Head of State Policy and Government Regulations at Waymo. Annabel great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> from San Francisco >> Jeff: Awesome. Next up is Inamarie Johnson. She is the Chief People and Diversity Officer for Zendesk Inamarie, great to see you. Where are you calling in from today? >> Great to be here. I am calling in from Palos Verdes the state >> Jeff: awesome >> in Southern California. >> Jeff: Some of the benefits of a virtual sometimes we can, we couldn't do that without the power of the internet. And next up is Jennifer Cabalquinto she is the Chief Financial Officer of the Golden State Warriors. Jennifer, great to see you Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, I wish I was coming in from the Chase Center in San Francisco but I'm actually calling in from Santa Cruz California today. >> Jeff: Right, It's good to see you and you can surf a lot better down there. So that's probably not all bad. And finally to round out our panelists, Kate Hogan, she is the COO of North America for Accenture. Kate, great to see you as well. Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, it's good to see you too. I am coming in from the office actually in San Jose. >> Jeff: From the office in San Jose. All right, So let's get into it . You guys are all very senior, you've been doing this for a long time. We're in a kind of a crazy period of time in terms of diversity with all the kind of social unrest that's happening. So let's talk about some of your first your journeys and I want to start with you Annabel. You're a lawyer you got into lawyering. You did lawyering with Diane Feinstein, kind of some politics, and also the city of San Francisco. And then you made this move over to tech. Talk about that decision and what went into that decision and how did you get into tech? 'cause we know part of the problem with diversity is a pipeline problem. You came over from the law side of the house. >> Yes, and to be honest politics and the law are pretty homogenous. So when I made the move to tech, it was still a lot of the same, but what I knew is that I could be an attorney anywhere from Omaha Nebraska to Miami Florida. But what I couldn't do was work for a disruptive company, potentially a unicorn. And I seized that opportunity and (indistinct) Lyft early on before Ride Hailing and Ride Sharing was even a thing. So it was an exciting opportunity. And I joined right at the exact moment that made myself really meaningful in the organization. And I'm hoping that I'm doing the same thing right now at Waymo. >> Great, Inamarie you've come from one of my favorite stories I like to talk about from the old school Clorox great product management. I always like to joke that Silicon Valley needs a pipeline back to Cincinnati and Proctor and Gamble to get good product managers out here. You were in the classic, right? You were there, you were at Honeywell Plantronics, and then you jumped over to tech. Tell us a little bit about that move. Cause I'm sure selling Clorox is a lot different than selling the terrific service that you guys provide at Zendesk. I'm always happy when I see Zendesk in my customer service return email, I know I'm going to get taken care of. >> Oh wow, that's great. We love customers like you., so thank you for that. My journey is you're right from a fortune 50 sort of more portfolio type company into tech. And I think one of the reasons is because when tech is starting out and that's what Zendesk was a few five years back or so very much an early stage growth company, two things are top of mind, one, how do we become more global? And how do we make sure that we can go up market and attract enterprise grade customers? And so my experience having only been in those types of companies was very interesting for a startup. And what was interesting for me is I got to live in a world where there were great growth targets and numbers, things I had never seen. And the agility, the speed, the head plus heart really resonated with my background. So super glad to be in tech, but you're right. It's a little different than a consumer products. >> Right, and then Jennifer, you're in a completely different world, right? So you worked for the Golden State Warriors, which everybody knows is an NBA team, but I don't know that everyone knows really how progressive the Warriors are beyond just basketball in terms of the new Chase Center, all the different events that you guys put on it. And really the leadership there has decided we really want to be an entertainment company of which the Golden State Warrior basketball team has a very, very important piece, you've come from the entertainment industry. So that's probably how they found you, but you're in the financial role. You've always been in the financial role, not traditionally thought about as a lot of women in terms of a proportion of total people in that. So tell us a little bit about your experience being in finance, in entertainment, and then making this kind of hop over to, I guess Uber entertainment. I don't know even how you would classify the warriors. >> Sports entertainment, live entertainment. Yeah, it's interesting when the Warriors opportunity came up, I naturally said well no, I don't have any sports background. And it's something that we women tend to do, right? We self edit and we want to check every box before we think that we're qualified. And the reality is my background is in entertainment and the Warriors were looking to build their own venue, which has been a very large construction project. I was the CFO at Universal Studios Hollywood. And what do we do there? We build large attractions, which are just large construction projects and we're in the entertainment business. And so that sort of B to C was a natural sort of transition for me going from where I was with Universal Studios over to the Warriors. I think a finance career is such a great career for women. And I think we're finding more and more women entering it. It is one that you sort of understand your hills and valleys, you know when you're going to be busy and so you can kind of schedule around that. I think it's really... it provides that you have a seat at the table. And so I think it's a career choice that I think is becoming more and more available to women certainly more now than it was when I first started. >> Yeah, It's interesting cause I think a lot of people think of women naturally in human resources roles. My wife was a head of human resources back in the day, or a lot of marketing, but not necessarily on the finance side. And then Kate go over to you. You're one of the rare birds you've been at Accenture  for over 20 years. So you must like airplanes and travel to stay there that long. But doing a little homework for this, I saw a really interesting piece of you talking about your boss challenging you to ask for more work, to ask for a new opportunity. And I thought that was really insightful that you, you picked up on that like Oh, I guess it's incumbent on me to ask for more, not necessarily wait for that to be given to me, it sounds like a really seminal moment in your career. >> It was important but before I tell you that story, because it was an important moment of my career and probably something that a lot of the women here on the panel here can relate to as well. You mentioned airplanes and it made me think of my dad. My father was in the air force and I remember him telling stories when I was little about his career change from the air force into a career in telecommunications. So technology for me growing up Jeff was, it was kind of part of the dinner table. I mean it was just a conversation that was constantly ongoing in our house. And I also, as a young girl, I loved playing video games. We had a Tandy computer down in the basement and I remember spending too many hours playing video games down there. And so for me my history and my really at a young age, my experience and curiosity around tech was there. And so maybe that's, what's fueling my inspiration to stay at Accenture for as long as I have. And you're right It's been two decades, which feels tremendous, but I've had the chance to work across a bunch of different industries, but you're right. I mean, during that time and I relate with what Jennifer said in terms of self editing, right? Women do this and I'm no exception, I did this. And I do remember I'm a mentor and a sponsor of mine who called me up when I'm kind of I was at a pivotal moment in my career and he said you know Kate, I've been waiting for you to call me and tell me you want this job. And I never even thought about it. I mean I just never thought that I'd be a candidate for the job and let alone somebody waiting for me to kind of make the phone call. I haven't made that mistake again, (laughing) but I like to believe I learned from it, but it was an important lesson. >> It's such a great lesson and women are often accused of being a little bit too passive and not necessarily looking out for in salary negotiations or looking for that promotion or kind of stepping up to take the crappy job because that's another thing we hear over and over from successful people is that some point in their career, they took that job that nobody else wanted. They took that challenge that really enabled them to take a different path and really a different Ascension. And I'm just curious if there's any stories on that or in terms of a leader or a mentor, whether it was in the career, somebody that you either knew or didn't know that was someone that you got kind of strength from kind of climbing through your own, kind of career progression. Will go to you first Annabel. >> I actually would love to talk about the salary negotiations piece because I have a group of friends about that we've been to meeting together once a month for the last six years now. And one of the things that we committed to being very transparent with each other about was salary negotiations and signing bonuses and all of the hard topics that you kind of don't want to talk about as a manager and the women that I'm in this group with span all types of different industries. And I've learned so much from them, from my different job transitions about understanding the signing bonus, understanding equity, which is totally foreign to me coming from law and politics. And that was one of the most impactful tools that I've ever had was a group of people that I could be open with talking about salary negotiations and talking about how to really manage equity. Those are totally foreign to me up until this group of women really connected me to these topics and gave me some of that expertise. So that is something I strongly encourage is that if you haven't openly talked about salary negotiations before you should begin to do so. >> It begs the question, how was the sensitivity between the person that was making a lot of money and the person that wasn't? And how did you kind of work through that as a group for the greater good of everyone? >> Yeah, I think what's really eye opening is that for example, We had friends who were friends who were on tech, we had friends who were actually the entrepreneurs starting their own businesses or law firm, associates, law firm partners, people in PR, so we understood that there was going to be differences within industry and frankly in scale, but it was understanding even the tools, whether I think the most interesting one would be signing bonus, right? Because up until a few years ago, recruiters could ask you what you made and how do you avoid that question? How do you anchor yourself to a lower salary range or avoid that happening? I didn't know this, I didn't know how to do that. And a couple of women that had been in more senior negotiations shared ways to make sure that I was pinning myself to a higher salary range that I wanted to be in. >> That's great. That's a great story and really important to like say pin. it's a lot of logistical details, right? You just need to learn the techniques like any other skill. Inamarie, I wonder if you've got a story to share here. >> Sure. I just want to say, I love the example that you just gave because it's something I'm super passionate about, which is transparency and trust. Then I think that we're building that every day into all of our people processes. So sure, talk about sign on bonuses, talk about pay parody because that is the landscape. But a quick story for me, I would say is all about stepping into uncertainty. And when I coach younger professionals of course women, I often talk about, don't be afraid to step into the role where all of the answers are not vetted down because at the end of the day, you can influence what those answers are. I still remember when Honeywell asked me to leave the comfort of California and to come to the East coast to New Jersey and bring my family. And I was doing well in my career. I didn't feel like I needed to do that, but I was willing after some coaching to step into that uncertainty. And it was one of the best pivotal moment in my career. I didn't always know who I was going to work with. I didn't know the challenges and scope I would take on, but those were some of the biggest learning experiences and opportunities and it made me a better executive. So that's always my coaching, like go where the answers aren't quite vetted down because you can influence that as a leader. >> That's great, I mean, Beth Comstock former vice chair at GE, one of her keynotes I saw had a great line, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think that its a really good kind of message, especially in the time we're living in with accelerated change. But I'm curious, Inamarie was the person that got you to take that commitment. Would you consider that a sponsor, a mentor, was it a boss? Was it maybe somebody not at work, your spouse or a friend that said go for it. What kind of pushed you over the edge to take that? >> It's a great question. It was actually the boss I was going to work for. He was the CHRO, and he said something that was so important to me that I've often said it to others. And he said trust me, he's like I know you don't have all the answers, I know we don't have this role all figured out, I know you're going to move your family, but if you trust me, there is a ton of learning on the other side of this. And sometimes that's the best thing a boss can do is say we will go on this journey together. I will help you figure it out. So it was a boss, but I think it was that trust and that willingness for him to stand and go alongside of me that made me pick up my family and be willing to move across the country. And we stayed five years and really, I am not the same executive because of that experience. >> Right, that's a great story, Jennifer, I want to go to you, you work for two owners that are so progressive and I remember when Joe Lacob came on the floor a few years back and was booed aggressively coming into a franchise that hadn't seen success in a very long time, making really aggressive moves in terms of personnel, both at the coaches and the players level, the GM level. But he had a vision and he stuck to it. And the net net was tremendous success. I wonder if you can share any of the stories, for you coming into that organization and being able to feel kind of that level of potential success and really kind of the vision and also really a focus on execution to make the vision real cause vision without execution doesn't really mean much. If you could share some stories of working for somebody like Joe Lacob, who's so visionary but also executes so very, very effectively. >> Yeah, Joe is, well I have the honor of working for Joe, for Rick Welts to who's our president. Who's living legend with the NBA with Peter Guber. Our leadership at the Warriors are truly visionary and they set audacious targets. And I would say from a story the most recent is, right now what we're living through today. And I will say Joe will not accept that we are not having games with fans. I agree he is so committed to trying to solve for this and he has really put the organization sort of on his back cause we're all like well, what do we do? And he has just refused to settle and is looking down every path as to how do we ensure the safety of our fans, the safety of our players, but how do we get back to live entertainment? And this is like a daily mantra and now the entire organization is so focused on this and it is because of his vision. And I think you need leaders like that who can set audacious goals, who can think beyond what's happening today and really energize the entire organization. And that's really what he's done. And when I talked to my peers and other teams in there they're talking about trying to close out their season or do these things. And they're like well, we're talking about, how do we open the building? And we're going to have fans, we're going to do this. And they look at me and they're like, what are you talking about? And I said, well we are so fortunate. We have leadership that just is not going to settle. Like they are just always looking to get out of whatever it is that's happening and fix it. So Joe is so committed His background, he's an epidemiologist major I think. Can you imagine how unique a background that is and how timely. And so his knowledge of just around the pandemic and how the virus is spread. And I mean it's phenomenal to watch him work and leverage sort of his business acumen, his science acumen and really think through how do we solve this. Its amazing. >> The other thing thing that you had said before is that you basically intentionally told people that they need to rethink their jobs, right? You didn't necessarily want to give them permission to get you told them we need to rethink their jobs. And it's a really interesting approach when the main business is just not happening, right? There's just no people coming through the door and paying for tickets and buying beers and hotdogs. It's a really interesting talk. And I'm curious, kind of what was the reception from the people like hey, you're the boss, you just figure it out or were they like hey, this is terrific that he pressed me to come up with some good ideas. >> Yeah, I think when all of this happened, we were resolved to make sure that our workforce is safe and that they had the tools that they needed to get through their day. But then we really challenged them with re imagining what the next normal is. Because when we come out of this, we want to be ahead of everybody else. And that comes again from the vision that Joe set, that we're going to use this time to make ourselves better internally because we have the time. I mean, we had been racing towards opening Chase Center and not having time to pause. Now let's use this time to really rethink how we're doing business. What can we do better? And I think it's really reinvigorated teams to really think and innovate in their own areas because you can innovate anything, right?. We're innovating how you pay payables, we're all innovating, we're rethinking the fan experience and queuing and lines and all of these things because now we have the time that it's really something that top down we want to come out of this stronger. >> Right, that's great. Kate I'll go to you, Julie Sweet, I'm a big fan of Julie Sweet. we went to the same school so go go Claremont. But she's been super aggressive lately on a lot of these things, there was a get to... I think it's called Getting to 50 50 by 25 initiative, a formal initiative with very specific goals and objectives. And then there was a recent thing in terms of doing some stuff in New York with retraining. And then as you said, military being close to your heart, a real specific military recruiting process, that's formal and in place. And when you see that type of leadership and formal programs put in place not just words, really encouraging, really inspirational, and that's how you actually get stuff done as you get even the consulting businesses, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. >> Yeah Jeff, you're exactly right. And as Jennifer was talking, Julie is exactly who I was thinking about in my mind as well, because I think it takes strong leadership and courage to set bold bold goals, right? And you talked about a few of those bold goals and Julie has certainly been at the forefront of that. One of the goals we set in 2018 actually was as you said to achieve essentially a gender balance workforce. So 50% men, 50% women by 2025, I mean, that's ambitious for any company, but for us at the time we were 400,000 people. They were 500, 6,000 globally. So when you set a goal like that, it's a bold goal and it's a bold vision. And we have over 40% today, We're well on our path to get to 50%, I think by 2025. And I was really proud to share that goal in front of a group of 200 clients the day that it came out, it's a proud moment. And I think it takes leaders like Julie and many others by the way that are also setting bold goals, not just in my company to turn the dial here on gender equality in the workforce, but it's not just about gender equality. You mentioned something I think it's probably at as, or more important right now. And that's the fact that at least our leadership has taken a Stand, a pretty bold stand against social injustice and racism, >> Right which is... >> And so through that we've made some very transparent goals in North America in terms of the recruitment and retention of our black African American, Hispanic American, Latinex communities. We've set a goal to increase those populations in our workforce by 60% by 2025. And we're requiring mandatory training for all of our people to be able to identify and speak up against racism. Again, it takes courage and it takes a voice. And I think it takes setting bold goals to make a change and these are changes we're committed to. >> Right, that's terrific. I mean, we started the conversation with Grace Hopper, they put out an index for companies that don't have their own kind of internal measure to do surveys again so you can get kind of longitudinal studies over time and see how you're improving Inamarie, I want to go to you on the social justice thing. I mean, you've talked a lot about values and culture. It's a huge part of what you say. And I think that the quote that you use, if I can steal it is " no culture eats strategy for breakfast" and with the social injustice. I mean, you came out with special values just about what Zendesk is doing on social injustice. And I thought I was actually looking up just your regular core mission and value statement. And this is what came up on my Google search. So I wanted to A, you published this in a blog in June, taking a really proactive stand. And I think you mentioned something before that, but then you're kind of stuck in this role as a mind reader. I wonder if you can share a little bit of your thoughts of taking a proactive stand and what Zendesk is doing both you personally, as well as a company in supporting this. And then what did you say as a binder Cause I think these are difficult kind of uncharted waters on one hand, on the other hand, a lot of people say, hello, this has been going on forever. You guys are just now seeing cellphone footage of madness. >> Yeah Wow, there's a lot in there. Let me go to the mind reader comments, cause people are probably like, what is that about? My point was last December, November timing. I've been the Chief People Officer for about two years And I decided that it really was time with support from my CEO that Zendesk have a Chief Diversity Officer sitting in at the top of the company, really putting a face to a lot of the efforts we were doing. And so the mind reader part comes in little did I know how important that stance would become, in the may June Timing? So I joked that, it almost felt like I could have been a mind reader, but as to what have we done, a couple of things I would call out that I think are really aligned with who we are as a company because our culture is highly threaded with the concept of empathy it's been there from our beginning. We have always tried to be a company that walks in the shoes of our customers. So in may with the death of George Floyd and the world kind of snapping and all of the racial injustice, what we said is we wanted to not stay silent. And so most of my postings and points of view were that as a company, we would take a stand both internally and externally and we would also partner with other companies and organizations that are doing the big work. And I think that is the humble part of it, we can't do it all at Zendesk, we can't write all the wrongs, but we can be in partnership and service with other organizations. So we used funding and we supported those organizations and partnerships. The other thing that I would say we did that was super important along that empathy is that we posted space for our employees to come together and talk about the hurt and the pain and the experiences that were going on during those times and we called those empathy circles. And what I loved is initially, it was through our mosaic community, which is what we call our Brown and black and persons of color employee resource group. But it grew into something bigger. We ended up doing five of these empathy circles around the globe and as leadership, what we were there to do is to listen and stand as an ally and support. And the stories were life changing. And the stories really talked about a number of injustice and racism aspects that are happening around the world. And so we are committed to that journey, we will continue to support our employees, we will continue to partner and we're doing a number of the things that have been mentioned. But those empathy circles, I think were definitely a turning point for us as an organization. >> That's great, and people need it right? They need a place to talk and they also need a place to listen if it's not their experience and to be empathetic, if you just have no data or no knowledge of something, you need to be educated So that is phenomenal. I want to go to you Jennifer. Cause obviously the NBA has been very, very progressive on this topic both as a league, and then of course the Warriors. We were joking before. I mean, I don't think Steph Curry has ever had a verbal misstep in the history of his time in the NBA, the guy so eloquent and so well-spoken, but I wonder if you can share kind of inside the inner circle in terms of the conversations, that the NBA enabled right. For everything from the jerseys and going out on marches and then also from the team level, how did that kind of come down and what's of the perception inside the building? >> Sure, obviously I'm so proud to be part of a league that is as progressive and has given voice and loud, all the teams, all the athletes to express how they feel, The Warriors have always been committed to creating a diverse and equitable workplace and being part of a diverse and equitable community. I mean that's something that we've always said, but I think the situation really allowed us, over the summer to come up with a real formal response, aligning ourselves with the Black Lives Matter movement in a really meaningful way, but also in a way that allows us to iterate because as you say, it's evolving and we're learning. So we created or discussed four pillars that we wanted to work around. And that was really around wallet, heart, beat, and then tongue or voice. And Wallet is really around putting our money where our mouth is, right? And supporting organizations and groups that aligned with the values that we were trying to move forward. Heart is around engaging our employees and our fan base really, right? And so during this time we actually launched our employee resource groups for the first time and really excited and energized about what that's doing for our workforce. This is about promoting real action, civic engagement, advocacy work in the community and what we've always been really focused in a community, but this really hones it around areas that we can all rally around, right? So registration and we're really focused on supporting the election day results in terms of like having our facilities open to all the electorate. So we're going to have our San Francisco arena be a ballot drop off, our Oakland facilities is a polling site, Santa Cruz site is also a polling location, So really promoting sort of that civic engagement and causing people to really take action. heart is all around being inclusive and developing that culture that we think is really reflective of the community. And voice is really amplifying and celebrating one, the ideas, the (indistinct) want to put forth in the community, but really understanding everybody's culture and really just providing and using the platform really to provide a basis in which as our players, like Steph Curry and the rest want to share their own experiences. we have a platform that can't be matched by any pedigree, right? I mean, it's the Warriors. So I think really getting focused and rallying around these pillars, and then we can iterate and continue to grow as we define the things that we want to get involved in. >> That's terrific. So I have like pages and pages and pages of notes and could probably do this for hours and hours, but unfortunately we don't have that much time we have to wrap. So what I want to do is give you each of you the last word again as we know from this problem, right? It's not necessarily a pipeline problem, it's really a retention problem. We hear that all the time from Girls in Code and Girls in Tech. So what I'd like you to do just to wrap is just a couple of two or three sentences to a 25 year old, a young woman sitting across from you having coffee socially distanced about what you would tell her early in the career, not in college but kind of early on, what would the be the two or three sentences that you would share with that person across the table and Annabel, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I will have to make a pitch for transportation. So in transportation only 15% of the workforce is made up of women. And so my advice would be that there are these fields, there are these opportunities where you can make a massive impact on the future of how people move or how they consume things or how they interact with the world around them. And my hope is that being at Waymo, with our self driving car technology, that we are going to change the world. And I am one of the initial people in this group to help make that happen. And one thing that I would add is women spend almost an hour a day, shuttling their kids around, and we will give you back that time one day with our self driving cars so that I'm a mom. And I know that that is going to be incredibly powerful on our daily lives. >> Jeff: That's great. Kate, I think I might know what you're already going to say, but well maybe you have something else you wanted to say too. >> I don't know, It'll be interesting. Like if I was sitting across the table from a 25 year old right now I would say a couple of things first I'd say look intentionally for a company that has an inclusive culture. Intentionally seek out the company that has an inclusive culture, because we know that companies that have inclusive cultures retain women in tech longer. And the companies that can build inclusive cultures will retain women in tech, double, double the amount that they are today in the next 10 years. That means we could put another 1.4 million women in tech and keep them in tech by 2030. So I'd really encourage them to look for that. I'd encouraged them to look for companies that have support network and reinforcements for their success, and to obviously find a Waymo car so that they can not have to worry where kids are on for an hour when you're parenting in a few years. >> Jeff: I love the intentional, it's such a great word. Inamarie, >> I'd like to imagine that I'm sitting across from a 25 year old woman of color. And what I would say is be authentically you and know that you belong in the organization that you are seeking and you were there because you have a unique perspective and a voice that needs to be heard. And don't try to be anything that you're not, be who you are and bring that voice and that perspective, because the company will be a better company, the management team will be a better management team, the workforce will be a better workforce when you belong, thrive and share that voice. >> I love that, I love that. That's why you're the Chief People Officer and not Human Resources Officer, cause people are not resources like steel and cars and this and that. All right, Jennifer, will go to you for the wrap. >> Oh my gosh, I can't follow that. But yes, I would say advocate for yourself and know your value. I think really understanding what you're worth and being willing to fight for that is critical. And I think it's something that women need to do more. >> Awesome, well again, I wish we could go all day, but I will let you get back to your very, very busy day jobs. Thank you for participating and sharing your insight. I think it's super helpful. And there and as we said at the beginning, there's no better example for young girls and young women than to see people like you in leadership roles and to hear your voices. So thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay thank you. >> Thank you >> All right, so that was our diversity panel. I hope you enjoyed it, I sure did. I'm looking forward to chapter two. We'll get it scheduled as soon as we can. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Ply from Barcelona, Spain pits the cube covering Cisco live 2020 Ratu by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back live to Cisco live in 2020 in Barcelona. We're in Europe, Barcelona. I'm John Ferrara, Dave Alante. We've got a great guest here and the whole theme of the show is not about the infrastructure is about the applications and the applications being powered by an infrastructure powered by Cisco. We've got a great guest, senior vice president, general manager, team collaboration, Shri Travaasa of Cisco. You run all the big products, WebEx on steroids, new announcements. You had a really killer announcements, the pack booth. We'll get into that. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming. Thank you for having me. What's the quick news? You're on stage giving the keynote quickly share the news. We can get into it. So we are obviously >>coming out with a set of updates to our great portfolio. We reach out to about 300 million users across the enterprise today who use us for all the way from meetings to team collaboration to calling to powering meeting rooms. So in a sense, what we have as a products that, uh, is either in the meeting room or on the desktop or on a mobile phone. So any one of those methods and mechanisms. And in the past couple of years we've seen massive adoption of video, uh, whether it'd be on the mobile phone, whether it be in your desktop or in a meeting room itself. >>So video is the key. You had an announcement with Mike, uh, Microsoft teams explain that because don't they? Don't they compete with you? >>Yes, we, we, so the best way to describe it as is it's compatibility and competition. So it's competitive to compete, um, for the sake of our end users. So end user choice pretty much drives, uh, the types of integrations we do these days. You can't leave it to an it organization to do that integration. You've got to make sure these products work. So we integrate quite a bit with our competitors, spar, Slack, Microsoft teams, zoom. We do integrate with all of those guys. And the Microsoft teams integration, um, is prefaced on providing the best real time media experience into the Microsoft ecosystem. So if a customer is using office three 65 for document collaboration and chooses us for real time collaboration, they get >>the best experience comes from. So this has been a sleepy space for awhile and then all of a sudden you've mentioned Slack, zoom comes out, big IPOs, high valuations, Microsoft kind of transitioning and gets, it's based to to teams. There's a lot of excitement all of a sudden. And I was thinking in the last year out, geez, I wonder if Cisco is asleep at the wheel, but today you had all these announcements, so obviously not asleep at the wheel. Describe what you see going on in the space and what excites you from a standpoint of what you've just announced. So I think >>over the past two years, rightfully so, there's been a ton of movement in this space and I think it's driven by, it's, it's important to talk about why it's driven by globalization of the workforce. So that globalization of the workforce has, has, has, has gotten caught steam in the past few years and you pretty much see folks being employed across the globe. Whoever has the skill gets employed in a sentence. And what we see within the confines of WebEx is an increase in user engagement. So the same user is using WebEx a lot more and we wonder why we're seeing basically cross time zone meetings go up and team collaboration as we know it is no longer across the table. It's actually across time zones, across geographies, across language boundaries. So you're seeing that happen and the power of team collaboration is not just bringing people together, it's the data in heading to within the conversation becomes the new currency. >>It's the new frontier. And you can do a whole bunch of analytics on that. You can provide information on that. You can basically bring what I would call uninterrupted work streams in the myths, which is, you know, how do you take a conversation, take a part of a set of action items out of it and basically take it all the way so that there's automation, there's least amount of transmission loss and transmission loss in a sense. So that's, that's what's causing, um, this, this industry to wake up because it's a productivity gain in knowledge worker population. >>I don't know why it's off the charts on these systems, you know, low denominator and it's so easy to justify. I mean to me this is the biggest way that people are kind of talking about, but not really specifically addressing it. And to me, I always like to look at the startup world because the startup world is ultimately the Canary in the coal mine. Cody cloud native was before cloud hit, the startups were in there wipe clean sheet of paper, all cloud. Now that's mainstream. I had a conversation with Mitchell, the founder of Hashi Corp and we were talking about the concept of virtual first. And his startup was all virtual. They didn't have an office, they could afford one, but their teams were remote. This is the new dynamic that works. And so I believe that this is going to be an enterprise requirement because this has been validated. >>You seeing people work virtually, development teams, marketing to any team, they're remote, they're at home. So this is a trend. This is real. And designing a product for virtual first versus saying, Oh, if your virtual uses Proctor was designed for this, this is really where it's coming to in my opinion. How are you guys addressing that? Because in that video is not easy. Totally not. You guys been doing video Cisco for a lot them. I know from the cable companies to make a deep packet inspection and managing packets, QoS and mean policy basis, the perfect storm for making video work better. So explain the whole virtual first and the video. Start by sharing a small little secret. I run this business and yet I'm a remote worker. Cisco's based in San, I live in Seattle. >>I live in a small town called mamasan. I'm, I'm a perfect example of who we are. It's all the. So without a doubt, what has also spurred this is the bandwidth to trust the globe, not just in the U S uh, I find that, you know, parts of Asia have very good connectivity. If you go into Korea, Singapore, it's just fantastic, right? If you go into the Western Europe, Scandinavian countries, it's just fabulous. So I think the, the fact of the matter is you, the act of working together across the table and the act of these collaboration tools bringing people together need to be the same. That's pretty much where we are all headed. We're all trying to achieve that Nirvana, making sure there's no dissonance when you bring people across video that's key. That requires not only the ability to see and hear people, but to be able to whiteboard, to be able to have a very rich and immersive conversation on biblical creation so that, you know, using like stickies on a whiteboard for example, how well can you do it? >>So those are the types of things that we are headed towards. Uh, and I w I would pretty much say you guys said it in your question. You have to design for a remote worker for a virtual work environment, which basically is all about optimizing for team collaboration and optimizing for information that's consistent across different communication types. Whether you pick up the phone, whether you are on a meeting in a persistent chat, all that transcription should look and feel the same. This is the convergence really of networking and software because software is where the action is, but the network controls the routes. So, you know, give you an example, we were doing a live broadcast in our studio in Palo Alto had Ken Jennings on from jeopardy and it was, I was so excited. It was a good interview. We had multiple guests on about AI and you know, and he was kind of our celebrity guests and he had terrible bandwidth with his house. >>I don't know, maybe his kids were playing games on it or he was downloading some Netflix, who knows, but he had a horrible visual. We couldn't control that. This is where the network optimization comes in. What are you guys doing there? You guys run the networks, you guys have access to some of the routes and looking for, you know, best route, best quality. So I think without a doubt, you know, the, your lowest common denominator leg in your network kind of decides the quality per se. Uh, but we, we continue to do things like a compression of bits on the wire so that you need the smallest amount of pipe. But at the end of the day for high Raz video, you still need a decent amount of bandwidth. And what ends up happening is it's not just bandwidth, it's uh, you know, understanding what kind of packet loss profile you have on that network. >>So what we are doing across nearly nearly every vendor today is figuring out how we can optimize for these Laci networks. So if you're talking to any collaboration engineer, um, the first interview question will inadvertently be, tell me your experience on Laci networks. What have you done, how many patents do you have? You know, that's kind of the, the discussion per se. So I think without a doubt the advent of 5g and its expansion will lead to Ken Jennings potentially having a much better experience. Right. Can you auto scale, not auto scale, but auto detect? Yes. That cause that's something that could be automated. And we, we automatically, we call it graceful degradation. So we start with aspiring for the 10 ADP. Then we'll bring it down to seven 2360 and no video. And that happens automatically and we let the end user know you're having a network blip and hence, uh, we have, we are degrading it or today's product. Yes. >>So years ago when you, there's video conferencing, you just have to show 15 minutes beforehand just to make sure everybody get on. Okay. So simplicity is another big adoption theme, whether it's one push phone calling or call me or whatever it is. At the same time, you've got to add functionality. You've had a transcription, you've had a translation, you've got the split screen. And when I stand up, the camera follows me. So are those counterpoints simplicity and functionality, how do you integrate those together? >>I think the, the, all of this is done in the quest to simplicity, right? Um, one of the key things we've done across the Cisco WebEx portfolio, we've been known as the stodgy characters. Um, you know guys who don't move fast, which is exactly the opposite, to be honest with you. We worked on making sure we get rid of, I'm going to use the word here, nerd knobs in the product optimized for the simple in a meeting, there are three things that matter. Three big use cases, scheduling, joining in, meeting quality. Those are the only three things matter. The rest doesn't matter, right? So if you look at our devices, if you look at everything, we have this consistent green button that shows up everywhere. Whether you bring up outlook, whether you bring up an iPhone calendar, whether you bring up a desktop in one of our devices, all of those things will have this consistent green bar. We don't, we never want the end user to miss it. See it hit it. It'll show up at the right time. Basically shows up between six minutes and the 40 minute Mark before the meeting. >>And by that in meeting quality, you mean the experience overall, how hard it is to share something or >>actually can you see that person? Can you hear that person, you know, things of that sort of, right. You know, how do you avoid echos in a meeting? Like, what if I turn on both audio multiple times in a particular echo, right. As I mentioned in our last interview, Sri about um, uh, the previous guests around, they want API APIs cause it was like API APIs. It's kind of a trend towards a thin, I won't say thin client cause that's some kind of an old, old word. But um, more efficient source code on the client side, not bloated >>software in the sense of having all these bells and whistles. I mean, I mean at some point you're going to use, right? It could be an advanced version. Maybe you have a tiered thing, but at the base set, how do you create software in this modern error so that you can have really fast software managing front end with the powerful backend. You think about, Hey Siri, you know, there's the front end, there's a back end. So you starting to see this kind of decoupling. How do you guys look at that as it changed the development thesis? Is that something that you guys are thinking about? What's your take on all that? >>Yeah, without a doubt. Right? So we, we, we constantly optimize media is a very different workload than for example, a commanding tool. Right? Yeah. Uh, and I don't mean to trivialize city or any other assistant media is hard when you're doing video. The app needs to have some intelligence to be able to disintegrate audio and video streams and content sharing, right? So these apps tend to have a bigger footprint on the desktop, on the mobile phone than other traditional apps. So there is a constant quest for that additional bit of optimization to reduce, you know, substantially reduce the juice you use out of the laptop. Uh, and with laptops becoming more and more powerful, mobile phones becoming more and more, more powerful, we are only able to bring more, more into that big tree. >>Yes. And the rich media is only getting more and more robust with video. Look at the gaming world. My kids got their rig set up, multiple monitors. I mean, it's a lifestyle experience, consumption of video. It's all, it put more pressure on you guys. It's hard. We know we do it. How, what's the, in your mind, what's your guiding principle for future innovation? Whether you're hiring, designing around video, what do you guys chasing that Nirvana? What is it? Is it the software, the hardware? It's a chips. >>I think it's a combination of them, right? If you look at Cisco, our inherent differentiation is we know, we know how to do software. We know a thing or two about networks. I mean no hardware. How do you bring these three together and there's a four to dimension, I'm going to call it quad. And it's security. You can't ignore security. You know, it's, it's something that you have to intrinsically think about. It's not a check by check box after you don't want somebody peeping Toms in their meeting. For example, everybody is simply >>back in the cams. Jeff Bezos has got hacked on video on his WhatsApp embedded malware. So are all kinds of weird things that come through. You don't know. >>I think it's, it's the amalgamation of all of these things. How do you maximize every single element of the pipe? Um, so we are working with, for example, our own DNA center methods and mechanisms by which we're saying based on our workload, how do we optimize the next look for our workload. When we find an issue within let's say WebEx, how do we automatically self heal the network? That is basically where we are headed. So we want to make sure we are constantly stack up and down the stairs, down the stack. And the other, you know you've talked about simplicity of use case. I'll give you an example. What we're doing with our devices now as it has face recognition, we don't store any, any images in the cloud. So as soon as you walk into a meeting room, we've got an IOT sensor that it recognizes your face. >>It says, Hey, let me pull up your meetings. It starts to track who all have joined your meeting. And then let's assume you forget to join the meeting. It wakes up and it says, would you like to join the meeting? Two of two of your colleagues have joined so you don't even have to hit the button. It is germaphobe friendly. So you don't have to touch. It binds you in basic automation. So that level of automation is coming in. So you're talking about the future. The future is about simplicity. That spans generations. So you're pretty much worn the human to come back and for the tech to fade away in the back of them. If you don't want them to be reliant on this app that you have to learn, right, it should be discernible, relatable, easy to use. >>Works like the movies in history. You're a rock star. I'm great to have you. In fact, now we know you live in Seattle. We're going to have you in our studio remotely and we're gonna make sure that bandwidth and that video is of highest quality., the SVP, senior vice president, general manager of the collaboration group of Cisco. Big part of the future of Cisco. This group is going to be really driving some of those network benefits. The applications are big part of the focus, changing the business models, business outcomes. This is the conversation is the cube coverage from Barcelona. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> From Boston, Massachusets, it's The Cube. Covering Actifio 2019: Data Driven, Brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. We're here at the Intercontinental Hotel at Actifio's Data Driven conference, day one. You're watching The Cube. The leader in on-the-ground tech coverage. My name is is Dave Valante, Stu Minamin is here, so is John Ferrer, my friend Frank Gens is here, he's the Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC and Head Dot Connector. Frank, welcome to The Cube. >> Well thank you Dave. >> First time. >> First time. >> Newbie. >> Yep. >> You're going to crush it, I know. >> Be gentle. >> You know, you're awesome, I've watched you over the many years, of course, you know, you seem to get competitive, and it's like who gets the best rating? Frank always had the best ratings at the Directions conference. He's blushing but I could- >> I don't know if that's true but I'll accept it. >> I could never beat him, no matter how hard I tried. But you are a phenomenal speaker, you gave a great conversation this morning. I'm sure you drew a lot from your Directions talk, but every year you lay down this, you know, sort of, mini manifesto. You describe it as, you connect the dots, IDC, thousands of analysts. And it's your job to say okay, what does this all mean? Not in the micro, let's up-level a little bit. So, what's happening? You talked today, You know you gave your version of the wave slides. So, where are we in the waves? We are exiting the experimentation phase, and coming in to a new phase that multiplied innovation. I saw AI on there, block-chain, some other technologies. Where are we today? >> Yeah, well I think having mental models of the6 industry or any complex system is pretty important. I mean I've made a career dumbing-down a complex industry into something simple enough that I can understand, so we've done it again now with what we call the third platform. So, ten years ago seeing the whole raft of new technologies at the time were coming in that would become the foundation for the next thirty years of tech, so, that's an old story now. Cloud, mobile, social, big data, obviously IOT technologies coming in, block-chain, and so forth. So we call this general era the third platform, but we noticed a few years ago, well, we're at the threshold of kind of a major scale-up of innovation in this third platform that's very different from the last ten or twelve years, which we called the experimentation stage. Where people were using this stuff, using the cloud, using mobile, big data, to create cool things, but they were doing it in kind of a isolated way. Kind of the traditional, well I'm going to invent something and I may have a few friends help me, whereas, the promise of the cloud has been , well, if you have a lot of developers out on the cloud, that form a community, an ecosystem, think of GitHub, you know, any of the big code repositories, or the ability to have shared service as often Amazon, Cloud, or IBM, or Google, or Microsoft, the promise is there to actually bring to life what Bill Joy said, you know, in the nineties. Which was no matter how smart you are, most of the smart people in the world work for someone else. So the questions always been, well, how do I tap into all those other smart people who don't work for me? So we can feel that where we are in the industry right now is the business model of multiplied innovation or if you prefer, a network of collaborative innovation, being able to build something interesting quickly, using a lot of innovation from other people, and then adding your special sauce. But that's going to take the scale of innovation just up a couple of orders of magnitude. And the pace, of course, that goes with that, is people are innovating much more rapid clip now. So really, the full promise of a cloud-native innovation model, so we kind of feel like we're right here, which means there's lots of big changes around the technologies, around kind of the world of developers and apps, AI is changing, and of course, the industry structure itself. You know the power positions, you know, a lot of vendors have spent a lot of energy trying to protect the power positions of the last thirty years. >> Yeah so we're getting into some of that. So, but you know, everybody talks about digital transformation, and they kind of roll their eyes, like it's a big buzzword, but it's real. It's dataware at a data-driven conference. And data, you know, being at the heart of businesses means that you're seeing businesses transition industries, or traverse industries, you know, Amazon getting into groceries, Apple getting into content, Amazon as well, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, so, my question is, what's a tech company? I mean, you know, Bennyhoff says that, you know, every company's a sass company, and you're certainly seeing that, and it's got to be great for your business. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely >> Quantifying all those markets, but I mean, the market that you quantify is just it's every company now. Banks, insurance companies, grocers, you know? Everybody is a tech company. >> I think, yeah, that's a hundred percent right. It is that this is the biggest revolution in the economy, you know, for many many decades. Or you might say centuries even. Is yeah, whoever put it, was it Mark Andreson or whoever used to talk about software leading the world, we're in the middle of that. Only, software now is being delivered in the form of digital or cloud services so, you know, every company is a tech company. And of course it really raises the question, well what are tech companies? You know, they need to kind of think back about where does our value add? But it is great. It's when we look at the world of clouds, one of the first things we observed in 2007, 2008 was, well, clouds wasn't just about S3 storage clouds, or salesforce.com's softwares and service. It's a model that can be applied to any industry, any company, any offering. And of course we've seen all these startups whether it's Uber or Netflix or whoever it is, basically digital innovation in every single industry, transforming that industry. So, to me that's the exciting part is if that model of transforming industries through the use of software, through digital technology. In that kind of experimentation stage it was mainly a startup story. All those unicorns. To me the multiplied innovation chapter, it's about- (audio cuts out) finally, you know, the cities, the Procter & Gambles, the Walmarts, the John Deere's, they're finally saying hey, this cloud platform and digital innovation, if we can do that in our industry. >> Yeah, so intrapreneurship is actually, you know, starting to- >> Yeah. >> So you and I have seen a lot of psychos, we watched the you know, the mainframe wave get crushed by the micro-processor based revolution, IDC at the time spent a lot of time looking at that. >> Vacuum tubes. >> Water coolant is back. So but the industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law forever. Even Thomas Friedman when he talks about, you know, his stuff and he throws in Moore's Law. But no longer Moore's Law the sort of engine of innovation. There's other factors. So what's the innovation cocktail looking forward over the next ten years? You've talked about cloud, you know, we've talked about AI, what's that, you know, sandwich, the innovation sandwich look like? >> Yeah so to me I think it is the harnessing of all this flood of technologies, again, that are mainly coming off the cloud, and that parade is not stopping. Quantum, you know, lots of other technologies are coming down the pipe. But to me, you know, it is the mixture of number one the cloud, public cloud stacks being able to travel anywhere in the world. So take the cloud on the road. So it's even, I would say, not even just scale, I think of, that's almost like a mount of compute power. Which could happen inside multiple hyperscale data centers. I'm also thinking about scale in terms of the horizontal. >> Bringing that model anywhere. >> Take me out to the edge. >> Wherever your data lives. >> Take me to a Carnival cruise ship, you know, take me to, you know, an apple-powered autonomous car, or take me to a hospital or a retail store. So the public cloud stacks where all the innovation is basically happening in the industry. Jail-breaking that out so it can come, you know it's through Amazon, AWS Outpost, or Ajerstack, or Google Anthos, this movement of the cloud guys, to say we'll take public cloud innovation wherever you need it. That to me is a big part of the cocktail because that's you know, basically the public clouds have been the epicenter of most tech innovation the last three or four years, so, that's very important. I think, you know just quickly, the other piece of the puzzle is the revolution that's happening in the modularity of apps. So the micro services revolution. So, the building of new apps and the refactoring of old apps using containers, using servos technologies, you know, API lifecycle management technologies, and of course, agile development methods. Kind of getting to this kind of iterative sped up deployment model, where people might've deployed new code four times a year, they're now deploying it four times a minute. >> Yeah right. >> So to me that's- and kind of aligned with that is what I was mentioning before, that if you can apply that, kind of, rapid scale, massive volume innovation model and bring others into the party, so now you're part of a cloud-connected community of innovators. And again, that could be around a Github, or could be around a Google or Amazon, or it could be around, you know, Walmart. In a retail world. Or an Amazon in retail. Or it could be around a Proctor & Gamble, or around a Disney, digital entertainment, you know, where they're creating ecosystems of innovators, and so to me, bringing people, you know, so it's not just these technologies that enable rapid, high-volume modular innovation, but it's saying okay now plugging lots of people's brains together is just going to, I think that, here's the- >> And all the data that throws off obviously. >> Throws a ton of data, but, to me the number we use it kind of is the punchline for, well where does multiplied innovation lead? A distributed cloud, this revolution in distributing modular massive scale development, that we think the next five years, we'll see as many new apps developed and deploye6d as we saw developed and deployed in the last forty years. So five years, the next five years, versus the last forty years, and so to me that's, that is the revolution. Because, you know, when that happens that means we're going to start seeing that long tail of used cases that people could never get to, you know, all the highly verticalized used cases are going to be filled, you know we're going to finally a lot of white space has been white for decades, is going to start getting a lot of cool colors and a lot of solutions delivered to them. >> Let's talk about some of the macro stuff, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's probably three trillion, maybe it's four trillion now, big market. You talked today about the market's going two x GDP. >> Yeah. >> For the tech market, that is. Why is it that the tech market is able to grow at a rate faster than GDP? And is there a relationship between GDP and tech growth? >> Yeah, well, I think, we are still, while, you know, we've been in tech, talk about those apps developed the last forty years, we've both been there, so- >> And that includes the iPhone apps, too, so that's actually a pretty impressive number when you think about the last ten years being included in that number. >> Absolutely, but if you think about it, we are still kind of teenagers when you think about that Andreson idea of software eating the world. You know, we're just kind of on the early appetizer, you know, the sorbet is coming to clear our palates before we go to the next course. But we're not even close to the main course. And so I think when you look at the kind of, the percentage of companies and industry process that is digital, that has been highly digitized. We're still early days, so to me, I think that's why. That the kind of the steady state of how much of an industry is kind of process and data flow is based on software. I'll just make up a number, you know, we may be a third of the way to whatever the steady state is. We've got two-thirds of the way to go. So to me, that supports growth of IT investment rising at double the rate of overall. Because it's sucking in and absorbing and transforming big pieces of the existing economy, >> So given the size of the market, given that all companies are tech companies. What are your thoughts on the narrative right now? You're hearing a lot of pressure from, you know, public policy to break up big tech. And we saw, you know you and I were there when Microsoft, and I would argue, they were, you know, breaking the law. Okay, the Department of Justice did the right thing, and they put handcuffs on them. >> Yeah. >> But they never really, you know, went after the whole breakup scenario, and you hear a lot of that, a lot of the vitriol. Do you think that makes sense? To break up big tech and what would the result be? >> You don't think I'm going to step on those land mines, do you? >> Okay well I've got an opinion. >> Alright I'll give you mine then. Alright, since- >> I mean, I'll lay it out there, I just think if you break up big tech the little techs are going to get bigger. It's going to be like AT&T all over again. The other thing I would add is if you want to go after China for, you know, IP theft, okay fine, but why would you attack the AI leaders? Now, if they're breaking the law, that should not be allowed. I'm not for you know, monopolistic, you know, illegal behavior. What are your thoughts? >> Alright, you've convinced me to answer this question. >> We're having a conversation- >> Nothing like a little competitive juice going. You're totally wrong. >> Lay it out for me. >> No, I think, but this has been a recurring pattern, as you were saying, it even goes back further to you know, AT&T and people wanting to connect other people to the chiraphone, and it goes IBM mainframes, opening up to peripherals. Right, it goes back to it. Exactly. It goes back to the wheel. But it's yeah, to me it's a valid question to ask. And I think, you know, part of the story I was telling, that multiplied innovation story, and Bill Joy, Joy's Law is really about platform. Right? And so when you get aggregated portfolio of technical capabilities that allow innovation to happen. Right, so the great thing is, you know, you typically see concentration, consolidation around those platforms. But of course they give life to a lot of competition and growth on top of them. So that to me is the, that's the conundrum, because if you attack the platform, you may send us back into this kind of disaggregated, less creative- so that's the art, is to take the scalpel and figure out well, where are the appropriate boundaries for, you know, putting those walls, where if you're in this part of the industry, you can't be in this. So, to me I think one, at least reasonable way to think about it is, so for example, if you are a major cloud platform player, right, you're providing all of the AI services, the cloud services, the compute services, the block-chain services, that a lot of the sass world is using. That, somebody could argue, well, if you get too strong in the sass world, you then could be in a position to give yourself favorable position from the platform. Because everyone in the sass world is depending on the platform. So somebody might say you can't be in. You know, if you're in the sass position you'll have to separate that from the platform business. But I think to me, so that's a logical way to do it, but I think you also have to ask, well, are people actually abusing? Right, so I- >> I think it's a really good question. >> I don't think it's fair to just say well, theoretically it could be abused. If the abuse is not happening, I don't think you, it's appropriate to prophylactically, it's like go after a crime before it's committed. So I think, the other thing that is happening is, often these monopolies or power positions have been about economic power, pricing power, I think there's another dynamic happening because consumer date, people's data, the Facebook phenomenon, the Twitter and the rest, there's a lot of stuff that's not necessarily about pricing, but that's about kind of social norms and privacy that I think are at work and that we haven't really seen as big a factor, I mean obviously we've had privacy regulation is Europe with GDPR and the rest, obviously in check, but part of that's because of the social platforms, so that's another vector that is coming in. >> Well, you would like to see the government actually say okay, this is the framework, or this is what we think the law should be. I mean, part of it is okay, Facebook they have incentive to appropriate our data and they get, okay, and maybe they're not taking enough responsibility for. But I to date have not seen the evidence as we did with, you know, Microsoft wiping out, you know, Lotus, and Novel, and Word Perfect through bundling and what it did to Netscape with bundling the browser and the price practices that- I don't see that, today, maybe I'm just missing it, but- >> Yeah I think that's going to be all around, you know, online advertising, and all that, to me that's kind of the market- >> Yeah, so Google, some of the Google stuff, that's probably legit, and that's fine, they should stop that. >> But to me the bigger issue is more around privacy.6 You know, it's a social norm, it's societal, it's not an economic factor I think around Facebook and the social platforms, and I think, I don't know what the right answer is, but I think certainly government it's legitimate for those questions to be asked. >> Well maybe GDPR becomes that framework, so, they're trying to give us the hook but, I'm having too much fun. So we're going to- I don't know how closely you follow Facebook, I mean they're obviously big tech, so Facebook has this whole crypto-play, seems like they're using it for driving an ecosystem and making money. As opposed to dealing with the privacy issue. I'd like to see more on the latter than the former, perhaps, but, any thoughts on Facebook and what's going on there with their crypto-play? >> Yeah I don't study them all that much so, I am fascinated when Mark Zuckerberg was saying well now our key business now is about privacy, which I find interesting. It doesn't feel that way necessarily, as a consumer and an observer, but- >> Well you're on Facebook, I'm on Facebook, >> Yeah yeah. >> Okay so how about big IPOs, we're in the tenth year now of this huge, you know, tail-wind for tech. Obviously you have guys like Uber, Lyft going IPO,6 losing tons of money. Stocks actually haven't done that well which is kind of interesting. You saw Zoom, you know, go public, doing very well. Slack is about to go public. So there's really a rush to IPO. Your thoughts on that? Is this sustainable? Or are we kind of coming to the end here? >> Yeah so, I think in part, you know, predicting the stock market waves is a very tough thing to do, but I think one kind of secular trend is going to be relevant for these tech IPOs is what I was mentioning earlier, is that we've now had a ten, twelve year run of basically startups coming in and reinventing industries while the incumbents in the industries are basically sitting on their hands, or sleeping. So to me the next ten years, those startups are going to, not that, I mean we've seen that large companies waking up doesn't necessarily always lead to success but it feels to me like it's going to be a more competitive environment for all those startups Because the incumbents, not all of them, and maybe not even most of them, but some decent portion of them are going to wind up becoming digital giants in their own industry. So to me I think that's a different world the next ten years than the last ten. I do think one important thing, and I think around acquisitions MNA, and we saw it just the last few weeks with Google Looker and we saw Tab Low with Salesforce, is if that, the mega-cloud world of Microsoft, Ajer, and Amazon, Google. That world is clearly consolidating. There's room for three or four global players and that game is almost over. But there's another power position on top of that, which is around where did all the app, business app guys, all the suite guys, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, you name it. Where did they go? And so we see, we think- >> Service Now, now kind of getting big. >> Absolutely, so we're entering a intensive period, and I think again, the Tab Low and Looker is just an example where those companies are all stepping on the gas to become better platforms. So apps as platforms, or app portfolio as platforms, so, much more of a data play, analytics play, buying other pieces of the app portfolio, that they may not have. And basically scaling up to become the business process platforms and ecosystems there. So I think we are just at the beginning of that, so look for a lot of sass companies. >> And I wonder if Amazon could become a platform for developers to actually disrupt those traditional sass guys. It's not obvious to me how those guys get disrupted, and I'm thinking, everybody says oh is Amazon going to get into the app space? Maybe some day if they happen to do a cam expans6ion, But it seems to me that they become a platform fo6r new apps you know, your apps explosion.6 At the edge, obviously, you know, local. >> Well there's no question. I think those appcentric apps is what I'd call that competition up there and versus kind of a mega cloud. There's no question the mega cloud guys. They've already started launching like call center, contact center software, they're creeping up into that world of business apps so I don't think they're going to stop and so I think that that is a reasonable place to look is will they just start trying to create and effect suites and platforms around sass of their own. >> Startups, ecosystems like you were saying. Alright, I got to give you some rapid fire questions here, so, when do you think, or do you think, no, I'm going to say when you think, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception, rather than the norm? Buy into the autonomous vehicles hype? Or- >> I think, to me, that's a ten-year type of horizon. >> Okay, ten plus, alright. When will machines be able to make better diagnosis than than doctors? >> Well, you could argue that in some fields we're almost there, or we're there. So it's all about the scope of issue, right? So if it's reading a radiology, you know, film or image, to look for something right there, we're almost there. But for complex cancers or whatever that's going to take- >> One more dot connecting question. >> Yeah yeah. >> So do you think large retail stores will essentially disappear? >> Oh boy that's a- they certainly won't disappear, but I think they can so witness Apple and Amazon even trying to come in, so it feels that the mix is certainly shifting, right? So it feels to me that the model of retail presence, I think that will still be important. Touch, feel, look, socialize. But it feels like the days of, you know, ten thousand or five thousand store chains, it feels like that's declining in a big way. >> How about big banks? You think they'll lose control of the payment systems? >> I think they're already starting to, yeah, so, I would say that is, and they're trying to get in to compete, so I think that is on its way, no question. I think that horse is out of the barn. >> So cloud, AI, new apps, new innovation cocktails, software eating the world, everybody is a tech company. Frank Gens, great to have you. >> Dave, always great to see you. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy. You're watching The Cube, from Actifio: Data Driven nineteen. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Altos Cube Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're with Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, CUBE Alumni. He's been on before. Building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in Comms, advertising, PR, with Cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again, thanks for coming in. >> Likewise John, It's really good to be back. >> So, we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. Cision's done a lot of interesting things. You've got a lot of M and A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with Cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say I think you cracked the code on I think a new reality, a new economic reality. Also new capabilities for comms folks. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a fun ride. >> So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals, companies have you bought? What's the headcount, what's the revenue? Give us an update. >> In the four years, 12 acquisitions, seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue's kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. A lot of leadership changes, and as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change, finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business like the Chief Communication Officer, the earn media folks. To say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So, a lot's been going on. >> Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend, in my opinion, for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset. It's coming quickly, so if you look at some of the big trends out there. Look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech, Amazon. Cloud computing, in that time period that you were, prior to just going to Cision, you had Oracle Cloud, done a lot of great things on the Marketing Cloud side. But the timing of Cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran, formerly of Cunningham Communications. He did the PR for Steve Jobs. You said, there's no more journalists, a few left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. >> You do. >> This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at Cision because you guys, although put these cubbies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. >> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. >> Tell us the vision of Cision and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? >> So, there's a couple shifts, John. You and I have talked about this in previous programs There's this shift of the line of business, having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one Cloud platform, right, from Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in Human Capital Management. 22 things squished into the Cloud, one from Workday, right. Same thing happened, you had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together, into one CRM in the Cloud, I buy from Salesforce, right. And our last rodeo, the early part of this stack, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire the LUMAscape into a marketing cloud, right, so there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO. So, it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here, happened on the earned media side and the Chief Communications Officer. So, bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO what Adobe is for the CMO what Salesforce is for the CRO, Workday is for the CHRO. That has to happen. You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, you can't do it. The second thing that had to happen, especially in marketing and advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit. Advertising was a slow single-digit CAGR industry for 50 years. And then something happened. After 5% CAGR for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years. Digital paid went from like 15 billion to 150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half my advertising is wasted on this one half. That went bye-bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right. When I was able to put Pixels on ads, John, you'd go to that page, Pixel would go on you, It would follow you around If you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire-- >> But that's how the infrastructure would let you, allowed you, it enabled you to do that. Then again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in here. >> Massive value. But my buyer, right, so the person that does the little ad on the most regional tech page got credit. My buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS, he's a credible third party influencer, writing objectively. That article's worth triple platinum and has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps. We've never, until Cision, well let's Pixel that, let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's ride that all the way down to the lead form that's right. Basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails. Therefore this line of business never get revenue credit. It stayed over here in the OpEx pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile. Well, you saw the crazy investment shift. So, that's really the more important one, is Comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business's attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. >> I think, I mean, I guess what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured, similar to how advertising >> You got it. >> Couldn't be measured then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. >> They get measured the same way. And then one other thing. That ad, that press release, down to the business event. This one had $2 million dollars of ad spend, this one had no ad spend. When it goes to convert, in CRM or it goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad, this one came from credible third party content. Guess which one, not only had zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better. It's the guy that chose to read credible third-party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better that somebody who just clicked on the ad. >> Well certainly, I'm biased-- >> So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. >> Well, I think the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm, has no budget basically, or thin budgets, trying to hit an organic, credible outlet which is converting in progression to a buyer, an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's just talk about the economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend, it could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. You're essentially talking about the big mega trend, which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. >> That's right. >> That flow. Of course, we believe and we, at the Cube, everyone's been seeing that with our business. Let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet, so we've been seeing, in the industry, PR and comms becoming more powerful. So, the Chief Communication Officer isn't just rolling out press releases, although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now, you've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the Chief Communication Officer really is the Chief Storyteller Officer, Not necessarily the CMO. >> Emphatically. >> The Martech Stack kind of tracking. So talk about that dynamic. How is the Chief Communication Officer role change or changing? Why is that important and what should people be thinking about, if they are a Chief Communication Officer? >> You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of our undergrad, 7 out of 10 times that CCO, the Chief Communication Officer, worked for the CEO and 30% of time other. Yet the role was materially narrow. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and widened its aperture. Right now though 7 out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO, which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And only 30% of them work for the CEO. Despite the fact that from an organizational stand point, that kind of counter intuitive org move has been made. It doesn't really matter because, so much of what you just said too, you was in marketing's purview or around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial they played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over in the communications, in part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand reputation, the goodwill, all of that is comms. Therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they've ever had. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. I mentioned that just because I find it very interesting. Comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. >> But budget wise, they're not really that loaded up with funding. >> And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show. Super strategic. Showing ROI. >> So, showing ROI is critical. >> Not the quality of clippings. >> It was the Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs if you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out. Like the ads and the e-commerce folks do. It simply drives the drives me. >> So take us through some of those analytics because people who know about comms, the old school comms people who are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because, can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can Silicon Angle write about us? I've got to get more clippings. That tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mix pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook.? >> Yeah, we call those Vanity Metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. Hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 222 billion people. I reached more people than there are on the planet with this PR campaign. I needed to get to the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, number one. But they don't, they do theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with, 100 reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with, how many of them I thought were positive, negative, neutral. Sentiment analysis, they measure number of reporters or hits versus their competitors and say, Proctor and Gamble rolled out this diaper product, how did I do this five days? How much did Proctor and Gamble diapers get written about versus Craft diapers versus Unilever's. Share a voice. Not irrelevant metrics. But not metrics the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in. >> Conversion to brand or sales, those kind of things? >> They never just never existed. Those never existed. Now when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people. I can tell you exactly who they were, demographic, firmographic, lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you who the audience is you're reaching. I can tell you exactly what they do. When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors. And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form if I'm B2B for pipe. It could be a e-commerce store from B2C. It could be a rating or review or a user generation content gourd. It could be a sign up and register, if I'm trying to get database names. Whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day every day. That's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 year. >> Talk about the trend around-- >> It's simple stuff. >> I know, if you improve the ROI, you get more budget. >> It really is that simple. >> That's been the challenge. I think PR is certainly becoming, comms is becoming more powerful. People know I talk about it all the time. I think comms is the new CMO I think command and control and organic content work together in the organic. We've seen it first hand in our business. But, it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision. A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. >> That's for sure. >> What are some of the people tech savvy look at when they look at say revamping comms platform or strategy versus say old school? >> I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here is one thing that is good for us, that 7 out of 10 to the CCOs work for the CMO. Because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago, and they were not tech savvy, and they were not sophisticated. They didn't know how to do this stuff either. That was a good 10 year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated. Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. >> So are we going to see a Comms Stack? Like Martech, ComTech. >> ComTech is the decision communication Cloud, is ComTech. So we did it. We've built the Cloud stack. Again like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms, and we've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO's already been through this. Been through this with Ad Techs, been through this with MarTech, been through this with eCommerce, been through this with Web. You know, I've got a three or four year sophistication path this time just because >> The learnings are there >> The company's already done it everywhere else. The boss has already done it everywhere else. >> So the learnings are there from the MarTech so it's a pretty easy leap to take? >> That's exactly right. >> It's just-- >> How CommTech works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how MarTech and AdTech work. A lot of it is the same technology, just being applied different. >> That's good news >> So, the adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing. It's a really good thing for us that 70% of them work for CMOs because the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet, to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys or omni channel across just paid and owned. They recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, It's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read, getting them into that, so that they're influencing you. >> It's kind of like Google PageRank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one, give it more weight. >> And now all of a sudden if I have my Cision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let him go across paid and owned too, I materially improve the performance of the paid and owned because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. That's really important. >> I really think. >> I thinks you've got a home run here. I think you've really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with comms and CommsTech. I see it all the time. In my years of experiences, it's so obvious. Then again, the tailwind is that they've been through the MarTech. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. So, I'm out evangelizing all the time about the CUBE Cloud and some of the things we're doing. I run into the deer in the headlights on one side, what do you mean? And then people like, I believe, I totally understand. The believers and the non believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some chief comms op, they're very savvy, progressive, we've got to make the shift. How do they get the ship to turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? >> And boy is that right. I felt the same thing, getting more doing it with the CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsoleted. They didn't know. Could they not see the train coming? They didn't want to see the train coming. Now you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago. Really different bunch. History's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving that change and transformation. You've got the deer in the headlight, okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how, and you do have your typical, you know, nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door. I don't want to hear about it. You've got all flavors. The good news is we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting actually to deploy and show results, the deer in the headlights are starting to innovate, and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. >> Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients, the old school thing. Some are trying to be progressive and do more services. Have you seen, with the Cision Cloud and things that you're doing, that you're enabling, those agencies seem to be more productive? >> Yes. >> Are the client's putting pressure on those agencies so they see more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. >> That's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a Bell Curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies for advice. So, you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you. By the time you're at the Bell Curve, the client's know about the tech or they've adopted the tech, and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign. This is yet another good old fashioned >> High gross profit. >> A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as the service agency. At the bottom, over here, I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Erik, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, to all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, you know, we choose our our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore, the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. The ones that do, really reap rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the is the very first place that that customer is going to go to. >> So, basically the agency-- >> The customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. >> So, the agency has to keep up. >> They certainly do. >> Because, if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated >> If they keep up, yup. >> Value is created. If they don't have their running shoes on, they're out. >> If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great. The last thing back in the things. We've kind of hit this. This is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCOs office and say, where are we on this, 'cause it's out in the wild now, there are over 1200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, CommsTech stuff. It's getting written about by good old fashioned media. Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years, now I am, and look what I just did to my Comms program. That gets read. The world's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow, I didn't know that was possible, where are we on this? So the Where Are We On This wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. >> It's an accountability-- >> Now it's accountability, and therefore, the urgency to get fluent and changed. So now they're hiring up quantums and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did. The anatomy of a communications department is starting to like half science half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and 5% science. But it's getting to be 50/50. >> Do you have any competition? >> We have, just like always. >> You guys pretty much have PR Newswire, a lot of big elements there. >> We do. >> You've got a good foothold. >> This is just an example. Even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant. And Eloqua is part of Oracle, giant and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You've got three goliaths in marketing automation. Hubspot's still sticking around. PeerPlay, marketing Automation. You can just picture it. CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world Zendesk's still kicking around. It's a little PeerPlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or complete. But I do have some small, point specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. >> The thing is, one, first you're a great leader. You've seen the moving on the marking tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt. But I think what's interesting is that like the Web 1.0, having websites and webpages, Web 2.0 and social networks. That was about the first generation. Serve information, create Affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking. You mentioned all that. I over-simplified it, but you get the idea. Now, every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infra structure. What does that mean? They're going to throw a podcast, they're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. Now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So, your Cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? >> You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack. That's a spot on one, another one. Early in my career, the 20 influences that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks. There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex. so I could take each one of them out for a three Martini lunch, they'd write something good about me. >> Wish is was that easy now. >> Now, you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels, and they change in real time, and they're global in nature. It's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech and by the way. >> You're left behind. >> If you send out digital content they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement. >> There's no agility. >> There's none. >> Zero agility. >> None, exactly. >> There's no like Dev Ops mindset in there at all. >> Then the speed with which, it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a ClipBook, I've got to get it to my CEO by Friday. That whole start the ClipBook on Tuesday, I've got to have the ClipBook, the physical ClipBook on the CEO as an example. Nope, if I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. >> Well, Andy Cunningham was on the Cube. >> This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology and transformation >> Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms, legend. She basically said on The Cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the ClipBook, create your own ClipBook and get it out there. Then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. >> Now, it's become the real-time, curated feed that never stops. It sure as hell better not. Because comms is in trouble if it does. >> Well this is a great topic. But let's have you in this, I can go deep on this. I think this is a really important shift, and you guys are the only ones that are on it at this level. I don't think the Salesforce and the Adobe yet, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck on their wave and they're making a lot of money. >> You know John, paid media and owned media. The Google Marketing Cloud, that SAP Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce Marketing Clouds. They don't do anything in earned. Nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But, you know, they're also chasing much bigger pots of money. Marketing and Advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But, bottom line is, they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing. >> You're just on a different wave. >> So, we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader, that is mission critical to everyone of their customers. They're going to end up being some pretty import partners to us, because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid and owned and have not had the luxury to even go here. >> Well I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't see it, in my opinion, or can't get there. With the right surfboard, to use a surfing analogy, there's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, get the plug in for Cision. What's going on, what's next? What's the big momentum? Get the plug in for the company. What are you guys still going to do? >> Plugin for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see, one of which is Falcon. Basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast. Cloud companies do this. Adobe has Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Parking Cloud. Salesforce has Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud. Cision has just become a multi cloud company. We now have the Cision Social Cloud and the Cision Communications Cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinklr, Hootsuite and collapse social into this. Most of social is earned as well. So, look for a wing spread, into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. Then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again our metrics and capabilities you can buy But, little teaser. If we can say, in two months here's the average click through on a Google ad, YouTube ad, a banner ad, I'll show it to you on a Blog, a press release, an article. Apples to apples. Here is the conversion rate. If I can start becoming almost like an eMarketer or publisher on what happens when people read earned, there's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling, and it's going to drive where are we on that. So this is going to be the year. >> It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. >> That's exactly right. >> It's a new digital advertising format. >> And its one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now, the way he's had it for marketing and advertising, that little conversation walking down the hall. In thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO is going where are we on that? That's the year that that can flip switches, which I'm excited about. >> Every silo function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there and whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, changing the game in the shift around the Chief Communications Officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave that's coming. Of course, it's early, but it's going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, John, thank you. >> So, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto Thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage day three here, theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman, and Justin Warren here to break down the action. Justin Warren, as you know, is Guest Analyst for us at many events, Chief Analyst at PivotNine, coming all back over here again, to break it down. So we're going to dissect what's going on here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This is, some say, me, the last stand to stop Amazon. Justin, good to see you. >> Good to see you as well, man. Stu, my first question is, as the show winds down, day three, a lot of people have left, all the big execs are gone, it's kind of last day, people coming together, party was last night, so we kind of see all the action, we kind of fished this pond dry, in theCUBE here, the last couple of days. The themes are starting to emerge. What are you seeing, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, John, 8,000 people, this is, you know, geeks that are really excited, and I mean that in the best of ways, of course. There's actually, there were people here before the show started, doing lightning talks and full day sessions. Tomorrow, there's an operative session that another 250 or 300 people will be doing Friday, so, you know, and people want to just suck the marrow out of the bone that is everything going on here, just get every ounce of knowledge here, and they are deep into this session, so, this is a great community. The question I want to ask you guys is you were at Amazon re:Invent two weeks ago. We've watched that show. I want the compare and contrast of this ecosystem and show, not just compare it to like, say, open stack, which we've been teasing apart all week, and I think there are some things we need to worry about, but a lot of good differences. But compare against the big one in the room, which is Amazon, and a big difference is Amazon is here, and they have a seat at the table, because they have to, and customers will force them there, but you know, should this worry Amazon, and how does this ecosystem compare with the Amazon ecosystem. The big thing for me is, I understand how people make money in the ecosystem of Amazon. I'm still trying to figure that out here. >> Yeah, eh, it is a different ecosystem. It does have a bit of a vibe of it could be the new re:Invent. We've had conversations over the last couple of days about-- >> Or is this the independent cloud, >> Exactly. >> You know, open ecosystem. >> It is the independent show that we've been waiting for, that we've wanted since COMDEX and Interop kind of went away, and it's all been vendor shows, and now we have an independent show where all the vendors can come and have kind of a neutral meeting place, and we can all gather together and have some common ground, which is like, that's what Kubernetes is. I've been saying over the last couple of days, Kubernetes is like the ethernet of cloud, so it's something which is an agreed standard and we can all collaborate on, and then, you never bet against ethernet. So know you can build all these other things on top of that platform, yeah. >> Just a quick note on that, right, that's Interop, and networking was at the core of that. It was basically everybody, oh, it's the chance of if we give true interoperability, maybe we can do multi-vendor and it won't all be Cisco, who dominated that market. Amazon's the same. >> Stu, this is to me, ethernet's a great example. I say TCPIP as well. Both are enabling technologies that are standardized, or actually started as de facto standards. They weren't necessarily bona fide standards. They emerged when people rallied around them. Those de facto standards, emerge and become a catalyst point for people to build on top of and around. Remember, there's still a lower level below the stack on ethernet. So you had, you know, physical data link layer in the OSI model, the grandfather of all stacks. That really changed, I think, 20 years of growth and innovation. I think Kubernetes is, exactly right, Justin, it's exactly your point. I see that as well, that it's not so much Kubernetes is going to be the be all end all. It's what it enables, and I think the innovations on top of Kubernetes, and underneath Kubernetes, take the holy trinity, I've been saying this on theCUBE now for the past year, the holy trinity of infrastructure and IT is storage compute networking, and those things are now being repurposed in a way that is highly scalable, dynamic, and resourceful for a lot of things. AI is a great example, everyone talks about AI, but storage policy, the knobs in Kubernetes can manage, and Google saying the guys of Kubernetes. That's one of the most underutilized aspects of Kubernetes, is the networking guys managing the knobs from below, and then app guys with servers messing maybe on the top. This is just an absolute growth engine, and the comparison to Amazon is similar, because Andy Jassy talks about builders, the right tool for the job. This is essentially the same mantra. I mean, this is tools, platforms. >> It's very similar, but with one very important difference, and around the money side of things. You don't have this massive behemoth which is going to come in, and one year you're on the keynote, and the next year we just announced a product, which completely killed your business. It's open source. That's not really going to happen. So you've got that common core of things, where there's no real competitive advantage on this stuff. So that's, you know, Linux, where's the competitive advantage on a kernel? There isn't one. So open source makes great sense for that kind of core of things that you then build upon, and then all the money is in all the innovation, all the value add that goes on top of that, and that makes a huge amount of sense to have an open source show for that. >> And I think, Stu, one of the things that we always talk about, networking in cloud, I think the concept of cloud is going to be old hat. You heard it here first on theCUBE. Because cloud is Amazon, cloud is a set of resources. When we start thinking about IoT at the edge, when you talk about moving compute to the edge, you're going to start to see mesh networks, peer to peer, and add a new kind of platform configurations that isn't necessarily cloud. It's a new thing. It's a platform, open platform, and there's going to be some incentives that are going to be designed for startups, that's economically beneficial to the new kinds of things, versus the economic incentives that Amazon might not have, to do things. So I think we're going to see emergence of new stuff. I would still say that cloud is a state of mind, it's not a location. And we here, it's CloudNativeCon. It's not just KubeCon. It's about doing things in a cloud native way, and that, like you say, it doesn't matter where it is or how it communicates together, but it's the way you operate it, it's the way it actually works in practice. It's not so much of, oh, we're going to build it here and we're going to put it in that cloud, or that cloud, or that cloud. >> And I think we've had some real clarity as to what that future of multi cloud looks like, 'cause it's not one massive cloud everywhere, it's not, oh, my applications spanning all over the place. It's we're working to solve that really tough problem of distributed architectures, and giving us ways that I shouldn't have to think about where I am spinning that up, or if I need to change vendor, not necessarily portability, you still do have some lock in, because Kubernetes is not the full stack, it's a piece of the overall platform, and while there's 75 different versions here that are all compliant, I should be able to move between them, but the devil's in the details, and there's lots of stuff that goes on top. >> Let's talk about multi cloud for a second. 'Cause you mentioned COMDEX, you talked about ethernet. At that time, during those big revolutions, the word multi-vendor was a big buzz word. Multi-vendor was like the basis of COMDEX. We all got to play together. Multi-vendor meant choice. Today, multi cloud is just a modern version of multi-vendor. >> Exactly, it's multi-vendor, and that's what enterprises want. Enterprises are a bit wary now. We hear lots of conversation about lock in, and that comes up a lot, and it's a real thing. Enterprises are concerned, they don't want to bet on one company, and then find out that actually, it's technology, it changes, things need to be moved around. We don't want to wake up in five, six years, and then suddenly find, oh my god, I can't change anything because I'm locked into this one vendor. >> So, Justin, they say they want multi-vendor. When it came to networking, I spent years working on interoperability, and plug tests, and all these things, and at the end of the day, it was way better to get my standards plus with a single vendor than it was to try to loop them together, and then, oh, when I changed something, so hopefully the difference here is actually, we have loosely coupled services, we have APIs, so can we actually do multi-vendor, multi-cloud that doesn't stress out my team, and have, every time I want to make a change, or they make a change, it moves. The new cloud world should be, things change, you know, it changes upstream, and downstream, I get to use them. So, once again, we talk about the shiny nirvana of, oh, you know, it's serverless, and the old trinity of computer storage. I don't even need to worry about that, 'cause it'll just work, but wait, if something goes wrong, I've been talking to a bunch of vendors here, that actually, how do I get observability, and manageability, to be able to drill down, because things could still go wrong. >> Well, you heard Bloomberg, we had an end user come on, it's a very interesting point, and Dan Khan, from the executive director, well, Bloomberg's kind of a different case, but look at what Bloomberg does. The guy said to us, "I actually don't want to buy "these products and services. "I just want to pay them money "to be available to support me "when I need support." 'Cause Bloomberg has fully integrated all their support internally. I think that's a trend that we're going to see in the enterprise, where CIOs start building teams, real software chops. It might not be as big as Bloomberg, but the notion of, we're going to run our own stuff. We'll use management services where appropriate, but we're going to have a core software build strategy, and I can't wait. An SLA of four hour response time. I need like, minutes. >> And that's how, I think, where we don't have the answers yet. There are still a lot of questions that enterprises are trying to work out about how do I actually do that. So you mentioned Bloomberg, and I interviewed them a few months ago, wrote something in Forbes about them. They are a special case in that they have chosen that we're going to invest in this technology so that we have people on staff, in our company, who understand Kubernetes. Now, that's not a choice that every enterprise is going to make, but they decided that actually, this technology, this software is so important to our business, to where we get all the value for our business that we need to invest in that technology. And I think a lot of enterprises are realizing that, actually, outsourcing everything to one vendor, and then giving all of your innovation engine to someone else, and they're realizing that was a mistake. Now, they're trying to figure out, okay, what do we bring in house, what do we do ourselves, what do we get vendors to do, which technologies do we use for what particular value creation, and that complexity, that decision making process, that's what we haven't quite worked out yet, and that's where I think there's a lot of value in the ecosystem, with service providers who can provide advice on here is how you should do it, based on what you need to do. >> That's a great point. Stu, I want you to comment on that. Let's refine this for a second, 'cause the people who actually spend the money, or the people re-imagining IT infrastructure, IT applications. The CIO, I've interviewed the VP of Advanced Technology at Proctor and Gamble, and he told me, when he came in, he came from Coca Cola, he's been an old IT guy, he says, look, we outsourced everything to the point where we're anemic. We got a couple of storage guys, they're pushing buttons, they're jumping on, calling the vendors, they outsource everything. He says they had no ability to create a competitive advantage for the business, and what they moved quickly to was to bring talent in to be builders, to be in house. So now you have that trend happening in the modern CIO, CXO kind of roles. Now you have to say, okay, I got teams here. How do I get the investments deployed, how do I go to this ecosystem here with all these tools, all these capabilities, how do I invest, how do I build out. >> Look, I think Kelsey Hightower had a great point when we interviewed him this week. It is a huge opportunity for managed services, because like we talked about, the Amazon, or even the ecosystem, how do I keep up with all of this, and the answer is, you don't. You need to be able to have people, whether it's system integrators, or partners that are going to help that. You know, look, Amazon gets criticized for not being deeper in open source. Well, they use a lot of open source and they deliver those services, and they make it easy. Frictionless is something we talked about for many years as being the thing. The enterprise wants to be able to spend money and just go do it, because they don't have a team to pitch these. Even somebody like Bloomberg, or some of these really big companies I love, talking, you've got Apple, and Nordstrom, and some really interesting, oh, by the way, and they're all hiring. Whether or not they're actually using Kubernetes, they cannot confirm or deny, but you know, we know how that goes. >> Hold on, first, let's unpack the end user piece here, okay? Amazon is pushing 5,000 reference-able customers. Okay, it's not about the Amazon question. End users here, how many reference-able customers are here? What are they actually, Uber's here, they're hiring. They might have some Kubernetes stuff in the background. Sure, they probably do. But actually, what does the end user adoption really look like? I mean... >> It's still early, but again, a difference between this show and Amazon re:Invent. How many end customers have a booth at re:Invent? Compared to here, where we have people, end customers who are here mostly to try to hire talent. They have booths. >> Kudos to the CNCF. They've got 80 end users participating. There are a lot of users here. This is not the vendor fest that we see at some shows when they get big. I hear they're not seeking the vendors. The vendors that I talked to were happy because they are the users here, and they're excited. Before we go, John, there's a couple kinks in the armors and things we need to worry about. The two, if I look at service meshes, and I look at serverless as a huge threat. One of the things I wanted to look at coming in was I'd heard a lot of talk about Knative, and I think Knative is great, but it is not, you know, Lambda is the defacto standard, just like S3 was before. Lambda is this, and Knative has absolutely nothing to do with Lambda and does not connect with it. It is the difference between serverless and functions, and so, all the AWS functions and all the Azure functions have nothing to do with Knative. For the people that looked at OpenWhisk and all these other options, Knative seems a good way to pull, they've done a re-spin of what's happening there, and it's moving things down the line. Once again, as Kelsey said, if we look at serverless as a spectrum, which many of the hardcore serverless people will debate and argue, and be like, that's not real, serverless, well, just like we said, there is only one real cloud, and it was Amazon. We know that's not the case. It will be a spectrum, we want to meet customers where they are. So, Knative, good news, but the elephant in the room is that AWS and Azure are where all of the serverless really happens, and therefore, there is a big air gap between them. Justin, service mesh is something I know you've been looking at. Give it to us the good, bad, and the ugly. >> Service mesh is really, really early. So, we're at that part where there's a diversity of innovation going on. There's about 12, or at least 12 different companies here at the show, who are all doing something with service mesh. They're all trying to sell you a different solution. This is what happens with technology. A new technology gets created, and we have this flurry of all these startups, who are all trying different things. And this is the destructive force of capitalism. Not all of them are going to succeed, but we have to have them all out there in the market, because at the moment, it's too early to figure out, okay, well, it's definitely going to be that one. If we knew that one, then I'd be putting all of my money behind that one company today. >> Last year, Justin, all the talk was about SDO. I've heard a lot of talk about SDO, but it hasn't all been good. >> No, that's the thing. So we've had a year now, and last year was definitely, hey, SDO is like, the service mesh. Like, not so much. Envoy seems to be the common ground that people are actively using. That's what most people are building on top of. So it looks like Envoy's going to be that underlayer of everything else. But in terms of how you actually use service mesh, it's still very early, and people are trying to figure out how to do I use this quite complex technology in practice? And as people use it more, as we get more adoption, then we'll start to see that one or two of the methods and the approaches will win out over all of the others, and that's where we can expect to see, well, I have an anointed winner. That will then win out, because it's useful, because it's functional, because end users want to do it that way. >> And Envoy, by the way, had traction. They had a sold out EnvoyCon. On the first day, 350 people, Lyft is driving that, and they're just heads down, solving problems. I think that seems to be the formula for some of the successful products, where you take away all the window dressing and the hype. It comes down to who's solving what problems. >> And that's the thing with open source. You can't just throw a whole bunch of marketing dollars at it to make it succeed. If end users don't like the code, and they don't use it, then it won't work. >> John, I want you to give us the word on the open source business model. We watched in the last year, Red Hat bought CoreOS for 250 million, then they were acquired by IBM for 34 billion, pending final, and all that stuff and everything, and then, reading through the VMware, SCC filing $550 million for Heptio. You know, big, big dollars, so, is open source just getting a lot of customers, and they get acquired by the big guys? What's the take? >> I think it's interesting. First of all, Red Hat might not like what I'm about to say, but I'll just say it. I think there was a steal with CoreOS. If you look at what Heptio got for valuation, CoreOS was an absolute steal. The team was phenomenal, they were doing some amazing work. At that time of the acquisition, the debate of how to make money dominated versus just getting behind the technology, and I think CoreOS was a fantastic team, and they had the right tracking. You can see what's happening now with now part of the Red Hat. So, Red Hat got a massive lift on that, so I think, kudos to Red Hat for taking that up the table at that time. Great acquisition, I think that helped them propel, and now show that to IBM that there's real value there. Now, I think open source as a business model is interesting because it's changing, right? You now have a new generation of builders and developers coming in. Open source has to evolve, and I think the CNCF I think is a cutting edge experiment or Petri dish of how to stay true to open source principles, and still nurture and enable a downstream impact for the commercialization. I think it's an opportunity, but it's also one of their biggest challenges, because if this is COMDEX, COMDEX is an open source. It's hawking wares, right? So it's a different business model. So, this is going to be a very interesting test in the industry to see how the current open source momentum, which is looking really strong right now, how that can interplay with commercialization, because certainly, the money's there, the value's there, and if we can get these value spots identified, the white spaces for startups, and let the big guys also play as well, it's going to be a very interesting landscape, it's certainly dynamic. I don't have the answers, but my gut's telling me that a whole new level of sets of services and platforms are going to be composed around these services, and I think it's all going to be driven by open source, that's clear. How it shapes out, valuations and the talent buys, the momentum, market buy, we'll be watching, I don't know. >> Yeah, it's exciting times. We're here at the beginnings of what I hope is going to be this massive new ecosystem, and we get to watch it grow, we get to watch it change. It's a great place to be. >> All I can say, Stu, is I wish I was 25 years old again, right now, because for young entrepreneurs, and young tech folks, this is probably one of the most exciting times, because you have real computer science, and dormant computer science, now re-energized with cloud computing scale. It's just like-- >> John, they don't appreciate what they had, you know. They don't know what it was like to have a computer that wasn't actually connected to things, let alone what we had. >> I used to build my own graphics libraries, I used to walk to school in bare feet in the snow. It's so hard. It's so easy now. >> Creating ones and zeroes-- >> Where's my token ring? >> Creating ones and zeroes by banging rocks together. >> It's so easy now. You guys got it made. You have no idea. Great stuff, Stu, this is great analysis, and I think, again, KubeCon is the beginning, with Cloud Native, this is just a small signal, I think. I think there's going to be a COMDEX moment soon, unless this thing just blows up, which I don't think is going to happen. >> I mean, look, last thing, John, I want to big thank to the Linux Foundation, CNCF, for working with us. We've been neighbors in the early days, great partnership, this community. They've got a great media section. All of friends over here, that are creating a lot of con, working really hard. The amount of work that goes through, and as we had the people from CNCF talking. They've got a core team, but it's people that volunteer, and we were a community too, and all our sponsors, John. >> Yeah, thanks to the community, and again, one more final point is that, this market, Justin, as you know, we all cover it, is in a learning mode. There's a lot of education oriented stuff that people are interested in. You've got Alex Williams over at New Stack, DevOps.com, TFiR over there, everyone's up in media out there. There is a thirst for content, there's a thirst for community learning. The sessions are packed. I mean, the hallways are interesting. You see people huddling, and I overhear the conversations. They're not talking about what party to go to, they're talking about how to implement a Kubernetes cluster, so this, really people working on and off the court here, so to speak. So, it's been great coverage. So, day three, breaking it down. I'm John Furrier, Justin Warren, Stu Miniman, back with more coverage, day three, after the short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Seattle,Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon andCloudNativeCon North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone,live Cube coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon2018 in Seattle. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman hosting three days of coverage. Wall to wall, 8,000 people,double from last year, North America, expanding intoChina, Europe, everywhere. The CNCF is expanding, so is Kubernetes. The rise of Kubernetes has spawned the Cloud Native movement going mainstream that's ecosystem driven. We got a great guest here. Steven Bower, data andanalytics infrastructure lead at Bloomberg, featuredthem on siliconangle.com in one of our special reportsand user using Kubernetes and the variety of Cloud Native. Steven welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on,award winning end user, given all the end users,everyone's kind of award winning. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Congratulations. Bloomberg's known, we've covered you guys, great development team. You guys have a lot ofengineers at Bloomberg as well as being a media company on cable, Bloomberg terminal, everything else. You've got a lot of datascience, you've got a lot of engineers, you're building stuff. What's the focus on Kubernetes? Where are you using it? How are you contributing? What's the dynamic? Why are you winning with Kubernetes? >> Sure, that's a good question. I think, well we're usingit all over the place in lots of different things. We have a huge engineeringteam that does all kinds of different things. So in the area that I manage,which is data and analytics infrastructure, we have been we basically managedatabases and search engines and all kinds of other tech like that. What we've ended uprealizing is that we built something that looks a lot like Kubernetes but doesn't work nearlyas well for all of those different systems, tomanage them at scale. You know, we're talkingthousands of instances of post cross and solar andall kinds of different things and having a singletool, or single platform which we can kind of levelup all of those things really makes a lot of sense in terms of not necessarily like cuttingcosts and things like that 'cause that's actuallynot as interesting to me as actually allowing theteams that manage those things to actually contribute to those projects, contribute to solar or postcross and stuff like that and free them from havingto spend a lot of time managing infrastructure. >> Tim Hopkins said, itwas just on theCUBE here before you came on,from Google, one of the co-leads on Kubernetesat gkegoogles@cloud. He said something interesting. I want to get your reaction to this. One of the benefits of Kubernetesis to give the confidence that deployments are going to be reliable and that confidence gets a flywheel and then people startshipping more as a matter of course of the business,not like oh my God we got to push a new code,oh my God, fingers crossed, press the button. The old model was fingers cross, go, QA, no, no, confidence, theconfidence and the iteration. Is that where you'reseeing the value, too? Does that relate to you? Does that make sense to you?Does that resonate with you? >> Yeah, it definitely does. A lot of the models thatwe're trying to move towards are really like declarative model of both how we develop software andthen how we deploy software and then how we manage it in production. Kubernetes offers that, thatecosystem across the board. That's been really, trying to think of a great way to put this. Being able to have that tooland being able to do that and the repeatability. In the world that I livein, everything we do we don't do one of it,we do, I think we run something like 2000 solar clusters. So all we're doing all daylong is just stamping out the same thing over and overagain and if I can build one system that doesthat very, really cleanly and simply and then I canuse that same system for running post tests orrunning something else that gives us the confidenceand we can test it, we can run it on our laptops. Our developers can developand do all that kind of stuff and it works the same everywherethey go and we can just rinse, lather, repeat kind of. >> So Steve, step back for a second. Your infrastructure, is thisall Bloomberg Data Center's? How does cloud fit into the discussion? >> Yeah, I mean, we dohave some infrastructure running in the cloud but primarily it's all on prem and data center. In my world it's all onmetal because we have all these data systemsthat need direct access to SSDs and MME andall this kind of stuff. >> Can you give us, withoutsharing state secrets, a little bit of the scaleof what you're doing? I love data's at the centerof what you're doing there. We can all understand howimportant data is to your business but talk aboutwhat the requirements are that why you have some special requirements that thetypical enterprise wouldn't. >> Sure, I think, youcan look at Bloomberg as a media company, wehave news, all that stuff. We obviously have the Bloomberg terminal and really what drives that terminal, it's all kinds of software but in the end it's data, right, andit's all kinds of data. What is that definition,big data and all these whatever stuff that everyonewas pitching five years ago. We have all of those problems. We have data that is movingat millions of ticks a second. We have enormous data sets. We have really complex data sets like people scanning courtfilings from tiny little courts all around thecountry and sending that data in and we have tonormalize that and put it in. So all these crazy differenttypes of information. They are both demanding interms of the complexities of parsing data and puttingthem and structuring them into those systems as wellas the scale so we have some pretty enormous andhigh performance systems that require us and kindof drive us to that need for metal and very focused on performance in all different aspects. >> Great, wonder, give us your engagement with this ecosystem here. One of the big questionscoming in is okay, Kubernetes, the thingwe here from the CNTF is well, it's getting kind of boring. I don't know that I agree with the term. I understand they'resaying it's becoming mature and therefore there's less drama around it which is good but this ecosystemis anything but boring. You ask a user like yourself, you've got complex requirements. There's more than 30different projects a year. What do you use out of here? What do you build yourself? What do you contribute to? How do you consideropen-source contributions? It's a big nut and wedon't have a ton of time but if you could scratch thesurface on some of those. >> I think the number onelesson that I've learned from this ecosystem isthat it's moving so rapidly that when we decide tobuild something on our own we have a talk tomorrow aboutour data science platform which we built about ayear-and-a-half, two-years ago. By the time we were ready to talk about it and everything like that,you have all the other different technologiesthat have moved forward. So it made us realize thatif we're going to start something internally,a new project, either A we should go look and seewhat's out there and contribute to that or we should juststart it in open source to begin with rather thanthat oh, let's build it and then we'll open source it. >> Chasing your tail kind of thing. >> Yeah, it's like we have tobecome part of the ecosystem in our entirety. >> That brings up a good question. I want to ask you this incontext of thinking about your peers that mightnot be as progressive as Bloomberg on the tech side. You guys certainly do a greatjob and it's well documented. Classic IT shop, racking andstacking servers and boxes and now we got the wholedigital transformation thing going on, same old, same old but now, 2019, real impact. The investments they'remaking on how to change their IT, their data isnow in front of them. They have to deal with them. This is right front andcenter 'cause companies are realizing they'regoing to go out of business if they don't actually make the adoption 'cause the data's super valuable. So how do you see the Kubernetesand the CNC of ecosystem changing the investment practices of a classic enterprise IT? You know, if your peerscalled you and said hey Steven, hey help me out,what's the secret playbook? Where do I go? I don't want to get, Igot to make some changes. What do they change? What's the impact of theinvestment with Kubernetes? What's the end game? What's the real impact? >> I think, it's a toughthing, right, 'cause Bloomberg is really notlike your typical IT shop. We are a software company at heart and so that makes us alittle bit different. When I talk to other people,I say that in the sense that not a lot of companiescan afford to decide to make a project open-- >> 'cause they outsource everything. >> Right, outsource it. Well, I mean-- >> They outsource everything. >> That's actually a huge change though. We're not sitting heretalking about hundreds of commercial products that are owned by a small handful of vendorsthat are multi-million dollar investments foreverything we're doing. We're talking about lotsof little tiny companies that have products thatare really, really valuable that are in the open sourceworld that we can get our hands on and startworking with before we even make a decision about talkingabout support or whatever. There's all kinds of technologies that, I walk into this room andthese are like friends all around 'cause we'veworked with all their software and we're like hey, theseguys have a company now. This was just a GitHubrepo a couple years ago and I think that that's abig change and embracing that, that's probablyreally hard for your typical kind of IT shop where theywant to have this clear line of I can call techsupport and get someone on the phone and that's like the main-- >> The classic old software model but it's changed. >> So Steve, one of thethings we're trying to get some insight on here isit's not just running Kubernetes in production,it's what am I doing with it. How does that change my business? I understand ML is a big pieceof what you're doing there. Give us some insight as to how does this transform your business? Does it transform your business? >> Specifically on the MLside and we'll talk about this actually that's kind of thefocus of our talk tomorrow so I don't want to stealtheir thunder too much but a lot of it was really about looking at okay, how did ML, deep ML people work? How did they want to work? If you ask an ML personwhat they really want they want an infinitely scalable cluster that it's just theirs and they want to an assay to manage all theinfrastructure for them and a data engineer to managecleaning up all the data and all these things and they wanted that all to themselves and not haveto share it with anyone else. So a lot of what we try tofigure out is how we can actually deliver that to themand it really has transformed. Once people realize that onour platform they had access to an enormous pool of GPUs,it went from oh, I want to work on my box and can you giveme GPUs on my one little box to wow, I can dohyper-parameter tuning across hundreds of GPUs overnight or during the day or whatever their needs are. It really unlocked people's capabilities and they're actuallylike, they went from being skeptical of a systemthat they had to share and things like that 'causeit actually just works and that's really the-- >> That's really thedopamine effect for them. They can see value withouthaving to go through the slogging of the configurationsand the normal stuff >> Yeah, exactly.>> that they had to do. >> Authentication. >> So we've been hearingthreads of the CICD pipeline is a big benefit,which you're kind of seeing as well but whatwe're also seeing people building below Kubernetes seeing storage and networking getting better. How do you see that holistically? Are you seeing is thenetwork more performant, that notion of programmabilitybecomes now part of it, automation, it's software. Everyone has to build software. In fact, I talked to theVP of Technology Innovation at Proctor and Gamble andhe's saying hey, we outsourced everything, I got to start hiring software so maybe not as big asBloomberg but the trend is let's get more software people on board but they still got networks,they still got storage, they still got the gear. What's the impact, the under-the-hood? >> Yeah, I think it'scomplex because you typically have these structures thatare built inside companies where you have a networkingteam and you have an infrastructure, ahardware team and whatever. One of the SREs on my team the other day, he was like, do you thinkwe can talk to the network team about puttingsoftware on their switches? That's a really interestingquestion to start asking and he actually had areally good use case. That makes a lot of sense, maybewe should think about that. And then dealing with, there'sobviously the technology aspect of that but there's also skillsets. Someone that's been workingwith a bunch of switches for a bunch of years isn'tnecessarily a programmer, used to a typical CICDprocess and things like that. >> On the flip side, I thinkthat's cool to recognize the networking guy butwe heard Tim Hopkins say there's a lot of policyknobs in Kubernetes that the networking guyscould potentially take advantage of so it mightwork the other way. Are the network guys looking at Kubernetes saying hey, or are theynot yet that sophisticated but they would love, they'd love policy. Network guys write policy. Wouldn't you want-- >> Yeah, yeah, oh absolutely. It's actually one of thebiggest draws of using Kubernetes in our ecosystem. We've made heavy use ofapplying network policy down to the workload level which means that from a securityperspective, if I know that I'm transmittingdata between two different places and I've only openedup assets for that one application, for thatone particular use case, rather than saying well,I know that I'm running the same workload on thesame box and I got to open it up for everyoneon that box but maybe someone might use thatthing but maybe they won't and like worrying about stuff like that, it's like no, I can runa workload and I know that these are the only two end points that it can talk to. >> Oh, that's a relief. That's like, hey, we're done. >> So for them this is their panacea. I know exactly whatworkloads are doing exactly what on the network andwhat they're capable of so that's been-- >> That's real progress. That's progress. >> Oh, it's huge progress, yeah. And we've been able todo things that we used to not be able to do for years. >> Talk about the-- >> I just had a quicklittle question there. You mentioned you've gotten SREs. When did you pick that up asa term that you called there and how do you see if you talk a little bit to the skill set and the jobs of peoplethat you have inside. >> Bloomberg's a big companyso the terminology of it and what actuallyindividual teams are doing is probably a little bitvaried across the organization. It's been something that'scome in over probably the last two to three years at Bloomberg. In my organization, it wasactually really interesting 'cause when I started off with, you know, you read the Google book and whatever. What I did is I wentto the guys on my team that were going to becomethe SREs for the organization and I had them write thismanifesto about how we should build and deploy and managesoftware and I didn't tell them necessarily up front thatthis is what was going to happen but when they finishedwriting that and agreed that this is how thingsshould work and they argued for a while, I said, okay,now go build all the tooling to make this easy forpeople to do, all right. And that's what we, and thenthey've just been building off their tooling. Turns out when you're workingwith a lot of the tools and the CNTF and then with Kubernetes, that's actually not that hard. There's lots of thingsthere that are just easy when you get to that place and so that's the kind of journey we'vebeen on to really try to build that infrastructure andthey've done a good job. The engineers downstream of them the speed that they're able to develop and the assurance that there was a CVE forKubernetes two weeks ago and we patched it theafternoon the CVE came out. Being able to do that in anysort of company of scale is I've worked a lot ofbanking and stuff like that in my past and it's unheard of to be able to deploy things in that speed. >> And that's really, Imean this is the goodness of clouds, the goodnessof having that kind of consistency operationally. It's funny you use SRE,that's a Google term. It's a great term andyou've got developers, you got operations kindof working together now. That's the magic. Well Steven, thank you so much for sharing this great insight on theCUBE. Certainly great valuefor the folks watching. Lot of traction, a lot ofpeople, end users contributing and consuming Kubernetes,building around it. Great trend, it's really fun to watch. A lot of composable servicesup and down the stack so congratulations. Steve Bower, Data andAnalytics Infrastructure Lead at Bloomberg. This is theCUBE bringingyou all the action, sharing the data here at KubeCon. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back withmore after this short break. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering, Boomi World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live Cube coverage here in Las Vegas, the Wynn Hotel for Dell Boomi World 18. So, exclusive coverage. We're here all day. Wall to wall coverage covering the impact of cloud native to application developers and owners and for businesses. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin here. We're here with Michael Dell. 13th time on the Cube. He's the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies. Continuing to defy logic. Growing leaps and bounds. Continuing to do more in the new era of IT and computing. Mike, great to see you. Thanks for coming. >> Great to be with you. Lisa, John, always fun. And here at Boomi World it's really exciting to see the ecosystem continue to grow. As people try to connect everything together Boomi is right there. Incredible business last quarter. Booking growth, 80%, 7500 customers. I still can't find a customer that doesn't need Boomi. The team continues to evolve what the capabilities. We've just had a great show here. 1000 customers showed up. Lot's of great customer stories about how they're integrating all their apps and data together. With the tsunami of data that is coming, it just gets more and more important and interesting and fun. >> You know, you mentioned on the key note stage with CEO Boomi, talking about some performance numbers that you always throw out, server growth. Continuing to grow, okay. The pundants were saying oh servers, that's cloud server-less. You still need compute, networking and storage but they do change with the cloud and SaaS has proven that business model of as a service is key. Boomi's got this little secret weapon around the unified platform that integrates a lot of these traditional components that is still going to be foundational but yet set up the next wave around AI, Edge, data tsunami that you mentioned. This is a key variable in the architectural shift. Can you talk about how you see that playing out? Because you got a couple big pieces on the chess board. VMWare, the continuous Dell Technologies portfolio kind of as the table stakes. This is kind of interesting new architecture. Explain how you see that. >> Pivotal, Dell EMC, VMWare. >> So a lot of pieces. >> Right. >> How does Boomi play into that? Because if it does be a glue layer if you will for lack of a better word, it can be very powerful. >> Yeah, so the challenge is when you go to Software as a Service, how do you connect the things together? Now, connecting 1 or 2 together is pretty straight forward. But when you start having 50 or 100 of these things, and then you've got on premise systems and now you want to have actions like an employee does something and based on their roll then something else happens, you have work flow. And then you get this, you go from a couple billion PCs to 5 billion smart phones to 100s of billions of connected things out there with this explosion in the edge. How you integrate and connect everything together with work flow and do it securely is super, super important. So we're seeing just an explosion of use cases. There was some great examples from a city digitizing and being able to detect leaks and when traffic lights aren't working. The used cases are pretty unlimited and Boomi and Pivitol play sort of at the top layer for us so the applications and integrating all the data and allowing customers to express their competitive advantage with software and data and AI and machine learning. And then of course we've got VM Ware to virtualize everything from the data center to the network and beyond. With NSX, what we're doing with NFE and software to fine win. And then of course we're the initial infrastructure company. Absolute number 1 in all aspects of the data center. And growing much faster than any of the competitors. >> And I want to also get your thoughts on VM Ware announced up to this morning, actually Barcelona time for VM Ware Europe, the acquisition of Heptio. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, Pat Kelson said in VM World, we're going in, we're going to make Kubernetes the dial tone. This is a key architectural component around orchestration. Containers certainly everyone knows, that's been standardized. People love containers. They're using them. As applications need to be more efficiently built out, out of the Boomi's value proposition, Kubernetes and these cloud native things are super important. What's your view on that? Great acquisitions, very young company? Not 34 billion dollars for a Red Hat like IBM bought but a small tuck in. How important is that trend for you? >> Well, think about what we've done with Pivitol and VM Ware together with the Pivitol container service and now adding Heptio with 2 of the 3 founders of the whole Kubernetes movement. We're going to be making Kubernetes just part of the dial tone of vSpheres. So for virtually all the customers out there, 600000 of them that use vSphere, it'll just be super easy to now have Kubernetes containers built into their vSphere environment. That's the vision. We've got a great team working on it across VM Ware and Pivitol and now the Heptio team. Adding to it. We're super pumped about all this. >> If your friend asked you at a party this weekend, hey Michael, why is Kubernetes important? What do you say to that? >> I guess it would depend on how much they know about this. >> They're a business owner responsible for application development. >> Yeah. >> They are owning to transform their organization. They realize clouds going to be a part of it. They here Kubernetes really popular, it's trending. But it's a technology. A lot of people are now getting this for the first time and seeing it as the early dopples have shown it. They try to want to know the impact and why it's important. Why is Kubernetes important as you start to get into this orchestration of apps and work loads across clouds. Why is it important? >> I think people don't want to get locked in to a particular place when it comes to their infrastructure. Kubernetes has clearly won the battle in terms of being able to be that abstraction layer. That's the simple thing that is super exciting. When it sort of went from cloud to hybrid cloud to multi cloud, people realized they wanted a 2 way street where they could move things back and forth. And now with the edge, they want to move it to the edge. With the distributed core. This explosion in data, this dat tsunami really requires a whole new set of tools in terms of the software infrastructure to be able to make it all work. >> So transformation is ... You're talking about Dell Technologies now. 34 years later you have 7 corporations under that. Done a lot to keep those brands, as they're very valuable. Dell Boomi as a business unit. Transformation is essential and Dell Boomi wants to be the transformation partner. It's also incredibly difficult. IT transformation. Digital, security, workforce. Dell Boomi works and Dell Technologies with a lot of large enterprise organizations that are still probably fairly not as well connected as they should be to find new value, new business dreams. How do you talk with customers, large enterprises that need to transform to stay competitive? Where do they start? And how dose the Dell transformation story in and of itself help those customers feel confident in what Dell Technologies can deliver? >> Right, well first thing I'd say is we actually work with customers of all sizes. We have an enormous business with small and medium and large customers. We're number 1 across the whole spectrum. We serve 99% of the Fortune 500. Since your question is about those types. They're looking at the digital transformation and figuring out this is really not an IT project. It's about technology becoming pervasive in everything that they're doing. From sells to marketing, to product creation to their whole fundamental strategy. So then it shows up in the office of the CEO and business line executives and they're having to reimagine. And so they look for a partner and Dell Technologies is very unique. 2 years and 2 months ago we put together all these companies and it's been fabulous. We've been growing double digits consistently and the response has been great because we can deliver a complete set of capabilities. Now you're right, change management, and how do I do it in my company, that's a big deal. So they're pulling on us to bring them more of a ... The don't want us to show up with a bunch of parts and drop em off. They want us to actually build them a solution that is specific to their needs. Help them implement it. In many cases, run it for them. So we do much of that ourselves with our own services organization. 60000 plus people in our services organization. And of course we have the best, all the great SIs out there that are helping customers implement and run and manage like I said, 99% of the Fortune 500. We're right there with them in this digital transformation. Of course we do the IT, the workforce, the PCs and of course security. Unbelievably important. Your whole brand trust is all based on that so we wrap the whole thing with security and no company has the breath that we have. I think we've kind of won the hearts and minds of the decision makers because of the capabilities that we have. Not that we take it for granted. We have to go earn that trust every single day. We have unbelievably talented people in our company. Over 20000 engineers. Scientists, PHDs. About 90% of them are software engineers. This is a very different company than it was 5 or 10 years ago. We're having a blast. It's a rocket ship, so. >> I had a chance to interview an IT leader and his name is Allen Bean. He's the global CTO and head of IT innovation at Proctor and Gamble. He brought the cloud to Coca-Cola. Has had a career all in IT going back to DHL in the 90s and 80s. So we were talking and I asked him, does IT matter. And Dave Alampi always brings up the book by Nick Carr. And we always talk about it. >> Love it. Such a fun topper, yeah. >> And so he says, quote, at that time some people thought it didn't matter, everyone was kind of complaining, but he says it does matter. It's a competitive advantage. And over the decades IT was outsourced. And now people are trying to bring that back in and make it a competitive advantage. This is now ... It's a mandate basically. So as people who have been kind of anemic with IT, they've got people running stuff but eventually outsource all the value. They got to bring that value in. Cloud is that opportunity. How do you respond to the leaders out there trying to figure this out. What are the keys to success around bringing back the competitive advantage and using the cloud for things that aren't core to the core competency but getting that core competency nailed down. What's your vision. >> Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's all about understanding what is your competitive differentiation and advantage as a business. And if you give that away to somebody else, you're going to be out of business in not too much time. Packers applications are great for things that aren't differentiated. But if you actually do something that's unique and valuable and special and you can't express that in software with your own data, you're going to have a problem, right? This is what companies are figuring out. This is what we're doing with Pivitol and Boomi allowing companies to build all this together. And look I think as it relates to cloud, customers have figured out it's multi cloud, right? It's a workload dependent discussion. Some workloads are great in the public cloud but in many cases, not so much, right? As we've modernized and automated the infrastructure we have customers that tell us hey our private cloud for our predictable workload, which is 90%, is 5, 6 times less expensive than AWS. We're building these converge, hyper converge, like the fast track to the automated modernized infrastructure. And look, you can decide. But we're seeing customers that want to move things back and forth and we're seeing a bit of a boomerang. Where customers have said oh everything you upload to the cloud, and no, not everything. >> And the digital transformation really is making IT a competitive advantage. So I had a long ranging interview. It's up on YouTube. I asked him a final question. I always said, okay, so you know, he's transforming Proctor and Gamble. I said okay, as you look ads and all those things what's the next mountain that you're going to climb? You're an IT pro, you said in the agenda. And I'll read you the quote. I want to get your reaction. He said, "I think we're looking forward. Latency is still an issue. We have to find ways to defeat latency and we're not going to do it through basic physics, we're going to have to change out business models, change our technology, distribution, change everything that we're doing. Consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and machine learning right at the point when they want it." So this is his next mountain. This is kind of what you were talking about on the stage here at the Dell Boomi event around the impact of AI and data. What's your reaction to that quote? >> Well to me this is all about the edge and 5G coming around the corner. And you look at all the big telcos. They're all piling in on 5G because it's 1000 times faster and 1000 times less latency. That's going to be a big turbo charge. The rocket ship. And it will just create an explosion in data and compute on the edge. And a lot of it's going to stay on the edge. Because you'll have these edge devices talking to each other. A whole new class of applications and capabilities because of that. That's super exciting. We're already seeing it with this build out of distributed core. And that's why we see so much growth in the data center business. >> So Michael, Dell Boomi, if you look at Boomi for a second, was named by the Gartner Magic Quadrant of 2018 as a leader in Ipads. Today they talked about ... >> Again, I think 6th or 7th year in a row. It's been there for quite some time. >> An established leader in an established market. But today they were talking about, hey we want to change the, we want to redefine the I in Ipads to intelligence. How is Dell Technologies and Boomi particularly starting to leverage terra bites and terra bites of customer meta data to make your systems smarter? To enable businesses to truly connect. Prim, edge devices as things continue to get more distributed and data becomes more critical? >> Yeah, so, the key to AI and all of its variance of machine learning, deep learning neural network is the data. The data is the fuel for the rocket ship of AI. And the challenge is, if you have your data spread out in 100 softwares of service providers and 3 public clouds and here and there and where's all your data? We don't really know. How do you fuel the rocket? It becomes a very difficult problem. This is the problem that we're beginning to address for our customers. We're going to have an event all about AI coming up I think next week. Where we're going to be talking much more about this. We got a number of offerings that we're rolling out. We've been helping customers for years build their data lakes and curate the data. And of course Pivitol and Boomi are essential to how you bring all of this together and make sense of it. Because if you just have all the data but you can't actually use it. If you're not already using AI and it's variance to improve your products and services, you're doing it wrong. We've identified over 450 projects just within Dell Technologies internally. As I mentioned on stage, we've sold about 700 million computers since I started in my dorm room. We have enormous telemetry data. Imagine, if you will, that something doesn't work exactly the way it's supposed to. Okay? What's the chance that has never happened before? >> Zero. >> The answers almost zero, right? Our job is to take all this data that we have, use all this intelligence and actually prevent it from happening. So we're building all kinds of intelligence and AI and preventative technology into all of our solutions from the data center to the desk top to the edge, to the multi cloud so that all these systems are just self healing and auto magically way more reliable. >> Auto magically, I like that. It just sounds like what you're saying is Dell Technologies articulating it's value and it's differentiation because you're using that data. >> You have to. >> To identify insight, to take action immediately. >> And to your point about the big companies, they have an advantage but it's a bit of a time value expiring advantage. They have the data that the new entrance don't have. >> Right. >> But they have to activate it quickly with this new computer science or else they'll be dinosaurs, right? Nobody wants to be a dinosaur. >> Michael, what's the business drivers, and you talk to customers all the time, that they're seeing and that matter most to them. Is it agility, is it transform the customer employee experience, compliant security? How would you view the pattern around the most important business driver for your customers that are trying to put the business transformation together with digital. Could you comment just anecdotally what you see? >> I think every customer is a little bit different in their journey. Some customers, security is number 1. Because of the kind of business that they're in and it just has to be that way. For other customers it's how do I increase my speed to the solution. It used to be we need a new feature. We'll get it in a year or 2. How about never. Does never work for you? That's kind of the old IT. Now with agile development you've got, what we're doing with Pivotol cloud foundry, you've got companies implementing, these are giant companies. Biggest companies in the world. They're implementing new things like in 2 or 3 weeks. It's amazing how fast. Speed and as a chief executive, that's what you crave. How can I take this new requirement that I heard from the customer and turn it into a feature that I can go offer very, very quickly? That's what you want to be able to do. It's what we used to be able to do when we were little tiny cubs. How do you do it with 200000 people? >> I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you popularized early on in your career, the direct business model, you also had the just in time manufacturing kind of ethos of build it, build to order, really streamline efficiency. So I want to kind of take the leap to now a new generation with cloud native where you have workflows and efficiencies. You have integration. So in a way the customers are now going direct to their customers and wanting to compose and build solutions. As you said on stage, these are going to be new problems that not yet have been identified. New solutions. So that customers have to be what you did. They got to build their own. So they got to build their own, they got to have the suppliers, they got to have the code. How do you see customers being successful if they want to take that efficiency approach? Kind of be 5 nines if you will in this new modern era. Because this is the challenge that they have. They have to build their own. They need suppliers. They need you guys. How do you see the customers being successful in that scenario? >> Yeah, I think what they're trying to do is shrink the time from when at that point of customer interaction, they can use the data to make the service and the product better and if it's like this lengthy value chain with all these different intermediaries and it takes weeks or months or never, that's just way too slow. They want it to be like instantaneous. How do they create that direct relationship with their customers? I only had 1000 dollars when I started so we couldn't really afford much so each dollar you invest very carefully. We just kind of out of necessity came up with some ideas that ... >> You were efficient because you had to be. >> We didn't have any choice, right? >> So when we talk about integration, we talk about it's the foundation of digital transformation, we've talked about IT, security, workforce. One of the things that you mentioned earlier that I'd like to get your perspective on, a different view of transformation is cultural. An enterprise organization as you mentioned has a huge advantage of a tremendous wealth of data. With that amount of data and the need for speed as you just talked about, where, in your opinion, and your experience, is cultural transformation as an enabler of an enterprise to really be able to react that quickly to develop new products, new revenue strengths? >> Yeah, I think it's a big challenge. And a lot of customers struggle with change management. You never want a good crisis go to waste. We sort of grew up in the business where it was change or die, quick or dead. If you don't do it you're gone, right? This was just the way our business, this was just how we had to compete. It's what we grew up in. And I think what's happened is more and more businesses are that way now. It requires the business leaders to say hey friends, we've got a real challenge here and we've got to move faster. It is change or die, it's quick or dead, I think for all businesses because this is the fastest time ever but it's the slowest time relative to the future. It's just going to get faster and faster. If companies ... The only way you get good at change is to do it more frequently. And so if you've never changed anything for 80 years in your company and all the sudden you start trying to change, it's really hard. You just have to start. >> How do you inspire say employees at Dell Technologies who've been with you for a very long time to be able to be open and agile themselves to help facilitate this transformation? >> I believe we built it into our culture that they understand that change is good as opposed to change is bad. If you fear something well then it's bad, right? We precondition people to say okay we're going to change something. Not to say every time we change something it works perfectly. We make mistakes, we learn, we trial and error. That's all fine. Fail fast. But you need a culture where you can embrace change. No question about it. I think a lot of companies that didn't really have that are figuring that out and either by crisis or by leadership or by some combination they're then forced into it. For me, it's what we grew up in. Because hey it's a tough world out there. >> Mike, I want to ask you a final question. Thanks for coming on and spending the time with us. Great interview here. Good length. Recently in the news with a lot of commentary from us as well as the industry around IBM buying Red Hat. I made a comment around the innovation piece of this and I want to get your thoughts on that because when you bought EMC, it was a merger of equals. You integrated that and the growth that you've been successful since then, I want to get your perspective. I want you to take a minute to explain to folks watching, when you did the merger equal with EMC, what happened? You've been successful integrating the organization. What innovative things have you done since the EMC merger of equals? Take a minute to explain, again, there's a lot of moving pieces on the table. You got VM Wares, you got Pivitol, you got Boomi. A lot of moving parts in your plan. You've been successful with the numbers. Financial performance shows it. Take a minute to explain what happened, where's the innovation coming out of Dell Technologies? >> So in hind sight, it looks pretty obvious, right? You take the leader and servers and the leader in storage and you say hey infrastructure hardware goes together. And by the way, if you have the leader of infrastructure software, VM Wares, you put that all together. Wow, that'd be really great. And turns out it was. It was actually much better than we thought. And so customers have really bought into that and then with Pivitol and Boomi and Rsave, Virtustream, Secureworks etc., we have such a complete set of capabilities that customers have said, hey, why do I want to buy from 20 smaller less capable companies and integrate it myself versus you guys will just do all this for me. If they were buying from 2 or 3 or 4 parts of Dell Technologies they'll say, well, why don't we just take the others, right? We been picking up huge amounts of share across the whole business. I'm talking about like 10s of billions of dollars of growth here. There's clearly a consolidation going on in the kind of existing parts of the industry but we've also got massive investments in the new cloud native parts and software defined, and security. It's been a real blessing to be able to pull all of these teams together. We had this relationship with EMC going back from 2001. We were very early supporters of VM Ware. We had a theory of victory and it's played out very well. The teams have really gelled enormously well and the customers have continued to give us their trust. >> I think, first of all servers, storage, networking is never going away. It's the holy trinity of anything in computing. Just looks different and consumes differently. But I think people underestimate the execution innovation that you guys have done. You didn't skip a beat. VM Ware didn't skip a beat. So things have happened, so that was a challenge of the integration. >> Not everybody predicted that it was going to go that way. It's actually gone much better than even we had planned. The revenue synergies have been much larger. >> Well congratulations and thanks for taking the time on the Cube. Michael Dell is here inside the Cube here at Boomi World 18. Dell Boomi World. It's the part of Dell Technologies. We think of them being the power engine for data processing, data growth, powering AI, integrating all the application workloads. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin. Stay tuned for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music) >> Since the dawn of the cloud, the Cube has been there. Connected.

Sand Hill Road to the heart of Silicon Valley it's the cute presenting the people first Network insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders when I'm John Ferrari with the cube I'm the co-host also the founder of Silicon angle me we are here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for the people first conversations I'm John furry with the cube weird Allen being global CTO and IT of innovation at Procter & Gamble formerly the same position at coca-cola has done a lot of innovations over the years also a reference account back in the day for web methods when they call on the financing of that one of the most famous IPOs which set the groundwork for web services and has a lot of history going back to the 80s we were just talking about it welcome this conversation on people first network thank you for inviting me so the people first network is all about people and it's great to have these conversations you're old school you were doing some stuff back on the 80s talking about doing RPA 3270 you've been old school here yeah I go back to APL as my first programming language went through the the third generation languages and of course the old 30 to 70 emulation which is what we know today is our PA one of the cool things I was excited to hear some of your background around your history web methods you were a reference call for venture financing of web methods which was financed on the credit card for the two founders husband and wife probably one of the most successful I appeals but more importantly at the beginning of the massive wave that we now see with web services this is early days this was very early days when I was at DHL we were looking at what we're gonna do for the future and in fact we built one of the first object-oriented frameworks in C++ at the time because that was all that was available to us or the best was available we rejected Corbis and we said look if we're gonna go this direction and one of my developers found web methods found philip merrick it was literally at the time working out of his garage and had this technology that was going to allow us to start moving into this object-oriented approach and I remember the day Robin Vasan form a field called and said hey I'm thinking about investing in web methods what do you think about it and not only was it one of the first startups that I ever worked with but it's actually the first time I met anybody in the venture community way back in nineteen I think 1997 is what had happened and that was a computing time in computer science and then the rest is history and then XML became what it became lingua franca for the web web services now Amazon Web Services you see in cloud computing micro services kubernetes service meshes this is a new stack that's being developed in the cloud and this is the new generation you've seen many waves and at Procter & Gamble formerly coca-cola you're the same role you have to navigate this so what's different now what's different say 15 20 years ago how are you looking at this market how you implementing some of the IT and infrastructure and software development environments I think what's change is you know when we got into the the early 2000s Nicolas car came out and said IT doesn't matter and I think anybody that was an IT had this very objectionable response initially but when you step back and you looked at it what she realised was in many cases IT didn't matter and those were those areas that were non-competitive those things that could be commoditized and it was completely right the reality is IT has always mattered that technology does give you a competitive advantage in certain markets and certain capabilities for a company but back then we had to go out and we had to purchase equipment we had to configure the equipment there was a lot of heavy lifting in corporations just did not want to invest the capital so they outsource the stuff wholesale I think General Motors was the first one that just out sourced everything and was followed by other companies including Procter & Gamble the decision at that time was probably right but as we go forward and we see what's happened with corporations we see the valuations of corporations the amount of return on equity based on the on the capital that's being invested we can see that data is important we can see that agility flexibility is key to competing in the future and therefore what's changing is we are now moving into an age of away from ERP so we're moving into an age away from these outsource providers on a wholesale basis and using it selectively to drive down costs and allowing us to free up money in order to invest in those things that are most important to the company so you're saying is that the folks naturally the server consolidation they've bought all this gear all this software over you know 18-month rollouts before they even see the first implementation those are the glory days of gravy trains for the vendor's yeah not good for the practitioners but you're saying that the folks who reinvested are investing in IT as a core competency are seeing a competitive advantage they certainly are you know I think I made the statement front of a number of the vendors and a few years ago and people were not comfortable with it but what I said was like you gone are the ears of these 10 20 million dollar deals gone are the ears of the million two million dollar deals we're in the ear of throwaway technology I need to be able to use and invest in technology for a specific purpose for a specific period of time and be able to move on to the next one it's the perfect time for startups but startups shouldn't be looking at the big picture they should be looking at the tail on these investments let me try things let me get out in the market let me have a competitive advantage in marketing which is most important to me or in supply chain those are the areas that I can make a difference with my consumers and my customers and that's where the investments have to go so just in constant of throwaway technology and you know you'd also be said of you know being more agile though interesting to look at the cloud SAS business model if Amazon for us I think that's the gold standard where they actually lower prices on a per unit basis and increase more services and value but in the aggregate you're still paying more but you have more flexibility and that's kind of a good tell sign so that you're seeing that ability to reuse either the infrastructure that's commoditized to shift the value this is are people having a hard time understanding this so I want to get your reaction to how should I tea leaders understand that the wave of cloud the wave of machine learning what a I can bring to the table these new trends how how should leaders figure this out is there a playbook as there are things that you've learned that you could share you know that there's really a playbook it's still early on everyone's looking for one cloud fits all the reality is whether it's Google whether it's Amazon whether it's Microsoft whether it's IBM all clouds are different all clouds have our special are purpose-built for different solutions and I think as an IT leader you have to understand you're not going to take everything and lift and shift that's what we used to do we're now in the position where we have to deconstruct our business we have to understand the services the capabilities that we want to bring to market and not lock ourselves in its building blocks its Legos we're in the period of Legos putting these things together in different manners in order to create new solutions if we try to lock ourselves in the past of how we've always financed things how we've always built things then we're not going to be any better off in the new world than we were in the old alan i want to get your reaction to to two words our PA and containers well as i said earlier our PA is 3270 emulation from the 1980s and for those of us that are old enough to remember that i I still remember scraping the the old green screens and and putting a little process around it it what's nice though is that we have moved forward machine learning and AI and other other capabilities are now present so that we can do this I actually played around with neural nets probably back in 1985 with an Apollo computer so that tells you how far back I go but technologies change processing speeds change everything the technology trends are allowing us to now to do these things the question that we have is also a moral dilemma is are we trying to replace people or are we trying to make improvements and I think that you don't look at our PA as a way simply to replace work it's a way to enhance what we're doing in order to create new value for the customer or for the consumer in our case I think in the in the area of containers you know again been around for a while been around for a while it's just another another approach that we're not we don't want lock in we don't want to be dependent on specific vendors we want the portability we want the flexibility and I think as we start moving containers out to the edge that's where we're gonna start seeing more value as the business processes and the capabilities are spread out again the idea of centralized cloud computing is very good however it doesn't need to be distributed what's interesting I find about the conversation here is that you mentioned a couple things earlier you mentioned the vendors locking you in and saying here's the ERP buy this and with this you have to have a certain process because this is our technology you got to use it this way and you were slave to their their tech on your process serve their tech with containers and say orchestration you now the ability to manage workloads differently and so an interesting time there's that does that change the notion of rip and replace lift and shift because if I a container I could just put a container around it and not have to worry about killing the old to bring in the new this is on the fundamental kind of debate going on do you have to kill the old to bring in the new well you need to kill the old sometimes just because it's old it's time to go other times you do need to repackage it and other times I hate to say it you do need to lift and shift if you're a legacy organization they have a long history such as most of the manufacturing companies in the world today we can't get rid of old things that quickly we can't afford to a lot of the processes are still valid as we're looking to the future we certainly are breaking these things down into services we're looking to containerize these things we're looking to move them into areas where we can compute where we want to when we want to at the right price we're just at the beginning of that journey in the industry I still think there's about five to seven years to go to get there now I'll talk about the role of the edge role of cloud computing as it increases the surface area of IT potentially combined with the fact that IT is a competitive advantage bring those two notions together what's the role of the people because you used to have people that would just manage the rack and stack I'm provisioning some storage I'm doing this as those stovepipes start to be broken down when the service area of IT is bigger how does that change the relationship of the people involved you know you win with people at the end of the day you don't win with technology you know a company of such as Proctor and Gamble and I think what's happened if you look at historically the ERP vendors came out probably 99 2000 and it used to be and remember these I'm old to be honest with you but I remember that we used to have to worry about the amount of memory we were managing we had to be able to tune databases in all of this and the vendors went ahead and they started automating all those processes with the idea that we can do it better than a human and a lot of people a lot of the technology talent then started leaving the organizations and organizations were left with people that we're focusing on process and people a process excuse me process and the the the business which is very good because you need the subject matter experts going forward we have to reinvest in people our people have the subject matter expertise they have some technology skills that they've developed over the years and they've enhanced it on their own but we're in this huge change right now where we have to think different we have to act different and we have to behave differently so doubling down on people is the best thing that you can do and the old outsource model of outsourcing everything kind of reduces the core competency of the people yeah now you got to build it back up again exactly I mean we when we left at P&G 15 years ago about 5,000 people left the organization when we outsource them when we outsource the technology to our partner at that time now it's time we're starting to bring it back in we've brought the network team back in and stood up our own sock in our own NOC for the first time in years just this past year we're doing the same thing by moving things out to the cloud more and more is moving to the cloud we're setting up our own cloud operations and DevOps capabilities I can tell you having been on both sides of it it's a lot harder to be able to bring it back in than it is to take it out and you know interesting proctoring games well known as being a very intimate with the data very data-driven company the data is valuable and having that infrastructure NIT to support the data that's important what's your vision on the data future of the data in the world well I think data is has a value to itself but when you tie it to products you tie it to your customers and consumers it's even more valuable and we're in the process now of things that we used to do completely internally with our own technology or technology partners we're now moving all of that out into the cloud now and I must say cloud its clouds plural again going back to certain clouds are better for certain things so you're seeing a dramatic shift we have a number of projects underway that are in the cloud space but for customers and consumers number of cloud projects in the way for our own internal employees it's all about collecting the data processing the data protecting that data because we take that very seriously and being able to use it to make better decisions I want to get your reaction on two points and two quite lines of questioning here because I think it's very relevant on the enterprise side you're a big account for the big whales the old ERP so the big cloud providers so people want to sell you stuff at the same time you're also running IT innovation so you want to play with the new shiny new toys and experiments start up so if startups want to get your attention and big vendors want to sell to you the tables have kind of turned it's been good this is a good it's a good buyers market right now in my opinion so what's your thoughts on that so you know start with the big companies what do they got to do to win you over well they got to look like how they got to engage and for startups how do they get your attention I think the biggest thing for either startup or large companies understanding the company you're dealing with whether it's Procter & Gamble whether it's coca-cola whether it was DHL if you understand how I operate if you understand how decisions are made if you understand how I'm organized that's gonna give you an a competitive advantage now the large corporations understand this because they've been around through the entire journey of computing with these large corporations the startups need to step back and take a look and see where do I add that competitive advantage many times when you're selling to a large corporate you're not selling to a large corporate you're selling two divisions you're selling two functions and that's how you get in I've been working with startups as I said back since web methods and it was just a two-person company but we brought them in for a very specific capability I then took web methods with me when I left DHL I took them to GE when I left GE I took them to ing because I trusted them and they matured along the way I think finding that right individual that has the right need is the key and working it slowly don't think you're gonna close the deal fast if you're start-up know it's gonna take some time and decide if that's in your best interest or not slow things down focus don't try to boil the ocean over too many of them try to boy you're right Jimmy people try to boil the ocean get that win one win will get you another one which will get you another win and that's the best way to succeed get that beachhead Ellen so if you could go back and knowing what you know now and you're breaking into the IT leadership's position looking forward what would you do differently can do a mulligan hey what would you do differently well you know I think one of the one of the dangers of being an innovator in IT is that you really are risk taker and taking risks is counterculture to corporations so I think I would probably try to get by in a little bit more I mean someone once told me that you know you see the force through the trees before anybody else does your problem is you don't bring people along with you so I think I would probably slow down a little bit not in the adoption of technology but I'd probably take more time to build the case to bring people along a lot faster so that they can see it and they can take credit for it and they can move that needle as well yeah always sometimes early adopters and pioneers had the arrows on the back as they say I've had my share now thanks for sharing your experience what's next for you what's the next mountain you're going to climb well I think that as we're looking forward latency is still an issue you know we have to find a way to defeat latency we're not going to do it through basic physics so we're gonna have to change our business models change our technology distribution change everything that we're doing consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and m/l right at the point where they want it and that means we're now dealing with milliseconds and nanoseconds of having to make decisions so I'm very interested in looking at how are we going to change consumer behavior and customer behavior by combining a lot of the new technology trends that are underway and we have to do it also with the security in mind now before we security was secondary now as we're seeing with all of the hacks and the malware and everything that's going on in the world we have to go in and think a little bit different about how we're gonna do that so I'm very much engaged in working with a lot of startups I live here in the Silicon Valley I commute to Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble I'm spending time and just flew in from tel-aviv literally an hour ago I'm in the middle of all the technology hotspots trying to find that next big thing and it's a global it's global innovation happens everywhere and anywhere the venture community if you look at the amount of funds it used to be invested out of the Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world it continues to be on a downward trend not because the funding isn't here in the Silicon Valley but because everyone is recognizing that innovation and technology is developed everywhere in the world Alan Bain was the CTO global CTO and IT innovator there at the cube conversation here in San Hill Road I'm John for a year thanks for watching you

(Upbeat music) >> From the Hard Rock hotel in Las Vegas, its theCUBE! Covering the Hosho Con 2018, brought to you by Hosho. >> Okay, welcome back every one, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here live in Las Vegas for Hosho Con, the first inaugural event where security and block chain conferences is happening, it's the first of its kind where practitioners and experts get together to talk about the future, and solve some of the problems in massive growth coming they got a lot of them. Its good new and bad news but I guess the most important thing is security again, the first time ever security conference has been dedicated to all the top shelf conversations that need to be had and the news here are covering. Our next guest Greg Pinn who's the head of strategy and products for iComply Investor Services. Great to have you thanks for joining us. >> Very nice to be here >> So, we were just talking before we came on camera about you know all the kind of new things that are emerging with compliance and all these kind of in between your toes details and nuances and trip wires that have been solved in the traditional commercial world, that have gotten quite boring if you will, boring's good, boring means it works. It's a system. But the new model with Block Chain and Token Economics is, whole new models. >> Yeah I think what's so exciting about this is that in the Fiat world, from the traditional financial market, everyone is so entrenched in what they've been doing for 20, 30, 40 years. And the costs are enormous. And Block Chain, Crypto coming in now is like we don't have to do it that way. We have to do compliance. Compliance matters, it's important and it's your legal obligation. But you don't have to do it in the same sort of very expensive, very human way that people have been doing it in the past. >> And Cloud Computing, DevOps model of software proved that automations a wonderful thing >> Right >> So now you have automation and you have potentially AI opportunities to automate things. >> And what we've seen is huge increases in technology, in around machine learning and clustering of data, to eliminate a lot of the human process of doing AML, KYC verification, and that's driving down costs significantly. We can take advantage of that in the Crypto Space because we don't have thousands of people and millions of millions of dollars of infrastructure that we've built up, we're starting fresh, we can learn from the past and throw away all the stuff that doesn't work, or isn't needed anymore. >> Alright let's talk about the emerging state of regulation in the Block Chain community and industry. Where are we? What's the current state of the union? If you had to describe the progress bar you know with zero meaning negative to ten being it's working, where are we? What is the state of >> I think if you'd asked me a year ago I think negative would've been the answer. A year ago there was still a big fight in Crypto about do we even want to be part of Compliance, we don't want to have any involvement in that. Because it was still that sort of, Crypto goes beyond global borders, it goes beyond any of that. What's happened now is people have realized, it doesn't matter if you're dealing in Crypto Currency or traditional currency, or donkeys or mules or computers or whatever, if you're trading goods for value, that falls under Regulatory Landscape and that's what we're hearing from the SCC, from FinCEN, from all the regulators. It's not the form it's the function. So if you've got a security token, that's a security, whether you want it to be or not. You can call it whatever you want, but you're still going to be regulated just like a security. >> And I think most entrepreneurs welcome clarity. People want clarity, they don't want to have to be zigging when they should be zagging. And this is where we see domicile problem. Today it's Malta, tomorrow it's Bermuda. Where is it? I mean no one knows it's a moving train, the big countries have to get this right. >> A hundred percent. And beyond that what we're seeing, what's very, very frustrating for a market as global as this is it's not just country-level jurisdiction, the US you've got State-level jurisdiction as well. Makes it very, very hard when you're running a global business if you're an exchange, if you're any sort of global, with a global client reach. Managing that regulation is very, very difficult. >> You know I interviewed Grant Fondo who's with Goodwin Law Firm, Goodwin Proctor they call it Goodwin now, he's a regulatory guy, and they've been very on the right side of this whole SCC thing in the US. But it points to the issue at hand which is there's a set of people in the communities, that are there to be service providers. Law Firms, Tax, Accounting, Compliance. Then you got technology regulation. Not just financial you have GDPR, it's a nightmare! So okay, do we even need GDPR with Block Chain? So again you have this framework of this growth of internet society, now overlaid to a technical shift. That's going to impact not only technology standards and regulations but the business side of it where you have these needed service providers. Which is automated? Which isn't automated? What's your take on all of this? >> I agree with you a hundred percent, and I think what's helpful is to take a step back and realize while compliance is expensive and a pain and a distraction for a lot of businesses. The end of the day it saves people's lives. And this is what, just like if someone was shooting a gun as you were running down the street, in your house, you're going to call the police, that is what financial institutions are doing to save these industries and individuals that are impacted by this. A lot of it from a Crypto Currency perspective, we have a responsibility because so much of what the average person perception is, is Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road. And we have to dig our way out of that sort of mentality of Crypto being used for negative things. And so that makes it even more important that we are ultra, ultra compliant and what's great about this is there's a lot great opportunities for new vendors to come into the space and harness what existed whether that's harnessing data, different data channels, different IDDent verification channels and creating integrated solutions that enable businesses to just pull this in as a service. It shouldn't be your business, if you're in exchange, compliance is something you have to do. It should not become your business. >> Yeah I totally agree, and it becomes table stakes not a differentiator. >> Exactly >> That's the big thing I learned this week it's people saying security's a differentiator, compliance is a, nah, nah, I have standards. Alright so I got to ask you about the, you know I always had been on the biased side of entrepreneurship which is when you hear regulations and you go whoa, that's going to really stunt the growth of organic innovation. >> Right. But in this case the regulatory peace has been a driver for innovation. Can you share some opinions and commentary on that because I think there's a big disconnect. And I used to be the one saying regulation sucks, let the entrepreneurs do their thing. But now more than ever there's a dynamic, can you just share your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I mean regulators are not here to drive innovation. That's not what their job is. What's been so interesting about this is that because of regulations coming to Crypto along with these other things, it's allowing businesses to solve the problem of compliance in very exciting, interesting ways. And it's driving a lot of technologies around machine learning, what people like IBM Watson are doing around machine learning is becoming very, very powerful in compliance to reduce that cost. The cost is enormous. An average financial institution is spending 15 percent. Upwards of 15 percent of their revenue per year on compliance. So anything they can do to reduce that is huge. >> Huge numbers >> And we don't want Crypto to get to that point. >> Yeah and I would also love to get the percentage of how much fraud is being eaten into the equation too. I'm sure there's a big number there. Okay so on the compliance side, what are the hard problems that the industry is solving, trying to solve? Could you stack rank the >> I think number one: complexity. Complexity is the biggest. Because you're talking about verifying against sanctions, verifying against politically exposed persons, law enforcement lists, different geographical distributions, doing address verification, Block Chain forensics. The list just stacks and stacks and stacks on the complexity >> It's a huge list. >> It's a huge list >> And it's not easy either. These are hard problems. >> Right, these are very, very difficult problems and there's no one expert for all of these things. And so it's a matter of bringing those things together, and figuring out how can you combine the different levels of expertise into a single platform? And that's where we're going. We're going to that point where it's a single shop, you want to release an ICO? You're an exchange and you need to do compliance? All of that should be able to be handled as a single interface where it takes it off of your hands. The liability is still with the issuer. It's still with the exchange, they can't step away from their regulatory liability, but there's a lot that they can do to ease that burden. And to also just ignore and down-risk people that just don't matter. So many people are in Crypto, not the people here, but there's so many people in Crypto, you buy one tenth of a Bitcoin, you buy a couple of Ether, and you're like okay that was fine. Do we really need to focus our time on those people? Probably not. And a lot of the >> There's a lot big money moving from big players acting in concert. >> And that's where we need to be focused. Is the big money, we need to be focused on where terrorists are acting within Block Chain. That's not to say that Block Chain and Crypto is a terrorist vehicle. But we can't ignore the reality. >> And I think the other thing too is also the adversary side of it is interesting because if you look at what's happening with all these hacks, you're talking about billions of dollars in the hands now of these groups that are highly funded, highly coordinated, funded basically underbelly companies. They get their hands on a quantum computer, I was just talking to another guy earlier today he's like if you don't have a sixteen character password, you're toast. And now it's twenty four so, at what point do they have the resources as the fly wheel of profit rolls in on the hacks. >> You know, one of the interesting things we talk about a lot is we have to rely on the larger community. We can't, I can't, you can't solve all of the problems. Quantum computing's a great example. That's where we look for things like two-factor authentication and other technologies that are coming out to solve those problems. And we need to, as a community, acknowledge That these are real problems and we've identified potential solutions. Whether that's in academia, whether it's in something like a foundation like the Ethereum Foundation, or in the private sector. And it's a combination of those things that are really driving a lot of it's innovation. >> Alright so what's the agenda for the industry if you had to have a list this long, how do you see this playing out tactically over the next twelve months or so as people start to get clarity. Certainly SCC is really being proactive not trying to step on everybody at the same time put some guard rails down and bumpers to let people kind of bounce around within some frame work. >> I think the SCC has taken a very cautious approach. We've seen cease and desist letters, we've seen notifications we haven't seen enormous finds like we see in Fiat. Look at HSBC, look at Deutsche Bank, billions of dollars in fines from the SCC. We're not seeing that I think the SCC understands that we're all sort of moving together. At the same time their responsibility is to protect the investor. And to make sure that people aren't being >> Duped. >> Duped. I was trying to find an appropriate term. >> Suckered >> Suckered, duped. And we've seen that a lot in ICOs but we're not seeing it, the headlines are so often wrong. You see this is an ICO scam. Often it's not a scam, it's just the project failed. Like lots of businesses fail. That doesn't mean it's a scam, it means it was a business fail. >> Well if institutional investors have the maturity to handle they can deal with failures, but not the average individual investor. >> Right, which is why in the US we have the credit investor, where you have to be wealthy enough to be able to sustain the loss. They don't have that anywhere else. So globally the SCC care and the other financial intelligence units globally are monitoring this so we make that we're protecting the investor. To get back to your question, where do I see this going? I think we're going to need to fast track our way towards a more compliant regime. And this I see as being a step-wise approach. Starting with sanctions making sure everyone is screened against the sanction list. Then we're going to start getting more into politically exposed persons, more adverse media, more enhanced due diligence. Where we really have that suite of products and identify the risk based on the type of business and the type of relationship. And that's where we need to get fast. And I don't think the SCC is going to say yeah be there by 2024, it's going to be be there by next year. I was talking to Hartej, he was one of the co founders of Hosho and we were talking on TheCUBE about self-regulation and some self-policing. I think this was self-governed, certainly in the short term. And we were talking about the hallway conversations and this is one of the things that he's been hearing. So the question for you Greg is: What hallway conversations have you overheard, that you kind of wanted to jump into or you found interesting. And what hallway conversations that you've been involved in here. >> I think the most interesting, I mentioned this on a panel and got into a great conversation afterwards, about the importance of the Crypto community reaching out to the traditional financial services community. Because it's almost like looking across the aisle, and saying look we're trying to solve real business problems, we're trying to create great innovative things, you don't have to be scared. And I was speaking at a traditional financial conference last week and there it was all people like this Crypto is scary and it's I don't understand it. >> You see Warren Buffett and Bill Gates poopooing it and freak out. >> But we have an obligation then, we can't wait for them to realize what needs to be done. We need to go to them and say, look we're not scary, look let's sit down. If you can get a seat at a table with a head of compliance at a top tier bank, sit down with them and say let me explain what my Crypto ATM is doing and why it's not a vehicle for money laundering, and how it can be used safely. Those sorts of things are so critical and as a community for us to reach across the aisle, and bring those people over. >> Yeah bridge the cultures. >> Exactly. Because it's night and day cultures but I think there's a lot more in common. >> And both need each other. >> Exactly. >> Alright so great job, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> If you have a quick plug on what you're working on, give the plug for the company. >> Sure, so iComply Investor Services is here to help people who want to issue ICOs, do that in a very compliant way. Because you shouldn't have to worry about all of your compliance and KYC and Block Chain Forensics and all that, you should be worried about raising money for your company and building a product. >> Alright final question since I got you here 'cause this is on my mind. Security token, has got traction, people like it 'cause no problem being security. What are they putting against that these days, what trend are you seeing in the security token? Are they doing equity? I'm hearing from hedge funds and other investors they'll want a little bit of equity preferred and or common, plus the token. Or should the token be equity conversion? What is some of the strings you're seeing? >> You know I think it' really just a matter of do you want paper or do you want a token? Just like a stock certificate is worth nothing without the legal framework behind it. A security token is the same way. So we're seeing where some people are wanting to do equity, where some of their investors want the traditional certificate. And some are fine with the token. We're seeing people do hybrid tokens where it morphs from security to utility or back. Where they're doing very creative things. It's what's so great about the Ethereum Network and the Smart Contracts, is there are all of these great options. The hard part then is, how do you fit those options into regular framework. >> And defending that against being a security, and this is interesting because if it converts to a utility, isn't that what security is? >> So that's the question. >> Then an IPO is an, again this is new territory. >> Right, and very exciting territory. It's an exciting time to be involved in this industry. >> In fact I just had an AE3B Election on tokens, first time ever. >> Yeah it's an amazing state that we're in. Where serious investors are saying yeah token's great for me. Give me the RC20 I'll stick it in my MetaMask Wallet, it's unbelievable where we are. And only more exciting things to come. >> Greg Pinn, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. TheCUBE covers live here in Las Vegas, Hoshocon, the first security conference in the industry of its kind where everyone's getting together talking about security. Not a big ICO thing, in fact it's all technical, all business all people shaping the industry, it's a community it's TheCUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. Stay with us for more after this short break. (Upbeat music)