>>Everyone welcome back from the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Aus re Mars. It's one of the re shows, as we know, reinvent is the big show. Now they have focus, shows reinforces coming up that security Remar is here. Machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John for your host, Michael Mike Miller here, director of machine learning thought leadership with AWS. Great to see you again. Yeah. Give alumni welcome back here. Back every time we got deep racer, always to talk >>About, Hey John, thanks for having me once again. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. >>So I want to get into the deep racer in context here, but first re Mars is a show. That's getting a lot of buzz, a lot of press. Um, not a lot of news, cuz it's not a newsy show. It's more of a builder kind of a convergence show, but a lot is happening here. It's almost a, a moment in time that I think's gonna be one of those timeless moments where we're gonna look back and saying that year at re Mars was an inflection point. It just seems like everything's pumping machine learning, scaling robotics is hot. It's now transforming fast. Just like the back office data center did years ago. Yeah. And so like a surge is coming. >>Yeah. >>What, what's your take of this show? >>Yeah. And all of these three or four components are all coming together. Right. And they're intersecting rather than just being in silos. Right. So we're seeing machine learning, enabled perception sort of on robots, um, applied to space and sort of these, uh, extra sort of application initiatives. Um, and that's, what's really exciting about this show is seeing all these things come together and all the industry-wide examples, um, of amazing perception and robotics kind of landing together. So, >>So the people out there that aren't yet inside the ropes of the show, what does it mean to them? This show? What, what, what they're gonna be what's in it for me, what's all this show. What does it mean? >>Yeah. It's just a glimpse into where things are headed. Right. And it's sort of the tip of the iceberg. It's sort of the beginning of the wave of, um, you know, these sort of advanced capabilities that we're gonna see imbued in applications, um, across all different industries. >>Awesome. Well, great to have you in the cube. Every time we have an event we wanna bring you on because deep racers become a, the hottest, I won't say cult following because it's no longer cult following. It's become massive following. Um, and which started out as an IOT, I think raspberry pie first time was like a, like >>A, we did a little camera initially camera >>And it was just a kind of a fun, little clever, I won't say hack, but just having a project that just took on a life OFS own, where are we? What's the update with racer you're here with the track. Yeah, >>Possibly >>You got the track and competing with the big dogs, literally dog, you got spot over there. Boston dynamics. >>Well we'll, we'll invite them over to the track later. Yeah. So deep razor, you know, is the fastest way to get hands on with machine learning. You know, we designed it as, uh, a way for developers to have fun while learning about this particular machine learning technique called reinforcement learning, which is all about using, uh, a simulation, uh, to teach the robot how to learn via trial and error. So deep racer includes a 3d racing simulator where you can train your model via trial and error. It includes the physical car. So you can take, uh, the model that you trained in the cloud, download it to this one 18th scale, um, kind of RC car. That's been imbued with an extra sensor. So we have a camera on the front. We've got an extra, uh, Intel, X, 86 processor inside here. Um, and this thing will drive itself, autonomously around the track. And of course what's a track and uh, some cars driving around it without a little competition. So we've got the deep racer league that sort of sits on top of this and adds a little spice to the whole thing. It's >>It's, it's like formula one for nerds. It really is. It's so good because a lot of people will have to readjust their models cuz they go off the track and I see people and it's oh my, then they gotta reset. This has turned into quite the phenomenon and it's fun to watch and every year it gets more competitive. I know you guys have a cut list that reinvent, it's almost like a, a super score gets you up. Yeah. Take, take us through the reinvents coming up. Sure. What's going on with the track there and then we'll get into some of the new adoption in terms of the people. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, we have monthly online races where we have a new track every month that challenges our, our developers to retrain their model or sort of tweak the existing model that they've trained to adapt for those new courses. Then at physical events like here at re Mars and at our AWS summits around the world, we have physical, uh, races. Um, and we crown a champion at each one of those races. You may have heard some cheering a minute ago. Yeah. That was our finals over there. We've got some really fast cars, fast models racing today. Um, so we take the winners from each of those two circuits, the virtual and the physical and they, the top ones of them come together at reinvent every year in November, December. Um, and we have a set of knockout rounds, championship rounds where these guys get the field gets narrowed to 10 racers and then those 10 racers, uh, race to hold up the championship cup and, um, earn, earn, uh, you know, a whole set of prizes, either cash or, or, you know, scholarships or, you know, tuition funds, whatever the, uh, the developer is most interested >>In. You know, I ask you this question every time you come on the cube because I I'm smiling. That's, it's so much fun. I mean, if I had not been with the cube anyway, I'd love to do this. Um, would you ever imagine when you first started this, that it would be such so popular and at the rise of eSports? So, you know, discord is booming. Yeah. The QB has a discord channel now. Sure, sure. Not that good on it yet, but we'll get there, but just the gaming culture, the nerd culture, the robotics clubs, the young people, just nerds who wanna compete. You never thought that would be this big. We, >>We were so surprised by a couple key things after we launched deep racer, you know, we envisioned this as a way for, you know, developers who had already graduated from school. They were in a company they wanted to grow their machine learning skills. Individuals could adopt this. What we saw was individuals were taking these devices and these concepts back to their companies. And they're saying, this is really fun. Like we should do something around this. And we saw companies like JPMC and Accenture and Morningstar into it and national Australia bank all adopting deep racer as a way to engage, excite their employees, but then also create some fun collaboration opportunities. Um, the second thing that was surprising was the interest from students. And it was actually really difficult for students to use deep racer because you needed an AWS account. You had to have a credit card. You might, you might get billed. There was a free tier involved. Um, so what we did this past year was we launched the deep racer student league, um, which caters to students 16 or over in high school or in college, uh, deep Razer student includes 10 hours a month of free training, um, so that they can train their models in the cloud. And of course the same series of virtual monthly events for them to race against each other and win, win prizes. >>So they don't have to go onto the dark web hack someone's credit card, get a proton email account just to get a deep Razer that's right. They can now come in on their own. >>That's right. That's right. They can log into that virtual the virtual environment, um, and get access. And, and one of the other things that we realized, um, and, and that's a common kind of, uh, realization across the industry is both the need for the democratization of machine learning. But also how can we address the skills gap for future ML learners? Um, and this applies to the, the, the world of students kind of engaging. And we said, Hey, you know, um, the world's gonna see the most successful and innovative ideas come from the widest possible range of participants. And so we knew that there were some issues with, um, you know, underserved and underrepresented minorities accessing this technology and getting the ML education to be successful. So we partnered with Intel and Udacity and launched the AI and ML scholarship program this past year. And it's also built on top of deep Bracer student. So now students, um, can register and opt into the scholarship program and we're gonna give out, uh, Udacity scholarships to 2000 students, um, at the end of this year who compete in AWS deep racer student racers, and also go through all of the learning modules online. >>Okay. Hold on, lets back up. Cuz it sounds, this sounds pretty cool. All right. So we kind went fast on that a little bit slow today at the end of the day. So if they sign up for the student account, which is lowered the batteries for, and they Intel and a desk, this is a courseware for the machine learning that's right. So in order to participate, you gotta take some courseware, check the boxes and, and, and Intel is paying for this or you get rewarded with the scholarship after the fact. >>So Intel's a partner of ours in, in putting this on. So it's both, um, helping kind of fund the scholarships for students, but also participating. So for the students who, um, get qualified for the scholarship and, and win one of those 2000 Udacity Nanodegree scholarships, uh, they also will get mentoring opportunities. So AWS and Intel, um, professionals will help mentor these students, uh, give them career advice, give them technical advice. C >>They'll they're getting smarter. Absolutely. So I'm just gonna get to data here. So is it money or credits for the, for the training? >>That's the scholarship or both? Yes. So, so the, the student training is free for students. Yep. They get 10 hours a month, no credits they need to redeem or anything. It's just, you log in and you get your account. Um, then the 2000, uh, Udacity scholarships, those are just scholarships that are awarded to, to the winners of the student, um, scholarship program. It's a four month long, uh, class on Python programming for >>AI so's real education. Yeah. It's like real, real, so ones here's 10 hours. Here's check the box. Here's here's the manual. Yep. >>Everybody gets access to that. That's >>Free. >>Yep. >>To the student over 16. Yes. Free. So that probably gonna increase the numbers. What kind of numbers are you looking at now? Yeah. In terms of scope to scale here for me. Yeah. Scope it >>Out. What's the numbers we've, we've been, uh, pleasantly surprised. We've got over 55,000 students from over 180 countries around the world that have signed up for the deep racer student program and of those over 30,000 have opted into that scholarship program. So we're seeing huge interest, um, from across the globe in, in this virtual students, um, opportunity, you know, and students are taking advantage of those 20 hours of learning. They're taking advantage of the fun, deep racer kind of hands on racing. Um, and obviously a large number of them are also interested in this scholarship opportunity >>Or how many people are in the AWS deep racer, um, group. Now, because now someone's gotta work on this stuff. It's went from a side hustle to like a full initiative. Well, >>You know, we're pretty efficient with what we, you know, we're pretty efficient. You've probably read about the two pizza teams at Amazon. So we keep ourselves pretty streamlined, but we're really proud of, um, what we've been able to bring to the table. And, you know, over those pandemic years, we really focused on that virtual experience in viewing it with those gaming kind of gamification sort of elements. You know, one of the things we did for the students is just like you guys, we have a discord channel, so not only can the students get hands on, but they also have this built in community of other students now to help support them bounce ideas off of and, you know, improve their learning. >>Awesome. So what's next, take us through after this event and what's going on for you more competitions. >>Yeah. So we're gonna be at the remainder of the AWS summits around the world. So places like Mexico city, you know, uh, this week we were in Milan, um, you know, we've got some AWS public sector, um, activities that are happening. Some of those are focused on students. So we've had student events in, um, Ottawa in Canada. We've had a student event in Japan. We've had a student event in, um, Australia, New Zealand. And so we've got events, both for students as well as for the professionals who wanna compete in the league happening around the world. And again, culminating at reinvent. So we'll be back here in Vegas, um, at the beginning of December where our champions will, uh, compete to ho to come. >>So you guys are going to all the summits, absolutely. Most of the summits or >>All of them, anytime there's a physical summit, we'll be there with a track and cars and give developers the opportunity to >>The track is always open. >>Absolutely. All >>Right. Well, thanks for coming on the cube with the update. Appreciate it, >>Mike. Thanks, John. It was great to be >>Here. Pleasure to know you appreciate it. Love that program. All right. Cube coverage here. Deep race are always the hit. It's a fixture at all the events, more exciting than the cube. Some say, but uh, almost great to have you on Mike. Uh, great success. Check it out free to students. The barrier's been lower to get in every robotics club. Every math club, every science club should be signing up for this. Uh, it's a lot of fun and it's cool. And of course you learn machine learning. I mean, come on. There's one to learn that. All right. Cube coverage. Coming back after this short break.

>>Live from Washington DC. It's the cube covering Boomi world 19 how to bide bullying. >>Welcome to the cue of the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin with John furrier live at Boomi world 2019 in DC. John and I are pleased to welcome one of our next guests, Rajiv Ahuja managing director, Deloitte consulting. Rajiv welcome to theCUBE. Thank you Lisa. So just saw the news yesterday, a partner summit, Deloitte named the 2019 innovation partner of the year. Congratulations to Deloitte on that. >>Thank you very much. We are very proud and honored to be an innovation partner with Boomi Uh, it's been a great journey with boomi. >>You are worldwide partner of the year last year. Talk to us about the Deloitte Boomi partnership, the Alliance, all the good stuff that's going on there. >>imooBSo we've been a boomi partner for a number of years now and our partnership has grown leaps and bounds over this time. Uh, we picked up Boomi as a, as an Alliance partner as years back because of the strength of their product. Phenomenal innovative product, great I-PASS platform. Uh, we love booming because of not just the features of its platform and product, but also because of the fact that it's easy to implement for our clients. Uh, it, it, it's easy to implement, uh, from a business perspective. Um, beauty of the product is that it has a lot of prebuilt integrations that it provides to our, our partners. Uh, and, and, and as a, as an Alliance partner with them. Uh, it provides by this all that we need from, in terms of training, in terms of, uh, you know, sales opportunities that we worked together with them on. >>As a management consultant and a global system integrator. You guys are, you work with a lot of big customers with big problems, big projects, broken down into smaller projects. What's the landscape look like from a customer? Digital transformation has been talked about for many, many years. People process technology. Why is Boomi doing so well? What's the, what's their secret sauce and what are the customers liking about booming? >>Excellent question. Um, so when we think about our clients right now, our clients are dealing with really business problems. They're talking about digital transformation. They're talking about, uh, cloud. They're talking about IoT, they're talking about, about, uh, how do we, how do they use AI? So those are the big problems that our clients are dealing with. Those are the big challenges and opportunities that declines have in front of them. And when our clients think of these, these opportunities and challenges are, there are three things that they need to deal with. They, they need to make sure that when they undertake these large transformations, they're able to easily integrate data that currently resides in a lot of their on-prim applications. In many of these transformation, the long pole in the tent happens to be the integration layer. That's what kind of holds back a lot of these transformation efforts. >>And Boomi is an excellent product to help them with that. A second area where clients kind of have to deal with Israeli, the speed of innovation. That's a big challenge that our clients have to deal with today. Uh, and, and, and, uh, you know, go another day is when you could bring out a new release of your product every three months, every six months. Our clients, customers, they need to see some new features every few weeks. And, and a large part about making change happen quickly is around being able to bring in the relevant data from your enterprise pretty quickly as well. And again, Boomi with its simplicity, uh, and providing an ability to simply integrate, uh, uh, products quickly. And you know, that helps with that agility as well as the speed of innovation or the number of projects increasing in companies. Because, you know, with data and agile application development, there's more projects happening. >>Do you see the numbers increasing? Can you share some insight into what that looked like? Is it a lot, is there order of magnitude? Is it changed? Is it the same game is 10, 15 years ago, but just broken down into smaller projects? One big project comes in. What's the, what's the, what's the project landscape like? >> So for us, uh, it's been, uh, a tremendous growth journey over the last 10 years. Okay. The number of projects, again driven by digital transformation efforts, cloud efforts, the number of projects, the kind of projects, the flavor of projects that is coming up. And the sheer volume of projects is around clients thinking about moving to SAS based application models, thinking about their digital transformation and then taking up more mobile as well as digital projects at this stage. Thinking about their, their uh, you know, big M and a deals at this stage. Uh, all these kind of changes within their environment and within their demands that their customers and the mining of them. That has really spiked up the level of number of projects that we see at the state. >>Are you seeing that in terms of the spike in projects similar between like an established business that might have all these silos of, of applications that don't connect versus like a, say a younger startup that might have a ton of data and they're trying to move so quickly? Are there the types of integration projects that they're needing to implement to transform? Pretty similar, >>so, so, eh, similar, but there are some unique characteristics for each of these. Uh, two uh, sort of buckets of clients I would say, or bucket of companies in a more traditional companies today. Really the need is around. Um, and I'll give you a few examples, right. Um, there is a big need among larger companies to, to move to cloud. A number of our clients have mandated that moving to cloud and taking their, their applications to the cloud is their priority number one. For a typical large sized company, their application landscape could be anywhere from about five to 600 applications in the ID portfolio to close to four to 5,000 applications. So if you look at that application landscape, the reality is that the push to the cloud at this moment of time across most of our clients, they have 15 20% of their applications in the cloud. They're using certain sass applications, they have their own custom applications that have been put on a cloud platform and then they still have a large proportion of their applications on prem as well. So that's the reality of application landscape. For our last scale clients and with this reality, the ability to integrate cloud to cloud applications, cloud two on-prem applications and on-prem to application on prem applications. That's, that's the key need for integration for our large scale clients. >>Reggie, I want to get your personal opinion on something. You've been in the industry for long time now. You seen many waves, maybe computer, client server, local area networking, inter networking, internet, web, web two. Dot. Oh, cloud cloud one. Dot. Oh, cloud 2.0 which we're in now. What is the big story in your mind, what's the most important story that in tech today in your mind and what's the most important story that isn't being told or isn't being shared? Talked enough about >>the, the big story that has been talked about and I mentioned earlier, right? Is, is multicloud that's the big story that kind of is on the surface. The big story is that ultimately everything has to be business driven. It's the customer that is demanding change from our clients. The customer is saying that they are, they want to just deal with mobile. The younger customer, which will be the customer for of tomorrow, they want to be mobile. Right? And our clients, whether it's financial services clients or retail clients or any clients, uh, in most of the industry, you know, that's where their mind is. They want to be mobile first. They want to be cloud first. So that's the big story that's being told. And every client across flawless, all all industries that we support, that's the same story that we hear at every line. Right? The second big story at our clients is, is that that, that the computational power as has gone has, has improved so much that IOT connections with IOT, that's reality now that is coming reality, that's becoming reality. The third big story at our clients is that the traditional on prem applications that run the core guts of our clients, they haven't gone away. They're here to stay for some time. Most of our clients want to transform their core applications, but, but they haven't yet spend the money to, to transform them, >>you know, and great perspective. Thank you for sharing that insight. Uh, one of the interesting things about cloud 2.0 I'm calling it cloud 2.0 cause we were kind of in cloud 2.0 world cloud one. Dot. O was compute storage scale up Amazon born in the cloud API APIs, agile grade cloud, cheap windows enterprise is hard. Multicloud hybrid cloud Coobernetti's containers, legacy infrastructure sins you mentioned. But one thing that's interesting and I'd like to get your thoughts on is that network management used to be a small white space. Then that turned into observability companies going public great solutions. So observability is now a big category. Automation is taking configuration management and turning that into a whole category around automation. Automation is a really big hot trend right now that's ultimately a data driven business driven opportunity. So observability automation, these are tell signs for cloud 2.0 what is your view on this? Someone who's been in the industry for while talking to customers as they start to think about standing up IOT or scaling up mobile automation's important. Data's important. What's your >>no, absolutely. At the end of the day it's all about data. At the end of the day, uh, when we talk about automation, right, and we're talking about end devices, we're talking about connectivity with the end devices, we're talking about our IOT and those connectivity. But at the end of the day, the heart of it is integration and bringing data that is residing either on prem, in core systems that you have all on the cloud in the courses from that you have, how do you bring that data at the forefront of your edge? A second key aspect around around cloud to auto is it's an ecosystem. Basically. It's an ecosystem place based basically not just in terms of sharing data within your walls and sharing data with your own ecosystem partners, but it's an ecosystem based play in cloud to Datto in terms of also utilizing what your ecosystem provides. So today there is really no need for a lot of our partners to kind of do a lot of lot of their compute inside. You know, when you think about AI, a lot of gold is available in the market today that you can leverage with your ecosystem players. So ecosystem players. Also another interesting aspect about cloud dude auto that often gets old. >>You talked a minute ago about you know, the, the need to have cloud to on prem integration on prem to on-prem, et cetera. And one of the things that I was reading about Boomi is, well, iPads used to be all about 10 years ago connecting on prem, sorry, the cloud to on-prem. Now it's any data source anywhere, any integration edge. You talked about that we have this as consumers, we have this demand to have everything mobile, right? Whenever, whatever it is that we want to call an Uber or maybe a CFO needs to procure some software. What, how does that influence Dillard's go to market strategy with Boomi knowing that booby is integrating on prem cloud edge? All of it? >>So great question. Uh, there are, there are really freaky, um, kind of opportunities that we see when we implement with our clients. Uh, the first big opportunity that we see is when our clients are, are taking a journey to the cloud. Uh, let's say many of our clients want to implement core SAS solution. They're implementing a net net suite solution, they're thinking of SAP S four HANA implementation on the cloud. They're thinking of both the implementation on the cloud, right? With any large SAS platform implementation, there is always need for connectivity to on-prem applications, other SAS applications at times two end devices, right? That's the point where we see a lot of our projects. That's the point where we see a lot of opportunity to help our clients using Boomi as an integration platform. Right? A second big area where we see, uh, our clients needing help is when in their life cycle there is a big event, for example, a big MNA deal, a big divestiture that that might be planning product launch or something significant, something significant. >>And at that point of time, for example, a typical divestiture deal, typically the company that is being so love at times as a part of the deal, the expectation from the buyer is that the core ID infrastructure that they're buying from the company would also be transformed as a part of the deal. And when that's the case and we have a number of examples of those where where you know as a part of the deal itself, the seller tries to modernize it infrastructure and the first thing they do is they go for a plethora of SAS applications to replace their core legacy applications and they want to integrate them very quickly. And that's another situation where we've seen a product like Boomi being very successful in helping us implement. So those are the two big use cases. And the third one is as obviously as you talked about around digital transformation, so driven by digital transformation, whether it's mobile alone or mobile along with transformations along with gain of some edge computational transformation. That's a situation where again, you know they're there, they're leading a large transformation within their organization. And a part of that is answer is making sure that from an integration perspective they standardize and that's where Boomi comes into a lot, a lot of picture as well. >>Well where do you have tons of opportunity? Tons of momentum. Thank you for joining John and me on the QB day, sharing what Deloitte and Boomi are doing together. And again, congratulations to Deloitte on the partner of innovation partner of the year. Thank you so much. Pleasure to talk with you for Regina and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Boomi world 19 thanks for watching. Thank you very much.

>> Narrator: Live from San Jose, California. In the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE. Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now here're your hosts. Jeff Frick and John Walls. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back here in San Jose, we're live at the Convention Center for the second day of QuickBooks Connect 2016. A thriving community, 5000 plus attendees here enjoying where there have been some fascinating keynotes and breakout sessions. And it's our pleasure to bring you some of the brightest and best minds in the QuickBooks community. And we have that with us today in the form of Jim McGinnis, who's the Vice President of Product Management at ProConnect. Jim, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> I got to tell you, I wasn't aware of your stature until Jeff informed me of last year when the two of you met. He said, "I could barley have a conversation with him because the man's a rock star". People kept coming up, they wanted to take selfies with him and it was nonstop. So apparently, your cache goes well beyond theCUBE. >> It's very kind, but the truth is, the rock stars are our 150,000 plus pro-advisors from around the world. These guys are making a huge difference in the small businesses' lives. They come here, they connect with small businesses, with each other, et cetera. Sometimes it feels a little silly, but I'm just honored to get to spend time with them. >> But they wanted the selfie so good for you. They're not asking for Jeff and John. They're asking for Jim. >> In the near future I'm sure. >> Give me an idea, first off, your feelings about the vibe. You heard us talking about, a little bit ago but your thoughts about what you're seeing here and the growth of this show over the last three years. >> I was having a conversation, you know this started on the back of a notebook three years ago where we said, "We're getting big enough that we believe we need to have a show to bring folks together". But we want to be different. We want to be about making connections. So the name QB Connect was born. We wanted to be the place where developers, small businesses, and accountants come together and meet. The vibe is phenomenal. The vibe it starts early Monday morning when we do the accountant kickoff. They go into training. A lot of them get certified in QuickBooks online and advance certifications as well. It continues the next day, yesterday, with these fabulous keynote speakers. Last night with a great band, Third Eye Blind. Sometimes these bands say, "Am I seriously playing for a bunch of accountants"? But they always come away and say, "That is one of the best "shows we've ever done because the enthusiasm, the excitement". Everybody loves to be here. And then today continued. We had fabulous speakers on the stage again. People like Tony Hawk and Simone Biles. >> Yeah, so what do you want when people leave here, and we're going to get into accounting and what's going on certainly in your world. But I'm just curious. The takeaway that you want people to have as they go back to all corners of the globe, frankly. What do you want them to do, and how do you want them to feel about QuickBooks when they go back and do their 12-hour day jobs? >> Absolutely. You know, I want them to feel empowered to really make a difference in their clients' lives, which is super fun. There was a quote yesterday from America who said, "You are modeling possibilities for someone else and you may not even realize it". And boy, our pro-advisors from around the world really model possibilities. They save small businesses all the time. In fact, 89% of small businesses say they're more successful because they work with and accountant. How do I want them to feel about QuickBooks and Intuit? I really want them to feel like we're their partners. Scott Cook founded this company believing that we're here to make a difference. To change our customer's financial lives so profoundly they can't imagine going back. When I talked to accountants last night, today, that's what they tell me. They want to change their small businesses' financial lives so profoundly, they can't imagine not working with an accountant. We're perfect partners. That's what I'd like them to take back. >> It's so funny right? The dirty little secret everyone thinks an accounting show. It's not an accounting show. >> No. >> It's a small business show. It's really a building businesses and partnerships, and really creating that foundation for other people to build from to be more successful in really pursuing their passions. I think that's why the energy is so strong. >> You said it well. It's all about possibilities and it's all about connections. >> Excellent. So lets talk about some big global trends that are not only impacting QuickBooks and Intuit, and your customers, and the accountants but everyone all over the place. The two big ones that have recently just overtaken everything, mobile and cloud. Huge impact on what you can build, how you can deliver it, how people consume it. How have those really changed what you guys have built and delivered at QuickBooks? >> That's great. I'll start with the cloud side because I think that's where it all starts. All those desktops, they're coffins. The data is buried underneath your desk and it's unusable in so many ways. When the data moves up into the cloud, now you can make connections between industries. You can do industry benchmarking. Now the data can just flow seamlessly from one application, like QuickBooks online, through trial balance to another application, like our ProConnect Tax online. We're able to connect up all these fabulous developers who are building solutions that we would never be able to build the creativity that we see and all plug in this online ecosystem. It changes everything. On the mobile side, boy isn't it fun to see all the tweets going by? Our reputations are being built for us. The best we can do is curate them at this stage. The other is it's anytime, anywhere isn't it? This idea that you can make an appointment with your accountant and he or you would drive across town to get some bit of information. It's just too slow in today's world. Mobile enables us to collaborate constantly with our accounting professionals and the accounting professionals to collaborate with their clients. >> And really in a different kind of form and function because mobile is quick. I got two minutes standing in line at the grocery store at Safeway. I got a couple of minutes while I'm filling up my car full of gas. I'm waiting for the kids to come out of the coach's meeting after the soccer games. So it's a lot more frequent little bits of connecting in the way that we use mobile apps to interact with our world. >> Absolutely. Think about all the productivity that's unlocked with mobile. Usually it's a simple question. I need something now. Make an appointment, drive across town, it's miserable. Instead you can ask a question and all that's successful because the data's in the cloud. >> Jeff: Right. >> So what do you do then in terms of, at least with a client base that has a reputation for being a bit slow to move. And there's not an enormous number of early adopters, it's almost like show me. But yet when you have these new possibilities like moving to the cloud, migration there, people are going to get left behind if they don't. How do you convey that sense of urgency and get them to convert and get them to adopt and take advantage of these great products and services that you're developing for people? >> I'm going to answer that by saying I say it ain't so. I think accountants and accounting professionals are some of the most forward people that I've known. Now, they have to be responsible. They have to look out for their clients. And they're under a lot time pressure. I think that if there's been some slowness in moving it's because we haven't gone fast enough to create applications that really save them the time. Software's a tough business, folks. Because before in my previous life I was in Proctor & Gamble. You knew the benefit up front. Software comes with immediate pain and uncertainty about whether it's really going to deliver the promise, the benefit that's there. What we have to do is we have to help show accountants that the possibilities are there and give them immediate satisfaction that the time savings that they seek is there. When we do that, we've already seen it. They move quickly. >> So you're kind of talking about, in a way I think, this firm of the future concept, right? That as far as where we're going in this 21st century. So talk a little more about that and what it means, brass tax terms. When the rubber hits the road here, in terms of the products that you're providing people and the changes you think the customer's going to have to make in order to really fulfill this vision of the firm of the future. >> That's exactly right. Sometimes our accounting professionals or pro-advisors come to us and say, "Can't you make it simpler? "Can't you break it down into a few steps "so I can follow a roadmap step-by-step "and get there?" And we've done that a little bit with our concept of firm of the future. The first step is the importance of getting online. That first client, that's a little scary. Put your next client online, see what its like, enjoy the benefits, learn the new operating systems, learn the new workflows. And then the benefits start to unlock. You can manage them all in QuickBooks online account. You can start tying in the different applications. You can see all of your clients there. And as you get your second and your third, you start to enjoy that. The second part of our pilar I would say, the firm of the future, is we do believe that the billable hour it's not scalable. Of all of the time savings that's coming by moving to an online platform, gosh, you'd have to have a lot more clients in order to make as much money as you're making today. We believe accounting professionals deserve to get paid for the value they create. And that means moving to fixed fee pricing, it means offering a range of services, that means going beyond just typing in data and compliance to actually creating more value through advisory services. And then that's the third pilar right there. Once you're online, and you're making money by creating value through advisory services, you need to get your name out there. Become a specialist in a certain vertical. Help people around the country, even around the globe, know the value that you can create. And they'll flock to you. We've seen little companies start up with two people, this one in Canada, has gone up to I think more than 500 clients in less than three years because they followed the firm of the future approach. >> That's really interesting. It was apart of the keynote too where a lot of the entrepreneurs said they started with their family accountant or family friend who didn't really have a specialization in the industries that they decided to build. Then at some point they had to flip because the value of accounting is not data entry. And it's kind of old school that automation should help you get rid of the redundant low value activity to free you up on the higher value activity which is asset planning, and tax planning, and future planning, and inventory planning, and the things where the accountant can bring much more value to the relationship that aren't tied to how many hours did it take to prepare your return. >> That's absolutely right. We say that the most important feature we can add into QuickBooks is an accountant. Sometimes there's some fear of technology, I have to share what I read recently in the Wall Street Journal which is, machines have been able to beat humans at chess. But there's a concept called centaur chess, which is half machine half human. When a chess expert is combined with a computer can beat any computer. And that's where we are in the accounting profession too. All this technology is fabulous, but where it really starts to sing is when it's combined with an accounting professional who understands it and leverages to give advice only a human being can give. >> Alright so a couple more trends now that are coming, get your reaction. Machine learning, big one, big data obviously it's been around awhile but the machine learning and the augmented intelligence, AI. Some people say artificial intelligence other people say there's nothing artificial about it. >> That's right. >> It should be augmented intelligence. The impacts of those on your software and your customers? >> Great question. Let's be specific. Things like chart of accounts. We can do a pretty good job of estimating what a chart of accounts should be for a given vertical. But they always get modified by the accountants because they know better than we do. When a few of them start to modify it and few more, pretty soon we can leverage the wisdom of the accounting profession crowd to get the very best chart of accounts for any given vertical. What a great opportunity. And then you think about benchmarks. I was talking to somebody before about when all of the plumbing industry is on QBO. And accountants can go in and say this is what accounts receivable should look like for plumbing, for a plumber. Think of the power of that. But one thing we know is every small business says the same thing, but I'm different. No problem, tell me how you're different? And in fact, we'll find 10,000 others who're different, just like you. >> Just like you, right. (all laughing) So, just going forward, you've go tax pros on one side, you've got accountants on the other, never the twain shall meet. Now you're bringing them together. And the importance of that, the value of that in terms of making sure there's an integration, there's a collaboration for small firms? >> In my new role as product manager for the ProConnect group, that's the part I'm really really excited about. Last year we launched QuickBooks online trial balance so that the data flows into the trial balance and from the trial balance mappings can be done and it flows directly into the tax software with a little modification, a click of the button, you can file right from the tax software. But our accountants told us, I don't understand. I don't want to run two different client lists when somethings going on in the tax side of it. I want to know about it where I do my work, in QuickBooks online accountants. So this year we've integrated the tax software right into QuickBooks online accountant. And now we're dreaming a little bit. Where as we talk about moving to advisory services, when it's a separate business impacts in my books, impacts in the decisions I make here, then get handed over the tax side of the shop. Now when it's all one application, those insights come back from tax and say, I wouldn't do it that way. I'd lease that. I wouldn't buy it because you're going to be in a much better position from a tax standpoint. And gosh, your business has really taken off. You need to think differently about your quarterly estimates. Because otherwise you're going to find yourself in a cash flow situation come October. >> So you're getting ahead. You're not looking after the fact and reacting. >> It's advisory service. It moves tax from being a once a year event to being an ongoing relationship. That's exciting. >> Well Jim, it's that kind of vision that I think, makes you a rock star. And if you got time for a quick selfie. (all laughing) If we all just kind of, you know... >> I'm all in. >> Jim McGinnis, Glad you could join us here. I look forward to seeing you down the road too. >> Thank you very much. >> Jeff: Best of luck to you. >> Jim: I've certainly enjoyed it. >> It's a little blurry, we'll have to do another one here. Back with more here from San Jose right after this. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)