(gentle music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. I've got a great guest here, CUBE alumni and very impressive, inspiring, Rachel Mushahwar Skaff, who's a managing director and general manager at AWS. Rachel, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be here. You all make such a tremendous impact with reporting out what's happening in the tech space, and frankly, investing in topics like this, so thank you. >> It's our pleasure. Your career has been really impressive. You worked at Intel for almost a decade, and that company is very tech, very focused on Moore's law, cadence of technology power in the industry. Now at AWS, powering next-generation cloud. What inspired you to get into tech? How did you get here and how have you approached your career journey, because it's quite a track record? >> Wow, how long do we have? (Rachel and John laugh) >> John: We can go as long as you want. (laughs) It's great. >> You know, all joking aside, I think at the end of the day, it's about this simple statement. If you don't get goosebumps every single morning that you're waking up to do your job, it's not good enough. And that's a bit about how I've made all of the different career transitions that I have. You know, everything from building out data centers around the world, to leading network and engineering teams, to leading applications teams, to going and working for, you know, the largest semiconductor in the world, and now at AWS, every single one of those opportunities gave me goosebumps. And I was really focused on how do I surround myself with humans that are better than I am, smarter than I am, companies that plan in decades, but live in moments, companies that invest in their employees and create like artists? And frankly, for me, being part of a company where people know that life is finite, but they want to make an infinite impact, that's a bit about my career journey in a nutshell. >> Yeah. What's interesting is that, you know, over the years, a lot's changed, and a theme that we're hearing from leaders now that are heading up large teams and running companies, they have, you know, they have 20-plus years of experience under their belt and they look back and they say, "Wow, "things have changed and it's changing faster now, "hopefully faster to get change." But they all talk about confidence and they talk about curiosity and building. When did you know that this was going to be something that you got the goosebumps? And were there blockers in your way and how did you handle that? (Rachel laughs) >> There's always blockers in our way, and I think a lot of people don't actually talk about the blockers. I think they make it sound like, hey, I had this plan from day one, and every decision I've made has been perfect. And for me, I'll tell you, right, there are moments in your life that mark a differentiation and those moments that you realize nothing will be the same. And time is kind of divided into two parts, right, before this moment and after this moment. And that's everything from, before I had kids, that's a pretty big moment in people's lives, to after I had kids, and how do you work through some of those opportunities? Before I got married, before I got divorced. Before I went to this company, after I left this company. And I think the key for all of those is just having an insatiable curiosity around how do you continue to do better, create better and make better? And I'll tell you, those blockers, they exist. Coming back from maternity leave, hard. Coming back from a medical leave, hard. Coming back from caring for a sick parent or a sick friend, hard. But all of those things start to help craft who you are as a human being, not as a leader, but as a human being, and allows you to have some empathy with the people that you surround yourself with, right? And for me, it's, (sighs) you can think about these blockers in one of two ways. You can think about it as, you know, every single time that you're tempted to react in the same way to a blocker, you can be a prisoner of your past, or you can change how you react and be a pioneer of the future. It's not a blocker when you think about it in those terms. >> Mindset matters, and that's really a great point. You brought up something that's interesting, I want to bring this up. Some of the challenges in different stages of our lives. You know, one thing that's come out of this set of interviews, this, of day and in conversations is, that I haven't heard before, is the result of COVID, working at home brought empathy about people's personal lives to the table. That came up in a couple interviews. What's your reaction to that? Because that highlights that we're human, to your point of view. >> It does. It does. And I'm so thankful that you don't ask about balance because that is a pet peeve of mine, because there is no such thing as balance. If you're in perfect balance, you are not moving and you're not changing. But when you think about, you know, the impact of COVID and how the world has changed since that, it has allowed all of us to really think about, you know, what do we want to do versus what do we have to do? And I think so many times, in both our professional lives and our personal lives, we get caught up in doing what we think we have to do to get ahead versus taking a step back and saying, "Hey, what do I want to do? "And how do I become a, you know, "a better human?" And many times, John, I'm asked, "Hey, "how do you define success or achievement?" And, you know, my answer is really, for me, the greatest results that I've achieved, both personally and professionally, is when I eliminate the word success and balance from my vocabulary, and replace them with two words: What's my contribution and what's my impact? Those things make a difference, regardless of gender. And I'll tell you, none of it is easy, ever. I think all of us have been broken, we've been stretched, we've been burnt out. But I also think what we have to talk about as leaders in the industry is how we've also found endurance and resilience. And when we felt unsteady, we've continued to go forward, right? When we can't decide, the best answer is do what's uncomfortable. And all of those things really stemmed from a part of what happened with COVID. >> Yeah, yeah, I love the uncomfortable and the balance highlight. You mentioned being off balance. That means you're growing, you're not standing still. I want to get your thoughts on this because one thing that has come out again this year, and last year as well, is having a team with you when you do it. So if you're off balance and you're going to stretch, if you have a good team with you, that's where people help each other. Not just pick them up, but like maybe get 'em back on track again. So, but if you're solo, you fall, (laughs) you fall harder. So what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this has come up, and this comes up in team building, workforce formation, goal setting, contribution. What's your reaction to that? >> So my reaction to that that is pretty simple. Nobody gets there on their own at all, right? Passion and ambition can only take you so far. You've got to have people and teams that are supporting you. And here's the funny thing about people, and frankly, about being a leader that I think is really important: People don't follow for you. People follow for who you help them become. Think about that for a second. And when you think about all the amazing things that companies and teams are able to do, it's because of those people. And it's because you have leaders that are out there, inspiring them to take what they believe is impossible and turn it into the possible. That's the power of teams. >> Can you give an example of your approach on how you do that? How do you build your teams? How do you grow them? How do you lead them effectively and also make 'em inclusive, diverse and equitable? >> Whew. I'll give you a great example of some work that we're doing at AWS. This year at re:Invent, for the first time in its history, we've launched an initiative with theCUBE called Women of the Cloud. And part of Women of the Cloud is highlighting the business impact that so many of our partners, our customers and our employees have had on the social, on the economic and on the financials of many companies. They just haven't had the opportunity to tell their story. And at Amazon, right, it is absolutely integral to us to highlight those examples and continue to extend that ethos to our partners and our customers. And I think one of the things that I shared with you at re:Invent was, you know, as U2's Bono put it, (John laughs) "We'll build it better than we did before "and we are the people "that we've been waiting for." So if we're not out there, advocating and highlighting all the amazing things that other women are doing in the ecosystem, who will? >> Well, I've got to say, I want to give you props for that program. Not only was it groundbreaking, it's still running strong. And I saw some things on LinkedIn that were really impressive in its network effect. And I met at least half a dozen new people I never would have met before through some of that content interaction and engagement. And this is like the power of the current world. I mean, getting the voices out there creates momentum. And it's good for Amazon. It's not just personal brand building for my next job or whatever, you know, reason. It's sharing and it's attracting others, and it's causing people to connect and meet each other in that world. So it's still going strong. (laughs) And this program we did last year was part of Rachel Thornton, who's now at MessageBird, and Mary Camarata. They were the sponsors for this International Women's Day. They're not there anymore, so we decided we're going to do it again because the impact is so significant. We had the Amazon Education group on. It's amazing and it's free, and we've got to get the word out. I mean, talk about leveling up fast. You get in and you get trained and get certified, and there's a zillion jobs out (laughs) there in cloud, right, and partners. So this kind of leadership is really important. What was the key learnings that you've taken away and how do you extend this opportunity to nurture the talent out there in the field? Because when you throw the content out there from great leaders and practitioners and developers, it attracts other people. >> It does. It does. So look, I think there's two types of people, people that are focused on being and people who are focused on doing. And let me give you an example, right? When we think about labels of, hey, Rachel's a female executive who launched Women of the Cloud, that label really limits me. I'd rather just be a great executive. Or, hey, there's a great entrepreneur. Let's not be a great entrepreneur. Just go build something and sell it. And that's part of this whole Women of the cloud, is I don't want people focused on what their label is. I want people sharing their stories about what they're doing, and that's where the lasting impact happens, right? I think about something that my grandmother used to tell me, and she used to tell me, "Rachel, how successful "you are, doesn't matter. "The lasting impact that you have "is your legacy in this very finite time "that you have on Earth. "Leave a legacy." And that's what Women of the Cloud is about. So that people can start to say, "Oh, geez, "I didn't know that that was possible. "I didn't think about my career in that way." And, you know, all of those different types of stories that you're hearing out there. >> And I want to highlight something you said. We had another Amazonian on the program for this day earlier and she coined a term, 'cause inside Amazon, you have common language. One of them is bar raising. Raise the bar, that's an Amazonian (Rachel laughs) term. It means contribute and improve and raise the bar of capability. She said, "Bar raising is gender neutral. "The bar is a bar." And I'm like, wow, that was amazing. Now, that means your contribution angle there highlights that. What's the biggest challenge to get that mindset set in culture, in these- >> Oh. >> 'Cause it's that simple, contribution is neutral. >> It absolutely is neutral, but it's like I said earlier, I think so many times, people are focused on success and being a great leader versus what's the contribution I'm making and how am I doing as a leader, you know? And when it comes to a lot of the leadership principles that Amazon has, including bar raising, which means insisting on the highest standards, and then those standards continue to raise every single time. And what that is all about is having all of our employees figure out, how do I get better every single day, right? That's what it's about. It's not about being better than the peer next to you. It's about how do I become a better leader, a better human being than I was yesterday? >> Awesome. >> You know, I read this really cute quote and I think it really resonates. "You meditate to upgrade your software "and you work out to upgrade your hardware." And while it's important that we're all ourselves at work, we can't deny that a lot of times, ourselves still need that meditation or that workout. >> Well, I hope I don't have any zero days in my software out there, so, but I'm going to definitely work on that. I love that quote. I'm going to use that. Thank you very much. That was awesome. I got to ask you, I know you're really passionate about, and we've talked about this, around, so you're a great leader but you're also focused on what's behind you in the generation, pipelining women leaders, okay? Seats at the table, mentoring and sponsorship. What can we do to build a strong pipeline of leaders in technology and business? And where do you see the biggest opportunity to nurture the talent in these fields? >> Hmm, you know, that's great, great question. And, you know, I just read a "Forbes" article by another Amazonian, Tanuja Randery, who talked about, you know, some really interesting stats. And one of the stats that she shared was, you know, by 2030, less than 25% of tech specialists will be female, less than 25%. That's only a 6% growth from where we are in 2023, so in seven years. That's alarming. So we've really got to figure out what are the kinds of things that we're going to go do from an Amazon perspective to impact that? And one of the obvious starting points is showcasing tech careers to girls and young women, and talking openly about what a technology career looks like. So specifically at Amazon, we've got an AWS Git IT program that helps schools and educators bring in tech role models to show them what potential careers look like in tech. I think that's one great way that we can help build the pipeline, but once we get the pipeline, we also have to figure out how we don't let that pipeline leak. Meaning how do we keep women and, you know, young women on their tech career? And I think big part of that, John, is really talking about how hard it is, but it's also greater than you can ever imagine. And letting them see executives that are very authentic and will talk about, geez, you know, the challenges of COVID were a time of crisis and accelerated change, and here's what it meant to me personally and here's what we were able to solve professionally. These younger generations are all about social impact, they're about economic impact and they're about financial impact. And if we're not talking about all three of those, both from how AWS is leading from the front, but how its executives are also taking that into their personal lives, they're not going to want to go into tech. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things you mentioned there about getting people that get IT, good call out there, but also, Amazon's going to train 30 million people, put hundreds of millions of dollars into education. And not only are they making it easier to get in to get trained, but once you're in, even savvy folks that are in there still have to accelerate. And there's more ways to level up, more things are happening, but there's a big trend around people changing careers either in their late 20s, early 30s, or even those moments you talk about, where it's before and after, even later in the careers, 40s, 50s. Leaders like, well, good experience, good training, who were in another discipline who re-skilled. So you have, you know, more certifications coming in. So there's still other pivot points in the pipeline. It's not just down here. And that, I find that interesting. Are you seeing that same leadership opportunities coming in where someone can come into tech older? >> Absolutely. You know, we've got some amazing programs, like Amazon Returnity, that really focuses on how do we get other, you know, how do we get women that have taken some time off of work to get back into the workforce? And here's the other thing about switching careers. If I look back on my career, I started out as a civil engineer, heavy highway construction. And now I lead a sales team at the largest cloud company in the world. And there were, you know, twists and turns around there. I've always focused on how do we change and how do we continue to evolve? So it's not just focused on, you know, young women in the pipeline. It's focused on all gender and all diverse types throughout their career, and making sure that we're providing an inclusive environment for them to bring in their unique skillsets. >> Yeah, a building has good steel. It's well structured. Roads have great foundations. You know, you got the builder in you there. >> Yes. >> So I have to ask you, what's on your mind as a tech athlete, as an executive at AWS? You know, you got your huge team, big goals, the economy's got a little bit of a headwind, but still, cloud's transforming, edge is exploding. What's your outlook as you look out in the tech landscape these days and how are you thinking about it? What your plans? Can you share a little bit about what's on your mind? >> Sure. So, geez, there's so many trends that are top of mind right now. Everything from zero trust to artificial intelligence to security. We have more access to data now than ever before. So the opportunities are limitless when we think about how we can apply technology to solve some really difficult customer problems, right? Innovation sometimes feels like it's happening at a rapid pace. And I also say, you know, there are years when nothing happens, and then there's years when centuries happen. And I feel like we're kind of in those years where centuries are happening. Cloud technologies are refining sports as we know them now. There's a surge of innovation in smart energy. Everyone's supply chain is looking to transform. Custom silicon is going mainstream. And frankly, AWS's customers and partners are expecting us to come to them with a point of view on trends and on opportunities. And that's what differentiates us. (John laughs) That's what gives me goosebumps- >> I was just going to ask you that. Does that give you goosebumps? How could you not love technology with that excitement? I mean, AI, throw in AI, too. I just talked to Swami, who heads up the AI and database, and we just talked about the past 24 months, the change. And that is a century moment happening. The large language models, computer vision, more compute. Compute's booming than ever before. Who thought that was going to happen, is still happening? Massive change. So, I mean, if you're in tech, how can you not love tech? >> I know, even if you're not in tech, I think you've got to start to love tech because it gives you access to things you've never had before. And frankly, right, change is the only constant. And if you don't like change, you're going to like being irrelevant even less than you like change. So we've got to be nimble, we've got to adapt. And here's the great thing, once we figure it out, it changes all over again. And it's not something that's easy for any of us to operate. It's hard, right? It's hard learning new technology, it's hard figuring out what do I do next? But here's the secret. I think it's hard because we're doing it right. It's not hard because we're doing it wrong. It's just hard to be human and it's hard to figure out how we apply all this different technology in a way that positively impacts us, you know, economically, financially, environmentally and socially. >> And everyone's different, too. So you got to live those (mumbles). I want to get one more question in before we, my last question, which is about you and your impact. When you talk to your team, your sales, you got a large sales team, North America. And Tanuja, who you mentioned, is in EMEA, we're going to speak with her as well. You guys lead the front lines, helping customers, but also delivering the revenue to the company, which has been fantastic, by the way. So what's your message to the troops and the team out there? When you say, "Take that hill," like what is the motivational pitch, in a few sentences? What's the main North Star message in today's marketplace when you're doing that big team meeting? >> I don't know if it's just limited to a team meeting. I think this is a universal message, and the universal message for me is find your edge, whatever that may be. Whether it is the edge of what you know about artificial intelligence and neural networks or it's the edge of how do we migrate our applications to the cloud more quickly. Or it's the edge of, oh, my gosh, how do I be a better parent and still be great at work, right? Find your edge, and then sharpen it. Go to the brink of what you think is possible, and then force yourself to jump. Get involved. The world is run by the people that show up, professionally and personally. (John laughs) So show up and get started. >> Yeah as Steve Jobs once said, "The future "that everyone looks at was created "by people no smarter than you." And I love that quote. That's really there. Final question for you. I know we're tight on time, but I want to get this in. When you think about your impact on your company, AWS, and the industry, what's something you want people to remember? >> Oh, geez. I think what I want people to remember the most is it's not about what you've said, and this is a Maya Angelou quote. "It's not about what you've said to people "or what you've done, "it's about how you've made them feel." And we can all think back on leaders or we can all think back on personal moments in our lives where we felt like we belonged, where we felt like we did something amazing, where we felt loved. And those are the moments that sit with us for the rest of our lives. I want people to remember how they felt when they were part of something bigger. I want people to belong. It shouldn't be uncommon to talk about feelings at work. So I want people to feel. >> Rachel, thank you for your time. I know you're really busy and we stretched you a little bit there. Thank you so much for contributing to this wonderful day of great leaders sharing their stories. And you're an inspiration. Thanks for everything you do. We appreciate you. >> Thank you. And let's go do some more Women of the Cloud videos. >> We (laughs) got more coming. Bring those stories on. Back up the story truck. We're ready to go. Thanks so much. >> That's good. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. It's not just going to be March 8th. That's the big celebration day. It's going to be every quarter, more stories coming. Stay tuned at siliconangle.com and thecube.net here, with bringing all the stories. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(relaxing music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. We got a great lineup of of guests this program and this segment, we got talking about hot company called, MessageBird. We got three amazing executives and leaders. Rachel Thornton, who's the chief marketing officer, and Andrea Euenheim, Chief People Officer, and Asha Thurthi, Chief Product Officer, We've got the CMO, Chief People Officer, and the Chief Product Officer. We've got everyone who's building that company. This is about building a startup culture that empowers women in tech. Ladies, thanks for coming on and thanks for taking the time. >> Thank you, John, for having us. >> Rachel, you know, you've seen big organizations, you're the CMO at AWS, now at MessageBird. This is a world where now there's new standards, you've got global culture, you can start off anywhere. A lot of things involved in being a C-suite leader, from not only marketing product to customers, but building a product, hiring the right team, team dynamics, power dynamics. So as female leaders, you guys are building that culture that empowers women to not only find their voices, but to use their voices to lead. What's the secret? What are you guys doing? Give us a taste of what's it like right now. Give us a feeling for what's going on in this world for you guys right now. >> I'll go first. I actually want to say that I was the, when MessageBird was building out their team, I was super excited to join because I was so impressed with the fact that the product officer was a woman, the HR officer was a woman. It was so great to see women in those leadership roles and I was just really positive and bullish on that. I felt like any company that was really building out that leadership team and thinking about being conscious of how do we have diverse perspectives and doing that is only going to make the product better. So I was super excited to join and I have really, really enjoyed being on a leadership team where I think we're 50% women. I think that is true. Like it's half women, which is really amazing. >> And that's to be the standard because I mean, software is in every product. Digital transformation is everyone and the world is not 17% women. I mean, let's just face it. So this is really a product issue as well and team issue because I mean, it just makes sense. I mean, this is really still, the industry's behind, this is a big problem. >> But I do think that, like I said, watching what's happening here, it gives me hope. Actually, it makes me inspired for to see other companies adopt it. I think, you know, both Asha and Andrea and you guys chime in, have just, you know, they're doing great jobs as leaders. I feel like we're all sort of, you know, able to speak, able to share our voice and able to inspire the folks in the company when they see that. >> Asha, talk, wait, Asha, could you weigh in on this because people matter in companies and now you have work at home, remote, you're seeing very successful configurations of teams, technical to business across the board, building products and working as a team. What's your take on this and what's your perspective? >> No, no, great question. The time is now. I really feel like the time has come for women to take what's really due for them and not just because we're women, because we are equally strong and contributing on the table. So I'm super excited for the generation that's to come because great voices really represent great customers because customers come in all different shapes and forms and people who are building the products, plus running companies should represent the customers, that end of the day, buy your products. So voice on the table is extremely important and so is making an attempt to make sure that you are hiring across all walks of life, all the way from sea level to even at IC level, ensuring that there is inclusion and diversity from a representation perspective. >> You've got the keys to the kingdom there as the product officer, Chief Product Officer, you know, you got to interface with engineering, you got to interface with the customers and like I mentioned earlier, the products are used by everyone now. This is all the, what's your experience been? What have you learned? Because again, a lot of engineers are male dominated and around the world, teams are male. What's your experience? How do you blend that together? How do you bring that harmony and so, and productivity? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, like I think the first thing is I think acknowledging the current state, which is women in tech, specifically because you asked about my role, continues to be a challenge. Women in tech be it in the product side of the equation or design side of the equation or engineering side of the equation, I think continues to be a challenge. I think all companies will have to lean in, especially starting education from STEM degrees, going forward to see how do you kind of make an effort to ensure that women in technology is not as high of a barrier that it used to be. Women in color in technology is not as high of a barrier as well. And how do you kind of make sure that when you are hiring, when you are advocating for your company, when you're setting up your interview loops, to actually setting up the right platform for all of these employees to thrive. You are ensuring that every walk of this, is kind of including women and making sure that all voice are voices are represented. Andrea, Rachel, I'd love your take as well because products just one piece of this whole equation where you build product. I'm kind of curious to see how you-- >> Andrea, weigh in, because this is like a hiring thing too. Like if you have a special test, like, okay, do we have the right makeup this person's going to, is there a bro test for example? I've heard companies have that where they have this kind of special questions that identify bros 'cause they don't want that in their culture. Is there a playbook? Is there a best practice in sourcing and identifying and interviewing loops? For instance, we just heard, Asha, that was great on the product side, Andrea, this is a big challenge. Putting teams together, having the right cohesive harmony, talent, looking for people, having the right interview loops, identifying that bro or the right makeup that you want to bring in or interview out. What's the strategy? How do you put these teams together because this is the real secret sauce. >> Not sure whether it's a secret sauce, but I think what we have shown that message for, is that we have made a very conscious effort and decision to start leading by example from the top to really build a leadership team that is already combining all the great traits on top of a good diversity in the team. Not only from a gender but also a skills and personality point of view. And then, from there, really making a planful intentional way down to say where do we hire which talent? What is it that we're still missing as a piece of the puzzle to really make the right decisions on leadership but also team compositions to really look at what's the customer needs, how can we build great products, how can we also compose great engineering teams to meet those expectations that our customers have and how do we build for the future? And that needs to happen in all different parts of the organization to really see that we can make a great effort across the board. >> And, you know, Rachel, last year, your talk inspired a lot of folks in conversation around sponsorship and you talk about networking and mentoring, but you highlighted sponsorship, I remember that clearly and that got great play in the conversation. So it's not just mentoring for mentoring's sake, there's also sponsorships. So there's really identifying, hiring, and then working with. And according to McKenzie's report that you guys are highlighting at me, MessageBird one in four C-suite leaders are identified as women and and with more hurdles to climb every day, especially at a startup. >> And I think that's why it has to be a combination of how do you think about your team composition? How do you think about your leadership composition? So all the things that Andrea just said, but then how do you make sure, as you're bringing folks in, you're constructing the right loop so people feel like this is a great place they want to be a part of, that it represents a diverse group of people. And then once they're in, how do you mentor people? What's the mentorship program you put in place? But the sponsorship program, I think like, sponsorship as well as mentorship also matters because you want to make sure when you identify folks in the organization, that you feel are ready for the next step, that you have identified as high potential, how do you come together as a leadership team and have a program that sponsors them, that gets them training or maybe it's executive coaching but also just makes them visible to leaders across the organization. So when it's time to put together the case for that promotion or maybe that new project or that that new group they would lead, everyone is aware of them and everyone has had some sort of interaction with them. So it really is building the right sort of sponsorship framework to help people get the kind of visibility and the kind of support they need to then unlock their potential in other areas. Whether, again, that's promotion or just taking on new groups or taking on new projects. >> Awesome. Well, you guys are fabulous. >> And in addition to this. >> Oh, go ahead, go ahead. >> No, in addition to this, I think it's also what is critical. Even though we're not the biggest company without Amazon and not Microsoft, but I think it's still important to also give exposure to the great people that we have, to make sure that everybody has visibility, everybody has a voice, and to make sure that we can then build sponsorship and mentorship across the different levels and teams and to build a great succession pipeline to really make sure that people can be considered for the next big project that is coming independent of any skill that they might have. But being a voice and having the experience that counts as most important. >> I love that inclusion, you jumped ahead. I wanted to get some questions 'cause you guys are a great group here. I guess the first question I had on the list here, is for you guys, what does it take to build an environment of inclusion? Because that's really key where female identified employees aren't just asked to questions, they take risks, they ask the right questions, they get involved, they're heard, they're recognized. What's it take to build that kind of environment? >> I can go, I think two things come to mind. One, I would say is commitment. Like commitment at the top. That you're not just going to lip sync, but you're going to walk the talk, that this is important to you as a company and who you stand or what you stand for as a human being. And you are going to put in the effort as a leadership team at the top to actually set the right example. Like MessageBird, I think Rachel said in her intro, 50% of the C level is women and you start right there. The second thing I would say is giving our people voice, you know, giving them confidence. Women because of, I don't know, thousands of years of social conditioning as such, hesitate to kind of speak up. So setting the right example, giving them the voice and encouraging them to take the challenges even if they're sponsored or not, to kind of make sure that they're willing to try new things and be not afraid of risk as much, I think is also super important. >> I think that's very, it is so, so true about the voice and about encouragement and just, I think all, you know, making sure people feel like across, you know, the entire organization, that they feel like they have a voice, their voice can be heard. And that we as a leadership team are supportive in those environments and people feel like I can take risks, I can't ask questions, I can push the envelope in terms of, "Hey, do you know, do we agree with this point? Is there room for discussion?" I think when people see that that's encouraged and it's encouraged for everyone, that's powerful. >> The McKinsey study had a lot of data in there. What's the summary on that on the people side? Obviously, the women are underrepresented, one in four, the C-suite leaders are women, but there's also people who are climbing through the ranks. I mean, what's the big takeaway from the McKinsey study beyond the obvious one in four stat? Is there any other messages in there that people should pay attention to? >> I think Asha said it really well with building the pipeline at the top. And I think that's something that we all think about every day. I think Andrea and her team do such a great job in helping us with that, but that is huge. Like, you're going to, you have to really think how can you build that pipeline out? And I think encouraging people, women, underrepresented groups, everyone to just think what do I want to do? What are the companies out there that I think would be great to work for? How can I find the right environment to support me? I think that's important and I think that helps build that pipeline. >> Okay. When you're a startup, you're a lot different than the big company, right? So the big companies are different. You guys are growing, startups are a lot about, you know, don't run a cash, hard charging, creative, teamwork. But it could be tough under fire. The startup, what's the learnings? How do you guys look at that and how do you guys manage that? Because it's super impart of the culture, of where the phase of these startups are in. >> I think the advantage that we have is we're not a big company. So I think in that way, there is a way to really build a culture of empowerment and us making decisions together and independent of where you come from, what experience you have, it's really what you can bring to the table. It's not having the fear of political cohesion. >> Yeah. >> That you have in larger corporations at times. To really build that great team that we are building right now. To say, all that matters to us is to build great products for our customers. And there's a lot of discussion about quota and one in four and I know large corporations are a lot more tied to meeting requirements that are depending on national laws and whatever, which is sometimes required to force a change in culture and how to do business. But I think us as a company, we just see a strong, strong benefit in not worrying about the gender. It's really like making an effort at the beginning to build the culture and the company that is just looking for a great team and a great culture independent of quotas. >> Actually, on the product side, Asha, on the product side. I want to get your thoughts because I know from startups, you know, being done a few myself, product market fit is huge, right? So you got, that's the goal and there's a lot of pressure. Rachel, you got to go to put the go to market together and you got to build the product. If you don't hit it, you got to br agile, you got to be fast, which could cause a lot of friction. You know, it's 'cause people got to reset, regroup. It's not for the faint of heart. How do you, pipeline folks, women are great for that. Are people aware? Do you have to, are people ready for it? Is there a training? How do you get someone ready or is there a test if they're startup ready? >> No, no, it's a great question. So like, we have a value at the company that's called move 200 miles an hour. All startups, I think, will totally resonate with this. As Andrea was saying, it's a balancing act. >> John: Yeah. >> How do you ensure that you're moving 200 miles an hour, but at the same time ensuring that you're hiring the right people who ultimately represent the customer. One example, Rachel and I were talking about this earlier, we actually represent 40% of the B2C emails that send globally. Imagine as the audience who's receiving one of these emails, think your favorites, you know, brand in Nordstrom that's actually sending you an email on the other end. Think about the customer on the other end. So it does require company commitment to ensure that the people you hire, represent ultimately the customer you're going after. So even if you're a startup, that's moving 200 miles an hour with lesser resources than any other bigger company, you have to commit to actually ensuring that your team has the right diversity. Starting all the way from sourcing to ensuring that this person is thriving and getting hopefully promoted to one day replace all of us. Let's put it that way. >> Rachel, weigh in on the startup velocity, challenges, dynamism, thoughts. >> You go, Andrea. >> It's not for everyone, you know, in that way, but it's something that if you find the right environment and the right people who thrive in such an environment like we do, it's magic. And building on that magic that we have is so powerful that we cannot afford giving voice to one group that is stronger than the others. We're counting on each other and this is a key element to who we are and how we want to build going forward. >> Rachel, your reaction, you're in a startup scene, whitewater rafting, heavy. Speed. >> It is very different. It's very different. But I love it. And what Andrea said is totally true. I think it isn't for everyone, but when you find a great organization and when you find a great group of people, it is magic. You know, it just, it's amazing the things you can do and it is a palpable feeling in the company when everyone is, you know, working on the same thing and excited about the same thing. >> You know, it's interesting about startups, not to take a tangent here, but a lot of startups just, it's not as much resource as a big company that that department doesn't exist. A lot of people doing multiple things. Wait a minute, someone doesn't write my emails for me, doesn't do the PowerPoints. Where's the marketing department? Where's the big budgets? There's a lot of juggling and a lot of versatility required, but also, there's opportunities to identify talent that could be hired for something that could move into something else. And this is part of the growth. And that's one side. On the other side, and this is a question, I promise, there's burnout, right? So you have burnout and fatigue, whether it's cultural and, or, I don't see an opportunity to really, truly a lot of aperture for new opportunities. So can you guys share your thoughts on this dynamic? Because in startups, there's a double-edged sword that could be burnout or there could be opportunity. >> I'll go and then I'll have Asha on the product side. I think that's true everywhere. I don't know, it could be that in some startups, it's exasperated, but I think that actually is true whether you're in a big company or a small company. I think, you know, depending on the industry, depending on the company size, depending on what you're going after, you know, you have to be clear about what it is you're going to deliver, how you're going to do it. And I do think it's important that everyone be able to say for themselves, "Hey, I'm excited about this product or I'm excited about this company and here's what I'm going to do," but I'm also going to make sure that I'm not putting myself in such a way that it does, you know, burnout does happen, but I don't think it can confine it to startups. I think it can happen anywhere. >> Okay. Yeah, exactly. We've seen that now. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. John, you've three moms on the call and definitely, we've all kind of come out of Covid into this space. I'm not going to lie, it's really hard. >> Yeah. >> It's really hard, actually balancing and juggling multiple different priorities that you have to. Especially in a startup world, when you move so many different miles an hour and you don't have enough support around you, it is really hard. The one advice I do have for women, which I kind of tell myself very repeatedly, is it's completely okay to be honest, I have taken an intentional action to be a lot more vulnerable over the years. Talk about, you know, having to pick up my child or, you know, having to spend the evening out when I need to spend time with my family. And being open about it because when I do it at the top, I can accept the space for enough people to talk about it a as well. So really, helping women set their own boundaries without feeling guilty about it. Because by nature, we end up, you know, taking care of everything around us. So how do you take care of yourself, fill your cup first so you don't burnout, to your question, I think is extremely critical. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's a really great point. Good point. I think about honesty and transparency comes in with boundaries, but also empathy. I think a lot of people, there's a lot of awareness now to this factor of teamwork and remote and creativity. Productivity is kind of a new, not new thing, but it's kind of more forefront and that's super important. How do you guys promote that? Because you still got to move fast, you got to schedule things differently. I mean, I find myself much more schedule oriented and it's hard to coordinate. How do you guys balance that because it's a management challenge, an opportunity at the same time to have that inclusivity vibe. >> I think on the empathy part on balancing, I just think you have to focus on it. It has to be a conscious choice. And I think, you know, sometimes we do it great and I only speak for myself. Sometimes I do it great, sometimes I don't. But I definitely think you have to focus on it. Think about it, think about where are you, you know, where are you scheduling things, what are you doing? How are you making sure you're thinking about your team, thinking about the, you know, the example you're providing or the example you're setting. >> Thoughts on the boundaries and when does something not a boundary, when it's not productive. 'Cause, you know, so I got my boundaries and they're like, "Wait, whoa, whoa, stay in your lane." No one likes to hear that. Stay in your lane thing. I mean, not to say that that people shouldn't stay in their lane. I just find that a little bit off-putting like, you know, stay in your lane. That sounds like a, it's against the culture. What do you guys think about how people should be thinking about their norms in these environments whether it's inclusivity and diversity? What are some of the areas to stay away from and what are the areas to promote in terms of how they'll communicate these boundaries and, or, good lanes, I should say. I mean, maybe I shouldn't say, stay in your lane's a bad thing, but, so it could be more off-putting. >> I can touch on something which is what can you do more of? I really resonated so much with Rachel's comment from last year on sponsorship. I am the product of sponsorship so it really resonates with me. Also, wouldn't even be sitting here with these two wonderful women and you. In addition to that, I think allyship, I think that's extremely important. What I would love to, you know, see everybody set the right example on is promoting a lot more of allyship where you kind of encourage, not just women, underrepresented minority, knowing really well the backgrounds that they come from and the, you know, situational context around it and seeing how can you be a great ally. And what great ally looks like for me is simple things. If you're in a meeting full of people and you see the underrepresented folks not talking or sharing their voice, how can you, as the senior person in the room, and you know, any person in the room, actually share the voice out and get their thoughts. If you can have many different people present in your company, all hands or what have you, what other forums that can be, how do you ensure that it's not just you always, but like you're putting in the spotlight on other people and, you know, when calibrations come in, when recruiting comes in, how do you ensure that your loops are diverse? So long story short, how do you ensure that you are setting the right example even if you don't belong to one of these groups, that I think do more of. >> Well, that's a great call out on the allies on mentorship programs and support networks. These are important. How should someone go forward and build a mentorship program and support networks so people can help each other out? Is there a way you guys have found best practices, Rachel and team? Is there a strategy that works well? >> Actually, Asha has some great examples here, so I'm going to toss it over to her. >> Thank you, Andy. Team, like this is what I would love for everyone to do more of. Like, we just kicked off 2023, why not make it a goal for this year? Let's seize the year to ensure that, you know, I'll start off with tech, especially where women are underrepresented. We ensure that all of your rock stars, all of your women, at least have a mentor, either within the organization or you reach out to your network externally and pair this person up with a mentor. What ultimately helps us, people having somebody they can bounce off their ideas off, get tips, get advice on how to tackle a particular situation. So really, pairing people up to ensure that they have a way to kind of bounce off ideas and see how can they elevate themselves, I think will go a long way. >> I mean, this is a big problem. Rachel, you've been a leader, you've seen this happen before. How do people climb through the ranks successfully? And you've seen people, maybe, fail a little bit. Is there a best practice or advice you could share with folks that are out there watching and listening on, you know, how to be savvy on climbing through the ranks, whether it's finding mentors being the right place at the right time. I always have the old saying, you know, "Hang around the basketball rim and you'll get a rebound." So is it timing, is it placement? What's your best practice advice for coming through the rim? >> I have a little, and then again, I think I've been very impressed with the team Asha built and just the things that she's done in her career. And I think that for women in tech, that's crucial. I would just say overall, finding your voice, using your voice, but also thinking about who's around you, who's supportive, who are the mentors or who are the people you would love to either mentor or have mentored you. And be sure to speak up and and make that known. And then I also think, don't be afraid to, like I said, use your voice, ask questions. Don't be afraid to also help people up. I think, Asha, what you said a few minutes ago is so true. Like, if there are folks in the room that aren't, you know, as vocal, that you know have amazing ideas, be sure that you're there to help them up, to help them with their voice 'cause you want to make sure that it just brings more to the conversation. >> Asha, you're running a product group, that's a big challenge. What's your thoughts on that? Can you share your opinion? >> Yeah, imposter syndrome is a real thing. I would definitely say confidence is self-taught is what I have really learned over the years and really kind of knowing that the next person to you may not be any smarter than you or may not be any less smart than you. So really, treating everybody as an equal around you and finding that inner strength and inner voice to be able to speak for yourself and to be able to share your ideas and do the best that you possibly can. Bring the A game and when you need help, asking for it. So really, just knowing that and taking initiative and we're here to help. >> Awesome. Andrea, you're here. I want to get your thoughts on building out a mentoring program and networks for women so they can have this great environment. What's it take to do that? I mean, it's hard to do. Building out meaningful networking mentorship program and sport network for women to help each other's hard. What's your experience? >> I think you need some strong leaders within an organization who are willing to sponsor and support. You need somebody to start it. It's usually senior female leaders who are kickstarting a networking environment and some good groups to have some great impact and then, also making sure that they get the visibility to see we accomplish great things together. We raise the topics that not everybody would see. And really bringing the other voice to the table to have like contradicting perspectives on what a company should do on the product side, but also on the general strategic side of things. And then building from there to say, "How can we also build great project teams that support these ideas and to really get the momentum going." Not big programs, but will really impact all communities that will push the topics. >> Awesome. Well, great, great, great panel here. Building a startup culture that empowers women in tech. You guys are amazing. Final question, rapid fire, go down the line. We'll start with Rachel, Andrea, Asha. What's it take to have that kind of success for startup? If you could share quickly what your advice is for people watching and succeeding in a startup. >> I would say focus, intention, and commitment. >> John: Andrea. >> I would say courage, backbone, authenticity. >> I couldn't agree more with Rachel. Focus and commitment. It is for me too. >> Well, you guys are amazing. Congratulations. And MessageBird, again, great ratios. You guys are succeeding. You're a standard for the industry and congratulations and thank you for taking the time on theCUBE's coverage National Women's Day. We also have women in data science at Stanford, with other programs going on today. It's a big day. Thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thank you, Jim. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of international news. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (relaxing music)

>>Hey everyone. Hello from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with you, and I'm on the show floor at Reinvent. But we have a very special program series that the Cube has been doing called Women of the Cloud. It's brought to you by aws and I'm so pleased to have an excellent panel of women leaders in technology and in cloud to talk about their tactical recommendations for you, what they see as found, where they've helped organizations be successful with cloud. Please welcome my three guests, Tara Kapor, president and Chief Revenue Officer, consulting and Digital Transformations, NTT Data. We have Rachel Mu, aws, head of North America, partner sales from aws, and Jimmy Barnes joins us as well, managing director, investment banking engineering at Goldman Sachs. It is so great to have you guys on this power panel. I love it. Thank you for joining me. >>Thank >>You. Let's start with you. Give us a little bit of, of your background at NTT Data and I, and I understand NTT has a big focus on women in technology and in stem. Talk to us a little bit about that and then we'll go around the table. >>Perfect, thank you. Thank you. So brand new role for me at Entity Data. I started three months back and it's a fascinating company. We are about 22 billion in size. We work across industries on multiple innovative use cases. So we are doing a ton of work on edge analytics in the cloud, and that's where we are here with aws. We are also doing a ton of work on the private 5G that we are rolling out and essentially building out industry-wide use cases across financial services, manufacturing, tech, et cetera. Lots of women identity. We essentially have women run cloud program today. We have a gal called Nore Hanson who is our practice leader for cloud. We have Matine who's Latifa, who's our AWS cloud leader. We have Molly Ward who leads up a solutions on the cloud. We have an amazing lady in Mona who leads up our marketing programs. So a fantastic plethora of diverse women driving amazing work identity on cloud. >>That's outstanding to hear because it's one of those things that you can't be what you can't see. Right. We all talk about that. Rachel, talk a little bit about your role and some of the focus that AWS has. I know they're big customer obsession, I'm sure obsessed with other things as well. >>Sure. So Rachel Muir, pleased to be here again. I think this will be my third time. So a big fan of the Cube. I'm fortunate enough to lead our North America partner and channel business, and I'll tell you, I've been at AWS for a little under two years, and honestly, it's been probably the best two years of my career. Just in terms of where the cloud is, where it's headed, the business outcomes that we can deliver with our customers and with our partners is absolutely remarkable. We get to, you know, make the impossible possible every day. So I'm, I'm thrilled to be here and I'm thrilled to, to be part of this inaugural Women of the Cloud panel. >>Oh, I'm prepared to have all three of you. One of the things that feedback, kind of pivoting off what, Rachel, one of the things that you said that one of our guests, some of several of our guests have said is that coming out of Adams keynote this morning, it just seems limitless what AWS can do and I love that it gives me kind of chills what they can do with cloud computing and technology, with its ecosystem of partners with its customers like Goldman Sachs. Jimmy, talk to us a little bit about you, your role at Goldman Sachs. You know, we think of Goldman Sachs is a, is a huge financial institution, but it's also a technology company. >>Yeah. I mean, since the age of 15 I've been super passionate about how we can use technology to transform business and simplify modernized business processes. And it's, I'm so thrilled that I have the opportunity to do that at Goldman Sachs as an engineer. I recently moved about two years ago into the investment banking business and it's, you know, it's best in class, one of the top companies in terms of mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, et cetera. But what surprised me is how technology enables all the businesses across the board. Right? And I get to be leading the digital platform for building out the digital platform for in the investment banking business where we're modernizing and transforming existing businesses. These are not new businesses. It's like sometimes I liken it to trying to change the train while it's moving, right? These are existing businesses, but now we get to modernize and transform on the cloud. Right. Not just efficiency for the business by efficiency for technologists as >>Well. Right, right. Sticking with you, Jimmy. I wanna understand, so you've been, you've been interested in tech since you were young. I only got into tech and accidentally as an adult. I'm curious about your career path, but talk to us about that. What are some of the recommendations that you would have for other women who might be looking at, I wanna be in technology, but I wanna work for some of the big companies and they don't think about the Goldman Sachs or some of the other companies like Walmart that are absolutely technology driven. What's your advice for those women who want to grow their career? >>I also, growing up, I was, I was interested in various things. I, I loved doing hair. I used to do my own hair and I used to do hair for other students at school and I was also interested in running an entertainment company. And I used actually go around performing and singing and dancing with a group of friends, especially at church. But what amazed me is when I landed my first job at a real estate agent and everything was being done manually on paper, I was like, wow, technology can bring transformation anywhere and everywhere. And so whilst I have a myriad of interest, there's so many ways that technology can be applied. There's so many different types of disciplines within technology. It's not, there's hands on, like I'm colder, I like to code, but they're product managers, there are business analysts, there are infrastructure specialist. They're a security specialist. And I think it's about pursuing your passion, right? Pursuing your passion and identifying which aspects of technology peak your interest. And then diving in. >>Love that. Diving in. Rachel, you're shaking your head. You definitely are in alignment with a lot of what >>Duties I am. So, you know, interesting enough, I actually started my career as a civil engineer and eventually made it into, into technology. So very similar. I saw in, you know, heavy highway construction how manual some of these processes were. And mind you, this was before the cloud. And I sat down and wrote a little computer program to automate a lot of these manual tasks. And for me it was about simplification of the customer journey and really figuring out how do you deliver value. You know, on fast forward, say 20 plus years, here I am with AWS who has got this amazing cloud platform with over 200 services. And when I think about what we do in tech, from business transformation to modernizing to helping customers think about how do they create new business models, I've really found, I've really found my sweet spot, and I'll say for anyone who wants to get into tech or even switch careers, there's just a couple words of advice that I have. And it's really two words, just start. >>Yes, >>That's it. Just start. Because sometimes later becomes never. And you know, fuel your passion, be curious, think about new things. Yes. And just >>Start, I love that. Just start, you should get t-shirts made with that. Tell me a little bit about some of your recommendations. Obviously just start is great when follow your passion. What would you say to those out there looking to plan the letter? >>So, you know, my, my story's a little bit like jus because I did not want to be in tech. You know, I wanted an easy life. I did well in school and I wanted to actually be an air hostess. And when I broke that to my father, you know, the standard Indian person, now he did, he, you know, he wanted me to go in and be an engineer. Okay? So I was actually push into computer engineering, graduated. But then really two things today, right? When I look back, really two pieces, two areas I believe, which are really important for success. One is, you know, we need to be competent. And the second is we need to be confident, right? Yes, yes. It's so much easier to be competent because a lot of us diverse women, diverse people tend to over rotate on knowing their technical skills, right? Knowing technical skills important, but you need to know how to potentially apply those to business, right? Be able to define a business roi. And I see Julie nodding because she wants people to come in and give her a business ROI for programs that you're executing at Goldman Sachs. I presume the more difficult part though is confidence. >>Absolutely. It's so hard, especially when, when we're younger, we don't know. Raise your hand because I guarantee you either half the people in the, in the room or on the zoom these days weren't listening or have the same question and are too afraid to ask because they don't have the confidence. That's right. Give me, let's pivot on confidence for a minute, Jim, and let's go back to how would you advise your younger self to find your confidence? >>That's, that's a tough one because I feel like even this older self is still finding exercise to, to be real. But I think it's about, I would say it's not praise. I think it's about praising yourself, like recognizing your accomplishments. When I think about my younger self, I think I, I like to focus more on what I didn't do or what I didn't accomplish, instead of majoring and focusing on all the accomplishments and the achievements and reminding myself of those day after day after day. And I think it's about celebrating your wins. >>I love that. Celebrating your wins. Do you agree, Rachel? >>I do. Here's the hard part, and I look around this table of amazing business leaders and I can guarantee that every single one of us sometime this year woke up and said, oh my gosh, I don't know how to do that. Oh >>Yeah. But >>What we haven't followed that by is, I don't know how to do that yet. Right. And here's the other thing I would tell my younger self is there will be days where every single one of us falls apart. There will be days when we feel like we failed at work. There will be days when you feel like you failed as a parent or you failed as a spouse. There'll be days where you have a kid in the middle of target screaming and crying while you're trying to close a big business deal and you just like, oh my gosh, is this really my life? But what I would tell my younger self is, look, the crying, the chaos, the second guessing yourself, the successes, every single one of those are milestones. And it's triumphant, it's tragic, but every single thing that we have been through is fiercely worthwhile. And it's what got us >>Here. Absolutely. Absolutely. Think of all the trials and tribulations and six and Zacks that got you to this table right now. Yep. So Terry, you brought up confidence. How would you advise the women out there won't say you're gonna know stuff. The women out there now that are watching those that are watching right there. Hi. How would you advise them to really find their, their ability to praise themselves, recognize all of the trials and the tribulations as milestones as Rachel said, and really give themselves a seat at the table, raise their hand regardless of who else is in the room? >>You know, it's a, it's a more complex question just because confidence stems from courage, right? Confidence also stems from the belief that you're going to be treated fairly right now in an organization for you to be treated fairly. You need to have, be surrounded by supporters that are going to promote your voice. And very often women don't invest enough in building that support system around them. Yeah. Right. We have mentors, and mentors are great because they come in and they advise us and they'll tell us what we need to go out and do. We really need a team of sponsors Yes. Who come in and support us in the moment in the business. Give us the informal channel because very often we are not plugged into the informal channel, right. So we don't get those special projects or assignments or even opportunities to prove that we can do the tough task. Yeah. So, you know, my, my advice would be to go out and build a network of sponsors. Yes. And if you don't have one, be a sponsor for someone else. That's right. I love that. Great way to win sponsorship is by extending it todos. >>And sometimes too, it's about, honestly, I didn't even know the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a few years ago. And I started thinking, who are I? And then I started realizing who they were. That's right. And some of the conversations that we've had on the cube about women in technology, women of the cloud with some of the women leaders have said, build, and this is kind of like, sort of what you were saying, build your own personal board of directors. Yeah. And that, oh, it gives me chills. It's just, it's so important for, for not just women, but anybody, for everybody. But it's so important to do that. And if you, you think about LinkedIn as an example, you have a network, it's there, utilize it, figure out who your mentors are, who your sponsors are, who are gonna help you land the next thing, start building that reputation. But having that board of directors that you can kind of answer to or have some accountability towards, I think is hugely very >>Important. Yeah. >>Very important. I think, you know, just for, just for those that are listening, a really important distinction for me was mentors are people that you have that help you with, Hey, here's the situation that you were just in. They advise you on the situation. Sponsors are the people that stick up for you when you're not in the room to them. Right. Sponsors are the ones that say, Hey, I think so and so not only needs to have a seat at the table, but they need to build the table. And that's a really important delineation. Yeah. Between mentors and sponsors. And everybody's gotta have a sponsor both within their company and outside of their company. Someone that's advocating for them on their behalf when they don't even know it. Yeah. Yeah. >>I love that you said that. Build the table. It reminds me of a quote that I heard from Will I am, I know, very random. It was a podcast he did with Oprah Winfrey on ai. He's very into ai and I was doing a panel on ai, so I was doing a lot of research and he said, similar for Rachel to build the table, don't wait for a door to open. You go build a door. And I just thought, God, that is such brilliant advice. It is. It's hard to do. It is. Especially when, you know, the four of us in this room, there's a lot of women around here, but we are in an environment where we are the minority women of color are also the minority. What do you guys think where tech is in terms of de and I and really focusing on De and I as as really a very focused strategic initiative. Turner, what do you think? >>So, you know, I just, I, I spoke earlier about the women that we have at Entity Data, right? We have a fabulous team of women. And joining this team has been a moment of revelation for me coming in. I think to promote dni, we all need to start giving back, right? Yes. So today, I would love to announce that we at Entity would like to welcome all of you out there. You know, folks that have diverse ideas, you know, ISV, partners with diverse solutions, thought leaders out there who want to contribute into the ecosystem, right? Customers out there who want to work with companies that are socially responsible, right? We want to work with all of you, come back, reach out to us and be a part of the ecosystem because we can build this together, right? AWS has an amazing platform that gives us an opportunity to do things differently. Yes. Right. Entity data is building a women powered cloud team. And I want to really extend that out to everyone else to be a part this ecosystem, >>But a fantastic opportunity. You know, when we talk about diversity and inclusion and equity, it needs to be intentional for organization. It sounds very intentional at ntt. I know that that intention is definitely there at AWS as well. What are your thoughts on where tech is with respect to diversity? Even thought diversity? Because a lot of times we tend to go to our comfort zones. We do. And so we tend to start creating these circles of kind of like, you know, think tanks and they think alike people to go outside of that comfort zone. It's part of building the table, of building the, is the table and getting people from outside your comfort zone to come in and bring in diverse thought. Because can you imagine the potential of technology if we have true thought diversity in an organization? >>Right? It's, it's incredible. So one of the things that I always share with my team is we've got the opportunity to really change the outcome, right? As you know, you talked about Will I am I'm gonna talk about Bono from you too, right? One of, one of his favorite quotes is, we are the people we've been waiting for. Oh, I love that. And when you think about that, that is us. There is no one else that's gonna change the outcome and continue to deliver some of the business outcomes and the innovation that we are if we don't continue to raise our hand and we don't continue to, to inspire the next generation of leaders to do the same thing. And what I've found is when you start openly sharing what your innovation ideas are or how you're leveraging your engineering background, your stories and your successes, and, and frankly, some of your failures become the inspiration for someone you might not even know. Absolutely. And that's the, you know, that's the key. You're right. Inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility, yes. Have to be at the forefront of every business decision. And I think too often companies think that, you know, inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility is one thing, and business outcomes are another. And they're not. No, they are one in the same. You can't build business outcomes without also focusing on inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility. That's the deliberate piece. >>And, and it has to be deliberate. Jimmy, I wanna ask you, we only have a couple of minutes left, but you're a woman in tech, you're a woman of color. What was that like for you? You, you were very intentional knowing when you were quite young. Yeah. What you wanted to do, but how have you navigated that? Because I can't imagine that was easy. >>It wasn't. I remember, I always tell the story and the, the two things that I really wanted to emphasize today when I thought about this panel is rep representation matters and showing up matters, right? And there's a statement, there's a flow, I don't know who it's attributed to, but be the change you want to see. And I remember walking through the doors of Goldman Sachs 15 years ago and not seeing a black female engineer leader, right? And at that point in time, I had a choice. I could be like, oh, there's no one look like, there's no one that looks like me. I don't belong here. Or I could do what I actually did and say, well, I'm gonna be that person. >>Good, >>Right? I'm going to be the chain. I'm going to show up and I am going to have a seat at the table so that other people behind me can also have a seat at the table. And I think that I've had the privilege to work for a company who has been inclusive, who has had the right support system, the right structures in place, so that I can be that person who is the first black woman tech fellow at Goldman Sachs, who is one of the first black females to be promoted up the rank as a, from analysts to managing director at the company. You know, that was not just because I determined that I belong here, but because the company ensure that I felt that I belong. >>Right. >>That's a great point. They ensure that you felt that. Yeah. You need to be able to feel that. Last question, we've only got about a minute left. 2023 is just around the corner. What comes to your mind, Jimmy will stick with you as you head into the new year. >>Sorry, can you repeat >>What comes to mind priorities for 2023 that you're excited about? >>I'm excited about the democratization of data. Yeah. I'm excited about a lot of the announcements today and I, I think there is a, a huge shift going on with this whole concept of marketplaces and data exchanges and data sharing. And I think both internally and externally, people are coming together more. Companies are coming together more to really de democratize and make data available. And data is power. But a lot of our businesses are running, running on insights, right? And we need to bring that data together and I'm really excited about the trends that's going on in cloud, in technology to actually bring the data sets together. >>Touro, what are you most excited about as we head to 2023? >>I think I'm really excited about the possibilities that entity data has right here, right now, city of Las Vegas, we've actually rolled out a smart city project. So saving citizens life, using data edge analytics, machine learning, being able to predict adverse incidents before they happen, and then being able to take remediation action, right? So that's technology actually working in real time to give us tangible results. We also sponsor the Incar races. Lots of work happening there in delivering amazing customer experience across the platform to millions of users real time. So I think I'm just excited about technology coming together, but while that's happening, I think we really need to be mindful at this time that we don't push our planet into per right. We need to be sustainable, we need to be responsible. >>Absolutely. Rachel, take us out. What are you most excited about going into 2023? >>So, you know, there are so many trends that are, that we could talk about, but I'll tell you at aws, you know, we're big. We, we impact the world. So we've gotta be really thoughtful and humble about what it is that we do. So for me, what I'm most excited about is, you know, one of our leadership principles is about, you know, with what broad responsibility brings, you know, you've got to impact sustainability and many of those other things. And for me, I think it's about waking up every day for our customers, for our partners, and for the younger generations. And being better, doing better, and making better for this planet and for, you know, the future generations to come. So >>I think your tag line just start applies to all of that. It does. It has been an absolute pleasure. And then really an honor to talk to you on the program. Thank you all for joining me, sharing your experiences, sharing what you've accomplished, your recommendations for those others who might be our same generation or older or younger. All really beautiful advice. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. We appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage in Monaco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. Monaco Crypto Summit is the event and there's a big conversation later at the yacht club with Prince Albert and everyone else will be there, and it'll be quite the scene. And Rachel Wolfson is here. She's with Cointelegraph. They're the media partner of the event, the official media partner of the Monaco Crypto Summit. She's also MCing the event on stage, presented by DigitalBits. Rachel, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So I know you're busy, thanks for taking the time cause' you got to go jump back in and moderate, and keep things on track. This isn't an inaugural event. So DigitalBits has exploded on the scene. I just saw a thing on YouTube news around this soccer player in Rome, has DigitalBits logo on their jersey. They're a big to do cause everyone's popular and they got a couple teams. So real world, kind of, assets coming together, what's going on in the event that you're MCing? What's the focus? What's the agenda? What's some of the conversations like? >> Yeah, definitely. Well, it's a great event. It's my first time here in Monaco and I'm loving it. And I think that Monaco is really becoming the next crypto hotspot. Definitely in terms of Metaverse and Web3 innovation, I think that we're going to start seeing a lot of that here. That's what we're seeing today at the Summit. So a lot of the presentations that we're seeing are really focused on Web3 and NFT platforms, so for instance, obviously what DigitalBits is doing. We watched a video before the break on Ecosystem and the Metaverse that people can join and be a part of, in terms of real estate, but we're seeing a lot of innovation here today with that. I moderated a great panel with Britney Kaiser, Lauren Bissell, Taross, I'm blanking on his last name, but it was about blockchain and how governments are implementing blockchain. So that was also really interesting to hear about what the Ukrainian government is doing with blockchain. So there's kind of a mix, but I'd say that the overall theme is Web3 and NFTs. >> Yeah. Britney was mentioning some of that, how they're going to preserve buildings and artifacts, so that in case they're looted or destroyed, they can preserve them. >> Right. I think it's called the Heritage Fund. And I just think it's such an interesting use case in terms of how governments are using blockchain because the best use for blockchain in my opinion, is recording data, and having that data be permanent. And so when we can have artifacts in Ukraine recorded on the blockchain, you know by being scanned, it's really revolutionary. And I think that a lot of governments around the world are going to see that use case and say, "Oh wow, blockchain is a great technology for things like that." >> So DigitalBits had a press conference this morning and they talked about their exchange and some other things. Did you attend that press conference or did you get briefed on that? >> I did not attend the press conference. I was prepping for my MC role. >> So they got this exchange thing and then there's real interest from Prince Albert's foundations to bring this into Monaco. So Monaco's got this vibe, big time. >> Rachel: Right. There's a vibe (John chuckles) >> What does it all mean, when you're putting in your reporting? What do you see happening? >> So, I mean, I honestly haven't covered Monaco actually ever in my reporting. And John, you know I've been reporting since 2017, but the vibe that I'm getting just from this summit today is that Web3 and NFTs are going to be huge here. I'm speaking, I haven't... You know, there's a panel coming up about crypto regulations, and so we're going to talk a little bit about laws being passed here in Monaco in terms of Metaverse and digital identity. So I think that there are a few laws around that here that they're looking at, the government here is looking at to kind of add clarity for those topics. >> I had a couple guests on earlier. We were talking about the old days, a couple years ago. You mentioned 2017, so much has changed. >> Yes. >> You know, we had a up and down. 2018 was a good year, and then it kind of dived back and changed a little bit. Then NFTs brought it back up again, been a great hype cycle, but also movement. What's your take on the real progress that's been made? If you zoom out and look at the landscape, what's happened? >> Right. I mean, well, a lot has happened. When I first entered the space, I initially came in, I was interested in enterprise, blockchain and private networks being utilized by enterprises to record data. And then we saw public blockchains come in, like Ethereum and enterprises using them. And then we saw a mix. And now I feel like we're just seeing public blockchains and there's really... (John chuckles) But there's still our private blockchains. But today, I mean, we've gone from that in 2017 to right now, I think, you know, we're recently seeing a lot of these centralized exchanges kind of collapsing. What we've seen with Celsius, for instance, and people moving their crypto to hardware wallets. I think that the space is really undergoing a lot of transformation. It's really revolutionary, actually, to see the hardware wallet market is growing rapidly, and I think that that's going to continue to grow. I think centralized exchanges are still going to exist in custody crypto for enterprises and institutions, and you know, in individuals as well. But we are seeing a shift from centralized exchanges to hardware wallets. NFTs, although the space is, you know, not as big as it was a year ago, it's still quite relevant. But I think with the way the market is looking today, we're only seeing the top projects kind of lead the way now, versus all of the noise that we were seeing previously. So yeah, I think it's- >> So corrections, basically? >> Right. Exactly. Corrections. And I think it's necessary, right. It's very necessary. >> Yeah. It's interesting. You know, you mentioned the big players you got Bitcoin, Ethereum driving a lot. I remember interviewing the crypto kiddies when they first came out, it was kind of a first gen Ethereum, and then it just exploded from there. And I remember saying to myself, if the NFTs and the decentralized applications can have that scale, but then it felt like, okay, there was a lot of jocking for under the covers, under the hood, so to speak. And now you've got massive presence from all the VCs, and Jason Ho has like another crypto fund. I mean, >> Right. you can't go a day without another big crypto fund from you know, traditional venture capitalists. Meanwhile, you got investors who have made billions on crypto, they're investing. So you kind of got a diversity of investor base going on and different instruments. So the investor community's changing and evolving too. >> Right. >> How do you see that evolving? >> Well, it's a really good point you mentioned. So Cointelegraph research recently released a report showing that Web3 is the most sought after investment sector this year. So it was DeFi before, and Web3 is now leading the way over DeFi. And so we're seeing a lot of these venture capitalist funds as you mentioned, create funds allocated just to Web3 growth. And that's exactly what we're seeing, the vibe I'm getting from the Monaco Crypto Summit here today, this is all about Web3. It's all about NFT, it is all about the Metaverse. You know, this is really revolutionary. So I think we're definitely going to see that trend kind of, you know, conquer all of these other sectors that we're seeing in blockchain right now. >> Has Web3 become the coin term for Metaverse and NFTs? Or is that being globalized as all shifted, decentralized? What's the read on it? It seems to be like, kind of all inclusive but it tends to be more like NFT's the new thing and the young Gen Zs >> Yeah want something different than the Millennials and the Xs and the Boomers, who screwed everything up for everybody. >> Yeah. (John chuckles) No, I mean, it's a great question. So when I think of Web3, I categorize NFTs and the Metaverse in there. Obviously it's just, you know the new form of the internet. It's the way the internet is- >> Never fight fashion, as I always say, right? >> Right. Yeah. Right. (John chuckles) It's just decentralization. The fact that we can live in these virtual worlds and own our own assets through NFT, it's all decentralized. And in my opinion, that all falls under the category of Web3. >> Well, you're doing a great job MCing. Great to have you on theCube. >> Rachel: Thanks. I'd like to ask you a personal question if you don't mind. COVID's impacted us all with no events. When did you get back onto the events circuit? What's on your calendar? What have you been up to? >> Yeah, so gosh, with COVID, I think when COVID, you know, when it was actually really happening, (John chuckles) and it still is happening. But when it was, you know, >> John: Like, when it was >> impacting- shut down mode. >> Right. When we were shut down, there were virtual events. And then, I think it was late last year or early this year when the events started happening again. So most recently I was at NFT NYC. Before that, I was at Consensus, which was huge. >> Was that the one in Austin or Miami? >> In Austin. >> That's right, Austin. >> Right. Were you there? >> No, I missed it. >> Okay. It was a very high level, great event. >> Huge numbers, I heard. >> Yes. Massive turnout. (John chuckles) Tons of speakers. It was really informative. >> It feels like a festival. actually. >> It was. It was just like South by Southwest, except for crypto and blockchain. (John chuckles) And then coming up, gosh, there are a lot of events. I'll be at an event in Miami, it's an NFT event that's in a few months. I know that there's a summit happening, I think in Turkey that I may be at as well. >> You're on the road. You're traveling. You're doing a lot of hopping around. >> Yes I am. And there's a lot of events happening in Europe. I'm US-based, but I'm hoping to spend more time in Europe just so I can go to those events. But there's a lot happening. >> Yeah. Cool. What's the most important story people should be paying attention to in your mind? >> Wow. That's... (Rachel chuckles) That's a big question. It's a good question. I think most, you know, the transition that we're seeing now, so in terms of prices, I think people need to focus less on the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum and more on innovation that's happening. So for instance, Web3 innovation, what we're seeing here today, you know, innovation, isn't about prices, but it's more about like actually now is the time to build. >> Yeah. because the prices are a bit down. >> Yeah. I mean, as, you know, Lewis Hamilton's F1 driver had a quote, you know, "It takes a team. No matter who's in the driver's seat, it's a team." So community, Wayne Gretzky skates where the puck is going to be I think is much more what I'm hearing now, seeing what you're saying is that don't try to count the price trade of Bitcoin. This is an evolution. >> Right. >> And the dots are connecting. >> Exactly. And like I said, now is the time to build. What we're seeing with the project Britney mentioned, putting the heritage, you know, on the blockchain from Ukraine, like, that's a great use case for what we're seeing now. I want to see more of those real world use cases. >> Right. Well, Rachel, thanks for coming on theCube. I really appreciate it. Great to see you. >> Thanks, John. >> And thanks for coming out of your schedule. I know you're busy. >> Thanks. Now you get some lunchtime now and get some break. >> Yeah. Get back on stage. Thanks for coming on. >> Rachel: Thank you. >> All right. We're here at the Monaco Crypto Summit. Rachel's MCing the event as part of the official media partner, Cointelegraph. Rachel Wolfson here on theCube. I'm John Furrier. More coverage coming after this short break. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE presentation of the AWS startup showcase, market MarTech, emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. Talking about the data analytics, all the news and all the hot stories. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. And today we're excited to be joined by Rachel Ostler, VP of product at Heap, Heap.io. Here to talk about from what, to why the future of digital insights. Great to see you, thanks for joining us today. >> Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for having me back. >> Well, we had a great conversation prior to the event here, a lot going on, you guys had acquired Auryc in an acquisition. You kind of teased that out last time. Talk about this, the news here, and why is it important? And first give a little setup on Heap and then the acquisition with Auryc. >> Yeah. So heap is a digital insights platform. So as you mentioned, it's all about analytics and so Heap really excels at helping you understand what your users and customers are doing in your digital application at scale. So when it comes to Auryc, what we really saw was a broken workflow. Maybe, I would even call it a broken market. Where a lot of customers had an analytics tool like Heap. So they're using Heap on one hand to figure out what is happening at scale with their users. But on the other hand, they were also using, like a session replay tool separately, to look at individual sessions and see exactly what was happening. And no one was very effective at using these tools together. They didn't connect at all. And so as a result, neither one of them could really be fully leveraged. And so with this acquisition, we're able to put these two tools together, so that users can both understand the what at scale, and then really see the why, immediately together in one place. >> You know, that I love that word why, because there's always that, you know, that famous motivational video on the internet, "you got to know your why", you know, it's very a motivational thing, but now you're getting more practicality. What and why is the, is the lens you want, right? So, I totally see that. And again, you can teased that out in our last interview we did. But I want to understand what's under the covers, under the acquisition. What was the big thesis behind it? Why the joint forces? What does this all mean? Why is this so important to understand this new, what and why and the acquisition specifically? >> Yeah, so let me give you example of a couple used cases, that's really helpful for understanding this. So imagine that you are a product manager or a, maybe a growth marketer, but you're someone who owns a digital experience. And what you're trying to do, of course, is make that digital experience amazing for your users so that they get value and that may mean that they're using it more, it may mean that new features are easily discoverable, that you can upsell things on your own. There's all sorts of different things that that may mean, but it's all about making it easy to use, discoverable, understandable, and as self-service as possible too. And so most of these digital builders, we call 'em digital builders sometimes. They are trying to figure out when the application is not working the way that it should be working, where people are getting stuck, where they're not getting the value and figure out how to fix that. And so, one really great used case is, I just want to understand in mass, like, let's say I have a flow, where are people dropping off? Right, so I see that I have a four step funnel and between step three and four people are dropping off. Heap is great for getting very detailed on exactly what action they're taking, where they're dropping off. But then the second you find what that action is, quantitatively, you want to watch it, you want to see what they did exactly before it. You want to see what they did after it. You want to understand why they're getting stuck. What they're confused at, are they mouthing over two things, like you kind of want to watch their session. And so what this acquisition allows us to do, is to put those things together seamlessly, you find the point in friction, you watch a bunch of examples, very easily. In the past, this would take you at least hours, if you could do it at all. And then in other used cases, the other direction. So there's the kind of, I think of it as the max to the min, and then there's the other direction as well. Like you have the, or maybe it's the macro to micro. You have the micro to macro, which is you have one user that had a problem. Maybe they send in a support ticket. Well, you can validate the problem. You can watch it in the session, but then you want to know, did this only happen to them? Did this happen to a lot of users? And this is really worth fixing, because all these customers are having the same problem. That's the micro to macro flow that you can do as well. >> Yeah. That's like, that's like the quantitative qualitative, the what and the why. I truly see the value there and I liked the way you explained that, good call out. The question I have for you, because a lot of people have these tools. "I got someone who does that." "I got someone over here that does the quantitative." "I don't need to have one company do it, or do I?" So the question I have for you, what does having a single partner or vendor, providing both the quantitative and the qualitative nails mean for your customers? >> So it's all because now it's immediate. So today with the two tools being separate, you may find something quantitatively. But then to, then to find the sessions that you want to watch that are relevant to that quantitative data point is very difficult. At least it takes hours to do so. And a lot of times people just give up and they don't bother. The other way is also true, you can watch sessions, you can watch as many sessions as you want, you can spend hours doing it, you may never find anything of interest, right? So it just ends up being something that users don't do. And actually we've interviewed a lot of customers, they have a lot of guilt about this. A lot of product managers feel like they should be spending all this time, but they just don't have the time to spend. And so it not only brings them together, but it brings them together with immediacy. So you can immediately find the issue, find exactly where it is and watch it. And this is a big deal, because, if you think about, I guess, like today's economic conditions, you don't have a lot of money to waste. You don't have a lot of time to waste. You have to be very impactful with what you're doing and with your spending of development resources. >> Yeah. And totally, and I think one of the things that immediacy is key, because it allows you to connect dots faster. And we have the aha moments all the time. If you miss that, the consequences can be quantified in a bad product experience and lost customers. So, totally see that. Zooming out now, I want to get your thoughts on this, cause you're bringing, we're going down this road of essentially every company is digital now, right? So digitization, digital transformation. What do you want to call it? Data is digital. This video is an experience. It's also data as well. You're talking, we're going to share this and people are going to experience that. So every website that's kind of old school is now becoming essentially a digital native application or eCommerce platform. All the things that were once preserved for the big guys, the hyper-scalers and the categories, the big budgets, now are coming down to every company. Every company is a digital company. What challenges do they have to transition from? I got a website, I got a marketing team. Now I got to look like a world class, product, eCommerce, multifaceted, application with developers, with change, with agility? >> Well, so I think that last thing you said is a really important part of it, the agility. So, these products, when you're going from a, just a website to a product, they're a lot more complex. Right? And so maybe I can give an example. We have a customer, it's an insurance company. So they have this online workflow. And if you can imagine signing up for insurance online, it's a pretty long complicated workflow. I mean, Hey, better to do it online than to have to call someone and wait on, you know, on the phone. And so it's a good experience, but it's still fraught with like opportunities of people getting stuck and never coming back. And so one of the things that Heap allowed this customer to do was figure out something that wasn't working in their workflow. And so if you think about traditional analytics tools, typically what you're doing is you're writing tracking code and you're saying, "Hey, I'm going to track this funnel, this process." And so maybe it has, you know, five different forms or pages that you have to go through. And so what you're doing when you track it is you say, did you submit the first one? Did you submit the second one? Did you submit the third one? So you know, like where they're falling off. You know where they're falling off, but you don't know why, you don't know which thing got them stuck because each one of these pages has multiple inputs and it has maybe multiple steps that you need to do. And so you're completely blind to exactly what's happening. Well, it turned out because Heap collects all this data, that on one of these pages where users were dropping off, it was because they were clicking on a FAQ, there was a link to a FAQ, and because this was a big company, the FAQ took them to a completely different application. Didn't know how to get back from there and they just lost people. And imagine if you are doing this with traditional means today, right? You don't have any visibility into what's happening on that page, you just know that they fell off. You might think about what do I do to fix this? How do I make this flow work better? And you might come up with a bunch of ideas. One of your ideas could be, let's break it into multiple pages. Maybe there's too much stuff on this page. One of your ideas may have been, let's try a FAQ. They're getting stuck, let's give them some more help. That would be a very bad idea, right? Because that was actually the reason why they were leaving and never coming back. So, the point I'm making is that, if you don't know exactly where people are getting stuck and you can't see exactly what is happening, then you're going to make a lot of very bad decisions. You're going to waste a lot of resources, trying things that make no sense. It is hard enough as a digital builder and all the product managers and growth marketers and marketers out there can attest to this, it's hard enough when you know exactly what the problem is to figure out a good solution. Right? That's still hard. But if you don't know the problem, it's impossible. >> Okay, so let's just level up, the bumper sticker now for the challenges are what? Decision making, what's the, stack rank the top three challenges from that. So it's being agile, right? So being very fast, because you're competing with a lot of companies right now. It's about making really good decisions and driving impact, right? So you have to have all the data that you need. You have to have the, the specific information about what's going on. Cause if you don't have it, you're going to decide to invest in things and you're not going to drive the impact that you want. >> So now you got the acquisition of Auryc and Auryc and you have the, this visibility to the customers that are building, investing, you mentioned, okay. As they invest, whether it's the digital product or new technology in R and D, what feedback have you guys seen from these investments, from these customers, what results have come out of it? Could you share any specific answers to the problems and challenges you have outlined, because you know, there's growth hackers could be failing cause of stupid little product mistakes that could have been avoided in the feedback, you know what I'm saying? So it's like, where can you, where are these challenges addressed and what are some of the results? >> Yeah, so, what we've seen with our customers is that when they are applying this data and doing this analysis on say workflows or goals that they're trying to accomplish, they've been able to move the needle quite a bit. And so, whether it is, you know, increasing conversion rates or whether it is making sure that they don't have, you know, drop off of trial signups or making sure that their customers are more engaged than before, when they know exactly where they're failing, it is much easier to make an investment and move the needle. >> Awesome. Well, let's move on to the next big topic, which I love, it's about data science and data engineering. You guys are a data company and I want to ask you specifically, how Heap uniquely is positioned to help companies succeed, where in the old big tech world, they're tightening the ropes on secure cookies, privacy, data sharing. At the same time, there's been an explosion in cloud scale data opportunities and new technologies. So it seems like a new level of, capability, is going to replace the old cookies, privacy and data sharing, which seem to be constricting or going away. How do you, what's your reaction to that? Can you share how Heap fits into this next generation and the current situation going on with the cookies and this privacy stuff. >> Yep, so it is really important in this world to be collecting data compliantly, right? And so what that means is, you don't want to be reliant on third party cookies. You want to be reliant on just first party information. You want to make sure that you don't collect any PII. Heap is built to do that from the ground up. We by default will not collect information, like what do people put into forms, right? Because that's a obvious source of PII. The other thing is that, there's just so much data. So you kind of alluded to this, with this idea of data science. So first of all, you're collecting data compliantly, you're making sure that you have all the data of what your user actions are doing, compliantly, but then it's so much data that it like, how do you know where to start? Right? You want to know, you want to get to that specific point that users are dropping off, but there's so many different options out there. And so that's where Heap is applying data science, to automatically find those points of friction and automatically surface them to users, so that you don't have to guess and check and constantly guess at what the problem is, but you can see it in the product surface right for you. >> You know, Rachel, that's a great point. I want to call that out because I think a lot of companies don't underestimate, they may underestimate what you said earlier, capturing in compliance way means, you're opting in to say, not to get the data, to unwind it later, figure it out. You're capturing it in a compliant way, which actually reduces the risk and operational technical debt you might have to deploy to get it fixed on compliance. Okay, that's one thing, I love that. I want to make sure people understand that value. That's a huge value, especially for people that don't have huge teams and diverse platforms or other data sources. The other thing you mentioned is owning their own data. And that first party data is a strategic advantage, mainly around personalization and targeted customer interaction. So the question is, with the new data, I own the data, you got the comp- capture with compliance. How do you do personalization and targeted customer interactions, at the same time while being compliant? It just seems, it seems like compliance is restrictive and kind of forecloses value, but open means you can personalization and targeted interactions. How do you guys connect the dots there by being compliant, but yet being valuable on the personalization and targeted? >> Well, it all depends on how the customer is managing their information, but imagine that you have a logged in user, well, you know, who the logged in user is, right? And so all we really need is an ID. Doesn't have, we don't need to know any of the user information. We just need an ID and then we can serve up the information about like, what have they done, if they've done these three actions, maybe that means that this particular offer would be interested to them. And so that information is available within Heap, for our customers to use it as they want to, with their users. >> So you're saying you can enable companies to own their data, be compliant and then manage it end to end from a privacy standpoint. >> Yes. >> That's got to be a top seller right there. >> Well, it's not just a top seller, it's a necessity. >> It's a must have. I mean, think about it. I mean, what are people, what are the, what are people who don't do this? What do they face? What's the alternative? If you don't keep, get the Heap going immediately, what's the alternative? I'm going through logs, I got to have to get request to forget my data. All these things are all going on, right? Is, what's the consequence of not doing this? >> Well, there's a couple consequences. So one is, and I kind of alluded to it earlier that, you're just, you're blind to what your users are doing, which means that you're making investments that may not make sense, right? So you can, you can decide to add all the cool features in the world, but if the customers don't perceive them as being valuable or don't find them or don't understand them, it doesn't, it doesn't serve your business. And so, this is one of like the rule number one of being a product manager, is you're trying to balance what your customers need, with what is also good for your business. And both of those have to be in place. So that's basically where you are, is that you'll be making investments that just won't be hitting the mark and you won't be moving the needle. And as I mentioned, it's more important now in this economic climate than ever to make sure that the investments you're making are targeted and impactful. >> Yeah and I think the other thing to point out, is that's a big backlash against the whole, Facebook, you're the product, you're getting used, the users being used for product, but you're, you guys have a way to make that happen in a way that's safe for the user. >> Yes. Safe and compliant. So look, we're all about making sure that we certainly don't get our customers into trouble and we recommend that they follow all compliance rules, because the last thing you want to be is on the, on the wrong side of a compliance officer. >> Well, there's also the user satisfaction problem of, and the fines. So a lot going on there, great product. I got to ask you real quick before we kind of wrap up here. What's the reaction been to the acquisition? Quantitative, qualitative. What's been the vibe? What are some, what are people saying about it? >> We've got a lot of interest. So, I mentioned earlier that this is really a broken workflow in the market. And when users see the two products working together, they just love it because they have not been able to leverage them being separate before. And so it just makes it so much easier for these digital builders to figure out, what do I invest in because they know exactly where people are having trouble. So it's been really great, we've had a lot of reach outs already asking us how they can use it, try it, not quite available yet. So it's going to be available later this summer, but great, great response so far. >> Awesome. Well, I love the opportunity. Love the conversation, I have to ask you now, looking forward, what does the future look like for companies taking advantage of your platform and tool? What can they expect in terms of R and D investments, area moves you're making? You're the head of product, you get the keys to the kingdom. What's the future look like? What's coming next? >> Yeah, so other than pulling the qual and the quant together, you actually hinted at it earlier when you're asking me about data science, but continuing to automate as much of the analysis as we can. So, first of all, analysis, analytics, it should be easy for everyone. So we're continue to invest in making it easy, but part of making it easy is, like we can automate analysis. We can, we can see that your website has a login page on it and build a funnel for you automatically. So that's some of the stuff that we're working on, is how do we both automate getting up to speed and getting that initial analysis done easily, without any work. And then also, how do we automate more complex analysis? So you have, typically a lot of companies have a data science team and they end up doing a lot of analysis, it's a little bit more complex. I'm not saying data science teams will go away, they will be around forever. There's tons of very complex analysis that they're probably not even getting time to do. We're going to start chipping away at that, so we can help product managers do more and more of that self-service and then free up the data science team to do even more interesting things. >> I really like how you use the word product managers, product builders, digital builders, because while I got you, I want to get your thought on this, because it's a real industry shift. You're talking about it directly here, about websites going to eCommerce, CMOs, a C-suite, they generally observe that websites are old technology, but not going away, because the next level abstraction builds on top of it. What's the new capabilities because for the CMOs and the C-suites and the product folks out there, they're not building webpages, they're building applications. So what is it about this new world that's different from the old web architecture? How would you talk to a CMO or a leader? And to, when they ask what's this new opportunity to take my website, cause maybe it's not enough traffic. People are consuming out in the organic, what's this new expectation and how, what does a new product manager environment look like, if it's not the web, so to speak? >> Well, there's a couple things. So one is, and you alluded to it a bit, like the websites are also getting more complex and you need to start thinking of your website as a product. Now it's, it may not be the product that you sell, but it is, well for eCommerce it's the place that you get access to the product, for B2B SaaS, it is the window to the product. It's a place where you can learn about the product. And you need to think about, not just like, what pieces of content are being used, but you need to understand the user flow, through the application. So that's how it's a lot more like a product. >> Rachel, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE here for this presentation, final word, put a plugin for the company. What are you guys up to? What are you looking for? Take a minute to explain kind of that, what's going on. How do people contact you with a great value proposition? Put a plugin for the company. >> Yeah, well, if you want to up level your product experience or website experience, you want to be able to drive impact quickly, try Heap. You can go to Heap.io, you can try it for free. We have a free trial, we have a free product even. And yeah, and then if you have any questions, you want to talk to a live person, you can do that too, at sales@Heap.io. >> Rachel, thanks so much. Customer-scale experiences with the cloud house league. This is the season two, episode three of the ongoing series. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios. Got a great guest here, Rachel Obstler, Vice President, Head of Product at heap.io or Heap is the company name, heap.io is URL. Rachel, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. Great to be here. >> So you guys are as a company is heavily backed with some big time VCs and funders. The momentum is pretty significant. You see the accolades in the industry. It's a hot market for anyone who can collect data easily and make sense of it relative to everything being measured, which is the Nirvana. You can measure everything, but then what do you do with it? So you're at the center of it. You're heading up product for heap. This is what you guys do. And there's a lot of solutions, so let's get into it. Describe the company. What's your mission and what you guys do? >> Yeah, so let me start maybe with how Heap was even started and where the idea came from. So Heap was started by Matin Movassate, someone who was working at Facebook. And this is important 'cause it gets right at the problem that we are trying to solve, which is that he was a product manager at Facebook and he was spending a lot of money on pizza. The reason why he was spending a lot of money on pizza is because he wanted to be able to measure what the users were doing in the product that he was responsible for, and he couldn't get the data. And in order to get the data, he would have to go beg his engineers to put in all sorts of tracking code to collect data. And every time he did so, he had to bribe him with pizza because it's no one's favorite work, number one, and then people want to build new things. They don't want to just constantly be adding tracking code. And then the other thing he found is that even when he did that then it took a couple weeks to get it done. And then he had to wait to collect the data to see what data is. It takes a while to build up the data, and he just thought there must be a better way. And so he founded, he with a couple other co-founders, and the idea was that we could automatically collect data all the time. So it didn't matter if you launched something new, you didn't have to do anything. The data would be automatically collected. And so Heap's mission is really to make it easy to create amazing digital experiences. And we do that by firstly, just making sure you have all the data of what your users are doing because you would think you want to create a new digital experience. You could just do that and it would be perfect the first time, but that's not how it works and users are not predictable. >> Yeah, remember back in the day, big data, Hadoop and that kind of fell flap, but the idea of a data lake started there. You saw the rise of Databricks, the Snowflakes. So this idea that you can collect is there. It's here now, state of the art. Now I see that market. Now the business model comes in. Okay, I can collect everything. How fast can I turn around the insights becomes the next question. So what is the business model of the company? What does the product do? Is it SaaS? Is it a as a package software? How do you guys deploy? How do your customers consume and pay for the service? >> Yeah, so we are a SaaS company and we sell largely to, it could be a product manager. It could be someone in marketing, but it's someone who is responsible for a digital service or a digital product. So they're responsible for making sure that that they're hitting whatever targets they have. It could be revenue, it could be just usage, getting more users adopted, making sure they stay in the product. So that's who we sell to. And so basically our model is just around sessions. So how many sessions do you have? How much data are you collecting? How much traffic do you have? And that's how we charge. I think you were getting at something else though that was really interesting, which is this proliferation of data and then how do you get to an insight. And so one of the things that we've done is first of all, okay, collecting all the data and making sure that you have everything that you need, but then you have a lot of data. So that is indeed an issue. And so we've also built on top of Heap a data science layer that will automatically surface interesting points. So for instance, let's say that you have a very common user flow. Maybe it's your checkout flow. Maybe it's a signup flow and you know exactly what the major milestones are. Like you first fill out a form, you sign up, like maybe you get to do the first thing in the trial. You configure it, you get some value. So we're collecting not only those major milestones, we're collecting every single thing that happens in between. And then we'll automatically surface when there is an important drop off point, for instance, between two milestones so that you know exactly where things are going wrong. >> So you have these indicators. So it's a data driven business. I can see that clearly. And the value proposition in the pitch to the customer is ease of use. Is it accelerated time to value for insights? Is it eliminating IT? Is it the 10X marketer? Or all of those things? What is the core contract with the customer, the brand promise? >> That's exactly. So it's the ability to get to insight. First of all, that you may never have found on your own, or that would take you a long time to keep trialing an error of collecting data until you found something interesting. So getting to that insight faster and being able to understand very quickly, how you can drive impact with your business. And the other thing that we've done recently that adds a lot to this is we recently joined forces with a company named Auryc so we just announced this on Monday. So now on top of having all the data and automatically surfacing points of interest, like this is where you're having drop off, this is where you have an opportunity, we now allow you to watch it. So not only just see it analytically, see it in the numbers, but immediately click a show me button, and then just watch examples of users getting stuck in that place. And it really gives you a much better or clearer context for exactly what's happening. And it gives you a much better way to come up with ideas as to how to fix it as one of those digital builders or digital owners. >> You know, kind of dating myself when I mention this movie "Contact" where Jodie foster finds that one little nugget that opens up so much more insight. This is what you're getting at where if you can find that one piece that you didn't see before and bring it in and open it up and bring in that new data, it could change the landscape and lens of the entire data. >> Yeah. I can give you an example. So we have a customer, Casper. Most are familiar with that they sell mattresses online. So they're really a digital innovator for selling something online that previously you had to like go into a store to do. And they have a whole checkout flow. And what they discovered was that users that at the very end of the flow chose same day delivery were much more likely to convert and ultimately buy a mattress. They would not necessarily have looked at this. They wouldn't necessarily have looked at or decided to track like delivery mechanism. Like that's just not the most front and center thing, but because he collects all the data, they could look at it and say, oh, people who are choosing this converted a much higher rate. And so then they thought, well, okay, this is happening at the very end of the process. Like they've already gone through choosing what they want and putting it in their card and then it's like the very last thing they do. What if we made the fact that you could get same day delivery obvious at the beginning of the whole funnel. And so they tried that and it improved their conversion rate considerably. And so these are the types of things that you wouldn't necessarily anticipate. >> I got to have a mattress to sleep on. I want it today. Come on. >> Yeah, exactly. Like there's a whole market of people who are like, oh no, I need a mattress right now. >> This is exactly the point. I think this is why I love this opportunity that you guys are in. Every company now is digitalizing their business, aka digital transformation. But now they're going to have applications, they're going to have cloud native developers, they're going to be building modern applications. And they have to think like an eCommerce company, but it's not about brick and mortars anymore. It's just digital. So this is the new normal. This is an imperative. This is a fact. And so a lot of them don't know what to do. So like, wait a minute, who do we call? This is like a new problem for the mainstream. >> Yeah, and think about it too. Actually e-commerce has been doing this for quite a while, but think about all the B2B companies and B2B SaaS, like all the things that today, you do online. And that they're really having to start thinking more like e-commerce companies and really think about how do we drive conversion, even if conversion isn't the same thing or doesn't mean the same thing, but it means like a successful retained user. It's still important to understand what their journey is and where you going to help them. >> Recently, the pandemic has pulled forward this digital gap that every company's seeing, especially the B2B, which is virtual events, which is just an indicator of the convergence of physical and online. But it brings up billions of signals and I know we have an event software that people do as well. But when you're measuring everything, someone's in a chat, someone hit a web page, I mean there are billions of signals that need to get stored, and this is what you guys do. So I want to ask you, you run the product team. What's under the covers? What's the secret sauce for you guys at Heap? Because you got to store everything. That's one challenge. That's one problem you got to solve. Then you got to make it fast because most of the databases can't actually roll up data fast enough. So you're waiting for the graph forever when some people say. What's under the covers? What's the secret sauce? >> Well, it's a couple different things. So one is we designed the system from the very beginning for that purpose. For the purpose of bringing in all those different signals and then being able to cut the data lots of different ways. And then also to be able to apply data science to it in real time to be able to surface these important points that you should be looking at. So a lot of it is just about designing the system for the very beginning for that purpose. It was also designed to be easy for everyone to use. So what was a really important principle for us is a democratization of data. So in the past, you have these central data teams. You still have them today. Central data teams that are responsible for doing complex analysis. Well, we want to bring as much of that functionality to the digital builders, the product managers, the marketers, the ones that are making decisions about how to drive impact for their digital products and make it super easy for them to find these insights without having to go through a central team that could again take weeks and months to get an answer back from. >> Well, that's what brings up a good point. I want to dig into, if you don't mind, Rachel, this data engineering challenge. There's not enough talent out there. When I call data engineer, I'm talking about like the specialist person. She could be a unique engineer, but not a data scientist. We're talking about like hardcore data engineering, pipelining, streaming data, hardcore. There's not many people that fit that bill. So how do you scale that? Is that what you guys help do? >> We can help with that. Because, again, like if you put the power in the hands of the product people or the marketers or the people that are making those decisions, they can do their own analysis. Then you can really offload some of those central teams and they can do some of the much more complex work, but they don't have to spend their time constantly serving maybe the easier questions to answer. You have data that's self-service for everyone. >> Okay, before I get into the quick customer side of it, quickly while I have you on the product side. What are some of your priorities? You look at the roadmap, probably got tons of people calling. I can only imagine the customer base is diverse in its feature requests. Everyone has the same need, but they all have different businesses. So they want a feature here. They want a feature there. What's the priorities? How do you prioritize? What are some of your priorities for how you're going to build out and keep continuing the momentum? >> Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that we just joined forces with a company name Auryc that has session replay capabilities, as well as voice of customer. So one of our priorities is that we've noticed in this market, there's a real, it's very broken up in a strange way. I shouldn't say it's strange. It's probably because this is the way markets form, startups start, and they pick a technology and they build on top of it. So as a result, the way the market has formed is that you have analytics tools like Heap, and they look at very quantitative data, collecting all sorts of data and doing all sorts of quantitative cuts on it. And then you have tools that do things like session replay. So I just want to record sessions and watch and see exactly what the user's doing and follow their path through one at a time. And so one is aggregating data and the other one is looking at individual user journeys, but they're solving similar jobs and they're used by the same people. So a product manager, for example, wants to find a point of friction, wants to find an opportunity in their product that is significant, that is happening to a lot of people, that if they make a change will drive impact like a large impact for the business. So they'll identify that using the quant, but then to figure out how to fix it, they need the qual. They need to be able to watch it and really understand where people are getting stuck. They know where, but what does that really look like? Like, let me visualize this. And so our priority is really to bring these things together to have one platform where someone can just, in seconds, find this point of opportunity and then really understand it with a show me button so that they can watch examples of it and be like, I see exactly what's happening here and I have ideas of how to fix this. >> Yeah, something's happening at that intersection. Let's put some cameras on. Let's get some eyes on that. Let's look at it. >> Exactly. >> Oh, hey, let's put something. Let's fix that. So it makes a lot of sense. Now, customer attraction has been strong. I know it's been a lot of press and accolades online with when you guys are getting review wise. I mean, I can see DevOps and app people just using this easily, like signing up and I can collect all the data and seeing value, so I get that. What are some of the customer value propositions that are coming out of that, that you can share? And for the folks watching that don't know Heap, what's their problem that they're facing that you can solve, and what pain are they in or what problem do they solve? So example of some success that's coming out of the platform, enablement, the disruptive enablement, and then what's the problem, what's the customer's pain point, and when they know to call you guys or sign up. >> Yeah, so there's a couple different ways to look at it. When I was talking about is really for the user. There's this individual person who owns an outcome and this is where the market is going that the product managers, the marketers, they're not just there to build new features, they're there to drive outcomes for the business. And so in order to drive these outcomes, they need to figure out what are the most impactful things to do? Where are the investments that they need to make? And so Heap really helps them narrow down on those high impact areas and then be able to understand quickly as I was mentioning how to fix them. So that's one way to look at it. Another use case is coming from the other side. So talking in about session replay, you may have a singular problem. You may have a single support ticket. You may have someone complaining about something and you want to really understand, not only what is the problem, like what were they experiencing that caused them to file this ticket, but is this a singular problem, or is this something that is happening to many different people? And therefore, like we should prioritize fixing it very quickly. And so that's the other use case is let's start, not with the group, like the biggest impact and go to like exactly some examples, let's start with the singular and figure out if that gives you a path to the group. But the other use case that I think is really interesting is if you think about it from a macro point of view or from a product leader or a marketing leader's point of view, they're not just trying to drive impact. They're trying to make it easy for their team to drive that impact. So they're thinking about how do they make their whole organization a lot more data driven or insights driven? How do they change the culture, the process, not just the tool, but all of those things together so that they can have a bigger business impact and enable their team to be able to do this on their own? >> You guys are like a data department for developers and product managers. >> Essentially, like we are the complete dataset and the easy analysis that really helps you figure out, where do I invest? How do I justify my investments? And how do I measure how well my investments are doing? >> And this is where the iteration comes in. This is the model everyone's doing. You see a problem, you keep iterating. Got to look at the data, get some insight and keep looking back and making that product, get that flywheel going. Rachel, great stuff. Coming out here, real quick question for you to end the segment. What's the culture like over at Heap? If people are interested in joining the company or working with you guys. Every company has their own kind of DNA. What's the Heap culture like? >> That's a great question. So Heap is definitely a unique company that I've worked at and in a really good way. We find it really important to be respectful to each other. So one of our values is respectful candor. So you may be familiar with radical candor. We've kind of softened it a bit and said, look, it's good to be truthful and have candor, but let's do it in a respectful way. We really find important that everyone has a growth mindset. So we're always thinking about how do we improve? How do we get better? How do we grow faster? How do we learn? And then the other thing that I'll mention, another one of our values that I love, we call it, "taste the soup". Some people use to call it dogfooding, but we are in Heap all the time. We call it Heap on Heap. We really want to experience what our customers experience and constantly use our product to also get better and make our product better. >> A little more salt on the sauce, keep the soup, taste it a little bit. Good stuff. Rachel, thanks for coming on. Great insights and congratulations on a great product opportunity. Again, as world goes digital transformation, developers, product, all people want to instrument everything to then start figuring out how to improve their offering. So really hot market and hot company. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. >> This is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(bright intro music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to "theCube's" presentation of Women in Technology's global event celebrating International Women's Day, I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. We have Rachel Thornton here, VP of AWS Marketing, CMO of AWS. Rachel, great to see you. Thank you for spending the time to come on and share your stories about mentorship, being a mentor, being a mentee. You've had a great career. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> You know, I'm super impressed with you, your super inspiration to a lot of people, your career in Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Amazon. You've worked in amazing companies that had great growth, great transformations, and business success and all employees that have all grown since then, you've been part of these great success stories and you've had a great career and the theme here is mentorship which is a super important topic. You've been a mentee. You've been a mentor. Everyone needs a mentor. Most people don't know how to do it and how to be involved. It's almost like a secret dark art of success that needs to be opened up. What's your thought on mentorship? >> Hopefully, people don't see it as secret dark art. I actually am a huge proponent of mentorship, both mentoring folks and actually encouraging people to seek out a mentor for themselves. Early on, you know, when I started working, I really thought about how can I navigate a particular situation or what do I want to learn more about? And even though I may have been nervous or a little shy at first to ask, I always thought, "Just ask," because really being able to have a mentor, someone who you can ask questions of, someone who can help, you know, help you with questions or help you with situations you're navigating or give advice I think is critical. As a mentor, I would just say, as a woman in tech over the years, I've realized the criticality of sort of finding your voice and using your voice and so I look at mentorship as a great way to help individuals, every individual that I mentor sort of find their voice and use it and then, ultimately, advocate on behalf of others, advocate on yourself, on behalf of yourself as well and I think it's just really, I think it's a great thing to mentor and I encourage everyone to do it by the way and it's also ask yourself, "Hey, who would I want to be my mentor? What do I think I want to get out of it," and then go forward. >> Well, let's start with the mentee side. When you were coming into your career as you grew through with mentorship, with a mentor, how did you find a mentor? How should people think about asking and finding? What's your thoughts on that? Because asking is great. People might be nervous. I mean, I know I'm nervous whenever I'm asking people am I interrupting them or confidence. It's a hard thing. How do you find a mentor? >> Uh-hmm, what I did and what I encourage other folks to do when they think about it is kind of write down what you're looking for in a mentor. What are the things you would like to ask or get help up with or get advice with? Is it career progression? Is it learning how to navigate maybe collaboration with different teams? Is it, hey, you have a couple of great ideas and you'd like to figure out a way to get them surfaced in the organization? But kind of write down what you're looking to get and then what I did and what I encourage other folks to do is really look around not only just at kind of your immediate team, but what are some of the other teams you're engaging with? I would even ask people in your organization. I did this early on like, "Hey, I'd like to get some more info on this or some help with this, who do I think would be or who do you think would be a good person?" We have a leadership principle at Amazon, learn and be curious. >> Yeah. >> And I think it dovetails so nicely into the whole mentor, mentorship, mentee relationship, because, you know, if you're looking for a mentor, it's good to sort of think, "Okay, what do I want to get out of it? Who would I ask if I don't don't know? Start asking, you know, people that you do know and I think that's going to lead you to the right person, but on the mentor side, I think as you're working with the person, keep asking questions. What do you, you know, really learn about them. Learn about what they're trying to do and help them learn about their selves, their opportunities, you know, where they can grow more. So I just think that's a great leadership principle for the whole construct of mentoring. >> It's a relationship, too. The mentee-mentor relationship. is one that's a give and take, but also this gains from both sides. How have you gained from your relationships with your mentors in the past and how should people think about that? Because it's just human, it's a human thing, but it's also kind of a cool thing and it helps everyone on both sides. Can you share that relationship, give and take and what people can gain from a good relationship? >> I think the biggest thing for me has been just the different perspective. I find that so valuable. I love the chance to get a completely different take on something, a completely different perspective, one that I maybe wouldn't have considered because I think if you are kind of, and we're all like this, you know? We all come to a decision or a situation with our own set of understandings, our own biases, if you will, our own frame of reference and I think it is a powerful thing to work with someone else and have them give you a completely different lens on a situation because it opens up, you know, not only how you think about something or how you react to something, but just how you would learn or, you know, maybe think about information or that situation going forward, right? And maybe, you know, probably do an even better job with handling it or processing it or considering it. >> You know, support is a huge thing in life, right? Having someone to support you and your career, same thing. Now that you're, seeing you're a leader at AWS, you're a mentor to many, I'm sure you get a lot of requests to be mentor. I mean, I'd love to have mentoring. Hey, you know, can you mentor me on this? So I'm sure you have your share of requests but you're also mentoring. Now you're the mentor. How do you view your assignment? What's new? What are your tricks? Is there some secret trade? Is there a way that you handle it? How should people think about being a good mentor? Is there a common vibe or practice that you see successful for you? >> I think on both sides, mentor or mentee, when I work with someone in a mentor capacity, I spend sort of the first time getting to know them and also what it is they want, kind of what they want out of it. Ask a lot of questions in the upfront, find out kind of what they're hoping to achieve. Like I think I said a few minutes ago. There could be folks that are like, "Hey, I want help with sort of career progression over the long term." I've also mentored folks who are like, you know, I have a great idea that I just want some help with sort of packaging up and maybe positioning and then helping me navigate who would be the best team to take it to." So I think that's good to know kind of upfront. Is it ongoing or maybe it's just in certain cases, you know, it can be a very time bound thing, but I think ask questions. You know, on the mentee side, I always sort of come at it when I have a mentor like here's what I want to get out of it. Here's what I'm looking for. Here are the three things I want to make sure I engage with you on and then it's really clear on both sides. If I do have someone who comes to me with a mentorship, you know, with a discussion around being a mentor, I will always ask, "Hey, have there other people, you know, that you've talked to because it could be that they're looking for, you know, input on a project, for example, and there could be a better person I think, you know that, "Hey, this person could be even better than me on helping you with this." >> Yeah. You're navigating, too. You're providing a little path and direction and the key is really to help someone in mentoring. >> Yes. >> Sounds like it. Now let's talk about the Amazon and AWS culture. You mentioned leadership principles. Is there programs within AWS? Is this part of the culture? I know being a good manager is mentoring, too, as well, but is there formal mentor programs within AWS? >> Yes, there's actually several different ones. Women in Amazon, which is an amazing group that we have. They have Amazon circles, which is a great mentor program. We have programs that are by country even. So, as you can imagine, Amazon's a global global company. One of the programs that I was really excited about 'cause I worked with the team that started it, but in the UK, we started to get IT program and it was interesting because we basically wanted to make sure that we were encouraging and aspiring girls between ages of 13 or 12 and 15, actually, to be interested in careers in tech and we sort of thought, "How do we do a good job with that? How do we get those girls excited? How do we get them mentors? How do we get them sponsors?" That was the other thing we thought about a lot of. So what we did was we aligned teams and individuals inside at AWS to schools and then within the schools to grades and then to individuals in the grades, girls in those grades, and over the course of a year, they would meet with their mentor. A team would have a specific school they would sponsor and then members on that team would be mentors to the girls in that school and then at the end of it, there would be sort of a project and an assessment and it was really exciting to see, you know, girls who were sort of, you know, they were thinking about it, but maybe they weren't sure and then at the end they were like, "I'm really excited about it and I actually know kind of the next steps if I wanted to continue on, you know, with university with kind of a tech job in my sights for my future career." >> You know, that's a great segue into the breaking bias, which is the theme this year of International Women's Day is getting that bias broke, getting people in early, and also creating a culture of inclusiveness where there's no bias and we see it and this is a good way to call it out this year, specifically, and it's been a theme I know in this area, but this year they're calling it out. How do you know when bias exists and how do you know when it's gone? When we're not talking about it anymore? I mean, that's it seem would be to me, but this is a big deal. >> Yeah. >> Share your thoughts on this bias piece and what we can do together to help aware and and solve it and break it. >> I think we all have bias. I think that you really do have to... I always in my head, I think whenever I'm meeting with teams or just meeting with people one on one, I'm meeting with customers, I think I sort of ask myself, "What's my take on the situation? If I weren't me, you know, if I was someone else, what their perception be? What am I bringing to this situation that's sort of based on my context to sort of who I am or my background and how is that different if I were to sit with someone that has a completely different background, a completely different set of context or a frame of reference?" I think that's so important across not only the teams I have here. You know, I have a global marketing team, so always asking myself, "I know I'm going to look at this one way. It's not the only way. So how do I make sure I have a great cross section of leaders, a great cross section of team members to bring the bear on a situation?" Because the more I can do that , the more diverse I can make those conversations, the better off we're going to be with whatever solution we come up with for our customer or solution, you know, to an internal problem is just not just looking at it through, you know, one lens or two lenses, but how do I get a group of people, a group of different frames of reference, if you will, to come to think about it and then say, "Okay, I've seen it this way. How are you seeing it?" And that just opens up so much more I think great ideas, great conversations, and ultimately great innovation. The more diverse those conversations are and the more diverse the audience is or the group is I'm having 'em with. >> That's a great take on how you feel and how you looked at that and I think that's to me a great call out because you get to be self aware and that's hard to do. You just basically walk through the mindset of stepping back and looking at perspectives other than your own and I think to me, that is hard for some people I've seen and that's one, self awareness, right? How do you do that and then how do you maintain it? (laughs) I mean, can you give some examples of how you've seen that in your career where it was just people weren't thinking before they were speaking or maybe driving too hard through conversations and then the ideal scenario that you just pointed out which is, "Okay, zoom out and understand and think and then align with at least, and you could do that in a debate. That's your philosophy at Amazon debate and align, but can you share some experiences where you've seen people just drive through too hard or didn't do that and scenarios where it did work? >> I definitely think that, you know, it's true. You can get folks in a meeting or in a conversation where like, "Oh, I think I'm right on this. I know I'm right on this. Let me explain to you how I'm right on this," and sometimes it's just, it's important that you take a moment and say, "Okay," but if we had someone in the room that wasn't you or didn't have the background, would there it be different? You know, would it be a different answer? I think when you get sort of locked into there's a right answer, that's not always the way it is. I think that there's, depending on the situation, there's definitely answers that yes, if we're trying to solve this problem, you know, we've looked at it a couple ways, we think there's a couple of different answers or a couple of different scenarios in which we can get the best outcome, but the more you can kind of move away from, at least I think, move away from, "Hey, there's a right here or there's only one way here," the better you're going to be ultimately on, "Hey, actually there turned out to be a couple of different ways that we could have addressed this issue or that we could have built this program," and so I do think that's important is not to kind lock yourself into one way, but think, "All right, let's take a beat and say, 'Hey, could there be another way we could have thought about this?'" >> Yeah, I mean, especially with room full of engineers, too, you can you imagine, "I'm right, this is the right answer," of different perspectives. You know, what's come out of a lot of these interviews is that, you know, diversity and inclusion and equity brings more power function. It's a step function. >> Yes. >> In value, right? It's a competitive advantage, too. I mean, it's the data's becoming clearer and clearer that more diversity, more inclusion, more equity brings more power to the conversations and products. >> 100%. >> And this is proven. How do we get there? As you're a senior leader now. You've got the helm at AWS on marketing. You've got a lot of influence as you go through your career. How are you going through that progression of keep driving that positive mindset, that change? >> Uh-hmm. I'm really, I love my team. When we sit down and talk about conversations, well, I always try to think about it is let everyone else speak first. Like I don't want to be the first person to comment on something, right? I always say, "Hey, let's hear from everyone else first," because then I think people feel free to kind of share what they think and I always do kind of look around and in my head just think, "Okay, have we got the teams here that we want to make sure we're including in the discussion," right? So kind of just saying, "Oh, we're going to roll out. Hey, we have a new idea for marketing program" For all of our customers? Great, it's a global program? Great, do we have global representation? Great, if we don't, hold on, we need to pause for a second. We're thinking about new messaging positioning. Okay, great, for our customers. Who's here to talk about it? Do we have, you know, marketing representation? How about, you know, PR? How about the engineers to your point? But just, again, I think the more diverse we can make that conversation, >> Yeah. >> You know, if I I'm in a room and I'm like, "You know, there's only a few of us and we all are going to have the same frame of reference for this conversation. Let's make sure we get some other folks in the room. So it's not just us with one set of context." >> Well, your customer, you guys have been so successful at AWS and Amazon, AWS in particular it's results you look at, just go back to our first cube event there in 2013, just enormous success and you get such a diverse customer base. It is global. It is, you know, 51% women, that's the statistic in the customer base in general, so super important and this is really a big deal. So I have to ask you, as you're the leader out there of AWS, you're an inspiration to many out watching. For the young folks out, the young girls and young women out there, who are going into their careers and thinking about tech, whether they're in early school or getting into the career path, what advice would you give them around how to be successful, how to find mentors, how to be a good citizen in the community, and how to contribute and how to move forward in a very positive way? >> When we started the conversation a couple of minutes ago, I mentioned finding your voice. I think that's really critical. I think, find your voice, use your voice. I know that sometimes, you know, early on, you know, in my career, I was maybe nervous about asking questions, but asked the questions. I think that the more questions you can ask, very oftentimes you'll ask a question and someone else, a bunch of other people in the room are like, "Oh, yeah, I would've asked that question." I think that, well, you know, I'm super proud of my leadership team. It's a 70/30 split, women, yay. >> Yeah. >> But I definitely think, "Look at who you're surrounding yourself with, think about your mentors, think about your team, think about your community, and just kind of, you know, ask yourself, 'Hey, how can I, you know, have this be an even broader community, an even more diverse community?'" Because having that, I think, is just going to help make whatever comes after it that much better and so I think that would be my big advice is just, you know, learn and be curious, like I said before. Ask a lot of questions, but definitely find your voice and share that voice with your community and make that community as sort of as broad as you can. >> Rachel, thanks, that's great insight. The word community resonates as all my interviews here on this International Women's Day, all comes back to community and being part of something, super important. Thank you so much for being part of our program and our community. We really appreciate it. Thank you for your time and insight and your mentorship and also your insights here on "theCube." We really appreciate it, thank you so much. >> Well, thank you, John. This was really great. Thank you for having me. >> Okay, this is "theCube's" presentation of Women in Tech's global event celebrating International Women's Day. More content coming, stay with us. I'm John Furrier, the host of "theCube." Thanks for watching. (bright outro music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome back to the Cube on Cloud. We're talking about developers. And while so many people remember the mean from 2010 of Steve Balmer jumping around on stage development developers and developers, uh, many people know what really important is really important about developers. They probably read the 2013 book called The New King Makers by Stephen O. Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program. Rachel Stevens, who is an industry analyst with Red Monk who was co founded by the aforementioned Stephen O. Grady. Rachel, Great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. >>Well, I've had the opportunity, Thio read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've got to talk events back when we used to do those in people. And >>I'm so >>glad that you get to come on the program especially. You were the ones I reached out. When we have this developer track, um, if you could just give our audience a little bit about your background. You know, that developer cred that you have Because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies. But, you know, I'm an infrastructure guy by training I've been learning about, you know, containers and serverless and all this stuff for years. But I'm not myself much of developer. I've touched a thing or two in the years. >>Yeah. So happy to be here. Red Monk has been around since 2002 and have kind of been beating that developer drum ever since then, kind of as the company, The founder, Stephen James, notice that the decision making that developers was really a driver for what was actually ending up in the Enterprise. And as even more true, as cloud came onto, the scene is open source exploded, and I think it's become a lot more of a common view now. But in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion, but I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. My work is an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand, bottoms up technology, adoption trends, so that that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise. Why, what kind of trends are happening? So, yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of Red Monk in 30 seconds. >>Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise and developers For the longest time. I just said there was this huge gap you talk about. Bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general I t. And the business sides of the house were like, I don't know, We don't know what those people in the corner we're doing, you know, it's important and things like that. But today it feels like that that's closed a bunch. Where are we? In your estimation, you know, our developers do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we have for this is whether the Enterprise Developer is its enterprise development oxymoron. In 2020 and 2021 >>I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for, especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last year. In the last decade, even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job bring in tools, regardless of whether they maybe have that official approval through the right channels because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running. We are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and thio shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building APS is growing. And so, as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, um, the tools that they need to do those, um, tasks to get these APS built is that the decision making us fall into them? This is what I need. This is what needs to come in, and so we're seeing. Basically, the tools that enterprise is air using are the tools that developers want to be using, and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. >>Now I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers were being asked to do Mawr and Mawr. We've seen these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, Well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive. And number one we found it necessarily. It wasn't necessarily cheaper. And number two, I couldn't make changes, and I didn't understand what was happening. So when when I talked to Enterprises today, absolutely. I need to have skills that's internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast, and therefore I need skills that I need people that can build what they have. What what do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? Uh, you know, we've talked so many times over the years is to you know, there's there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers way. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have and where things trending? >>Yeah, it's It's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full tool set that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there is just this fragmentation at every level of the stack. And there's this explosion of choice and decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things? And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days and that you are making a lot of decisions and you are wiring a lot of things together and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. E think. One of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like Full stack developer really carried a lot of panache, maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away. Just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be ableto spanned this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we're asking people to dio. So we're seeing this explosion of choice, which is meaning that there is a little bit more focused and where developers are trying to actually figure out what is my niche. What is it that I'm supposed to focus on. And so it's really just this balancing of act of trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. >>Rachel is such a great point there. We've actually seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CFCF landscape and look at everything out there or goto any of your public cloud providers, there's no way that anybody even working for those companies no good portion of the tools that are out there so nobody could be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint, you know, there is the discussion of, you know what do I shift? Left What? You know, Can I just say, Okay, this piece of it, it could be a manage service. I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in house. What is it that's important. And obviously, you know, a zoo analyst. We know it varies greatly across companies, but you know what? What are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have skill set and the tools in house that they should understand. And what can they push off to their platform of choice? >>Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really pressing because one of the trends that we're watching closely, it's just this rise of manage services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like, what an I team. That's they have, like the Nicholas Carr. I t doesn't matter, and we're pushing this all the way. And then we realized, Oh, we've got to bring that all back. Um, but we also realize that we really want as enterprises want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and wiring together, your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a manage service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite APS where we're going to say, Okay, I'm gonna pull in back end AP ice from a whole bunch of tools like twilio or stripe or all zero where algo Leah, all of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app. And I can have this great user, um, interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself. But I am responsible for wiring at all together. So I think it's that wire together set of interest that is happening for developers as the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the manage services being important. Um played an important role in how absent composed, and it's the composition of that APs that is happening internally. >>What one of the one of the regular research items that I see a red monk is you know what languages you know. Where are the trends going? There's been relative stability, but then something's changed. You know, I look at the tools that you mentioned Full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago, and he's like like like terror form is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months, Andi. I kind of laugh because it's like, OK, I managed. I measure a lot of the technology that I used in the decades. Um, not that await. This came out six months ago and it's kind of mature. And of course, you know, C I C d. Come on. If it's six weeks old, it's probably gone through a lot of generations. So what do you see? Do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the You know what the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do >>we need to >>be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? >>Yeah. So when when you spoke about languages, we dio a semi annual review of language usage as a sign on get hub and in discussion as seen on stack overflow, which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world. But those air data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open eso just before anyone writes me angry letters that that's not the way that we should be doing it, Um, but one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used, and there's some movement at the bottom. But the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like, um, we're seeing Scotland that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a jvm based language and having that support from Google. Or we're seeing typescript where it can piggyback off of the breath of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where were combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in, but also, language on its own is probably pretty stable. So, like as you start to make language choices as a developer, that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover language frameworks on the other hand, like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from, that may be a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict. But language trends are a little bit more stable over >>time, changing over time. You know, Boy, I I got to dig into, you know, relatively Recently I went down like the jam stack. Uh, ecosystem. I've been digging into a serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people. I talked to him. They're like, I don't even need to be a code. Or I could be a marketing person. And I can get things done when I talked to some developers there like a citizen developers. They're not developers. Come on, you know, I really need to be able to do this, so I'll give you your choices, toe. You know, serverless and some of these trends to kind of ext fan. You know who can you know? Code and development. >>Yeah. So for both translate jam stack and serve Ellis, One of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of APS that they approach will fit for will grow as the tool develops. And you add more functionality over time and all of these platforms expand the capability, but definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said, we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of APS can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these APs, because I e. I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what that what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person. Like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical, that's really cool, and you're excited about that. Nobody else on your team could build. You're not walking around saying I am a low code marketing person like that, that that's that's that's demeaning. Like you're like. No, I'm technical. I'm a technical market, or look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living like and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and >>you don't >>wanna demean and said, Oh, that was I did a low code that just like everybody, is just trying to solve problems. And everybody, um, is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need toe work on finding the correct language because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. >>Yeah, Rachel, what? Want to get your take on just careers for developers now to think about in 2020 everyone is distributed. Lots of conversations about where we work. Can we bring the remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had the chance that interview that the head of remote. Forget lab. They're over 1000 people and they're fully remote. So, you know, remote. Absolutely a thing for developers. But if you talk about careers, it is no longer, you know. Oh, hey, here's my CV. It's I'm on git Hub. You can see the code I've done. We haven't talked about open source yet, so give us your take on kind of developers today. Career paths. Andi. Kind of the the online community there. >>Yeah, this could be a whole own conversation. We'll try to figure out my points. Um, so I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project Hustle versus doing, exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your get hub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion and a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you you need to be spending your time on the side working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances, like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask. These people toe also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source, having an understanding of how tools are done. Having this, um, this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point Teoh is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills two other employers you can kind of maybe make your way in is a junior developer because you worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still again. It's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is to correct sides of this argument. And both of those things are true. At the same time where it's it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like, or even advancing in a career path If you're already a developer, it's It's tricky. >>Well, I want to get your take on something to you know, I think back to you know, I go back a decade or two I started working with about 20 years ago. Back in the crazy days were just Colonel Daughter Warg and, you know, patches everywhere and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing on most of the people contributing to the free software before we're calling it open source. Most of the time, it was their side Hustle was the thing they're doing. What was their passion? Project? I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously, there's a lot of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I goto the Linux Foundation shows. I mean, you've got whole companies that are you know, that that's their whole business. So I want to get your take on, you know, you know, governance, you know, contribution from the individual versus companies. You know, there's a lot of change going on there. The public cloud their impact on what's happening open source. What are you seeing there? And you know what's good? What's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? >>Yeah. E think the governance of open source projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having and how things are put together is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company. Like all of these air live conversations that are ongoing and a lot of communities e think one of the things that is interesting overall, though, is just watching if you're if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like where it was at one point, um, deemed a cancer by one of the vendors in the space, and now it is something that is just absolutely an inherent part of most well tech vendors and and users is an important part of how they are building and using software today, like open source is really an integral tool. And what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprises role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And e don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet. But I think that just looking at that long view, it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing >>So Rachel without giving away state secrets. We know read Monk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice do you give to the industry? We said we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say okay, I wanna at 2030 look back and say, Boy, this is wonderful for developers. You know, everything is going good. What things have we done along the way? Where have we made progress? >>Yeah, I think I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite APS and thinking about what that developer experience looks like. I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together and There's just so much for developers to dio to actually get all of these APs from source to production. So when we talk with our customers, a lot of our time is spent thinking, How can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle, but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is the developers air trying to accomplish? How can you think about where your ATF, It's not on your tool or you your project? Whatever it is that you are working on, how does this fit? Not only in terms of your one unique problem space, but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade. Is trying to help people actually get everything wired together in a coherent way. >>Rachel. No shortage of work to do there really appreciate you joining us. Thrilled to have you finally as a cube. Alumni. Thanks so much for joining. >>Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>All right. Thank you for joining us. This is the developer content for the cube on cloud, I'm stew minimum, and as always, thank you for watching the Cube.

>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage at AWS re:Invent 2020, with special coverage of the APN Partner Experience. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Rachel Rose. She is the head of global AWS programs. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Rachel >> Thanks, Rebecca. So excited to be here. >> Well, we're delighted to have you so we just heard Sandy's keynote address, and we know that AWS has announced a number of new partner programs, including AWS competencies and service validations. Why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit more about these? >> Sure. It couldn't be more of an exciting time for our partner community. We've made a number of key global announcements today. What you just heard from Sandy. So that includes the launch of two new AWS competency programs. We have the travel and hospitality competency, as well as the public safety and disaster response competency. Additionally, we announced changes to our top performing service delivery program, the Amazon RDS service delivery. >> So tell us exactly what is an AWS competency? What is it? What does it bring to partners and customers? >> Yes, of course. The competency program is designed to highlight and promote our top partners, based on their proven technical and customer success in key specialized areas. We focus on industries, workloads, as well as key use cases. It benefits our customers by providing them with a short list of highly vetted and trusted partners to work with based on whatever their needs may be. So for example, if you're a customer looking for a HIPAA compliant partner out of Japan, the competency program can help you. It's all about saving time for our customers. No more searching for partners for hours on end, we do all that work for you. And one additional note I'll make on competencies is that, Rebecca, this isn't a new program for us at AWS. We've been designing and iterating on these programs for years. Adding new designations, new use cases, as well as evolving our existing programs, all based on customer feedback. We're thrilled to announce these new programs today and hope you'll check out the travel and hospitality, as well as the public safety and disaster response competency. >> So we're going to dig into those a little bit later, but tell our viewers a little bit more about the two competencies that were launched today. >> Yes, Rebecca, and as I mentioned, we've launched two new competencies. We have first, the travel and hospitality competency, which launched today with 27 of our top global ISVs and consulting partners. These partners are experts at helping our customers accelerate their modernization and innovation journeys to building a resilient business for the long run. Everything from the behind the scenes, operational efficiencies, as well as guest facing customer experiences. And then the public safety and disaster response competency, which highlights our top ISV partners that build products on AWS to help our customers prepare, respond and recover from these natural and man-made disasters. We launched today with 16 top global ISVs today. >> So I want to ask you a little bit about why now. Put this into context for our viewers. We know that the world is gripped by the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. Why launch these two competencies now? >> Great question. For travel and hospitality, there's really very few industries that face a technology environment as complex and mission critical, especially given the state of the world that we're in right now with the pandemic. It's an ongoing challenge for us to hire and retain that domain expertise in-house, leading a growing demand for experienced on demand resources. Our partner community has responded so quickly here, working with our joint customers to charter a smart digital way forward. It's why the majority of our Fortune 500 companies, and over 90% of our Fortune 100 already utilize AWS Partner Solutions and Services. For public safety and disaster response, it's a direct response to the economic law caused by these natural and man-made disasters. 2020 was an unprecedented year for so many reasons, but especially in terms of disaster and public safety event. And at AWS, we're committed to helping our first responders, our public safety agencies, and our disaster response organizations by mitigating the impact affected by these communities. Through this competency, we can differentiate our top most highly vetted partners giving our customers an easy way to find businesses that offer trusted and specialized services, tailored to meet their mission critical needs. >> Well, it certainly sounds like something the world needs now, Rachel. You've also mentioned updates to one of your service validation programs. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that? >> Yes. Based on customer feedback, we've made significant updates to the Amazon RDS service delivery program. This program is designed to highlight our top partners that implement and migrate customers to Amazon RDS. Based on the increased demand we've seen for purpose-built databases, we've made changes to the Amazon RDS delivery program by adding in validation that's actually based on that individual engine type, like Amazon Aurora MySQL or Amazon RDS for Oracle. This allows our customers to identify an Amazon RDS partner with demonstrated success delivering Amazon RDS solutions for specific database engine. >> What were some of the partners that were announced today? >> Our partner capability ranges across the board, and we feel really honored to work with such interesting partners that are delivering on behalf of our customers every single day. You know, one example, OneBlood, which is the third largest blood bank, engaged our public safety and disaster response competency launch partner, Solodev to help evolve the digital customer experience for their donors. By leveraging AWS auto-scaling technologies, OneBlood was able to rapidly provision additional servers to meet the high demand in the face of a massive national emergency. As a result, their website never went down and willing donors were able to connect with the right information just in time. Another really interesting partner story is thanks to Elenium Automation. They're a travel and hospitality competency launch partner, they're based out of Australia, and they helped Etihad Airways become the first airline to trial contactless technology, which helps monitor the temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate of any person using any airport and touch points. I mean, how cool is that? >> It's very cool. So if there are partners who are watching this who are interested in learning more, what should they do? Where should they go? >> Yeah, there's so many great resources. So I'll start with our customers. Our customers that are looking for these highly vetted, trusted partners can go to our AWS Partner Solutions Finder, filter by expertise, and you can find the right partner that you need at any time. For our partners that want to learn more about how to engage with these programs, they can visit our APN webpage or our competency webpage. >> So finally, I want you to close this out here and look into your crystal ball and think about the next 12 to 24 months. What would you say to your partners? You are the head of partner experience. Can you talk a little bit about a sneak peek for what partners can experience in the next year and the year after? >> We've been collecting mountains of customer feedback, and it's really what's critical in order for us to build out what that roadmap looks like for us in 2021. So some of the top requests that we continue to see from our customers are revolved around energy. So I think you can expect to see an energy competent (mumbles) in 2021, as well as adding a mainframe category to our migration competency. We're also going to continue to evolve our service validation program. So you've heard me talk a little bit about RDS earlier. We're going to continue to evolve that program as well by adding business applications as a new category. So I think that's just a tiny little sneak peek onto what the team's working on, but we're definitely focused on collecting customer feedback in order to ensure we have the right roadmap ahead of us. >> Exciting times ahead. Thank you so much, Rachel Rose, the head of global AWS Partner Programs. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Appreciate the time. >> And thank you for tuning in to theCUBE virtuals coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned. (soft music)

>> [Narrator} From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome back to theCUBE on cloud. We're talking about developers and well, so many people remember the meme from 2010 of Steve Ballmer jumping around on stage developer, developers and developers. Many people know what is really important about developers they probably read the 2013 book called "The New Kingmakers" by Stephen O'Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program Rachel Stephens who's an industry analyst with RedMonk who was cofounded by the aforementioned Stephen O'Grady. Rachel great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I've had the opportunity to read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've come to talk at events back when we used to do those in people. In person I don't- >> Busy times >> So glad that you get to come on the program, especially you were the ones that I reached out when we had this developer track. If you could just give our audience a little bit about your background that developer credit that you have because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies but I'm an infrastructure guy by training. I've been learning about, containers and serverless and all this stuff for years but I'm not myself much a developer I've touched a thing or two in the years. >> Yeah. So happy to be here. RedMonk has been around since 2002 and have kind of been beating that developer drum ever since then kind of. As the company, I'm the founder. Stephen James noticed that the decision making the developers is really a driver for what was actually ending up in the enterprise. And as even more true as cloud came onto the scene as open source exploded. And I think it's become a lot more of a common view now but in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion. But I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. I work as an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand bottoms up technology adoption trends. So that that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise. Why, what kind of trends are happening? And so, yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of RedMonk in 30 seconds. >> Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise and developers. For the longest time I just said there was this huge gap. You talk about bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want. If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general IT and the business sides of the house were like, "We don't know what those people in the corner are doing, it's important." And things like that. But today it feels like that that's closed a bunch. Where are we in your estimation? Are our developers, do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we had for this is whether the enterprise developer is enterprise developer and oxymoron in 2020, in 2021? >> I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for, especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last year, And like last decade, even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job and bring in tools, regardless of whether they may be have that official approval through the right channels. Because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running we are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building apps is growing, and so as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, the tools that they need to do those tasks to get these apps built, the decision making is falling to them. This is what I need. This is what needs to come in. And so we are seeing basically the tools that enterprise are using are the tools that developers want to be using and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. >> Now, I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers are being asked to do more and more. We see these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, "Well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive." And number one, we found it wasn't necessarily cheaper. Number two, I couldn't make changes and I didn't understand what was happening. So when I talked to enterprises today absolutely, I need to have skillsets internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast and therefore I need skills and I need people that can build what they have. What do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? we've talked so many times over the years there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have? And where were things trending? >> Yeah, it's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full tool set that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there's just this fragmentation at every level of the stack. And there's this explosion of choice in decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things. And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days in that you are making a lot of decisions, and you are wiring a lot of things together, and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. And I think one of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like full stack developer really carried a lot of panache maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be able to span this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we are asking people to do. So we're seeing this explosion of choice which is meaning that there is a little bit more focus in where developers, we're trying to actually figure out what is my niche, what is it that I'm supposed to focus on? And so it's really just this balancing of act of trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. >> Rachel is such a great point there we've absolutely seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CNCF as landscape and look at everything out there or go to any of your public cloud providers there's no way that anybody even working for those companies know a good portion of the tools that are out there. So nobody can be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint? There's the discussion of, what do I shift left? Can I just say okay, this piece of it, it can be a managed service, I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in house? What is it that's important? And obviously, as analysts, we know it varies greatly across companies, but what are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have the skillset and the tools in house that they should understand and what can they push off to their platform of choice? >> Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really prescient because one of the trends that we are watching closely it's just this rise of managed services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like what in NITMSA have like the Nicholas car, IT doesn't matter, and we're pushing this all away. And then we realized, "Oh, we got to bring that all back." But we also realized we really want as enterprises want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and why we're together your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a managed service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite apps, where we're going to say, "Okay, I'm going to pull in back end APIs from a whole bunch of tools like Twilio or Stripe or Alsera, or Algolia all of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app, and I can have this great user interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself but I am responsible for wiring it all together. So I think it's that wired together set of interests that is happening for developers has the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the managed services being important playing an important role in how apps are composed. And it's the composition of that app sort of is happening internally. >> One of the regular research items that I see at a RedMonk is, what languages, where are the trends going? There's been some relative stability but then some things change. I look at the tool set, you mentioned full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago and he's like, "Like, ah." Like Terraform is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months. And I kind of laugh because it's like, okay, I measure a lot of the technologies that I use in the decades, not that, "Oh wait, this came out six months ago and it's kind of mature." And of course, CICD come on, if it's six weeks old it's probably gone through a lot of iterations. So what do you say, do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do we need to be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? >> Yeah, so when you spoke about languages we do a semi-annual review of language usage as seen on GitHub and discussion as seen on Stack Overflow which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world but those are data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open. So just before anyone writes me, angry letters I said that's not the way that we should be doing it (laughs) but one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used. And there's some movement at the bottom but the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like we're seeing Kotlin, that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a JVM based language and having that support from Google or we're seeing TypeScript where it can piggyback off of the breadth of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where we're combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time, combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in but also language on its own is probably pretty stable. So as you start to make language choices as a developer that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover. Language frameworks on the other hand, like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden, there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from. That's maybe a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict, but language trends are a little bit more stable over time. >> There's a lot change. Changing over time. Boy, I got to dig into, relatively recently I went down like the JAMStack ecosystem I've been digging into serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people I talked to and they're like, "I don't even need to be a coder. I can be a marketing person, and I can get things done." When I talked to some developers they're like, "Citizen developers, they're not developers, come on. I really need to be able to do this." So I'll give you your choice as to, serverless and some of these trends to kind of expand who can code and develop. >> Yeah, so for both trans like JAMstack and serverless, one of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of apps that they approach will fit for, will grow as the tool develops and that you add more functionality over time. And all of these platforms expand the capability but definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of apps can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these apps, because I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person, like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical that's really cool. And you're excited about that nobody else on your team can build. You're not walking around saying, "I am a low code marketing person" Like that's demeaning. Like I know I'm a technical marketer. Look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and you don't want to demean or say, "oh hi, I did a low code, that in a sec." Everybody is just trying to solve problems. And everybody is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need to work on finding the correct language because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. >> Yeah, quick Rachel, what want to get your take on just careers for developers now to think about in 2020, everyone is distributed lots of conversations about where do we work? Can we bring your remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had a chance to interview the head of remote for GitHub there were over a thousand people and they're fully remote. So, remote absolutely a thing for developers. But if you talk about careers it's no longer, "Oh, Hey, here's my CV." It's, "I'm on GitHub. You can see the code I've done." We haven't talked about open source yet. So give us your take on kind of developers today, career paths and kind of the online community there. >> Yeah. Oh, this could be its whole own conversation. (laughs) I'll try to figure it out the, my points. So I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project hustle versus doing exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your GitHub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion in a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you need to be spending your time on the side, working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances. Like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask these people to also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source having an understanding of how tools are done, having this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point to, is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills to other employers. You can kind of maybe make your way in as a junior developer because you've worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still, again, it's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is two correct sides of this argument. And both of the things are true at the same time where it's it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like or even advancing in a career path if you're already a developer, it's, it's tricky. >> Well, I want to get your take on something too. I go back a decade or two, when I started working with Linux about 20 years ago back in the crazy days where it was just kind of lot of work and patches everywhere, and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing. And most of the people contributing to the free software before we even were calling it open source most of the time it was their side hustle. It was the thing they're doing. It was their passion project. I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously there's lots of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I go to the Linux Foundation shows I mean, you've got whole companies that, that's their whole business. So I want to get your take on governance, contribution from the individual versus companies there's a lot of change going on there. Heck the public clouds, their impact on what's happening open source. What are you seeing there? And what's good, what's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? >> Yeah, I think the governance of opensource projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having, and how things are put together is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company. Like all of these are live conversations that are ongoing in a lot of communities. I think one of the things that is interesting overall though is just watching if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like, where it was at one point deemed at cancer by one of the vendors in this space, and now it is something that is just absolutely, an inherent part of most tech vendors and end users is an important part of how they are building and using software today. Like open source is really an integral tool in what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprise's role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And I don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet but I think that just looking at that long view it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing. >> So Rachel, without giving away state secrets we know RedMonk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice do you give to the industry? We said, we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say, okay, I want to at 2030, look back and say, "Boy, this is wonderful for developers, everything's going good." What things have we've done along the way, where have we made progress? >> Yeah, so I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite apps and thinking about what that developer experience looks like, I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together. And there's just so much for developers to do to actually, get all of these apps from source to production. So when we talk with our customers, a lot of our time is spent thinking, how can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle, but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is the developers are trying to accomplish? How can you think about where you're art fits not only your tool or your project whatever it is that you are working on, how does this fit? Not only in terms of your one unique problem space but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade, is trying to help people actually, get everything wired together in a coherent way. >> Rachel, no shortage of work to do there, really appreciate you joining us thrilled to have you finally as a CUBE alumni. Thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you for joining us. This is the Developer Content for theCUBE on cloud. I'm Stu Miniman. And as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of PagerDuty summit 2020, brought to you by PagerDuty >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty summit 20, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back, one of the PagerDuty alumni of theCUBE, Rachel Obstler the VP of product for PagerDuty. Rachel, it's great to talk to you today. >> Oh, it's great to talk to you too, Lisa. Thank you for having me. >> So one benefit of this, you know, massive pivot in the last six months is companies like PagerDuty get to reach even more folks that would come in person. So, I know the summit is expecting a lot more people to attend because there's no travel limits, but since this massive pivot happened in the last a few months, I want to to understand what some of the things are that you've observed as the VP of product. What have you seen that really is revolutionary? >> You know, one thing that we saw, and this is back a couple of months when COVID first happened, we thought, you know, it seems like there's an unprecedented shift to people using online services and so we wanted to check and see if that load was represented in our platform. And of course, you know, we help companies manage digital operations, respond to incidents. And so we actually looked at the incident load and we saw that some industries or some verticals had seen an unprecedented growth in incidents. So, this load was really impacting their platforms and in some cases like with online learning or e-learning, we saw they had over 10 times the number of incidents and the period immediately following the start of the pandemic and everyone shifting to work from home, from what they had seen just before. >> So, was this, some of the things that you looked at at your platform, and then it was that what prompted the survey that you guys just released last week? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. So, we saw that in our platform, we've also seen since then it is calmed down a bit. So, if we look at the six months after the pandemic really started and everyone moved to work from home versus the six months before, we saw about a 38% increase. So it's still an increase even now and so then this did prompt us to do a survey because we wanted to see not just what was reflected in our platform, but we wanted to talk to maybe companies that may not be PagerDuty customers as well as customers, and also understand how their attitudes you know were changing and what they were seeing. So, it's not just about the data, but it's also about the beliefs and what sort of stress people are feeling. >> And that stress is so real and it's something that if it's not addressed, we're talking about customer support, folks who are on the digital front lines and can affect a customer churning, for example, the brand reputation is on the line. So, what are some of the interesting things that you've found talking to these, IT practitioners, these Devops folks about what they've experienced in terms of incidents and their time in the last six months? >> Yeah, that is a great question. So I'll share some of the data that we found. I mean, one is that responders said that pressure on their digital services has increased about 80%. So that's, a pretty significant number, 62% of IT and Devops practitioners are working in additional or spending an additional 10 hours per week, on responding to incidents and so if you think about, you know, the average work week, maybe it's 40 hours, I know most of us don't actually work 40 hours, maybe they're working 50 hours, even in that case, like that's a 1/5 of their time. So, this is pretty significant amount of their time that they're spending on responding to issues as opposed to innovating, which is really what they want to be doing is building new goods and services and, you know, capabilities for their customers. >> So spending some, you know, 10 hours extra a week reacting, and I imagine that a good amount of those 10 hours are in the middle of the night or kind of random hours, whereas before the volume they didn't see. So, what are some of the things that PagerDuty is can do to help with that, What are some of the things that these practitioners talk to you guys about? This will help us tremendously because we know that this crazy time it's going to be TBD for a little while longer. >> Yeah, that's a really good question and just some stats on that, because we also have stats on that from the survey, we saw that more than half of the respondents of the survey are being asked to respond to incidents five plus times, more than five times on personal time during the week. And so that could be, it doesn't have to be in the middle of the night. It could be in the middle of the night, it could be after hours, dinner time, breakfast time, but that's still a lot of interruptions for you know, your life. And so there are a number of things that PagerDuty can do. One of a couple of the things that we really focus on are around intelligence and automation and so examples of intelligence are, if you have a lot of issues that are coming at you, you may not know which ones are important, which ones you should work on, which ones you can ignore, which ones are part of a larger problem. And so we have a lot of capabilities in the system that group things together, help you understand which ones are critical, which ones are not critical, get them to the right person and also provide important context for fixing them. So, you may want to know things like, this is impacting my service right now, our other services impacted, which teams are working on that. Who should I collaborate with? Or you may want to know, Hey, I've never seen this before myself. Has it ever happened before? I'd like to see past that are similar. So, those are just some examples of the things that we can provide. It's intelligence when someone is, you know, interrupted and has to immediately figure out, what do I do with this issue? When it comes to automation, you know, we can help customers in a number of different ways. One is we can automate menial tasks, like let's imagine that you find out there's an issue, you think this is a very serious issue, you need to pull in more people, well, pulling them into a bridge a chat channel, making sure they have the right information. We make it super easy for customers to do things like that. But we also make it easy for them to automate maybe diagnostics. Like maybe they want to call out to assist them and pull in more information. Maybe they want to actually be start a server. So there's all sorts of ways that you can automate. We also help you automate communication to the broader environment or the broader set of people. So, you mentioned earlier customer service teams. Well, if you're a development team and you know, there's an issue and you know, that customer service teams are soon going to be getting a whole bunch of tickets. They need to know what's going on, so that they can answer those tickets and maybe get ahead of them, maybe even post something on a status page, telling customers, yes, we know we have an issue so they know it's being worked on and they know that it's being taken care of. >> You know, one of the things I didn't think about when in the beginning of this pandemic, because there was such chaos, there still is chaos, is the demand for digital services dramatically increased and it wasn't just ordering groceries online or okay, I can't go to a store so, I'm going to depend even more on Amazon than I have before. And we have this culture where we expect, we can get anything we want and some cities overnight, or rather in a couple of hours, the demand is there. The customer expectation is there and the patient system enabling if I think of like a Netflix, which is a customer of PagerDuty's and all of the competing streaming services, if I'm not going to get what I want, within a second, I'm going to go find somebody else, who's going to be able to deliver the service that I'm expecting. To the demand on the digital services is greater and greater and one of the things I saw in that survey that you guys just published is that 40% of the respondents think it's actually going to get worse from here. So they got to be able to implement a AIOps tools and automation. Now, if the volume isn't going to decrease, right? >> Yeah, you've really nailed it Lisa. That's exactly what's happening out there and I think it's not going to decrease. We've basically not just had a, a blip in time, people have shifted how they're operating to being online and now they're used to it. And this is probably not going to change in the foreseeable future. And so absolutely when you're seeing these types of increases in demand for your services, which leads to more incidents that leads to more noise, it leads to a lot more operational work, basically you have to find a way to manage it if you want to keep innovating and to your point, customers or end users expect more innovation, right? They're not going to expect that a company is going to stop innovating just because they have a got a lot more users now. So, absolutely the main way or one of the big ways that customers really need to address this is to be able to work smarter and, you know, tools that help you automate things and help you gather data faster and provide intelligence to things and help you find the signal from the noise like the PageDuty are really important to serving that bigger need that is not going away as you said. Yeah, that's theCuBEs tagline extracting signal from the noise and the thing that's important about that is right now, as you talked about there's blurred lines, right? We either work from home or we live at work and I think it every day it can change and that's challenging. Not only is there no commute so you can work or the expectation is you going to to be online, you going to to be accessible but also one of the very real challenges that we're all experiencing, no matter what industry you work in is burnout is real. It's been real for a long time, but right now it's critical for organizations to help reduce, address it and help reduce it. What are some of the things that you're hearing when you're talking to customers about, hey guys, PagerDuty, how can you help my practitioners, my DevOps folks become less reactive? How can you help us manage these incidents so that they can go back to innovating, which is what they like to do, because we want to be able going to have productive, happy employees? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, some of the things that we can do is help you look across all your incidents and understand where are you getting repeat incidents. We can also help you look at things that are showing up as incidents that are notifying people, but aren't real incidents. So, for instance, we've looked at our system and we've seen that a decent percentage of incidents auto resolve within two minutes or three minutes and so those are incidents that are still notifying someone, but then maybe there's auto resolution capabilities in the platform, maybe there's maybe it was just a very delicate monitor that was finding something wasn't really there. But in any case, this is disturbing someone and maybe waking them up for no reason and so there are tools that we can provide that allow you to set rules around things like this. Like, don't tell me about this, unless it's still going for three minutes, don't tell me, unless it happens three times in a row. Like, there's really easy ways to cut down on a lot of noise that distracts people that interrupts them that maybe bothers them off hours, which you really want to avoid. And then beyond that, there's also things that you can do in our system and in general, that help you just understand when someone had a bad on call. So, knowing when there's certain people that are getting, woken up a lot or responding off hours or spending a lot of time, responding to issues or responding to just a lot of issues in general, that's something that we can provide so that, you know, any manager can look across team and just see like, which people really need a little bit of relief. >> And I'm sure that would be welcomed by everybody in every industry. You know, we talk about customer experience all the time, pandemic or no pandemic, but really ultimately something that I've always believed and seen it is that, if the employee experience isn't really good, then that is directly able to negatively impact the customer experience. But one of the things I was looking at too, like with respect to like first Gen AIOps tools, with respect to ROI companies saying, I'm not really getting that yet. So give me an insight into how PagerDuty thinks that second Gen AIops tools are going to help dial up that ROI for companies to really invest in this so, that they are the winners of tomorrow? >> That's a really good question. So, a lot of the earlier AIOps tools require a lot of training. So, you know, people to spend time telling the system, this should be grouped, or that should be grouped and also requires not just that upfront training for them to work, but also ongoing training. So, continually training the system. And so second Gen AI really uses the data and the system to automatically make suggestions about things. And that's very straightforward with a tool like PagerDuty because we have all this information about what happened in the past. What happened when you were responding to incidents, who responded to them, how long they took, how bad they were. And so we can really leverage a lot of that data to help automatically reduce noise and point out the things that are important, without having people needing to spend a lot of time with the system upfront, before anything actually works. And so, in fact, like we can just have you turn it on, it works and it continues to learn and get better. >> And that's critical because in this digital default, as I know you've got PagerDuty is talking about, I spoke with Jennifer Todd about that. There is no more luxury of time about a company determining, well, how should we go on our digital transformation? That time luxury is gone. Last question, Rachel, for you, fifth PD summit, first virtual, but the opportunity to engage and interact with a lot more customers since there are no trouble limits. I'm just curious some of the things that are, that you're excited about at this year's event. >> You know, one of the things I'm excited about is I think we're able to give our attendees a lot more choice of what do they attend because it's virtual, so you don't have to have a room, you know, where you can have a certain number of, you know, sessions and only one session at a time. So, I think there's going to be more choice for our customers. We're also going to have a great lineup of speakers. So, I think this also means that not only can we have more attendees show up because it's more convenient, but we can have more really great speakers and industry luminaries because they don't have to also travel to the site, but they can do things from where they are. So, I think those are two of the really great things about, you know, the remote world that we live in. I, of course am disappointed that I'm not going to be able to see more customers, face to face, or at least in the same room and have that interaction, but we'll still have plenty of meetings even though we'll be doing it online. >> Silver linings, well Rachel, it's been great having you on the program. Can't wait to hear about all the great things that come from the summit 20. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE. >> Hi and welcome back. I'm Stuart Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Getting to the end of a full day wall-to-wall coverage. We've been rather than everyone getting together in Dublin where we talk to SUSE executives, their customers and their partners where they are around the globe, happy to welcome to the program. Rachel Cassidy, she is the Senior Vice President of Global Channel and Cloud. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me a pleasure to be here. >> All right, so love getting to talk a little bit about the channel, talk about the whole go to market piece, maybe you start a little bit if you would, Channel and Cloud, how do those two go together? Talk to us a little bit about what your organization does? >> Okay, sure. That's great. So I think this is something new for SUSE. So at the beginning of this calendar year, we actually saw a lot of synergy between how you're going to market with our full end to end ecosystem, and really pulling in all of the different partner type-- around with supporting our customer, digital transformation to the Cloud. So that allowed us to pull all of the alliances together that really support end to end that transformation. So under this charter, we're basically looking to fulfill and support our customers, regardless of what route they want to use to help them through this time of digital transformation, enabling them in whatever type of Cloud environment is best suited for their business, whether it's hybrid, or completely public or born in the Cloud, etc. So that's what our team is is focused to do. >> Excellent, interesting to see how those pieces are coming together. Of course, one of the big discussions is, moving more towards that cloud model we've been saying for years, you know, public Cloud really is that bar that everything gets managed to add everything from the consumption model to price and everything and the like. I know one of the pieces is that you have a new partner program, could you lay out, what's changing? How does that all work? Well, what does it mean that how SUSE is going to work with that ecosystem? >> Great. Yeah. So we're very excited about this. We're releasing or unfolding slowly our SUSE one partner program. And this is one holistic partner across all of SUSEs. I think historically, we had some different programs that address certain go to market routes or what have you. And we're pulling that all together, so we have this larger all encompassing offering. Already today, we've just soft launched a brand new partner portal, so there'll be easier look and feel and ability to use our systems, Coming soon, we'll also have an updated Learning Management System behind the scenes, so you'll have easier and more access to different types of training to support the different roles as you going to build out your panel in cloud strategy within your organization, and all of the supporting services and solutions that support that as well. The other big things that we're doing, and this is a preview of what I mean later towards the end of the summer, so this isn't released yet, but I'm giving you that precursor here. Is a different approach. So we're not going to categorize our partners by I'm an IHV or I'm an ISV, what we're going to do is focus on specialization. So how to sell Are you a seller of a solution? Are you a builder? So you're building integrated solutions that other partners in the downstream channel can sell? Are you a managed service provider or services provider or CSP? Yeah, so we'll have those different areas of specialization. But then our partners can opt into one or more and make their business more impactful to their customers and we'll support them along that journey. >> Sounds like that that move is to kind of align more with what you're seeing customers, I'm assuming. What do you expect that seems to have a ripple effect the SUSE's business? >> Yeah, I think it allows us to have more of an impact with our customers make our end and offerings more strategic, and also allows us to really leverage and create relationships across the full partner ecosystem. So it's not just the a SUSE's specific solution, but we're looking at what are the use cases that our customers are trying to solve? And how do we put the different parts and pieces of the ecosystem together to help them get to that next state of success, whatever that looks like for them, and oftentimes that's the trifecta of a multi partner solution. That then we can package bundle support, and enable our partner ecosystem to support customers on as well. >> Excellent, Rachel, how are you seeing some of the changes in that ecosystem impacting what you're doing? We talked a bit about Cloud, AI, of course, is a big discussion point for the event this week. So how are some of those larger technology trends, impacting your channel and go to market? >> Yeah, I mean, the first piece is I think the different partners are changing their businesses, there were traditional IAT, they're looking and expanding their offerings into more services or MSP type offerings. So they're looking to really engage and support their customers through that digital transformation. And that's what the partner program and how we're aligning our organization is in support (mumbles) And then maybe on the technology roadmap, we're looking to move up the stack and be more more impactful with some of those application-driven solutions. So MLN, AI, etc. And how we can be a bigger part of that and enable our partners to be successful in that as well. And then on top of that, I think the other compelling factor that we have to offer is through source initiative. I think especially now in this marketplace, we're seeing a lot of more, you know, it was already becoming mainstream, if you will, but now with COVID-19, it is a catalyst for innovation. And we are all about through open source opportunities and offerings. And that's what we're also enabling our partner ecosystem and our end customers jointly together around so that they can also be successful. >> Yeah, I've had some great conversations covering SUSECON, with your partner ecosystem, talking about the digital transformation, talking about the date. Is their framework, are there some new training that you're rolling out? Maybe you can expand a little bit on that, that digital transformation discussion, how you make sure that you've got a holistic solution for customers between SUSE and it's in an ecosystem. >> Yeah, great question. So one of the things that we're doing is, we're calling them to the one partner stack. And they're modularized, integrated solutions stack. And we're doing these basically top down and bottom up. So from a market demand perspective, where should we be playing? What are the partners that we should be interlocking with to create those end to end solutions that meet high market demand opportunities and challenges that our customers face today. And at the same time, we're also building and defining these from the ground up. So what are the assets that we're seeing from the field without any marketing support or anything just kind of proactively coming through us, help us solve this problem, and pulling those parts and pieces together, and then also making them very modularized. So that they can be almost like a LEGO Block, if you will. So you can plug and play the pieces that are relevant to your specific solutions. And in the partner world, if you have your own storage offering or whatnot, you can use that or you can use art. So it's very modular. And it also really helps to address very tailored civic solutions. We're starting these kind of a horizontal play. So looking at some of these new technologies, like you mentioned, what are we doing in AI veteran to help support that partner ecosystem and an end to end solution. But then the next wave of this is, what can we do more of that repeatable and scalable to help our healthcare providers or automotive opportunities as well. So the next iteration, our neck neck, will be to have these solutions to one partner stack, if you will, for vertical offerings as well. And then if we're sorry, you also mentioned framing. So all of this it's not just building it in the background. We're doing it in the field, with our customers, with our partners and then all of the different supporting components that you need to be successful from how to support, do it yourself marketing tips so that we can empower our partners to build this into their solutions or services are also part of this. And then enablement is a key table stakes for all of it. And not just on the the parts and pieces but the end to end offering. And also looking at that role base. Like what do I need to really help my customer understand the value of this end to end solution all the way down to the support technician or the deployment architect. >> Excellent, so Rachel is both in the keynote and the conversation that I had with Melissa, there was really a celebration of SUSE being fully independent now, for a year. I'm curious what impact that has on the ecosystem, and how does just being an independent open source company impact the relationship that you have? >> I think we've seen a nice uplift and excitement and opportunity from just that. So when people choose or go or embrace an open source option is because they want choice and we are now the largest independent open source company in the world, and we're offering advice and flexibility. And all those values that are key in the open source, culture and world are part of SUSE's culture, which I also think is really important and it resonates through our partner ecosystem, but also then extends to our customers. >> Excellent, I want to give you any final words you want to share with the ecosystem as to what they should be looking for, you give a little bit of a hint for some things coming out in the summer. But final takeaways from SUSECON. >> Yeah, our logo or tagline, if you will, is the power of many. And this isn't something that any one of us can do on our own. And I think especially in this days, environment, all the challenges that we're facing, we're really seeing people come together. And that is the definition of open source. And I've been in this environment for quite some time. I drank the Kool Aid a long, long time ago, and it's important to us. So for the partner ecosystem, like they say, the power of many and work together as one. And I think that's kind of the the message that resonates, and we want to make working with us, whether you're a customer or a partner, easier to go to market, easier to be innovative and find those solutions together. And, part of our overarching mentality is, to simplify, modernize and accelerate. So everything we do are under those three pillars, which I think is really exciting. And I'm excited to be here and be a part of this, especially at this time. >> Well, Rachel Cassidy, thank you so much for updates, I think perfect note to end things on community, obviously something that a big focus at the show, as well as something that is near and dear to the heart of theCUBE team. So it's been a pleasure for us to participate in SUSECON this year and definitely look forward to many more SUSE events in the future. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stuart thanks for having me. Have a great day. >> All right, make sure to check out theCUBE dot net for all the interviews that we have. That, well, it shows we will be at future. I'm Stuart Miniman, and thank you for joining us for theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are here in our Palo Alto studios today. We got through March, this is some really crazy time. So we're taking advantage of the opportunity to reach out to some of the community leaders that we have in our community to get some good tips and tricks as to know how to kind of deal with this current situation. All the working from home, school from home. And we're really excited to have one of the experts. One of my favorite CUBE guests. We haven't had her around since October 2017, which I find crazy. And we'd love to welcome into theCUBE via the remote dial-in, Rachel Tobac. She is the CEO of SocialProof Security. Rachel, great to see you and I cannot believe that we have not sat down since 2017. >> I know, I can't believe it, it's been so much time. Thanks for having me back. >> Absolutely, but we are good Twitter friends. >> Oh yeah >> Exchanging stuff all the time. So, first of, great to see you. Just a kind of of introduction, tell us a little bit about SocialProof Security and your very unique specialty. >> Yes. SocialProof Security is all about social engineering and protecting you from the those types of attackers. So, basically we help you understand how folks manipulate you and try and gain access to your information. I am an attacker myself so I basically go out, try it, learn what we can learn about how we do our attacks and then go on and train you to protect your organization. So, training and testing. >> Alright. Well, I am going to toot your horn a little bit louder than that because I think it's amazing. I think that you are basically 100% undefeated in hacking people during contests at conventions, live. And it's fascinating to me and why I think it's so important it's not a technical hack at all. It's a human hack, and your success is amazing. And I've seen you do it. There's tons of videos out there with you doing it. So, what are kind of just the quick and dirty takeaways that people need to think about knowing that there are social hackers, not necessarily machine hackers out there, trying to take advantage of them. What are some of these inherit weaknesses that we just have built into the system? >> Yeah, thanks for your kind words too, I appreciate that. The challenge with social engineering is that it leverages your principles of persuasion. The parts of you that you cannot switch off. And so, I might pretend to be similar to you so that I can build rapport with you. And it's really hard for you to switch that off because you want to be a kind person, you want to be nice and trusting. But it's hard, it's a tough world out there and unfortunately criminals will leverage elements of your personality and your preferences against you. So, for instance if I know you have a dog, then I might play a YouTube video of a dog barking and try and gain access to information about your systems and your data, while pretending to be IT support, for example. And that's really tough because, you know three minutes into the conversation we are already talking about our dog breeds and now you want to trust me more. But unfortunately just because we have something in common, it doesn't mean that I am who I say I am. And so, I always recommend people are politely paranoid. It just basically means that you use two methods of communication to confirm that people are who they say they are. And if they are trying to get you to divulge sensitive information or go through with a wire transfer, for instance, you want to make sure that you check that first. We just saw an example of this with Barbara Corcoran. Famously on Shark Tank. Where she has many investments in real estate. And unfortunately a cyber criminal was able to take advantage and get almost $400,000 wired over to them and they did lose that money because they were able to take advantage of the bookkeeper, the accountant and the assistant and folks just were not checking back and forth that people are who they say they were with multiple methods of communication. >> It's crazy. A friend of mine actually is in the real estate business. And we were talking earlier this year and he got a note from his banker. Looked like his banker's email. It was the guy's name that he works with all the time. Was talking about a transfer. It didn't have a bunch of weird misspelling and bad grammar. And all kind of the old school things that kind of would expose it as a hack. And he picked up the phone and called the guy, and said "we don't have a transaction happening right now. "Why did you send this to me?" So it gets really really really good. But lets dive into just a little vocabulary 101. When people talk about "fishing" and "spearphishing" what does that exactly mean for people that aren't really familiar with those terms? >> Sure. Most likely you are going to see it happen over email. In fact, with COVID-19 right now we've seen through Google's Transparency Report on fishing that there's been a 350% increase in fishing attacks. And I believe Brisk had this huge research that said that there were 300,000 plus suspicious COVID 19 fishing websites that were just spun up in the past couple of weeks. It's pretty scary but basically what they are trying to do is get you to input your credentials. They are trying to get access to your machine or your credentials so that they can use them on other high value sites, gain access to your information, your data, points, your sensitive data basically. And use that against you. It's really tough. Unfortunately, criminals don't take a break even in crisis. >> Yeah they are not self-isolating unfortunately, I guess they are sitting there with their computers. So that's interesting. So, I was going to ask you, kind of what is the change in the landscape now. So you answered a little bit there but then the other huge thing that's happening now is everybody is working from home. They are all on Zoom, they are all on Skype, WebEx. And you've actually had some really timely post just recently about little things that people should think about in terms on just settings on Zoom to avoid some of the really unfortunate things that are popping in kind of randomly on Zoom meetings. So, I wonder if you could share some of those tips and tricks with the audience. >> Yeah, absolutely. Some of the big issues that we are seeing recently is what people have coined as Zoombombing. It's all over the news. So you've probably heard about it before but in case you are wondering exactly what that is. It's whenever an attacker either guesses your Zoom ID code and you don't have a password on your Zoom call that you are in the middle of. Or they might gain access to your Zoom ID code because maybe your took a screenshot of your Zoom and posted that to social media. And now if you don't have password protection or your waiting room is on they can just join your call and sometimes you might not notice that they are on the call, which could lead to privacy issues, data breach for instance or just a sensitive data leak. If they join via the phone you might not even notice that they are on the call. And so it's really important to make sure that you have password protection on for your Zoom and you have waiting rooms enabled. And you don't want to take pictures of your workstation. I know that's really tough for folks. because they want to showcase how connected they are during these difficult times I do understand that. But realize that when you take those screenshots of your workstation, this is something that we just saw in the news with Boris Johnson just a few days ago. He posted an image of his zoom call and it included some of the software they used. And so, you just mentioned spearphishing, right? I can look at some of that software get an idea for maybe the version of his operating system the version of some of the software he may be using on his machine and craft a very specific spearfish just for him that I know will likely work on his machine, with his software installed because I understand the version and the known vulnerabilities in that software. So, there's a lot of problems with posting those types of pictures. As a blanket rule you are not going to want to take pictures of your workstation. Especially not now. >> Okay, so, I remember that lesson that you taught me when we're in Houston at Grace Hopper. Do not take selfies in front of your pics, in front of your work laptop. 'Cause as you said, you can identify all types of OS information. Information that gives you incredible advantage when you are trying to hack into my machine. >> Yeah, that's true. And I think a lot of people don't realize they are like, "everybody uses the browser, everybody uses Power Point", for example. But sometimes, the icons and logos that you have on your machine, really give me good information about the exact version and potentially the versions that might be out of data in your machine. When I can look up those non-vulnerabilities pretty easily that's a pretty big risk. The other things that we see is people take screenshots and I can see their desktop and when I can see your desktop, I might know the naming convention that you use for your files which I can name drop with you or talk about on the phone or over email to convince you that I really do have access to your machine like I am IT support or something. >> Yeah, it's great stuff. So for people who want more of this great stuff go to Rachel's Twitter handle. I'm sure we have it here on the lower third. You've got the great piece with. Last week with John Oliver hacking the voting machines like a week before the elections last year which was phenomenal. Now I just saw your in this new HBO piece where you actually just sit down at the desk with the guy running the show and hacker disciplines systems. Really good stuff. Really simple stuff. Let's shift gears one more time, really in terms of what you are doing now. You said you are doing some help in the community to directly help those in need as we go through this crisis. People are trying to find a way to help. Tell us a little bit more about what you are doing. >> Yeah, as soon as I started noticing how intense COVID-19 was wreaking havoc on the hospital and healthcare systems in the world I decided to just make my services available for free. And so I put out a call on my social medias and let folks know "Hey if you need training ,if you need support if you just want to walk through some of your protocols and how I might gain access to your systems or your sensitive data through those protocols, let me know and I'll chat with you" And, I've had an amazing response. Being able to work with hospitals all over the world for free to make sure that they have the support that they need during COVID-19 it really does mean a lot to me because it's tough I feel kind of powerless in this situation there's not a lot that I can personally do there are many brave folks who are out there risking it all every single day to be able to do the work to keep folks safe. So, just trying to do something to help support the healthcare industry as they save lives. >> Well, that's great. I mean, it is great 'cause if you are helping the people that are helping ,you know, you are helping maybe not directly with patients but that's really important work and there's a lot of stuff now that's coming out in terms of, kind of of this tunnel vision on COVID-19 and letting everything else kind of fall by the wayside including other medical procedures and there is going to be a lot of collateral damage that we don't necessarily see because the COVID situation has kind of displaced everything out and kind of blown it out. Anything that you can do to help people get more out of the resources, protect their vulnerability is nothing but goodness. So, thank you for doing that. So, I will give you a last word. What's your favorite, kind of closing line when you are at Black Hat or RSA to these people to give them the last little bit "Come on, don't do stupid things. There is some simple steps you can take to be a little bit less vulnerable" >> Yeah, I think something that we hear a lot is that people kind of give a blanket piece of advice. Like, don't click links. And, that's not really actionable advice. Because a lot of times you are required to click links or download that PDF attachment from HR. And, many times it is legitimate for work. And so, that type of advice isn't really the type of advice I like to give. Instead, I like to say just be politely paranoid and use two methods of communication to confirm if it is legitimate before you go ahead and do that. And, it will take a little bit of time I'm not going to lie it'll take you an extra 30 seconds to 60 seconds to just chat somebody and say "Hey quick question about that thing you sent over" But it can start to change the security consciousness of your culture. And maybe they'll put out a chat while they send out an email from HR to let you know that it is legitimate and then you are kind of starting this cycle at the beginning. Not every single person has to ask individually you can start getting that security consciousness going where people are politely paranoid and they know that you are going to be too so they are going to preempt it and make sure that you understand something is legitimate with a second form of communication. >> Great tip, I am a little taken aback, everybody now wants to get their score so high their customer satisfaction score so after like every transaction you get this silly surveys "How was your time at SafeWay? "Or Bank of America?" All these things Survey Monkey. I don't really know how those businesses stay in anymore. I am not clicking on any Bank of America customer satisfaction or Safeway customer satisfaction link. But I will be politely paranoid and look for the right ones to click on. (giggle) >> That's good and use two methods of communication to confirm they are real. >> That's right,two-factor authentication. Alright,well Rachel, thank you for taking a few minutes of your time. Thank you for your good work with hospitals in the community and really enjoyed catching up. As always, love your work and I'm sure we'll be talking you more on Twitter. >> Thanks for having me on again and I'll see you on the Internet. >> All right, be safe. >> Rachel: Thank you >> All right, that was Rachel. I am Jeff. You are watching theCUBE. We are coming to you from our Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching. Stay safe and we'll see you next time. (instrumental music)

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE! Covering Coupa Insp!re'19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Insp!re'19. Can you hear all the buzz around me? You probably can hear it, it's electric. The keynote just ended, and I'm very pleased to welcome, fresh from the keynote stage, we have Rachel Botsman, author and trust expert from Oxford University. Rachel, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you for having me. >> Your talk this morning about the intersection of trust and technology, to say it's interesting is an understatement. You had some great examples where you showed some technology brands, that we all know, and have different relationships with: Uber, Facebook, and Amazon. And the way that you measured the audience is great, you know, clap the brand that you trust the most. And it was so interesting, because we expect these technology brands to, they should be preserving our information, but we've also seen recent history, some big examples, of that trust being broken. >> Rachel: Yeah, yeah. >> Talk to us about your perspectives. >> So what I thought was interesting, well kind of unexpected for me, was no one clapped for Facebook, not one person in the room. And this is really interesting to me, because the point that I was making is that trust is really, really contextual, right? So if I had said to people, do you trust on Facebook that you can find your friends from college, they probably would've clapped. But do I trust them with my data, no. And this distinction is so important, because if you lose trust in one area as a company or a brand, and it can take time, you lose that ability to interact with people. So our relationship and our trust relationship with brands is incredibly complicated. But I think, particular tech brands, what they're realizing is that, how badly things go wrong when they're in a trust crisis. >> Talk to me about trust as a currency. You gave some great examples this morning. Money is the currency for transactions, where trust is the currency of interactions. >> Yeah, well I was trying to frame things, not because they sound nice, but how do you create a lens where people can really understand, like what is the value of this thing, and what is the role that it plays? And I'm never going to say money's not important; money is very important. But people can understand money; people value money. And I think that's because it has a physical, you can touch it, and it has an agreed value, right? Trust I actually don't believe can be measured. Trust is, what is it? It's something there, there's a connection between people. So you know when you have trust because you can interact with people. You know when you have trust because you can place their faith in them, you can share things about yourself and also share things back. So it's kind of this idea that, think of it as a currency, think of it as something that you should really value that is incredibly fragile in any situation in any organization. >> How does a company like Coupa, or an Amazon or a Facebook, how do they leverage trust and turn it into a valuable asset? >> Yeah, I don't like the idea that you sort of unlock trust. I think companies that really get it right are companies that think day in and day out around behaviors and culture. If you get behaviors and culture right, like the way people behave, whether they have empathy, whether they have integrity, whether you feel like you can depend on them, trust naturally flows from that. But the other thing that often you find with brands is they think of trust as like this reservoir, right? So it's different from awareness and loyalty; it's not like this thing that, you can have this really full up battery which means then you can launch some crazy products and everyone will trust it. We've seen this with like, Mattel, the toy brand. They launched a smart system for children called Aristotle, and within six months they had to pull it because people didn't trust what it was recording and watching in people's bedrooms. We were talking about Facebook and the cryptocurrency Libra, their new smart assistants; I wouldn't trust that. Amazon have introduced smart locks; I don't know if you've seen these? >> Lisa: Yes. >> Where if you're not home, it's inconvenient for a very annoying package slip. So you put in an Amazon lock and the delivery person will walk into your home. I trust Amazon to deliver my parcels; I don't trust them to give access to my home. So what we do with the trust and how we tap into that, it really depends on the risk that we're asking people to take. >> That's a great point that you bring about Amazon, because you look at how they are infiltrating our lives in so many different ways. There's a lot of benefits to it, in terms of convenience. I trust Amazon, because I know when I order something it's going to arrive when they say it will. But when you said about trust being contextual and said do you trust that Amazon pays their taxes, I went wow, I hadn't thought of it in that way. Would I want to trust them to come into my home to drop off a package, no. >> Rachel: Yeah. >> But the, I don't know if I want to say infiltration, into our lives, it's happening whether we like it or not. >> Well I think Amazon is really interesting. First of all because so often as consumers, and I'm guilty, we let convenience trump trust. So we talk about trust, but, you know what, like, if I don't really trust that Uber driver but I really want to get somewhere, I'll get in the car, right? I don't really trust the ethics of Amazon as a company or like what they're doing in the world, but I like the convenience. I predict that Amazon is actually going to go through a major trust crisis. >> Lisa: Really? >> Yeah. The reason why is because their trust is largely, I talked about capability and character. Amazon's trust is really built around capability. The capability of their fulfillment centers, like how efficient they are. Character wobbles, right? Like, does Bezos have integrity? Do we really feel like they care about the bookshops they're eating up? Or they want us to spend money on the right things? And when you have a brand and the trust is purely built around capability and the character piece is missing, it's quite a precarious place to be. >> Lisa: I saw a tweet that you tweeted recently. >> Uh oh! (laughs) >> Lisa: On the difference between capability and character. >> Yes, yeah. >> Lisa: And it was fascinating because you mentioned some big examples, Boeing. >> Yes. >> The two big air disasters in the last year. Facebook, obviously, the security breach. WeWork, this overly aggressive business model. And you said these companies are placing the blame, I'm not sure if that's the right word-- >> No no, the blame, yeah. >> On product or service capabilities, and you say it really is character. Can you talk to our audience about the difference, and why character is so important. >> Yeah, it's so interesting. So you know, sometimes you post things. I actually post more on LinkedIn, and suddenly like, you hit a nerve, right? Because I don't know, it's something you're summarizing that many people are feeling. And so the point of that was like, if you look at Boeing, Theranos was another example, WeWork, hundreds of banks, when something goes wrong they say it was a flaw in the product, it was a flaw in the system, it's a capability problem. And I don't think that's the case. Because the root cause of capability problems come from character and culture. And so, capability is really about the competence and reliability of someone or a product or service. Character is how someone behaves. Character gets to their intentions and motives. Character gets to, did they know about it and not tell us. Even VW is another example. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So it's not the product that is the issue. And I think we as consumers and citizens and customers, where many companies get it wrong in a trust crisis is they talk about the product fix. We won't forgive them, or we won't start giving them our trust again until we really believe something's changed about their character. I'm not sure anything has changed with Facebook's culture and character, which is why they're struggling with every move that they take, even though their intentions might be good. That's not how people in the world are viewing them. >> Do you think, taking Boeing as an example, I fly a lot, I'm sure you do as well. >> Rachel: Yeah. >> When those accidents happened, I'm sure everybody, including myself, was checking, what plane is this? >> Rachel: Yeah. >> Because when you know, especially once data starts being revealed, that demonstrated pilots, test pilots, were clearly saying something isn't right here, why do you think a company like Boeing isn't coming out and addressing that head on from an integrity perspective? Do you think that could go a long way in helping their brand reputation? >> I never, I mean I do get it, I'm married to a lawyer so I understand, legal gets involved, governance gets involved, so it's like, let's not disclose that. They're so worried about the implications. But it's this belief they can keep things hidden. It's a continual pattern, right? And that they try to show empathy, but really it comes across as some weird kind of sympathy. They don't really show humility. And so, when the CEO sits there, I have to believe he feels the pain of the human consequence of what happened. But more importantly, I have to believe it will never happen again. And again, it's not necessarily, do I trust the products Boeing creates, it's do I trust the people? Do I trust the decisions that they're making? And so it's really interesting to watch companies, Samsung, right? You can recover from a product crisis, with the phones, and they kind of go away. But it's much harder to recover from what, Boeing is a perfect example, has become a cultural crisis. >> Right, right. Talk to us about the evolution of trust. You talked about these three waves. Tell our audience about that, and what the third wave is and why we're in it, benefits? And also things to be aware of. >> Yes! (laughs) I didn't really talk about this today, because it's all about inspiration. So just to give you a sense, the way I think about trust is three chapters of human history. So the first one is called local trust; all running around villages and communities. I knew you, I knew your sister, I knew whoever was in that village. And it was largely based on reputation. So, I borrowed money from someone I knew, I went to the baker. Now this type of trust, it was actually phenomenally effective, but we couldn't scale it. So when we wanted to trade globally, the Industrial Revolution, moving to cities, we invented what I call institutional trust. And that's everything from financial systems to insurance products, all these mechanisms that allow trust to flow on a different level. Now what's happening today, it's not those two things are going away and they're not important; they are. It's that what technology inherently does, particularly networks, marketplaces, and platforms, is it takes this trust that used to be very hierarchical and linear, we used to look up to the CEO, we used to look up to the expert, and it distributes it around networks and platforms. So you can see that at Coupa, right? And this is amazing because it can unlock value, it can create marketplaces. It can change the way we share, connect, collaborate. But I think what's happened is that, sort of the idealism around this and the empowerment is slightly tinged, in a healthy way, realizing a lot can go wrong. So distributed trust doesn't necessarily mean distributed responsibility. My biggest insight from observing many of these communities is that, we like the idea of empowerment, we like the idea of collaboration, and we like the idea of control, but when things go wrong, they need a center. Does that make sense? >> Lisa: Absolutely, yes. >> So, a lot of the mess that we're seeing in the world today is actually caused by distributed trust. So when I like, read a piece of information that isn't from a trusted source and I make a decision to vote for someone, just an example. And so we're trying to figure out, what is the role of the institution in this distributed world? And that's why I think things have got incredibly messy. >> It certainly has the potential for that, right? Looking at, one of the things that I also saw that you were talking about, I think it was one of your TED Talks, is reputation capital. And you said you believe that will be more powerful than credit history in the 21st century. How can people, like you and I, get, I want to say control, over our reputation, when we're doing so many transactions digitally-- >> Rachel: I know. >> And like I think you were saying in one of your talks, moving from one country to another and your credit history doesn't follow you. How can somebody really control their trust capital and creative positive power from it? >> They can't. >> They can't? Oh no! >> I don't want to disappoint you, but there's always something in a TED speech that you wish you could take out, like 10 years later, and be like, not that you got it wrong, but that there's a naivety, right? So it is working in some senses. So what is really hard is like, if I have a reputation on Airbnb, I have a reputation on Amazon, on either side of the marketplace, I feel like I own that, right? That's my value, and I should be able to aggregate that and use that to get a loan, or get a better insurance, because it's a predictor of how I behave in the future. So I don't believe credit scores are a good predictor of behavior. That is very hard to do, because the marketplaces, they believe they own the data, and they have no incentive to share the reputation. So believe me, like so many companies after, actually it was wonderful after that TED Talk, many tried to figure out how to aggregate reputation. Where I have seen it play out as an idea, and this is really very rewarding, is many entrepreneurs have taken the idea and gone to emerging markets, or situations where people have no credit history. So Tala is a really good example, which is a lending company. Insurance companies are starting to look at this. There's a company called Traity. Where they can't get a loan, they can't get a product, they can't even open a bank account because they have no traditional credit history. Everyone has a reputation somewhere, so they can tap into these networks and use that to have access to things that were previously inaccessible. So that's the application I'm more excited about versus having a trust score. >> A trust score that we would be able to then use for our own advantages, whether it's getting a job, getting a loan. >> Yeah, and then unfortunately what also happened was China, and God forbid that I in any way inspired this decision, decided they would have a national trust score. So they would take what you're buying online and what you were saying online, all these thousands of interactions, and that the government would create a trust score that would really impact your life: the schools that your children could go to, and there's a blacklist, and you know, if you jaywalk your face is projected and your score goes down. Like, this is like an episode of Black Mirror. >> It's terrifying. >> Yeah. >> There's a fine line there. Rachel, I wish we had more time, because we could keep going on and on and on. But I want to thank you-- >> A pleasure. >> For coming right from the keynote stage to our set; it was a pleasure to meet you. >> On that dark note. >> Yes! (laughing) For Rachel Botsman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Insp!re London '19. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

>> Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to Washington D.C., we are live here at theCUBE at Inforum '18. I'm John Walls along with Dave Vallante and it's a pleasure now to welcome to the show from Capgemini couple of folks, Rachel Myers, who's Director of Alliances at Capgemini. (laughing) And John Clark, who's the VP of info-practice at Capgemini and Dave put your phone away, would you please. >> We're off to a good start. >> We are. (laughing) >> Who are you guys again? >> I think it was givin' him directions for dinner tonight. I think what you're doing. It's down at K Street take a right. >> Don't drive scooters without a helmet. >> That's right. Inside story. Rachel and John, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Let's talk about the partnership with Infor. Where it's coming from. What you are adding to that. How you view it and what you're gettin' out of it. And John, if you would? >> Yeah absolutely. First, hello from D.C., he said. The relationship that Capgemini has had with Infor goes back over 20 years. But we formalized it really two years ago and had a strategic partnership defined around several of the products that Infor has with a big focus on digital and cloud. So Capgemini sees that Infor is really leading the charge in a lot of native cloud products out there and we know that, that is certainly something our clients are looking for. So formalized relationship and extremely excited to be lead partners and sponsors here at Inforum. >> And so Rachel, where do you come into play here then as far as Director of Alliances goes? I think the job title probably speaks for itself, but in terms of how the Infor relationship works and where it comes in to your portfolio onto your plate, how does that work? >> So I manage the relationship with Infor as our customers are looking at cloud and all the options out there. I manage the relationship into Infor bringing the right folks to bear to our customers and joining at the hip where we need to in support of our customers. >> Okay, so you mentioned John, that its been a 20 year relationship. So that means it goes back probably to the loss and software days, right? The whole early days of ERP. Now we come into the modern era, cloud. We're hearing all about AI. We're also hearing about, sort of, micro-verticals and industry expertise. >> Yes, yes. >> So square that circle for me because you guys have deep industry expertise. How do you mesh with Infor? >> Yeah great question. We absolutely, as you said, go to market from a sector perspective, so everything we do has some tent of an industry or a sector verticalisation and it matches exactly well with how Infor goes to market with last model functionality. So what we do for example, is look at where Infor and our sector team see gaps like on food processing companies and we'll build out that solution and take that to market. So really kind of extending the last malfunctionality with Infor and having Capgemini's solutions as well. >> So does that functionality ultimately make it back into Infor code or not necessarily? >> Not necessarily. >> Okay, all right. So it's like last inch function-- >> Right exactly. That's a pretty good analogy for it. >> Okay so, well, it's always the hardest part, right? I mean you think of cable, you think of all the-- >> Telephone whatever. >> Sort of examples, right? So, you know the old story is if you're here and you want to get to the wall and you go half way, you never get there, right? >> Exactly. >> So that's kind of the process that you're in. There's always more to do, right? >> Right. >> Okay, so what's hot these days in your space? >> Well we're here at Inforum talking to customers and our partners about many things. But we actually are speaking about Industry 4.0 which is a big hot topic. Supply chain and EAM, Enterprise Asset Management. We have practices and expertise in all of those, so we can bring the best to our customers from a system integration partner capability which would be us along with Infor and the products that they bring to bear. >> So what's the 101 on 4.0? Presumably a lot of automation, more efficiency, driving business value. How would you describe Industry 4.0 Next Gen? >> It's the next evolution, I would say, to automation of processees. We're getting closer, I would think, and people are definitely piloting to get there, but building a road map and helping them really see the value is what we're trying to do with our customers these days and making it real and really producing some ROI beyond that with automation. >> So AI is a piece of that? How about, have you seen like blockchain hit yet? Or is that sort of on people's road maps? >> I think it's definitely a road map item. I think there's some experimentation, but what we're definitely seeing become real is robotics process automation, RPA. We're doin' a lot of that with our customers and taking it beyond experimentation to actual ROI. >> And the RPA is exploding. I was actually impressed and surprised to hear so much RPA talk this morning. I didn't realize that Infor had quasi out of the box capbilities there. So what are you seeing? A lot of, sort of back office functions getting automated, software robots getting trained to do mundane tasks? What's the experience there? >> I think as we are implementing ERPs like Infor's, there is a need to take processes that customers are doing today manual and automate those to see the extension and the ROI beyond just the ERP software. >> We do see a lot of it start in the back office, so a lot of finance and HR functions is kind of the first place that companies look for 'cause on thing that we do see on RPA projects is don't try to tackle everything, but get focused and get some quick wins, if you will and that's really where we built our library and where we work with Infor. >> Is it fair the automation of it is coming from the lines of business which is kind of your wheelhouse, right? >> Right. >> It's not, sort of an IT thing so much. IT is probably a little afraid of it, but is that the way you see it? >> Yes it is. >> Okay and so talk about Capgemini's strategy as the world sort of evolves. You know, you always hear small projects, small wins are the way to go and for years it was like the big SAP implementation >> Yeah. >> Or the big Oracle implementation. How are you guys changing your business to accommodate that new thinking? >> So really on several fronts. One is definitely the methodology that we have and we see on projects is shifting from a waterfall to an agile. So much quicker iterations and cycles on the projects themselves and usually the scope. It will start off with a line of business and again, if it's looking for, hey, I just need to improve the digital relationship I have with my customer. Which can a lot of times just mean start a digital relationship with my customer. So it's really, you kind of keep a tight focus on the scope and just have an agile approach which, again, is what we have changed our methodologies for. >> So digital obviously is real. I mean, every CEO that we talk to is trying to get digital right. A lot of experimentation going on. Like you said a lot of, hey we have to have a digital strategy then you throw AI into the mix. You throw things like blockchain. It's a complicated situation for a lot of firms. What are the discussions like with customers? Where are you seeing the most success or early traction? >> I think having the vision and the scope of where you want to go three years, five years down the road and being able to prioritize against that road map what's going to give you the biggest benefit first, so that it's not just haphazardly trying out these technology enablers like RPA and AI, it is a clear vision and strategy of where we're trying to go and solely hitting some of that ROI and seeing value. >> Are you seeing more of a save money, make money kind of a mix? What are you seeing there? I would say probably a mix, save money for the right reasons and spend money to get the ROI that we're planning for in that road map. >> Just to amplify on the point that you're making Dave. Just from the customer side of the fence on this, for people who aren't, you're just introducing them to the cloud, right? To begin with and they're trying to embrace or understand a concept that they don't have any experience with and now you think of all these other capabilities you have down the road or all these other opportunities whether it's artificial intelligence or whether it's RPA, whatever it is. It's got to be mind-blowing. A little bit, doesn't it? And how do you, I guess, calm 'em down if they realize we are that far behind. We're never going to get there. We're always going to be three, five, 10 years behind because we're that far behind right now. So how do you, I guess, allay their concerns and then get them up to speed at such a way that they feel like they can catch up? >> Yeah, say one of the key things that we can provide is various maturity models. So we have kind of a keepin' it simple of a two by two grid of where do you fall from digital enablement? A, do you even know what that means? Do you do it within divisions or certain lines of business? And then, is that a part of the strategy for your customer acquisition, customer retention, employee retention, et cetera. And start with kind of a fit there and then we basically have offerings that then go from okay, if you're starting out then the approach can be let's go through what cloud is. Like I said, there are absolutely still discussions that we have now on, hey what is the difference between cloud and on-prem? Is it the same software version? Is it a different software? What are the security features and the data center? Some of those questions are still out there as you said and we've got to look at the maturity model to get 'em there. >> So let's go through the simple, I like simple, the two dimensional, one of the buckets, so it's like, hey, we're not even thinkin' about it, it's kind of lower left. Upper left would be line of business focus sort of narrow. Lower right would be at strategic, but we're not acting on it yet. >> Right, in a division or a single line of business or I may have a cross functional solution with a great digital road map, but it's in one plant, you know, 'cause then you get into, okay, well that's probably because you either had a champion locally or you had some trigger such as some customer issues or production issues or something that forced the issue, so to speak, there. And then the top right is, yeah, it's part of the strategy. It's built in to where the budget is allocated as well and it's a part of all the conversations we're having with business and IT. >> Were you guys seeing particular, thinking about sticking on digital for a minute, you think particular industry uptake, I mean, obviously retail's been disrupted, publishing, you know the music industry's been disrupted. But there's certain industries that really haven't been dramatically disrupted yet, financial services, healthcare, defense, really to date, these high risk businesses. What are you guys seeing and kind of where's the greatest familiarity or affinity to digital? >> Where we're starting and where we've been focused with Infor and the market place is consumer products and distribution as well as manufacturing. That's really been a focus area for us and we didn't get into this, but John's team has capability in Infor and is skilled in Infor and there are some focus areas for us with the customers in those industry segments. >> Do you think that automation, AI, improvements in the supply chain, you know robotics even software robots will reverse the trend toward offshore manufacturing tariffs, I guess maybe help too, but I mean, are you seeing any evidence of that automation sort of making the pendulum swing back or are the cost advantages so attractive and is the supply chain so intrenched? >> I'll let John elaborate, but I would say that there is still a fit for purpose for offshoring certain things and for automating certain things and that's why I think it's important to build a plan and a strategy for which things will be solved for in which ways. >> Yeah and the one thing I want to add is as you see some plant go from, it took 200, 300 people to operate a facility to I can do it with 10. That changes the economics of now the labor cost and labor arbitrage isn't as much a function, but yes, what about the rent, facilities and transportation? So we are seeing the economic calculation change a bit from the point of just go offshore for labor. Well if labor is not a big a point, we are seeing a shift there. >> Right, so the labor component's shrinking. And then you can automate that. Is there a quality aspect or is that kind of a myth? >> We think that's a myth from what we're seeing. >> Quality can improve a little bit. >> Exactly. >> Won't go down. Won't go down. >> You're saying coming back on-shoring? Or are you saying offshoring? >> Or automating. Automating whether it's on or off. >> Oh regardless of the location, right? >> Right. >> Automation's going to drive quality up. Lower re-work, right? Okay. >> Robots do it a little bit better than us especially if it's repetitive. >> They don't get tired. (laughing) How about some of your favorite kind of joint examples with Infor, any kind of customer wins you can talk about? >> We're actually working together in a lot of spaces, but one of the biggest ones that we are actually talking about a case study here on the floor at Inforum is at Coke Industries, one of it's companies Flint Hills Resources. We're actually in the middle of an EAM implementation with Flint Hills and working together collaboratively with Infor at the client. >> And is that the or bigger picture, you said 20 year relationship formalized much more recently than that. Ultimately what does that deliver for the client? You think at the end of the day? What's the power of that partnership? >> So I think that there's several things, one is that with the experience and history of a Capgemini with 50 years of consulting experience and strategy work. We now specifically bring Infor and Infor's technology into the conversations that it was not a structure before two years ago. So now we specifically have, where does Infor fit in the road map from a software agnostic industry perspective? And then from a just a plain and simple support and keeping your customer's Infor environment running that's additional strength that we have that we didn't have before. >> So you guys are known for being technology agnostic even though you've got an affinity of going to market with a company in this case Infor. How are they doing? What's on the to do list? If you're talking to customers saying, hey this is the sweet spot," here's where some of the items we want them to improve on. What would you say? >> I'd say for, I can at least say tactically with my team we are looking to enhance our solution is around burst and analytics. So that's definitely a best debris tool in the marketplace and so where we can integrate that into more products 'cause it's, Infor acquired it year and a half ago. So we're trying to fold it in with each product and keeping that trajectory. Where again a customer only has one platform to support for-- >> So that's kind of infusing that modern BI into the platforms. Functionally you're kind of happy with it. >> Oh absolutely. >> And it's just a matter of getting the function into-- >> Right. >> The sweet. >> Have it the defacto. >> Right. >> That's where we want to get. >> Right, right. >> But honestly if you just look at the floor out there, you know from our perspective, the great showing and the excitement and just the conversations that we have around Infor. There's been some confusion, I would say, from, without naming names, other competitors of Infor's on what is our cloud and digital road map and then when we look at Infor with cloud native, you know from the ground up, it makes that back to one of the questions you had on, depending on where customers are starting, if you can go from the beginning like Infor has done with some of their products, natively built cloud up. Then those are great conversations and we're seeing more of that in the market right now. >> When we talk to customers, when you talk to the sort of, traditional vendors, they'll say it's a hybrid world, which seems to be. >> It's true. >> When you talk to other cloud guys, it's like, cloud, cloud, cloud. Now even AWS has somewhat capitulated, they've made some announcements to do stuff on-prem. But logically it makes sense that if the data is in some data center location, it's probably going to stay there for a while if it's working and it's a lot of it and you don't necessarily want to move it to the cloud, so do you buy that? Is it a hybrid world? Will it stay a hybrid world? Or do you feel like the pendulum really is swinging into the cloud or not because of IoT, it's more sort of a decentralized world. What do you guys think? >> I think it's a customer choice. Sometimes we have some federally regulated customers that are concerned about data and security and not necessarily there yet in terms of the cloud and we have some customers that are wanting to go 100% cloud so I think it is definitely customer choice and we are there to advise them whether cloud is the right answer and even to help them implement and support them on their journey. So I think we've seen all, every which flavor of cloud, hybrid. >> From your stand point, whatever you want, you're going to-- >> Yeah, I'd say in the past two or three years there's definitely more clients, I would say most now will look at some, when they're doing their TCO and software selection, they absolutely will lead with, hey at least the core part, ERP part, for example, what can I do for cloud with that? 'Cause there's just so much-- >> Considerationalities. >> Yeah the consideration versus three, five years ago no you wouldn't look at that, but I do think there absolutely will be a hybrid foot print going forward. >> Well, if there's an affinity to cloud, presumably Infor has an advantage there, 'cause they're born on the cloud, or at least for that part of the business and other entrenched ERP is not going to be so easy to move to the cloud. In fact that's what you want to do. >> And I think we share the vision with Infor and talking to customers with the cloud first approach. It makes sense to move to the cloud. There is value in the cloud and we can help build that story for them. >> Charles Philips pretty smooth spokesperson, he's a clear thinker, he laid out the strategy. The strategy of, this is my fourth Inforum, I mean, it's grown, but it's consistent, you know, he presents it in a manner that I think is pretty compelling, so that's got to make you feel good, right? You got a leader that's committed, been here for a while. >> Yeah absolutely and one other thing that I really do like about coming to Inforum to see Charles is he actually gets it. If you think of it from CEO of a large software company with hundreds of products, he knows where they actually fit and can go through kind of the road map and the story. So very credible. >> The partnership's a win-win for sure. It certainly sounds like you've painted a very good picture and we appreciate the time. >> Yeah. >> Thanks for being with us and good luck the next couple of days here at the show. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate the time. >> Should be, right? (laughing) Back with more live in Washington D.C., you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering PagerDuty Summit '18, now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2018 at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square, San Francisco. Been here all day, a lot of excitement, a lot of buzz, some great keynotes including Ray Kurzweil checking in, which was really a cool thing. We're excited to have our next guest, she's Rachel Obstler, she's a VP of products for PagerDuty. She's the one responsible for delivering all this fun new, fun new toys, right? >> Did it all on my own. (laughs) >> All on your own, so Rachel, great to see you. >> Nice to see you, too, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so great event, we were talking, you know, our second year. Last year was cool, it was kind of out by the water, but this is, you know, another kind of historic, classic San Francisco venue. We're surrounded by all the gilding and everything else-- >> Yes. >> Tech companies with all their displays. >> Yeah, there are not a lot of spaces that are big enough to do an event like this-- >> Right. >> In San Francisco proper unless you're going full-on Moscone Center, so... (chuckles) >> You'll be there soon enough, I think. >> Maybe. (laughs) >> So, let's get into it, you announced a bunch of new products here over the last couple days, so what did, let's go through some of those announcements. >> Sure, so we announced two new products. One of them is PagerDuty Visibility, and PagerDuty Visibility is really designed for the person that we call the bow-tie knot in the organization. >> The bow-tie knot. >> The bow-tie knot, so you know, you have a bow-tie, a bow-tie and there's a little knot in the middle-- >> Right. >> So, the bow-tie knot is usually an engineering leader, it's someone who when there's a problem happening, an incident going on, that they're kind of coordinating between keeping track of what's going on on the ground with the responders actually trying to fix it, and telling all the stakeholders what is going on, because stakeholders don't understand things like the server XXX has some problem, right? >> Right, right. >> But at the same time you don't want those executives getting on a call and disrupting the responders who are actually busy working on the issue. >> Right, right. >> So, that person in the bow-tie knot has a lot of manual work to do to make sure they're translating constantly between what's going on and what the executives need to know, and they need to know because if there's an issue with a customer application you want to get in front of it. You want to be able to proactively tell your support team if tickets come in this is what you say. >> Right. >> You want to maybe even send an email to your customers, "We know there's an issue." Update your status page, "We're working on it." You know, tell them as much as you can. It gives them confidence that it's being taken care of. >> Right, so this gives them kind of the God view of all the things that the team is working on in terms of getting resolution to that problem. >> Yeah, it ties the technical services, which are the things that are jargon and gobbledygook, except for the people working on them-- >> Right. >> To what are business services, which are those customer applications that the executives understand and the customers understand, so with that tie you know when a technical service is impacting a customer application, which one it's impacting, and you can also let the right people know who are responsible for that customer application, what they need to know so they can let the customers know. >> Right, so what happened before without having kind of a central place to manage that communication and that visibility? >> That bow-tie knot person did this all manually. >> Just running around gathering facts and figures-- >> Yep. >> And status and updates-- >> Yep, and then-- >> From various points on the compass. >> And then fielding phone calls with people, yelling at them-- >> Right, right. >> And it's a very painful, you know, we talked to a lot of customers. It's a very painful position to be in. >> Right, well that's a good one, and then you have another one, PagerDuty Analytics. >> Yes, so PagerDuty Analytics is really a product more used during peacetime, so Visibility's used during wartime to make sure responders know which customer applications are being impacted, but during peacetime there's a number of operational analytics that you want to know about all the realtime work that you're doing. So, some examples are I had a set of engineers that were on call last week, was it a bad on call? How many times were they woken in the middle of the night, do I need to give someone a day off? Right, so to make sure you manage the health of your team. You may also want to know which of my technical services is causing the most pain for the business, so that might be a monthly or quarterly report, doing like a quarterly business review. So, which technical services do I need to invest in because even a technical service that may not be down that much, if it's impacting multiple critical customer applications it could be causing your business a lot of money. >> Right, right. >> You also may want to know what's your total time that you're spending resolving issues, right? So, how many hours are across all your employees? Are you spending, just reacting to realtime issues that may happen and is that too much? >> Right, and if you can't measure it you can't manage it, right? >> Exactly. >> And it's funny because pulling from Jen's keynote earlier today, I think she talked about, the number was 3.6 billion incidents that have gone through the system just in year-to-date 2018. >> Yep. >> So, the scale is massive. >> Yep. >> But you guys are bringing some artificial intelligence, you're bringing some machine learning to bear because you have to, right? >> That's right. >> This gets way beyond the scope of a person being able to really prioritize and figure out what's a signal, what's a noise, what do they have to really focus on. >> That's exactly right, so in June we launched a product called Event Intelligence, and what it does is it takes in all those signals that PagerDuty takes into the system and then it makes sense of them. So, it says, "Well, these things are related, "let's group them together," so as each new signal comes in it won't create a new incident that someone then needs to run down. It will put it in the existing incident, so the responder keeps getting all the context they need about the incident, but they don't keep getting notified while they're trying to concentrate and fix something. >> (chuckles) They must love you guys, they must love you guys. (laughs) So, then the other piece I found interesting and I think some might find a little confusing is all the number of integrations you guys have-- >> Mm-hm. >> With so many different kind of workflow management and monitoring and a lot of things. How does that work, how does that kind of... I would imagine there's some, you know, competition, cooperation with all these different applications, but as Jen said earlier today if that's what the customer wants that's what you guys got to deliver. >> That's right, and you know, this is a complex ecosystem, there are a lot of different tools in the ecosystem. Naturally, as companies get bigger there will be areas of overlap, but we very strongly believe in an open ecosystem. We want to interoperate with every product that's out there, so we do have a lot of different integrations. We have a lot of integrations with companies where we take data in, so monitoring data that tells you, "Hey, your server's down," or whatever else it is-- >> Right. >> But we also have a lot of integrations with, like, ticketing tools, tools that will, or a customer file's a ticket, so that, you know, you can have the information, this is what's going on in the engineering side right now so the customer support team can stay informed. >> Right. >> And also managing through workflow, a lot of companies use like an ITSM tool to manage through workflows, so integrating with them, integrating with chat tools. We integrate with Slack, you know, so there's a lot of different integrations because you want to make sure that resolving an incident is the smoothest, easiest process it can possibly be because it's stressful enough already. >> Right, right, so a lot of stuff going on here. So, as you look forward don't, you know, congratulations on getting a couple of products out today, but what are some of your priorities as you kind of look at the roadmap, you know, kind of where you guys have things covered. Where do you see some new opportunities to take, you know, some of the tools that you guys have built? >> Yeah, we see a big opportunity in that world of Event Intelligence, so we already have a product but we're going to continue to add more capabilities to it and continue to take advantage of the data in our platform. So, surfacing that data in more intelligent ways through Event Intelligence could also be through Analytics, so for instance, you know, we today can group things together intelligently, we can show you similar incidents, right? This incident looked like something that happened in the past. Well, next maybe we can say, "This looks like something that happened in the past, "and oh, gee, that got really bad. "You might want to pay special attention "because this one may get bad, too." >> Right. >> So, starting to get more predictive, really making sense of all the data that you have from the past history, our 10,500 customers over nine years. It's a lot of data that we can use to help people get more and more efficient with their realtime work. >> Right, and is there an opportunity to kind of use cross-customer data, not, you know, obviously you've got to anonymize it and all those types of issues, but clearly, you know, there's stuff that has happened to other companies that I could probably, you know, benefit in knowing that information around some, you know, some common attributes either around a particular type of infrastructure configuration or whatever. So, have you started to pull that and bake that back into some of the recommendations or... >> Yeah, so one area that we do have available as some data today is benchmarking, so without, as you said, sharing any specific customer data it's very helpful for customers to understand first of all how their individual teams are performing versus their teams, but then also how their teams are performing against the industry. >> Right. >> So, are we fast at responding to incidents? What does best in class look like? How quickly could you actually mobilize a response to a major incident? This is like great data for our customers to have as they move forward in their digital transformation. >> Right, hugely, hugely important. >> Mm-hm. >> So, last word, you said you've, you know, you're relatively new to the company but you're a wily old veteran because you guys are growing so fast. (laughs) Just love to get your impressions. It's your second PagerDuty Summit, you know, kind of the vibe, I think Jen's got a really, very positive and very specific kind of a leadership style. >> Mm-hm. >> Just share your impressions with the show and what's going on inside of PagerDuty. >> It's been great, I've loved every moment that I've worked there. I feel like we're doing things that are really innovative and we're always pushing the envelope trying to go faster and faster, so I'm really excited for the next year. >> Good. >> Can't wait to see what the next Summit looks like. (laughs) >> Yeah, what it's going to look like. Yeah, probably be like 2,000-- >> We're not even done with this one yet. (laughs) >> 2,000 people, I'm sure, all right. Yeah, but the Advanced Planning Committee's already taking notes, right? >> Yeah, right. (laughs) >> All right, well Rachel, thank you for taking a few minutes and congratulations on your product release. I'm sure there were many sleepless nights over the last several months to get that stuff out. >> Thank you, Jeff, great to be here. >> All right, she's Rachel, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, we're at PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco, thanks for watching. (techy music)