>>Live from San Diego, California It's the Q Covering Koopa and Cloud Native Cot Brought to you by Red Cloud. Native Computing Pounding and its ecosystem >>Welcome back, toe Gorgeous. SAN Diego, California This is Q Khan Cloud Native Khan. 29 years. I'm still minimum. My co host is John Troyer, and this is the end of three days water wall coverage over 12,000 and 10 d Having a welcome to the program. Cassie, Who's the executive director at the national headquarters for v. American Red Cross. Matt. Thank you, American Red Cross. And thank you so much for joining us. >>Yeah. Thanks for having me. Uh, it's been a great conference so far. Uh, you know, we're here to share our story where as an end user on our journey with Cloud native with kubernetes Andi how that helps Red Cross do what we do, which is help people in need a cz best we can every day. >>Eso no matter what industry I talked to, everybody's dealing with change. There's always more things happening. American Red Cross. I mean, you know, it feels like I hear American Red Cross mentioned Maur a cz Time goes on because you know everything from, you know, things related to climate through, you know, global events and the like. So maybe before we get into some of the tech, just give us, you know, you know your role there and how kind of the changing world impact your organization. >>Sure. So my role is to support a few different business units. One is biomedical marketing. We try to recruit blood donors, too. Give blood at Red Cross Blood Dot or GE and other channels. That's obviously a significant part of what we d'oh were major player in the blood supply market in the US we provide service is to the armed forces, you know, in that regard as well. So that's part of it. Part of it is I work with humanitarian service is group as well to recruit financial donors on recruit volunteers. That's primarily through Red Cross. That or GE a T least as faras my group goes on, then corporate brand marketing and chapter related marketing and communications. So all that happens through Red Cross that Oregon Red Cross blood dot organ some related platforms on those our flagship brand products. >>Okay, And what led to the American Red Cross being part of this cloud. Native computing, Yeah, system. >>Our journey is a lot like, you know, a lot of other folks. We had a very, you know, monolithic type of architecture. We had all of these different business units with the different priorities, different timelines, different needs wrapped up into one big monster of a platform that, you know, kind of bundled up risk for everybody in this one platform. And, uh, you know, we'd always have collisions of priorities, mostly not to mention the resource issues of who's gonna work, you know, on what? At what time. And so a few years ago, we started talking about breaking that down. And, um, we've been lucky to have some technical leaders that are very aware of and welcoming to new cloud native technologies. We decided at that time to pursue, you know, a cloud native architecture. And what we have today in a few years later, is two years worth of being in production with a platform that runs on Amazon. We take advantage of a lot of the native orchestration tools there for running our clusters. And we've been able to service, you know, those different needs in a much more nimble way. We can release something for a Red Cross blood dot or without risking much on the financial donation side or on the volunteer recruitment side. And likewise, you know, for those other groups, we can kind of separate out the risks for each of those groups. And that's that's been a great, great benefit. >>You've been on the the vendor side. The for profit side is I t very different at the non profit. If you're looking, people are looking down, you get >>higher. Yeah, You know, I have been doing it a long time, a lot of different perspectives. But I think you know what I tried to do. And I would. I think I've seen work best is when I t is not the ticket taker, you know, integrated with the business. I'm very fortunate to have some business partners at Red Cross that collaborate. You know, every day we're having conversations every day. We have some people on our team that feel as though they're accountable for business outcomes, not just, you know, doing cool technology things, you know, For example, you know, multiyear evolution of process related to being more agile. We've got so much more integration and communication with business teams have gone from, you know, something like one release every five months now due to a weak, you know, and I think we could do more. It's just we don't have the need to do more. Um, and that's a huge, huge, big lift. You know, there's a lot of conversations that need to happen. Should make that work. >>Yeah, it's all a journey, right? We're all we're all improved. Continuous improvement, but so follow up there. So as a 90 leader for a very large organization, you know, they're one of the things people are saying this year. Wow. The conference is big. So many new technologies. So many new company somebody open source projects. You know, you're in the middle of this journey. You can't screw it up, right? That would be disastrous. So how do you How do you How did you and your organization look at new technologies and pick out which do technologies to try and incorporate them into your stack and your portfolio? >>Right. So we wanted to be a cloud native. We wanted a do, um, you know, focus on projects that where we knew there were skills in the marketplace, uh, that we could acquire at our price point. You know, we try to be good stewards of donor dollars at the end of the day, you know, all the money we have comes from folks like you and you guys who support Red Cross, you know, and thank you very much for all that generous support. And so we try to spend that money, uh, you know, very carefully. Way have some people who are, uh, you know, employees on our team made about 25 or so. But one of the great things we've been able to do with some of these technologies now is we have a program called Code for Good. It's a volunteer work force where we're here recruiting volunteers with the skill set that you know, they have a day job, but they have an interest in supporting Red Cross. Uh, maybe not financially. Maybe not with their blood, but they can give us some time on their skills, and we run it like an open source project. We set out a road map of features for six months or so. We have planning sessions, we say. Listen, you know if you can sign up for a feature that because you have two hours this week to work. Great. You have six hours. Great. You just had a baby, and you're not available for three months. Fine. You know, we we wanna have a, you know, a bench of people that can self select based on their time commitment, what to work on. And somehow it's been been working Great. You know, we started this in June. We have about 30 volunteers now on. We've already delivered an app for slack. That is kind of a workplace app where you can, you know, if your organization works with us, you can donate right from slack. You can give a schedule of blood donation, appointment, do things like that. >>I love that model. It's something that, you know we've looked at years ago. That kind of micro participation, if you will. You know, You think it's like, you know, Wikipedia wouldn't have been built if it wasn't for everybody. Just spending a little bit of time on it. Uh, I'm curious. Does something like participating with you know, this ecosystem I have generalized tools that people know and can plug in with, as opposed to, you know, having to know your direct stack Is that helpful To kind of be able to recruit people into that environment? What? What are the kind of most needed skills on dhe usages that you're recruiting? >>It is. You are learning. Curve at this point is much smaller than it was on our previous platform Because of the fact that we're using technologies people are familiar with, um, you know, things like Docker we use a lot. We just started evaluating Prometheus, another C N C F project for monitoring some non proud systems. Hopefully that'll graduate into production systems. So from a technology standpoint, yes, yes, we find that, you know, the people we talked with can walk in and be productive sooner. You know, there's still the Red Cross specific things they need to know about how we do business. But, um, you know, at least at this point, is that and not some proprietary system that they also have to learn >>any learnings that you've had participating in the c m. D. F. With the rollout of the technologies that you share with your peers, >>you know, I love the sea. NCF is very maintainer driven, You know, uh, and and user driven. I heard today at one of the analyst panels. I did. I think maybe 30% of people here are end users. >>That's a pretty >>large number. Um, you know, the fact that we can come here and learn about technologies meet people, meat vendors meet some of the people contributing code. Um, it's a lot different than you know, maybe some some summit sponsored by a for profit vendor that wants to, uh, you know, generate leads and sell you things. It feels much more community driven here and open to lots of different perspectives. >>So now what you looking forward to in the next few years? Both in terms of your stack and maybe coming back >>to Cuba? Yeah, way. It's funny. We've started to see other parts of Red Cross come to us toe, learn about kubernetes because the vendors they work with are mentioning these things. And and we have been early adopters, as far as you know, where across goes our group. Um and I think it's great if we can expand usage of, um, cloud native technologies to other parts of the organization on really get some economies of scale. So that's part of what we're trying to do is kind of internal, uh, consulting knowledge sharing collaboration on then, as far as what we're doing on our team way. Just really want to focus on. We're on a stable point in the platform, and then we want to do some things around monitoring and alerting that. Reduce those incident outages, too. Nothing. Hopefully, um, and work on that. >>You're working on a few projects that are that are being worked on here for That >>s So you have this Prometheus project. Like I said, we're piloting that, uh, you know, I would say in four or five months time, we'll know if that's going to be something we can, you know, put some more investment into >>All right, that want to give you the final word. Red cross dot org's code for good. I believe. The web. >>Yes, yes. >>What else? >>Your code for the number four. Good on. You know, if you're interested in volunteering, we need technical skills. We need team leadership skills, product owner skills, eh? So it's not just about you know, developing features and ops engineers as well. So thanks for your time. I want to say hi to my daughter, Peyton. It's late on the East Coast, so go to bed now, but thanks, folks. >>All right. What? Well, Matt, and actually, that is the final word for our day one of coverage for John Troyer. I'm stupid. And be sure to join us tomorrow. We've got two more days water wall coverage here. Lots of great speakers. Really appreciate. We've got the end users on. And, Matt, thank you so much. And, you know, great mission. The code for good. We definitely hope that the community here, you know, reaches out in connection Participates s Oh, that's it for today. Fixes all for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. And a special segment, we're actually going to doing our 2020 predictions. I am Stu Miniman, joining me, my two co-hosts of the week. To my left is Justin Warren, who I believe's been to, you went to the first one? >> I've been to all four, yeah. >> All four of the North America shows. >> Yep. >> I personally have been now to three of the North American, as well as one in the Barcelona. And we have a first time KubeConner, but long time host of theCUBE and things, John Troyer to my right. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. So first thing, the rapid fire. 12,000 in attendance. Last year 8,000, the year before 4,000. So, my math says that it will be 16,000 when we come next year to beautiful November in Boston, Massachusetts, which I can drive to. We've had snow in Austin, rain in San Diego. So, I'm predicting 60 to 70 degree weather in Boston, 'cause that never happens in Boston. Number of attendees next year, Justin? >> Well, it was doubling and now they have dropped it to 50%, so I reckon another 50%, I'll reckon 18 to 20,000. >> Stu: Oh, John? >> Yeah, I'll go higher. That many plus one. >> Okay, I feel like we'll do, I bet $1, $1. But, okay-- >> We have not hit peak Kubernetes yet. >> No. >> We definitely have not hit peak Kubernetes. One of the things, I keep looking for the theme of the show, and one of the things, we've been talking in some of the segments, is there needs to be simplification. When we talk about where we're at with cloud adoption, when we talk about some of these environments, there is a broad ecosystem. So, there needs to be some winnowing down of the technologies. We've seen some areas where things like MicroK8s and K3s to be able to be able to put Kubernetes at the edge. It's not that, that will replace Kubernetes, but things need to get simpler in some environments. Justin, I'll throw it to you first. Is simplification the theme of the show, is there something else that's grabbing you? >> The theme for me is that the money has arrived. We saw a little bit of that last year but this year it is definitely just the number of sponsors that we have here, the number of startups that we have here, the ecosystem, the number of parties, the VCs are here. This feels like a lot of other technology shows that we've been to before in their hay day. We are right here in the hay day of Kubernetes. So, I can see it getting bigger. Will there be consolidation? Yes, I think there will. But I think that this is going to broaden out further first. I don't think that we're quite at the point where things need to start collapsing in. I think we're still going to be exploring all the different options that we have. I think the theme is simplification, yes, I agree. But it's now going to be people trying to solve that problem by creating these higher-level services, managed-Kubernetes offerings. A lot of the different component projects that are there, we're going to see a lot of options where they try to manage that for you and make it easier to consume. But there will be several different attempts at that and not all of them are going to survive. >> Yeah, I'll go with you. Simplification's going to be an issue. Has to happen, we saw a lot of different stacks here at the show, if you go out on the show floor. A lot of people are trying to give you a generic platform. A general-purpose platform, maybe it has its own opinionated view of networking, or storage, or management, or security. But at the end of the day we need things on top of the platform. So, I'm hoping next year we see more things on top of the platform, more applications. We saw some big data applications this year. But people are still building engines and I want them to build cars, because not everybody can build the engine. >> Justin: Yes! >> Well, and actually, Justin, a question for you is when we talk about Kubernetes, there's so many people I interview here and they're like, "Well, no, "we know how to build it better than others "and when you want to go across all environments "we should do it." Is that, are we still going to see that for awhile? Or, can we all hold hands, and talk about open source and be able to just manage across all of these environments? >> Well, one of the key founding principles of Kubernetes is that you can operate it the same everywhere. If it's certified Kubernetes, it should function the same, no matter who's build of it it is. So, that just provides us a common platform that we then build on top of. So, I think the main differentiation's going to be on things like the tooling and the services that allow you to operate that base layer of Kubernetes. But that base layer of Kubernetes is about interesting as Ethernet. It's extremely pluggable and it's just ubiquitous, but no one really cares which brand of Ethernet you happen to be giving me. I care about all the stuff that I run on it. And that's what I think that we're going to see a lot more, I'm with you, John. We're going to see a lot more of those services. I'm seeing a bunch of startups at this show that are starting on that journey, they're providing a lot of things like database services, very highly-tuned monitoring and measurement telemetry systems. There's a big push to make sure that there is a certain amount of interoperability between these different services. Things like having open telemetry be the standard for sending telemetry information around. Because everyone knows that if we all build to Ethernet we're all going to have a much better time of it, than if we all start trying to come up with our own version of it and call it Banyan VINES, and FidoNet, and God knows what. >> Okay, I'm glad you brought up the example of Ethernet. First of all, I have no problem watching a 45-minute discussion of what 400 Gig's going to look like, and the challenge and the opportunities. And if you are talking Ethernet in someone's data center, for the most part they're going to run that on a single vendor because while there is interoperability, it's not until I go to the Internet, because layer two, I want to keep it single vendor, when I go layer three I want to do that. Is that, maybe it's not the best analogy but Kubernetes-- >> No, I think that's reasonable. And if you're trying to operate something across different environments then it's much easier if the two environments can talk to each other. Simple example that people tend to forget about is M&A. If one company goes and buys another one and I run Banyan VINES and you run, I don't know, FinLand or something, then we can't talk to each other, and integrating those two companies becomes impossible. But at least if we both have, you might have Juniper, I might have Cicso, those two network sets can still talk to each other. You might be running, I don't know ,Mesosphere, and someone else might be running Mirantis or Rantia, and that's their system for operating Kubernetes. Turns out, actually if you can operate it much the same, one of you can decide, you know what, we're going to operate everything with Rantia, 'cause we think that that's going to be the best thing for the holistic company. You may keep them separate. As long as you get the same outcome then it doesn't really matter. >> Yeah, that's why I think we aren't yet at peak Kubernetes. Those Kubernetes skills that are in high demand from a job market that people are being upskilled on, they're actually still going to be useful. Now, these stacks that these opinions that people are doing. I mean, they want us to talk about people over projects, right? That's a great philosophy, this is a very friendly community, it's very open source. But, cynically, I think, and sometimes people swap your company T-shirt for your project T-shirt that your company is the one that's behind. And that's kind of a, that's a little bit of a bait and switch. Yes, it's an open source stack. Yes, all the major vendors have open source, 100% open source stacks around Kubernetes. But they're all with different projects and they all pick their own projects. So, I think that is yet to be resolved. >> Well, it's interesting 'cause the thing that I heard is it used to be open source was something that people contribute to it. Now, the majority of people that contribute to open source do it as part of their job. So, there is some of that. Yes, I'm paid by company X, but my job is to participate in the community. There is a large company that got bought by $34 billion. They have a lot of contributors out there. Their job is open source, they are on those projects, they might switch from one project to another. We had Kelsey Hightower on today, he's like, "Hey, right, "but we need to think of people above project. "It's okay for them to move from one to the other "between projects or between companies." But, right, it is very much often companies that are behind the scenes and pushing people and dollars into these projects. One thing I like about the CNCF here is we do have, there's 129 end-user companies participating here, so we've reached a certain maturity level that they are driving it, not just companies driving it for the dollars. So, I guess the thing I want to ask though is, there's so many companies here, we started off the conversation this week, John, talking about Docker. And the cautionary tale of how many companies, when I asked, "What is your business model, what do you do?" Is, I created some cool new project. What does that mean? You look at the business model. You live right with Silicon Valley there. What are you seeing as you look forward? What do you expecting to see consistently? >> Oh sure, I mean, half the logos will be gone but they'll be swapped out for other logos, so that's all fine, right? If you have a point solution, as I was kind of pointing out, things are kind of stackifying. So, things need to consolidate from a buyer's perspective. A lot of the sessions here were about custom projects that people did, either in-house or for a customer. So, I think that's okay, that's the natural, it's the natural Cambrian explosion and then die off. >> Yep, creative destruction. (John laughing) That's the general point of how we do things. There's a lot of things that are basically a feature and you can't really build a company behind a feature. They're hoping that they will find some sort of pathway to money, we've seen some big acquisitions where they didn't really find a good route to money. That's fine, people will figure that out. And how you fund this development, Stu, I mean that's the perennial problem. At the moment it's possibly not the perfect solution but it's a pretty good one, in that we have developers are employed by a company that pays them to develop open source software. So, anyone can go and grab that software and then use it. So, we don't actually really depend on that company sticking around. >> And enterprise sales, it's still very expensive to have even a small booth here, and three or four people and nice T-shirts, and all of your swag, and you flew them here. And fly them all around the country to company after company, conference room after conference room. That is an expensive model to sell things. I mean, you need to have a fair amount of revenue. >> All right, so, Justin, a lot of progress, a lot of projects. >> Yeah. >> What's missing? Look out for 2020, is there an area or a space that needs to mature or needs work? What's your advice for this ecosystem? >> Well, for me it's all about the data. So, we've seen a lot of evolution in stateful sets and being able to manage state-based data within the Kubernetes ecosystem, a lot of progress on that, but there's still a long, long, long way to go. Also, just on the general operational tooling. So, the things that we are used to and have taken for granted in other traditional, like vSphere, or we've come from the VMware ecosystem. Simple things like higher availability. So, I need my data to always be available and I need to be able to have this managed. There's a lot of stuff in there but there's still a lot more stuff that needs to happen. Service mesh and that service discovery and making that easy enough for normal mortal humans to deal with, that still really isn't there. You kind of have to be a bit of a super genius to configure that and get it working and operating. So, there's still a lot of very hard work on these quite hard problems, to then make it look simple. >> Yeah, so, John, the one I want to throw to you is Dan Kohn came out on the keynote stage yesterday and he said, "Kubernetes has crossed the chasm, "yet most enterprises are still worried "about software failure." We know many people that are coming in new and shell-shocked when they come to look. What does the industry as a whole and this ecosystem, specifically, need to do to make sure that we don't come a year from now and say, "Wow, things slowed down "because we kind of couldn't get "the vast majority of people on board?" >> Well, I mean, we're going back to, I guess then the same thing, things have to be simpler. In times of uncertainty people either stop or they go to a trusted provider. There is, probably, although there's a high value on Kubernetes skills right now, that also means there's not enough folks. So, if you can't get the engineers. That was a problem in previous generations of some of these stacks, in that if you couldn't get enough engineers, or if the stack, if everybody had their own snowflake version of it and the skills were not transferable you could not move forward. So, I'm hoping we'll see more managed service providers. I'm hoping that we'll see more startups and services built on top of these existing infrastructures, I think we're seeing more of those. I see a lot of stuff in the operations space and kind of the SRE space, the incident management space. Kind of all the tooling you'll need to actually run these things in day two and beyond. And then, hopefully, the industry keeps pounding on digital transformation and process transformation. One project at a time, you start with one, you start small, you start tooling, you start tooling up, you get some small things under your belt and start to learn. But that's enterprise timeline. So, at a certain speed. >> All right, last thing, any aha moments, surprises, cool things as you've been going around the show? Justin? >> Oh, just walking into the show surprised me. Just how big it has gotten and how much energy there is here. It's amazing to me and I can just only see it getting bigger and, I hope, better. I am surprised by the reaction from people who haven't come into the Kubernetes ecosystem, I think. There's still a lot of people out there for whom this is a big surprise. That it's as big a show as this is, there are lots and lots of people out there who can't actually spell Kubernetes. So, there's a lot of work for us to go and do to figure out how we get those people to come into this ecosystem in a way that doesn't shock them and scare them away. >> Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to the party, those of you that had been joined. John? >> Hey, the thing that surprised me was this is both a multicloud show and a non-cloud show. This is the only show where people working in multiple public clouds can come together. So, that's one of the systemic forces causing it to grow. On the other hand, this is not a public cloud-only show. Over and over again, we talk to people here on theCUBE, I talk to people on the show floor, and most of their workloads, or many of their workloads, are on-premises, right? Kubernetes is fully functional and fully up to speed in private cloud, in people's data centers because it is useful. And they're starting to do that process tooling and process re-engineering, even on-site. And then they may be using a portfolio of different clouds. So, I think that was one of the surprising things to me is this was not 100% public cloud show. >> Yeah, and a little bit of caution I'll give there is we want to make sure we don't become complacent and say, oh, well, we could just kind of slide in what we were doing before and not make some change because the driver here, we've been talking about for decades now, was really kind of that application modernization. And Kubernetes and this whole, it is about cloud-native. It's not the Kubernetes, it's the cloud-native piece. >> You know what I didn't hear? I did not hear putting legacy apps on Kubernetes as much this year. Much quieter this year. >> So, and I'll just say, I'll highlight, we did an interview yesterday with the American Red Cross. Tech For Good, it's something that we've been highlighting, John, for especially helping lead the charge and make sure we highlight that. The Microsoft show, they very much talked about that this year. American Red Cross is saying, hey, we always want your dollars but we'd also love your skillset. So, if this community, and specifically Kubernetes, cloud-native ecosystem makes it easier. There's common tooling, something that I've been hearing a lot this year is when I go through that modernization I can hire the next-generation workforce. There's too many of those, oh, I'm doing it the old way. If I don't have somebody with 30 or 40 years experience in the industry, you won't understand our systems and we need that next generation of workforce to be able to get involved. So, love future jobs, Tech For Good, all good things. This community's always been strong on diversity and inclusion. And so, I guess final word I'll say, big shout-out to, of course, the CNCF, this event, they have a large menagerie that they need to take in here and manage, and they're doing a good job. There's always things to work on. They are listening and open. We have really appreciated the partnership. A huge shout-out, of course, to our sponsors that make it possible for us to do this. So, for Justin Warren, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much. We definitely are excited for one more day. Tomorrow, as well as next year in 2020, Amsterdam and Boston. Please reach out always if you have any questions. And thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Docker, Docker, Docker. No, you're in the right place. This is KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman kicking off three days of live, wall to wall coverage. My co-host for most of the week this week is John Troyer. Justin Warren's also in the house. He'll be hosting for me. And a big shout out to John Furrier who's back at the corporate ranch in Palo Alto keeping an eye on all the CloudNative stuff with us. The reason that I actually mentioned Docker is because it is the first thing that is on our lips this week. Just this week, Docker, which is the company that, if it wasn't for Docker, we wouldn't have 12,500 people here at this event. Really democratized containers. But the company itself built out a platform, millions and millions of companies using containers. But when the orchestration layer came in there was some contention, there's lots of politics. I'm waiting for Docker the Broadway musical to come out to talk about all the ins and outs there because Kubernetes really sucked the air out of the CloudNative world. Spawned tons of projects here. As you can see behind us, this ecosystem is massive and swelling. Last year it was 8,000 people, year before it was 4,000 people, so many people here, so. And John, so, let's start. This is your first time at this show, you've done many shows with us, definitely covered some of the cloud-native, you've worked with many of the companies that are in this ecosystem here. Give me your first impressions here of KubeCon CloudNativeCon. >> Sure, sure. Well, I mean Stu, 12,000 people, it's pretty crowded here. We're right by the t-shirt line, on day one of the conference. Look, a conference this big, especially an open source conference, there's several jobs to be done, right. This is an active set of open source projects and open source communities. So a lot of the keynote this morning was updating people on details about the latest releases, the latest features, what's in, what's out, what's going on. CNCF is a very broad umbrella for a very broad number of projects, not a coherent opinionated stack, it's a lot of different things that all contribute to a set of CloudNative technologies. So, that's job one. Job two, it's a trade show, and it's an industry show, and people are coming here to figure out how to build and learn and operate. So, that wasn't particularly well served by the keynote this morning. There was certainly a lot of hands-on this week. There's a huge number of breakouts, there's a huge number of tracks. Even day zero, which is a set of specialty breakout workshops and sessions, everything was packed. There were over a dozen of those. So, what strikes me is the breadth here is that it's a mile wide. I won't say it's an inch deep, because there's some, but it is a mile wide. >> Yeah, yeah, John you are right, there's so much going on. The day zero tracks are amazing. I think there were over two dozen, maybe even more of the sessions where, you know, half-day or full day deep dives. Even talk, there was some other small events even that went on for two or three days leading up to this. So, sprawling ecosystem. Last year at this show in Seattle, I actually said that this show is the independent cloud show that we've been looking for. John, I was at Microsoft Ignite just a couple of weeks ago, and absolutely, Satya Nadella, they're not talking about the bits and the bytes. It's a, you know, Microsoft is your trusted partner for everything you're going to do, including building 50 billion new applications. Amazon Reinvent will just be right after Thanksgiving, and we will hear a very different message from Amazon and where they play. But this is not a company, it is a lot of different projects. The CNCF is the steward of this, and so Kubernetes is the one that gets all the attention. I think for this group to even grow more, it needs to be focused more on the CloudNativeCon, because how do we do cloud-native? You know, what does that mean? We heard, you know, Sugu was up on stage talking about Vitess, and he said, look, if you bake your database directly in fully Kubernetes cloud-native, that means that when you want to move between clouds you bring your data with you. So, data, security, networking, messaging, there's so many pieces here. It's a lot of work to be done to mature this stack, but it definitely is getting more mature. You start hearing many of these projects with a million or more downloads a month. So many pieces. John, what are you looking to dig into this week, what are you most excited for, what questions do you want answered? >> Well, here on theCUBE I'm always excited when we get to talk to people in production, customers, really see what's going on. There's a lot of stuff in production right now, which is not to say a lot of stuff isn't bleeding edge, right. I hear a lot of stuff, just out of the woodwork, about things that are fragile, things that aren't ready, things that are not quite updated, and I think Kubernetes is an architectural as well as a spiritual home for everything. But there's a lot of pieces that plug in, and there are opinionated ways of doing it, there are best of breed way, there are vertically integrated stacks. What's the best approach, it's not clear to me. I mean if you have to look at it from a company perspective, who are the winners and losers, I don't think that's a very productive way of looking at it. I'm interested in some projects like, we're going to be talking with Rancher, and they've got some announcements, but I'm also interested in K3s, which is their project there. I'm been hearing some really interesting things on the storage front. You know, all these things are really necessary. It's not all just magic containers moving around. You got to actually get the bits and bytes into the right place at the right time and backed up. >> Yeah, I love that you brought up K3s. Edge is definitely something that I hear talking a lot, because if you talk about cloud-native, it's not just about public cloud. Many of these things can run in my on-premises data centers and everything like that. >> And Edge fits in all of these environments, so. Right, winners and losers, I remember two years ago, first time I got a chance to interview Kelsey Hightower, who we do have on the program. He had actually taken a couple shows off, but he's back here at the show. I said Kelsey, why are we spending so much talking about Kubernetes? Doesn't this just get baked into every platform? And he's like, yeah totally, that's not the importance of it. It's not about distributions, and not about who's who, any of the software companies, it's how do they pull all of the pieces together. How do they add value on top of it. One of the terms I've heard mentioned a lot is, we need to think a lot about day two. Heck, there was even one of the companies that was heavy in this space, Mesosphere, they renamed the company Day Two IQ, spelled D2IQ. No relation to R2D2. But you know, that's what they are focused on to help these things really go together. So yeah, we talk about multicloud, and how do I get my arms around all of these pieces, how do I manage a sprawling environment. You add Edge into it. I've got a huge surface of attack for security issues. So, John, remember cloud was supposed to be simple and cheap, and it really isn't either of those things anymore, so yeah, a lot for us to dig into. >> Yeah, it'll be an interesting mix. Developers, experts, people brand new, probably half the people here they're the first time, and people coming over from the IT space as well as people coming from the open source space and I even saw this morning this is the biggest conference I've ever been to. So it's a many, it's different parts of the elephant, I'd say. >> Yeah, absolutely. It is a good sized conference, especially for open source it probably is the largest. But Salesforce Dreamforce is going on this week, which is more than an order of magnitude bigger, so my condolences to anybody in San Francisco right now, because we know the BART and everything else completely swamped with too many people. One other thing, you know, CNCF, what's really interesting for me always is when you look at a lot of these projects, the people that we saw up on stage were companies, it was the person that oh, I started this project and I'm the technical lead on it, and that's where I'm going. We've interviewed many of the people that start these projects, and they come many times out of industry. It's not a vendor that said, hey, I built something and I'm selling it. It is companies like Uber and Lyft that said, we did things at massive scale, we had a problem, we built something, we thought it was useful for us. Open source seemed a good way to help us get broader visibility and maybe everybody could help, and other people not only pitch in, but say this is hugely valuable, and that's where we go with it. So, it's something we, a narrative I've heard for years about everybody's going to be a software company, well, almost everybody at this conference is building software. We've heard about 30 to 40% of the people attending this show are developers, and therefore many of them are going to build products. A question I have and I'll give you is, with Docker, we just kicked off talking about Docker. You know, Docker created this huge wave of what happens there, but to put it bluntly, Docker the business failed. So, they are not dead, there's the piece that's in Mirantis, there's the piece doing the developer piece. We wish all of them the best of luck, but they had the opportunity to be the next VMware, and instead they are the company that gave us this wave, but did not capitalize on it. So, I look around and I see so many companies, and you say, "Hey, what are you?" "Oh, we're the creators of X technology in this project," and my question is, are you actually going to be able to make money and do a business, or is this just something that gets fit into the overall ecosystem. John, any thoughts and advice for those kind of companies. >> Well, I mean we are here, even though there's 12,000 people here, this is still very leading edge, right. There's a lot of pieces, parts here. We're not sure how they're all going to fit together. A lot of the projects have come out of real use cases, like you say, but they're, it's commercial viability is a different beast than utility. Docker was very good at developer experience, but the DNA of actually selling an enterprise management stack is a whole different beast, and there are a lot of those too. So I mean I think a lot of the companies here may not be around, but their technologies will live on. I think if you're here, and the interviews here at the show I think will be a, you'll want to have your antenna out to see like, okay, does this give you a feeling like this is solving a real problem and is incorporated in a real ecosystem. You know, the big company, it cuts both ways, right. Some of the times those technologies get absorbed and become the standard, sometimes they disappear. So the advice is you just put one foot in front of the other and try to find people in production. That's the only way at the end of the day that you could move ahead as a small company. >> All right, John, I gave you one piece of advice when we came here and I said, you know one thing we don't talk about at this show, we don't talk about OpenStack. So, I'm going to break that rule for a second here, just 'cause I feel we have as an industry learned some of the lessons. There is some of the irrational exuberance around some of these. There's lots of money being thrown at these environments, but I do feel that we are reaching maturity and adoption so much faster, because we are not trying to replacing something. The early days of OpenStack was, you know, we're your alternative for AWS, and we're going to get you off of VMware licensing. And both of those things were, they didn't happen for the most part. And OpenStack did fit in certain environments, especially outside of North America there's lots of OpenStack deployments. The telecommunications environment OpenStack is used a bunch. Telecom, another area, talk about Edge, that plays in here and we have a number of conversations. But there are both the big and the small companies when I look at our list of people we're going to be talking on the program. You know, I love first the customers. We've got Fidelity, Bloomberg, Red Cross, and Ford Motor Company all on the program, and we've got big companies, mega giants like Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as couple of companies that came out of stealth like in the last week, including Render and Chronosphere. So, you know, broad spectrum of what's going on. You've done some of the OpenStack shows with me. You've got a long community and ecosystem viewpoint, John. What do you think and what do you hear, yeah. >> You know, this is, I guess yeah, this is a next generation, you could look at it that way. Anytime you bring together one of these open source foundations, you know, it is kind of a new style of development. You do have differing agendas. People do again have to have their antenna up to see, is this person promoting this open source project and what is their commercial interest in it. Because there are different agendas here. But it looks pretty healthy. Look, there's probably a million engineers worldwide that are going to have to know the guts of Kubernetes, but it's a different job to be done than OpenStack. OpenStack community is actually, that exists, is still thriving. It is good for the job to be done there. This job to be done's a little different. I think it's going to be an engine, you know, the engine that's embedded in everything else. So there's going to be a hundred million engineers that don't need to know anything about Kubernetes, but people here are the people that pop the hood open and start to you know, mess with the carburetor and this is a carburetor show. And so for the coverage here we're going to try to up level it to talk about the business a little bit, but this feels important. It feels cross-cloud, it feels outside of any one silo, and I'm really interested to see what we're going to learn this week. >> Okay, and thank you John. I really appreciate it to get it right final. It's like what is our job here? We are an independent media organization. Yes, we did bring our own stickers here to be able to, you know, we know everybody here loves stickers, so we've got theCUBE and we've got the fun gopher one, our friends at Women Who Go that support this, because, you know, inclusion, diversity, something that this community definitely embraces, we are huge supporters of their, but right, we want to be able to give that broad viewpoint of everything. We're not going to be able to get into every project. We're not going to go as deep as the day zero content web, but give a good flavor for everything going on in the show. I've found of all the shows I've gone to in recent years, this is some of the biggest brains in the industry. There's a lot of really important stuff, so I appreciate bringing my PHD holding co-host with me, John. Looking forward to three days with you to dig into all the environment. All right, so we will be wall to wall coverage, three days. If you're at the event, we are here in the expo hall. You can't miss us, we've got the big lights right next to the CloudNativeCon store. If you're online of course reach out to us. I'm @stu, S-T-U on Twitter. He's @jtroyer, and hit us up, see us in person, come grab some stickers, let us know who you want to talk to and what question you have, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Washington DC it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public-Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to AWS public sector here in Washington DC, the Cube's live coverage, two-day coverage, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting alongside John Ferrier, and we are welcoming back to the Cube, 13 time Cube alum, Sanjay Poonen in the COO of VM-Ware. Thank you so much for coming back on the show >> VIP status, by the way. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> That's definitely VIP status. >> Yes we have a red carpet rolled out >> Delighted to be here. I've lost track of the number of times, but when you're having fun it's good. >> Exactly, so tell us a little bit about what is VM-ware's role here in the public sector, what are you doing here at this conference? >> VM-ware and AWS announced a partnership in October 2016, and it really was the coming together of the best in the public cloud, with the best in the private cloud for what we describe as the hybrid cloud opportunity. And the past two and a half years, coming up on three years pretty soon, has been incredibly exciting. We started off with some of the key industries that we felt, for us, the public sector is among our top three industries. But financial services, telco, public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, all the key industries, technology, we're looking for ways by which they could take their applications into the cloud without having to re-factor and re-platform those applications. That's a big deal because it's wasted of work, if you can lift and shift and then innovate. And that's the value we brought to the public sector and some of our earliest customers, were customers in the public sector like MIT, schools, most of the regulated industries. In the on premise world, we're very strong in almost every, civilian, military, the legislative advance, the judicial advance, the federal agency, all of them use us. Millions and millions of work loads. The question really is how is they think about modernization can they get the best manifesto of the public cloud while leveraging their VM footprint >> So some would say that modernization may not include the original VM-ware vision because a lot of the governments are tryna replace and equated old systems like coldblow, mainframes, whatever, but you guys have been around dominated the operating side of IT for a while so you're kind of seeing the first wave of virtualization, the first wave of modernization but there's some cloud native people they might see that as like "Whoa, is that old school?" So what is particular perspective on that innovation dynamic? Because a lot of the public sector investors are awakening now going "Oh my god, I can move fast with Cloud" So Cloud is bringing on a new set of disruptors in IT, you guys have already been there on the first wave of disruption, so how do balance that kind of presence, >> Yeah >> But also disruption, you might be viewed that way, I'm not sure. >> Yeah, I would say, actually, that the first wave of our free reign modernization started with this device before Cloud. Okay, in 2007 when the iPhone came out there was a significant move by big parts of the public sector to move away from blackberry, which is kind of what they use for the decade prior to that. And when we brought AirWatch, we began to see some of the earliest industries that were adopting the public sector. Many of the agencies started to look at us now, so we actually began our journey into this modernization discussion in the workplace transformation, part of the discussion before we got to Cloud. So we were prepared for some of what that looked like, for example, census 2020 that entire for all the workers something is being done with mobile devices now as opposed to paper or surveys that were done maybe 10, 20 years ago, and all powered and secured by Workspace ONE. Now, when it got to Cloud we were prepared for that because, you know, we knew a little bit of what that meant and mobile and Cloud were some of the two top discussion items that people were talking about as modernization at first under the banner of digital transformation. We had to begin to showcase to a customer that moving an application, now we're talking clients server three tier architectures as opposed to a cobalt mainframe that's really where we have but the bulk of the 886 architecture that's from virtualized VM-ware if you could take them now to the cloud and then use some of the services that these guys are building whether it's data based, whether it's artificially intelligence, machine learning, if you waste all your time in re-platforming and re-marketing an application it's that much less time you have to do some of those innovative things. And the lift and shift process once we had this sort of highway into the Cloud, so to speak, which is what VM-ware Cloud and AWS does, it became so apparent, so we are that process, we had to then work what we can talk about Fred RAM certification all of these things that I'm (inaudible) >> In AirWatch was really a critical acquisition, turns out a boom for you guys with public sector. >> Oh yeah. >> You guys had the iPhone was a driver not so much the blocking and tackling of virtualizing data centers and IT, which you had a presence in, but it was the mobility piece. >> Well since 1998, 99, since the company was founded, the public sector business of VM-ware has been very important, I mean I would say, like I said it's the top three and so, we have tremendous amount of relationships some of our biggest deals. Eight figures plus deals where done with some of the biggest and many of our partners here. >> So it's a large business. >> Large business. >> Did you break that in the numbers? >> We did but we have always said it so a top three, we have always talked about in our earnings calls, some big, large customer examples like US Army, and then , which is also a sort of representative of this community here. Safe, local education. All the universities are using us. So the footprint of VW-ware premise was well documented, well understood, lots of spent going on there. What we didn't have an access to, we had some virtual desktops, VDIs. This mobile aperture gave us a whole new banner of spending. But then the Cloud aperture is kind of taking this to a whole new level. And quite frankly if you look at the commercial sector, the overall IT spent in the world is about one trillion we track and about 150 to 200 billion of that, 15 to 20 % is being spent on the Cloud. And the public sector, governs sector is starting to track that, they are probably a little bit lagging in certain areas to commercial. But that 15 to 20 % is only going to get 30 or 40 % in the next five years. VM-ware has been one the top infrastructure companies, we are looking at our move, a bigger part of the wall of share that we gain as people move their investment to the Cloud. >> When you are thinking about the different clients and customers that you're working with, the Sled groups and then the corporate customers, what-how different are they and how, what's on the public sector's mind versus your corporate clients? And how do you manage the relationships differently? >> Yeah, we have sort of segment them at VM-ware and many companies have done the same thing into three pockets. One is who we describe as the federal public sector customers that are civilian, military and we mirror that in almost every country so Theresa here, for example, runs AWS and we have a similar type of work structure to hear in each of the key regions. The second big segment is healthcare, many of the healthcare organizations are regulated there's similar characteristics and the third is SLED, state local education. And those three pockets are very similar patterns in the way in which they buy, their CIOs are similar and they also have often very similar security requirements. So the highest maybe something like a FED and FedRAMP and we some specialized needs that they have for certain certifications on the device or certifications on the Cloud and we have to comply with all of those. But then as you get to the ones that are in the state local maybe they don't as many and higher certifications but what it's helped is to basically work with partners with a very similar across this, and the proposition on the initial transformation is really modernization of either the data center and their applications or modernization of the device. And VM-ware is very uniquely provisioned to help on both those fronts. >> And security is really top of mind >> Absolutely >> I mean we've heard on the main stage and we know how big a threat these cyber threats face. These Cyber threats pose. >> Absolutely, and if you think about aspects of security. Security has multiple aspects of where you can think of them as control points. The network, the end-point, the cloud, identity and lots of event management that is collected. These are the five biggest markets of security. In each of those areas VM-ware is starting to play more. For example, network, you know, five, six years ago people didn't think of VM-ware in that area but with NSX our leading software define networking area, we have become the lead on that segment and about half of our use cases are security related for a use case called micro-segmentation. So the government can basically segment out a set of their apps and through software, think of these as on-off switches almost like light switches only allow certain apps to access certain parts of the data center. That's very easily done through NSX. Workspace ONE, the endpoint can now be extremely secure and provide all the levels of security that Blackware provided in their proprietary devices but now on any device. So we've been systematically looking at each of these areas I would estimate about 15 to 20 % of VM-ware revenue is security related use cases and public sector this is a very, very key place where we get grilled on and we have to satisfy their level of requirements for security. >> Sanjay, what are you doing here? I know you said you are speaking at a panel, Fireside chat, what's your agenda of the week? What's the story? What some of the key talking points for VM-ware? >> VM-ware is one of the top sponsors here, I don't know whatever is global or platinum or whatever the highest level is, you will see our name's there. And largely what we did when we announced this partnership was, you know, Andy and I were classmates at school. We wanted to build a very close partnership at their big events, so you will see us at all the major summits. VM-ware is a top sponsor, and you'll see them also at >> Doubling down on the relationships. >> Yep, we're doubling down. And they're doing the same at VM-world, so we said "Listen" and I think I talked about this in one of your previous shows. If you can mingle, VM-ware has collectively about 100,000 people that come to all the VM-ware events across the world and maybe about half a million to people who watch those events online. Amazon has probably twice that number. But if we can mingle each other audiences because they are coming off into both shows and we, the best showing up at AWS summits and we'll give them lots of access to VM-world. >> Ups* >> (laughs) There we go. >> Operations >> Hey, that's got a ring to it. I like it >> That's exactly the vision. So we, first of all, VM-ware is a big presence and the acquisition we've done, also, like Cloud helped also has a big presence, so that's one. Number two, we try as often as possible to have either a key note or some kind of Provence, I've had a good friendship with Theresa. She invited me to speak, I think there's an event with their top five hundred customers, sort of a key note inside that. And I do that a little later this afternoon. And it's also a tremendous opportunity, I think they have 13 or 15,000 attendees here to meet some of our top customers, so those are the three things that I'm doing over the course of the next day and a half. >> You got the CIA deal 2013, what that has done, in gestation period since then, a lot of other folks in the DC circuit here, public sector, government, agencies, they are all going "Hmm, Amazon has got the right formula" so Theresa put the formula together, people are adopting it, you guys do the strategic deal with AWS with your AA gown on, as a student of the game if you will in tech, Sanjay, which you are, knowing what you know now at VM-ware what's your perspective on this? Because you got a big tail wind with Cloud, you get clarity in what you guys do, in what AWS does, you also have multi Cloud with other Clouds, I mean you got NSX with a nice product, you got multi Cloud built-in hybrid, I mean, pretty good at spot for VM-ware for public sector. What's your perspective on this? >> Yeah, two parts to your question. First off, tremendous respect for Andy. I was describing before I go out on the show with both of you, when we were in school, I wouldn't have put him, in 1987 when we graduated, as the person who would of been the pied piper of this public Cloud revolution. But kudos to him, Theresa a fantastic executive and I think that, you know, 2013 CIA deal put them on an incredible place to be, a front runner in this and many other deals they've done similarly. VM-ware, we saw over the last, you know, 3, 4, 5 years is a significant rise of Amazon in our accounts. Customers were asking us "Why can't we get the best of both worlds? Why does it have to be on premise runs and VM-ware and public lines and I've got to portent and refactor and re platform my applications?" So our customers drove a us together and what we've sort to do in our relationship with Amazon is we meet on a quarterly basis, we review feature and function, product road map, we're aggressive, with our sales teams are trying to pursue opportunities together. And that's really helped us, you know, that's part of the reason I'm here, so, the more that we can do together to satisfy customers, customers like seeing big partners come together, even if, it feels a little bit like Berlin wall moment, right? You remember 1987? You had the US and Soviet Union and people were surprised by that. I that that the general consensus was complete surprise in 2016 when we announced the project with Amazon. But with every move we made like for instance, recently we announced the FedRAM status, one of our biggest 8 figure deals we had announced in our queue for was with a major customer that's in this segment, actually. Our public sector SLED and the more that we can do this, I think there's a lot of future ahead of us. >> Berlin is interesting, you know, tearing down that wall that was a moment that came down and the government, the theme that we are hearing over and over again is red tape. Lag with data it hurts application work loads so fast data, make it available, cut the read tape out of procurement, I mean, basically, 1980s, 1990s, procurement rules don't apply to how people consume and deploy technology today. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Tear down that red tape. >> I think you got that right. I think the governments mandate to go Cloud first in the, you know, last several administrations was absolutely key and certain elementary work loads like websites, I mean why, so if it's a public website that's holding public information, I mean, of course, you've got to worry about security but the data public anyway. Okay, so, what's going to get hacked? I mean, why don't you move all websites that are web content, so some of those early work loads are moved over very easy. I would call it so, the 1-O-1 of posting. Why would you want to have server just to host a website? But once that's done the more mission critical applications, Windows work loads, Oracle's sequel service databases, Virtual desktops, now you are starting to see and I think eventually some of the more mission critical apps like SAP or Oracle apps, I think you see them also now with a lot of customers in both public sectors and commercial- >> Military DOD tactical edges, >> Absolutely. >> The military lives are on the line, it's not a video game, lag actually will kill people. So you want to have that application peaked. >> Exactly. >> With the right architect >> One of the things that are so inspiring about being here at the public sector summit is that we are seeing all these used cases, of using the Cloud for good to solve pressing environmental challenges, health challenges, social challenges, what are you seeing, what is VM-ware working on that is, that is particularly inspiring to you? >> I am glad you asked that Rebecca. I would say that's one the things and Amazon shares a similar value where we think that, you know, technology companies have to think beyond themselves and be a force for good. I think that one of the first times at any major conference, last year we had the Nobel Peace Prize winner who's changed the world, Malala, come and speak and I think everyone who comes to major tech conferences, and we had one of the biggest conferences, was, I mean, we had grown big men, 6 foot tall crying at the end of that. And we had a number of customers that we loved to be able to talk about there stories, Make A wish is an example of an organization that, you know, if someone's with a terminal disease and they want to have some wish that they could wish for, all the infrastructure runs in VM-ware and we can help them serve that audience better, we have a number of charitable organization, Red Cross was on (unintelligible), so we, a big part of pad mind the attire of companies, kind of charter in our EPICC values has been people of integrity, people of work with the customers and the community. Our values EPICC stands for execution, passion, integrity customer and community. And that last C I think is very important, cause, you know, we live in a world and the more important thing is not necessarily how much money you make but what a force you can be for changing people's life. That lasts forever. You can't take your money into the grave but the more you can have on people, impact on people's lives, I mean, John, I am delighted to see your daughter. >> Yeah. >> I mean that generation continues >> Well, it's community right? >> And you're passing on those values onto the next generation or helping people that's the bigger story of life and that gets us equally excited as innovation. >> Communities can now be instrumented via digital technologies, so your faster time to find truth, people who have communities were very active, the data is there, it's all in the data and so you can see the impact >> You know, I think that's absolutely key. So John, I would agree with you and I think you as, you know, you talk to companies that's an important question to ask them. Because we are all in this together. There is no whether it's competitors or what's not, we can all serve the greater community, here for good and make this world a better place, you know there is a lot of what we do that helps the world run better, that's good, infrastructure helps us run better, but helping the world be a better place, it takes both individual and collective will. >> Well one of the talent gaps is not just computer programming and tech people it's architects for the new society that needs help and these key policy questions like governance and responsibilities, you're seeing YouTube and Facebook and our neck of the woods responsible for all this impact and they don't really kind of, there's no oversight. (laughs) >> Well, listen I'm not going to get into the public debate about, you know, privacy and governance and so on. I would say that one thing that, you know, we're also really excited to kind of give back to the community in terms of education. One of the things that is very powerful to VM-ware is our user groups. We call them V-mugs, VM-ware user groups and there's collectively about 150, 200000 of them and it's amazing when you spend time with them, they are really, really, they are members of the community really because they're customers and partners and they dedicate their time to educating others and the more that we can use online forums, I love the way in which you're using your online platform with the AI and other techniques. I think artificial intelligence becomes the ground equalizer, give access to everybody. >> Access to the voice is access to the data but right now as you pointed out we need a society that's going to have shared values and I think that's like where the good is coming from and it's easy to get on the bad tech band wagon which everyone is on right now but there are examples of tech for good, you mentioned- >> But when you say shared values, is that you, I mean is that possible? >> Well, I think there is, there is an awakening going on now from Silicon Valley where I live and here in DC which it's, it's in my face here because people as tech savvy here as they are in say Silicon Valley, no offense, but those people aren't as tech savvy here as they are in Silicon Valley, they don't go deep on the impact of tech but they see the results of bad tech. So I don't see a lot of a vandalizing going on outside of certain areas around tech for good. So I think there's a lot of great examples, human trafficking, you're seeing tech for hiring, new generations onboard training, skills gap, so efficiencies in healthcare, there is so many areas that tech could be used for good and if people were educated on focusing on that and not the bad, I mean bad's got to eradicated, certainly, I'm not for bad things but maybe there's a lot more good, the good pile is much bigger than the bad pile in tech, so, when I say shared values is recognition of that which is let's get on the same page, there's bad and there's good, have that debate and then apply the tech. >> Yeah, interesting. It's a galvanizing force. >> Well, it's just like any invention whether it's the printing press or the use of fire, I mean, there is good use of it and there's bad use of it. And we got to to find ways by which technology while this debate is going on as to as some of these social media platforms, my fundamental belief is that technology is going to transform society, the reason I came to the United States as an immigrant was to study computer science and I felt like the United States had, you know, when I came to this college I hade never heard of called Dartmouth College in Haven New Hampshire, was very fortunate to have a scholarship to go there but that's because I wanted to study computer science and I felt like computer science could change a lot of the way at which, you know, at that time, I was just trying to program and learn how to, you know, create algorithms but if you look at what transformed every aspect whether it's the mobile device which is really a computer in your pocket or Cloud computing which is kind of bringing the super computer into the Cloud. >> (inaudible) >> I think it's tremendous what we can do and we have to constantly find ways by which artificial intelligence and these forces of, you know, the next part of general mobile, Cloud computing can be used for greater good. >> Did you go to scholarship on full bode with basketball? (all laugh) >> Man, we got the Warriors with two ball games. >> So you are a big Warriors and for the folks that don't know Sanjay, we always used to talk about every time Warriors looking good to stay alive but not looking good >> So sad to see. I mean it's sort of, the last game I was watching last night, it was, it was sad, it was, of course, it was a win but also a loss to see KD go down that way was just absolutely tearful, yeah, but, you know, we have one more game. >> It's going to be hard >> It's going to be hard to, you know, kind of beat the crowd and the crowd is really loud at Oracle and get one more game and then, yeah, I think it'll get to game 7, we'll what happens but it's just great to their heart. >> I'm from Boston so I'm kind of over Golden state but I am sure everyone is over Boston and our red socks and our throw-ins and our pads >> Duck tour has only been 15 months? >> I know exactly! Exactly! We're still- >> There will be a Celtic warriors game >> That would have been so good >> That would have been so good like the Lakers (inaudible) >> It was more recent than that. It was the pads victory, so yeah >> Okay >> Yeah, anyway. Just saying, just saying. Sanjay, thank you so much for coming back on The cube, we look forward to your 14th visit on the show. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, John. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Ferrier, stay tuned for more AWS public sector summit here in Washington DC. (Upbeat Music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our exclusive coverage of, in Puerto, Rico for Blockchain Unbound. This is the industry conference room. People around the world from Silicon Valley, New York, and around the glove, coming to Puerto, Rico to talk about Blockchain decentralized internet cryptocurrency and really the future of society and global economic value creation of course our continuing coverage is focusing La Sierra for 2018. Our next guest is Mark Jeffery, CEO and Co-Founder of a company called Guardian Circle. Welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So you guys are doing something really interesting, so we, first of all, we like to geek out, as Fred say, "We're alpha-geeks." But we love IoT, cloud computing. You're doing something really interesting right now with Blockchain and this new decentralized internet around something of a critical infrastructure nature. Take a minute to talk about Guardian Circle's product, the coin, token that you're doing, and what it all means. >> So, Guardium is the token, the company's called Guardian Circle. Together they comprise global decentralized emergency response. So, six billion people on earth have no 911, There's just no magic number you can call, right? So hold that in your mind for a second. The other one billion of us, we do have 911, but it's not very good, it hasn't been really updated since the 60's. If you call 911 and if you're lucky enough to not get a busy signal, they have no idea where you are. Your location information is not transmitted. Which Uber can find you more easily than 911. Which is just insane, but that is the way it is. So, nevermind, so throw all that out >> So 911 is broken? 911 is broken. >> Yep If you have it, it's broken, and most people don't have it, so throw the whole thing out the window, let's start over. What would we build today? The way the world should work is whenever you're in trouble, no matter where you are on the globe, all you should have to do is press a button, that button sends an alert up to the Cloud, the Cloud looks down and sees what people and resources are already nearby, and then activates, coordinates, pushes all that help to you as quickly as possible. So, ten people in three minutes. That's what were, that's our-- >> So a couple things going on. So to me when you say, what should we start from scratch, put in my little operating system design network solutions add on, all kind of rolled into one as a stable, fault-tolerant, resilient, robust, always on network. >> Yes. >> Database that is fully interoperable and updated in real time of every number, every location, every persons capability to understand the discovery and resolution of a number. >> Yeah, so >> So that sounds like the internet. That sounds like the internet. >> (laughs) Well that's a little bit, probably further than we're going right now, but yes. Ultimately, you're correct. That would be the ultimate-- >> So no legacy baggage, 1960's Telco. >> No >> We're talking about immobile, in Africa for instance, there's more mobile penetration than anything else. That's what they got. >> Yes. >> So every country is their own sovereign kind of architecture? >> Yes >> Are you guys looking at it from a global perspective or regional? >> Global, so we think that, I mean, this is, this thing should be mobile native, location aware, and the alert should go out to multiple parties. And the phone number is your identifier in this system, but it's effectively an IP based system, really, so you're right. We have to balance that against privacies, so you get to decide who is on your alert grid, right? So you have to emphatically say, yes my friends, family and neighbors, and the subscription services, and if available, these official services. >> So Blockchain can solve the immutability privacy issue? >> Yes. >> The decentralized nature of network effect is a dynamic that people look for in good deals or good architecture. That's in place. >> Yes. >> People have a social graph, interest graphs connections. So the analog world is going digital. I mean, the old days was, is there a doctor in the house? But you were limited by how far you could yell. >> Right. >> So here you're saying literally, if you connect properly, the users in charge are their, their data. >> Yeah. >> They can dictate what they want to connect to, where, is that kind of how it works, is it peer to peer? >> Yeah, it's sort of peer to peer. I mean, a lot of people think, a lot of people mishear me a little bit and think that when you press that button, the alert goes out to everybody that's nearby, right? So total strangers that may or may not be trustworthy are suddenly coming, that's not what I'm saying. That is not what we're doing because we don't want to accidentally summon Jack the Ripper, like that's, you don't want to make a bad situation worse, right? So, you explicitly invite people into your protection grid, we call them guardians, hence, Guardian Circle, that would be your guardian circle. And you can have an unlimited number of them, so six, 6000, however many friends you have. Then we will also feature paid subscription services where you will be able to subscribe to, like, your local EMT collective, or your local license and bonded arms security, or if you're in a remote corner of the world, you could subscribe to the guy with a truck, who could run you down the mountain, right? When you're having medical problems. So it's going to vary depending on where you are in the world. We're also working with the Women's Safety Xprize, we're a partner, we're the backend of that prize. Which is an IoT device contest to make a panic button device, right? So when you push the panic button, what happens? It goes into Guardian Circle. >> So how does token economics fit into this? So I'm getting why it's tokenizable, How does it work mechanically? Do I buy tokens for safety? Is it like, I mean, take us through some of the use cases. >> Yeah sure, so there's five different ways in which we use the token. The first one is, obviously, to create the, to buy emergency response subscriptions. Now we're going to allow you, or provide a way for you to, as a consumer, just swipe your credit card in the app, and in the background you'll be purchase Guardium tokens, right? And it'll re-up every month if you don't have enough in, it'll be that sort of thing. So you might not even really be conscious of the fact that you're using cryptocurrency. If you are, there's a wallet that'll allow you to just use the cryptocurrency manually, the way you do any, any right now, right? >> And. >> So there's that. >> Okay so continue. >> Yep, the second thing we're going to do, we think that giving will be a big behavior in our universe, so you're going to be able to send Guardium directly to a beneficiary in the developing world. And what's cool about that is it doesn't go through a governments, a bank, or an organization. So remember Red Cross in Haiti? Can't happen here, and we're going to go even further than that, down the road, you're going to be able to track every dollar that you donated as easily as a FedEx, right? >> So you are creating a direct relationship between people who might want to help people and then a direct access for resources for the user. >> Correct. >> And so that's the primary, kind of a two >> That's one major flywheel. >> major flywheels going on. >> Just like people sponsor a child, safety is one of the biggest problems in the world. In fact, some people say, this guy named, Greg Hahn, who says it's the number one problem in the world that all other problems flow from the fact that people in the developing world aren't safe. Why don't they have water? Cause they're not safe. Why don't they have education? Cause they're not safe. Lawlessness has to be solved first. >> Trust is a huge part of this too. >> Yeah. >> So how do I set this up, where are you guys in the system, is there a product up and running, how do people get involved with your project? Take a minute to share that. >> Sure, so we have apps released today and they're distributed world-wide on IOS, Android, and Alexa. We also have an open API that lets anyone plug any alert device into our grid, obviously we have to, we want to know who you are first, but basically everyone is welcome. And so, and then our token sales site is at Guardium, Guardium.co. >> G, Guard, ium, Guardium. >> Yes, Guardium. >> And then Guardian Circle? >> Correct. >> Guardium with the m and the end of the token. What's the plan, what are you guys, how much have you raised, what's the story? Yeah, so we're selling ten million dollars worth of tokens, which represents 30% overall, 33% overall. We have a 100 million tokens in the sys, that, that's it, that will ever be distributed. It's on the NEO Blockchain, so we are, we are, we're sort of different from a lot of other folks. We're one of the very first western, we're not the first but we're one of the firsts. >> NEO has a good reputation of high performance. >> Yes >> Is that one of the considerations you had for them? >> Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, we deal in emergencies, so our tolerance for things like CryptoKitty swamping the network is very low. So yeah, so we liked what NEO had to say in a lot of ways because of that. >> I interviewed the CryptoKitties at Polycon, interesting story. It's a Pokemon moment for the internet stare. Well congratulations Mark, what's next for you guys, get through the sale, how's the team makeup look, what's going on with the company? >> Yeah, get through, I mean, definitely get through the sale is the biggest thing right now. We're a small team of, like about five people, plus some contractors. The next big thing that we have on our agenda is we're going out to India in four weeks to actually test the Xprize IoT panic button devices on the streets of Mumbai, so Guardian Circle plus device. >> Intense environment a lot of people there. >> Yeah. >> So let's talk about you. What is your background that got you here, or was there an itch you were scratching? Why this time, also the way to attract a lot of alph entrepreneurs, this is a disruptive time, but why Mark Jeffrey's, why now, why Guradian Circle, what's the passion behind it? >> So, well I started life as an engineer, but I won't bore you with all my adventures up until this moment. But in 2013, I became very interested in Bitcoin, wrote a book called, Bitcoin Explained Simply. Got the book, got the little crazy thoughts in my head. >> You're an author, speaker >> Right, same thing. >> distinguished influencer. (laughs) >> So that was sort of how that side began. In 2014, I basically, my girlfriend at the time had a stroke, she's fine, but at the time she was all alone. And she was on the floor of her garage, and I took her to the hospital, brought her back, and afterwards, I realized, she was alone for about a half an hour, if this had been a real stroke, this could have been very serious, she could have died, she could have been paralyzed. And she was drowning in help, there were about seven people who were either driving by or nearby while this was going on, within a 1000 yards. And she had no way to get to them. >> Yeah, yeah, a personal example of what you're doing. >> And I also realized, the other component was, all the help, I didn't know six, five of the other six people, they're her friends, they're not mine. But during her emergency, all of us need to be sharing location and in communication with each other immediately. And the importance of that just cannot be overstated in emergencies, seconds count. And so putting instant communications so that we can coordinate a response is the second-half of the problem. I initially did not intend to build an app. I went looking for this app and what I discovered was there are a ton of panic button apps, but all of them neglected solving the second-half of the problem, which is organizing the response. >> Yeah. >> And getting people on, in the same-- >> Mobilizing resources. >> Yeah, getting everyone into a war room without requiring them to know each other ahead of time, that was the big thing, no one had thought of that, so. >> It's like rolling up services when you need it instantly. It's like a compiler. >> It's at hawk services. >> You know, compile everything >> Yes, exactly. >> at real time assembly. >> Real time assembly, yeah >> Operating system. (laughs) >> that's exactly, it's great. That's actually a really good way to put it, yeah. >> No, but this is also pretty important, so it was a great personal example, thanks for sharing that personal story. But you know, there's a avalanches, whether you're a skier, it's people who go rock climbing, there's all kinds of use cases where a mountain biker is missing, all kinds of-- >> Remote locations are really big ones. >> I'm scuba diving, where are people, where were they last? So a lot of this is, are location based, and no one knows what the situation is, so the alerting is only one step to the value chain. >> It is, but I think, sorry you have a question. >> No, no, I was going to ask you, where does it go from there? >> Well I think, I think there are a lot of, I think safety check-ins, I think there's other things that we can do, but the one thing that, the one lesson that I've seen again, and again, and again, and again is that the companies that fail invariably, oh, the companies that don't focus always fail. So you got to pick one thing and be the best in the world at that one thing. And the emergency situation is our one thing, and that's big enough. >> Well, I think you have a great opportunity and we'll splint through the, as the evolution of this market grows, it's kind of a moving train, but the value promises is legit. I was talking to Fred Krueger, your friend and colleague in the business, it's a marketplace of these days, so it's money and marketplaces, in your case it's safety, marketplace. I could envision a day with your services where I publish and subscribe to services, I got in a catalog. >> Yes. >> Hey, I know my risks, everyone knows what they do in vanity, or risk factors whether you're jumping out of an airplane, or double black diamond skier. I would love to go to Lake Tahoe, or a mountain, or a place like this, and saying, I'm going to take some chances, here's what I'm going to subscribe to. >> (laughs) You're going to have to subscribe to some extra tokens while you're there. >> I would use Guardium. It could be more, I'm just brainstorming, thinking out loud, but I mean, that's the kind of web services framework you could bring. >> That's exactly right. >> Is that they way you guys are thinking about it? >> I do, I do, I'm so focused on this sort of food and shelter stage of our life right now. >> Yeah, get an ICO done. So yeah, we've got tons of all those ideas written done but we're not quite there yet, but when we get there, great ideas, absolutely. >> Well the use cases are changing because the peoples expectations are changing and now technology can meet these cases. So I'm seeing a lot of social entrepreneurship being done that are coming in through a funding vehicles that never would have got funded on venture capital funding. >> Totally correct. >> Whether it's battered women applications, human trafficking, safety apps, stuff that can make money, not be a kazillion, billion dollar business, but really change society and makeup. >> You've hit the nail on the head. There are a lot of Blockchain companies or ICO companies, this stuff, the venture guys, would never fund it because their model doesn't allow for it. They have, all these things have to be Facebook potentially, or they just have no tolerance for it. >> And the philanthropy world is not incented on economics, and also when the project loses its grant or funding the stack just gets thrown away. >> So this allows for sustainability for mission-based investing and developing. Slowly, I see societal entrepreneurship categorically going to boom from this wave. >> Yeah, totally agree. >> Across the board. >> The world will become a better place, we'll have better companies. >> Mark Jeffery, Guardian Circle, co-founder and CEO. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here on the ground in Puerto, Rico for Blockchain Unbound. A lot of great stuff here, a lot of great start-ups, investors, of course theCUBE. 2018 will be covering all the shows. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(orchestral music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation here in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier. Where conversation around venture capital, entrepreneurship, crypto currencies, block chain, and more, Jonathan Ebinger our friend with BRV, formerly Blue Run Ventures, but BRV for short, sounds better, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks John, looking forward to it. >> Great to see you, we've known each other for a long time and you've been a great investor, your firm has done a lot of great stuff, deals are really famous deals, but also you dig into the companies and you really stand by your portfolio companies, but you've also done a lot of work in China. >> Yes. >> So you have a good landscape of what's going on. What's the, what's going on in China? >> Well China is really expanding in ways which we had not foreseen when we first started investing there almost 15 years ago. We were really active for five to 10 years, investing in companies that initially were considered copycat companies, you can't really use that term anymore. In fact what's happening more and more, you're seeing Chinese ideas coming to the United States. Businesses like We Chat are being copied as fast as they can, you're seeing Snapchat, Messenger and so forth, they're quickly trying to amalgamate as many assets as they can within their viewership much like we're seeing in a lot of the other Chinese analogs over there. It's exciting to see, it's very much an arms race. >> It's been interesting to watch. We were at the Ali Baba Cloud Conference last year, at the end of last year, it's interesting the innovation and entrepreneurial thirst has really changed. If you go back just 10 years ago when you guys were first getting in there, I remember the conversations were what's going on in China, it's very developmental but what's going on 10 years ago, they are dominating the mobile space, they're mobile usage is really much different makeup in how they do startups, the apps. How much of that has influenced some of their success just the demand? >> Always on, location always available, it opens up a whole new level of communication services. The idea of the larger screen format, people used to think in the United States, these large devices coming out of Korea first and then China, we thought these would never play in the United States, now Apple 10, larger screen size, it makes sense, it's mobile first right from the get go for a now billion plus users. >> So BRV, how many active portfolio companies do you guys have and what's the profile that you're looking for for entrepreneurs, what are some of the kind of companies? >> We're about 45 active companies right now. We're putting about, we're putting money in about 10 new companies a year at this point. We have a very disciplined approach of investing in Series A style companies, Series A of course means a lot of different things to people, but generally, we like to put $3 to $5 million to work early on and then follow on. >> How much do take for that, just a third? >> Typical in the 20%-25% range. There's a lot of companies out there that still fit that profile. Of course you're seeing some super sized Series A's that happen, we don't play in those but for the traditional software companies, evaluations are really right in our sweet spot. >> How big is the fund now, just what's the number in terms of capital? >> We're in fund six, we're just over $150 million. >> And you got to save some for follow on rounds. >> Exactly. >> Talk about the changes in venture capital because what's interesting, I had a conversation with Greg Sands with Costanoa Ventures, another great investor, formerly I think the first employee of Netscape I think or the business plan. Great guy, he talked about the dynamics of, you don't need that much cash anymore because if you can get unit economic visibility into what the business is working, you can do so much more with that and I'm calling it the hourglass effect, you get through that visibility, you're in control, you own your own destiny, versus the old Silicon Valley model which seems to be fading away, which is hey, what do you need? $40 million, or here's $100 million. That really limits your exit options and sometimes you can drown in your own capital. Talk about that dynamic. >> You're seeing the $40 million rounds with businesses that are much more capital intensive and that's coming back in vogue now but for the most part, I agree with what Greg's saying and this whole advent of seed funds and super seed funds and angel funds and so forth has been really great for the traditional series A investor. A lot of that early fundamental and foundational work is being done and then when the series A comes, it's more about expansion so we're effectively getting what was a Series B type stage company now we're investing in Series A. We're saying hey, this product works, there's product market fit, let's put dollars to work to really grow the market. >> So you're saying Series B was a kind of prove the business model, shifted down to the A because the cost to get there is lower and hence that's opened up a seed round lower in numbers, so it just shifts down a little bit. >> It really has, it really has and that plays into our sweet spot. We really like working on business models, distribution strategies, things like that. >> And what kind of startups do you want to invest in? What are some of the categories? >> Love financial services, we like health tech, we're doing education, we're really pretty omnivorous when it comes to the sector. What we're looking for is really businesses that are using data, real time data to disrupt the numbers. >> So you're not sector driven, you're disruption oriented. >> That's right. >> Okay let's talk about disruption, my favorite trend. Obviously I love the China dynamic because you're not sure what it is, but it's really doing well so you can't ignore it and they're innovative and they're hustling hard and they've got massive numbers. Block chain, we're super excited about, we love crypto, we think it's the biggest wave coming out there, so a lot of my smart, entrepreneurial friends are jumping on their surfboards literally and jumping out into those waves and there's a lot of action there. At the same time, people are saying, stay away from that crypto thing, it's a scam. Kind of a different perspective, what's your thoughts on that? >> If you look at, you separate the cryptocurrencies from block chain, I think it becomes a lot more clear. Block chain is for real. Tracking provenance on transactions, real estate transactions, multinational transactions, makes a lot of sense, dovetails nicely with security, so there's a real business there. You saw the announcement with IBM and Mersk the other day, what they are taking enterprise level block chain into their whole supply chain. I think that's really important. We have a company in the category called pay stand which is doing the same sort of thing with smaller size businesses, just accelerating the whole process on accounts receivable, taking working capital. >> And they're doing block chain for that? >> Yes block chain is an option, we're not forcing people onto block chain, but the idea of hey, let's give people more cost effective ways to transact, get rid of the paper checks, get rid of the invoicing and just join the modern world, much like you use Venmo if you and I are going to exchange money. >> That's pay stand, that's one of your hot companies. >> Yeah it is, absolutely. >> So are they using block chain or not? >> They are, yes. >> Okay, because it's a physical asset, it's kind of a supply chain thing? >> They use it to track the funds themselves, unlike a credit card where you have to pay a big fee or ACH which you can't really get proof of funds, with their block chain technology, you can be sure that you have the funds available and you get it instantly. >> Let's talk about use cases that you think out there, I'd like you to just weigh in on use cases for block chain that a mainstream person that's not in the tech business would understand, because they say, is it real or not? I agree block chain is legit, what are some use cases that would highlight that? >> I think if you've ever been involved in real estate, bought a home, things like that, just tracking title insurance, you're going all the way back if you live in California, you're going all the way back to pre-statehood days, you have to track the provenance of that land all the way through. You're paying title insurance, title insurance is a business you don't really need if you have accurate provenance tracking through block chain. I think that's one most of us can understand. Obviously bills of weighting with things coming over on ships. That's natural and right now things get held up in port because people are trying to find a clipboard before you can sign off on who, is this bill of weighting actually clean, that stuff can be done automatically with 2D barcodes, block chain usage. >> Certainly with perishable goods too, we learned that with IBM's example. >> Sure. >> Okay let's get into the hot companies you got going on. Name some of the hot investments that you've done. >> Sure, well I talked about pay stand a minute ago, really excited about them, another one we really like is a company called aerobotics. I know you're a fan of autonomous flying. If you think about drones and everyone knows DJI and they're a great company, that's one to one, one person flying one drone, that's not scalable obviously, it scales at one to one. With autonomous flying, you can have a whole army of drones out doing your business, whether they're doing site exploration, checking for chemical spills, looking at traffic and so forth. The company is now operating in three continents, it's just, if you think about what a drone is, effectively it's a flying cell phone. It's a cell phone that goes around, takes pictures, transmits data back, we know something about cell phones at BRV, we've been investing in this category for a long time so when we say aerobotics come along, we said this is just a natural extension of real time data, cellular technology, and location based services. >> You guys don't get a lot of credit as much as you should, in my opinion on that, you guys were very early on the mobile, mobile connectivity side and mobile footprint and device and software. That's playing well into the hottest trend that we see, that's not the sexiest trend, that's IOT. >> Absolutely. >> Because drones are certainly, industrial IOT is a big one. Instrumenting physical plants, equipment, and IOT in general the edge of the network. What's your thoughts on IOT and how would you, how do you see that evolving? It's more than just the edge of the network issue, it's bigger. >> It is, well of course the devices and sensors are important. I think a lot of that's been commoditized. The business that we've been seeing develop and there's a lot of folks, they've moved from analytics of the web to analytics of IOT, so there's a lot of interesting companies coming in the analytic space. We're not playing in that as much, we tend to like to invest in companies that are big enough that you need to have analytics for them. We like companies that have proprietary control of analytics versus necessarily running analytics for company X. >> So you're not poopooing IOT per se, just that from an investment thesis standpoint, it's not on your radar yet. >> That's right, they're either too capital intensive for us as a firm or you're basically managing someone else's data. I want to be in companies that we're managing our own data for a proprietary advantage. >> That's really what I was going to get to next, the role of data driven, so we've lived in dupe world, theCUBE started in 2010 in the offices of Cloud Air actually and people don't know the history and it's been interesting, Hadoop was supposed to save the world, the data, but it really started the data trend, the data driven trend, Mike Olsen, Amar Omadala and the team over there really nailed it but it didn't turn into be just Hadoop, it's everything so we're seeing that now become a bumper sticker, data driven marketer, I'm a data driven executive, I'm a data driven interviewer, all that stuff, what does it actually mean? What does data driven mean to you? >> Data is, there's big data and then there's actionable data obviously people talk about exhaust, the data coming off, we really got started with, as you know, we were investors in Waze, awful lot of data coming out of your cell phone, extracting just the important pieces of it are really what's important. We're investors in a company called Cabbage which looks at every transaction a small business makes to determine their credit worthiness. It's really the science. People talk about data scientists, what do they actually do? What they're actually doing is separating out the wheat from the chaff because it's just a crush of data. I saw your interview with Andy Jazzy to other day from AWS, the amount of data that's being stored, it's almost unfathomable but the important people. >> They have a lot of data. You'd like to invest in them now. >> Exactly, but that's really the thing, it's being able to separate the good data from the bad. >> You look at Amazon, I was talking to Jesse and he didn't really go there because he was kind of on message but when I talked with Swami who runs the AI group over there, we were talking about, I said to him straight up, I'm like, you're running a lot of workloads on your cloud, I'm sure you have data on those workloads. Just the impact of what they could do with that data. This is the virtuous cycle that their business model is made up of, but it's changing the game for what they can become. The thing that we're seeing in the data world is, sometimes the outcome might not be what you think because if you can use the data effectively, it's a competitive advantage, not a department. >> Right and you have to really stay true to your commitment to data. What we've seen happen is when companies, if you've been around for 10 years or so, you start to trust your gut, that's important, but it can also not lead you to see obvious conclusions because the world changes. >> And also committing to data also means from a practitioner's standpoint, investing in the tech, investing in things to be data driven, not just to say it. >> Exactly. >> Okay so what's the future for you guys? What are you looking at next year, what are some of the things you'd like to accomplish for investment opportunities, besides getting all the hot deals, you did Waze, that was an amazing deal, one of my favorite products, how did that go down? How many people passed on Waze? >> I don't know how many people passed, but we were lucky, they wanted to bring us in to the initial syndicate, they wanted to have some folks who understood. >> But it wasn't that obvious though at the beginning. What was the original pitch? >> The initial pitch was that they were going to have folks have the dash devices, the product would sit on your dashboard and they were going to be using it to map Eastern Europe because Eastern Europe was just coming into the Western world and they didn't really have good roads and good maps. We thought, that's interesting but they probably also don't have smartphones, so why don't we come across the Atlantic and let's make this thing work in the US and then from there, the rest took off country by country we were the number one navigation app in I think 150 countries at one point. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned over the past few years in the industry that's different now I mean obviously there's some context that I'll share which is obviously the big cloud players are becoming bigger, scale's a big thing, you got Google, you got Microsoft and Amazon, you've got Facebook's out there as well. Then you get the political climate. You go to Washington D.C. and New York, Silicon Valley is not really talked highly about these days on the hill in Washington, yet GovCloud is completely changing the game of how the government is going to work with massive innovations and efficiencies, literally overnight, it's almost weird. >> It is and it isn't. If you look at it through a longer term horizon, Silicon Valley is again at the forefront, we're really the first ones with more transparency in the industry, all the different movements which are really important and all the conversations that are happening are important and they're happening here first. I think you're starting to see a ripple effect, you're seeing it going through entertainment, you're going to see it in the government, industry after industry I think is going to start to have to be more open as Silicon Valley has led the way on that. >> That's a great point. Take a minute to describe the folks out there watching that aren't from here, what is Silicon Valley about in your opinion? >> Silicon Valley is, of course it's more than a mindset, but folks who are here are here on purpose. They come here intentionally. There are very few people that I know who were born and raised here, so they're coming here because they want to be part of a shared ethos around success, around success, around shared values and competition so it's a very healthy environment, I came, I used to live in Washington D.C. and I couldn't be happier to be 3000 miles away. >> If you're a technology entrepreneur, this is where all the sports and action is, as I always say, we always love sports analogies. Okay, I got to ask you about the VC situation around ICOs, initial coin offerings are being talked about as an alternative to fundraising, there's some security options on token sales as a utility, the SEC has started to put some guidelines down on what that looks like, but the general sentiment is, it's a new way to raise money and some people are doing private rounds with venture capital and doing token sales through ICOs. You see some hybrids, but for the most part, the hard core I don't want to say right or left wing, is there a wing of the political spectrum, but the hard core ICO guys are like, this is all about disrupting the VC community and you're a VC, so you got to take that a little bit personal but the point is, what do you think about that? Is that talked about? >> I think that's good salesmanship. The VC industry such as it is, you can fit every VC into one section of Stanford stadium. There just aren't that many VCs to really go after. We're a small group of folks. I think that going after maybe disrupting the way folks are raising money through Kickstarter and things like that, that's all great. We're not going to stop it, we're going to embrace it. I think that there's plenty of different ways to raise capital, I have no compunction about those things. >> Do you think it's more of a democratization trend or a new asset class, so you don't see it disrupting the VCs per se, but if it's only a handful of VCs that could fit into Stanford Stadium, for instance, then certainly there's more options, it's a dilution. >> I think you look at it as it's just an alternative financing method, do I take debt, do I take equity, do I take venture, do I take friends and family? It's just one more arrow in the quiver of the entrepreneur, I think you have to be smart about it because thinking that you're going to get the same level of attention from an investor in your ICO that you are going to get from a series A investor who owns 20% of your company, those are two very different value propositions. >> So you see a lot of pitches and sometimes, you have to say no a lot and that's the way the game is, but a lot of times, you want the best deals. But the founders' side of the table, they're looking at the VC, I need money. So that's one of the options, what they really want is a value added partner, so what's your current take on what that means these days? Sometimes it means a firm, sometimes it means a partner, sometimes it means the community. How are you guys looking at BRV as value add versus the worst case scenario which is value subtract, you just want to have that be positive. >> I see that written about venture too. >> I know, some people experienced it. >> I think it helps that we've been around now for almost 20 years, we got started in '98 so you have to look at our body of work and the continuum of investments and founders and CEOs and CTOs that we've invested in. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who have taken money from BRV, and so that's one of the real positives about this current state we're in is that there's so much transparency. The fact that we are, I like to think we're good actors and have been for a long time, that comes out, now through our words but through the words of. >> What would they say about you guys? What would your entrepreneurs say about BRV? >> Aside from using buzzwords like value add, they say, they know their industry, they're not afraid to ask for help, they try to call problems when they see it, things like that. >> You stand by your companies. >> Absolutely. >> Awesome, well what's your favorite trend that you're personally interested in? >> I think you have to go after health care right now. It is just such a big market right now. People have been nibbling all different sides of it right now, there's been folks who are trying to expedite processing, there's actual innovations happening on the medical side, I think there is just, technology is just now starting to get into that, technology has gotten into education. >> How about the startup you guys funded that's related to the health care field. >> Yes, we're in a company called Hello Heart which is really at the confluence of a number of trends. It starts off, what Hello Heart is, it's a personal blood pressure cuff for you as an employee of a big company, more and more companies are starting to self insure. If you're a big enough company, 10,000 plus employees or even fewer, you're going to want to self insure to save money but also, your employees get very much more comfortable with you as an employer, you care about my well being, so it's a very virtuous cycle for the employees. >> So companies themselves insuring their own employees. >> Absolutely. >> They have to be super big, this company. >> This is just one component of a self insured business. You also, of course you still have access to doctors and stuff, I'm not making the pitch for being self insured as a company, I'm just saying that. >> But that's a trend. >> It's absolutely a trend and you're seeing a lot of what I would call point solutions stepping in, whether it's psychiatric, whether it's opioid help, whether it's working on heart conditions, these are all different point solutions which are being amalgamated together to help companies which are self insuring. >> So is Hello Heart for consumers or for business? >> It's sold to businesses but individual employees have it so they can keep track of their blood pressure. >> But I can't buy one if I wanted one? >> Not today, but I'll make sure I can get one to you. >> I need one, get all of our employees instrumented. >> Exactly. >> Drug tested all that stuff going on. People worry about the privacy, that's something I would be concerned with, putting. >> That's taken a really fast pendulum swing. A few years ago, Generation X was privacy, there is no privacy, the default was, location is always on, that's just flipped 180 degrees in the last few years. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming into this CUBE conversation, I want to ask you one final question, one thing we're passionate about is women in tech and underserved minorities, obviously Silicon Valley has to do a better job, it's out on the table, and it's working but we're still seeing a lot more work to be done, we're seeing titles not being at the right level, but pay's getting there in some places but titles aren't, some paying still below for women, still a lot more to do, what are you guys doing for the women in tech trend, how are you guys looking at that? Certainly it's a sensitive topic these days, but more importantly, it's one that's super important to society. >> It is, I think like a lot of things that have long term value, it's really about your actions versus your words, so our firm has two out of the five investment professionals are female, one of the last three CEO's we've founded is a female CEO, we have technologists, we have marketing people, we have CEO's that are females it's very much of a cross the board, sex, race and so forth. >> You guys are indiscriminate, a good deal's a good deal. >> Exactly right. >> It's about making money, VC's are in the business of making money, a lot of people don't understand, you guys have a job to do but you do a good job. >> We're in the business of making money but our investors for the most part are not for profits. Large universities, our biggest investor is the Red Cross, so when we do well, the Red Cross does well and the country does well. >> You're mission driven at this point. >> Exactly. >> Is that by design or is that just, your selection? >> We're delighted with our LP's, it's important that we have synergies aside from just finances with our investors. >> That's super well, I appreciate you coming on, I think it's super great that you're tying society benefits into money making and entrepreneurship, great stuff Jonathan Ebinger here on theCUBE, BRV check them out, great VC firm here in Silicon Valley. It's a CUBE conversation, we're talking about startups and entrepreneurship I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. (upbeat techno music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE presentation. We are here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada for NetApp Insight 2017. I'm John Furrier, your co-host and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. Here at theCUBE, here with Keith Townsend for all day today. Keith Townsend at CTO Advisor covering NetApp 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. And before we kickoff a long day of great conversations with thought leaders, experts, executives, and also customers of NetApp who are transitioning to a whole digital world, a digital transformation. We can't not address the massacre that happened only a few days ago here in Las Vegas, here at the Mandalay Bay, our second home of theCUBE. If you know theCUBE, you know that we're here all the time. Hits home for us, but that pales in comparison to the families and victims of the 58 dead, 59 total but 58 that have died plus the shooter. Over 500 injured in the heinous cowardly act from the shooter who killed those people. Really I'm trying to kind of hold it together because it really hits home for me because, like 9/11, it's one of those moments that this is planned. This was a coordinated attack, kind of like the Oklahoma bombing, and it reflects on our society. I want to make a comment. And Keith, I'd like to get your thoughts in a minute. But first I would like to say our hearts and prayers are with the victims and families. And want to put a shout out to the first responders because if you look at the Mandalay Bay and what happened here, there could have been a lot more that have died. And that is really a testament to the people who responded, to this unpredictable act. And our prayers go out to the families and victims. And again, a shout out to the law enforcement people. Keith, this is a tragedy that people are trying to make sense out of it. And you know, we have to move on. Obviously, we're here at the NetApp event. A lot of great things to talk about with data and the future and how society will change with technology. But this is a time in history where we're seeing a societal shift. But we got to make sense of it. >> Yeah, you know, John, I'm going to try and keep it together as well. I think this is my seventh time in Vegas this year. And I'm sure every time I've spent at least some time in Mandalay Bay. This event, you know, I had a personal tragedy in my own life of losing my nephew to gun violence. We're all scratching for answers and trying to find a solution to this. And I'm a little bit ... It's a tough moment I think, personally, for us and our friends in the community. But the folks here at NetApp have done a really great job. Not just NetApp but the community in general, here in Las Vegas there's been folks in the community that have organized blood drives. The Red Cross has actually asked us to stop donating blood because of the outpouring of support. And I think that focus of hope in changing the world is what I would like to focus on. >> Well, I mean, take a company like NetApp having their annual customer event, partner event here at Mandalay Bay. It's their big event. And on their doorstep this happens. How they've handled themselves, I think, shows the culture of NetApp. They respect, they took pause. They canceled the first day. They handled it with extreme class. George Kurian put out there a personal story. But this is what it's about. We've got to move on. But I think to me, it's not about politics. It's not about any of that. It's about how do we move forward? And I hate to use a cliché, it's a wake up call. The world has changed in an instant through a prism of a known life. We heard that at 9/11. It's been 16 years. Enough's enough. And here's the deal, we have to be awake. We are realizing that, not the digital transformation for the enterprise, it is a transformation around the world. If you look at geopolitics, or you look at what's happened even today in the news. Even though the President of the United States is here to visit with the families, the Senate Intelligence Committee points out more fake news influenced via social media on Facebook with the Russians hacking the election. They didn't really hack the election, they just used advertising and albatross Facebook among other platforms to manipulate the election. Equifax hack, turns out as I reported originally on theCUBE, it was a state-sponsored activity, it was not a hack. These are new realities. And this is the theme that we see at theCUBE across our events that we go to, the new reality that we are living in a completely different society and it's on us to lean in and be part of the solution. And it's not about being a political solution or saying, "Hey, I'm praying." I mean, we're praying. But you can pray. Praying is what you do, action is another. But it's not about just the gun laws or this or that, it's about the society and the communities. The GoFundMe's are going crazy for the victims, but you can't replace the mother. We had a loss in our community, former Cisco employee lost her life, three kids. The communities have to lean in, individuals have to lean in if they have expertise. I think this is going to be a call to arms that's going to have a revolutionary effect on people. And I think it's an opportunity for the technology industry to lean in, use what we know. We have AI. We got blockchain. We got machine-learning. And this data, the slogan of NetApp couldn't be more perfect. Changing the world with data this is the mandate. >> So, George Kurian gave an ardent, and just compassionate... I had a tough time keeping myself together at the end of yesterday's keynote. George shared how data helped save his son's life. His 13-year-old son comes home every day thankful for technology. And we need to find ways to use AI, use machine learning to impact our communities. While we're talking about the larger, global community, even in my hometown of Chicago that's ravished by violence. You know, there's ways to use social media, data, AI-driven changes to help create policies and to help enable community organizers to understand the source of this nonsense basically. We say this is the new normal, but we should never grow numb to it. >> And I'm grateful -- >> John: No, it's not normal. It's not normal. And this is why I tell my daughter who's the class president of junior high school, Paolo Alto High School, this is not normal. This is not normal. This is not what we want. >> Keith: No! >> You know, you're personal tragedy, hit home with you personally. You had to rationalize it. And you're also a very active participant in the community. This is a new opportunity. The new normal is to behave differently, not the outcome. How do you look at that? Given what you've been through personally and now this, it brings together emotions but then the logic has to kick in. >> Keith: Right. >> You have to execute, actually take action. >> So, it started again Monday when a bunch of us had to make the decision on whether or not we're going to make the trip to Vegas to participate in a enterprise IT show. Your initial gut reaction is, "You know what, so many dead. What does it really matter to go to a conference at this point in time?" And then, you start to rationalize. "You know what? My way of life, our way of life cannot change. We can't allow this tragic event to change how we approach it." And again, NetApp and George did a great job of kicking off the conversation saying that we need to use this as a pivot point to drive the conversation to how us technologists can leverage this. >> Let's take this to where NetApp's living right now. NetApp Insight 2017 is the even we're kicking off here, all day coverage, here on theCUBE with Keith Townsend, expert in the field. Cloud, data, storage, it's all converging. But the reality is is that NetApp has SolidFire. They've bought great company. You're seeing a DNA transfer off of the original DNA of NetApp which has been very innovative culture. They have a very big success story as a start up, went public, and now are continuing to transform. Their customers are transforming but you bring up this new normal that the behavior we want to change and the outcomes that will become of it, speaks to the culture of what we're seeing in the enterprise transformation. A new class of developers are coming in. And the class of developers are about DevOps, their about infrastructure as code. And these new developers, have a new mindset. >> Yeah, so NetApp, a storage company, right? They store bits, retrieve bits. Not so much. They spent a hour on stage yesterday, even before they talked about any products, any architectures, talking about the value of data. Data is the ... And John, you've talked about data for as long as I've known you. Data is the number one asset of any company and NetApp focused not on storage, not on arrays, not on how fast the speeds and feeds go, but the value of data and extracting that value from your subsystems and then going into the conversation around how NetApp can assist in that journey in leveraging data. >> Okay, we're going to kickoff Day One coverage with NetApp Insight 2017 here on theCUBE. Changing the world with data. That is the focus, that is the conversation. And that is an aperture, that's the entire world from how you store the data, how to use the data. How do you to put it to work? How do you create value and transformation? This is theCUBE bringing the action here from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for NetApp Insight 2017. Stay with us. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision, 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here covering, wall-to-wall coverage of Veritas Vision 2017, hashtag: VtasVision. I'm Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman. Lynn Lucas is here. She's the CMO of Veritas; welcome to The Cube. >> I am so excited to be on The Cube for the first time. Thank you for joining us. >> Well, thank you for having us. We're really excited to have you. We were talking off camera and this morning, in our open, about Richard Branson, the keynote. Very inspiring, so interesting, and then you got an opportunity to interview him and it was really substantive. So what was that like, what was it like meeting him, what was he like backstage? Share it with our audience. >> Absolutely. So, first, I, it really was an honor. The man has, when you do the research on him, the number of businesses he's created and disrupted is really amazing when you go back and look at it. The record industry, phone industry, airline industry. I mean, it goes on and on and he's still doing it. What I was most struck with, though, is that he's really humble and approachable. So we spent about 20 minutes with him in the backstage, and he was just a very genuine person. Very concerned, as you and your listeners may have heard, in the keynote, about the impact of the hurricanes. Really committed to philanthropy now, and what I loved is that he really understood what Veritas is doing with data, and he was able to really quickly connect that with how it might help on important issues that he's concerned about, namely climate change, making communities part of businesses, and so forth. It was fantastic. >> Well, I thought he did a really good job, and you guys did a really good job, because he's like, wow, Richard Branson, big name. But why is he at Veritas Vision? And he came, he talked about his agenda, he talked about the hurricane, he connected it to data, to climate change, and he very, like I said off camera, in a non-self-promoting way, let us know very quietly that yeah, of course the fee that I'm getting here I'm donating to the cause, and you should donate too. Right, and it was just really, congratulations on such a good get. >> Well, we were thrilled to have him and really honored to have him, and I truly felt that he understands the importance technology is playing. He actually told us that they were without cell phone and any kind of internet connection right after the hurricane for about, I think what he said was about seven days, and he said it was a very weird, disconnected feeling, because it's become so prevalent in our lives, and then when they all left and got on his plane to go back to London to mobilize aid for the British Virgin Islands, he said that he looked back in the plane, and he said every single person is on their phone like this. And it's such an interesting and powerful tool though, for generating interest in, unfortunately, the very horrible events that have happened, and so the social media, the connectivity that we all experience and getting that word out, I think he really connected with what we do as technologists here, and he had a really fascinating conversation with us about his interest in flying cars, so he's seeing potential for flying cars in the next few years and as a way to perhaps help us reduce carbon emissions and he's excited about technology. So I think he had a lot of fun. >> And we should mention, I think, Bill Coleman and Veritas is matching contributions and then you have extended that through his non-profit? >> Correct, so Bill Coleman also is a great philanthropist like Richard is, and ever since he's arrived here at Veritas he's been very lean-forward with making sure that Veritas is giving back. It was part of the culture, but I really feel that Bill has augmented that, and so for these recent set of disasters, hurricane Harvey, hurricane Irma, Veritas has set up a funding, and then we are doing double matching, and what we did after the unfortunate hurricane Irma came through is Virgin Unite is donating to the BBI's. We've added that to the list of charities and double matching that, as well. >> So people can go to Virgin Unite and donate, or they can donate through your website as well? >> They should go to Virgin Unite and donate, they should go to the, there's also the American Red Cross in the Houston area and the Miami area that are doing donations. Donate, you know, direct through them. >> So please, take a moment, if you can. Donate often, you know, every little bit helps for sure. Okay, so let's get into it. Quite a show, second year of Veritas. It's the rebirth of Veritas, and Veritas, in our view, how do you feel, give us the sort of rundown on the show. >> Oh, I, ah, fantastic. The feedback from the customers, which is what I'm really most concerned about here has been, this year, last year was a great coming out, but this Veritas is much more innovative than we ever thought you could be. We heard the predictions around 360 Data Management last year, but wow, you've delivered. You've got a new set of exciting announcements around what we're doing to move to the cloud. Clearly, the partnership with Microsoft is a huge part of that. New innovations in SDS. And so we've seen a great rise in attendance this year, in terms of our customers, and we've had a fabulous new set of sponsors, which I'm just thrilled to have here. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, which I think shows the strength of what we're doing to help customers as they move to the cloud, and they really are transforming their datacenter environment. >> So, talk a little bit about digital, as a marketing pro. Every customer we talked to is going through, if you talk to the C-level, they're going through digital transformations; it's real. As a CMO, you're living in a digital transformation. What does it mean from a marketing perspective? How are you addressing, you know, these trends and taking advantage of them? >> It's crucial. I spend most of my time with my staff thinking about: how do we advance our own digital expertise and take advantage of the data that we too have. Really, CMOs are in command of so much data around customers, or should be in command of so much data around customers, in a good way, to provide more content that is directed at what their problems are. I think we've all experienced the uncomfortable feeling where maybe you Google something and suddenly you're getting ad after ad after ad from a company, and it might have been an accidental Google search, right? So we can use it for good in that way, understanding our customers. We're on a real digitization journey. It's a big word, but what it means for me in marketing at Veritas is really advancing and investing in our marketing infrastructure. One of the new things that we've just done is a complete underpinning reboot of Veritas.com, which the audience can see has gone live right here, for Vision. Making the site more personalized and more relevant to those that are visiting it. >> Yeah, Lynn, one of the things we've been digging into a little bit is you have a lot of existing customers with, you know, a very strong legacy. There's all these new trends, and you threw out lots of, you know, really interesting data. You know, the IOT with 269 times greater data than the datacenter, ah, how do you balance, kind of, helping customers, you know, get more out of what they have but bringing them along, showing them the vision, you know, helping them along that path to the future? Because, you know, change is difficult. >> It is, but you know, I have to say, and I think Mike Palmer said this as well, at one point, actually, when I've visited customers, I've been in, this year, I've been to Australia, I've been to France, been to Germany, London, Singapore, all over in the US, and talking to a lot of our existing customers, and what they're telling us is really that: we want your help in moving forward. So, we really embrace our existing customers. We're not in the business of trying to go around them. But they're our best advocates, and I think as a marketer, it's really key to understand that, is your existing customers are your best advocates. So we're helping them understand what we're doing for them today and also helping them learn how they can be advocates and heroes maybe to other parts of the business with some of these new technologies. >> Yeah, that's a great point. I'd love for you to expand on, you know, in IT it was always: up, the admin for my product is kind of where I'm selling, and how do I get up to the C-suite? Conversations we've been having this week, there's a lot of the, you know, cloud strategy, the GDPR, you know, digitization. It's, you know, the person who might have boughten that backup is pulling in other members of the team. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, the dynamics inside the company, where Veritas is having those conversations. >> Yeah, I think actually you brought up GDPR, and that's a perfect example. So GDPR is a regulation that is going to impact any company that is holding data about a European Union citizen, and it's an area that Veritas can really solve problems in, but we didn't know a lot of the legal and compliance buyers, which often are the ones making the purchase decisions in this case. We have been so thrilled to see that our existing advocates in the backup space have been bringing us into conversations and in Europe, what we've done so successfully now is actually bring the two groups together in roundtables and have our current customers bring us into conversations with legal and compliance. And it's creating, for them, stronger connections within the business, and that makes them more relevant to their bosses and those other lines of business, and there's a lot of proactive or positive feedback around that, that I think is what marketers and sales should be thinking about. It's not about how to go around, it's about how do I bring you with me. >> So, as you go around the world, I wonder if, again, another marketing, marketing to me, is very challenging; you've got a hard job. Marketers, I don't have the marketing DNA. But you want to maintain your relevance. You're a 30-plus year old company. Take something like GDPR. How do you think about the content that you serve up your audience? You can scare 'em to death, you know? That's what a lot of people are doing. You can educate them, but it's kind of deep and wonky. How are you thinking about that transfer of knowledge, you know, for the benefit of customers and obviously, ultimately, for the benefit of Veritas? >> So the way I think about that is B to H. Business to Human. So at the end of the day, you know, we talk about B to B marketing or B to C marketing. It's B to H, now, and what I mean by that is: at the end of the day, we're all human, individuals, we have a lot coming at us, as you've pointed out, with information and data, so what we've done is definitely not a scare tactic. Yes, GDPR is coming. But I think that in marketing, my philosophy is: let's work on how we can help you in the positive. I don't believe in the fear, uncertainty and doubt. And what we've done is approach it as we would hope to be approached, which is: let's give you some practical information simply, in amounts that you can absorb. And let's face it, I think Josie was the one that said this, our attention span is about that of a goldfish. I can't remember if it was plus or minus one second. And so, what we've actually gotten great feedback on is that we've broken the GDPR regulation down into very simple parts, and we've said: hey, here are the five parts. Here's how we're relevant and can help you. And we've done that in pieces that are as simple as a one-page infographic. We can obviously go a lot more complex, but at the beginning, when you're researching a topic, you're not looking for the 40-page white paper anymore. You're looking for what we call "snackable" pieces of content that get you interested. >> Yeah, that was good. I remember that infographic from the session yesterday. It was sort of, you know, discover and then four other steps and then, you know, made it sound simple. Even though we know it's more complicated, but at least it allows a customer to frame it. Okay, I think I can now get my arms around these. I understand there's a lot of depth beneath each of them, but it helps me at least begin to clock it. Another topic we want to talk about is women in tech. We had a great conversation with Alicia Johnson from Accenture about WAVE, which is Women and Veritas Empowered. Right? Talk about, again, the relevance of those programs generally and I want to ask you some follow-up questions. >> Sure, so I'm a big believer in those types of programs. We want to sponsor those here and bring together our own Veritas female engineering community, but also our customers that are here. I think that while we would all like it to be a world where we were at a neutral, bias-free, we're not quite there yet. And I think programs that bring people together, whether it's gender or any other dimension, are important to get people to connect in a community, share with each other, learn from each other, and so, I do hope one day for my daughter, who's 11, perhaps that this is a non-topic, but until it isn't, I think the power of sharing is important, and so I'm really pleased to have WAVE. It's our second year having WAVE. It was a bigger program with Accenture sponsoring it. And we look forward to continuing to do that. Veritas also will have a big presence at the Anita Borg Institute, which is coming up next month, as well. >> Yeah, and The Cube will be there, of course. It'll be our, what, fourth year there, Stu? So it's a big show for us and we're obviously big supporters of the topic; we tend to talk about it a lot. And I think, you know, Lynn, your point is right. Hopefully by the time our daughters are grown up, we won't be talking about it, but I think it's important to talk about now. >> Lynn: It is. >> And one of the things that Accenture laid out is that, by 2025, their objective is to have 50 percent, you know, women on staff, and I think it was 25 percent women in leadership positions. I was impressed and struck, and I wonder if you can comment as a C-level executive, struck by the emphasis on P&L management, which, you know, tends to be a man's world. But, thoughts on that and you, as a C-level executive, you know, women in that position? >> Yeah, and again, it's one of these things where I'll have to say it's a little both uncomfortable, but obviously I feel that it is still important to talk about because I wish we were at a place where we didn't have to. I'm really proud of Veritas, because we have myself and Michelle Vanderhar on Bill's staff. So Bill has been a promoter of having diversity on his own direct staff, and I think that top down approach is super important in Silicon Valley and any business that there's real support for that. And Michelle Vanderhar is our chief council, which has, in many cases, not been a position where you would have seen a lady leading that. So we work on that at Veritas, and I personally believe it and I think Mr. Branson said that, as well, in his keynote as well this morning. When we have diversity, we have a breadth of ideas that makes it just a better place to work, and frankly, I think, leads to better innovation in whatever field that you're in. >> Lynn, last question I wanted to ask you, the tagline of the conference is: the truth in information. So much gets talked about, you know, what's real news? You know, what's fake? What do you want people, as the takeaway for Veritas and the show? The truth in information is our rallying cry, and you're right, I think it couldn't be more timely. We're not here to take a particular political stance, but what we find is in the business world, the companies are struggling with: where do I find what's really relevant? Let me give you a story. I was in France earlier this year, sitting with a CIO of one of the very largest oil and gas companies in France. Happens to be a lady who was formerly the chief data officer and she'd moved from that position into the CIO position. And when we talk about the truth in information, the example that she gave us which was so striking is that they've been doing the scans of the Earth, and actually the streets of Paris, for 50, 60 years, to understand the infrastructure, what they may have, and so forth, and at this point, with all of that data, they literally are having a hard time understanding what, out of all of these pieces of information, these topographical scans that they have, is relevant anymore. And this is the same story that I've heard in pharmaceutical companies that are doing drug tests. This is the same story that you would hear in, frankly, media companies that are doing filming, and are trying and all of this is digitized. So, when we talk about that with our customers, it really resonates, is that with so much coming at us, it's hard, in business as well as it is in our consumer lives, to really know: what do I have that's relevant? And I think the opportunity Veritas has is to help customers with a single data management platform, start to get a handle on that and be able to be much more efficient and productive. >> Alright, Lynn Lucas, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. We really appreciate it. >> Thank you! I really enjoyed my first time. I can't wait to be back on again, and hope to have you guys here next year, Vision 2018. >> We'd love to be here. Alright, bringing you the truth, from Veritas Vision, this is The Cube. We'll be right back. (uptempo musical theme)