>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director at AWS joins us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time. And just recently, as of March switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products, and I've done things from web development to mobile, to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI, and now honeycomb. I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. >>And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across charity majors again, Christine Young, who's our other founder. And then Liz Frank Jones, who's our, our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You two leaders, you mentioned that you liked the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females and the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically we have tried not to over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point, for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. >>So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which I don't know region, they were in, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You could do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using honeycomb to understand and observe their system. And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. >>They can go into honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out under data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. And we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that realtime visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, because a lot of all of our customers, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers, and they have many integrations, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>You back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I know that this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There is kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use the technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that tele, telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and it land was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I, I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is we'll lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And, you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI headstart program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities. And that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time, hands on, definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teens at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice or your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to join, have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love it there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a, a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million other people in the room that probably has the, have the same question. And because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. >>My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director a at AWS joins us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time. And just recently, as of March switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile, to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI, and now honeycomb. I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. >>And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across charity majors again, Christine yen, who our other founder, and then Liz Frank Jones, who our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically we have tried not to over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point, for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguard, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. >>So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which I don't know region, they were in, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. >>They can go into honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out under data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. And we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, because a lot of all of our customers, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers, and they have many integrations, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observa observability market that we have. >>Vera a back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I Don know that this Predates me to some extent, but I Don know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does also in a pretty unorthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use the technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year, we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that tele telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and demand was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D E and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach Vera? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that end, we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be Africa, tech hu Latinas in tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And, you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities. And that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time, hands on, definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teen at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions, and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to join, have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead. Love that various same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a bit, a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because an imposter syndrome don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is one of the best things. Raise your hand and ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us talking to >>My pleasure. Likewise, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in.

>>Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner, showcase women in tech. I'm Lisa Martin from the cube. And today we're gonna be looking into the exciting evolution of women in the tech industry. I'm going to be joined by Danielle GShock, the ISP PSA director at AWS. And we have the privilege of speaking with some wicked smart women from Teradata NetApp. JFI a 10th revolution group, company and honeycomb.io. We're gonna look at some of the challenges and biases that women face in the tech industry, especially in leadership roles. We're also gonna be exploring how are these tech companies addressing diversity, equity and inclusion across their organizations? How can we get more young girls into stem earlier in their careers? So many questions. So let's go ahead and get started. This is the AWS partner showcase women in tech. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three. And I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two great guests here with me to talk about women in tech. Hillary Ashton joins us the chief product officer at Terry data. And Danielle Greshaw is back with us, the ISV PSA director at AWS ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking through such an important topic, Hillary, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us a little bit of an intro into you, your background, and a little bit about Teradata. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Hillary Ashton. I head up the products organization. So that's our engineering product management office of the CTO team. Um, at Teradata I've been with Terra data for just about three years and really have spent the last several decades. If I can say that in the data and analytics space, um, I spent time, uh, really focused on the value of, of analytics at scale, and I'm super excited to be here at Teradata. I'm also a mom of two teenage boys. And so as we talk about women in tech, I think there's, um, uh, lots of different dimensions and angles of that. Um, at Teradata, we are partnered very deeply with AWS and happy to talk a little bit more about that, um, throughout this discussion as well. >>Excellent. A busy mom of two teen boys. My goodness. I don't know how you do it. Let's now look, Atter data's views of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's a, the, it's a topic that's important to everyone, but give us a snapshot into some of the initiatives that Terra data has there. >>Yeah, I have to say, I am super proud to be working at Teradata. We have gone through, uh, a series of transformations, but I think it starts with culture and we are deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. It's really more than just a statement here. It's just how we live our lives. Um, and we use, uh, data to back that up. Um, in fact, we were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the 13th year in a row. Um, and all of our executive leadership team has taken an oath around D E and I that's available on LinkedIn as well. So, um, in fact, our leadership team reporting into the CEO is just about 50 50, um, men and women, which is the first time I've worked in a company where that has been the case. And I think as individuals, we can probably appreciate what a huge difference that makes in terms of not just being a representative, but truly being on a, on a diverse and equitable, uh, team. And I think it really, uh, improves the behaviors that we can bring, um, to our office. >>There's so much value in that. It's I impressive to see about a 50 50 at the leadership level. That's not something that we see very often. Tell me how you, Hillary, how did you get into tech? Were you an engineering person by computer science, or did you have more of a zigzaggy path to where you are now? >>I'm gonna pick door number two and say more zigzaggy. Um, I started off thinking, um, that I started off as a political science major or a government major. Um, and I was probably destined to go into, um, the law field, but actually took a summer course at Harvard. I did not go to Harvard, but I took a summer course there and learned a lot about multimedia and some programming. And that really set me on a trajectory of how, um, data and analytics can truly provide value and, and outcomes to our customers. Um, and I have been living that life ever since. Um, I graduated from college, so, um, I was very excited and privileged in my early career to, uh, work in a company where I found after my first year that I was managing, um, uh, kids, people who had graduated from Harvard business school and from MIT Sloan school. Um, and that was super crazy, cuz I did not go to either of those schools, but I sort of have always had a natural knack for how do you take technology and, and the really cool things that technology can do, but because I'm not a programmer by training, I'm really focused on the value that I'm able to help, um, organizations really extract value, um, from the technology that we can create, which I think is fantastic. >>I think there's so much value in having a zigzag path into tech. You bring Danielle, you and I have talked about this many times you bring such breadth and such a wide perspective. That really is such a value. Add to teams. Danielle, talk to us from AWS's perspective about what can be done to encourage more young women to get and under and underrepresented groups as well, to get into stem and stay. >>Yeah, and this is definitely a challenge as we're trying to grow our organization and kind of shift the numbers. And the reality is, especially with the more senior folks in our organization, unless you bring folks with a zigzag path, the likelihood is you won't be able to change the numbers that you have. Um, but for me, it's really been about, uh, looking at that, uh, the folks who are just graduating college, maybe in other roles where they are adjacent to technology and to try to spark their interest and show that yes, they can do it because oftentimes it's really about believing in themselves and, and realizing that we need folks with all sorts of different perspectives to kind of come in, to be able to help really, um, provide both products and services and solutions for all types of people inside of technology, which requires all sorts of perspectives. >>Yeah, the diverse perspectives. There's so much value and there's a lot of data that demonstrates how much value revenue impact organizations can make by having diversity, especially at the leadership level. Hillary, let's go back to you. We talked about your career path. You talked about some of the importance of the focus on de and I at Tarana, but what are, what do you think can be done to encourage, to sorry, to recruit more young women and under groups into tech, any, any carrot there that you think are really important that we need to be dangling more of? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll build on what Danielle just said. I think the, um, bringing in diverse understandings, um, of, of customer outcomes, I mean, I, the we've really moved from technology for technology's sake and I know AWS and entirety to have had a lot of conversations on how do we drive customer outcomes that are differentiated in the market and really being customer centric and technology is wonderful. You can do wonderful things with it. You can do not so wonderful things with it as well, but unless you're really focused on the outcomes and what customers are seeking, um, technology is not hugely valuable. And so I think bringing in people who understand, um, voice of customer who understand those outcomes, and those are not necessarily the, the, the folks who are PhD in mathematics or statistics, um, those can be people who understand a day in the life of a data scientist or a day in the life of a citizen data scientist. And so really working to bridge the high impact technology with the practical kind of usability, usefulness of data and analytics in our cases, I think is something that we need more of in tech and sort of demystifying tech and freeing technology so that everybody can use it and having a really wide range of people who understand not just the bits and bites and, and how to program, but also the value in outcomes that technology through data and analytics can drive. >>Yeah. You know, we often talk about the hard skills, but this, their soft skills are equally, if not more important that even just being curious, being willing to ask questions, being not afraid to be vulnerable, being able to show those sides of your personality. I think those are important for, for young women and underrepresented groups to understand that those are just as important as some of the harder technical skills that can be taught. >>That's right. >>What do you think about from a bias perspective, Hillary, what have you seen in the tech industry and how do you think we can leverage culture as you talked about to help dial down some of the biases that are going on? >>Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, and, and there's some interesting data out there that says that 90% of the population, which includes a lot of women have some inherent bias in their day, day behaviors when it comes to to women in particular. But I'm sure that that is true across all kinds of, of, um, diverse and underrepresented folks in, in the world. And so I think acknowledging that we have bias and actually really learning how, what that can look like, how that can show up. We might be sitting here and thinking, oh, of course I don't have any bias. And then you realize that, um, as you, as you learn more about, um, different types of bias, that actually you do need to kind of, um, account for that and change behaviors. And so I think learning is sort of a fundamental, um, uh, grounding for all of us to really know what bias looks like, know how it shows up in each of us. >>Um, if we're leaders know how it shows up in our teams and make sure that we are constantly getting better, we're, we're not gonna be perfect anytime soon. But I think being on a path to improvement to overcoming bias, um, is really, is really critical. And part of that is really starting the dialogue, having the conversations, holding ourselves and each other accountable, um, when things aren't going in, in a, in a Coptic way and being able to talk openly about that, that felt, um, like maybe there was some bias in that interaction and how do we, um, how do we make good on that? How do we change our, our behavior? Fundamentally of course, data and analytics can have some bias in it as well. And so I think as we look at the, the technology aspect of bias, um, looking at at ethical AI, I think is a, a really important, uh, additional area. And I'm sure we could spend another 20 minutes talking about that, but I, I would be remiss if I didn't talk more about sort of the bias, um, and the over the opportunity to overcome bias in data and analytics as well. >>Yeah. The opportunity to overcome it is definitely there you bring up a couple of really good points, Hillary. It, it starts with awareness. We need to be aware that there are inherent biases in data in thought. And also to your other point, hold people accountable ourselves, our teammates, that's critical to being able to, to dial that back down, Daniel, I wanna get your perspective on, on your view of women in leadership roles. Do you think that we have good representation or we still have work to do in there? >>I definitely think in both technical and product roles, we definitely have some work to do. And, you know, when I think about, um, our partnership with Teradata, part of the reason why it's so important is, you know, Teradata solution is really the brains of a lot of companies. Um, you know, the what, how, what they differentiate on how they figure out insights into their business. And it's, it's all about the product itself and the data and the same is true at AWS. And, you know, we really could do some work to have some more women in these technical roles, as well as in the product, shaping the products. Uh, just for all the reasons that we just kind of talked about over the last 10 minutes, um, in order to, you know, move bias out of our, um, out of our solutions and also to just build better products and have, uh, better, you know, outcomes for customers. So I think there's a bit of work to do still. >>I agree. There's definitely a bit of work to do, and it's all about delivering those better outcomes for customers at the end of the day, we need to figure out what the right ways are of doing that and working together in a community. Um, we've had obviously a lot had changed in the last couple of years, Hillary, what's your, what have you seen in terms of the impact that the pandemic has had on this status of women in tech? Has it been a pro is silver lining the opposite? What are you seeing? >>Yeah, I mean, certainly there's data out there that tells us factually that it has been, um, very difficult for women during COVID 19. Um, women have, uh, dropped out of the workforce for a wide range of, of reasons. Um, and, and that I think is going to set us back all of us, the, the Royal us or the Royal we back, um, years and years. Um, and, and it's very unfortunate because I think we we're at a time when we're making great progress and now to see COVID, um, setting us back in, in such a powerful way. I think there's work to be done to understand how do we bring people back into the workforce. Um, how do we do that? Understanding work life balance, better understanding virtual and remote, working better. I think in the technology sector, um, we've really embraced, um, hybrid virtual work and are, are empowering people to bring their whole selves to work. >>And I think if anything, these, these zoom calls have, um, both for the men and the women on my team. In fact, I would say much more. So for the men on my team, I'm seeing, I was seeing more kids in the background, more kind of split childcare duties, more ability to start talking about, um, other responsibilities that maybe they had, uh, especially in the early days of COVID where maybe daycares were shut down. And, um, you had, you know, maybe a parent was sick. And so we saw quite a lot of, um, people bringing their whole selves to the office, which I think was, was really wonderful. Um, uh, even our CEO saw some of that. And I think, um, that that really changes the dialogue, right? It changes it to maybe scheduling meetings at a time when, um, people can do it after daycare drop off. >>Um, and really allowing that both for men and for women makes it better for, for women overall. So I would like to think that this hybrid working, um, environment and that this, um, uh, whole view into somebody's life that COVID has really provided for probably for white collar workers, if I'm being honest for, um, people who are in a, at a better point of privilege, they don't necessarily have to go into the office every day. I would like to think that tech can lead the way in, um, you know, coming out of the, the old COVID. I don't know if we have a new COVID coming, but the old COVID and really leading the way for women and for people, um, to transform how we do work, um, leveraging data and analytics, but also, um, overcoming some of the, the disparities that exist for women in particular in the workforce. >>Yeah, I think there's, there's like we say, there's a lot of opportunity there and I like your point of hopefully tech can be that guiding light that shows us this can be done. We're all humans at the end of the day. And ultimately if we're able to have some sort of work life balance, everything benefits, our work or more productive, higher performing teams impacts customers, right? There's so much value that can be gleaned from, from that hybrid model and embracing for humans. We need to be able to, to work when we can, we've learned that you don't have to be, you know, in an office 24, 7 commuting, crazy hours flying all around the world. We can get a lot of things done in a ways that fit people's lives rather than taking command over it. Wanna get your advice, Hillary, if you were to talk to your younger self, what would be some of the key pieces of advice you would say? And Danielle and I have talked about this before, and sometimes we, we would both agree on like, ask more questions. Don't be afraid to raise your hand, but what advice would you give your younger self and that younger generation in terms of being inspired to get into tech >>Oh, inspired and being in tech? You know, I think looking at technology as, in some ways, I feel like we do a disservice to, um, inclusion when we talk about stem, cuz I think stem can be kind of daunting. It can be a little scary for people for younger people. When I, when I go and talk to folks at schools, I think stem is like, oh, all the super smart kids are over there. They're all like maybe they're all men. And so, um, it's, it's a little, uh, intimidating. Um, and stem is actually, you know, especially for, um, people joining the workforce today. It's actually how you've been living your life since you were born. I mean, you know, stem inside and out because you walk around with a phone and you know how to get your internet working and like that is technology right. >>Fundamentally. And so demystifying stem as something that is around how we, um, actually make our, our lives useful and, and, and how we can change outcomes. Um, through technology I think is maybe a different lens to put on it. So, and there's absolutely for, for hard sciences, there's absolutely a, a great place in the world for folks who wanna pursue that and men and women can do that. So I, I don't want to be, um, uh, setting the wrong expectations, but I, I think stem is, is very holistic in, um, in the change that's happening globally for us today across economies, across global warming, across all kinds of impactful issues. And so I think everybody who's interested in, in some of that world change can participate in stem. It just may be through a different, through a different lens than how we classically talk about stem. >>So I think there's great opportunity to demystify stem. I think also, um, what I would tell my younger self is choose your bosses wisely. And that sounds really funny. That sounds like inside out almost, but I think choose the person that you're gonna work for in your first five to seven years. And it might be more than one person, but be, be selective, maybe be a little less selective about the exact company or the exact title. I think picking somebody that, you know, we talk about mentors and we talk about sponsors and those are important. Um, but the person you're gonna spend in your early career, a lot of your day with a lot, who's gonna influence a lot of the outcomes for you. That is the person that you, I think want to be more selective about, um, because that person can set you up for success and give you opportunities and set you on course to be, um, a standout or that person can hold you back. >>And that person can put you in the corner and not invite you to the meetings and not give you those opportunities. And so we're in an economy today where you actually can, um, be a little bit picky about who you go and work for. And I would encourage my younger self. I actually, I just lucked out actually, but I think that, um, my first boss really set me, um, up for success, gave me a lot of feedback and coaching. Um, and some of it was really hard to hear, but it really set me up for, for, um, the, the path that I've been on ever since. So it, that would be my advice. >>I love that advice. I it's brilliant. I didn't think it choose your bosses wisely. Isn't something that we primarily think about. I think a lot of people think about the big name companies that they wanna go after and put on a resume, but you bring up a great point. And Danielle and I have talked about this with other guests about mentors and sponsors. I think that is brilliant advice and also more work to do to demystify stem. But luckily we have great family leaders like the two of you helping us to do that. Ladies, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on the program today and talking through what you're seeing in de and I, what your companies are doing and the opportunities that we have to move the needle. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much. Great to see you, Danielle. Thank you Lisa, to see you. >>My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Peretti, the EVP of global AWS strategic alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company, and Danielle brushoff. One of our cube alumni joins us ISV PSA director, ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking about a, a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? >>Sure. Um, so let's just start, uh, Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called revelent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups over half of them are women. And then we also have, uh, a company called rubra, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. >>Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >>Yes. I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. You know, we wanna have, uh, an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right. And, uh, we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, um, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, uh, giving them paths to growth, to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that. Of course I benefit benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well. And it's super important. >>Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >>Um, I just think that, um, you know, I I've been able to get, you know, a seat at the table. I think that, um, I feel as though I have folks supporting me, uh, very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as, um, you know, a, represent a representative, uh, to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think, um, they give me a platform, uh, in order to do that, um, like this, um, but also many other, uh, spots as well. Um, and I'm happy to do it because I feel that, you know, if you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job, and that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to, um, bring more, more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there, >>A lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gender diversity perspective in tech? We know the, the numbers of women in technical positions, uh, right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up, but what are some of the trends that you are seeing? >>So it's, that's a really interesting question. And, and Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, uh, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the, at the summit. And we were talking about this. We were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to, uh, AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about, uh, the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really, uh, something that shocked everyone when we, when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, uh, working from home, um, better pay, uh, more flexibility, uh, better maternity leave seems like those things are happening. >>So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they, they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because they, we feel collectively women, uh, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. Um, I think I've had great mentors, but, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a pres a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson, Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring a salary and hiring guide a career and hiring guide every year and the data points. And that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. Uh, it gives an abundance of information around, uh, everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is what, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, uh, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey so we can get as much information and take action. So >>Absolutely 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, um, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn, the Ted talk that the CEO and founder of girls and co did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a, a survey that HP did some years back that showed that, um, 60%, that, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less, we've all been in that imposter syndrome, um, conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS, a specific focus here to get these numbers up. >>I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how, you know, I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at what are the, who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's all a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and, and those types of things, but then also, um, more flexible working, uh, can, you know, uh, arrangements, but then also, um, early, how can we actually impact early, um, career women and actually women who are still in school. Um, and our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get, um, more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, um, and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people. >>Um, and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, you know, we're, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates, um, when you're talking about mid to late career. Um, but how can we, you know, help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after, you know, having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, uh, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS, we have a great military program, but then also just that early high school, uh, career, you know, getting them in, in that trajectory. >>Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is, you know, getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >>Uh, let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did, uh, we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What can cuz that's the goal, right? To make sure that, that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal? So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs, uh, from a very young age, some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you. Can't be what you can't see. So, uh, getting mentoring programs, uh, established, uh, we also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And some, there was a teachable moment for, for me there actually, it was really wonderful because, um, an African American woman said to me, Sue and I, I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. >>And what she said was Sue, it's really different. Um, for me as an African American woman, uh, or she identified, uh, as nonbinary, but she was relating to African American women. She said, your white woman, your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that, but those are the things that we need to educate people on those, those moments where we think we're, we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson, Frank, we're, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women, uh, to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We, we try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. Uh, we have a, a women's group, a women's leadership group, uh, so much that, that we do, and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >>Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far, um, regarding some of the trends and, and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >>Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders, uh, on how <laugh>, you know, it used to be a, a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the, um, uh, solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. You know? And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple years ago, didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their, or in their organizations. Now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with, um, work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks, so they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned, uh, things around in a very positive way. >>And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to, to get those data points up, to get more women of, of all well, really underrepresented minorities to, to be able to provide that feedback so that you can, can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. >>Right? So as I, when I go back to that higher that, uh, careers in hiring guide, that is my focus today, really because the more data that we have, I mean, the, and the data takes, uh, you know, we need people to participate in order to, to accurately, uh, get a hold of that data. So that's why we're asking, uh, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world, but if people don't take action, then we can't get the right. The, the, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be. Therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the, all over the world to participate on our website, Jefferson frank.com, the se the high, uh, in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. >>7% is such a, you know, Danielle and I we're, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute, uh, some of the other things that we're doing. We're, we're partnering in. As I mentioned, more of these events, uh, we're, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ed and I events and collecting more information from women. Um, like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are, that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. >>We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this, uh, hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've gotta get that 7% up. We've gotta keep talking. We've gotta keep, uh, getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned, uh, women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've gotta get that number up, uh, as well because, um, you know, I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or, or her peers, it inspires me. And I feel like, you know, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >>Absolutely. That's not that metaphor I do too, but we, but to your point to get that those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need, it's a help me help use situation. So ladies underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the woman here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females and leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important. Cause >>Thank you for having me, Leah, Lisa, >>Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Um, thank you for that. Uh, my name's Stephanie cur, as Lisa mentioned, I'm the worldwide head of sales for, uh, AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS, um, going back 25 years now, uh, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. Um, I come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, um, but had been in a different career and I had an opportunity to try something new. Um, I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. Um, and, uh, it, it turned out to be a 25 year career, um, that I'm really, really excited about and, and, um, really thankful for that person, for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance, um, for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply, um, on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities and put that forth to our customers, um, in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performant teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my, um, career know, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. Um, we find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really reflective, not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really, uh, meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that, um, a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that, that, so I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way, um, to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we're showing them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team, >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can't see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of them was an interview on the Cub I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago, um, about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective and AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent. And, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Um, two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, uh, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. Um, and then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women on solution architecture organizations. We have, uh, you know, I just personally connect people as well and to like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home, um, during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a, a long tenured Amazonian. Um, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who, uh, ha has been a sponsor of my career has, uh, Matt YK, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph, who's a cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. Um, and you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, um, you know, and, and get things done, um, inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And S I've, I've agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your, uh, original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really, really key difference. I think also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Um, some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. Uh, he actually is in the distribution, was in distribution, uh, with advent tech data no longer there. Um, Corey Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. Um, so a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend, um, um, different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies and when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference. I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take, uh, an extra, uh, approach an extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One. I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. Um, and they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups, so early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know, uh, the massive influence they've had Daniel back over. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ, that AWS employees to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, um, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. Um, but I think just making sure that, um, you know, both everything from, uh, recruit to onboard to ever boarding that, uh, they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as that they have someone, uh, working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. Um, for me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can come to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner or with a colleague. Um, and then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor, uh, to, to people on my team. Um, that is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment a great place for those women are marginalized, um, communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it and much like Danielle, uh, and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship. Um, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp, um, on my team personally, I think, um, leading by example's really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the, um, life stuffs still lands on the women, whether we like it or not. Uh, I have a very, uh, active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. Um, and I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. Um, I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week now, obviously to make sure your job's covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, um, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. Um, so it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. Um, I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. Um, you both talked about, um, kind of being what you, uh, can see, and, and I know both companies are upset customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Um, some of that maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned, uh, in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp. Um, with that, uh, key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the, um, partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. Uh, so, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to, uh, about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has, uh, started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just, um, uh, the trajectory, um, between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. Um, we feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people in my team often say we feel like Amazonians. Um, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the, uh, first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. Um, I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, um, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the, in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is, um, a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, um, female, male, um, race and so forth, and just to really, uh, have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. Um, so we definitely feel like a part of the family. Uh, we are absolutely loving, uh, working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back five years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the thet route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your youngest Stephanie self. >>Uh, I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you. But, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >><laugh> absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be an, a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Um, it's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs, this thing. Um, you know, I genuinely now, uh, took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, um, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Um, don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger selves was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vero Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our cube alumni, Danielle Ock ISV PSA director at AWS. Join us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. >>Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years. Um, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. Um, I was an engineer for most of that time. Uh, and just recently as a March, switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, um, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different, um, companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile to platforms. Um, it would be apt to call me a generalist. Um, and in the more recent years I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me that, uh, came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI and now honeycomb. Um, I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. >>Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right, uh, for your career. And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her, uh, found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, uh, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from, uh, an amazing woman <laugh>, which I haven't seen before. Uh, so I came across charity majors again, Christine Y our other founder, and then Liz Jones, who's our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically, um, we have tried not to over index on that because there was this, uh, maybe fear awareness of, um, it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. Um, but I'm seeing that, uh, rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility, uh, with great power comes great responsibility, and we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. Um, so I would say that for me, it was, um, a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Um, even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both, um, ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so, um, I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you there talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, so honeycomb is an observability tool, uh, that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And, um, we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh, just to name a couple, if you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because, uh, APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. >>What I mean by rich data is, um, something that has a lot of attributes. So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which, um, I don't know, region, they were in, um, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ality and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query the data. We can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. >>And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. They can go into comb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out, um, under your data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. Uh, and we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important, uh, segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, um, because a lot of all of our customers, uh, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. Um, they've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, uh, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Um, definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers and they have many integrations, uh, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Um, being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS, uh, things in that area as well. And so, uh, very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>Back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, I know this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And, um, I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a longstanding conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use this technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. Um, that also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out, um, in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool, um, based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb. And it man was win, win. >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in, let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. Um, but again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently, um, that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Um, some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among, um, a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal, um, practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it, um, with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect, uh, the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with, uh, a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space, um, by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. Um, and you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles, uh, is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives. Uh, and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, um, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them, um, to do what they need to do in their unique, um, environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand, um, and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities, and that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network, um, and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tag, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate, uh, being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer, uh, back actually in the late nineties, uh, during the, the first.com bubble and, uh, have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, um, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS, uh, as a customer facing solutions architect. Um, I do think spending a lot of time, hands on definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome, um, issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teams at AWS since 2015. Um, so it's really been a great ride. Um, and like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change, uh, as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career, uh, direction, um, and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder, uh, to join, have community, uh, in that. But then as a leader, um, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love that there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask, uh, questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or, uh, in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed, there's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is, um, one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Shaw, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >>Yes. And I will tell you, all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do. And I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the, um, stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So >>I agree. And we're gonna get to set, cuz advice is one of the, the main things that our audience is gonna hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from TETA there, Reynolds joins us from honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Paris from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things Danielle that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like D Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with de and I initiatives. And that intention was a, a, a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where de I is concerned. What are your, what were some of the things that stuck out to you? >>Absolutely. I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where in the last, you know, five to 10 years, there's been a, you know, a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, um, first and foremost, by being intentional, that you can change the, uh, the way your organization looks. Um, but also just that, you know, without being intentional, um, there was just a lot of, you know, outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for, um, you know, a healthy, um, and productive environment, uh, working environment. And so, you know, a lot of these companies have made a big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how, you know, these align with our values. So >>Yeah, that, that value alignment mm-hmm <affirmative> that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners, there's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a D E and I alignment that they have. And I, I think everybody also kind of agreed Stephanie Curry talked about, you know, it's really important, um, for diversity on it, on, on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in >>This. Absolutely. And I absolutely, and I definitely even feel that, uh, with their studies out there that tell you that you make better products, if you have all of the right input and you're getting all many different perspectives, but not just that, but I can, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also, you know, the teams that I work alongside. Um, arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well to in technical roles. Um, but you can just see the difference in the outcomes. Uh, at least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >>That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented, um, groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that, um, you know, some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >>Yeah. I think especially, uh, speaking with Hillary and hearing how, uh, Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first, uh, concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to, you know, go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus, or am I going to be able to, you know, be at my kids' conf you know, conference or even just, you know, have enough work life balance that I can, um, you know, do the things that I wanna do outside of work, uh, beyond children and family. So these are all very important, um, and questions that especially women come and ask, but also, um, you know, it kind of is a, is a bellwether for, is this gonna be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also gonna be able to have that balance that I need need. So I think that was something that is, uh, changing a lot. And many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >>Absolutely. The pandemic not only changed how we think about work, you know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model. We're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about there's, it's a win-win. >>Absolutely. And, you know, definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. Um, but I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it. And I hope that, you know, everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious, you know, work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also, um, you know, have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >>Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail with, and that's mentors and sponsors the differences between them recommendations from, uh, the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that, that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic, advice were mentors and sponsors are concerned is, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks. I shouldn't say that that are attracted to a company it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided something that I'm gonna take into consideration myself. >>Yeah. And I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me, um, with my career. But, you know, if you don't have the ability to do that, or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to, you know, find a mentor for a period of time or, um, you know, just, just enable for you to be able to get from say a point a to point B just for a temporary period. Um, just so you can grow into your next role, have a, have a particular outcome that you wanna drive, have a particular goal in mind find that person who's been there and done that and can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager mentor, who can help you get to the next step. >>Exactly. That, that I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know, that's something that everybody, I think, regardless of gender of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is, this is how it happened to me. This is I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >>Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it. Um, but also just hearing all the different techniques on, on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does, um, you know, even some of the smartest, most confident men I've, I've met in, uh, industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but, um, it is very common and hopefully we, we talk about some good techniques to, to deal with that. >>I think we do, you know, one of the things that when we were asking the, our audience, our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves? What would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in stem and in tech and everybody sort of agreed on me, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Um, show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know, oh, how can people have the same question sitting in the room? >>Well, and also, you know, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that, you know, it's a, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint and you're always going to, um, have new things to learn and you can spend, you know, back to, we talked about the zing and zagging through careers, um, where, you know, we'll have different experiences. Um, all of that kind of comes through just, you know, being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers, but I wanna learn is a key thing, uh, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well, >>Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too, that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean not right now or may, maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is gonna learn is that, you know, failure is not necessarily a bad F word. If you turn it into opportunity, no isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I, I thought that was a really positive message that our guests, um, had to share with the, the audience. >>Yeah, totally. I can, I can say I had a, a mentor of mine, um, a very, uh, strong woman who told me, you know, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural. And you know that when you say that, not right now, um, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. <laugh> >>Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary Vera, Stephanie Sue, and you so much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one, episode three, Danielle, thanks so much for helping >>Us with it's been a blast. I really appreciate it >>All audience. We wanna enjoy this. Enjoy the episode.

(bright music) >> Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one episode three and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Greshock, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and a sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >> Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. >> I agree, and we're going to get to (indistinct) 'cause advice is one of the the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from Teradata. Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb. Stephanie Curry from NetApp. And Sue Persichetti from Jefferson Frank and the topics that we dig into are, first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion, that is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things, Danielle, that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw, from a thematic perspective, over and over, was that, like Vera Reynolds was talking about, the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives and that intention was a common theme that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What were some of the things that stuck out to you? >> Absolutely, I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where, in the last five to 10 years, there's been a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, first and foremost by being intentional, that you can change the way your organization looks. But also just that without being intentional there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive environment, working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in and so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how these align with our values. >> Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another theme that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment. There's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a DE&I alignment that they have and I think everybody also kind of agreed, Stephanie Curry talked about, it's really important for diversity on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this episode. >> Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives. But not just that, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities, tech is a little bit behind but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can, just in the adjacent teams of mine. >> That's awesome, we talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >> Yeah, I think, especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody, I think that is definitely, when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus? Or, am I going to be able to be at my kid's conference? Or even just have enough work life balance that I can do the things that I want to do outside of work, beyond children and family. So these are all very important questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bellwether for, is this going to be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work and then I'm also going to be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >> Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. You know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work, and that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which, at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about, it's a win-win. >> Absolutely, and definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation, to be able to put up boundaries, but I think, at least I personally, have been able to find the way to do it and I hope that everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up, to effectively have a harmonious work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >> Yeah absolutely, and a lot of that, from a work life balance perspective, bleeds into one of the next topics that we covered in detail and that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic advice, where mentors and sponsors are concerned, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company, it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way, but I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided, something that I'm going to take into consideration myself. >> Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that but as I reflect through my own career I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time or just enable for you to be able to get from, say a point A to point B, just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role. Have a particular outcome that you want to drive. Have a particular goal in mind. Find that person who's been there and done that and they can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. >> Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and it's something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know that's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real, this is how it happened to me, this is how I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well, about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >> Absolutely and I think the key there is just acknowledging it but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does. Even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common and hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. >> I think we do. You know, one of the things that, when we were asking our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves, what would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech, and everybody sort of agreed on the, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader. I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives and that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. >> Well and also, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn and you can spend, back to we talked about the zigging and zagging through careers where we'll have different experiences, all of that kind of comes through just being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, "I don't know all the answers but I want to learn," is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. >> Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is the word no doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean, not right now, or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn is that failure is not necessarily a bad F word if you turn it into opportunity. No isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door and I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. >> Yeah totally, I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural and that when you say that, not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. >> Exactly, Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary, Vera, Stephanie, Sue, and you. So much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this Partner Showcase. Season one episode three. Danielle, thank you so much for helping us. >> Thank you. Thank you, it's been a blast. I really appreciate it. >> All right, audience, we want to thank you. Enjoy the episode. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Everyone, it's nice to see you. Welcome to the "AWS Partner Showcase". I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Greshock, the ISV PSA Director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you, and talk about such an important topic. >> Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do, and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So-- >> I agree, and we're going to get to that. 'Cause advice is one of the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from Teradata, Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Persichetti from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity, equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things, Danielle, that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like Vera Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives. And that intention was a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What were some of the things that stuck out to you? >> Absolutely, I think each one of us is working in the inside of organizations where in the last five to 10 years there's been a strong push in this direction. Mostly because we've really seen first and foremost by being intentional, that you can change the way your organization looks. But also just that without being intentional, there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how these align with our values. >> Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS, there's a DE&I alignment that they have. And I think everybody also kind of agreed. Stephanie Curry talked about it's really important for diversity on impacting performance. Highly performing teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this episode. >> Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives. But not just that, but I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >> That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >> Yeah, I think especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely... When I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus? Or am I going to be able to be at my kids' conference, or even just have enough work-life balance that I can do the things that I want to do outside of work beyond children and family. So these are all very important questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bellwether for, is this going to be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also going to be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >> Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. Initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period. But we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance which at the end of the day it's so much better for product development for the customers as you talked about, it's a win-win. >> Absolutely. And definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. But I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it and I hope that everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious work life. Where you can still be at home most of the time, but also have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >> Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work-life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail. And that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic advice where mentors and sponsors are concerned is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company, its brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided, something that I'm going to take into consideration myself. >> Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time or just enable for you to be able to get from say a point A to point B just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role, have a particular outcome that you want to drive, have a particular goal in mind. Find that person who's been there and done that and they can really help you get through if you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. >> Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several other women about imposter syndrome. That's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is how it happened to me, this is how I navigated around it or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >> Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it, but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it, because everybody does. Even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it. And I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common. And hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. >> I think we do. One of the things that when we were asking our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves, what would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech. And everybody sort of agreed on the don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. >> Well, and also for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn. And you can spend... Back to we talked about the zigging and zagging through careers where we'll have different experiences. All of that kind of comes through just being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers but I want to learn is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. >> Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end, it can often mean, not right now or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn is that failure is not necessarily a bad F-word if you turn it into opportunity. No isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. >> Yeah, totally. I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, "Your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows, and that's natural." And that when you say that, not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes when you can. >> Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary, Vera, Stephanie, Sue and you. So much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one episode three. Danielle, thanks so much for helping us with this. >> Thank you. Thank you, it's been a blast, I really appreciate it. >> All right. Audience, we want to thank you, enjoy the episode. (gentle music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering AWS executive. Something >>brought to you by Accenture. >>Welcome back, everyone. We are kicking off day two of the cubes. Live coverage of the ex center Executive Summit here at AWS. Reinvent, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this panel. We have some bad meta. He is the chief information officer at Putnam based in Boston. Where? Boston People together. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Nitin Gupta. He's the partner and solutions lead. Financial service is at AWS Welcomed and Shale Jane back again for more. Who leads the data business group in North America. Thanks >>so much the last time. >>Yes. We can't get enough of each other. So thank you so much for coming on the show. We're talking about the data data journey and financial service is so I'm gonna start with you, Sam. It tell us. Tell our viewers a little bit about Putnam. That your assets under management. Your employees? >>Sure. So you know, problem is a global firm. We are a leader in mutual funds in the mutual fund business. We're in 84 year old organization. We based in Boston on, and we are known for innovation. We've done a lot of firsts in our industry on our focus has always bean looking after the needs of our shareholders. So even as we launch digital transformation, we launch it with the lens off, making sure we're covering the needs of our shareholders. >>So what was the impetus? What was the driving force to it? To embark on this cloud journey? >>Sure, So you look recovered. The financial markets recover industries. We look at our own industry as well. Things are changing rather rapidly, right, if I may just turn it around a little bit. Last year's letter from our CEO Bob Reynolds, said That problem now has Maur increasingly Maur four and five star funds, according to Morningstar, then we've had it as a percent of total funds ever. Before we had inflows, when the rest of the industry were having outflows, we built a digital platform and we said digital technology at problem is how we gonna view the internal technology department who will help enable our company to go and provide the investment insights directly to our advisors and to our shareholders so that they can benefit from the performance that we're we're delivering, right? We can only do that through a change. What's really going on in our industry is that there's more choice that's now available to shareholders than ever before. So while we talk about where there's outflows in in in our world, there's actually a lot of flow happening, right, So So it's for us to figure out how. How are the tastes changing right? What are people buying would do advisors need? When do they need them and can reposition ourselves to service them at scale, and so that those are the things that are driving our business? For us to continue to serve the shareholders needs. We really need to be in tune with where the market is. So we're helping do that at Putnam through technology, >>so shale in it. And I mean, what he's just described is thin. This enormously changing landscape and financial service is disrupted by a lot of new entrance. A lot of financial text in tak, a lot of different kinds of technologies. A lot of industries are experiencing this rapid pace of change. How do u ex ensure in AWS work with Putnam amidst this tremendous change, and how do you sit down with the client and sort of work out? Where do we go from here? >>So you know, I want to touch upon a couple of things that made you said And Rebecca You said, So no one is the cloud of their journey. It's It's not a destination that you're trying to get to, And then the other thing that you talked about, it's change. So we had in the cycle right now. But there's a lot of change happening at an industry we had in the cycle Where you nothing, that $38 trillion or something, which is a generator, you know, they're just getting transferred from one generation to the other. I'm not getting any off it. Unfortunately, you know >>all of >>this change that is happening in the industry. What is really required is you need something up in terms of technology, a platform that allows you to move quickly on adapt really quickly to this change. And I think that's where cloud comes in when we talk about all the new generation technologies like data machine learning, artificial intelligence, how >>do you >>leverage all of those. How do you fail quickly? How do you test experiment? Run thousands of not millions of experiments and see what will work in what will not work and do that in a very cost effective way and cloud of a very easy. It's an effective way to do it. And the weight of Louis is helping our customers. Obviously. You know, we we announced a bunch of service is yes, today way have the widest and the deepest tack that is dead in the industry today. You know the strength of our partners. Accenture. So you know, Accenture has Bean one of our longest standing partners altar and financial firm on, you know, working with them, working with our partners to enable our customers. But then we're also investing very heavily in building our industry capabilities. Are accounting solution architects? Professional service is security professionals helping our customers answer all the questions that they would need to answer as they go in this journey with us. So it's, you know, we are in this with them for for the long haul on dhe, you know, super excited about parking trip. >>So from our perspective, I think where we view the world as at a point where we're post digital, where digital was to put a front end that made your engagement with the customers much better. But now we're talking about intelligent enterprise, which is to really digitize the company from the inside out. So not only you need cloud for agility and all the other benefits that cloud offers, but you also need to look at data is the vehicle that would actually not only transform the culture of the company but also be able to integrate with your partners. For example, Cement talked about, you know, getting mind share from the advisers. But if you can exchange data, integrate data much better, faster with them and serve data to them in shapes and speeds that they need, they'll be more amenable to put you on their roster as well. So I think we're seeing a change that's mostly driven by the fintech industry disruption. That's that's happening as well. And it is no better time than now with the cloud and data to really help transform companies like >>the's tons of innovation, right, it's We heard Andy Jassy talk about the Let's roll Sweet the Sweets that are available to us. Our job is to learn what they are and how does it apply to our business because at the end of the game you said it's about our shareholders. It's about the value that we can bring. But we want to harness the power off all of the innovation, and we can't even though we've Bean an innovator, we're not going to innovate alone, all right, so it's really helpful to have to surround yourself with partners who have done this before, to be learning from others and bringing in the right tools at the right time, so so we can turn things around quickly, right? This is way are obviously very conservative and risk averse when it comes to managing other people's money. So we have to be very, very careful. Having said that, you know, we want to learn about all the guardrails we can put in place so we can go faster. >>I want to actually do something about what Shayla brought up, and that is the cultural change within the organization, because change is hard and so many people are resistant, particularly when things are going relatively well and they say Why mess that up with the new technology? So how is hard? Maybe >>is the understatement of the week very hard, and as you guys know, you know where it's not. It's not hard because people don't just want changes. They are experts in things that they've been doing for the last 15 years. 20 years. They've bean at our firm for a really long time. They really know how everything works from front to back. What happens, though? Now, when we get a changing need from the market and people want to buy things differently and we want to sell different products and maybe wanna introduce new products to the market, we can create bottlenecks that slow things down if we're not careful. So this is where we want to learn about the two pizza teams and how you can do things faster. How can we apply that to our world? Which means business partners working with technology, co located in small teams, being completely empowered to deliver solutions, right, working with our risk and compliance people, making sure that everyone's doing things that there were supposed to be doing right? How do we put that to work in the financial service is industry. So where we're learning as we go, we're learning to break down the sidles in the organization, and it's hot all the way around because we're experts in our areas. We know what we've done really well. But fortunately we have a leader in our CEO who's basically said that Let's transform problem so that we become leaders in the digital era for financial service is so with his support waken. Get the executive team align, and as the executive team aligns, then you find that people in the organization they want to work in this model, right but way don't know yet what we don't know, right? It's so we know how to do things from yesterday. Now we're learning and working together. So you guys have come in and this is where we've said, Bring in the people who have done this before and let's hold a session with 40 50 people that Putnam and let's just learn about what that transformation looked like at other places, so we don't make the same mistakes. >>Well, that's what Andy Jassy said in his fireside chat this morning. He was talking about how he had surgery recently in the question you need to ask your surgeon is how many times have you done this surgery? Because that is the critical thing. And so having a trusted partner is so important. So how how does it work that we're working together, collaborating on this relationship? How are you ensuring that Putnam doesn't make mistakes and does do the right tool for the right job shell? >>So, um, earlier this year, we actually launched an offering. A devious lighthouse with eight of us and what it is is a is a collection off. All of our assets are thought, leadership and architectures that we have garnered over the years, having worked with plants like Putnam and have them through the journey. So we put them all together and we bring Bring that Fourth Putnam is one of the first clients actually take advantage of it Abuse Data Lighthouse and, for example, we have a methodology that is specially customized for doing data on on eight of us. So things like that is what we bring to the table to help eliminate the risk that they may encounter. >>And data is critical to us, right? It's we manage a set of data assets, and that's the engine off the organization. So when we look at cloud migration way, look at what's our data strategy? How are rebuilding the so called you guys introduce the terminology for confirmed data sets? And then can we gallon eyes the rest of the organization around it, from investment professionals to operational professionals who used that data every day. Manager governent Make sure that it is what it's supposed to be. And to do that in a cloud environment where their user experience becomes a lot simpler, a lot easier almost takes I t a little away from the day to day. We don't have to be in the report writing business because we can make them more self service right that will create efficiencies in our organization. Our clients are asking us to do things at a lower cost than ever before and introduce more products and more tools and more service is right, so >>I would just tie with Samantha, just said with your question about culture. So if you can make it easy for people, for example, making things self service and data that's discovered through a catalog, so you have a place where you can go and find all the data sets it available. What is the quality? What is the veracity of data and then be able to take a piece of that and try some experiments with it? I think that would enable the cultural change much faster >>because they are able to basically do their jobs better. >>Yes, yes, >>it is. A is a more productive implement. Will highly >>engaged employees, right? We don't want to be in a situation where we find a lot of those disengagement moving employees and the mission for company. We want high engagement. We own people committed to what they're doing. We want to remove hurdles, and technology is they can produce great efficiencies, but it's not done right. It can also be a big hurdle. So we want to learn how to deliver the right tools, the right products to make it easier for way like to say, bring delightful experiences for our clients and our employees. >>Delightful. Another were another Jeff Bezos favorite word of his Obviously Putnam is, is a real innovator and really on the vanguard of this new technology. What are you seeing in the greater financial service is landscape. I mean, how how what are the what is the corporate mind set when it comes to this kind of change? >>So you know, when we look across our financial service is customer base across banking, capital markets, insurance pretty much every customer today. The question is not, you know if we should move to the cloud or when should we move to the cloud? But I think every every CEO and see io is asking the question, How do I move too loud? And what applications do I move over? How do I start on this journey of transformation? Whether it's a digital or it's reducing costs are improving my risk. Posher whatever that end goal is on dhe, you know, when we look at use cases across the industry, risk and data is with one of the easiest use cases to get started with, say, on Ben Field. They were looking at Solvent E to calculations for 25 million other policy holders, and they reduce that time from 10 days to 10 minutes. That is a, you know, really good use case off getting moving to the cloud. You know, if Indra is a great example. They're very public customer analyzing 38 building over market records in the stock market and looking in on alive in all of the data. On it up with data and risk is one of the core use cases that companies start with but then >>has to >>get more as they learn more about the cloud. As they get more get a deeper understanding, they start looking at other things, like Transforming Corp core applications. Today we have core creating applications, scored insurance application score, banking applications that are running running on the cloud. And then they start looking and innovation. You know, how do we look at artificial intelligence? How do we look at machine learning? How do we look at the new technologies to really transform our business and one of the great use case? And we thought so. You know, a lot off insurance companies Liberty Mutual using Lexx as part of their there was a conversational agent for their customers. But one of the interesting examples I have is it's ah, it's a reinsurer in Denmark, Italy insurer in Denmark, and what they're doing is they're using image recognition from from Amazon to look at on accident in the field and then analyzing that, using the using our recognition service to see what that that actual damages and what the cost is and feeding that information to the underwriter really compressing the time that it takes two from a clean filing to processing and payment to a matter of a few few few hours on getting that payment to the to the customer. So really creating a very positive customer experience. >>So it speaking of customer experiences, what have you know? You said you thought you were in service to your shareholders. What have been some of the results that you've seen? >>So you have to look across the organization, right? So our advisers served the need on the retail side, so we were like a bee to be business, right? So we have to be cognizant of what's going on in their world. They're sitting down with clients and talking through the choices, and they have certain needs what they need to fulfill their obligations. They need to explain why they're doing what they're doing. If Putnam knows where each of the advisers are at in their journey with their clients, we can be more helpful to them in explaining why our funds are behaving the way they are right, that information can be had at the right time at the right moment when they need it. Need it, And that brings advisers closer to our our teams are retail distribution teams are marketing teams are investment teams are investment professionals, are using data and analytics to get information to. We're using technology to get information to them faster, so companies are doing releases. There's a ton of information out there these days. We're using technology to dig deeper into the press releases as well as the SEC filings, looking at the footnotes, really trying to understand what they're trying to say, what they said before and what are analysts should be focused on. And we can take a 70 page document, condense it to seven pages and pinpoint what the technology tools say's are really insights. And the analysts will take the time and read the whole thing. But they'll also look at the insides and they'll add it into their process. So technology's additive to the investment process and really making a change help and then that's helping Dr performance. So at the end of the day, we're living good performance on our funds through data analytics technology, you know, give you another example. Some off the were were very strong in the in the mortgage analytics business and on the fixed income side. Our team's very well known. They've been together for many, many years now. They're starting to use data at scale, and we found that being able to go to the cloud to do these analytics right in hours instead of days has really made a material difference in the number of iterations we can run. So now the questions are, when we do risk management, can we do that a little differently and run more reiterations and get more accuracy? So we're seeing all of that benefit. That's direct user experience, that people are seeing people seeing how technology is helping them do a better job with their thesis. >>Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on. The Cube seem ed knitting and shale. A pleasure having you on. >>Thank you for being here. >>I'm Rebecca night. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of the Ex Center Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit

>>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 March. >>Welcome back to the Cube here at Q. Khan Club native Khan, 2019 in San Diego, California Instrumental in my co host is Jon Cryer and first of all, happy to welcome back to the program. Diane Mueller, who is the technical of the tech lead of cloud native technology. I'm sorry. I'm getting the wrong That's director of community development Red Hat, because renew. Goodbye is the technical lead of cognitive technologies at in video game to the end of day one. I've got three days. I gotta make sure >>you get a little more Red Bull in the conversation. >>All right, well, there's definitely a lot of energy. Most people we don't even need Red Bull here because we're a day one. But Diane, we're going to start a day zero. So, you know, you know, you've got a good group of community of geeks when they're like Oh, yeah, let me fly in a day early and do like 1/2 day or full day of deep dives. There So the Red Hat team decided to bring everybody on a boat, I guess. >>Yeah. So, um, open ships Commons gathering for this coup con we hosted at on the inspiration Hornblower. We had about 560 people on a boat. I promised them that it wouldn't leave the dock, but we deal still have a little bit of that weight going on every time one of the big military boats came by. And so people were like a little, you know, by the end of the day, but from 8 a.m. in the morning till 8 p.m. In the evening, we just gathered had some amazing deep dives. There was unbelievable conversations onstage offstage on we had, ah, wonderful conversation with some of the new Dev ops folks that have just come on board. That's a metaphor for navigation and Coop gone. And and for events, you know, Andrew Cliche for John Willis, the inevitable Crispin Ella, who runs Open Innovation Labs, and J Bloom have all just formed the global Transformation Office. I love that title on dhe. They're gonna be helping Thio preach the gospel of Cultural Dev ops and agile transformation from a red hat office From now going on, there was a wonderful conversation. I felt privileged to actually get to moderate it and then just amazing people coming forward and sharing their stories. It was a great session. Steve Dake, who's with IBM doing all the SDO stuff? Did you know I've never seen SDO done so well, Deployment explains so well and all of the contents gonna be recorded and up on Aaron. We streamed it live on Facebook. But I'm still, like reeling from the amount of information overload. And I think that's the nice thing about doing a day zero event is that it's a smaller group of people. So we had 600 people register, but I think was 560 something. People show up and we got that facial recognition so that now when they're traveling through the hallways here with 12,000 other people, that go Oh, you were in the room. I met you there. And that's really the whole purpose for comments. Events? >>Yeah, I tell you, this is definitely one of those shows that it doesn't take long where I say, Hey, my brain is full. Can I go home. Now. You know I love your first impressions of Q Khan. Did you get to go to the day zero event And, uh, what sort of things have you been seeing? So >>I've been mostly I went to the lightning talks, which were amazing. Anything? Definitely. There. A number of shout outs to the GPU one, of course. Uh, friend in video. But I definitely enjoyed, for example, of the amazing D. M s one, the one about operators. And generally all of them were very high quality. >>Is this your first Q? Khan, >>I've been there. I've been a year. This is my third con. I've been accused in Europe in the past. Send you an >>old hat old hand at this. Well, before we get into the operator framework and I wanna love to dig into this, I just wanted to ask one more thought. Thought about open shift, Commons, The Commons in general, the relationship between open shift, the the offering. And then Okay, the comments and okay, D and then maybe the announcement about about Okay. Dee da da i o >>s. Oh, a couple of things happened yesterday. Yesterday we dropped. Okay, D for the Alfa release. So anyone who wants to test that out and try it out it's an all operators based a deployment of open shift, which is what open ship for is. It's all a slightly new architectural deployment methodology based on the operator framework, and we've been working very diligently. Thio populate operator hub dot io, which is where all of the upstream projects that have operators like the one that Reynolds has created for in the videos GP use are being hosted so that anyone could deploy them, whether on open shift or any kubernetes so that that dropped. And yesterday we dropped um, and announced Open Sourcing Quay as project quay dot io. So there's a lot of Io is going on here, but project dia dot io is, um, it's a fulfillment, really, of a commitment by Red Hat that whenever we do an acquisition and the poor folks have been their acquired by Cora West's and Cora Weston acquired by Red Hat in an IBM there. And so in the interim, they've been diligently working away to make the code available as open source. And that hit last week and, um, to some really interesting and users that are coming up and now looking forward to having them to contribute to that project as well. But I think the operator framework really has been a big thing that we've been really hearing, getting a lot of uptake on. It's been the new pattern for deploying applications or service is on getting things beyond just a basic install of a service on open shift or any kubernetes. And that's really where one of the exciting things yesterday on we were talking, you know, and I were talking about this earlier was that Exxon Mobil sent a data scientist to the open ship Commons, Audrey Resnick, who gave this amazing presentation about Jupiter Hub, deeper notebooks, deploying them and how like open shift and the advent of operators for things like GP use is really helping them enable data scientists to do their work. Because a lot of the stuff that data signs it's do is almost disposable. They'll run an experiment. Maybe they don't get the result they want, and then it just goes away, which is perfect for a kubernetes workload. But there are other things you need, like a Jeep use and work that video has been doing to enable that on open shift has been just really very helpful. And it was It was a great talk, but we were talking about it from the first day. Signs don't want to know anything about what's under the hood. They just want to run their experiments. So, >>you know, let's like to understand how you got involved in the creation of the operator. >>So generally, if we take a step back and look a bit at what we're trying to do is with a I am l and generally like EJ infrastructure and five G. We're seeing a lot of people. They're trying to build and run applications. Whether it's in data Center at the and we're trying to do here with this operator is to bring GPS to enterprise communities. And this is what we're working with. Red Hat. And this is where, for example, things like the op Agrestic A helps us a lot. So what we've built is this video Gee, few operator that space on the upper air sdk where it wants us to multiple phases to in the first space, for example, install all the components that a data scientist were generally a GPU cluster of might want to need. Whether it's the NVIDIA driver, the container runtime, the community's device again feast do is as you go on and build an infrastructure. You want to be able to have the automation that is here and, more importantly, the update part. So being able to update your different components, face three is generally being able to have a life cycle. So as you manage multiple machines, these are going to get into different states. Some of them are gonna fail, being able to get from these bad states to good states. How do you recover from them? It's super helpful. And then last one is monitoring, which is being able to actually given sites dr users. So the upper here is decay has helped us a lot here, just laying out these different state slips. And in a way, it's done the same thing as what we're trying to do for our customers. The different data scientists, which is basically get out of our way and allow us to focus on core business value. So the operator, who basically takes care of things that are pretty cool as an engineer I lost due to your election. But it doesn't really help me to focus on like my core business value. How do I do with the updates, >>you know? Can I step back one second, maybe go up a level? The problem here is that each physical machine has only ah limited number of NVIDIA. GPU is there and you've got a bunch of containers that maybe spawning on different machines. And so they have to figure out, Do I have a GPU? Can I grab one? And if I'm using it, I assume I have to reserve it and other people can't use and then I have to give it up. Is that is that the problem we're solving here? So this is >>a problem that we've worked with communities community so that like the whole resource management, it's something that is integrated almost first class, citizen in communities, being able to advertise the number of deep, use their your cluster and used and then being able to actually run or schedule these containers. The interesting components that were also recently added are, for example, the monitoring being able to see that a specific Jupiter notebook is using this much of GP utilization. So these air supercool like features that have been coming in the past two years in communities and which red hat has been super helpful, at least in these discussions pushing these different features forward so that we see better enterprise support. Yeah, >>I think the thing with with operators and the operator lifecycle management part of it is really trying to get to Day two. So lots of different methodologies, whether it's danceable or python or job or or UH, that's helm or anything else that can get you an insult of a service or an application or something. And in Stan, she ate it. But and the operator and we support all of that with SD case to help people. But what we're trying to do is bridge the to this day to stuff So Thea, you know, to get people to auto pilot, you know, and there's a whole capacity maturity model that if you go to operator hab dot io, you can see different operators are a different stages of the game. So it's been it's been interesting to work with people to see Theo ah ha moment when they realize Oh, I could do this and then I can walk away. And then if that pod that cluster dies, it'll just you know, I love the word automatically, but they, you know, it's really the goal is to help alleviate the hands on part of Day two and get more automation into the service's and applications we deploy >>right and when they when they this is created. Of course it works well with open shift, but it also works for any kubernetes >>correct operator. HAB Daddio. Everything in there runs on any kubernetes, and that's really the goal is to be ableto take stuff in a hybrid cloud model. You want to be able to run it anywhere you want, so we want people to be unable to do it anywhere. >>So if this really should be an enabler for everything that it's Vinny has been doing to be fully cloud native, Yes, >>I think completely arable here is this is a new attack. Of course, this is a bit there's a lot of complexity, and this is where we're working towards is reducing the complexity and making true that people there. Dan did that a scientist air machine learning engineers are able to focus on their core business. >>You watch all of the different service is in the different things that the data scientists are using. They don't I really want to know what's under under the hood. They would like to just open up a Jupiter Hub notebook, have everything there. They need, train their models, have them run. And then after they're done, they're done and it goes away. And hopefully they remember to turn off the Jeep, use in the woods or wherever it is, and they don't keep getting billed for it. But that's the real beauty of it is that they don't have to worry so much anymore about that. And we've got a whole nice life cycle with source to image or us to I. And they could just quickly build on deploy its been, you know, it's near and dear to my heart, the machine learning the eyesight of stuff. It is one of the more interesting, you know, it's the catchy thing, but the work was, but people are really doing it today, and it's been we had 23 weeks ago in San Francisco, we had a whole open ship comments gathering just on a I and ML and you know, it was amazing to hear. I think that's the most redeeming thing or most rewarding thing rather for people who are working on Kubernetes is to have the folks who are doing workloads come and say, Wow, you know, this is what we're doing because we don't get to see that all the time. And it was pretty amazing. And it's been, you know, makes it all worthwhile. So >>Diane Renaud, thank you so much for the update. Congratulations on the launch of the operators and look forward to hearing more in the future. >>All right >>to >>be here >>for John Troy runs to minimum. More coverage here from Q. Khan Club native Khan, 2019. Thanks for watching. Thank you.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back here, San Francisco Moscow Centre, North John Walls along with John Troyer. We're live here on the Cuban Veum World 2019 and right now we're joined by Christmas. Reynolds, who's a product in court product management and Clyde on data service, is for Centurylink. It's good to see you, sir. Good to be here. Thank you. And And he's gonna tell us today why Milliseconds matter, right? You are. >> That is the goal. Your >> your subject of ah, coming presentation. Just about 45 minutes or so. But we'll get to that a little bit. First off, let's just paint the picture of centurylink your presence here quite obvious. But you know what your portfolio includes? There what you're up to, and maybe starting to hint a little bit about why milliseconds matter to you. >> Makes it so. Where a technology company, global in nature. A lot of our roots started with fiber connectivity. Basic networking service is I. P Service is. But over the years we've become far more of a nightie service company. So there was an acquisition of Savvas a long time ago that brought a lot of those capabilities to our company. And we've made more fold in acquisitions that have also bolster those capabilities. We have invested heavily in Security Service's recently and about two weeks ago we had an announcement that said, We're investing heavily an edge compute getting workloads closer to end users. And that's really where milliseconds matters. You want the performance of those applications to consumers or machinery or whatever it may be toe work effectively and work well. And sometimes that requires that those workloads air in close proximity to the end users. >> Would you bring up ej compute? We were just having this discussion before we started, John asked of you. Okay, What? How do you define the because of there A lot of different slices of that, right? Different interpretations, different definitions. So with that being said, how do you define and or at least in your mind, how do you separate edge or what's true edge? Yeah, >> good questions. I think he was John question, not mine. I chuckled time, so because there is no perfect answer. Uh, the broadest definition I've seen is that you have core, and you can think eight of us Azure. You can think where the big core cloud nodes are that are pretty central, maybe 50 milliseconds away from the end users. There's two intermediate edges, if you will, and this is where there are varying opinions. To me, there's really only one if you're within five milliseconds of where your end users are, I consider that to be a market edge. Some people say there's a closer edge that's in within a millisecond of the end users, but I just I personally have not seen the use cases come out yet that require that low of a late unsee that don't actually reside where the end users are so >> going. Well, that's, um, so that's, um, modules at a at a warehouse or ah, manufacturing facility. Is that what? Is that what you consider like an edge? Uh, media marketed? >> Yeah, in >> theirs. It's interesting if you have 10 manufacturing plants in a geographic area, or maybe a better example is if you're a logistics company and you have sorting and distribution centers, you have multiple of those in an area that can all use the same compute as long as it's within five milliseconds, you can do the sorting lines and keep the machinery working. You can get routed into the rate vehicles for distribution. That's a good market edge. When you get all the way to that, the deep edge or on premise they think of an autonomous vehicle is a good example. There are certain things you're not gonna want to transmit and make driving decisions that don't reside on that vehicle. You don't want to crash into anyone. You need almost instantaneous decisions. And that would be the edge that intermediate one millisecond that sits between the two of those. I think it pushes one direction or the other. >> So Chris, here in the emerald 2019 obviously a lot of talking about cloud, but very specifics. This year. We have a lot of specifics around what Veum, where is doing Hybrid Cloud Israel and of course, hybrid cloud implies the network. And so one of the latest announcement from Centurylink is that you're providing via more cloud on AWS you're managing. You are able to help manage provide that as a managed service. I know you already do. Manage service is where you managing stuff in your data centers. But you could, I guess you can also manage workloads on prim and talk a little bit about that portfolio and how adding Veum VMC on AWS few more cloud nebulas adds to that. And then maybe we'll slide into the networking peace and how important that is. >> So we have AH, tool called Cloud Application Manager that has been built over the past handful of years that allows customers to deploy workloads to AWS toe azure and now to be emcee on AWS as well as private cloud environment. So maybe customers want to host those workloads on premise. Maybe it's regulatory compliance or whatever the reason may be. So we have a lot of experience of helping customers deploy those workloads, and then a lot of customers come to us and want to manage. I want us to manage the life cycle of those workloads, those air, the core capabilities. I think the reason that VMC on AWS is so compelling to customers is a lot of customers may not want to deal with the hardware refresh cycles that they do when it's their own private cloud environment or their own hardware stack. This gives them the opportunity to migrate those workloads and a relatively seamless fashion into an environment that is sitting in Maur of, ah, public cloud type model where it's it's Op X versus the Catholics in the headache. >> Go ahead. John was good, just in terms of so and so. Part of why you would work with Centurylink is you are experienced manage service provider. But also you have ah lot of the networking set up to do that efficiently, right? So maybe you talk about some of the workload is that you see going up there and some of the tools and, uh, performance folks can expect, >> Yeah, that's near the core part of my products that so near and dear to me for sure. We've developed a lot of capabilities over the last year and 1/2 around dynamic networking. So if you have your existing VM wear environment in your own data center, or maybe it's a private cloud that's managed by century link, we now have the ability for customers to go in and create net new connections, private network connections that have better Leighton see have better through putting performance between those environments and AWS or, in this case, VMC on AWS. And it allows customers to do a couple of things if they have their own environment and they're happy with it today. But it's not scaling, and they need to add more capacity. They could do that in the hybrid fashion in VMC on eight of us. If they're done with their existing environment hardware stack and they just want a forklift and move that into VMC on eight of us, they can create a big, large connection, push a ton of data over a few weeks, shut it down, and our building models and hourly billing models such that we're only charging them for as long as it's necessary. This gives them flexibility to manage where their workloads air sitting between those two locations as they see fit over time. >> So you're talking about all these new flexibilities new capabilities, much more agile systems being, I guess, interconnected with each other, right? But whether it's hybrid or whether it's multi cloud, whatever the case is, >> how you how to get >> everybody or everything that talk to each other in a way that works and provides, You know, the addresses, the Leighton see challenge, because to me, I'm again outside looking in. That's Ah, that's a big hurdle. As new capabilities get developed, new possibilities exists, but we gotta make it fast way, and we have to make sure they're they're speaking the same language. >> Yeah, it's a great question, and it is very challenging, and it is not all automated today as much as we would like. We have great integration to deploy workloads between environments. We've spent a ton of time from a networking standpoint of integrating with different cloud providers, and they each have their loan little nuances and to make it common between all of them takes a lot of time and effort. Where a lot of our focus is going in the next 12 months is how do you take those application, migration and management capabilities we have in one tool set? How do you marry that? With all of the dynamic networking capabilities and standardization across the cloud providers, we've done so the now it's not only are you moving network workloads, you're also creating the right underlying network to support those workloads in that multi cloud fashion well to capabilities we have. We just need to marry him up a little more clearly. >> I mean, what are you saying out there in the market with your customers? Multi Cloud Bright is perhaps another overused word like EJ. Are you seeing multi cloud portfolios? Are you seeing applications? Talk, actually use have data in one place, and and the and the computer and another. And obviously network becomes increasingly important if that's a reality today. But is that is that real, or is that still science fiction? >> It's becoming more riel so that there are a lot of customers. My pain, A lot of enterprises really bet big on one cloud provider because you have to build up the competency of capabilities inside your own shop and you become really good with working in Azure. Eight of us or Google or of'em were on the hunt. BP BMC Oh, the companies that are doing true multi cloud and using multiple cloud providers. Well, our companies that probably reside around here, so I won't say any of these specifically or doing this mutt. Companies like uber companies like Spotify companies that are born in the cloud that started with those core competencies will take the best of multiple cloud providers. So maybe the Big Data Analytics sitting in Google is most intriguing to them. But they love the tale of the storage cost. Price points on eight of us, and they love this. Ask spit in azure. They'll piece together components since they built it in a containerized fashion. And they take the best of what each cloud has to offer and into your point. The cloud providers air coming to centurylink and saying We need a better way to stitch together all of these different cloud environments because people, the cutting edge developers are pushing us in that direction. Now >> what about the the application network relationship? Um, changing is, you know, you see a shift there of some kind of as, uh, we're talking about, obviously a lot of new opportunities, a lot of developments, and so does that alter the dynamics of that relationship in any way >> It does, and it's the same conversations I just mentioned. Actually, that's driving it. I think today it is network engineers and network infrastructure. People reacting to applications not performing well are reacting to a software developers requested toe add this Google region or that VM wear on on AWS region over time. What's gonna happen, I believe, is their service mesh orchestration capabilities like SDO is a good example is the one Google is pushing hard and it would it allows people to do is from a rules driven perspective. I want my application to have these Leighton see requirements and you can't find me a network solution that is any worse than that. Or if you're seeing packet loss greater than 80% I want you to add more capacity to the network. It won't be humans the network engineers doing that. It's going to be application saying here are my criteria for me to work well, networks Let me see all the options I have out there now. I'm gonna go pick the best one and change it if I need you to make make myself work the way I need to. As an application. >> I love that that I've never connected Is Theo down as as an at, sir, as an APP service layer down to the network. Thank you. I just have a new I got a new thought. Eureka another reason >> why milliseconds matter. That's right. Hey, Chris. Thanks for the time. We appreciate that. I know this is a very busy time for you on. You do have a speaking engagements. We're gonna cut you loose for that. But thanks for spending time with us. And good luck. It centurylink appreciate it. Enjoyed it. Looking forward, Thio. More success. Back with more for Vimal. World 2019 after this short break right here on the Q.

>> Commentator: Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology held at VMware. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Joining me today is Cornelia Davis. She is the Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal which is the Palo Alto-based company that provides Agile development services on an open source platform. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling, you started telling me a little bit about your personal story. You're a woman in tech who loves the tech, but you said for the past three years, you've also become an activist and an evangelist for getting more women into this business. Tell us about that transformation. >> Yes, I'll tell you a little bit about that story. I have the gray hair to prove it. I've been doing this for some time. I actually was a woman studying computer science back in the day where we were getting close to equity. >> Rebecca: There was a time when it was-- >> Yeah, there was so back in the '80s, I was majoring in computer science and I think that we were close to 40% at the time, although I have to say even before I was in college, I was always the girl who was out playing soccer with the boys at lunch time. Gender never really seemed to make much of a difference to me but anyway, I got a degree in computer science and then I spent 25 years in the industry and sure, there were times where I would notice that I was the only woman in the room. Actually I would say maybe three or four years ago, I went to a customer opening where they were catering to the developer community and in the room there were 250 developers, I was the only woman. I mean seriously, I was the only woman of 250 and I was like wow. But other than notice it and chuckle about it and even have some of those experiences where maybe somebody assumed that I was the HR person and not the technologist, those types of things, I never really did anything about it. And then about three years ago, I had the great fortune of meeting Robin Hauser Reynolds and Stacy Hartmann who are the two women behind the movie Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, you've seen it? >> Rebecca: Yes, yes. >> A fantastic film, a fantastic piece and had this opportunity to meet them and got involved in the film and Pivotal became a sponsor. They did some of the filming. They did some interviewing of people at Pivotal and it was through that experience and then I got to go to some of the screenings and participate in panels and so on and it was through that experience that I started to understand that it wasn't just curiosity, that it was actually declining, the numbers were declining and that it was a real serious problem. And so after being in the industry for 25 years and not really doing anything about it, I've become an activist and so I spend a lot of time jabbing on about this. I'll give you another example. Last year in January, Pivotal brought most of the company together here in the Bay Area. We brought about 1,200 people into the Bay Area for worldwide kickoff. And the very first talk that they had after our CEO spoke was a talk on diversity and they actually invited me to come up and speak about gender diversity or lack thereof in technology and talked about the Girls Who Code and some of those great programs out there. >> I want to get back to Girls Who Code because I know that you're passionate about it, but I want to also just get back to the moment that you described where you went from chuckling about being the only woman in the room and saying, "Oh it's not silly," to really feeling, "Hey this isn't right. "I want things to be different." What was that moment? Are you trying to recreate that moment for other women as a wake up call? How would you describe your activism? >> I don't know that it was a moment, but the thing that catalyzes me, the thing that makes me really passionate about doing this is that I have this tremendous opportunity. The way that I came into computing personally was at the end of my sophomore year in high school when we were signing up for classes the following year, I was looking at what might I sign up for and I signed up for a computer programming class and then I went off and I joked around that I went off and had a bitchin' summer. That's the stuff we said in the '80s. I went off and had a bitchin' summer. >> We should bring that word back. Let's do it, Cornelia. >> It's a good word. And I came back and had this computer class on my schedule and I was like, "Uh no, no, no, no. "There is no way I'm doing this." And I skipped class for the first two or three days and then I finally went and curiosity got the better of me. I tried it out and I was hooked. Literally that was the moment, not for my activism, but that was the moment where I had like, "Oh my gosh, this is going to change everything. "This is what want to I do." And that's what brought me to computing and that's what makes me an activist now because I didn't realize for those 25 years that other people didn't have those opportunities, that they were actually systemically being discouraged from having those opportunities and so I think that's at the core of my activism is I want people to have the opportunity because I love what I do so much and I think I was mentioning before before we started rolling the cameras that I've been a technologist my whole career. Occasionally I've branched off and tried to do maybe a little bit more leadership or a little bit more of that, but I love the tech so much and it's such a great wonderful career to be in, self-sustaining and all of those things, I want other people to have that opportunity. That's what gets me going. >> I was reading a bio where you're a self-described propeller head and you can find her knee deep in the code and now you want to inspire the next generation and so you've gotten involved with Girls Who Code. Tell us more. >> Yes so it wasn't actually through the film. I think it was just simply, it was serendipitous, right around the time that I was starting to awaken to what was going on in the industry. Working for Pivotal, Pivotal in our San Francisco office, it's a very cool office. It's very different from what I saw in most of my career which was cube farms. It's a very open floor plan, very hip, just a cool place to be. >> What the rest of us East Coasters envisions Silicon Valley to be. >> Yeah, it's really pretty cool. And so the Girls Who Code, for those of you who might be watching that don't know about the Girls Who Code, it's an organization that really targets high school girls and their flagship program is in the summer they have a seven-week immersion program where they bring girls in and they basically code, they learn to code from nine to five every day for seven weeks. It's a pretty intensive program. Well about three years ago, we weren't sponsoring at that level, but we would be a field trip location. One of our close partners, investors, customers, is General Electric. They hosted a group of these 20 girls in their San Ramon office. They came to us for a couple of summers as a field trip location and of course the girls loved it. They walk off the elevator there's snacks, there's drinks. We parent programmed with them. It's a really cool experience. And then last summer, we actually took the next step and hosted our own groups so we had a group of 20 young women who were here in our Palo Alto office for seven weeks learning to code and I had the wonderful opportunity to spend time with them several times throughout the summer and I actually commute to the Bay Area, not everyday but I commute to the Bay Area and the days that I was coming up here in part to see the girls, I'd wake up at four in the morning for my flight and I'd be like, "I get to spend time with the girls today," and I saw it. I saw the girls who in the first week were clearly there because their parents made them be there and they're sitting there like this and they've got the same attitude that I had when I was in high school the first three days like I am not doing this and the same people are standing up at the graduation ceremony at the end of the seven weeks saying, "This changed my life." And one of those young women I'm spending a little bit more time with is now a computer science major at Northwestern, early decision. It's just fantastic to see that light up. That's what gets me going. >> Now why high school? I get high school in the sense that they're old enough to take on a summer job like internship, but what is it about that age do you think that is so critical? >> Yeah so that age, I'll be honest with you, I think is almost too late for a lot of girls because we are able to reach, I just mentioned, that there were girls in there whose parents forced them into that. They had already self-selected out. Just like I had when I was in high school. I had self-selected out. I was way too cool to be in computing and so in some ways high school is a little bit too late. However, I think you nailed it, is that there's an opportunity there that they're mature enough that you can do something as immersive as a seven-week program and these girls are tremendous. These girls after a seven-week program are going back to their high schools and being the president of their Girls Who Code after school clubs and teaching them and I was just spending some time, we had a hangout with them recently where they said when their friends are asking, "What are you going to do this summer?" And the girls said, "I have no idea, "but you know what you should do "is you should do Girls Who Code." She said, "That's all I want to do. "I just want to do Girls Who Code all over again." And so I think you're right, I think it's opportunistic in that they're ready, but unfortunately I think it, like I said, it self-selects a lot of people out. I think fundamentally the thing that we need to do to reach the younger grades, the younger students, is it needs to be part of the curriculum. It absolutely 100% needs to be part of primary school curriculum so that they can get hooked and understand what it is before they self-select out because they're self-selecting out based on a perception and the image that they have of what it is, the Silicon Valley show, that's a perception. Sure it's satyr but young people see that and they don't see it as that. It just looks like something where there's a whole bunch of misbehaving men treating women poorly. >> So on that actually Cornelia, what do you make of the really distressing news that we're hearing that's not necessarily new, there has been the Uber bombshell of last week, but what we know about the culture here and maybe why there were so many women and it was almost 50/50 and then we started to see a drastic change and lower numbers of women in computer science and a lot of women just saying, "Ew, I don't want to be part of that. "I don't want that for my career." What do you say to them and what do you say to the men who are not even knowingly discouraging them from that kind of career? >> Oh, I love what you just said, not even knowingly. One of the things that I spend a lot of time talking with folks about every chance I get is implicit bias. I think that there's definitely overt sexism and in the last week we've seen that big in the news and that is a huge problem. I think I've heard statistics of whatever 60% of women have some level of relatively overt sexism, 100% of us get the implicit, the non-overt, and people who are well-meaning saying things, when they say for example, I was just chatting with a young lady a couple of weeks ago. She's a sophomore in college and she was telling me that last summer during her internship, within the first week or two, her boss was talking to her about her career plans moving forward and was already encouraging her to go more into management than into technology. This person was not evil, wasn't trying to keep women out of technology or keep women out of the most technical parts of a technology career, but he really genuinely believed that, "Maybe women are better at that and not so good at this," and it's really just our implicit biases. So I think that's a big part of it. And for the last year or two, I've been talking about implicit bias and I've been talking about the compensating mechanisms so first of all recognizing your implicit biases and then being conscious about them and then consciously combating them. I've become in the last several months, I would say six months, I've become more and more interested in the idea of how do we actually change those implicit biases. >> And this is men and women. It's not just the men here. >> No question because when I've had conversations where I've spoken for example on implicit bias, I've had women come up to me afterward and say, "I signed my son up for a coding camp. "I never even thought about signing up my daughter." >> Rebecca: Oh, that hurts. >> And I was like, "So you're signing her up now, right?" She's like, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah." And so I think it's really interesting to start thinking about how do we actually get rid of them? It's one thing to recognize them and then fight them, but it's another thing to get rid of them. I think the only way we can get rid of them goes back to the statistics that we talked about early on which is I am surprised when I see a woman technologist. That's just the way our brains work. We categorize things. >> We have an idea in our head of what that person looks like. >> We put things in buckets. We wouldn't be able to function in this world with so many different inputs unless we put things into buckets and we just put things into buckets largely based on statistics. And so I'm becoming increasingly interested in really amplifying the voice of women in technology because when we hear women's voices in technology, women who are up there not talking about what we're talking about today which is the gender imbalance, but talking about the tech itself, then we start to normalize, then we start to re-categorize things in our brains so that we're not surprised when we hear a woman talking about something deeply technical or somebody who's doing particle physics or something like that, we're not surprised anymore and say, "Wow she's a rocket scientist," it's normal. That's what I'm interested in doing is getting that to be the norm, not the exception. I think the first step what I would say to people, what I do say to men and women across the industry is first of all recognize it and then let's see what we can do to change it. >> Cornelia Davis, thank you so much. That's good advice, that's good advice. And we'll be right back with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here at VMware. (modern techno music)