(digital music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Bren Briggs, joins me next, the Director of DevOps and Cybersecurity at Hypergiant. Bren, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey there, I'm glad to be here. >> You have a very cool background, which I wish we had time to get into your mandolin playing, but we don't. Tell me a little bit about Hypergiant this is a company that's new to me? >> So we are an AI and Machine Learning Company, and we had the slogan we talked about a lot, it's almost tongue in cheek, "Tomorrowing Today" where we want to build and focus on technology that advances the state-of-the-art and we want to, where this deep history and background in services, where we build custom solutions for companies that have data problems and that have AI and machine learning problems. And they come to us and we help them make sense of their data and we build a custom software solution from top to bottom. And we help them with their data problems and their really difficult problems that they have there in a very specialized way. And yeah, that's what we do. It's really fun. >> "Tomorrowing Today", I like that build T-shirts with that on that. (Bren chuckles) So talk to me about the work that you guys are doing with SUSE Rancher Government Labs. You're doing some very cool work with the air force, help me understand that. >> Sure, so about a year and some change ago, we had a government contract, an air force contract, to develop some new or just to basically write an experiment with some new sensing technology onboard a satellite. So we built this satellite, we were talking about how we're going to employ DevOps' best practices on the satellite and if that's even a thing that can be done. How we get these rights of space and really thinking through the entire process. And as we did this, we were getting more and more deeply involved with a very very new group. Actually, we kind of started at the same time. A new group within the air force called, Platform One. Platform One's mission is to bring DevSecOps to the DoD Enterprise. And so as we're kind of starting off together and getting to know each other, Rob Slaughter who started and ran Platform One for the first bit of his existence, he said, "hey, we're going to incorporate some Platform One stuff into this. Let's talk about just building an actual Platform One satellite and see what that looks like." And so that was kind of the start of this whole idea was what do we do and how do we do DevSecOps in low Earth orbit? Can we put Kubernetes on satellite and will it work? >> And tell me some of the results? So, I used to work for NASA, so I would geek out on anything that has to do with the space program. But talk to me about some of the things that you uncovered bringing Kubernetes, AI, machine learning to this, outer Edge of Earth? >> I think the first thing that we learned that I think, it's an understatement to say that space is hard. (Both laughing) But it really is. And that was the part that we learned about was it was hard in all of the ways that we did not expect. And a lot of it had to do with just government and logistics. We learned that it is difficult a lot of times to just to find a way to get into space and then once you're there, how you operate in the conditions that you're in and how you could even communicate with your satellite is it's just a logistical adventure on top of all of the other engineering problems that you have while you're on low Earth orbit? The other thing that we figured out was awkward things are difficult. While you're on orbit, they can be slow or fragmented and so it pays to get it right the first time but that's not the nature of modern software development is you'd never get it right and you're continually updating. So that was a problem that really nagged us for awhile was after we did the wider experiment, like how would we continuously update this and what would we do? And those ideas and questions fed into the experiment that became Sat One and then the follow one much bigger experiment that became the Edge One and Edge working group. >> Tell me a little bit about the wider experiment, give me some context of how that relates to Platform One, Sat One? >> I can't (laughing) I can't really go into details about what wider did or anything like that. It was not a classified mission, it's just not something that I can disclose. >> Okay, got it. >> Sorry. >> So talk to me about some of the work that you guys are doing together Hypergiant with SUSE in terms of pushing forward the next generation of Kubernetes to low Earth orbit and beyond. >> Sure, so SUSE RGS, specifically, Chris Nuber, like, one of the things that I have to do is I have to be a cheerleader for all of the amazing people that were on this project. And two people in particular, Chris Tacke and Chris Nuber, were instrumental in making this work. I was like almost tangentially involved where I was doing some input and architecture and helping debug but it was really Chris Tacke and Chris Nuber that made this thing, that built this thing and made it work. And Chris Nuber, was our assigned resource from SUSE RGS. And he said, "Obviously SUSE is going to prefer, or SUSE is going to prefer SUSE products." That it makes sense. But there's a reason because the products that he implemented and the patterns that he implemented and the architecture and expertise that he brought were second to none, I don't think that we could have done better with any other distribution of Kubernetes. He recommended a K3s is a very lightweight Kubernetes distribution that had really good opinions. It's a single binary. It was very easy to deploy and manage and update and it just, it really didn't break. That was the best thing that we were looking for (chuckles) it was one solid piece with no moving parts, relatively speaking. And so Chris Nuber was very essential in providing the Kubernetes architecture while Chris Tacky was the one who helped us write some of the demo applications and build the fail over and out of band interaction that we were going to have from the hardware on the satellite to the Kubernetes control plane. >> Very cool. It sounds like you had a great collaborative team there, which is essential in any environment. >> We deed. >> And I liked how you described space as a logistical adventure that reminds me very much of my days at NASA. (Bren laughing) It definitely is a logistical adventure to put it mildly. Talk to me a little bit about the work that you're doing to define the Edge for the Department of Defense? That sounds very intriguing. >> Yeah, so this was almost a direct result of what happened with the sat one experiment where Rob Slaughter and a few of the other folks who saw what we did with sat one, you know, were again, logistical adventure. We built this entire thing and we worked so hard and we're moving through fright flight readiness checks and as things happen, funding kind of went. And so you've got all this experience and this like, prototype that this really confident that it's space ready and everything and they said, "hey, listen, you know, we have the same problem on our flight with terrestrial environments, they're nearly identical the only difference is, you know, you don't have to worry about radiation nearly as much." (laughing) So then, you know, we joked about that and we started this new idea, this Edge One idea as part of the AVMs program, where they're figuring out this new, like battlefield communications pattern of the future. And one of the things that they're really concerned about is secure processing and how do you do applications at like where people are stationed, which could be anywhere in very remote locations. Then that's what turned into Edge One is, you know, we imagined initially Edge One as satellite one without wings and earth bound and that grew into, well, what about submarines? What about carriers? What about command and control squadrons that are stationed in cities? What about special operators that are far forward? What about first responders who are moving into, you know, hazardous environmental conditions? Can you wear a Kubernetes cluster with like super low power arm chips? And so we started thinking of all these different applications of what Edge could be anywhere from a five volt board all the way up to a data center in a box. And that caused us to realize that we're going to break Edge into really three categories based on the amount of material or resources needed to power it and how hard it is to get to. So we have the Near Edge, which is, you know, you have data center like capabilities, and it's easy to get to it, but you, because you have people stationed with it, but you may have reached back once every month or so. So think, you know, a shift that's underway or an air gap system or something like that. And then you have a Tiny Edge, which is exactly like kind of the more traditional idea that you think of when you think of Edge, which is really, really tiny compute, maybe it's on a windmill or something I don't really know, pick your thing to put Kubernetes on that should never have Kubernetes, that's the kind of thing. And then you've got Far Edge, which is, you know, if the control plane crashes, good luck, you'll never getting to it. And so that would be a satellite. And so the far it... so really a lot of these, it depends on the failure mode. Like what happens when it fails and that for the most part defines kind of what category you're going to be in. >> Tiny Edge, Near Edge and Far Edge. I think Sir. Richard Branson and his team went to the Far Edge (chuckles) low Earth orbit >> He did (laughing). >> This last weekend, I guess, yeah. That low Earth orbit does seem like it would be the Far Edge. Talk to me a little bit about, I mean, you talk about these applications then from a defense perspective that very dramatically, what are some of the important lessons that you've learned besides if it breaks in the Far Edge, you're not getting to it. >> Some of the important lessons that we learned. So I actually did this exact job in the air force. I was a combat communicator, which meant that we took, by pure coincidence I'm back in this, like, I did not intend for this to happen its pure coincidence, (Lisa laughing) but, you know, we communicate, we went out to the Edge, right. We went out to the Near Edge and we did all of this stuff. And the biggest lesson, I think learning from doing this or doing that and then going into this is that the world doesn't have to revolve around SharePoint anymore (Lisa laughing) because we can shape our own habitation (Both laughing) >> That is good to know. >> If it can be done on SharePoint, the air force and the army will do it in SharePoint, I promise you. They've done some actually terrifying things with it. All joking aside though, I think that one of the things that we learned was the difference between like something being complex and complicated when it came to systems engineering and management, like this is a very complex system it's actually orders of magnitude more complex than the current deployments that are out there which is effectively VMware and you're migrating virtual machines across multiple physical nodes in these remote data centers. But it's also complicated, it's really difficult to manage these deployments and the hardware. And I remember like when I was in combat comm, we had this 72 hour goal to get all of our systems up. And it was kind of like a 50-50, if we would make it, it felt like most of the time where you had priorities for getting things up and running. And obviously, you know, that certain applications weren't as important as others. So they were the ones that had to fall on the wayside if you're going to make your 72 hour mark. But I'm just thinking about like how difficult it was to deploy and manage all of this stuff and now with Kubernetes, yes, the complexity is far higher, but we can make it so it's not as complicated. We can offload a lot of that brain sweat, the people in the rear echelon, where they can connect in remotely after you come up and you get reached back, they push your config and your mission profile is there. And now you're focused on the mission you're not focused on debugging pods, and you're focused on the mission and not focused on, you know, why my virtual machine didn't migrate or something like that. And we can get applications that are built in-house and updated continuously, and we can verify and validate the sources of where these things are coming from. And all of these are important problems to everybody, not just the military, but the military tends to have the money and the ability to think about these things first, 'cause that's where these problems tend to get solved first. >> So interesting. You've sort of had this circular experience being in the air force, now coming back and working on projects like this, what are some of the things that Hypergiant has learned? And some of the things that are next next for Hypergiant as a company? >> I think that we are getting really good at being a small contractor in the Federal space where we actually were just awarded an IDIQ with a cap of $950 million in a small group of, I think, 23 other companies. And so that shows right there the investment that the Federal Government has in us and the potential that they see for us to build and deliver these highly tailored and specialized solutions. The other thing that we've learned is how to form like coalitions to collaborate with a lot of these other smaller companies. I think that the days of seeing the Defense Industrial Base dominated by the same four people or five people are over. And it's not that these people, I mean, they've been, they've basically been propping up most of the defense industry for a very long time and I think a lot of people would argue that, you know, this is a problem, right, you have this near monopoly of a very few people, but the other thing is that they're not as nimble, they grow by acquisition and we have this ability to be highly tailored and specialized and we don't need to do everything in the world to survive. We can go and form coalitions with other groups to go solve a particular problem. Like we're great at AI and ML, and we're great at DevSecOps, then maybe we're not so great at, you know, hardware or you know, things like that. Like we can go partner up with these people and solve problems together and we don't have to be a Boeing to do it and you don't have to go hire a Boeing to do this. And I think that's really, really great, no slight to Boeing, but I think it's really great that it's a lot easier for smaller companies to do this and we are navigating this new world and we're bringing Agile into the government and that's, yeah, in some cases we have to drag them, kicking and screaming into this decade, but, you know, that's what we're doing and I'm very excited to see that because when I was in Agile and DevOps, those were words you didn't say, you weren't allowed to do that. >> No. >> Now they've done a complete 180, it's really cool. >> That's cool. I have a minimum that brings in thought diversity, having more companies to work with, but to your point, the agility that you bring in as a smaller company helping them to actually embrace Agile, that's huge because to your point, that's kind of historically not what government organizations are used to. So it sounds like a little bit they've learned a tremendous amount from working with small companies like Pepperdine. >> I like the thing so. Platform One is a fantastic example. So it was really started as a what we're calling software factories within the air force and within the DOD and other DOD branches have now started to replicate the pattern. So we have several software factories within the air force and Platform One is like the DevSecOps Software factory, and we have the ski camp and space camping, Kobayashi Maru and you're noticing a theme here (laughing) and so they're very nerdy names, but so we have these software factories and there's all these projects are being worked. But one of the amazing things I noticed when I showed up to work on the first day was that I had no idea who was uniformed and who was civilian. It was a completely badge off rank, off situation. Very few people showed up in uniform and the ones that did typically had their blouse off so you had no idea what their rank was. Everybody went by first name and we behaved like a start-up. And these civilians were coming from other startups like Hypergiant or a Timo or other very small, very specialized groups and SUSE RGS, of course they were there too and they're embedded in several different teams. And so you have this, like this quasi company that got this startup really that got formed and the culture is very, you know, very varies, you know, bay area startup type in some ways, for both better and worse. There's, I mean, we're, definitely full tilt on (laughs) on the Agile train there, but it's just, it's like nothing I've ever seen inside the DOD. And they're not just learning from these small companies and from Agile companies, but they're behaving like them. And it's spreading, they're seeing what work is getting done and what can be accomplished and how you can continuously deliver value instead of working for, you know, six or eight months and then showing the customer something and them hating it and you sending it back and, you know, it's more of a continuous improvement type thing. And I think that they're embracing that and I'm very excited to see it. >> That's important 'cause changing a culture is incredibly hard but seeing and hearing that they're embracing that is exciting. And I'm sure there's going to be many more things you could talk about generally, but I got to ask you if somebody like SUSE gave you $250,000, and you could buy one of the tickets on Branson's next flight, would you do it? >> I mean, yeah, why would I not? Like, how can I pass up a trip, (Lisa laughing) you know, go to the Edge of space. >> The Far Edge. >> Like yeah, the Far Edge, maybe I'll just, you know, hurdle the satellite out the window, as you know, we're up there, you know, peak and probably could throw it quite that fast, but we'll see. (Lisa laughing) But yeah, no, I think I would take the trip, yeah, that'd be fun. >> You're brave. Brave than I'm, I don't know. Well, Bren it's been delightful talking to you. Thank you for sharing what you guys at Hypergiant and SUSE have been doing together, the Department of Defense, the exciting things going on there and for the new definitions and my lexicon of the Edge, it's been great talking to you. >> Thank you, have a great day. >> You too. For Bren Briggs, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a CUBE Conversation. (digital music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering >>space and cybersecurity. Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly >>Over On Welcome to this Special virtual conference. The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from the Cube. I'm John for your host and master of ceremonies. Got a great topic today in this session. Really? The intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic and this conversation is the cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup. We have Jeff Armstrong's the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly Jeffrey. Thanks for jumping on and Bang. Go ahead. The second director of C four s R Division. And he's joining us from the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition Sustainment Department of Defense, D O D. And, of course, Steve Jake's executive director, founder, National Security Space Association and managing partner at Bello's. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session. We got an hour conversation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>So we got a virtual event here. We've got an hour, have a great conversation and love for you guys do? In opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity in space, Jeff will start with you. >>Well, thanks very much, John. It's great to be on with all of you. Uh, on behalf Cal Poly Welcome, everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission to Cal Poly. Whether that means traditional undergraduates, master students are increasingly mid career professionals looking toe up, skill or re skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers ready Day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves is lucky to be on California's beautiful central Coast. But in recent years, as we have developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, we have discovered that our location is even more advantages than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than u C. Santa Barbara, and the base represents the southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air force base have partner to support regional economic development to encourage the development of a commercial spaceport toe advocate for the space Command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because because both parties stand to benefit Vandenberg by securing new streams of revenue, workforce and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students, and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the Central Coast and the US, creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called Reach, which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to camp to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that is facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has has long been an important defense contractor, an important partner to Cal poly funding scholarships and facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years north of grimness funded scholarships for Cal Poly students this year, their funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars program, Cal Poly Scholars, a support both incoming freshman is transfer students. These air especially important because it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal, and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernized the U. S. I. C B M Armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. How Polly is partnered with many private companies, such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cybersecurity Institute, College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber ready workforce by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment, side by side with military, law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG and E, most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry as a rough approximation. More than 4500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace and defense as their employment sector on linked in, and it's not just our engineers and computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow Panelists not too long ago, >>are >>speaking to bang, we learned that Rachel sins, one of our liberal arts arts majors, is working in his office. So shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates sword extraordinary heights such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International space station later this year as I close. All of which is to say that we're deeply committed the workforce, development and redevelopment that we understand the value of public private partnerships and that were eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state in the nation and our past efforts in space, cybersecurity and links to our partners at as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cybersecurity. Thank you so much, John. >>President, I'm sure thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique progressive. You and wanna tip your hat to you guys over there. Thank you very much for those comments. Appreciate it. Bahng. Department of Defense. Exciting you gotta defend the nation spaces Global. Your opening statement. >>Yes, sir. Thanks, John. Appreciate that day. Thank you, everybody. I'm honored to be this panel along with President Armstrong, Cal Poly in my long longtime friend and colleague Steve Jakes of the National Security Space Association, to discuss a very important topic of cybersecurity workforce development, as President Armstrong alluded to, I'll tell you both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the N S. A have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them in training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs. A swell Asare collective National security Earlier today, during Session three high, along with my colleague Chris Hansen discussed space, cyber Security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferations of hundreds, if not thousands, of satellites providing a variety of services, including communications allowing for global Internet connectivity. S one example within the O. D. We continue to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you one of the enabling technologies eyes the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used unemployed for the U. D. Certainly not lost on Me is the fact that Cal Poly Pioneer Cube SATs 2020 some years ago, and they set the standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the valiant benefit gained way ahead of everybody else, it seems, and Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steve's I colleague, current CEO Mr Bill Britain, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Uh, earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's Cyber Innovation Challenge. In June works Cal Poly host California Mill and high school students and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid. Unfortunately, the pandemic change the plan. Why I truly look forward. Thio feature events such as these Thio participating. Now I want to recognize my good friend Steve Jakes, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here over two decades or so, who was in acknowledge space expert and personally, I truly applaud him for having the foresight of years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology but Polly policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operational izing space. Space is our newest horrifying domain. That's not a secret anymore. Uh, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains such as land, air and sea, obviously all of strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict they will need to be. They will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts in a joint operation. We must succeed. All to defending space is critical as critical is defending our other operational domains. Funny space is no longer the sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly, as I discussed in the previous session, commercial space is taking the lead a lot of different areas, including R and D, A so called new space, so cyber security threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. Three US considers and federal access to and freedom to operate in space vital to advancing security, economic prosperity, prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country. That's making cyberspace an inseparable component. America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space force ah, year ago or so as the newest military service is like the other services. Its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect us and allied interest in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Imagine combining that US space force with the U. S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of space and cyberspace operation strengthened U D capabilities and integrate and bolster d o d cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires had trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy as well as high technical skill set much like we're seeing in stem, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now the D. O. D. Is recognized the importance of the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage his growth Back in 2013 the deputy secretary of defense signed the D. O d cyberspace workforce strategy to create a comprehensive, well equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the D. O. D and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program or site up. It's an exchange programs, which is very interesting, in which a private sector employees can naturally work for the D. O. D. In a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas are important to the d. O. D. A key responsibility of cybersecurity community is military leaders on the related threats and cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talk about rapid that position, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation. Likewise, cybersecurity must keep up with this challenge to cyber security. Needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent investing the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity, workforce, streets, future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John. Thank you. >>Thank you so much bomb for those comments and you know, new challenges and new opportunities and new possibilities and free freedom Operating space. Critical. Thank you for those comments. Looking forward. Toa chatting further. Steve Jakes, executive director of N. S. S. A Europe opening statement. >>Thank you, John. And echoing bangs thanks to Cal Poly for pulling these this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, we on behalf the association delighted and honored Thio be on this panel with President Armstrong along with my friend and colleague Bonneau Glue Mahad Something for you all to know about Bomb. He spent the 1st 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve. Very few people do that. So bang on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your long life long devotion to service to our nation. We really appreciate that and I also echo a bang shot out to that guy Bill Britain, who has been a long time co conspirator of ours for a long time and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly Bill, keep it up. But professor arms trying to keep a close eye on him. Uh, I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by by President Armstrong and bahng. Uh, in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. Um, we all recently reflected again on that tragic 9 11 surprise attack on our homeland. And it's an appropriate time, we think, to take pause while the percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or babies then For the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9 11 has taught us a lot to include to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open to include those quote eyes and ears from space, making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect. Protecting our nation requires we work in a cybersecurity environment at all times. But, you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see him. No, sir, We see Space launches man there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch, they become invisible. So what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well, to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine by Bonds and my good friend Chuck Beans. Chuck. It's a space guy, actually had Bonds job a fuse in the Pentagon. He is now chairman and chief strategy officer at York Space Systems, and in his spare time he's chairman of the small satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand. So I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article. Uh, they're afraid somewhat. So these are Chuck's words. Let's talk about average Joe and playing Jane. Before heading to the airport for a business trip to New York City, Joe checks the weather forecast informed by Noah's weather satellites to see what pack for the trip. He then calls an uber that space app. Everybody uses it matches riders with drivers via GPS to take into the airport, So Joe has lunch of the airport. Unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made with the help of precision farming made possible through optimized irrigation and fertilization, with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS on the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, aided by GPS and nose weather satellites. And Joe makes his meeting on time to join his New York colleagues in a video call with a key customer in Singapore made possible by telecommunication satellites. Around to his next meeting, Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting to another to the other side of town. So he calmly tells Syria to adjust the destination, and his satellite guided Google maps redirects him to the new location. That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite. The report details a meeting among world leaders discussing the developing crisis in Syria. As it turns out, various forms of quote remotely sensed. Information collected from satellites indicate that yet another band, chemical weapon, may have been used on its own people. Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary as they cruise across the Atlantic, made possible again by communications satellites and Joe's parents can enjoy the call without even wondering how it happened the next morning. Back home, Joe's wife, Jane, is involved in a car accident. Her vehicle skids off the road. She's knocked unconscious, but because of her satellite equipped on star system, the crash is detected immediately and first responders show up on the scene. In time, Joe receives the news books. An early trip home sends flowers to his wife as he orders another uber to the airport. Over that 24 hours, Joe and Jane used space system applications for nearly every part of their day. Imagine the consequences if at any point they were somehow denied these services, whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. And each of these satellite applications used in this case were initially developed for military purposes and continue to be, but also have remarkable application on our way of life. Just many people just don't know that. So, ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to chuck beans, well, the United States has a proud heritage being the world's leading space faring nation, dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Today we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to quote, wash and listen, provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation and timing from our GPS system. Much of what you heard in Lieutenant General J. T. Thompson earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also our also to our quality of life is Chuck told us. We simply no longer could live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversary like adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing ketchup while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2000 and seven, China demonstrated it's a set system by actually shooting down is one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counter space systems to disrupt hours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to bay well as Bond mentioned, the United States has responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and in Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational you United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located. Vandenberg Air Force Base Combined with our intelligence community today, we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space. And that's a very, very good thing. Commence, really. On the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association devoted solely to supporting the national security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the D C area, but we have arms and legs across the country, and we are loaded with extraordinary talent. In scores of Forman, former government executives, So S s a is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway ranging from a number of thought provoking policy. Papers are recurring space time Webcast supporting Congress's Space Power Caucus and other main serious efforts. Check us out at NSS. A space dot org's One of our strategic priorities in central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development. Just like cow calling. We will work with our U. S. Government customers, industry leaders and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry and two assistant mentoring and training as their careers. Progress on that point, we're delighted. Be delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with him very soon. So students stay tuned something I can tell you Space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry work force is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists, method and mathematicians, but also with a large non technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets things thes systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board from cost estimating cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal and many other support. Tasker Integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff, no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. When summary as bang had mentioned Aziz, well, there is a great deal of exciting challenges ahead we will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead, and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Richard Branson are in the game, stimulating new ideas in business models, other private investors and start up companies. Space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and microelectronics now allows the potential for a plethora of small SAT systems to possibly replace older satellites the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much, and I look forward to the further conversation. >>Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool. It's relevant. But it's important, as you pointed out, and you're awesome story about how it impacts our life every day. So I really appreciate that great story. I'm glad you took the time Thio share that you forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you. But that would add that to the story later. Great stuff. My first question is let's get into the conversations because I think this is super important. President Armstrong like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bang and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives. Through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation. There are opportunities now with with research and grants, and this is, ah, funding of innovation that it's highly accelerate. It's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >>Yeah, I really appreciate that And appreciate the comments of my colleagues on it really boils down to me to partnerships, public private partnerships. You mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockie Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Space six JPL, also member of organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science, and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity in space but those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward at Cal Poly Aziz mentioned we've been involved with Cube set. Uh, we've have some secure work and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Uh, those partnerships are essential not only for getting the r and d done, but also the students, the faculty, whether masters or undergraduate, can be involved with that work. Uh, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during Covic or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or our industry. Uh, and then they're even better equipped, uh, to hit the ground running. And of course, we'd love to see even more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that a secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical, and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest and all demographics of California and the US into this field, uh, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential, and our goal is to grow them just like I know other colleagues and C. S u and the U C are planning to dio, >>you know, just as my age I've seen I grew up in the eighties, in college and during that systems generation and that the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives. They were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bond talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud. And Bezos was mentioned. Elon Musk. Sir Richard Branson. You got new ideas coming in from the outside. You have an accelerated clock now on terms of the innovation cycles, and so you got to react differently. You guys have programs to go outside >>of >>the Defense Department. How important is this? Because the workforce that air in schools and our folks re skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table. So share your thoughts. >>No, thanks, John. Thanks for the opportunity responded. And that's what you hit on the notes back in the eighties, R and D in space especially, was dominated by my government funding. Uh, contracts and so on. But things have changed. As Steve pointed out, A lot of these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork funding R and D. So they're taking the lead. So what we can do within the deal, the in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done on. Uh, since they're they're, you know, paving the way to new new approaches and new way of doing things. And I think we can We could certainly learn from that. And leverage off of that saves us money from an R and D standpoint while benefiting from from the product that they deliver, you know, within the O D Talking about workforce development Way have prioritized we have policies now to attract and retain talent. We need I I had the folks do some research and and looks like from a cybersecurity workforce standpoint. A recent study done, I think, last year in 2019 found that the cybersecurity workforce gap in the U. S. Is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened off getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like assess a professor Armstrong indicated, because we're gonna need them to be in place. Uh, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so, Uh, on top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with with stamps students, we can't afford not to have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within the with the not only deal with the but the commercial side as well. Thank you. >>How's the gap? Get? Get filled. I mean, this is the this is again. You got cybersecurity. I mean, with space. It's a whole another kind of surface area, if you will, in early surface area. But it is. It is an I o t. Device if you think about it. But it does have the same challenges. That's kind of current and and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap Get filled, Steve Or President Armstrong? I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What is some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >>Steve, go ahead. I'll follow up. >>Okay. Thanks. I'll let you correct. May, uh, it's a really good question, and it's the way I would. The way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it up front. And it comes with our teaching, etcetera across the board and from from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it. We've gotta have secure systems with everything we do and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them. Eyes is so paramount to the whole the whole cycle, and and that's kind of and it really takes focused attention. And we continue to use the word focus from an NSS, a perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce on the government side, but not nearly enough of them. And likewise on industry side. We could use Maura's well, but when you get down to it, you know we can connect dots. You know that the the aspect That's a Professor Armstrong talked about earlier toe where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that. That network at that ecosystem the will of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power not just of one or two companies, but our our entire membership to help out >>President >>Trump. Yeah, I would. I would also add it again. It's back to partnerships that I talked about earlier. One of our partners is high schools and schools fortune Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of, uh, administrations in California across party lines and education. Their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly and visit our learned by doing lab and you, you've got to get students interested in stem at a early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running. And that's exacerbated and really stress. Now, with this covert induced recession, California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation. But that is that has dropped this year or reasons. We all understand, uh, due to Kobe, and so our partnerships, our creativity on making sure that we help those that need the most help financially uh, that's really key, because the gaps air huge eyes. My colleagues indicated, you know, half of half a million jobs and you need to look at the the students that are in the pipeline. We've got to enhance that. Uh, it's the in the placement rates are amazing. Once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, uh, placement rates are like 94%. >>Many of our >>engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just gonna take key partnerships working together. Uh, and that continued partnership with government, local, of course, our state of CSU on partners like we have here today, both Stephen Bang So partnerships the thing >>e could add, you know, the collaboration with universities one that we, uh, put a lot of emphasis, and it may not be well known fact, but as an example of national security agencies, uh, National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber, the Fast works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate its 45 future cyber first responders as an example, so that Zatz vibrant and healthy and something that we ought Teoh Teik, banjo >>off. Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point. I'd like to define what is a public private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped. It's a modern error. Things air accelerated get you got security. So you get all these things kind of happen is a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business. Andi in the public sector. So >>what is what >>is a modern public private partnership? What does it look like today? Because people are learning differently, Covert has pointed out, which was that we're seeing right now. How people the progressions of knowledge and learning truth. It's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public private partnership and some some examples and improve points? Can you can you guys share that? We'll start with the Professor Armstrong. >>Yeah. A zai indicated earlier. We've had on guy could give other examples, but Northup Grumman, uh, they helped us with cyber lab. Many years ago. That is maintained, uh, directly the software, the connection outside its its own unit so that students can learn the hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses, and I know that that has already had some considerations of space. But that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public private partnership has benefits to both entities. Uh, in the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the is the talent, the talent that is, that is needed, what we've been working on for years of the, you know, that undergraduate or master's or PhD programs. But now it's also spilling into Skilling and re Skilling. As you know, Jobs. Uh, you know, folks were in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago. But it also spills into other aspects that can expand even mawr. We're very fortunate. We have land, there's opportunities. We have one tech part project. We're expanding our tech park. I think we'll see opportunities for that, and it'll it'll be adjusted thio, due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before Cove it. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important. Um, I wanna make sure that I'm driving across the bridge. Or or that that satellites being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training, uh, to do that and that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on a campus, getting that experience expanding and as adult. And we're gonna need those public private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these stem and engineering fields. >>It's interesting People in technology can work together in these partnerships in a new way. Bank Steve Reaction Thio the modern version of what a public, successful private partnership looks like. >>If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically, Dodi's has have had, ah, high bar thio, uh, to overcome, if you will, in terms of getting rapid pulling in your company. This is the fault, if you will and not rely heavily in are the usual suspects of vendors and like and I think the deal is done a good job over the last couple of years off trying to reduce the burden on working with us. You know, the Air Force. I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days where companies come in, do a two hour pitch and immediately notified of a wooden award without having to wait a long time. Thio get feedback on on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best. Thio strengthen that partnership with companies outside the main group of people that we typically use. >>Steve, any reaction? Comment to add? >>Yeah, I would add a couple of these air. Very excellent thoughts. Uh, it zits about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone. You know, the world that Bond and Bond lives in and I used to live in in the past has been quite structured. It's really about we know what the threat is. We need to go fix it, will design it says we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Um, life is so much more complicated than that. And so it's it's really to me. I mean, you take you take an example of the pitch days of bond talks about I think I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, uh, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks in academia. Because we are all in this together in a lot of ways, for example. I mean, we just sent the paper to the White House of their requests about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective? And we hope Thio embellish on this over time once the the initiative matures. But we have a piece of it, for example, is the thing we call clear for success getting back Thio Uh, President Armstrong's comments at the collegiate level. You know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program they grabbed kids in their their underclass years identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this. Get them scholarships. Um, um, I have a job waiting for them that their contract ID for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with S C I clearance. We believe that could be done so, and that's an example of ways in which the public private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on Day one. We think those kind of things can happen. It just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, give them giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can like these days. >>That's a great point, E. President. >>I just want to jump in and echo both the bank and Steve's comments. But Steve, that you know your point of, you know, our graduates. We consider them ready Day one. Well, they need to be ready Day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's that's exciting, uh, and needed very much needed mawr of it. Some of it's happening, but way certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans, >>and that's a great example of good Segway. My next question. This kind of reimagining sees work flows, eyes kind of breaking down the old the old way and bringing in kind of a new way accelerated all kind of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue, and this is the next topic. How can we employ new creative solutions? Because, let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern. You know the programs you get you particularly through the system. This is this is multiple disciplines. Cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart and math and have, ah, degree in anthropology and even the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new new world. What are some creative approaches that >>you know, we're >>in the workforce >>is quite good, John. One of the things I think that za challenge to us is you know, we got somehow we got me working for with the government, sexy, right? The part of the challenge we have is attracting the right right level of skill sets and personnel. But, you know, we're competing oftentimes with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples of a big deal. And those are the same talents. We need to support a lot of programs we have in the U. D. So somehow we have to do a better job to Steve's point off, making the work within the U. D within the government something that they would be interested early on. So I tracked him early. I kind of talked about Cal Poly's, uh, challenge program that they were gonna have in June inviting high school kid. We're excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security, and so on those air something. So I think we have to do it. Continue to do what were the course the next several years. >>Awesome. Any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be on idea, or just a kind of stoked the ideation out their internship. So obviously internships are known, but like there's gotta be new ways. >>I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier getting students in high school, uh, and aligning them sometimes. Uh, that intern first internship, not just between the freshman sophomore year, but before they inter cal poly per se. And they're they're involved s So I think that's, uh, absolutely key. Getting them involved many other ways. Um, we have an example of of up Skilling a redeveloped work redevelopment here in the Central Coast. PG and e Diablo nuclear plant as going to decommission in around 2020 24. And so we have a ongoing partnership toe work on reposition those employees for for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond. Uh, but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the up skilling and re Skilling uh, on I think that's where you know, we were talking about that Purdue University. Other California universities have been dealing with online programs before cove it and now with co vid uh, so many more faculty or were pushed into that area. There's going to be much more going and talk about workforce development and up Skilling and Re Skilling The amount of training and education of our faculty across the country, uh, in in virtual, uh, and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >>I want to get your guys thoughts on one final question as we in the in the segment. And we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where you know, SAS business model subscription. That's on the business side. But >>one of The >>things that's clear in this trend is technology, and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at the world now we're living in co vid um, Cal Poly. You guys have remote learning Right now. It's a infancy. It's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity to enable new ways to collaborate, Right? So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed? How these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery higher to build the workforce? These air opportunities? How do you guys view this new digital transformation? >>Well, I think there's there's a huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium. We're filming this on one day, and it's going to stream live, and then the three of us, the four of us, can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing. And I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this this symposium, I think there's more and more that we can do from a Cal poly perspective with our pedagogy. So you know, linked to learn by doing in person will always be important to us. But we see virtual. We see partnerships like this can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in person time, decrease the time to degree enhanced graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps or students that don't have the same advantages. S so I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the up Skilling and Re Skilling, where employees air all over, they can be reached virtually then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. Eso I'm I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's gonna be different with every university with every partnership. It's one. Size does not fit all. >>It's so many possibilities. Bond. I could almost imagine a social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the d o. D. Possibly in the future. But >>these are the >>kind of kind of crazy ideas that are needed. Are your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross policy? >>I think technology is gonna be revolutionary here, John. You know, we're focusing lately on what we call digital engineering to quicken the pace off, delivering capability to warfighter. As an example, I think a I machine language all that's gonna have a major play and how we operate in the future. We're embracing five G technologies writing ability Thio zero latency or I o t More automation off the supply chain. That sort of thing, I think, uh, the future ahead of us is is very encouraging. Thing is gonna do a lot for for national defense on certainly the security of the country. >>Steve, your final thoughts. Space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people. Your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity >>Such a great question in such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Um echoing are my colleague's sentiments. I would add to it. You know, a lot of this has I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. Um, you know, we're not attuned to doing things fast. Uh, but the dramatic You know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now. I think it ties back Thio hoping Thio, convince some of our senior leaders on what I call both sides of the Potomac River that it's worth taking these gamble. We do need to take some of these things very way. And I'm very confident, confident and excited and comfortable. They're just gonna be a great time ahead and all for the better. >>You know, e talk about D. C. Because I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies in Congress and Senate. So I was getting job when I say that. Sorry. Presidential. Go ahead. >>Yeah, I know. Just one other point. Uh, and and Steve's alluded to this in bonded as well. I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships. That doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And I would also I have a zoo. You talk about technology. I have to reflect on something that happened in, uh, you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing a traditional data a data warehouse, data storage data center, and we partner with a W S. And thank goodness we had that in progress on it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before Cove. It hit on with this partnership with the digital transformation hub. So there is a great example where, uh, we we had that going. That's not something we could have started. Oh, covitz hit. Let's flip that switch. And so we have to be proactive on. We also have thio not be risk averse and do some things differently. Eyes that that is really salvage the experience for for students. Right now, as things are flowing, well, we only have about 12% of our courses in person. Uh, those essential courses, uh, and just grateful for those partnerships that have talked about today. >>Yeah, and it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these air themes that expand into space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you. very much for sharing your insights. I know. Bang, You're gonna go into the defense side of space and your other sessions. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time for great session. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. >>I'm John Furry with the Cube here in Palo Alto, California Covering and hosting with Cal Poly The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special virtual conference, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from The Cube. I'm John Furey, your host and master of ceremony's got a great topic today, and this session is really the intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic, and this conversation is a cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup, we've Jeff Armstrong is the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly. Jeffrey, thanks for jumping on and Bong Gumahad. The second, Director of C4ISR Division, and he's joining us from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition and sustainment of Department of Defense, DOD, and of course Steve Jacques is Executive Director, founder National Security Space Association, and managing partner at Velos. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session, we've got an hour of conversation, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So we've got a virtual event here, we've got an hour to have a great conversation, I'd love for you guys to do an opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity and space, Jeff, we'll start with you. >> Well, thanks very much, John, it's great to be on with all of you. On behalf of Cal Poly, welcome everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission at Cal Poly, whether that means traditional undergraduates, masters students, or increasingly, mid-career professionals looking to upskill or re-skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers, ready day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves as lucky to be on California's beautiful central coast, but in recent years, as we've developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, We have discovered that our location is even more advantageous than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than UC Santa Barbara and the base represents the Southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air Force Base have partnered to support regional economic development, to encourage the development of a commercial space port, to advocate for the space command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because both parties stand to benefit. Vandenberg, by securing new streams of revenue, workforce, and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the central coast and the U.S., creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure, and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called REACH which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that has facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has as long been an important defense contractor and an important partner to Cal Poly, funding scholarships in facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years, Northrop Grumman has funded scholarships for Cal Poly students. This year, they're funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars Program. Cal Poly scholars support both incoming freshmen and transfer students. These are especially important, 'cause it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented, and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernize the U.S. ICBM armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting... Protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. Cal Poly has partnered with many private companies such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web Services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part, through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cyber Security Institute College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber-ready workforce, by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment side by side with military law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG&E most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry. As a rough approximation, more than 4,500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace or defense as their employment sector on LinkedIn. And it's not just our engineers in computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow panelists not too long ago, speaking to Bong, we learned that Rachel Sims, one of our liberal arts majors is working in his office, so shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates soar to extraordinary heights, such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International Space Station later this year. As I close, all of which is to say that we're deeply committed to workforce development and redevelopment, that we understand the value of public-private partnerships, and that we're eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state and the nation, in our past efforts in space, cyber security and links to our partners at, as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cyber security. Thank you so much, John. >> President Armstrong, thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique, progressive view and want to tip a hat to you guys over there, thank you very much for those comments, appreciate it. Bong, Department of Defense. Exciting, you've got to defend the nation, space is global, your opening statement. >> Yes, sir, thanks John, appreciate that. Thank you everybody, I'm honored to be in this panel along with Preston Armstrong of Cal Poly and my longtime friend and colleague Steve Jacques of the National Security Space Association to discuss a very important topic of a cybersecurity workforce development as President Armstrong alluded to. I'll tell you, both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the NSSA have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them and training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs, as well as our collective national security. Earlier today, during session three, I, along with my colleague, Chris Samson discussed space cyber security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferation of hundreds, if not thousands of satellites, providing a variety of services including communications, allowing for global internet connectivity, as one example. Within DOD, we continued to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you, one of the enabling technologies, is the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used and employed for DOD. Certainly not lost on me is the fact that Cal Poly pioneered CubeSats 28, 27 years ago, and they set a standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the value and benefit gained way ahead of everybody else it seems. And Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I'm especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steven's colleague, the current CIO, Mr. Bill Britton, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's cyber innovation challenge in June, Oops, Cal Poly hosts California middle, and high school students, and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid, unfortunately, the pandemic changed the plan, but I truly look forward to future events such as these, to participate in. Now, I want to recognize my good friend, Steve Jacques, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here, over two decades or so, who was an acknowledged space expert and personally I've truly applaud him for having the foresight a few years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology, but policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operationalizing space. Space, it certainly was fortifying domain, it's not a secret anymore, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains, such as land, air, and sea, obviously all are strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict, they will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts, and in a joint operation, we must succeed in all. So defending space is critical, as critical as to defending our other operational domains. Funny, space is the only sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly as I discussed in a previous session, commercial space is taking the lead in a lot of different areas, including R&D, the so-called new space. So cybersecurity threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. The U.S. considers and futhered access to and freedom to operate in space, vital to advancing security, economic prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country, thus making cyberspace an inseparable component of America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space Force a year ago or so as the newest military service. Like the other services, its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect U.S. and allied interest in space and to provide spacecape builders who joined force. Imagine combining that U.S. Space Force with the U.S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of the space and cyberspace operation, strengthen DOD capabilities and integrate and bolster a DOD cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires a trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy, as well as a high technical skill set. Much like we're seeing in STEM, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now, the DOD has recognized the importance to the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage its growth. Back in 2013, the Deputy Secretary of Defense signed a DOD Cyberspace Workforce Strategy, to create a comprehensive, well-equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now, this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the DOD and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program, or CITE that it's an exchange program, which is very interesting in which a private sector employee can naturally work for the DOD in a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas, important to the DOD. A key responsibility of the cyber security community is military leaders, unrelated threats, and the cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talked about rapid acquisition, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation, likewise, cyber security must keep up with this challenge. So cyber security needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent, invest in the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity workforce for the future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John, thank you. >> Thank you so much, Bob for those comments and, you know, new challenges or new opportunities and new possibilities and freedom to operate in space is critical, thank you for those comments, looking forward to chatting further. Steve Jacques, Executive Director of NSSA, you're up, opening statement. >> Thank you, John and echoing Bongs, thanks to Cal Poly for pulling this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, on behalf of the association, I'm delighted and honored to be on this panel of President Armstrong, along with my friend and colleague, Bong Gumahad. Something for you all to know about Bong, he spent the first 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve, very few people do that. So Bong, on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your lifelong devotion to service to our nation, we really appreciate that. And I also echo a Bong shout out to that guy, Bill Britton. who's been a long time co-conspirator of ours for a long time, and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly, Bill, keep it up. But Professor Armstrong, keep a close eye on him. (laughter) I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by President Armstrong and Bong. And in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. We all recently reflected again on that tragic 9/11 surprise attack on our homeland and it's an appropriate time we think to take pause. While a percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or were babies then, for the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9/11 has taught us a lot to include, to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open, to include those "eyes and ears from space," making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect, protecting our nation requires we work in a cyber secure environment at all times. But you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see 'em. Now sure, we see space launches, man, there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch they become invisible, so what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine, by Bongs and my good friend, Chuck Beames, Chuck is a space guy, actually had Bongs job a few years in the Pentagon. He's now Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at York Space Systems and in his spare time, he's Chairman of the Small Satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand, so I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article, paraphrase somewhat, so these are Chuck's words. "Let's talk about average Joe and plain Jane. "Before heading to the airport for a business trip "to New York city, Joe checks the weather forecast, "informed by NOAA's weather satellites, "to see what to pack for the trip. "He then calls an Uber, that space app everybody uses, "it matches riders with drivers via GPS, "to take him to the airport. "So Joe has launched in the airport, "unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made "with the help of precision farming "made possible to optimize the irrigation and fertilization "with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS. "On the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, "aided by GPS and NOAA's weather satellites "and Joe makes his meeting on time "to join his New York colleagues in a video call "with a key customer in Singapore, "made possible by telecommunication satellites. "En route to his next meeting, "Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting "to the other side of town. "So he calmly tells Siri to adjust the destination "and his satellite-guided Google maps redirect him "to the new location. "That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite, "report details of meeting among world leaders, "discussing the developing crisis in Syria. "As it turns out various forms of "'remotely sensed information' collected from satellites "indicate that yet another banned chemical weapon "may have been used on its own people. "Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents "and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary "as they cruise across the Atlantic, "made possible again by communication satellites "and Joe's parents can enjoy the call "without even wondering how it happened. "The next morning back home, "Joe's wife, Jane is involved in a car accident. "Her vehicle skids off the road, she's knocked unconscious, "but because of her satellite equipped OnStar system, "the crash is detected immediately, "and first responders show up on the scene in time. "Joe receives the news, books an early trip home, "sends flowers to his wife "as he orders another Uber to the airport. "Over that 24 hours, "Joe and Jane used space system applications "for nearly every part of their day. "Imagine the consequences if at any point "they were somehow denied these services, "whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. "In each of these satellite applications used in this case, "were initially developed for military purposes "and continued to be, but also have remarkable application "on our way of life, just many people just don't know that." So ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to Chuck Beames. Well, the United States has a proud heritage of being the world's leading space-faring nation. Dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, today, we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to "watch and listen," provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation, and timing from our GPS system, much of which you heard in Lieutenant General JT Thomson's earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also to our quality of life. As Chuck told us, we simply no longer can live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing catch up while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2007, China demonstrated its ASAT system by actually shooting down one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counterspace systems to disrupt ours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to be. Well, as a Bong mentioned, the United States have responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and the Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Combined with our intelligence community, today we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space, and that's a very, very good thing. Commensurately on the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association, devoted solely to supporting the National Security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the DC area, but we have arms and legs across the country and we are loaded with extraordinary talent in scores of former government executives. So NSSA is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway, ranging from a number of thought-provoking policy papers, our recurring spacetime webcasts, supporting Congress's space power caucus, and other main serious efforts. Check us out at nssaspace.org. One of our strategic priorities and central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development, just like Cal-Poly. We will work with our U.S. government customers, industry leaders, and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry, and to assist in mentoring and training as their careers progress. On that point, we're delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with them very soon. So students stay tuned, something I can tell you, space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry workforce is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists and mathematicians, but also with a large non-technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets these systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board, from cost estimating, cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal, and many other support tasks that are integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce, tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff and no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. In summary, as Bong had mentioned as well, there's a great deal of exciting challenges ahead. We will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, are in the game, stimulating new ideas and business models. Other private investors and startup companies, space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and micro electronics now allows a potential for a plethora of small sat systems to possibly replace older satellites, the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much and I look forward to the further conversation. >> Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool, it's relevant, but it's important as you pointed out in your awesome story about how it impacts our life every day so I really appreciate that great story I'm glad you took the time to share that. You forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you, but we'll add that to the story later, great stuff. My first question is, let's get into the conversations, because I think this is super important. President Armstrong, I'd like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bong and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation, there are opportunities now with research and grants, and this is a funding of innovation that is highly accelerated, it's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >> Yeah, I really appreciate that and appreciate the comments of my colleagues. And it really boils down to me to partnerships, public-private partnerships, you have mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Space X, JPL, also member of an organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity and space. But those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward. At Cal Poly, as mentioned, we've been involved with CubeSat, we've have some secure work, and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Those partnerships are essential, not only for getting the R&D done, but also the students, the faculty, whether they're master's or undergraduate can be involved with that work, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during COVID or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or industry, and then they're even better equipped to hit the ground running. And of course we'd love to see more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest in all demographics of California and the U.S. into this field, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential and our goal is to grow them just like I know our other colleagues in the CSU and the UC are planning to do. >> You know, just as my age I've seen, I grew up in the eighties and in college and they're in that system's generation and the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives, they were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bong, talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud and Bezos was mentioned, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, you got new ideas coming in from the outside, you have an accelerated clock now in terms of the innovation cycles and so you got to react differently, you guys have programs to go outside of the defense department, how important is this because the workforce that are in schools and/or folks re-skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table, so share your thoughts. >> No, thanks Johnny, thanks for the opportunity to respond to, and that's what, you know, you hit on the nose back in the 80's, R&D and space especially was dominated by government funding, contracts and so on, but things have changed as Steve pointed out, allow these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork, funding R&D so they're taking the lead, so what we can do within the DOD in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done. And since they're, you know, paving the way to new approaches and new way of doing things and I think we can certainly learn from that and leverage off of that, saves us money from an R&D standpoint, while benefiting from the product that they deliver. You know, within DOD, talking about workforce development, you know, we have prioritized and we have policies now to attract and retain the talent we need. I had the folks do some research and it looks like from a cybersecurity or workforce standpoint, a recent study done, I think last year in 2019, found that the cyber security workforce gap in U.S. is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened, getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like Professor Armstrong indicated because we're going to need them to be in place, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so. On top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with STEM students. We can't afford not have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within DoD, not only DoD but the commercial side as well, thank you. >> How's the gap get filled, I mean, this is, again, you've got cybersecurity, I mean, with space it's a whole other kind of surface area if you will, it's not really surface area, but it is an IOT device if you think about it, but it does have the same challenges, that's kind of current and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap get filled, Steve or President Armstrong, I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What are some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >> Steve, go ahead., I'll follow up. >> Okay, thanks, I'll let you correct me. (laughter) It's a really good question, and the way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it upfront and it comes with our teaching, et cetera, across the board. And from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it, we've got to have secure systems in everything we do, and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them is so paramount to the whole cycle. And that's kind of, it really takes a focused attention and we continue to use the word focus from an NSSA perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce, on the government side, but not nearly enough of them and likewise on the industry side, we could use more as well, but when you get down to it, you know, we can connect dots, you know, the aspects that Professor Armstrong talked about earlier to where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that network, that ecosystem if you will, of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power, not just of one or two companies, but of our entire membership thereabout. >> President Armstrong-- >> Yeah, I would also add it again, it's back to the partnerships that I talked about earlier, one of our partners is high schools and schools Fortune, Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of administrations in California across party lines and education, their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly, and visit our learned-by-doing lab. And you've got to get students interested in STEM at an early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid, so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running and that's exacerbated and really stress now with this COVID induced recession. California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation, but that has brought this year for reasons all understand due to COVID. And so our partnerships, our creativity, and making sure that we help those that need the most help financially, that's really key because the gaps are huge. As my colleagues indicated, you know, half a million jobs and I need you to look at the students that are in the pipeline, we've got to enhance that. And the placement rates are amazing once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, placement rates are like 94%. Many of our engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just going to take a key partnerships working together and that continued partnership with government local, of course, our state, the CSU, and partners like we have here today, both Steve and Bong so partnerships is the thing. >> You know, that's a great point-- >> I could add, >> Okay go ahead. >> All right, you know, the collaboration with universities is one that we put on lot of emphasis here, and it may not be well known fact, but just an example of national security, the AUC is a national centers of academic excellence in cyber defense works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate and certify future cyber first responders as an example. So that's vibrant and healthy and something that we ought to take advantage of. >> Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point, 'cause I'd like to define, you know, what is a public-private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped, it's a modern era, things are accelerated, you've got security, so you've got all of these things kind of happenning it's a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business and in the public sector. So what is a modern public-private partnership and what does it look like today because people are learning differently. COVID has pointed out, which is that we're seeing right now, how people, the progressions of knowledge and learning, truth, it's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public-private partnership and some examples and some proof points, can you guys share that? We'll start with you, Professor Armstrong. >> Yeah, as I indicated earlier, we've had, and I could give other examples, but Northrop Grumman, they helped us with a cyber lab many years ago that is maintained directly, the software, the connection outside it's its own unit so the students can learn to hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses and I know that that has already had some considerations of space, but that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public-private partnership has benefits to both entities and the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the talent. The talent that is needed, what we've been working on for years of, you know, the undergraduate or master's or PhD programs, but now it's also spilling into upskilling and reskilling, as jobs, you know, folks who are in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago, but it also spills into other aspects that can expand even more. We're very fortunate we have land, there's opportunities, we have ONE Tech project. We are expanding our tech park, I think we'll see opportunities for that and it'll be adjusted due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before COVID. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important, I want to make sure that I'm driving across a bridge or that satellite's being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training to do that in that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on campus, getting that experience, expanding it as an adult, and we're going to need those public-private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these STEM and engineering fields. >> It's interesting people and technology can work together and these partnerships are the new way. Bongs too with reaction to the modern version of what a public successful private partnership looks like. >> If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically DOD's had a high bar to overcome if you will, in terms of getting rapid... pulling in new companies, miss the fall if you will, and not rely heavily on the usual suspects, of vendors and the like, and I think the DOD has done a good job over the last couple of years of trying to reduce that burden and working with us, you know, the Air Force, I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days, where companies come in, do a two-hour pitch and immediately notified of, you know, of an a award, without having to wait a long time to get feedback on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best to strengthen that partnership with companies outside of the main group of people that we typically use. >> Steve, any reaction, any comment to add? >> Yeah, I would add a couple and these are very excellent thoughts. It's about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone, you know, the world that Bong and I, Bong lives in and I used to live in the past, has been quite structured. It's really about, we know what the threat is, we need to go fix it, we'll design as if as we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Life is so much more complicated than that and so it's really, to me, I mean, you take an example of the pitch days of Bong talks about, I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks and academia, because we are all in this together in a lot of ways. For example, I mean, we just sent a paper to the white house at their request about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective and we hope to embellish on this over time once the initiative matures, but we have a piece of it for example, is a thing we call "clear for success," getting back to president Armstrong's comments so at a collegiate level, you know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program that grabs kids in their underclass years, identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this, get them scholarships, have a job waiting for them that they're contracted for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with an SCI clearance. We believe that can be done, so that's an example of ways in which public-private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on day one. We think those kinds of things can happen, it just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can, like pitch days. >> That's a great point, it's a good segue. Go ahead, President Armstrong. >> I just want to jump in and echo both the Bong and Steve's comments, but Steve that, you know, your point of, you know our graduates, we consider them ready day one, well they need to be ready day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's exciting and needed, very much needed more of it, some of it's happening, but we certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans. >> And that's a great example, a good segue. My next question is kind of re-imagining these workflows is kind of breaking down the old way and bringing in kind of the new way, accelerate all kinds of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue and this is the next topic, how can we employ new creative solutions because let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern, you know, the programs and you'd matriculate through the system. This is multiple disciplines, cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart in math and have a degree in anthropology and be one of the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new, new world, what are some creative approaches that's going to work for you? >> Alright, good job, one of the things, I think that's a challenge to us is, you know, somehow we got me working for, with the government, sexy right? You know, part of the challenge we have is attracting the right level of skill sets and personnel but, you know, we're competing, oftentimes, with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples is a big deal. And those are the same talents we need to support a lot of the programs that we have in DOD. So somehow we have do a better job to Steve's point about making the work within DOD, within the government, something that they would be interested early on. So attract them early, you know, I could not talk about Cal Poly's challenge program that they were going to have in June inviting high school kids really excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security and so on. Those are some of the things that I think we have to do and continue to do over the course of the next several years. >> Awesome, any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be an idea, or just to kind of stoke the ideation out there? Internships, obviously internships are known, but like, there's got to be new ways. >> Alright, I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier, getting students in high school and aligning them sometimes at first internship, not just between the freshman and sophomore year, but before they enter Cal Poly per se and they're involved. So I think that's absolutely key, getting them involved in many other ways. We have an example of upskilling or work redevelopment here in the central coast, PG&E Diablo nuclear plant that is going to decommission in around 2024. And so we have a ongoing partnership to work and reposition those employees for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the upskilling and reskilling, and I think that's where, you know, we were talking about that Purdue University, other California universities have been dealing with online programs before COVID, and now with COVID so many more Faculty were pushed into that area, there's going to be a much more going and talk about workforce development in upskilling and reskilling, the amount of training and education of our faculty across the country in virtual and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >> I want to get your guys' thoughts on one final question as we end the segment, and we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where, you know, SAS business model subscription, and that's on the business side, but one of the things that's clear in this trend is technology and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at a world now, we're living in COVID, and Cal Poly, you guys have remote learning right now, it's at the infancy, it's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity enable new ways to encollaborate, So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed, how these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery, hire, develop the workforce, these are opportunities, how do you guys view this new digital transformation? >> Well, I think there's huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium, we're filming this on Monday and it's going to stream live and then the three of us, the four of us can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing and I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this symposium. I think there's more and more that we can do. From a Cal Poly perspective, with our pedagogy so, you know, linked to learn by doing in-person will always be important to us, but we see virtual, we see partnerships like this, can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in-person time, decrease the time to degree, enhance graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps for students that don't have the same advantages. So I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the upskilling and reskilling, where employees are all over, they can re be reached virtually, and then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. So I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's going to be different with every university, with every partnership. It's one size does not fit all, There's so many possibilities, Bong, I can almost imagine that social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, and have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the DOD possibly in the future. But these are the kind of crazy ideas that are needed, your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross-pollination. >> I think technology is going to be revolutionary here, John, you know, we're focusing lately on what we call visual engineering to quicken the pace of the delivery capability to warfighter as an example, I think AI, Machine Language, all that's going to have a major play in how we operate in the future. We're embracing 5G technologies, and the ability for zero latency, more IOT, more automation of the supply chain, that sort of thing, I think the future ahead of us is very encouraging, I think it's going to do a lot for national defense, and certainly the security of the country. >> Steve, your final thoughts, space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people, your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity. >> Such a great question and such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Echoing my colleagues sentiments, I would add to it, you know, a lot of this has, I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. You know, we're not attuned to doing things fast, but the dramatic, you know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now, I think it ties back to, hoping to convince some of our senior leaders and what I call both sides of the Potomac river, that it's worth taking this gamble, we do need to take some of these things you know, in a very proactive way. And I'm very confident and excited and comfortable that this is going to be a great time ahead and all for the better. >> You know, I always think of myself when I talk about DC 'cause I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies than in Congress and Senate, so (laughter)I always get in trouble when I say that. Sorry, President Armstrong, go ahead. >> Yeah, no, just one other point and Steve's alluded to this and Bong did as well, I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships, that doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And also, as you talk about technology, I have to reflect on something that happened and you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing traditional data, a data warehouse, data storage, data center and we partnered with AWS and thank goodness, we had that in progress and it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before COVID hit, and with this partnership with the digital transformation hub, so there's a great example where we had that going. That's not something we could have started, "Oh COVID hit, let's flip that switch." And so we have to be proactive and we also have to not be risk-averse and do some things differently. That has really salvaged the experience for our students right now, as things are flowing well. We only have about 12% of our courses in person, those essential courses and I'm just grateful for those partnerships that I have talked about today. >> And it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these are themes that expand the space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you very much for sharing your insights, I know Bong, you're going to go into the defense side of space in your other sessions. Thank you gentlemen, for your time, for a great session, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you all. I'm John Furey with The Cube here in Palo Alto, California covering and hosting with Cal Poly, the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, thanks for watching. (bright atmospheric music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's the CUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> We're back at the beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of New York City in Central Park. I'm Dave Vellante, and you're watching the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Day with Veritas Vision, and Anteneh Miticu is here. He's the enterprise backup and data protection team leader at Teradyne, very experienced practitioner We love Anteneh talking to the customers. So thanks very much for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. So talk about your role as the data protection team leader. What does that entail? >> Yeah, so basically Teradyne has data close to 1.5 terabytes that we protect on a day to day basis and weekly basis and we have 14 different sites that we protect data. So, we just, you know, do backups, and recovery, and restoration, and all that stuff. >> So what are the drivers of your business that affect the data protection strategy? >> So, basically data changes from day to day basis and data grows and we have a lot of threats around us that we have to protect the data. So, we have to make sure that we are on top of protecting it on a day to day basis and archiving it so. >> Okay, so one of the challenges obviously is that you're data's not just in one box. >> That's right. >> You mentioned 14 sites a terabyte and a half and... >> Not terabyte. Petabyte, sorry. >> That's right Petabyte. >> Petabyte, that's right. >> I got a terabyte in my backpack. So, and that presumably occurred over time, sprawled over time. So, what kind of challenges did that create in terms of your ability to protect your data and keep up with the backup Windows the RPO's and the RTO's requirement. >> Yeah, yeah, so basically the way the backup has been evolving is that, originally, we had tape backup where the capacity of each tape is very small and the data is big and using libraries and tape drives take a long time to boot backup and also you need people in each location to be able to manage libraries and tapes and there are so many factors that affect the day to day backup. So in combination all that when you put all that together it's very challenging to protect the data. And then, slowly, to mitigate those kinds of problems then we apply disk-based backup and then cloud-based backup which makes it easier and easier. >> So you still use tape? >> Yes. >> Just not for backup, right? >> Yes, we still use tapes in some locations, but slowly we are growing towards cloud backup and disk-based backup. So, because of still using tape, still using libraries, still using managing multiple locations using people who are in that location to help us out while the team is managing it from remote side. All that is challenging and complex. >> So here at this Veritas Solution Day, CEO is here earlier when you sit down with the Veritas executives, you're a big customer, what do you tell them? What do you tell them you need? What do you tell them you want? What do you tell them in terms of the direction you want Veritas to go? >> Yeah, so basically what we want is simplicity on our tape backup on our backup structure strategy. And also, it shouldn't be too expensive to protect data. So, now the cost of storage is getting cheaper and slowly it's getting cheaper to put data on the cloud but we want to see simplicity, number one. We want to see user friendly software and applications to be able to help us manage the data and visibility to the data that we're managing so that we understand what's dark data and what's live data. And we want to be able to see all our environment from a single platform instead of multiple platforms. So the conference today is showing us that kind of road map, that things are getting integrated and the visibility is coming and the cost is coming down much, much better. So, down the road we can see that we're going to be able to manage much better than how we've been managing so far. >> So Anteneh, you're one of Veritas' 50,000 customers. As you well know there's a lot of startups in this business. There's a lot of competition, it's a big market. A lot of money pouring in. So you must be, the vendors must be knocking down your door to try to win your business. So how do you evaluate that? You come to a session like this you hear some road map items. We were talking to a customer earlier and he was saying, you know, they don't really want to migrate if they don't have to. You have an affinity with Veritas. What kinds of things do you evaluate? Are you thinking about changing your backup approach or even your backup vendor? How do you evaluate those decisions? >> Yeah, I mean, obviously we always have to check and see where we should go in terms of protecting our data. And we have to evaluate our strategy. So, so far Veritas has been one of the great companies we've been working with and we don't see any plan of moving away from Veritas, but, there are so many other companies that are coming that are simpler and that provide much better flexibility. So, if those companies work out, we'll see how it goes, but as of today, Veritas has been very good for us. We've been working with Veritas for a long time at least as long as I've been working with Teradyne. So, but, we'll see how it goes. >> So there's the promise of 8.1.2 is to deliver to you the simplicity that you're demanding. Where are you today in terms of releasing? >> Yeah, so, right now we're on 8.1.1 so what I have heard on 8.1.2 is incredible. Basically, it's going to give us a lot of capabilities that we are doing outside of 8.1.1 which is manual like upgrading our clients and being able to see all our clients and mass of service from one location. All that integration is coming. So, I'm very excited about 8.1.2 and I can't wait to go back and start using it. >> When you have to go from 8.1.1 to 8.1.2 can you describe what that's like? What the planning is like, what you have to do to get there. How much is involved? >> Yeah, so, you're going to have to go and deploy 8.1.2 on the master server and that is going to give you the capability to be able to push it to other servers as well. But before, 8.1.1 then we have to go to each master server and push it which was very time consuming. And also, we have over 400 clients that we have to use something else outside of net backup to be able to upgrade. Now, we can use 8.1.2 to be able to upgrade all those clients from 8.1.2. >> And you referenced earlier Cloud, you use multiple clouds I presume, like most companies, and SAS is in there as well? >> Yeah, so we just started using Cloud. We still are using the old-fashioned way which is tape and disk on most of our locations, but right now just deployed Azure Cloud using backup catalyst server and that's working out very well. It's working out very well and it's making our life much simpler and much better. So we see ourselves moving toward that direction. >> You like the cloud, okay. So, we joke, do you get your weekends back? >> Yeah, actually people who supported from the field offices, now they get their weekend back. Because they are the ones who helped us out while we are supporting it from Boston. >> So you're using Azure, you said. Are you a Microsoft shop predominantly? >> No, this is just the beginning, but we're open on NWES and other cloud providers as well. >> Okay, so it's not, Azure wasn't selected because you had a big Microsoft install base. It was more for the capabilites of the infrastructure that you went there. >> Yes, yes, but we are very flexible and we are open to see other providers as well. And that backup provides users the capability to use other providers as well. >> So, traditionally, the backup admin was somebody to whom pretty much anybody had to go the application guys had to go, the database people, the lines of business, if they wanted to protect their data. That sort of group, or that individual would really be the gatekeeper, if you will. With the Cloud, there's a move towards self-service. Now, what do you think about that and how does that fit with your strategy? Is that something that you're aggressively promoting? How do you protect the corporation from anomalous behavior or non-compliance and things like that? Talk about the trend towards self-service and how that role of the backup admin is evolving. >> Yeah, so the role of the backup admin is very complex, even before. But now, because of self-serving, self-service is available, then the database admins or the virtual team can be able to manage their own backups from their side. But still, backup admins have to be able to manage it in a way that fits according to the strategy that we want the organization to run their backups. So the role of the backup admins is now more complex, and it's not only in one place doing one thing, but working with multiple team allowing other people to have visibility and control while the backup admins manage it from behind. >> You've been with Teradyne almost two decades. You remember the days when backup was just always an afterthought, and still is in a lot of applications, by the way. But increasingly with things like Dev Ops, applications are getting more involved in essentially making infrastructure programmable and building in security, building in data protection. Have you seen that trend at your company and where do you see that going? >> Yeah, so say that again? Sorry. >> So, specifically with regard to building data protection in from the beginning as opposed to bolting it on at the end. Is that something that you guys are able to do with your developers and your Dev Ops teams? >> Yeah, so right now, protecting the data is very strategic and the approach is not just taking the data and putting it somewhere and forgetting about it, but with a plan and purpose, you know? >> So anything here today that you saw that was exciting? What did you think of the event? >> The event was great, and I was glad to be here. And the last couple of years, I was in Vegas with the Veritas Conference as well. And it was very good to be able to talk to other peers and good to get the road map from Veritas as to where they are heading going forward, and so we can be able to align our road map with their road map as well. It's good to get the big picture, and it's good to have conversations and discussions. Just now we came out of so many detailed technical discussions. I'm excited to be here. >> So you saw Richard Branson last year. That was pretty cool, wasn't it? >> That's right. Yeah, he's a great guy and I'm his admirer, and seeing him up close and explaining his experiences and all that stuff was great. >> It's always good to see billionaires giving back and he does sincerely. >> That's right. >> Thanks very much for coming on the CUBE and sharing your experience and your knowledge. I really appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. Alright. Keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're going to take this short break. You're watching the CUBE, from Veritas Solutions Days at Central Park Tavern on the Green. We'll be right back. (digital music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is SiliconANGLE Media's coverage of theCUBE at Nutanix .NEXT in East Frant. Really excited to have on the program Rob Lloyd who is the CEO of Hyperloop One. Off of the keynote this morning Rob, thank you so much for finding time to join us. It's great to join you. So, it's interesting. I've been watching Hyperloop since the day one when it got announced. I'm study mechanical engineering. So transportation's something I looked at. But I've been in the tech world. I knew you back from your Cisco days. When I talked to some friends of mine that didn't know about Hyperloop, you kind of explain it was like, "Oh! Remember the bank pneumatic tubes? "It's like we're going to do that with people." And they're like, "That sounds crazy!" And then you say, "Well, Elon Musk is behind it." And they're like, "Well, OK, another Elon Musk thing "that's probably going to be near impossible, "but they will find a way to make it work." >> Rob: Mm-hmm. You talked a little about your journey in the keynote this morning, but let's start, Hyperloop One. Pre-revenue, give kind of a thumbnail of the company and where you are today. So it's a three year old company. Literally in a garage, in the very late part of 2014, our founder, co-founder, started on November 2nd. So, just an idea. A white paper that Elon wrote, which was the concepts of something very different. A new mode of transportation. Slightly outraged by the expense and archaic nature of the High-Speed Rail in California proposal. So, that's the starting point. A company that was founded, co-founded by Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist, and some brilliant engineer, Josh Giegel. Now, from that point, 300 people, 245 million dollars raised and just this summer, having only started on the designs, tested some concepts: a magnetic levitation, a custom-design linear electric motor, evacuating a tube to the equivalent of 200,000 feet above the Earth's surface. We built a full-scale prototype. 500 meters prove the tech is working, and the cool part is that the speed with which this engineering and development is occurring is like nothing else. So, it's kind of DevOps for hardware. And we saw what happened when people kind of went to Agile Development Methodologies. We saw it in tech. But it really hasn't hit the traditional methods of transportation, where people build in silos. They're not closely associated with a fabricator or a welder. And we have mechanical engineers working with fabricators working with welders, and you make amazing progress when you see that happen. You stated, it's been over 100 years since we had a kind of major new transportation model. The tooling that allows you to prototype this... I know, it's kind of, friend of mine, it's watching the space stuff and watching the videos that you put out. Everything from testing the engine, to the pod. If I remember, wasn't there a contest around the pods, too? Well, actually, yeah. The tools we have today, the analytics tools, the way we can model things, didn't exist when we did our first moonshots, when the United States said we're going to put a man on the moon and NASA was mobilized and the country was excited. We didn't have the tools we have today. So we have much, much better tools. We have methodologies and approaches that are not accepted everywhere but are embraced in our company. And you make things happen that were taking five years from an engineering perspective. And you can build a full-scale prototype in 10 months. That really changes the speed with which this can occur. Most people say this would take a decade. This is going to take three years. As I said, like other Elon Musk companies, you've got strong conviction at Hyperloop One. Some of the things that kind of skeptics come up with reminds me a lot of autonomous vehicles. "Ah, well, regulators are never going to let it happen, "and, gosh, safety." It's like "I'm putting software? "It's going to do this? We're going to be going at what speeds?" And you know, "How fast?" And all these things. How long's this going to take before its reality? Can you give us a little bit of that road map, as to how we make sure that once somebody actually goes in this, that they're not going to end up just completely flattened? So, the way that we're approaching this is actually different than the way in which most new technologies are regulated in transportation. We're going to partner with one or two countries. We're going to partner with the regulator while we're designing the commercial version of our technology. So while we commercialize, which is the next two to three years of our road map, we know the tech works. Now you build a commercial offer. You build the car. You build the pod. We will commercialize this. We're going to work with them now, so we don't come to them in three to five years and say, "Would you please certify this?" And in doing so, we actually bring a huge opportunity to the countries that go first. We ran a global competition, to kind of AKA Peter Diamandis, who's on our board, like the X Prize. We actually asked countries, "Who'd like to build the world's first Hyperloop?" 2,600 people registered. 100 serious submissions. Dozens of them are now real projects moving forward with government support. So, the short answer is, we have to do it differently. We're going to partner with a regulator while we're commercializing the tech. And then when we get there, of course you want it to be safe. Of course you'll need certification. But you do that now rather than later. And you'll end up bringing benefits to a country that chooses to go first. Did I hear right that the first solution is probably going to be in the Middle East? There is a good probability that's the case. The land is fairly flat. We can build along existing right-of-ways. There's massive investments in airports and ports there. Wherever there's a very dense transportation hub today, airports, downtown centers, connections to metro or train stations, that's where we want to put kind of a Hyperloop portals. So think of it as the backbone between two data centers. All the activity going on in the data center, we want to connect those high-density locations. But it's not just one-to-one. We can branch on and branch off. So it's sort of like point-to-point packet switching. One of the things that really excited me in your presentation that I didn't know as well is you talked about kind of the sustainability, the energy of this compared to other options, as well as the affordability. Something that really could help a lot of environments. Could you speak to those? Yeah, so... There is absolute science about the substitution rates that will go to a faster mode of transportation if the price is right. So, our model as we analyze opportunities around the world, in the United States, in Europe, Northern Europe, Canada, India, and the Middle East, where we see a lot of our projects today... If we price at the same price level of the current mode of transport, you'll get almost 100% conversion, because why not? Why wouldn't I go, in nine minutes, to Abu Dhabi from Dubai, instead of what could be a two-hour car drive? But why not price it for the ticket of a metro ride? Then you'll get really high ridership, high utilization. The economics of building infrastructure, a PPP structure that would bring private equity, debt, pension funds, sovereign funds together, to invest in that new infrastructure, that's how it's going to work. So that's the passenger case. And then on the freight side, you know, seriously, we forgot that this on-demand economy is based on a transportation network that effectively is 100 to 200 years old. Steel cans, right? This idea of a container was invented, a standard-sized container that goes on ships. The ships unload them in ports. They sit a couple of days. Then a truck puts it on the back, and they drive through our cities. Or it goes on the back of a train and takes seven to ten days to get to its consumer. That doesn't work anymore, in this world of Amazon, on-demand, Alibaba commerce. The only option they have is to pay for air freight, which is five to six times more than it would cost to carry those same packages and goods in a Hyperloop cargo system. Huge opportunity. Rob, speak about sustainability, kind of the energy required for this compared to other modes of transportation. We take some energy to remove the pressure inside the tube which obviously reduces resistance. It's an all-electric motor. Because we have little resistance and no friction, because we're floating on magnets, effectively floating on a magnetic cushion, once you're up to speed, you're pretty much gliding, like gliding in space. >> Stu: What speed do we think that'll be? Well, by the way, this really is, I'm being very candid, it depends on the route. It depends on how straight we can get a right-of-way. It depends on the levels, so flat and straight means you can go fast. If you're going to go 300 kilometers, we can go six, seven, eight hundred miles an hour which is faster than an aircraft. And obviously city center to city center, then we don't have the drive of an hour and a half, the vagaries of weather, and all that other stuff, which has made air travel for most of us just a somewhat demoralizing experience. So, solar power, wind power, and in some environments where we do have a lot of sun, we can just have the tube covered with solar panels and make the entire thing energy neutral, which is really, really amazing. A new mode of transportation that doesn't consume any energy. Yeah, maybe Elon can help with some of the solar stuff. Elon's got that stuff. How much is Elon involved? So he's not involved in our company. His idea, right? His brainchild. Our company was formed to commercialize that, and there are others that are now in this market. I think we're the leader. No, I know we're the leader. We've demonstrated the technology no one else has. And we're there. I mean, this is a go-for-it business. So we're going for it. Well you just had a new partnership with Virgin announced recently. So Richard Branson, you know... Yeah, so Virgin Hyperloop One, a brand that actually has been known for customer experience, thinking of the customer, delivering an experience, taking on the giants as he did with Virgin Atlantic, putting people into space now from a commercial perspective, as well as satellites. So think of his companies and transportation and how that brings comfort to governments and investors, that we're here to actually really make something big happen, and Richard's done that. He's a serial entrepreneur. And that brand typically stands for an excellent experience. Yeah. He has pretty good track record as a risk taker out there, too. Some of the extreme things that he had done, but absolutely, the comfort and the brand there... Pre-revenue, you said a couple of years until we're there, but you mentioned even that you've got kind of a pipeline of orders already, so sounds like-- Well the projects are big, so this is infrastructure. We won't be financing that. That will be done by people that find governments and pension funds and sovereign funds and insurance companies that invest in infrastructure. But if you take a look at the projects because they're big, they start with billions and they go up from there. So it's kind of fun to think that you're first order could be three billion. It's kind of neat to go from this pre-revenue stage to the size of projects that we'll have. That three billion will be spent on, some will be on contractors, some will be on infrastructure, but for us, the revenues that will come will be high margin. We're building a software platform that will connect with other modes of transport and manage the massive amounts of data we'll be collecting off the pod and the track, the headway between these vehicles, which could be as close as ten seconds traveling at that speed, and then obviously you've got to have a whole lot of control software and a whole IoT Platform built in. Last question I have for you. We're here at a technology show. Just throw out there: software, massive amounts of data, I've got to have the analytics going into it, and there, is the tech all ready? How's the industry doing to support some of these kind of moonshot-type of activities? High-speed networking is going to be a big deal for us. So we probably need kind of an evolution of 5G because we're moving so fast inside that enclosed area that we're going to need some radio technology to keep all of those devices connected. That's a little bit of a push. Listen, we're starting from scratch. So we have a clean sheet. So we have legacy to integrate. That's typically an advantage. We're not trying to do mechanical switching. We'll do a digital switch, which means you'll actually just bump a vehicle off onto an on-ramp and weave it back in with software, kind of like packets on the network. But clean sheet. I think we have tools required to do everything that we're looking for today, an industry that's evolved, has developed around IoT, and a plethora of options that our architects and engineers are working on today. Gosh, all my background thinking about packet loss and things like that, it gets me a little bit nervous, but I know you've got lots of engineers working to solve that problem. Rob Lloyd, Hyperloop One. Really appreciate you joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT in Nice, France. You're watching theCUBE.

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. (upbeat techno music) >> This is the Cube, the leader in live coverage and we're covering Veritas Vision 2017, Veritas the tagline here is Truth and Information. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman and we're excited to have Tom Shaffstall here, he's the storage network analyst at Exelon energy company and we love, Tom, having practitioners on because we get the truth, so welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> Set it up for us, your role, start with Exelon. Tell us about your interest in energy and what you guys are doing and of course your role at the company. >> We are a utility company that deals with both wind, solar, natural gas and nuclear generation. We have multiple, Exelon has multiple companies that are providing electricity in Chicago area and Philadelphia area, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. We are a pretty big company, employee wise and we have tons and tons of data and I'm in charge of making sure that that stuff gets backed up and stored properly. >> You saw the Richard Branson keynote this morning I presume? >> Tom: Yes, I enjoyed that, that was very good. >> It was very good, providing a little tailwind for much of your business, certainly the wind and solar parts of it. Okay, let's get into it. You're looking after that portion of the infrastructure, maybe paint a picture for us as to what it looks like in your environment, the applications that you're supporting and actually, let me check that. Before we get into that, what's happening in your business that is affecting your IT strategy? You hear a lot about digital transformation, obviously costs, pressures, what are your priorities from the business and how does it affect IT? >> Of course there's cost pressures from the management, but we also have, we're moving into the cloud as of the last couple years, we're also starting to look at data center as a service for our customers, for the businesses, so I'm involved in several different things in regards to the data centers, the service, cloud infrastructure and managing and monitoring all that stuff. >> What is that, data centers as a service? >> Unpack that a little bit for us, cloud strategy, how's that coming about? >> It's actually been done very well for us. We've gone through a whole set of stages and proof of concepts but we've also worked well with Microsoft Azure because that's where we're putting all our stuff and we have a production side, we have a development side and we also have now a sandbox which is pretty interesting for testing. We're putting all those in together with the infrastructure that we already have in regards to making sure things are done properly, the security is done properly, the ownership of the accounts are done properly, so everything is done in a real precise manner through our process. >> Data center as a service is essentially your hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses the public piece which is Azure, your private cloud on prem and all the associated corporate edicts and security and compliance, stuff that goes with that, is that correct? >> Correct and we also have remote sites that we're going to be doing, we have a lot of energy plants around the country that are really small, they don't have real big pipe so data center as a service really works for them as well, that's the things we're starting to look into as well. >> Part of that is the service catalog, getting that house in order, is that right? >> Tom: Yes. >> Do you do chargebacks or showbacks? >> Tom: Yes we do. >> You do chargebacks. >> Yeah so that's all included in that. >> Have you always done chargebacks? >> Over the past several years, we've really built it up more and been more precise in our chargebacks. >> I've always wondered, I wonder if you can comment from your experiences and your peers, you know 10 years ago you would ask folks if they're doing chargebacks they say no, it's just too complicated, we just put it out there. Sometimes we do showbacks but as cloud has come into prominence, people seem to be doing more and more chargebacks to be more cloud like and more precise. Maybe that's tooling, maybe that's culture, what's your experience been? >> We actually started doing more and more reporting on our physical and virtual environments about two years before we actually started into the Azure cloud. I think that was in preparation for that because they saw that that kind of technology was already there in the cloud and we wanted to be prepared for that and make sure that the accounting side of things was a little bit more precise in what we were doing, in charging back. >> Okay let's get into it, Stu. >> Can you maybe sketch out for us a little bit, how much data does your engineering team cover how many sites, what's the purview and how do we, give us this thumbnail sketch. >> We have three main data centers right now in Chicago and in the Baltimore area. Currently we're taking one of those data centers and we're consolidating into the sister data center which is about 20 miles away from each other. We're dwindling it down and our utilities for instance, are managing their own data centers as well. We have multiple data centers all over the country. We're putting most of our corporate stuff into two major data centers so we're in the process of moving those and we have about nine petabytes of data that we're actually backing up and managing, storage wise. That's just on the corporate side, that's not even on our nuclear side, we have more on that side. >> And the primary applications that you're supporting, you don't have to do an application portfolio, we only have 15, 20 minutes, but generally speaking, maybe talk about some of the more critical ones from a backup perspective. >> Backup perspective, we have Just Net backup, both on the nuclear side and on the corporate side, we are also using Data Insight as well on the corporate side and we just I believe got our nuclear guys interested in Data Insight stuff. >> But in terms of the applications that you're, the data that you're protecting, what applications are they supporting, if I could ask it that way. >> We have HP applications, suites, we have R Man, we have Oracle databases, we have SQL databases, and I'm at a loss. >> A lot of the core database stuff, so pretty high SLA. Tight RPO, RTO requirements on those or they vary? >> They vary depending on the categorization of the actual database or the actual application. >> And how do you deal with the variability of those service level agreements? Are you able to provide granular levels of service or is it one size fits all? >> We go down to the granular level. We don't try to do one size fits all, that just didn't work in the starting of things when I first started in the company, we saw that they were trying to do that and it just doesn't work. >> Predominantly or exclusively a Net Backup shop in terms of your data protection, is that right? >> Yes, we also have snap falding and stuff with our net apps our shares so we are backing those up and snapping them off to the other data center and vice versa. We have that capabilities as well. >> You've been at this position for over a decade and you've seen the end of the client server era, not the end, but the tail end of the curve, internet era, obviously now seeing the cloud, virtualization and into the cloud, how have those changes affected your data protection strategy over the years? >> With our virtual side of things, we've actually migrated most of our virtual backups just to VM ware. They are actually handling all that within our infrastructure where we hold all the VM ware servers. That's all done outside of Net Backup all together. We do take care of the production side of the VM ware servers that we have through Net Backup and we treat them as physical servers, but all our test and dev, all that stuff, that's done and held for 14 days and then it's gone. >> We talked a little bit about, off camera, you said you were very happy with Net Backup so you really haven't brought in alternatives. What about the product and the company is appealing to you? >> There's been a history with me because in a previous life if you want to call it, I was in the financial business, working in the data center and I had the opportunity to get into the early stages of Veritas Net Backup four I think it was and then I got out of the financial industry and got into the utility industry and it was automatically Net Backup, I was familiar with it, it's very easy to use, it's just pretty reliable for restores and all that kind of stuff, good management. >> Tom one of the things we've been poking at this week is, of course Veritas has a lot of Net Backup customers, you're a loyal one, talking about this digital transformation and software defined multicloud, hyperscale world, some of those things I think resonating, what are you hearing, what interests you from some of the new products that they're announcing and how do you see the relevance of what Veritas is saying in your world? >> What has interested me so far in our sessions and in the keynote sessions and all, I'm looking into possibly talking to our architects about Infomap and getting that maybe possibly in house and/or the data resiliency because we're already got most of our stuff in the cloud that we're pushing out there. We don't have to push any extra data out there right now, but we may still do that, we may be still migrating some data like for archiving and that kind of thing. That's a possibility but we will probably look to Veritas for that when we go to do those things. >> Thinking about what you've heard this week, you hear a lot from Veritas about modern data protection, cloud, application mobility, things of that nature. As a practitioner, how do you look at those things, those capabilities, are those things that you're considering actually actively architecting or building a plan around. Maybe you could talk about the futures a little bit. >> With our data, we have to make sure there's accountability somewhere, we have to make sure that we know who the owners of these things are and we have to coordinate with them in regards to moving anything, of course. With sip infrastructure and all that kind of stuff, all those regulations, we had to make sure that all our data is held properly and going into the cloud, we want to make sure that what we're putting out there is going to be put out there and held securely. There's still some trepidation in regards to that but I believe our company is moving forward and wanting to do more and could get less of a footprint in our data centers for hardware and all that kind of stuff. For the governance of this stuff, we have the Data Insight software out there, it's helping us to recognize what kind of files are out there, who's using them, who has access to them, and we are starting to use that more as well. We're currently doing a POC to try and get ownership to that actual data because we really don't other than what Data Insight already gives it, this is the number of people that have been using this data, I'm giving you ownership is the way it was before, but now we're able to actually classify, this is the owner, he's going to be the one that takes care of that side. >> Tom I'm just curious, we talk a lot about there's the opportunity of data. Is data for your business, is it a challenge to keep up with the growth and manage it and govern it or is your business turning that into an opportunity? >> It's my full time job and my boss's full time job to make sure that we have enough room for all the data that we're doing. We are trying to do some neat things in regards to managing it better and keeping data, especially for us, our upper management decided to ask us the question recently is are we doing replication between data centers to keep our DRs and all that kind of stuff viable? We were like, yeah and then we started going into that perspective and actually got it so that we can definitely say yes, we have everything here and here, we are DR safe. >> Do you test that? >> Yes. In fact we just recently did a full test of our corporate financial DR data and it went off without a hitch. >> Excellent, all right Tom, we'll give you the last word on the conference, Veritas Vision, how do you like it, why do you come to this, shows like this, what kinds of things do you learn, what's of interest to you? >> I like to get more information as to what Veritas is offering. They're a very good company, I've had a very good rapport with our salespeople and with the engineers, with the help desk people that come in and talk to you and make sure that if we're having issues, they're right on, I've just had a real good experience with Veritas and the whole realm of things. >> Things at the show, anything interesting that pops out to you? Things that you've learned, the take aways? >> We're looking more now into some of the cloud capabilities that you guys have, especially with the resiliency program with the Infomap and again, more information with the Data Insight, all the capability's there, it's going to start bringing out. Just the beauty of all that stuff actually working together and being more cohesive, because before you had Data Insight you had Infomap, you had, and they weren't really communicating properly to really help each other report. It's really good stuff that's happening. >> Tom Sheffstall, thanks very much for coming on the Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Keep right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest, this is the Cube, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)