>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, everyone. It's theCUBE live at MWC '23, day three of four days of CUBE coverage. It's like a cannon of CUBE content coming right at you. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We've got Dell and VMware here. Going to be talking about the ecosystem partnerships and what they're doing to further organizations in the telco industry. Please welcome Jared Woodrey, Director of Partner Engineering Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, OTEL. Odded Solomon is here as well, Director of Product Management, VMware Service Provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to theCUBE. So Jared, first question for you. Talk about OTEL. I know there's a big announcement this week, but give the audience context and understanding of what OTEL is and how it works. >> Sure. So the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab is physically located at Round Rock, Texas, it's the heart and soul of it. But this week we also just announced opening up the Cork, Ireland extension of OTEL. The reason for our existence is to to try and make it as easy as possible for both partners and customers to come together and to re-aggregate this disaggregated ecosystem. So that comes with a number of automation tools and basically just giving a known good testing environment so that tests that happen in our lab are as close to real world as they possibly can be and make it as transparent and open as possible for both partners like VMware as well as customers. >> Odded, talk about what you're doing with Dell and OTEL and give us a customer example of maybe one that you're working with or even even mentioning it by a high level descriptor if you have to. >> Yeah. So we provide a telco cloud platform, which is essentially a vertical in VMware. The telco cloud platform is serving network function vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, and so on. What we do with Dell as part of this partnership is essentially complementing the platform with some additional functionality that is not coming out of the box. We used to have a data protection in the past, but this is no longer our main business focus. So we do provide APIs that we can expose and work together with Dell PPDM solution so customer can benefit from this and leverage the partnership and have overall solution that is not coming out of the box from VMware. >> I'm curious, from a VMware perspective. VMware is associated often with the V in VMware, virtualization, and we've seen a transition over time between sort of flavors of virtualization and what is the mix currently today in the telecom space between environments that are leveraging what we would think of as more traditional virtualization with full blown Linux, Windows operating systems in a VM versus the world of containerized microservices? What does that mix look like today? Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so the VMware telco cloud platform exists for about eight years. And the V started around that time. You might heard about open stack in addition to VMware. So this has definitely helped the network equipment providers with virtualizing their network functions. Those are typically VNF, virtualized network functions, inside the VMs. Essentially we have 4G applications, so core applications, EPC, we have IMS. Those are typically, I would say maybe 80 or 90% of the ecosystem right now. 5G is associated with cloud native network functions. So 5G is getting started now, getting deployed. There is an exponential growth on the core side. Now, when we expand towards the edge of the network we see more potential growth. This is 5G ran, we see the vRAN, we see the open RAN, we see early POCs, we see field trials that are starting. We obviously has production customer now. You just spoke to one. So this is really starting, cloud native is really starting I would say about 10 to 20% of the network functions these days are cloud native. >> Jared, question for you. You mentioned data protection, a huge topic there obviously from a security perspective. Data protection used to be the responsibility of the CSPs. You guys are changing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that and what Dell's play there is? >> Yeah, so PowerProtect Data Management is a product, but it's produced by Dell. So what this does is it enables data protection over virtual cloud as well as the physical infrastructure of specifically in this case of a telecoms ecosystem. So what this does is enables an ability to rapidly redeploy and back up existing configurations all the way up to the TCP and TCA that pulls the basis of our work here with VMware. >> So you've offloaded that responsibility from the CSPs. You freed them from that. >> So the work that we did, honestly was to make sure that we have a very clear and concise and accurate procedures for how to conduct this as well. And to put this through a realistic and real world as if it was in a telecoms own production network, what did that would actually look like, and what it would take to bring it back up as well. So our responsibility is to make sure that when we when we provide these products to the customers that not only do they work exactly as their intended to, but there is also documentation to help support them and to enable them to have their exact specifications met by as well. >> Got it. So talk about a little bit about OTEL expansion into Cork. What you guys are doing together to enable CSPs here in EMEA? >> Yeah, so the reason why we opened up a facility in Cork Island was to give, for an EMEA audience, for an EMEA CSPs and ability to look and feel and touch some of the products that we're working on. It also just facilitates and ease especially for European-based partners to have a chance to very easily come to a lab environment. The difference though, honestly, is the between Round Rock, Texas and Cork Island is that it's virtually an extension of the same thing. Like the physical locations can make it easier to provide access and obviously to showcase the products that we've developed with partners. But the reality is that it's more than just the physical location. It's more about the ability and ease by which customers and partners can access the labs. >> So we should be expecting a lot of Tito's vodka to be consumed in Cork at some point. Might change the national beverage. >> We do need to have some international exchange. >> Yeah, no, that's good to know. Odded, on the VMware side of things. There's a large group of folks who have VMware skillsets. >> Odded: Correct. >> The telecom industry is moving into this world of the kind of agility that those folks are familiar with. How do people come out of the traditional VMware virtualization world and move into that world of cloud native applications and serve the telecom space? What would your recommendation be? If you were speaking at a VMUG, a VMware Users Group meeting with all of your telecom background, what would you share with them that's critical to understand about how telecom is different, or how telecom's spot in its evolution might be different than the traditional IT space? >> So we're talking about the people with the knowledge and the background of. >> Yeah, I'm a V expert, let's say. And I'm looking into the future and I hear that there are 80,000 people in Barcelona at this event, and I hear that Dell is building optimized infrastructure specifically for telecom, and that VMware is involved. And I'm an expert in VMware and I want to be involved. What do I need to do? I know it's a little bit outside of the box question, but especially against the backdrop of economic headwinds globally, there are a lot of people facing transitions. What are your thoughts there? >> So, first of all, we understand the telco requirements, we understand the telco needs, and we make sure that what we learn from the customers, what we learn from the partners is being built into the VMware products. And simplicity is number one thing that is important for us. We want the customer experience, we want the user experience to be the same as they know even though we are transitioning into cloud native networks that require more frequent upgrades and they have more complexity to be honest. And what we do in our vertical inside VMware we are focusing on automation, telco cloud automation, telco cloud service assurance. Think of it as a wrapper around the SDDC stack that we have from VMware that really simplifies the operations for the telcos because it's really a challenge about skillset. You need to be a DevOps, SRE in order to operate these networks. And things are becoming really complex. We simplify it for them with the same VMware experience. We have a very good ability to do that. We sell products in VMware. Unlike our competition that is mostly selling professional services and support, we try to focus more on the products and delivering the value. Of course, we have services offering because telcos requires some customizations, but we do focus on automation simplicity throughout our staff. >> So just follow up. So in other words the investment in education in this VMware ecosystem absolutely can be extended and applied into the telecom world. I think it's an important thing. >> I was going to add to that. Our engagement in OTEL was also something that we created a solutions brief whether we released from Mobile World Congress this week. But in conjunction with that, we also have a white paper coming out that has a much more expansive explanation and documentation of what it was that we accomplished in the work that we've done together. And that's not something that is going to be a one-off thing. This is something that will stay evergreen that we'll continue to expand both the testing scope as well as the documentation for what this solution looks like and how it can be used as well as documentation on for the V experts for how they can then leverage and realize the the potential for what we're creating together. >> Jared, does Dell look at OTEL as having the potential to facilitate the continued evolution of the actual telco industry? And if so, how? >> Well, I mean, it would be a horrible answer if I were to say no to that. >> Right. >> I think, I honestly believe that one of the most difficult things about this idea of having desired ecosystem is not just trying to put it back together, but then also how to give yourself choice. So each time that you build one of those solution sets like that exists as an island out of all the other possibilities that comes with it. And OTEL seeks to not just be able to facilitate building that first solution set. Like that's what solutions engineering can do. And that's generally done relatively protected and internally. The Open Telecom Ecosystem seeks to build that then to also provide the ability to very easily change specific components of that whether that's a hardware component, a NIC, whether a security pass just came out or a change in either TCP or TCA or we talked a little bit about for this specific engagement that it was done on TCP 2.5. >> Odded: Correct. >> Obviously there's already a 2.7 and 3.0 is coming out. It's not like we're going to sit around and write our coattails of what 2.7 has happened. So this isn't intended to be a one and done thing. So when we talk about trying to make that easier and simpler and de-risk all of the risk that comes from trying to put all these things together, it's not just the the one single solution that you built in the lab. It's what's the next one? And how do I optimize this? And I have specific requirements as a CSP, how can I take something you built that doesn't quite match it, but how do I make that adjustment? So that's what we see to do and make it as easy and as painless as possible. >> What's the engagement model with CSPs? Is it led by Dell only, VMware partner? How does that work? >> Yeah, I can take that. So that depends on the customer, but typically customers they want to choose the cloud vendor. So they come to VMware, we want VMware. Typically, they come from the IT side. They said, "Oh, we want to manage the network side of the house the same way as we manage the IT. We don't want to have special skill sets, special teams." So they move from the IT to the network side and they want VMware there. And then obviously they have an RSP process and they have hardware choices. They can go with Dell, they can go with others. We leverage vSphere, other compatibility. So we can be flexible with the customer choice. And then depending on which customer, how large they are, they select the network equipment provider that the runs on top. We position our platform as multi-vendor. So many of them choose multiple network functions providers. So we work with Dell. So assuming that the customer is choosing Dell. We work very closely with them, offering the best solution for the customer. We work with them sometimes to even design the boxes to make sure that it fits their use cases and to make sure that it works properly. So we have a partnership validation certification end-to-end from the applications all the way down to the hardware. >> It's a fascinating place in history to be right now with 5G. Something that a lot of consumers sort of assume. It's like, "Oh, hey, yeah, we're already there. What's the 6G thing going to look like?" Well, wait a minute, we're just at the beginning stages. And so you talk about disaggregation, re-aggregation, or reintegration, the importance of that. Folks like Dell have experience in that space. Folks at VMware have a lot of experience in the virtualization space, but I heard that VMware is being acquired by Broadcom, if it all goes through, of course. You don't need to comment on it. But you mentioned something, SDDC, software-defined data center. That stack is sometimes misunderstood by the public at large and maybe the folks in the EU, I will editorialize for a moment here. It is eliminating capture in a way by larger hyperscale cloud providers. It absolutely introduces more competition into the market space. So it's interesting to hear Broadcom acknowledging that this is part of the future of VMware, no matter what else happens. These capabilities that spill into the telecom space are something that they say they're going to embrace and extend. I think that's important for anyone who's evaluating this if they're concern. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, when I reintegrate, do I want VMware as part of this mix? Is that an unknown? It's pretty clear that that's something that is part of the future of VMware moving forward. That's my personal opinion based on analysis. But you brought up SDDC, so I wanted to mention that. Again, I'm not going to ask you to get into trouble on that at all. What should we be, from a broad perspective, are there any services, outcomes that are going to come out of all of this work? The agility that's being built by you folks and folks in the open world. Are there any specific things that you personally are excited about? Or when we think about consumer devices, getting data, what are the other kinds of things that this facilitates? Anything cool, either one of you. >> So specific use cases? >> Yeah, anything. It's got to be cool though. If it's not cool we're going to ask you to leave. >> All right. I'll take that challenge. (laughs) I think one of the things that is interesting for something like OTEL as an exist, as being an Open Telecom Ecosystem, there are going to be some CSPs that it's very difficult for them to have this optionality existing for themselves. Especially when you start talking about tailoring it for specific CSPs and their needs. One of the things that becomes much more available to some of the smaller CSPs is the ability to leverage OTEL and basically act as one of their pre-production labs. So this would be something that would be very specific to a customer and we would obviously make sure that it's completely isolated but the intention there would be that it would open up the ability for what would normally take a much longer time period for them to receive some of the benefits of some of the changes that are happening within the industry. But they would have immediate benefit by leveraging specifically looking OTEL to provide them some of their solutions. And I know that you were also looking for specific use cases out of it, but like that's a huge deal for a lot of CSPs around the world that don't have the ability to lay out all the different permutations that they are most interested in and start to put each one of those through a test cycle. A specific use cases for what this looks like is honestly the most exciting that I've seen for right now is on the private 5G networks. Specifically within mining industry, we have a, sorry for the audience, but we have a demo at our booth that starts to lay out exactly how it was deployed and kind of the AB of what this looked like before the world of private 5G for this mining company and what it looks like afterwards. And the ability for both safety, as well as operational costs, as well as their ability to obviously do their job better is night and day. It completely opened up a very analog system and opened up to a very digitalized system. And I would be remiss, I didn't also mention OpenBrew, which is also an example in our booth. >> We saw it last night in action. >> We saw it. >> I hope you did. So OpenBrew is small brewery in Northeast America and we basically took a very manual process of checking temperature and pressure on multiple different tanks along the entire brewing process and digitized everything for them. All of that was enabled by a private 5G deployment that's built on Dell hardware. >> You asked for cool. I think we got it. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Jared: I think beer. >> Cool brew, yes. >> Root beer, I think is trump card there. >> At least for folks from North America, we like our brew cool. >> Exactly. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell, OTEL, and VMware are doing together, what you're enabling CSPs to do and achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You watching theCUBE live from MWC '23. Day three of our coverage continues right after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Good evening, everyone. Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's "theCUBE". We are at Mobile World, MWC, excuse me, '23. New name this year. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, we have had some great conversations. This is only day one of four days of coverage from "theCUBE" but one of the things that we've been talking about is disaggregation. You've wrote about it in your breaking analysis. We've been talking about it. Today is a big thing that's happening. We're going to be talking about that next. >> Yeah, open ecosystems require integration. Integration requires certification. And so, you got to have labs. We're going to talk about that and what value that brings to the community. >> Right. Please welcome Tibor Fabry-Asztalos, senior vice president of telecom systems and product engineering at Dell. >> Hi. >> And back to "theCUBE" after a couple of hours, Gautam Bhagra, vice president of partnerships at Dell. Guys, great to have you here. >> I love to be here. Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, day one, I'm sure lots of conversations, lots of meetings, lots of jet lag that we're all trying to get over. Talk about, Gautam, we'll start with you. Talk about the disaggregation era. What it is intended to support? What is it intended to enable? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think to be honest with you, Lisa, we spoke about this earlier also, like the whole vision with the disaggregation is to make sure our telco providers can take the benefits of having the innovation that comes along with it, right? So currently, we all know they're tied into like lock systems, which kind of constricts them in going after this whole innovative space. So, our hope is by working with our operators and our partners, we can help make that disaggregation journey a lot easier and work on some of these challenges, and make it easier for the telcos to innovate and consolidate going forward. So, we're working very closely and we talked about the community this morning. We're working very closely with Tibor and his team from an engineering perspective to help build those solutions with our partners and we're excited about the announcements we made this morning. >> When you hear challenges from this ecosystem, can you stack rank 'em? What are you hearing? Kind of what's top of mind? And so, the top three, if you would. >> Some of the challenges are just to define moving from a closed system and open system, just to making sure that the acceptance of that to see what's the value proposition is for an open system and then for the carriers to see the path going from a closed system to an open system. Of course, at the end, people realize the value at the end and speed of innovation that you're going to get all the new technologies and new features, functionality you get in an open system. But then the challenge comes with it, how you actually integrate those and then validate them, and you are to deploy them. So in a sense, that's the opportunity and also some of the challenge along the way. And that's where, as Gautam said, that's where we are also looking at playing the key role with the OTEL lab, the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, where we take these pieces of the open ecosystem and have combined them, validate them, and provide the pipeline to the customer. Pre-integration and then full integration into the production network. >> Those challenges, I presume, vary whether you're talking to a greenfield network operator versus somebody who's got a 40, 50 year history, a hundred-year history in the business, right? I mean migration is a big issue for them, right? Whereas the greenfield, we heard from DISH earlier, they want to drive innovation so they might be willing to sacrifice some other areas. So, is that a fair summarization and what are you hearing? >> [Tibor and Gautam] Yeah. >> Absolutely it is. I mean, that's where you see that DISH being kind of a leader in the space, as they were deploying in greenfield, they defined what the open ecosystem should look like, defined all the components of it, how you integrate them, validate them, and they were able to, well, go through it and deploy it. To your point, for an open, closed systems, as how you actually start transforming the existing network into the open one, that's going to go to a different process, right? You need to figure out how these new open systems can interrupt and work together with existing networks. So, that's one likely some of those carriers will start in an isolated area and grow from there. Deploy an open system in a rural area, for example, and then build from there. >> So, what a bank would do is they say, "Okay, we're going to write in our own abstraction layer." >> Gautam: Yeah. >> Right? "Using microservices, we're going to connect to the cloud. And we're going to, you know, put maybe some lower risk applications in the cloud first and then we're going to create our own cloud." Is there a similar dynamic here? >> Yeah, I mean, so I think you're spot on, right? Like, I think one of the things that we are seeing with the telco operators that we've spoken to is they're very risk averse. >> Yep. >> Right, they have very strong SLA requirements. They cannot go down even for a second. So, what that basically means is the innovation aspect is constrained by the risks that they perceive on any changes that you want to make on the architecture. So, the question that comes up is how do we make it easier for them to not worry about the bare minimum requirements of making sure the network's running and working while thinking about the new innovative technologies and solutions you want to build on the start. So, back to your bank example, nine years ago, no one in a bank even was thinking about like applications that will run on the cloud. Like for them, it was like a side project. They'll try and test something, see if it works, and then they'll think about cloud in the future, right? But now, core applications on banks are actually being built on public cloud. I think we see the same happening with the telco operators as well. Right now, they're understanding the move from a closed ecosystem to an open ecosystem. They understand the value proposition. On the core side, it's already happening a lot. And I think they are slowly moving there and that's where I think Tibor and team have been doing a great job working with our customers to make the transition happen. >> But there are so many permutations. >> Right. >> And integration points. How is Dell addressing that across the ecosystem? >> So, to give you an example, we talked about OTEL, which is our brand new, kind of 13,000 square feet lab that we kind of inaugurated last year based in Round Rock, Texas. >> Dave: Open Telecom. >> Dave and Tibor: Ecosystem Lab. >> Correct, great. And so, as part of that, that's a physical lab but more importantly, that's kind of a community where partners, customers come together to actually, and collaborate and work on these solutions. And as part of this, we also develop what we call the SIP, or Solution Integration Platform, to enable exactly what you just said. Making sure that we have a platform that actually can take all these various components, validate them individually, combine them, and then provide a DevOps and GitOps model, how you actually combine them, provide the BOM or SBOM, and then push that to pre-production and deployments for our customers. So, that's part of the challenge as we talked earlier. And that's how Dell and we are looking at actually enabling this basically, the validation of this disaggregated wall. >> Oh. >> Sorry, I just wanted to- >> Go ahead. >> just going to add one more point, right? So, when we look at the partners that we are working with as well in the OTEL and there are three ways we are working with them. At the bare minimum, we want to make sure that solution will run on the Dell infrastructure and the hardware, right? So, we have the self-certification process. We had a lot of good uptake on it and we are seeing a lot more come in. In fact, I had a check-in with "theCUBE" this morning in our side and it's more than a hundred plus partners already interested in going through that. Awesome. Then we have other places where we work on with partners to build reference architectures together, right? So, we want some sort of validated solution that will work together that we can take to the market. And then we also have engineered solutions that we are building with partners like the infrastructure block offering that we have taken where it's all pre-packaged, pre-built by Dell, working very closely with our partners. So, the telcos don't have to worry about deployment, integration, and everything else that comes along. >> And I presume the security supply chain is part of that- >> Yes. >> bill of materials- >> Absolutely. >> you just described. >> Yeah. >> Exactly. >> And that would include all those levels, the engineered systems, the reference architectures as well? And how do you decide like candidates, we can't do it all, right? So, it's the big markets get the engineered system, is that right? How do you adjudicate there? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think there are a couple of angles to look at it, right? I think the first and foremost is where we see the biggest demand is coming from the customers in terms of the stack they already have and where they have the pain points. >> Dave: Okay. >> Right, so this is why we are working with Red Hat and Wind River, as an example, because they are in most of the deployments that we are aware of with the customers and where we see an opportunity for Dell to partner with these partners. I think we are seeing a lot of new players also coming up the stack. And as they come up the stack and we find opportunities to co-build and co-innovate, absolutely we'll be building joint solutions with them as well. >> Where are you on, from a partnership perspective, on the strategic vision? You mentioned a number of things that have already been accomplished, quite a few. But from your journey perspective on that strategy, where are you? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question. I think we really want to be the partner of choice for all technology and services company within the telecom space. We're looking to drive the transformation in the network area, right? So, that's the vision that we have in the telecom system business from a partnership side. We have created some really good strategic partnerships with key providers, with independent software vendors, the network equipment providers. We're having some really good, strategic conversations with them. You've heard some of the announcement come out today, the work we are doing with Nokia, with Samsung, the Red Hat announcement, the Wind River, and so on and so forth. And there's a lot more in the pipeline. But more importantly, we want to grow the impact of the ecosystem. So, that's why we are launching the partner community today as well to make that happen. >> How does the lab work? Who has access to it? Can I self-certify? If I can self-certify, how do you make sure that I'm following the rules, all of the stuff- >> Sure. >> that you would- >> Absolutely. >> expect. >> So yes, you can self-certify, that's Gautam just mentioned. We already had quite a few ISVs go through that self-certification. And then there's also, there's reference architecture that's being done and other engineered solutions that we talked about earlier. And the lab is set up in a way that when needed, test lines can be isolated. So, only certain set of partners have access to it. So, it's made up in a way that enables collaborations. At the same times, it kind of enables a certain set of customers and partners working together without having challenges of having a completely open system. >> Okay, but so, if I want to do something with you guys and let's say, I am a candidate for an engineered system, so how does it work? Somebody's got to buy the equipment, right? He's got to ship it, right? There's a lot of Dell equipment involved. >> Tibor: That's correct. >> There's other third-party CapEx software, et cetera. So, you fund that, the partners fund that, it's a hybrid funding model, how does that all get done? >> So today, for obviously, we work closely with those partners. The engineered solutions we've developed so far, we've been funding it largely and as you said, is Dell infrastructure plus the cast layers and the cloud players we work with. So, we actually put those in place. We funded them, of course, with participation from them. And that's being done through those labs. >> Okay, great. So, you guys are providing that benefit to the ecosystem. Writing checks, bringing engineering talent to the table. >> Gautam: Yeah. >> Okay. >> And at the same time, I mean, it's a partnership at the end of the day, right? So, depending on the kind of partnership we are. So, if you're an ISV, it's fairly simple. Come into our labs. You don't have to worry about the infrastructure. >> Sure. >> Run it all in our labs and you're good. If you're a hardware vendor or a NEP, network equipment provider, that's where it gets interesting where they need to send us stuff, we need to send them stuff. And usually, like Tibor mentioned, it's a joint collaboration. We all put in our chips on the table and we work together. >> So, when you're having conversations with prospective partners, obviously different types of partners, Gautam, that you just talked about, what's in it for them? What's the value proposition? What does this community- >> Gautam: Yeah. >> give them from a competitive advantage standpoint? >> Yeah, so I mean there are, so the way I think about it, right? There are three things that Dell is bringing to the table. The first one is our experience and expertise on doing this transformation within the enterprise space and the learnings we have from there that we're bringing to telco now, right? So, Dell's been working with enterprises for many, many years. We are one of the big providers there. We all know what transformation enterprise went through. >> Tibor: Telco transformation, IT transformation. >> Exactly. And that's the experience we have, which we're bringing to telco. The second one is our investment, both from a go-to market side as well as the way we are working with our sales and marketing, and so on and so forth, with the engineering side. And finally, I think, and this for me is the best one, is Dell is a very partner-centric organization. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Our strategy is built around partnerships. So, that's the other piece that we bring to the table. >> Where are the labs? Oh, go ahead. >> And what's one more note on that, and also, we are talking about the engineered solutions. There's also the supply chain then because that's a basically appliance and then that goes to Dell's supply chain, which is best in class. >> Dave: And where are the labs? How many are there? >> So Round Rock, Texas is the biggest one, the 13,000 square feet. We also have extension to it. We just announced opening one in Cork for the EME market to making sure that we can cover any regulatory challenges. But also, basically any test lines that we need to cover that have latency challenges. That's why we want to make sure that we have labs in other areas as well. >> And the go-to market, is it an overlay organization, a dedicated organization? >> Yeah, so it's a bit of both as you know. But yeah, in the telecom business unit, we have a dedicated sales organization as well as an alliance organization working very closely with product and engineering to take it to market. >> Given the strength and the breadth of the partner program in the community, based on this is only day one of MWC but is there anything that you've heard today that excites you where telecom is going and where Dell and its ecosystem is going and really burgeoning? >> Oh, I've had I don't know how many meetings since 6:00 AM this morning. So, it's been an amazing event and we're just having so many great conversations with partners, our customers. And I think a lot of today is all about figuring out what our strategy and our vision is, where is each side going and what the overlap is. I think the end result's going to be follow up conversations with a lot of these partners that we are working with or will be working with soon. And then thinking about, do we build engineered solutions together? Do we go validated route? Like we going to figure that out. But I mean, for me, this is like the perfect place to come and share your vision and strategy and understand what we are trying to solve for. >> To me, what's been interesting that all the interactions and discussions are about how to get to or render open ecosystem. That's great to see that the focus is on how to make it work versus still questioning it and I think that's pretty good. >> Well, you guys launched this business I think during the pandemic, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So I mean, you could do a lot over Zoom, but as we were talking about earlier, having the face-to-face interaction, there's no replacement for it. The 6:00 AM meetings versus the 30 minute zoom calls and your body language, I mean, you learn so much that you can take away from these events. >> Absolutely. Seeing someone in 3D is so different and it's good to build that relationship and rapport as well with the folks. >> I agree. >> It is. There's so much value in the hallway conversations that you can't have over Zoom. So, I guess last question for you as we head into to day two, what are some of the things that we can be on the lookout for from Dell and its ecosystem? >> Hmm. >> Interesting. (Tibor chuckling) >> I mean, all our announcements are out. I think what you can look at for us to really be leading in this segment, taking a leadership role, and continuously looking at how we can really enable the open ecosystem and how we can provide more value there, and how we can see how we can lead in this space. >> How you can lead in this space. >> Yeah, I mean for me, I mean, day two is like, I have a lot more meetings in day two than day one so I don't know if it's like people flying in today or what, but it's amazing to just meet the partners and customers. >> So, that theme of velocity for you is going to keep going. >> Oh, it's not stopping. (Lisa laughing) That's for sure. We are excited about it. >> Well, thank you for carving out some time to talk to with us on "theCUBE" about the partner program, the open ecosystem and the commitment to growing that and enabling partners to really differentiate their services with Dell. We appreciate it. >> We appreciate it as well. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. Day one of our coverage. Be right back with our final guest of the day so stick around. (upbeat music continues)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Again, all day wall-to-wall coverage, just had a great interview with Walmart, we've got a Next interview coming up, you're going to hear from Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, two experts, both experienced entrepreneurs, executives in technology. We're here to break down what just happened with Walmart, and what's coming up with George Gilbert, former colleague, Wikibon analyst, Gartner Analyst, and now independent investor and expert. George, great to see you, I know you're following this space. Like you read about it, remember the first days when Dataverse came out, we were talking about them coming out of Berkeley? >> Dave: Snowflake. >> John: Snowflake. >> Dave: Snowflake In the early days. >> We, collectively, have been chronicling the data movement since 2010, you were part of our team, now you've got your nose to the grindstone, you're seeing the next wave. What's this all about? Walmart building their own super cloud, we got Bob Muglia talking about how these next wave of apps are coming. What are the super apps? What's the super cloud to you? >> Well, this key's off Dave's really interesting questions to Walmart, which was like, how are they building their supercloud? 'Cause it makes a concrete example. But what was most interesting about his description of the Walmart WCMP, I forgot what it stood for. >> Dave: Walmart Cloud Native Platform. >> Walmart, okay. He was describing where the logic could run in these stateless containers, and maybe eventually serverless functions. But that's just it, and that's the paradigm of microservices, where the logic is in this stateless thing, where you can shoot it, or it fails, and you can spin up another one, and you've lost nothing. >> That was their triplet model. >> Yeah, in fact, and that was what they were trying to move to, where these things move fluidly between data centers. >> But there's a but, right? Which is they're all stateless apps in the cloud. >> George: Yeah. >> And all their stateful apps are on-prem and VMs. >> Or the stateful part of the apps are in VMs. >> Okay. >> And so if they really want to lift their super cloud layer off of this different provider's infrastructure, they're going to need a much more advanced software platform that manages data. And that goes to the -- >> Muglia and Handy, that you and I did, that's coming up next. So the big takeaway there, George, was, I'll set it up and you can chime in, a new breed of data apps is emerging, and this highly decentralized infrastructure. And Tristan Handy of DBT Labs has a sort of a solution to begin the journey today, Muglia is working on something that's way out there, describe what you learned from it. >> Okay. So to talk about what the new data apps are, and then the platform to run them, I go back to the using what will probably be seen as one of the first data app examples, was Uber, where you're describing entities in the real world, riders, drivers, routes, city, like a city plan, these are all defined by data. And the data is described in a structure called a knowledge graph, for lack of a, no one's come up with a better term. But that means the tough, the stuff that Jack built, which was all stateless and sits above cloud vendors' infrastructure, it needs an entirely different type of software that's much, much harder to build. And the way Bob described it is, you're going to need an entirely new data management infrastructure to handle this. But where, you know, we had this really colorful interview where it was like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em, but they weren't really that much in opposition to each other, because Tristan is going to define this layer, starting with like business intelligence metrics, where you're defining things like bookings, billings, and revenue, in business terms, not in SQL terms -- >> Well, business terms, if I can interrupt, he said the one thing we haven't figured out how to APIify is KPIs that sit inside of a data warehouse, and that's essentially what he's doing. >> George: That's what he's doing, yes. >> Right. And so then you can now expose those APIs, those KPIs, that sit inside of a data warehouse, or a data lake, a data store, whatever, through APIs. >> George: And the difference -- >> So what does that do for you? >> Okay, so all of a sudden, instead of working at technical data terms, where you're dealing with tables and columns and rows, you're dealing instead with business entities, using the Uber example of drivers, riders, routes, you know, ETA prices. But you can define, DBT will be able to define those progressively in richer terms, today they're just doing things like bookings, billings, and revenue. But Bob's point was, today, the data warehouse that actually runs that stuff, whereas DBT defines it, the data warehouse that runs it, you can't do it with relational technology >> Dave: Relational totality, cashing architecture. >> SQL, you can't -- >> SQL caching architectures in memory, you can't do it, you've got to rethink down to the way the data lake is laid out on the disk or cache. Which by the way, Thomas Hazel, who's speaking later, he's the chief scientist and founder at Chaos Search, he says, "I've actually done this," basically leave it in an S3 bucket, and I'm going to query it, you know, with no caching. >> All right, so what I hear you saying then, tell me if I got this right, there are some some things that are inadequate in today's world, that's not compatible with the Supercloud wave. >> Yeah. >> Specifically how you're using storage, and data, and stateful. >> Yes. >> And then the software that makes it run, is that what you're saying? >> George: Yeah. >> There's one other thing you mentioned to me, it's like, when you're using a CRM system, a human is inputting data. >> George: Nothing happens till the human does something. >> Right, nothing happens until that data entry occurs. What you're talking about is a world that self forms, polling data from the transaction system, or the ERP system, and then builds a plan without human intervention. >> Yeah. Something in the real world happens, where the user says, "I want a ride." And then the software goes out and says, "Okay, we got to match a driver to the rider, we got to calculate how long it takes to get there, how long to deliver 'em." That's not driven by a form, other than the first person hitting a button and saying, "I want a ride." All the other stuff happens autonomously, driven by data and analytics. >> But my question was different, Dave, so I want to get specific, because this is where the startups are going to come in, this is the disruption. Snowflake is a data warehouse that's in the cloud, they call it a data cloud, they refactored it, they did it differently, the success, we all know it looks like. These areas where it's inadequate for the future are areas that'll probably be either disrupted, or refactored. What is that? >> That's what Muglia's contention is, that the DBT can start adding that layer where you define these business entities, they're like mini digital twins, you can define them, but the data warehouse isn't strong enough to actually manage and run them. And Muglia is behind a company that is rethinking the database, really in a fundamental way that hasn't been done in 40 or 50 years. It's the first, in his contention, the first real rethink of database technology in a fundamental way since the rise of the relational database 50 years ago. >> And I think you admit it's a real Hail Mary, I mean it's quite a long shot right? >> George: Yes. >> Huge potential. >> But they're pretty far along. >> Well, we've been talking on theCUBE for 12 years, and what, 10 years going to AWS Reinvent, Dave, that no one database will rule the world, Amazon kind of showed that with them. What's different, is it databases are changing, or you can have multiple databases, or? >> It's a good question. And the reason we've had multiple different types of databases, each one specialized for a different type of workload, but actually what Muglia is behind is a new engine that would essentially, you'll never get rid of the data warehouse, or the equivalent engine in like a Databricks datalake house, but it's a new engine that manages the thing that describes all the data and holds it together, and that's the new application platform. >> George, we have one minute left, I want to get real quick thought, you're an investor, and we know your history, and the folks watching, George's got a deep pedigree in investment data, and we can testify against that. If you're going to invest in a company right now, if you're a customer, I got to make a bet, what does success look like for me, what do I want walking through my door, and what do I want to send out? What companies do I want to look at? What's the kind of of vendor do I want to evaluate? Which ones do I want to send home? >> Well, the first thing a customer really has to do when they're thinking about next gen applications, all the people have told you guys, "we got to get our data in order," getting that data in order means building an integrated view of all your data landscape, which is data coming out of all your applications. It starts with the data model, so, today, you basically extract data from all your operational systems, put it in this one giant, central place, like a warehouse or lake house, but eventually you want this, whether you call it a fabric or a mesh, it's all the data that describes how everything hangs together as in one big knowledge graph. There's different ways to implement that. And that's the most critical thing, 'cause that describes your Uber landscape, your Uber platform. >> That's going to power the digital transformation, which will power the business transformation, which powers the business model, which allows the builders to build -- >> Yes. >> Coders to code. That's Supercloud application. >> Yeah. >> George, great stuff. Next interview you're going to see right here is Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, they're going to unpack this new wave. Great segment, really worth unpacking and reading between the lines with George, and Dave Vellante, and those two great guests. And then we'll come back here for the studio for more of the live coverage of Supercloud 2. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>>And good afternoon. Welcome back here on the Cub as to continue our coverage at aws Reinvent 22, win the Venetian here in Las Vegas, day two, it's Wednesday. Thanks. Still rolling. Quite a along. We have another segment for you as part of the Global Startup program, which is under the AWS Startup Showcase. I'm joined now by Vink at Viera, who is the CEO and co-founder of R Set. And good to see you, >>Sir. Thanks for having me here. Yeah, >>No, a real pleasure. Looking forward to it. So first off, for some of, for yours who might not be familiar with Roxette, I know you've been on the cube a little bit, so you're, you're an alum, but, but why don't you set the stage a little bit for Rock set and you know, where you're engaged with in terms of, with aws? >>Definitely. Rock Set is a realtime analytics database that is built for the cloud. You know, we make realtime applications possible in the cloud. You know, realtime applications need high concurrency, low latency query processing data needs to be fresh, your analytic needs to be fast. And, you know, we built on aws and that's why we are here. We are very, very proud partners of aws. We are in the AWS Accelerate program, and also we are in the startup program of aws. We are strategic ISV partner. And so yeah, we make real time analytics possible without all the cost and complexity barriers that are usually associated with it. And very, very happy to be part of this movement from batch to real time that is happening in the world. >>Right. Which is certainly an exciting trend. Right. I know great news for you, you made news yesterday, had an announcement involved with the intel with aws, who wants to share some of that >>With us too? Definitely. So, you know, one, one question that I always ask people is like, you know, if you go perspective that I share is like, if you go ask a hundred people, do you want fast analytics on fresh data or slow analytics on stale data? You know, a hundred out of a hundred would say fast and fresh, right? Sure. So then the question is, why hasn't this happened already? Why is this still a new trend that is emerging as opposed to something that everybody's taking for granted? It really comes down to compute efficiency, right? I think, you know, at the end of the day, real time analytics was always in using, you know, technologies that are, let's say 10 years ago using let's say processors that were available 10 years ago to, you know, three cloud, you know, days. There was a lot of complexity barriers associated with realtime analytics and also a lot of cost and, and performance barriers associated with it. >>And so Rox said from the, you know, from the very beginning, has been obsessing about building the most compute efficient realtime database in the world. And, you know, AWS on one hand, you know, allows us to make a consumption based pricing model. So you only pay for what you use. Sure. And that shatters all the cost barriers. But in terms of computer efficiency, what we announced yesterday is the Intel's third generation Zon scalable processors, it's code named Intel Ice Lake. When we port it over Rock said to that architecture, taking advantage of some of the instructions sets that Intel has, we got an 84% performance boost, 84, 84, 84. >>It's, it's incredible, right? >>It's, it's an incredible charts, it's an incredible milestone. It reduces the barrier even more in terms of cost and, you know, and, and pushes the efficiency and sets a, a really new record for how efficient realtime, you know, data processing can be in the cloud. And, and it's very, very exciting news. And so we used to benchmark ourselves against some of our other, you know, realtime, you know, did up providers and we were already faster and now we've set a, a much, much higher bar for other people to follow. >>Yep. And, and so what is, or what was it about real time that, that, you know, was such a barrier because, and now you've got the speed of, of course, obviously, and maybe that's what it was, but I think cost is probably part of that too, right? That's all part of that equation. I mean, real time, so elusive. >>Yeah. So real time has this inherent pattern that your data never stops coming. And when your data never stops coming, and you can now actually do analytics on that. Now, initially people start with saying, oh, I just want a real time dashboard. And then very quickly they realize, well, the dashboard is actually in real time. I'm not gonna be staring at the 24 7. Can you tap on my shoulder when something is off, something needs to be looked at. So in which case you're constantly also asking the question, is everything okay? Is everything all right? Do I need to, is is that something that I need to be, you know, double clicking on and, and following up on? So essentially very quickly in real time analytics, what happens is your queries never stop. The questions that you're asking on your data never stops. And it's often a program asking the question to detect anomalies and things like that. >>And your data never stops coming. And so compute is running 24 7. If you look at traditional data warehouses and data lakes, they're not really optimized for these kinds of workloads. They're optimized to store massive volumes of data and in a storage efficient format. And when an analyst comes and asks a question to generate a report, you can spin up a whole bunch of compute, generate the report and tear it all down when you're done. Well, that is not compute running 24 7 to continuously, you know, you know, keep ingesting the data or continuously keep answering questions. So the compute efficiency that is needed is, is much, much, much higher. Right? And that is why, you know, Rox was born. So from the very beginning, we're only built, you know, for these use cases, we have a, an extremely powerful SQL engine that can give you full feature SQL analytics in a very, very compute efficient way in the cloud. >>Right. So, so let's talk about the leap that you've made, say in the last two years and, and, and what's been the spur of that? What has been allowed you to, to create this, you know, obviously a, a different kind of an array for your customers from which to choose, but, but what's been the spark you think >>We touched upon this a little earlier, right? This spark is really, you know, the world going from batch to real time. So if you look at mainstream adoption of technologies like Apache, Kafka and Confluent doing a really good job at that. In, in, in growing that community and, and use cases, now businesses are now acquiring business data, really important business data in real time. Now they want to operationalize it, right? So, you know, extract based static reports and bi you know, business intelligence is getting replaced in all modern enterprises with what we call operational intelligence, right? Don't tell me what happened last quarter and how to plan this quarter better. Tell me what's happening today, what's happening right now. And it's, it's your business operations using data to make day to day decisions better that either grows your top line, compresses your bottom line, eliminates risk that are inherently creeping up in your business. >>Sure. You know, eliminate potential churn from a customer or fraud, you know, deduction and, and getting on top of, you know, that, you know, a minute into this, into, into an outage as opposed to an hour into the outage. Right? And so essentially I think businesses are now realizing that operational intelligence and operational analytics really, you know, allows them to leverage data and especially real time data to make their, you know, to grow their businesses faster and more efficiently. And especially in this kind of macro environment that is, you know, more important to have better unit economics in your business than ever before. Sure. And so that is really, I think that is the real market movement happening. And, and we are here to just serve that market. We are making it much, much easier for companies that have already adopted, you know, streaming technologies like Kafka and, and, and knows Canis MSK and all these technologies. Now businesses are acquiring these data in real time now. They can also get realtime analytics on the other end of it. Sure. >>You know, you just touched on this and, and I'd like to hear your thoughts about this, about, about the economic environment because it does drive decisions, right? And it does motivate people to look for efficiencies and maybe costs, you know, right. Cutting costs. What are you seeing right now in terms of that, that kind of looming influence, right? That the economy can have in terms of driving decisions about where investments are being made and what expectations are in terms of delivering value, more value for the buck? >>Exactly. I think we see across the board, all of our customers come back and tell us, we don't want to manage data infrastructure and we don't want to do kind of DIY open source clusters. We don't wanna manage and scale and build giant data ops and DevOps teams to manage that, because that is not really, you know, in their business. You know, we have car rental companies want to be better at car rentals, we want airlines to be a better airline, and they don't, don't want their, you know, a massive investment in DevOps and data ops, which is not really their core business. And they really want to leverage, you know, you know, fully managed and, you know, cloud offerings like Rock said, you know, built on aws, massively scalable in the cloud with zero operational overhead, very, very easy to get started and scale. >>And so that completely removes all the operational overhead. And so they can invest the resources they have, the manpower, they have, the calories that they have on actually growing their businesses because that is what really gonna allow them to have better unit economics, right? So everybody that is on my payroll is helping me grow my top line or shrink my bottom line, eliminate risk in my business and, and, and, and churn and, and fraud and other, and eliminate all those risks that are inherent in my business. So, so that is where I think a lot of the investments going. So gone are the days where, you know, you're gonna have these in like five to 10% team managing a very hard to operate, you know, open source data management clusters on EC two nodes in, in AWS and, and kind of DIYing it their way because those 10 people, you know, if all they do is just operational maintenance of infrastructure, which is a means to an end, you're way better off, you know, using a cloud, you know, a bond in the cloud built for the cloud solution like rock and eliminate all that cost and, and replace that with an operationally much, much simpler, you know, system to op, you know, to to work with such as, such as rock. >>So that is really the big trend that we are seeing why, you know, not only real time is going more and more mainstream cloud native solutions or the real future even when it comes to real time because the complexity barrier needs to be shattered and only cloud native solutions can actually, >>You get the two Cs cost and complexity, right. That you, you need to address. Exactly. Yeah, for sure. You know, what is it about building trust with your, with your clients, with your partners? Because you, you're talking about this cloud environment that, that everyone is talking about, right? Not everyone's made that commitment. There are still some foot draggers out there. How are you going about establishing confidence and establishing trust and, and, and providing them with really concrete examples of the values and the benefits that you can provide, you know, with, with these opportunities? >>So, you know, I grew up, so there's a few ways to to, to answer this question. I'll, I'll, I'll come, I'll cover all the angles. So in, in order to establish trust, you have to create value. They, you know, your customer has to see that with you. They were able to solve the problem faster, better, cheaper, and they're able to, you know, have a, the business impact they were looking for, which is why they started the project in the first place. And so establishing that and proving that, I think there's no equivalence to that. And, you know, I grew up at, at, you know, at Facebook back in the day, you know, I was managing online data infrastructure, okay. For Facebook from 2007 and 2015. And internally we always had this kind of culture of all the product teams building on top of the infrastructure that my team was responsible for. >>And so they were not ever, there was never a, a customer vendor relationship internally within Facebook that we're all like, we're all part of the same team. We're partnering here to have you, you know, to help you have a successful product launch. There's a very similar DNA that, that exists in Rock said, when our customers work with us and they come to us and we are there to make them successful, our consumption based pricing model also forces us to say they're not gonna really use Rock said and consume more. I mean, we don't make money until they consume, right? And so their success is very much integral part of our, our success. And so that I think is one really important angle on, you know, give us a shot, come and do an evaluation, and we will work with you to build the most efficient way to solve your problem. >>And then when you succeed, we succeed. So that I think is a very important aspect. The second one is AWS partnership. You know, we are an ISV partner, you know, AWS a lot of the time. That really helps us establish trust. And a lot of the time, one of the, the, the people that they look up to, when a customer comes in saying, Hey, what is, who is Rock? Said? You know, who are your friends? Yeah. Who are your friends? And then, you know, and then the AWS will go like, oh, you know, we'll tell you, you know, all these other successful case studies that R has, you know, you know, built up on, you know, the world's largest insurance provider, Europe's largest insurance provider. We have customers like, you know, JetBlue Airlines to Klarna, which is a big bator company. And so, so all these case studies help and, and, and, and platform and partners like AWS helps us, helps you amplify that, that, you know, and, and, and, and, and give more credibility. And last but not least, compliance matters. You know, being Soto type two compliant is, is a really important part of establishing trust. We are hip hop compliant now so that, you know, we can, you know, pi I phi data handling that. And so I think that will continue to be a part, a big part of our focus in improving the security, you know, functionality and, and capabilities that R set has in the cloud, and also compliance and, and the set of com, you know, you know, standards that we are gonna be compliant against. >>Well, I'm glad you hit on the AWS too, cause I did wanna bring that up. I, I appreciate that and I know they appreciate the relationship as well. Thanks for the time here. It's been a pleasure. Awesome. Learning about Rockette and what you're up to. Thank you. >>You bet. >>It's a pleasure. Thank you. Vi ka. All right. You are watching the cube coverage here at AWS Reinvent 22. And on the cube, of course, the leader, the leader in high tech coverage.

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

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the 80, but startup showcases MarTech is the focus. And this is all about the emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting, fast growing startups from the cloud AWS ecosystem to talk about the future and what's available now, where are the actions? I'm your host John fur. Today. We joined by Cub alumni, Jerry Chen partner at Greylock ventures. Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on, >>John. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate you welcome there for season two. Uh, as a, as a guest star, >><laugh>, you know, Hey, you know, season two, it's not a one and done it's continued coverage. We, we got the episodic, uh, cube flicks model going >>Here. Well, you know, congratulations, the, the coverage on this ecosystem around AWS has been impressive, right? I think you and I have talked a long time about AWS and the ecosystem building. It just continues to grow. And so the coverage you did last season, all the events of this season is, is pretty amazing from the data security to now marketing. So it's, it's great to >>Watch. And 12 years now, the cube been running. I remember 2013, when we first met you in the cube, we just left VMware just getting into the venture business. And we were just riffing the next 80. No one really kind of knew how big it would be. Um, but we were kinda riffing on. We kind of had a sense now it's happening. So now you start to see every vertical kind of explode with the right digital transformation and disruption where you see new incumbents. I mean, new Newton brands get replaced the incumbent old guard. And now in MarTech, it's ripe for, for disruption because web two has gone on to web 2.5, 3, 4, 5, um, cookies are going away. You've got more governance and privacy challenges. There's a slew of kind of ad tech baggage, but yet lots of new data opportunities. Jerry, this is a huge, uh, thing. What's your take on this whole MarTech cloud scale, uh, >>Market? I, I think, I think to your point, John, that first the trends are correct and the bad and the good or good old days, the battle days MarTech is really about your webpage. And then email right there. There's, there's the emails, the only channel and the webpage was only real estate and technology to care about fast forward, you know, 10 years you have webpages, mobile apps, VR experiences, car experiences, your, your, your Alexa home experiences. Let's not even get to web three web 18, whatever it is. Plus you got text messages, WhatsApp, messenger, email, still great, et cetera. So I think what we've seen is both, um, explosion and data, uh, explosion of channel. So sources of data have increases and the fruits of the data where you can reach your customers from text, email, phone calls, etcetera have exploded too. So the previous generation created big company responses, Equa, you know, that exact target that got acquired by Oracle or, or, um, Salesforce, and then companies like, um, you know, MailChimp that got acquired as well, but into it, you're seeing a new generation companies for this new stack. So I, I think it's exciting. >>Yeah. And you mentioned all those things about the different channels and stuff, but the key point is now the generation shifts going on, not just technical generation, uh, and platform and tools, it's the people they're younger. They don't do email. They have, you know, proton mail accounts, zillion Gmail accounts, just to get the freebie. Um, they're like, they're, they'll do subscriptions, but not a lot. So the generational piece on the human side is huge. Okay. And then you got the standards, bodies thrown away, things like cookies. Sure. So all this is makes it for a complicated, messy situation. Um, so out of this has to come a billion dollar startup in my mind, >>I, I think multiple billion dollars, but I think you're right in the sense that how we want engage with the company branch, either consumer brands or business brands, no one wants to pick a phone anymore. Right? Everybody wants to either chat or DM people on Twitter. So number one, the, the way we engage is different, both, um, where both, how like chat or phone, but where like mobile device, but also when it's the moment when we need to talk to a company or brand be it at the store, um, when I'm shopping in real life or in my car or at the airport, like we want to reach the brands, the brands wanna reach us at the point of decision, the point of support, the point of contact. And then you, you layer upon that the, the playing field, John of privacy security, right? All these data silos in the cloud, the, the, the, the game has changed and become even more complicated with the startup. So the startups are gonna win. Will do, you know, the collect, all the data, make us secure in private, but then reach your customers when and where they want and how they want it. >>So I gotta ask you, because you had a great podcast just this week, published and snowflake had their event going on the data cloud, there's a new kind of SAS platform vibe going on. You're starting to see it play out. Uh, and one of the things I, I noticed on your podcast with the president of Hashi Corp, who was on people should listen to that podcast. It's on gray matter, which is the Greylocks podcast, uh, plug for you guys. He mentioned he mentions the open source dynamic, right? Sure. And, and I like what he, things, he said, he said, software business has changed forever. It's my words. Now he said infrastructure, but I'm saying software in general, more broader infrastructure and software as a category is all open source. One game over no debate. Right. You agree? >>I, I think you said infrastructure specifically starts at open source, but I would say all open source is one more or less because open source is in every bit of software. Right? And so from your operating system to your car, to your mobile phone, open source, not necessarily as a business model or, or, or whatever, we can talk about that. But open source as a way to build software distribute, software consume software has one, right? It is everywhere. So regardless how you make money on it, how you build software, an open source community ha has >>One. Okay. So let's just agree. That's cool. I agree with that. Let's take it to the next level. I'm a company starting a company to sell to big companies who pay. I gotta have a proprietary advantage. There's gotta be a way. And there is, I know you've talked about it, but I have my opinion. There is needs to be a way to be proprietary in a way that allows for that growth, whether it's integration, it's not gonna be on software license or maybe support or new open source model. But how does startups in the MarTech this area in general, when they disrupt or change the category, they gotta get value creation going. What's your take on, on building. >>You can still build proprietary software on top of open source, right? So there's many companies out there, um, you know, in a company called rock set, they've heavily open source technology like Rock's DB under the hood, but they're running a cloud database. That's proprietary snowflake. You talk about them today. You know, it's not open source technology company, but they use open source software. I'm sure in the hoods, but then there's open source companies, data break. So let's not confus the two, you can still build proprietary software. There's just components of open source, wherever we go. So number one is you can still build proprietary IP. Number two, you can get proprietary data sources, right? So I think increasingly you're seeing companies fight. I call this systems intelligence, right, by getting proprietary data, to train your algorithms, to train your recommendations, to train your applications, you can still collect data, um, that other competitors don't have. >>And then it can use the data differently, right? The system of intelligence. And then when you apply the system intelligence to the end user, you can create value, right? And ultimately, especially marketing tech, the highest level, what we call the system of engagement, right? If, if the chat bot the mobile UI, the phone, the voice app, etcetera, if you own the system of engagement, be a slack, or be it, the operating system for a phone, you can also win. So still multiple levels to play John in multiple ways to build proprietary advantage. Um, just gotta own system record. Yeah. System intelligence, system engagement. Easy, right? Yeah. >>Oh, so easy. Well, the good news is the cloud scale and the CapEx funded there. I mean, look at Amazon, they've got a ton of open storage. You mentioned snowflake, but they're getting a proprietary value. P so I need to ask you MarTech in particular, that means it's a data business, which you, you pointed out and we agree. MarTech will be about the data of the workflows. How do you get those workflows what's changing and how these companies are gonna be building? What's your take on it? Because it's gonna be one of those things where it might be the innovation on a source of data, or how you handle two parties, ex handling encrypted data sets. I don't know. Maybe it's a special encryption tool, so we don't know what it is. What's your what's, what's your outlook on this area? >>I, I, I think that last point just said is super interesting, super genius. It's integration or multiple data sources. So I think either one, if it's a data business, do you have proprietary data? Um, one number two with the data you do have proprietary, not how do you enrich the data and do you enrich the data with, uh, a public data set or a party data set? So this could be cookies. It could be done in Brad street or zoom info information. How do you enrich the data? Number three, do you have machine learning models or some other IP that once you collected the data, enriched the data, you know, what do you do with the data? And then number four is once you have, um, you know, that model of the data, the customer or the business, what do you deal with it? Do you email, do you do a tax? >>Do you do a campaign? Do you upsell? Do you change the price dynamically in our customers? Do you serve a new content on your website? So I think that workflow to your point is you can start from the same place, what to do with the data in between and all the, on the out the side of this, this pipeline is where a MarTech company can have then. So like I said before, it was a website to an email go to website. You know, we have a cookie fill out a form. Yeah. I send you an email later. I think now you, you can't just do a website to email, it's a website plus mobile apps, plus, you know, in real world interaction to text message, chat, phone, call Twitter, a whatever, you know, it's >>Like, it's like, they're playing checkers in web two and you're talking 3d chess. <laugh>, I mean, there's a level, there's a huge gap between what's coming. And this is kind of interesting because now you mentioned, you know, uh, machine learning and data, and AI is gonna factor into all this. You mentioned, uh, you know, rock set. One of your portfolios has under the hood, you know, open source and then use proprietary data and cloud. Okay. That's a configuration, that's an architecture, right? So architecture will be important in terms of how companies posture in this market, cuz MarTech is ripe for innovation because it's based on these old technologies, but there's tons of workflows, but you gotta have the data. Right. And so if I have the best journey map from a client that goes to a website, but then they go and they do something in the organic or somewhere else. If I don't have that, what good is it? It's like a blind spot. >>Correct. So I think you're seeing folks with the data BS, snowflake or data bricks, or an Amazon that S three say, Hey, come to my data cloud. Right. Which, you know, Snowflake's advertising, Amazon will say the data cloud is S3 because all your data exists there anyway. So you just, you know, live on S3 data. Bricks will say, S3 is great, but only use Amazon tools use data bricks. Right. And then, but on top of that, but then you had our SaaS companies like Oracle, Salesforce, whoever, and say, you know, use our qua Marketo, exact target, you know, application as a system record. And so I think you're gonna have a battle between, do I just work my data in S3 or where my data exists or gonna work my data, some other application, like a Marketo Ella cloud Z target, um, or, you know, it could be a Twilio segment, right. Was combination. So you'll have this battle between these, these, these giants in the cloud, easy, the castles, right. Versus, uh, the, the, the, the contenders or the, or the challengers as we call >>'em. Well, great. Always chat with the other. We always talk about castles in the cloud, which is your work that you guys put out, just an update on. So check out greylock.com. They have castles on the cloud, which is a great thesis on and a map by the way ecosystem. So you guys do a really good job props to Jerry and the team over at Greylock. Um, okay. Now I gotta ask kind of like the VC private equity sure. Market question, you know, evaluations. Uh, first of all, I think it's a great time to do a startup. So it's a good time to be in the VC business. I think the next two years, you're gonna find some nice gems, but also you gotta have that cleansing period. You got a lot of overvaluation. So what happened with the markets? So there's gonna be a lot of M and a. So the question is what are some of the things that you see as challenges for product teams in particular that might have that killer answer in MarTech, or might not have the runway if there's no cash, um, how do people partner in this modern era, cuz scale's a big deal, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> you can measure everything. So you get the combination of a, a new kind of M and a market coming, a potential growth market for the right solution. Again, value's gotta be be there. What's your take on this market? >>I, I, I think you're right. Either you need runway, so cash to make it through, through this next, you know, two, three years, whatever you think the market Turmo is or two, you need scale, right? So if you're at a company of scale and you have enough data, you can probably succeed on your own. If not, if you're kind of in between or early to your point, either one focus, a narrower wedge, John, just like we say, just reduce the surface area. And next two years focus on solving one problem. Very, very well, or number two in this MarTech space, especially there's a lot of partnership and integration opportunities to create a complete solution together, to compete against kind of the incumbents. Right? So I think they're folks with the data, they're folks doing data, privacy, security, they're post focusing their workflow or marketing workflows. You're gonna see either one, um, some M and a, but I definitely can see a lot of Coopers in partnership. And so in the past, maybe you would say, I'm just raise another a hundred million dollars and do what you're doing today. You might say, look, instead of raising more money let's partner together or, or merge or find a solution. So I think people are gonna get creative. Yeah. Like said scarcity often is good. Yeah. I think forces a lot more focus and a lot more creativity. >>Yeah. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up up. Cause I didn't think you were gonna go there. I was gonna ask that biz dev activity is going to be really fundamental because runway combined with the fact that, Hey, you know, if you know, get real or you're gonna go under is a real issue. So now people become friends. They're like, okay, if we partner, um, it's clearly a good way to go if you can get there. So what advice would you give companies? Um, even most experienced, uh, founders and operators. This is a different market, right? It's a different kind of velocity, obviously architectural data. You mentioned some of those key things. What's the posture to partner. What's your advice? What's the combat man manual to kind of compete in this new biz dev world where some it's a make or break time, either get the funding, get the customers, which is how you get funding or you get a biz dev deal where you combine forces, uh, go to market together or not. What's your advice? >>I, I think that the combat manual is either you're partnering for one or two things, either one technology or two customers or sometimes both. So it would say which partnerships, youre doing for technology EG solution completers. Like you have, you know, this puzzle piece, I have this puzzle piece data and data privacy and let's work together. Um, or number two is like, who can help you with customers? And that's either a, I, they can be channel for you or, or vice versa or can share customers and you can actually go to market together and find customers jointly. So ideally you're partner for one, if not the other, sometimes both. And just figure out where in your life cycle do you need? Um, friends. >>Yeah. Great. My final question, Jerry, first of all, thanks for coming on and sharing your in insight as usual. Always. Awesome final question for the folks watching that are gonna be partnering and buying product and services from these startups. Um, there's a select few great ones here and obviously every other episode as well, and you've got a bunch you're investing in this, it's actually a good market for the ones that are lean companies that are lean and mean have value. And the cloud scale does provide that. So a lot of companies are getting it right, they're gonna break through. So they're clearly gonna be getting customers the buyer side, how should they be looking through the lens right now and looking at companies, what should they look for? Um, and they like to take chances with seeing that. So it's not so much, they gotta be vetted, but you know, how do they know the winners from the pretenders? >>You know, I, I think the customers are always smart. I think in the, in the, in the past in market market tech, especially they often had a budget to experiment with. I think you're looking now the customers, the buyer technologies are looking for a hard ROI, like a return on investment. And before think they might experiment more, but now they're saying, Hey, are you gonna help me save money or increase revenue or some hardcore metric that they care about? So I think, um, the startups that actually have a strong ROI, like save money or increased revenue and can like point empirically how they do that will, will, you know, rise to the top of, of the MarTech landscape. And customers will see that they're they're, the customers are smart, right? They're savvy buyers. They, they, they, they, they can smell good from bad and they're gonna see the strong >>ROI. Yeah. And the other thing too, I like to point out, I'd love to get your reaction real quick is a lot of the companies have DNA, any open source or they have some community track record where communities now, part of the vetting. I mean, are they real good people? >>Yeah. I, I think open stores, like you said, in the community in general, like especially all these communities that move on slack or discord or something else. Right. I think for sure, just going through all those forums, slack communities or discord communities, you can see what's a good product versus next versus bad. Don't go to like the other sites. These communities would tell you who's working. >>Well, we got a discord channel on the cube now had 14,000 members. Now it's down to six, losing people left and right. We need a moderator, um, to get on. If you know anyone on discord, anyone watching wants to volunteer to be the cube discord, moderator. Uh, we could use some help there. Love discord. Uh, Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. What's new at Greylock. What's some of the things happening. Give a quick plug for the firm. When you guys working on, I know there's been some cool things happening, new investments, people moving. >>Yeah. Look we're we're Greylock partners, seed series a firm. I focus at enterprise software. I have a team with me that also does consumer investing as well as crypto investing like all firms. So, but we're we're seed series a occasionally later stage growth. So if you're interested, uh, FA me@jkontwitterorjgreylock.com. Thank you, John. >>Great stuff, Jerry. Thanks for coming on. This is the Cube's presentation of the, a startup showcase. MarTech is the series this time, emerging cloud scale customer experience where the integration and the data matters. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the hottest cloud startups from the ADWS ecosystem. Um, John farrier, thanks for watching.

>>From around the globe. It's the Cube covering data citizens 21 brought to you by culebra. Hello everyone john walls here as we continue our cube conversations here as part of Data citizens 21 the conference ongoing caliber at the heart of that really at the heart of data these days and helping companies and corporations make sense. All of those data chaos that they're dealing with, trying to provide new insights, new analyses being a lot more efficient and effective with your data. That's what culebra is all about and their founder and their Chief data Citizen if you will stand christians joins us today and stan I love that title. Chief Data Citizen. What is that all about? What does that mean? >>Hey john thanks for having me over and hopefully we'll get to the point where the chief data citizen titlists cleaves to you. Thanks by the way for giving us the opportunity to speak a little bit about what we're doing with our Chief Data Citizen. Um we started the community, the company about 13 years ago, uh 2008 and over those years as a founder, I've worn many different hats from product presales to partnerships and a bunch of other things. But ultimately the company reaches a certain point, a certain size where systems and processes become absolutely necessary if you want to scale further for us. This is the moment in time when we said, okay, we probably need a data office right now ourselves, something that we've seen with many of our customers. So he said, okay, let me figure out how to lead our own data office and figure out how we can get value out of data using our own software at Clear Bright Self. And that's where it achieved. That a citizen role comes in on friday evening. We like to call that, drinking our own champagne monday morning, you know, eating our own dog food. But essentially um this is what we help our customers do build out the offices. So we're doing this ourselves now when we're very hands on. So there's a lot of things we're learning again, just like our customers do. And for me at culebra, this means that I'm responsible as achieved data citizen for our overall data strategy, which talks a lot about data products as well as our data infrastructure, which is needed to power data problems now because we're doing this in the company and also doing this in a way that is helpful to our customers. Were also figuring out how do we translate the learning that we have ourselves and give them back to our customers, to our partners, to the broader ecosystem as a whole. And that's why uh if you summarize the strategy, I like the sometimes refer to it as Data office 2025, it's 2025. What is the data office looked like by then? And we recommend to our customers also have that forward looking view just as well. So if I summarize the the answer a little bit it's very similar to achieve their officer role but because it has the external evangelization component helping other data leaders we like to refer to it as the chief data scientist. >>Yeah that that kind of uh you talk about evangelizing obviously with that that you're talking about certain kinds of responsibilities and obligations and when I think of citizenship in general I think about privileges and rights and about national citizenship. You're talking about data citizenship. So I assume that with that you're talking about appropriate behaviors and the most uh well defined behaviors and kind of keep it between the lanes basically. Is that is that how you look at being a data citizen. And if not how would you describe that to a client about being a data citizen? >>It's a very good point as a citizen. You have the rights and responsibilities and the same is exactly true for a day to citizens. For us, starting with what it is right for us. The data citizen is somebody who uses data to do their job. And we've purposely made that definition very broad because today we believe that everyone in some way uses data, do their job. You know, data universal. It's critical to business processes and its importance is only increasing and we want all the data citizens to have appropriate access to data and and the ability to do stuff with data but also to do that in the right way. And if you think about it, this is not just something that applies to you and your job but also extends beyond the workplace because as a data citizen, you're also a human being. Of course. So the way you do data at home with your friends and family, all of this becomes important as well. Uh and we like to think about it as informed privacy. Us data citizens who think about trust in data all the time because ultimately everybody's talking today about data as an asset and data is the new gold and the new oil and the new soil. And there is a ton of value uh data but it's not just organizations themselves to see this. It's also the bad actors out there were reading a lot more about data breaches for example. So ultimately there is no value without rescue. Uh so as the data citizen you can achieve value but you also have to think about how do I avoid these risks? And as an organization, if you manage to combine both of those, that's when you can get the maximum value out of data in a trusted manner. >>Yeah, I think this is pretty interesting approach that you've taken here because obviously there are processes with regard to data, right? I mean you know that's that's pretty clear but there are there's a culture that you're talking about here that not only are we going to have an operational plan for how we do this certain activity and how we're going to uh analyze here, input here action uh perform action on that whatever. But we're gonna have a mindset or an approach mentally that we want our company to embrace. So if you would walk me through that process a little bit in terms of creating that kind of culture which is very different then kind of the X's and oh's and the technical side of things. >>Yeah, that's I think where organizations face the biggest challenge because you know, maybe they're hiring the best, most unique data scientists in the world, but it's not about what that individual can do, right? It's about what the combination of data citizens across the organization can do. And I think there it starts first by thinking as an individual about universal goal Golden rule, treat others as you would want to be treated yourself right the way you would ethically use data at your job. Think about that. There's other people and other companies who you would want to do the same thing. Um now from our experience and our own data office at cordoba as well as what we see with our customers, a lot of that personal responsibility, which is where culture starts, starts with data literacy and you know, we talked a little bit about Planet Rock and small statues in brussels Belgium where I'm from. But essentially um here we speak a couple of languages in Belgium and for organizations for individuals, Data literacy is very similar. You know, you're able to read and write, which are pretty essential for any job today. And so we want all data citizens to also be able to speak and read and write data fluently if I if I can express it this way. And one of the key ways of getting that done and establishing that culture around data uh is lies with the one who leads data in the organization, the Chief Petty Officer or however the roll is called. They play a very important role in this. Um, the comparison maybe that I always make there is think about other assets in your organization. You know, you're you're organized for the money asset for the talent assets with HR and a bunch of other assets. So let's talk about the money asset for a little bit, right? You have a finance department, you have a chief financial officer. And obviously their responsibility is around managing that money asset, but it's also around making others in the organization think about that money asset and they do that through established processes and responsibilities like budgeting and planning, but also ultimately to the individual where, you know, through expense sheets that we all off so much they make you think about money. So if the CFO makes everyone in the company thinks about think about money, that data officer or the data lead has to think has to make everyone think uh in the company about data as a as it just as well and and those rights those responsibilities um in that culture, they also change right today. They're set this and this way because of privacy and policy X. And Y. And Z. But tomorrow for example as with the european union's new regulation around the eye, there's a bunch of new responsibilities you have to think about. >>Mhm. You know you mentioned security and about value and risk which is certainly um they are part and parcel right? If I have something important, I gotta protect it because somebody else might want to um to create some damage, some harm uh and and steal my value basically. Well that's what's happening as you point out in the data world these days. So so what kind of work are you doing in that regard in terms of reinforcing the importance of security, culture, privacy culture, you know this kind of protective culture within an organization so that everybody fully understands the risks. But also the huge upsides if you do enforce this responsibility and these good behaviors that that obviously the company can gain from and then provide value to their client base. So how do you reinforce that within your clients to spread that culture if you will within their organizations? >>Um spreading a culture is not always an easy thing. Um especially a lot of organizations think about the value around data but to your point, not always about the risks that come associated with it sometimes just because they don't know about it yet. Right? There's new architecture is that come into play like the clouds and that comes with a whole bunch of new risk. That's why one of the things that we recommend always to our uh customers and to data officers and our customers organizations is that next to establishing that that data literacy, for example, and working on data products is that they also partners strongly with other leaders in their organization. On the one hand, for example, the legal uh folks, where typically you find the aspects around privacy and on the other hand, um the information security folks, because if you're building up a sort of map of your data, look at it like a castle, right that you're trying to protect. Uh if you don't have a map of your castle with the strong points and weak points and you know, where people can build, dig a hole under your wall or what have you, then it's very hard to defend. So you have to be able to get a map of your data. A data map if you will know what data is out there with being used by and and why and how and then you want to prioritize that data which is the most important, what are the most important uses and put the appropriate protections and controls in place. Um and it's fundamental that you do that together with your legal and information security partners because you may have as a data leader you may have the data module data expertise, but there's a bunch of other things that come into play when you're trying to protect, not just the data but really your company on its data as a whole. >>You know you were talking about 2025 a little bit ago and I think good for you. That's quite a crystal ball that you have you know looking uh with the headlights that far down the road. But I know you have to be you know that kind of progressive thinking is very important. What do you see in the long term for number one? You're you're kind of position as a chief data citizen if you will. And then the role of the chief data officer which you think is kind of migrating toward that citizenship if you will. So maybe put on those long term vision uh goggles of yours again and and tell me what do you see as far as these evolving roles and and these new responsibilities for people who are ceos these days? >>Um well 2025 is closer than we think right? And obviously uh my crystal ball is as Fuzzy as everyone else's but there's a few things that trends that you can easily identify and that we've seen by doing this for so long at culebra. Um and one is the push around data I think last year. Um the years 2020, 2020 words uh sort of Covid became the executive director of digitalization forced everyone to think more about digital. And I expect that to continue. Right. So that's an important aspect. The second important aspect that I expect to continue for the next couple of years, easily. 2025 is the whole movement to the cloud. So those cloud native architecture to become important as well as the, you know, preparing your data around and preparing your false, he's around it, et cetera. I also expect that privacy regulations will continue to increase as well as the need to protect your data assets. Um And I expect that a lot of achieved that officers will also be very busy building out those data products. So if you if you think that that trend then okay, data products are getting more important for t data officers, then um data quality is something that's increasingly important today to get right otherwise becomes a garbage in garbage out kind of situation where your data products are being fed bad food and ultimately their their outcomes are very tricky. So for us, for the chief data officers, Um I think there was about one of them in 2002. Um and then in 2019 ISH, let's say there were around 10,000. So there's there's plenty of upside to go for the chief data officers, there's plenty of roles like that needed across the world. Um and they've also evolved in in responsibility and I expect that their position, you know, it it is really a sea level position today in most organizations expect that that trend will also to continue to grow. But ultimately, those achieved that officers have to think about the business, right? Not just the defensive and offensive positions around data like policies and regulations, but also the support for businesses who are today shifting very fast and we'll continue to uh to digital. So those Tv officers will be seen as heroes, especially when they can build out a factory of data products that really supports the business. Um, but at the same time, they have to figure out how to um reach and always branch to their technical counterparts because you cannot build that factory of data products in my mind, at least without the proper infrastructure. And that's where your technical teams come in. And then obviously the partnerships with your video and information security folks, of course. >>Well heroes. Everybody wants to be the hero. And I know that uh you painted a pretty clear path right now as far as the Chief data officer is concerned and their importance and the value to companies down the road stan. We thank you very much for the time today and for the insight and wish you continued success at the conference. Thank you very much. >>Thank you very much. Have a nice day healthy. >>Thank you very much Dan Christians joining us talking about chief data citizenship if you will as part of data citizens 21. The conference being put on by caliber. I'm John Wall's thanks for joining us here on the Cube. >>Mhm.

>>Hey, welcome to the Cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021, the virtual experience, I'm lisa martin, I have two guests joining me. One is a cube alum kamal Shah is back, he's now the VP of cloud platforms at Brent had come on, it's great to have you back on the program. You're in a new role, we're going to talk about that. Thank you. And Kirsten newcomer is here as well. She's the Director of cloud and Death stickups strategy at Red Hat, Kirsten, Welcome and thank you for bringing the red hat vibe to the segment. >>Absolutely, very happy to be here. >>So looking forward to this conversation that we're going to be having in the next 20 minutes or so. We're gonna be talking about the last time come on, you were on, you were the ceo of stack rocks In January of 2021. The announcement that red hat plans to acquire stack rocks, it wouldn't be talking all about that. But I'd like to start with Kirsten, give us your perspective from red hats perspective, why is red hat a good fit for stack rocks? >>You know, there are so many reasons first of all as as you know, right? Red hat has been working with product Izing kubernetes since kubernetes one dato. Right, so so open shift three dato shipped with kubernetes one dot Oh, so we've been working with kubernetes for a long time, stack rocks embraces kind of is kubernetes native security embraces the declarative nature of kubernetes and brings that to security. Red hats, Custer's red hat enterprise customers, we have a great set across different verticals that are very security conscious and and during my five years at red hat, that's where I spend the majority of my time is talking with our customers about container and kubernetes security. And while there's a great deal of security built in to open shift as it goes to market out of the box, customers need the additional capabilities that stack rock springs. Historically, we've met those needs with our security partners. We have a great ecosystem of security partners. And with the stack rocks acquisition, we're now in a position to offer additional choice. Right. If a customer wants those capabilities from Red hat tightly integrated with open shift, we'll have those available and we continue to support and work with our broad ecosystem of security partners. >>Excellent customers always want choice. Come on. Give me your perspective. You were at the helm the ceo of stack rocks as you were last time you were on the cube. Talk to me about the redhead acquisition from your seat. >>Yeah. So as as Kirsten mentioned, we were partners of red hat. You're part of the red hat partner ecosystem. And uh, what we found is that was both a great strategic fit and a great cultural fit between our two companies. Right? And so the discussions that we had were how do we go and quickly enable our customers to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives to move workloads to the cloud, to containerized them, to manage them through kubernetes and make sure that we seamlessly addressed their security concerns. Right? Because it continues to be the number one concern for large enterprises and medium sized enterprises and frankly any enterprise that uh, you know, uh, working out today. So, so that was kind of the impetus behind it. And I must say that so far the the acquisition has been going on very smoothly. So we had two months in roughly and everybody and has been very welcoming, very collaborative, very supportive. And we are already working hand in hand to to integrate our companies and to make sure that we are working closely together to make our customers successful. >>Excellent. We're gonna talk about that integration in a second. But I can imagine challenging going through an acquisition during a global pandemic. Um but that is one of the things that I think lends itself to the cultural alignment. Kamal that you talked about, Kirsten. I want to get your perspective. We know we talk about corporate culture and corporate culture has changed a lot in the last year with everybody or so many of us being remote. Talk to me about kind of the core values that red hat and stack rocks share >>actually, you know, that's been one of the great joys doing during the acquisition process in particular, Kamal and and ali shared kind of their key values and how they um how they talked to talk with their team And some of the overlap was just so resonated so much for all of us. In particular the sense of transparency, uh, that the, that the team the stack rocks executive team brings and approaches. That's a that's a clear value for red hat um strongly maintained. Uh, that was one of the key things the interest in um uh, containers and kubernetes. Right. So the technology alignment was very clear. We probably wouldn't have proceeded without that. But again, um and I think the investment in people and the independence and the and the strong drive of the individuals and supporting the individuals as they contribute to the offering so that it really creates that sense of community um and collaboration that is key. Uh and and it's just really strong overlap in in cultural values and we so appreciated that >>community and collaboration couldn't be more important these days. And ultimately the winner is the customers. So let's dig in. Let's talk about what stack rocks brings to open shift Kirsten take it away >>man. So as I said earlier, um so I think we we really believe in continuous security at red hat and in defense and depth. And so when we look at an enterprise kubernetes distribution that involves security at the real core os layer security and kubernetes adding the things into the distribution, making sure they're there by default, that any distribution needs to be secured to be hardened, auditing, logging, identity, access management, just a wealth of things. And Red hat has historically focused on infrastructure and platform security, building those capabilities into what we bring to market stack rocks enhances what we already have and really adds workload protection, which is really when it comes down to it. Especially if you're looking at hybrid cloud, multi cloud, how you secure, not just the platform, but how you secure your workloads changes. And we're moving from a world where, you know, you're deploying anti virus or malware scanners on your VMS and your host operating system to a world where those work clothes may be very short lived. And if they aren't secured from the get go, you miss your opportunity to secure them right? You can't rely on, you know, you do need controls in the infrastructure but they need to be kubernetes native controls and you need to shift that security left. Right? You never patch a running container. You always have to rebuild and redeploy if you patch the running container the next time that container images deployed, you've missed, you've lost that patch. And so the whole ethos the whole shift left. The Deb sec ops capabilities that stack rock springs really adds such value. Right? You can't just do DEF SEc or set cops. You need to do a full infinity loop to really have def SEc ops and stack rocks. I'm gonna let Kamal tell you about it, but they have so many capabilities that that really drive that shift left and enable that closed loop. We're just so excited that they're part of our offerings. >>So can you take us through that? How does stack rocks facilitate the shift left? >>Yeah, absolutely. So stack rocks, which we we announced at summit is now being rebranded as red hat. Advanced cluster security was really purpose built to help our customers address the use cases across the entire application lifecycle. Right? So from bill to deploy to run time. So this is the infinite loop that Kirsten mentioned earlier and one of our foundations was to be kubernetes native to ensure that security is really built into the application is supposed to bolt it on. So specifically, we help our customers shift left by securing the supply chain and we're making sure that we identifying vulnerabilities early during the build process before they make it to a production environment. We helped them secure the infrastructure by preventing miS configurations again early in the process because as we all know, MIS configurations often lead to breaches at at runtime. Right? We help them address uh compliance requirements by ensuring that we can check for CS benchmarks are regulatory requirements around the C I P C I, hip hop and this and and that's uh you know, just focusing on shift left, doesn't really mean that you ignore the right side or ignore the controls you need uh when your applications are running in production. So we help them secure that at runtime by identifying preventing breaches the threat detection, prevention and incident response. >>That built in security is you both mentioned that built in versus bolt on Kirsten? Talk to me about that, that as really kind of a door opener. We talked a lot about security issues, especially in the last year. I don't know how many times we've talked about miS configurations leading to breaches that we've seen so many security challenges present in the last year. We talked to me a little bit Kirsten about >>what >>customers appetites are for going. All right now, I've got cloud native security, I'm going to be able to, I'm going to feel more comfortable with rolling out production deployments. >>It's, it's a great place to go. So there are a number of elements to think about. And if I could, I could, I could start with by building on the example that Kamal said, Right, So when we think about um I need to build security into my pipeline so that when I deliver my containerized workloads, they're secure. What if I miss a step or what if a new vulnerability is discovered after the fact? Right. So one of the things that stack rocks or redhead a CS offers is it has built in policy checks to see whether a container or running image has something like a package manager in it. Well, a package manager can be used to load software that is not delivered with the container. And so the idea of ensuring that you are including workload, built in workload, protect locks with policies that are written for you. So you can focus on building your applications. You don't necessarily have to learn everything there is to know about the new attack vectors that are really just it it's new packaging, it's new technology. It's not so much there are some new attack vectors, but mostly it's a new way of delivering and running your applications. That requires some changes to how you implement your security policies. And so ensuring that you have the tools and the technology that you're running on have those capabilities built in. So that when we have conversations with our security conscious customers, we can talk with them about the attack vectors they care about. We can illustrate how we are addressing those particular concerns. Right? One of them being malware in a container, we can look for stack. Rocks can look for a package manager that could be used to pull in, you know, code that could be exploited and you can stop a running container. Um, we can do deeper data collection with stack rocks. Again, one of the challenges when you're looking at moving your security capabilities from a traditional application environment is containers come and go all the time. In a kubernetes cluster nodes, your servers can come and go in a cloud native kubernetes cluster, right? If you're running on on cloud public cloud infrastructure, um, those things are the nodes are ephemeral to, they're designed to be shut down and brought back up. So you've got a lot more data that you need to collect and that you need to analyze and you need to correlate the information between these. Right? I no longer have one application stack running on one or more VMS, it's just things are things are moving fast so you want the right type of data collection and the right correlation to have good visibility into your environment. >>And if I can just build on that a little bit. The whole idea here is that these policies really serve as god rails right for the developers. So the it allows developers to move quickly to accelerate the speed of development without having to worry about hundreds of potential security issues because there are guardrails that will notify that with concrete recommendations early in the process. And the analogy I often use is that you know the reason we have breaks in our cars, it's not to slow us down but to allow us to go faster because we know we can slow down when we need to write. So similarly these policies are really it's really designed to accelerate the speed of development and accelerate digital transformation initiatives that our customers are embarking on >>and come on. I want to stick with you on the digital transformation front. We've talked so much about how accelerated that has been in the last year with everything going on in such a dynamic market. Talk to me Kamal about some of the feedback that you've gotten from stack rocks customers about the acquisition and how it is that maybe that facilitator of the many pivots that businesses have had to do in the last year to go from survival mode to thriving business. >>Yeah. Yes, absolutely. The feedback from all of our customers bar none has been very very positive. So it's been it's allowed us to invest more in the business and you know, we publicly stated that we are going to invest more in adding more capabilities. We are more than doubling the size of our teams as an example. And really working hand in hand with our uh the broader team at Red had to uh further accelerate the speed of development and digital transformation initiatives. So it's been extremely positive because we're adding more resources, We're investing more. We're accelerating the product roadmap uh based on uh compared to what we could do as a, as a start up as you can imagine. And and the feedback has been nothing but positive. So that's kind of where we are today. And what we're doing with the summit is rolling out a new bundle called open shift uh, Open shift platform plus, which includes not just Red hat A CS which used to be Stock rocks, but also red hat open shift hybrid cloud platform as well as Red hat advanced uh container cluster management, ACM capabilities as well as create the container registry. So we're making it easier for our customers to get all the capabilities that they need to for the drive digital transformation initiatives to get. It goes back to this whole customer centric city team that red hat has, that was also core value of stack rocks and and the winner and all of this, we believe ultimately is our, our our customers because that's where we exist to serve them, >>right. And I really like that if I could chime in kind of on top of that a little bit. Um so, so I think that one of the things we've seen with the pandemic is more of the red Hat customers are accelerating their move to public cloud and away from on premises data centers. Uh and and you know, that's just part partly because of so many people working remotely. Um it just has really pushed things. And so with Hybrid cloud becoming even more key to our joint customer base and by hybrid cloud, I mean that they have some environments that are on premises as they're making this transition. Some of those environments may stay that footprint may stay on premises, but it might be smaller, they may not have settled on a single public cloud. They could, in fact, they often are picking a public cloud based on where their development focuses. Google is very popular for ai and ml workloads. Amazon of course is just used, you know, by pretty much everybody. Um and then Azzurri is popular with um a subset of customers as well. And so we see our customers investing in all of these environments and stack rocks red hat A CS like open shift runs in all these environments. So with open shift platform plus you get a complete solution that helps with multi cluster management with a C. M with security across all of these environments, right? You can take one approach to how you secure your cluster, how you secure your workloads, how you manage configurations, You get one approach no matter where you're running your containers and kubernetes platform when you're doing this with open shift platform plus. So you also get portability. If today you want to be running an amazon maybe tomorrow you need to spin up a cluster in google, you can do that if you're working with the K s or G K E, you can or a Ks, you can do that with red hat a CS as well. So we really give you everything you need to be successful in this move and we give you back to that choice word, right? We give you the opportunity to choose and to migrate at the speed that works for you. >>So that's simplicity. That streamlining. I gotta ask you the last question here in our last couple of minutes. Come on, what's the integration process been like? as we said the acquisition just a couple of months in. But talk to me about that integration process. What that's been like? >>Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned earlier, the process has been very smooth so far, so two months in and it's largely driven by the common set of culture and core values that exists between our two companies. And so uh you know, from a product standpoint, we've been working hand in hand because I mentioned earlier, we were partners are working hand in hand on accelerating the road map the joint roadmap that we have here uh from a go to market perspective teams are well integrated. We are going to be rolling out the rolling out the bundle and we're gonna be rolling out additional uh options for our customers. We've also publicly announced that will be open sourcing uh red hat A. C. S. Uh formerly known as Stock Rock. So stay tuned for further news and that announcement. And, and so you know, uh, again two months and everybody's been super collaborative. Super helpful, super welcoming. And the team is the well settled and we're looking forward to now focusing on our primary objective is just to make sure that our customers are successful. >>Absolutely. That customer focus is absolutely critical. But also so is the employee experience. And it sounds like we both talked about the ethos and the and the core value alignment. They're probably being pretty critical to doing an integration during a very challenging time globally. I appreciate both of you joining me on the program today, sharing what's going on stack rocks now asks the opportunities for customers to have that built in cuBA and the security. Thanks so much for your time. >>Thank you. Thank >>you for Camel shaw and Kirsten newcomer. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit, The virtual experience. Mhm

>>on the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hello and welcome back to the Cubes Live coverage Cube live here in Palo Alto, California, with the Virtual Cube this year because we can't be there in person. I'm your host, John Fairy year. We're kicking off Day two of the three weeks of reinvent a lot of great leadership sessions to review, obviously still buzzing from the Andy Jassy three. Our keynote, which had so many storylines, is really hard to impact. We're gonna dig that into into into that today with Jerry Chan, who has been a Cube alumni since the beginning of our AWS coverage. Going back to 2013, Jerry was wandering the hallways as a um, in between. You were in between vm ware and V C. And then we saw you there. You've been on the Cube every year at reinvent with us. So special commentary from you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, John, Thanks for having me and a belated happy birthday as well. If everyone out there John's birthday was yesterday. So and hardest. Howard's working man in technology he spent his entire birthday doing live coverage of Amazon re events. Happy birthday, buddy. >>Well, I love my work. I love doing this. And reinvent is the biggest event of the year because it really is. It's become a bellwether and eso super excited to have you on. We've had great conversations by looking back at our conversations over the Thanksgiving weekend. Jerry, the stuff we were talking about it was very proposed that Jassy is leaning in with this whole messaging around change and horizontal scalability. He didn't really say that, but he was saying you could disrupt in these industries and still use machine learning. This was some of the early conversations we were having on the Cube. Now fast forward, more mainstream than ever before. So big, big part of the theme there. >>Yeah, it z you Amazon reinvent Amazon evolution to your point, right, because it's both reinventing what countries are using with the cloud. But also what Amazon's done is is they're evolving year after year with their services. So they start a simple infrastructure, you know, s three and e c. Two. And now they're building basically a lot of what Andy said you actually deconstructed crm? Ah, lot of stuff they're doing around the call centers, almost going after Salesforce with kind of a deconstructed CRM services, which is super interesting. But the day you know, Amazon announces all those technologies, not to mention the AI stuff, the seminar stuff you have slack and inquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion. So ah, lot of stuff going on in the cloud world these days, and it's funny part of it, >>you know, it really is interesting. You look up the slack acquisition by, um, by Salesforce. It's interesting, you know, That kind of takes slack out of the play here. I mean, they were doing really well again. Message board service turns into, um, or collaboration software. They hit the mainstream. They have great revenue. Is that going to really change the landscape of the industry for Salesforce? They've got to acquire it. It opens the door up from, or innovation. And it's funny you mention the contact Center because I was pressing Jassy on my exclusive one on one with him. Like they said, Andy, my my daughter and my sons, they don't use the phone. They're not gonna call. What's this? Is it a call center deal? And he goes, No, it's the It's about the contact. So think about that notion of the contact. It's not about the call center. It's the point of contact. Okay, Linked in is with Microsoft. You got slack and Salesforce Contact driven collaboration. Interesting kind of play for Microsoft to use voice and their data. What's your take on that? >>I think it's, um you know, I have this framework. As you know, I talked my friend systems of engagement over systems intelligence and systems record. Right? And so you could argue voice email slack because we're all different systems of engagement, and they sit on top of system of record like CRM customer support ticketing HR. Something like that. Now what sells first did by buying slack is they now own a system engagement, right? Not on Lee is slack. A system engagement for CRM, but also system engagement for E. R. P Service. Now is how you interact with a bunch of applications. And so if you think about sales for strategy in the space, compete against Marcus Soft or serves now or other large AARP's now they own slack of system engagement, that super powerful way to actually compete against rival SAS companies. Because if you own the layer engagement layer, you can now just intermediate what's in the background. Likewise, the context center its own voice. Email, chat messaging, right? You can just inter mediate this stuff in the back, and so they're trying to own the system engagement. And then, likewise, Facebook just bought that company customer a week ago for a billion dollars, which also Omni Channel support because it is chat messaging voice. It's again the system engagement between End User, which could be a customer or could be employees. >>You know, this really gonna make Cit's enterprise has been so much fun over the past 10 years, I gotta say, in the past five, you know, it's been even more fun, has become or the new fun area, you know, And the impact to enterprise has been interesting because and we're talking about just engaging system of record. This is now the new challenge for the enterprise. So I wanna get your thoughts, Jerry, because how you see the Sea, X O's and CSOs and the architects out there trying to reinvent the enterprise. Jassy saying Look and find the truth. Be on the right side of history here. Certainly he's got himself service interest there, but there is a true band eight with Cove it and with digital acceleration for the enterprise to change. Um, given all these new opportunities Thio, revolutionize or disrupt or radically improve, what's the C. C X's do? What's your take on? How do you see that? >>It's increasingly messy for the CXS, and I don't I don't envy them, right? Because back in the day they kind of controlled all the I t spend and kind of they had a standard of what technologies they use in the company. And then along came Amazon in cloud all of sudden, like your developers and Dio Hey, let me swipe my credit card and I'm gonna access to a bunch of a P I s around computing stories. Likewise. Now they could swipe the credit card and you strike for billing, right? There's a whole bunch of services now, so it becomes incumbent upon CSOs. They need Thio new set of management tools, right? So not only just like, um, security tools they need, they need also observe ability, tools, understanding what services are being used by the customers, when and how. And I would say the following John like CSOs is both a challenge for them. But I think if I was a C X, so I'll be pretty excited because now I have a bunch of other weapons and other bunch of services I could offer. My end users, my developers, my employees, my customers and, you know it's exciting for them is not only could they do different things, but they also changed how their business being done. And so I think both interact with their end users. Be a chat like slack or be a phone like a contact center or instagram for your for your for your kids. It's actually a new challenge if I were sick. So it's it's time to build again, you know, I think Cove it has said it is time to build again. You can build >>to kind of take that phrase from the movie Shawshank Redemption. Get busy building or get busy dying. Kinda rephrase it there. And that's kind of the theme I'm seeing here because covert kind of forced people saying, Look, this things like work at home. Who would have thought 100% people would be working at home? Who would have thought that now the workloads gonna change differently? So it's an opportunity to deconstruct or distant intermediate these services. And I think, you know, in all the trends that I've seen over my career, it's been those inflection points where breaking the monolith or breaking the proprietary piece of it has always been an opportunity for for entrepreneur. So you know, and and for companies, whether you're CEO or startup by decomposing and you can come in and create value E I think to me, snowflake going public on the back of Amazon. Basically, this is interesting. I mean, so you don't have to be. You could kill one feature and nail it and go big. >>I think we talked to the past like it's Amazon or Google or Microsoft Gonna win. Everything is winner take all winner take most, and you could argue that it's hard to find oxygen as a start up in a broad platform play. But we think Snowflake and other companies have done and comes like mongo DB, for example, elastic have shown that if you can pick a service or a problem space and either developed like I p. That's super deep or own developer audience. You can actually fight the big guys. The Big Three cloud vendors be Amazon, Google or or market soft in different markets. And I think if you're a startup founder, you should not be afraid of competing with the big cloud vendors because there there are success patterns and how you can win and you know and create a lot of value. So I have found Investor. I'm super excited by that because, you know, I don't think you're gonna find a company takedown Amazon completely because they're just the scale and the network effects is too large. But you can create a lot of value and build Valuable comes like snowflake in and around the Amazon. Google Microsoft Ecosystem. >>Yeah, I want to get your thoughts. You have one portfolio we've covered rock rock set, which does a lot of sequel. Um, one of your investments. Interesting part of the Kino yesterday was Andy Jassy kind of going after Microsoft saying Windows sequel server um, they're targeting that with this new, uh, tool, but, you know, sucks in the database of it is called the Babel Fish for Aurora for post Chris sequel. Um, well, how was your take on that? I mean, obviously Microsoft big. Their enterprise sales tactics are looking like more like Oracle, which he was kind of hinting at and commenting on. But sequel is Lingua Franca for data >>correct. I think we went to, like, kind of a no sequel phase, which was kind of a trendy thing for a while and that no sequel still around, not only sequel like mongo DB Document TV. Kind of that interface still holds true, but your point. The world speaks sequel. All your applications be sequel, right? So if you want backwards, compatibility to your applications speaks equal. If you want your tire installed base of employees that no sequel, we gotta speak sequel. So, Rock said, when the first public conversations about what they're building was on on the key with you and Me and vent hat, the founder. And what Rock said is doing their building real time. Snowflake Thio, Lack of better term. It's a real time sequel database in the cloud that's super elastic, just like Snowflake is. But unlike snowflake, which is a data warehouse mostly for dashboards and analytics. Rock set is like millisecond queries for real time applications, and so think of them is the evolution of where cloud databases air going is not only elastic like snowflake in the cloud like Snowflake. We're talking 10 15 millisecond queries versus one or two second queries, and I think what any Jassy did and Amazon with bowel officials say, Hey, Sequels, Legal frank of the cloud. There's a large installed base of sequel server developers out there and applications, and we're gonna use Babel fish to kind of move those applications from on premise the cloud or from old workload to the new workloads. And, I think, the name of the game. For for cloud vendors across the board, big and small startups thio Google markets, often Amazon is how do you reduce friction like, How do you reduce friction to try a new service to get your data in the cloud to move your data from one place to the next? And so you know, Amazon is trying to reduce friction by using Babel fish, and I think it is a great move by them. >>Yeah, by the way. Not only is it for Aurora Post Chris equal, they're also open sourcing it. So that's gonna be something that is gonna be interesting to play out. Because once they open source it essentially, that's an escape valve for locking. I mean, if you're a Microsoft customer, I mean, it ultimately is. Could be that Gateway drug. It's like it is ultimately like, Hey, if you don't like the licensing, come here. Now there's gonna be some questions on the translations. Um, Vince, um, scuttlebutt about that. But we'll see it's open source. We'll see what goes on. Um great stuff on on rocks that great. Great. Start up next. Next, uh, talk track I wanna get with you is You know, over the years, you know, we've talked about your history. We're gonna vm Where, uh, now being a venture capitalist. Successful, wanted Greylock. You've seen the waves, and I would call it the two ways pre cloud Early days of cloud. And now, with co vid, we're kind of in the, you know, not just born in the cloud Total cloud scale cloud operations. This is kind of what jazz he was going after. E think I tweeted Cloud is eating the world and on premise and the edges. What it's hungry for. It kind of goof on mark injuries since quote a software eating the world. This is where it's going. So it's a whole another chapter coming. You saw the pre cloud you saw Cloud. Now we've got basically global I t everything else >>It's cloud only I would say, You know, we saw pre cloud right the VM ware days and before that he called like, you know, data centers. I would say Amazon lawns of what, 6 4007, the Web services. So the past 14 15 years have been what I've been calling cloud transition, right? And so you had cos technologies that were either doing on migration from on premise and cloud or hybrid on premise off premise. And now you're seeing a generation of technologies and companies. Their cloud only John to your point. And so you could argue that this 15 year transitions were like, you know, Thio use a bad metaphor like amphibians. You're half in the water, half on land, you know, And like, you know, you're not You're not purely cloud. You're not purely on premise, but you can do both ways, and that's great. That's great, because that's a that's a dominant architecture today. But come just like rock set and snowflake, your cloud only right? They're born in the cloud, they're built on the cloud And now we're seeing a generation Startups and technology companies that are cloud only. And so, you know, unlike you have this transitionary evolution of like amphibians, land and sea. Now we have ah, no mammals, whatever that are Onley in the cloud Onley on land. And because of that, you can take advantage of a whole different set of constraints that are their cloud. Only that could build different services that you can't have going backwards. And so I think for 2021 forward, we're going to see a bunch of companies or cloud only, and they're gonna look very, very different than the previous set of companies the past 15 years. And as an investor, as you covering as analysts, is gonna be super interesting to see the difference. And if anything, the cloud only companies will accelerate the move of I t spending the move of mawr developers to the cloud because the cloud only technologies are gonna be so much more compelling than than the amphibians, if you will. >>Yeah, insisting to see your point. And you saw the news announcement had a ton of news, a ton of stage making right calls, kind of the democratization layer. We'll look at some of the insights that Amazon's getting just as the monster that they are in terms of size. The scope of what? Their observation spaces. They're seeing all these workloads. They have the Dev Ops guru. They launched that Dev Ops Guru thing I found interesting. They got data acquisition, right? So when you think about these new the new data paradigm with cloud on Lee, it opens up new things. Um, new patterns. Um, S o. I think I think to me. I think that's to me. I see where this notion of agility moves to a whole nother level, where it's it's not just moving fast, it's new capabilities. So how do you How do you see that happening? Because this is where I think the new generation is gonna come in and be like servers. Lambs. I like you guys actually provisioned E c. Two instances before I was servers on data centers. Now you got ec2. What? Lambda. So you're starting to see smaller compute? Um, new learnings, All these historical data insights feeding into the development process and to the application. >>I think it's interesting. So I think if you really want to take the next evolution, how do you make the cloud programmable for everybody? Right. And I think you mentioned stage maker machine learning data scientists, the sage maker user. The data scientists, for example, does not on provisioned containers and, you know, kodama files and understand communities, right? Like just like the developed today. Don't wanna rack servers like Oh, my God, Jerry, you had Iraq servers and data center and install VM ware. The generation beyond us doesn't want to think about the underlying infrastructure. You wanna think about it? How do you just program my app and program? The cloud writ large. And so I think where you can see going forward is two things. One people who call themselves developers. That definition has expanded the past 10, 15 years. It's on Lee growing, so everyone is gonna be developed right now from your white collar knowledge worker to your hard core infrastructure developer. But the populist developers expanding especially around machine learning and kind of the sage maker audience, for sure. And then what's gonna happen is, ah, law. This audience doesn't want to care about the stuff you just mentioned, John in terms of the online plumbing. So what Amazon Google on Azure will do is make that stuff easy, right? Or a starved could make it easy. And I think that the move towards land and services that moved specifically that don't think about the underlying plumbing. We're gonna make it easy for you. Just program your app and then either a startup, well, abstract away, all the all the underlying, um, infrastructure bits or the big three cloud vendors to say, you know, all this stuff would do in a serverless fashion. So I think serverless as, ah paradigm and have, quite frankly, a battlefront for the Big Three clouds and for startups is probably one in the front lines of the next generation. Whoever owns this kind of program will cloud model programming the Internet program. The cloud will be maybe the next platform the next 10 or 15 years. I still have two up for grabs. >>Yeah, I think that is so insightful. I think that's worth calling out. I think that's gonna be a multi year, um, effort. I mean, look at just how containers now, with ks anywhere and you've got the container Service of control plane built in, you got, you know, real time analytics coming in from rock set. And Amazon. You have pinned Pandora Panorama appliance that does machine learning and computer vision with sensors. I mean, this is just a whole new level of purpose built stuff software powered software operated. So you have this notion of Dev ops going to hand in the glove software and operations? Kind of. How do you operate this stuff? So I think the whole new next question was Okay, this is all great. But Amazon's always had this problem. It's just so hard. Like there's so much good stuff. Like, who do you hired operate it? It is not yet programmable. This has been a big problem for them. Your thoughts on that, >>um e think that the data illusion around Dev ops etcetera is the solution. So also that you're gonna have information from Amazon from startups. They're gonna automate a bunch of the operations. And so, you know, I'm involved to come to Kronos Fear that we talked about the past team kind of uber the Bilson called m three. That's basically next generation data dog. Next generation of visibility platform. They're gonna collect all the data from the applications. And once they have their your data, they're gonna know how to operate and automate scaling up, scaling down and the basic remediation for you. So you're going to see a bunch of tools, take the information from running your application infrastructure and automate exactly how to scale and manager your app. And so AI and machine learning where large John is gonna be, say, make a lot of plumbing go away or maybe not completely, but lets you scale better. So you, as a single system admin are used. A single SRE site reliability engineer can scale and manage a bigger application, and it's all gonna be around automation and and to your point, you said earlier, if you have the data, that's a powerful situations. Once have the data can build models on it and can start building solutions on the data. And so I think What happens is when Bill this program of cloud for for your, you know, broad development population automating all this stuff becomes important. So that's why I say service or this, You know, automation of infrastructure is the next battleground for the cloud because whoever does that for you is gonna be your virtualized back and virtualized data center virtualized SRE. And if whoever owns that, it's gonna be a very, very strategic position. >>Yeah, it's great stuff. This is back to the theme of this notion of virtualization is now gone beyond server virtualization. It's, you know, media virtualization with the Cube. My big joke here with the Q virtual. But it's to your point. It's everything can now be replicated in software and scale the cloud scale. So it's super big opportunity for entrepreneurs and companies. Thio, pivot and differentiate. Uh, the question I have for you next is on that thread Huge edge discussion going on, right. So, you know, I think I said it two years ago or three years ago. The data center is just a edges just a big fat edge. Jassy kind of said that in his keynote Hey, looks at that is just a Nedum point with his from his standpoint. But you have data center. You have re alleges you've got five G with wavelength. This local zone concept, which is, you know, Amazon in these metro areas reminds me the old wireless point of presence kind of vibe. And then you've got just purpose built devices like cameras and factory. So huge industrial innovation, robotics, meet software. I mean, whole huge edge development exploding, Which what's your view of this? And how do you look at that from? Is an investor in industry, >>I think edges both the opportunity for start ups and companies as well as a threat to Amazon, right to the reason why they have outposts and all the stuff the edges if you think about, you know, decentralizing your application and moving into the eggs from my wearable to my home to my car to my my city block edges access Super interesting. And so a couple things. One companies like Cloudflare Fastly company I'm involved with called Kato Networks that does. SAS is secure access service edge write their names and the edges In the category definition sassy is about How do you like get compute to the edge securely for your developers, for your customers, for your workers, for end users and what you know comes like Cloudflare and Kate have done is they built out a network of pops across the world, their their own infrastructure So they're not dependent upon. You know, the big cloud providers, the telco providers, you know, they're partnering with Big Cloud, their parting with the telcos. But they have their own kind of system, our own kind of platform to get to the edge. And so companies like Kato Networks in Cloud Player that have, ah, presence on the edge and their own infrastructure more or less, I think, are gonna be in a strategic position. And so Kate was seen benefits in the past year of Of of Cove it and locked down because more remote access more developers, Um, I think edge is gonna be a super great area development going forward. I think if you're Amazon, you're pushing to the edge aggressively without post. I think you're a developer startup. You know, creating your own infrastructure and riding this edge wave could be a great way to build a moat against a big cloud guy. So I'm super excited. You think edge in this whole idea of your own infrastructure. Like what Kato has done, it is gonna be super useful going forward. And you're going to see more and more companies. Um, spend the money to try to copy kind of, ah, Cloudflare Kato presence around the world. Because once you own your own kind of, um, infrastructure instead of pops and you're less depend upon them a cloud provider, you're you're in a good position because there's the Amazon outage last week and I think like twilio and a bunch of services went down for for a few hours. If you own your own set of pops, your independent that it is actually really, really secure >>if you and if they go down to the it's on you. But that was the kinesis outage that they had, uh, they before Thanksgiving. Um, yeah, that that's a problem. So on this on. So I guess the question for you on that is that Is it better to partner with Amazon or try to get a position on the edge? Have them either by you or computer, create value or coexist? How do you see that that strategy move. Do you coexist? Do you play with them? >>E think you have to co exist? I think that the partner coexist, right? I think like all things you compete with Amazon. Amazon is so broad that will be part of Amazon and you're gonna compete with and that's that's fair game, you know, like so Snowflake competes against red shift, but they also part of Amazon's. They're running Amazon. So I think if you're a startup trying to find the edge, you have to coexist in Amazon because they're so big. Big cloud, right, The Big three cloud Amazon, Google, Azure. They're not going anywhere. So if you're a startup founder, you definitely coexist. Leverage the good things of cloud. But then you gotta invest in your own edge. Both both figure early what? Your edge and literally the edge. Right. And I think you know you complement your edge presence be it the home, the car, the city block, the zip code with, you know, using Amazon strategically because Amazon is gonna help you get two different countries, different regions. You know you can't build a company without touching Amazon in some form of fashion these days. But if you're a star found or doing strategically, how use Amazon and picking how you differentiate is gonna be key. And if the differentiation might be small, John. But it could be super valuable, right? So maybe only 10 or 15%. But that could be ah Holton of value that you're building on top of it. >>Yeah, and there's a little bit of growth hack to with Amazon if you you know how it works. If you compete directly against the core building blocks like a C two has three, you're gonna get killed, right? They're gonna kill you if the the white space is interest. In the old days in Microsoft, you had a white space. They give it to you or they would roll you over and level you out. Amazon. If you're a customer and you're in a white space and do better than them, they're cool with that. They're like, basically like, Hey, if you could innovate on behalf of the customer, they let you do that as long as you have a big bill. Yeah. Snowflakes paying a lot of money to Amazon. Sure, but they also are doing a good job. So again, Amazon has been very clear on that. If you do a better job than us for, the customer will do it. But if they want Amazon Red Shift, they want Amazon Onley. They can choose that eso kind of the playbook. >>I think it is absolutely right, John is it sets from any jassy and that the Amazon culture of the customer comes first, right? And so whatever is best for the customer that's like their their mission statement. So whatever they do, they do for the customer. And if you build value for the customer and you're on top of Amazon, they'll be happy. You might compete with some Amazon services, which, no, the GM of that business may not be happy, but overall. Net Net. Amazon's getting a share of those dollars that you're that you're charging the customer getting a share of the value you're creating. They're happy, right? Because you know what? The line rising tide floats all the boats. So the Mork cloud usage is gonna only benefit the Big Three cloud providers Amazon, particularly because they're the biggest of the three. But more and more dollars go the cloud. If you're helping move more. Absolute cloud helping build more solutions in the cloud. Amazon is gonna be happy because they know that regardless of what you're doing, you will get a fraction of those dollars. Now, the key for a startup founder and what I'm looking for is how do we get mawr than you know? A sliver of the dollars. How to get a bigger slice of the pie, if you will. So I think edge and surveillance or two areas I'm thinking about because I think there are two areas where you can actually invest, own some I p owned some surface area and capture more of the value, um, to use a startup founder and, you know, are built last t to Amazon. >>Yeah. Great. Great thesis. Jerry has always been great. You've been with the Cube since the beginning on our first reinvented 2013. Um, and so we're now on our eighth year. Great to see your success. Great investment. You make your world class investor to great firm Greylock. Um great to have you on from your perspective. Final take on this year. What's your view of Jackie's keynote? Just in general, What's the vibe. What's the quick, um, soundbite >>from you? First, I'm so impressed and you can do you feel like a three Archy? No more or less by himself. Right then, that is, that is, um, that's a one man show, and I'm All of that is I don't think I could pull that off. Number one. Number two It's, um, the ability to for for Amazon to execute at so many different levels of stack from semiconductors. Right there, there there ai chips to high level services around healthcare solutions and legit solutions. It's amazing. So I would say both. I'm impressed by Amazon's ability. Thio go so broad up and down the stack. But also, I think the theme from From From Andy Jassy is like It's just acceleration. It's, you know now that we will have things unique to the cloud, and that could be just a I chips unique to the cloud or the services that are cloud only you're going to see a tipping point. We saw acceleration in the past 15 years, John. He called like this cloud transition. But you know, I think you know, we're talking about 2021 beyond you'll see a tipping point where now you can only get certain things in the cloud. Right? And that could be the underlying inference. Instances are training instances, the Amazons giving. So all of a sudden you as a founder or developer, says, Look, I guess so much more in the cloud there's there's no reason for me to do this hybrid thing. You know, Khyber is not gonna go away on Prem is not going away. But for sure. We're going to see, uh, increasing celebration off cloud only services. Um, our edge only services or things. They're only on functions that serve like serverless. That'll be defined the next 10 years of compute. And so that for you and I was gonna be a space and watch >>Jerry Chen always pleasure. Great insight. Great to have you on the Cube again. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Congrats to you guys in the Cube. Seven years growing. It's amazing to see all the content put on. So you think it isn't? Just Last point is you see the growth of the curve growth curves of the cloud. I'd be curious Johnson, The growth curve of the cube content You know, I would say you guys are also going exponential as well. So super impressed with what you guys have dealt. Congratulations. >>Thank you so much. Cute. Virtual. We've been virtualized. Virtualization is coming here, or Cubans were not in person this year because of the pandemic. But we'll be hybrid soon as events come back. I'm John for a year. Host for AWS reinvent coverage with the Cube. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more coverage all day. Next three weeks. Stay with us from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of aws reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel >>and AWS. Welcome back here to our coverage here on the Cube of AWS.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

>>Hello, everyone. My name is John Jane Shake. I work from Iran. Tous Andi. I am here this afternoon very gratefully with Anders Vulcan, who is VP of technology strategy for cloud bees, a Miranda's partner and a well known company in the space that we're going to be discussing. Anders is also a well known entity in this space, which is continuous integration and continuous delivery. Um, you've seen already today some sessions that focus on specific implementations of continuous integration and delivery, um, particularly around security. And, uh, we think this is a critically important topic for anyone in the cloud space, particularly in this increasingly complicated kubernetes space. To understand, um, Miranda's thanks, Uh, if I can recapitulate our own our own strategy and, uh, and language that with complexity on uncertainty consistently increasing with the depth of the technology stacks that we have to deal with consistently, um um elaborating themselves that navigating this requires, um first three implementation of automation to increase speed, which is what C and C d do. Um, and that this speed ba leveraged toe let us ship and iterate code faster. Since that's ultimately the business that all of us air in one way or another. I would like, I guess, toe open this conversation by asking Onders what does he think of that core strategy? >>You know, I think you know, hitting the security thing, right? Right off the bat. You know, security doesn't happen by accident. You know, security is not something that you know, Like a like a server in a restaurant. You know, Sprinkles a little bit of Parmesan cheese right before they serve you the the food. It's not something you Sprinkle on at the end. It's something that has to be baked in from the beginning, not just in the kitchen, but in the supply chain from from from the very beginning. So the you know it's a feature, and if you don't build it, if you're not going to get an outcome that you're not gonna be happy with and I think the you know it's increasingly it's obviously increasingly important and increasingly visible. You know, the you know, the kinds of security problems that we that we see these days can can be, you know, life altering, for for people that are subject to them and and can be, you know, life or death for a company that that's exposed to it. So it's it's it's very, very important. Thio pay attention to it and to work to achieve that as an explicit outcome of the software delivery process. And I think, you know, C i n c d as as process as tooling as culture plays a big part in that because ah, lot of it has to do with, you know, set things up, right? Um run them the same way over and over, you know, get the machine going. Turned the crane. Now, you wanna you wanna make improvements over over time. You know, it's not just, you know, set it and forget it. You know, we got that set up. We don't have to worry about it anymore, but it really is a question of, you know, get the human out of the loop a lot of the times because if if you're dealing with configuring complex systems, you wanna make sure that you get them set up configured, you know, documented Ideally, you know, as code, whether it's a domain specific language or or something like that. And then that's something that you contest against that you can verify against that you can that you can difficult. And then that becomes the basis for for your, you know, for yourself, for pipelines, for your automation around, you know, kind of the software factory floor. So I think automation is a key aspect of that because it, you know, it takes a lot of the drudgery out of it, for one thing, So now the humans have more time to spend on doing on the on the creative things on the things that we're good at a zoo. Humans and it also make sure that, you know, one of the things that computers are really good at is doing the same thing over and over and over and over. Eso that kind of puts that responsibility into the hands of the entity that that knows how to do that well, which is which is the machine eso I think it's, you know, it's a light. It's a deep, deep topic, obviously, but, you know, automation plays into it. Uh, you know, small batch sizes play into it, you know, being able to test very frequently whether that's testing in. You're kind of you're C I pipeline where you're sort of doing building mostly unit testing, maybe some integration testing, but also in layering in the mawr. Serious kinds of testing in terms of security scanning, penetration, testing, vulnerability, scanning. You know those sorts of things which, you know, maybe you do on every single see I Bill. But most people don't because those things tend toe take a little bit longer on. And you know you want your sea ice cycle to be as fast as possible because that's really in service of the developer who has committed code and wants toe kind of see the thumbs up from the system saying it. And, um, so most organizations most organizations are are are focusing on, you know, making sure that there's a follow on pipeline to follow on set of tests that happened after the C I passes successfully and and that's, you know, where a lot of the security scanning and those sorts of things happen. >>It's a It's an interesting problem. I mean, you mentioned, um, what almost sounds like a Lawrence Lessig Ian kind of idea that, you know, code is law in enterprises today, code particularly see, I code ends up being policy, but At the same time, there's, Ah, it seems to me there's a an alternative peril, which is, as you increase speed, particularly when you become more and more dependent on things like containers and layering technology to provide components and capabilities that you don't have to build yourself to your build pipeline, that there are new vulnerabilities, potentially that creep in and can creep in despite automation. Zor at least 1st. 1st order automation is attempts toe to prevent them from creeping in. You don't wanna you wanna freeze people on a six month old version of a key container image. But on the other hand, if the latest version has vulnerabilities, that could be a problem. >>Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's it's a it's a it's a double edged sword. It's two sides of the same coin. I think you know, when I talked to a lot of security people, um, you know, people to do it for a living is supposed to mean I just talk about it, um, that Z not completely true. But, um, the ah, lot of times the problem is old vulnerabilities. The thing that I think keeps a lot of people up at night isn't necessarily that the thing at the tip of the releases for particular, you know, well known open source, library or something like that. But that's gonna burn you all the vast majority of the time. And I want to say, like, 80 85% of the time. The vulnerability is that you that you get hosed by are ones that have been known about for years. And so I think the if I had to pick. So if you know, in that sort of two sides of that coin, if I had to pick, I would say Be aggressive in making sure that your third party dependencies are updated frequently and and continuously right, because that is the biggest, biggest cause of of of security vulnerabilities when it comes to third party code. Um, now you know the famous saying, You know, move fast and break things Well, there's certain things you don't want to break. You know you don't want to break a radiation machine that's going to deliver radio radiotherapy to someone because that will endanger their health. So So those sorts of systems, you know, naturally or subject a little bit more kind of caution and scrutiny and rigor and process those sorts of things. The micro service that I run that shows my little avatar when I log in, that one probably gets a little less group. You know, Andre rightfully so. So I think a lot of it has to do. And somebody once said in a I think it was, Ah, panel. I was on a PR say conference, which was, which was kind of a wise thing to say it was Don't spend a million dollars protecting a $5 assets. You know, you wanna be smart and you wanna you wanna figure out where your vulnerabilities they're going to come from and in my experience, and and you know, what I hear from a lot of the security professionals is pay attention to your supply chain. You're you want to make sure that you're up to date with the latest patches of, of all of your third party, you know, open source or close source. It doesn't really matter. I mean, if anything, you know, open source is is more open. Eso You could inspect things a little bit better than the close source, but with both kinds of streams of code that you consume and and use. You wanna make sure that you're you're more up to date as opposed to a less up to date? Um, that generally will be better. Now, can a new version of the library cause problems? You know, introduce bugs? You know, those sorts of things? Yes. That's why we have tests. That's what we have automated tests, regression, sweets, You know, those sorts of things. And so you wanna, you know, you wanna live in a in a world where you feel the confidence as a as a developer, that if I update this library from, you know, one debt owed at 3 to 1 debt owed at 10 to pick up a bunch of, you know, bug fixes and patches and those sorts of things. But that's not going to break some on demand in the test suites that that will run against that ought to cover that that sort of functionality. And I'd rather be in that world of Oh, yeah, we tried to update to that, but it But it broke the tests and then have to go spend time on that, then say, Oh, it broke the test. So let's not update. And then six months later, you do find out. Oh, geez. There was a problem in one that owed at three. And it was fixed in one. That about four. If only we had updated. Um, you know, you look at the, um you look at some of the highest profile security breaches that are out there that you sort of can trace toe third party libraries. It's almost always gonna be that it was out of date and hadn't been patched. That's so that's my you know, opinionated. Take on that. Sure. >>What are the parts of modern C I c D. As opposed to what one would encounter 56 years ago? Maybe if we can imagine that is being before the micro services and containers revolution really took off. >>You know, I think e think you're absolutely right that, you know, not the whole world is not doing. See, I Yeah, and certainly the whole world is not doing city yet. Um, you know, I think you know, as you say, we kind of live in a little bit of an ivory tower. You know, we live in an echo chamber in a little bit of a bubble Aziz vendors in this space. The truth is that I would say less than 50% of the software organizations out there do real. See, I do real CD. The number's probably less than that. Um, you know, I don't have anything to back that up other than just I talked to a lot of folks and work with, you know, with a lot of organizations and like, Yeah, that team does see I that team does Weekly builds You know, those sorts of things. It's it's really all over the place, Onda. Lot of times there's There's definitely, in my experience, a high correlation there with the amount of time that a team or a code base has been around, and the amount of sort of modern technologies and processes and and and so on that are that are brought to it on. And that sort of makes sense. I mean, if you if you're starting with the green field with a blank sheet of paper, you're gonna adopt, you know, the technologies and the processes and the cultures of today. A knot of 5, 10 15 15 years ago, Um but but most organizations air moving in that direction. Right? Andi, I think you know what? What? What? What's really changed in the last few years is the level of integration between the various tools between the various pieces and the amount of automation that you could bring to bear. I mean, I you know, I remember, you know, five or 10 years ago having all kinds of conversations with customers and prospects and and people of conferences and so on and they said, Oh, yeah, we'd like to automate our our software development life cycle, but, you know, we can't We have a manual thing here. We have a manual thing there. We do this kind of testing that we can automate it, and then we have this system, but it doesn't have any guy. So somebody has to sit and click on the screen. And, you know, and I used to say e used to say I don't accept No for an answer of can you automate this right? Everything. Anything can be automated. Even if you just get the little drinking bird. You know that just pokes the mouse. Everyone something. You can automate it, and I Actually, you know, I had one customer who was like, Okay, and we had a discussion and and and and they said, Well, we had this old Windows tool. We Its's an obscure tool. It's no longer updated, but it's it's it's used in a critical part of the life cycle and it can't be automated. And I said, Well, just install one of those Windows tools that allows you to peek and poke at the, you know, mass with my aunt I said so I don't accept your answer. And I said, Well, unfortunately, security won't allow us to install those tools, Eh? So I had to accept No, at that point, but But I think the big change were one of the biggest changes that's happened in the last few years is the systems now have all I'll have a p i s and they all talk to each other. So if you've gotta, you know, if you if you've got a scanning tool, if you've got a deployment tool, if you have a deployment, you know, infrastructure, you know, kubernetes based or, you know, kind of sitting in front of our around kubernetes thes things. I'll talk to each other and are all automated. So one of the things that's happened is we've taken out a lot of the weight states. A lot of the pauses, right? So if you you know, if you do something like a value stream mapping where you sit down and I'll date myself here and probably lose some of the audience with this analogy. But if you remember Schoolhouse Rock cartoons in in the late seventies, early eighties, there was one which was one of my favorites, and and the guy who did the music for this passed away last year, sadly, But, uh, the it was called How a bill Becomes a Law and they personified the bill. So the bill, you know, becomes a little person and, you know, first time passed by the house and then the Senate, and then the president either signs me or doesn't and or he vetoes, and it really sort of did this and what I always talk about with respect to sort of value stream mapping and talking about your processes, put a GoPro camera on your source codes head, and then follow that source code all the way through to your customer understand all of the stuff that happens to it, including nothing, right? Because a lot of times in that elapsed time, nothing keeps happening, right. If we build software the way we were sorry. If we build cars the way we build software, we would install the radio in a car, and then we would park it in a corner of the factory for three weeks. And then we might remember to test the radio before we ship the car out to the customer. Right, Because that's how a lot of us still develop some for. And I think one thing that's changed in the in the last few years is that we don't have these kind of, Well, we did the bill. So now we're waiting for somebody to create an environment and rack up some hardware and install an operating system and install. You know, this that and the other. You know, that that went from manual to we use Scheffer puppet to do it, which then went to we use containers to do it, which then went to we use containers and kubernetes to do it. So whole swaths of elapsed time in our software development life cycles basically went to nothing, right and went to the point where we can weaken, weaken, configure them way to the left and and and follow them all the way through. And that the artifact that we're delivering isn't necessarily and execute herbal. It could be a container, right? So now that starts to get interesting for us in terms of being able to test against that container scan against that container, def. Against that container, Um, you know, and it, you know, it does bring complexity to in terms of now you've got a layered file system in there. Well, what all is in there, you know, And so there's tools for scanning those kinds of things, But But I think that one of the biggest things that's happened is a lot of the natural pause. Points are no longer natural. Pause points their unnatural pause points, and they're now just delays in yourself for delivery. And so what? What a lot of organizations are working on is kind of getting to the point where those sorts of things get get automated and connected, and that's now possible. And it wasn't 55 or 10 years ago. >>So It sounds like a great deal of the speed benefit, which has been quantified many different ways. But is once you get one of these systems working, as we've all experienced enormous, um, is actually done by collapsing out what would have been unused time in a prior process or non paralyze herbal stuff has been made parallel. >>I remember doing a, uh, spent some time with a customer, and they did a value stream mapping, and they they found out at the end that of the 30 days of elapsed time they were spending three days on task. Everything else was waiting, waiting for a build waiting foran install, waiting for an environment, waiting for an approval, having meetings, you know, those sorts of things. And I thought to myself, Oh, my goodness, you know, 90% of the elapsed time is doing nothing. And I was talking to someone Gene Kim, actually, and I said, Oh my God, it was terrible that these you know, these people are screwed and he says, 0 90%. That's actually pretty good, you know? So So I think you know, if you if you think today, you know, if you If you if you look at the teams that are doing just really pure continuous delivery, you know, write some code committed, gets picked up by the sea ice system and passes through CIA goes through whatever coast, see I processing, you need to do security scanning and so on. It gets staged and it gets pushed into production. That stuff can happen in minutes, right? That's new. That's different. Now, if you do that without having the right automated gates in place around security and and and and those sorts of things you know, then you're living a little bit dangerously, although I would argue not necessarily any more dangerously, than just letting that insecure coat sit around for a week before your shipment, right? It's not like that problem is going to fix itself if you just let it sit there, Um, but But, you know, you definitely operated at a higher velocity. Now that's a lot of the benefit that you're tryingto trying to get out of it, right? You can get stuff out to the market faster, or if you take a little bit more time, you get more out to the market in, in in the same amount of time you could turn around and fix problems faster. Um, if you have a vulnerability, you can get it fixed and pushed out much more quickly. If you have a competitive threat that you need to address, you can you know, you could move that that much faster if you have a critical bug. You know, I mean, all security issues or bugs, sort of by definition. But, you know, if you have a functionality bug, you can you can get that pushed out faster. Eso So I think kind of all factors of the business benefit from from this increase in speed. And I think developers due to because anybody you know, any human that has a context switch and step away from something for for for, you know, duration of time longer than a few minutes, you know, you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna have to load back up again. And so that's productivity loss. Now, that's a soft cost. But man, is it Is it expensive and is a painful So you see a lot of benefit there. Think >>if you have, you know, an organization that is just starting this journey What would you ask that organization to consider in orderto sort of move them down this path? >>It's by far the most frequent and almost always the first question I get at the end of the talk or or a presentation or something like that is where do we start? How do I know where to start? And and And there's a couple of answers to that. What one is Don't boil the ocean, right? Don't try to fix everything all at once. You know that because that's not agile, right? The be agile about your transformation Here, you know, pick, pick a set of problems that you have and and make a, you know, basically make a burn down list and and do them in order. So find find a pain point that you have right and, you know, just go address that and and try to make it small and actionable and especially early on when you're trying to affect change. And you're tryingto convinced teams that this is the way to go and you may have some naysayers, or you may have people who are skeptical or have been through these processes before that have been you know failures released, not the successes that they that they were supposed to be. You know, it's important to have some wind. So what I always say is look, you know, if you have a pebble in your shoe, you've got a pain point. You know how to address that. You know, you're not gonna address that by changing out your wardrobe or or by buying a new pair of shoes. You know, you're gonna address that by taking your shoe off, shaking it until the pebble falls out there putting the shoe back on. So look for those kinds of use cases, right? So if you're engineers are complaining that whenever I check in the build is broken and we're not doing see, I well, then let's look at doing C I Let's do see eye, right? If you're not doing that. And for most organizations, you know, setting up C I is a very manageable, very doable thing. There's lots of open source tooling out there. There's lots of commercial tooling out there. Thio do that to do it for small teams to do it for large teams and and everything in between. Um, if the problem is Gosh, Every time we push a change, we break something. You know where every time something works in staging it doesn't work in production. Then you gotta look at Well, how are these systems being configured? If you're If you're configuring them manually, stop automate the configuration of them. Um, you know, if you're if you're fixing system manually, don't you know, as a friend of mine says, don't fix, Repave? Um, you know, you don't wanna, you know, there's a story of, you know how how Google operates in their data centers. You know, they don't they don't go look for a broken disk drive and swap it out. You know, when it breaks, they just have a team of people that, like once a month or something, I don't know what the interval is. They just walked through the data center and they pull out all the dead stuff and they throw it out, and what they did was they assume that if the scale that they operate, things are always going to break physical things are always going to break. You have to build a software to assume that breakage and any system that assumes that we're going to step in when a disk drive is broken and fix it so that we can get back to running just isn't gonna work at scale. There's a similarity. There's sort of ah, parallel to that in in software, which is you know, any time you have these kinds of complex systems, you have to assume that they're gonna break and you have to put the things in place to catch those things. The automated testing, whether it's, you know, whether you have 10,000 tests that you that you've written already or whether you have no tests and you just need to go right, your first test that that journey, you've got to start somewhere. But my answer thio their questions generally always just start small, pick a very specific problem. Build a plan around it, you know, build a burned down list of things that you wanna address and just start working your way down that the same way that you would for any, you know, kind of agile project, your transformation of your own processes of your own internal systems. You should use agile processes for those as well, because if you if you go off for six months and and build something. By the time you come back, it's gonna be relevant. Probably thio the problems that you were facing six months ago. >>A Then let's consider the situation of, ah, company that's using C I and maybe sea ice and C d together. Um, and they want to reach what you might call the next level. Um, they've seen obvious benefits they're interested in, you know, in increasing their investment in, you know and cycles devoted to this technology. You don't have to sell them anymore, but they're looking for a next direction. What would you say that direction should be? I >>think oftentimes what organizations start to do is they start to look at feedback loops. So on DAT starts to go into the area of sort of metrics and analytics and those sorts of things. You know what we're we're always concerned about? You know, we're always affected by things like meantime to recovery. Meantime, the detection, what are our cycle times from, you know, ideation, toe codecommit. What's the cycle? Time from codecommit the production, those sorts of things. And you know you can't change what you don't measure eso so a lot of times the next step after kind of getting the rudimentary zoo of C I Orsini or some combination of both in places start to measure. Stop you, Um, and and then but But there. I think you know, you gotta be smart about it, because what you don't want to do is kind of just pull all the metrics out that exists. Barf them up on the dashboard. And the giant television screens say boom metrics, right. You know, Mike, drop go home. That's the wrong way to do it. You want to use metrics very specifically to achieve outcomes. So if you have an outcome that you want to achieve and you can tie it to a metric start looking at that metric and start working that problem once you saw that problem, you can take that metric. And you know, if that's the metric you're showing on the big you know, the big screen TV, you can pop that off and pick the next one and put it up there. I I always worry when you know a little different when you're in a knock or something like that. When when you're looking at the network stuff and so on. But I'm always leery of when I walk into to a software development organization. You know, just a Brazilian different metrics, this whole place because they're not all relevant. They're not all relevant at the same time. Some of them you wanna look at often, some of them you just want to kind of set an alarm on and make sure that, you know, I mean, you don't go down in your basement every day to check that the sump pump is working. What you do is you put a little water detector in there and you have an alarm go off if the water level ever rises above a certain amount. Well, you want to do the same thing with metrics, right? Once you've got in the water out of your basement, you don't have to go down there and look at it all the time. You put the little detector in, and then you move on and you worry about something else. And so organizations as they start to get a little bit more sophisticated and start to look at the analytics, the metrics, um, start to say, Hey, look, if our if our cycle time from from, you know, commit to deploy is this much. And we want it to be this much. What happens during that time, And where can we take slices out of that? You know, without without affecting the outcomes in terms of quality and so on, or or if it's, you know, from from ideation, toe codecommit. You know what? What can we do there? Um, you start to do that. And and then as you get those sort of virtuous cycles of feedback loops happening, you know, you get better and better and better, but you wanna be careful with metrics, you know, you don't wanna, you know, like I said, you don't wanna barf a bunch of metrics up just to say, Look, we got metrics. Metrics are there to serve a particular outcome. And once you've achieved that outcome, and you know that you can continue to achieve that outcome, you turn it into an alarm or a trigger, and you put it out of sight. And you know that. You know, you don't need to have, like, a code coverage metric prominently displayed you you pick a code coverage number that you're happy with you work to achieve that. Once you achieve it, you just worry about not going below that threshold again. So you can take that graph off and just put a trigger on this as if we ever get below this, you know, raising alarm or fail a build or fail a pipeline or something like that and then start to focus on improving another man. Uh, or another outcome using another matter >>makes enormous sense. So I'm afraid we are getting to be out of time. I want to thank you very much on this for joining us today. This has been certainly informative for me, and I hope for the audience, um, you know, thank you very, very much for sharing your insulin.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit, happening digitally, interviewing practitioners, executives, and thought leaders from around the world. Happy to welcome back to our program, one of our CUBE alumni, Ashesh Badani, who's the Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms with Red Hat. Ashesh, thank you so much for joining us, and great to see you. >> Yeah, likewise, thanks for having me on, Stu. Good to see you again. >> All right, so, Ashesh, since the last time we had you on theCUBE a few things have changed. One of them is that IBM has now finished the acquisition of Red Hat, and I've heard from you from a really long time, you know, OpenShift, it's anywhere and it's everywhere, but with the acquisition of Red Hat, it just means this only runs on IBM mainframes and IBM Cloud, and all things blue, correct? >> Well, that's true for sure, right? So, Stu, you and I have been talking for many, many times. As you know, we've been committed to hybrid multi-cloud from the very get-go, right? So, OpenShift supported to run on bare metal, on virtualization platforms, whether they come from us, or VMware, or Microsoft Hyper-V, on private clouds like OpenStack, as well as AWS, Google Cloud, as well as on Azure. Now, with the completion of the IBM acquisition of Red Hat, we obviously always partnered with IBM before, but given, if you will, a little bit of a closer relationship here, you know, IBM's been very keen to make sure that they promote OpenShift in all their platforms. So as you can probably see, OpenShift on IBM Cloud, as well as OpenShift on Z on mainframe, so regardless of how you like OpenShift, wherever you like OpenShift, you will get it. >> Yeah, so great clarification. It's not only on IBM, but of course, all of the IBM environments are supported, as you said, as well as AWS, Google, Azure, and the like. Yeah, I remember years ago, before IBM created their single, condensed conference of THINK, I attended the conference that would do Z, and Power, and Storage, and people would be like, you know, "What are they doing with that mainframe?" I'm like, "Well, you do know that it can run Linux." "Wait, it can run Linux?" I'm like, "Oh my god, Z's been able to run Linux "for a really long time." So you want your latest Container, Docker, OpenShift stuff on there? Yeah, that can sit on a mainframe. I've talked to some very large, global companies that that is absolutely a part of their overall story. So, OpenShift-- >> Interesting you say that, because we already have customers who've been procuring OpenShift on mainframe, so if you made the invest mainframe, it's running machine learning applications for you, looking to modernize some of the applications and services that run on top in OpenShift on mainframe now is an available option, which customers are already taking advantage of. So exactly right to your point, we're seeing that in the market today. >> Yeah, and Ashesh, maybe it's good to kind of, you know, you've got a great viewpoint as to customers deploying across all sorts of environments, so you mentioned VMware environments, the public cloud environment. It was our premise a few years ago on theCUBE that Kubernetes get staked into all the platforms, and absolutely, it's going to just be a layer underneath. I actually think we won't be talking a lot about Kubernetes if you fast-forward a couple of years, just because it's in there. I'm using it in all of my environments. So what are you seeing from your customers? Where are we in that general adoption, and any specifics you can give us about, you know, kind of the breadth and the depth of what you're seeing from your customer base? >> Yeah, so, you're exactly right. We're seeing that adoption continue on the path it's been on. So we've got now, over 1700 customers for OpenShift, running in all of these environments that you mentioned, so public, private, a combination of the two, running on traditional virtualization environments, as well as ensuring that they run in public cloud at scale. In some cases managed by customers, in other cases managed by us on their behalf in a public cloud. So, we're seeing all permutation, if you will, of that in play today. We're also seeing a huge variety of workloads, and to me, that's actually really interesting and fascinating. So, earliest days, as you'd expect, people trying to play with micro-services, so trying to build new market services and run it, so cloud native, what have you. Then as we're ensuring that we're supporting stateful application, right. Now you're starting to see if your legacy applications move on, ensuring that we can run them, support them at scale, within the platform 'cause we're looking to modernize applications. We'll talk maybe in a few minutes also about lift-and-shift that we got to play as well. But now also we're starting to see new workloads come on. So just most recently we announced some of the work that we're doing with a series of partners, from NVIDIA to emerging AI ML, AI, artificial intelligence machine learning, frameworks or ISVs, looking to bring those to market. Been ensuring that those are supported and can run with OpenShift. Right, our partnership with NVIDIA, ensuring OpenShift be supported on GPU based environment for specific workloads, whether it be performance sensitive or specific workloads that take advantage of underlying hardware. So starting now to see a wide variety if you will, of application types is also something that we're starting, right, so numbers of customers increasing, types of workloads, you know, coming on increasing, and then the diversity of underlying deployment environments. Where they're running all services. >> Ashesh, such an important piece and I'm so glad you talked about it there. 'Cause you know my background's infrastructure and we tend to look at things as to "Oh well, I moved from VM to a container, "to cloud or all these other things," but the only reason infrastructure exists is to run my application, is my data and my application that are the most important things out there. So Ashesh, let me get in some of the news that you got here, your team work on a lot of things, I believe one of them talks about some of those, those new ways that customers are building applications and how OpenShift fits into those environments. >> Yeah, absolutely. So look, we've been on this journey as you know for several years now. You know recently we announced the GA of OpenShift Service Mesh in support of Istio, increasing an interest as for turning microservices will take advantage of close capabilities that are coming in. At this event we're now also announcing the GA of OpenShift Serverless. We're starting to see obviously a lot of interest, right, we've seen the likes of AWS spawn that in the first instance, but more and more customers are interested in making sure that they can get a portable way to run serverless in any Kubernetes environment, to take advantage of open source projects as building blocks, if you will, so primitives in, within Kubernetes to allow for serverless capabilities, allow for scale down to zero, supporting serving and eventing by having portable functions run across those environments. So that's something that is important to us and we're starting to see support of in the marketplace. >> Yeah, so I'd love just, obviously I'm sure you've got lots of break outs in the OpenShift Serverless, but I've been talking to your team for a number of years, and people, it's like "Oh, well, just as cloud killed everything before it, "serverless obviates the need for everything else "that we were going to use before." Underlying OpenShift Serverless, my understanding, Knative either is the solution, or a piece of the solution. Help us understand what serverless environment this ties into, what this means for both your infrastructure team as well as your app dev team. >> Yeah, great, great question, so Knative is the basis of our serverless solution that we're introducing on OpenShift to the marketplace. The best way for me to talk about this is there's no one size fits all, so you're going to have specific applications or service that will take advantage of serverless capabilities, there will be some others that will take advantage of running within OpenShift, there'll be yet others, we talked about the AI ML frameworks, that will run with different characteristics, also within the platform. So now the platform is being built to help support a diversity, a multitude of different ways of interacting with it, so I think maybe Stu, you're starting to allude to this a little bit, right, so now we're starting to focus on, we've got a great set of building blocks, on the right compute network storage, a set of primitives that Kubernetes laid out, thinking of the notions of clustering and being able to scale, and we'll talk a little bit about management as well of those clusters. And then it changes to a, "What are the capabilities now, "that I need to build to make sure "that I'm most effective, most efficient, "regard to these workloads that I bring on?" You're probably hearing me say workloads now, several times, because we're increasingly focused on adoption, adoption, adoption, how can we ensure that when these 1700 plus, hopefully, hundreds if not thousands more customers come on, how they can get the most variety of applications onto this platform, so it can be a true abstraction over all the underlying physical resources that they have, across every deployment that they put out. >> All right, well Ashesh, I wish we could spend another hour talking about the serverless piece, I definitely am going to make sure I check out some of the breakouts that cover the piece that we talked to you, but, I know there's a lot more that the OpenShift update adds, so what other announcements, news, do you have to cover for us? >> Yeah, so a couple other things I want to make sure I highlight here, one is a capability called ACM, advanced cluster management, that we're introducing. So it was an experimental work that was happening with the IBM team, working on cluster management capabilities, we'd been doing some of that work ourselves, within Red Hat, as part of IBM and Red Hat coming together. We've had several folks from IBM actually join Red Hat, and so we're now open sourcing and providing this cluster management capability, so this is the notion of being able to run and manage these different clusters from OpenShift, at scale, across multiple environments, be able to check on cluster health, be able to apply policy consistently, provide governance, ensure that appropriate applications are running in appropriate clusters, and so on, a series of capabilities, to really allow for multiple clusters to be run at scale and managed effectively, so that's one set of, go ahead, Stu. >> Yeah, if I could, when I hear about multicluster management, I think of some of the solutions that I've heard talked about in the industry, so Azure Arc from Microsoft, Tanzu from VMware, when they talk about multicluster management, it is not only the Kubernetes solutions that they're offering, but also, how do I at least monitor, if not even allow a little bit of control across these environments? So when you talk about cluster management, is that all the OpenShift pieces, or things like AKS, EKS, other options out there, how do those fit into the overall management story? >> Yeah, that's absolutely our goal, right, so we've got to get started somewhere, right? So we obviously want to make sure that we bring into effect the solution to manage OpenShift clusters at scale, and then of course as we would expect, multiple other clusters exist, from Kubernetes, like the ones you mentioned, from the cloud providers as well as others from third parties and we want the solution to manage that as well. But obviously we're going to sort of take steps to get to the endpoint of this journey, so yes, we will get there, we've got to get started somewhere. >> Yeah, and Ashesh, any guides, when you look at people, some of the solutions I mentioned out there, when they start out it's "Here's the vision." So what guidance would you give to customers about where we are, how fast they can expect these things to mature, and I know anything that Red Hat does is going to be fully open source and everything, what's your guidance out there as to what customers should be looking for? >> Yeah, so we're at an interesting point, I think, in this Kubernetes journey right now, and so when we, if you will, started off, and Stu you and I have been talking about this for at least five years if not longer, was this notion that we want to provide a platform that can be portable and successfully run in multiple deployment environments. And we've done that over these years. But all the while when we were doing that, we're always thinking about, what are the capabilities that are needed that are perhaps not developed upstream, but will be over time, but we can ensure that we can look ahead and bring that into the platform. And for a really long time, and I think we still do, right, we at Red Hat take a lot of stick for saying "Hey look, you form the platform." Our outcome back to that has always been, "Look, we're trying to help solve problems "that we believe enterprise customers have, "we want to ensure that they're available open source, "and we want to upstream those capabilities always, "back into the community." But, let's say making available a platform without RBAC, role-based access control, well it's going to be hard then for enterprises to adopt that, we've got to make sure we introduce that capability, and then make sure that it's supported upstream as well. And there's a series of capabilities and features like that that we work through. We've always provided an abstraction within OpenShift to make it more productive for developers and administrators to use it. And we always also support working with kubectl or the command line interface from kube as well. And then we always hear back from folks saying "Well, you've got your own abstraction, "that might make that seem impossible," Nope, you can use both kubectl GPUs or C commands, whichever one is better for you, have at it, we're just trying to be more productive. And now increasingly what we're seeing in the marketplace is this notion that we've got to make sure we work our way up from not just laying out a Kubernetes distribution, but thinking about the additional capability, additional services that you can provide, that would be more valuable to customers, and I think Stu, you were making the point earlier, increasingly, the more popular and the more successful Kubernetes becomes, the less you will see and hear of it, which by the way is exactly the way it should be, because that becomes then the basis of your underlying infrastructure, you are confident that you've got a rock solid bottom, and now you as a customer, you as a user, are focusing all of your energy and time on building the productive application and services on top. >> Yeah, great great points there Ashesh, the vision people always talked about is "If I'm leveraging cloud services, "I shouldn't have to worry "about what version they're running." Well, when it comes to Kubernetes, ultimately we should be able to get there, but I know there's always a little bit of a delta between the latest and newest version of Kubernetes that comes out, and what the managed services, and not only managed services, what customers are doing in their own environment. Even my understanding, even Google, which is where Kubernetes came out of, if you're looking at GKE, GKE is not on the latest, what are we on, 1.19, from the community, Ashesh, so what's Red Hat's position on this, what version are you up to, how do you think customers should think about managing across those environments, because boy, I've got too many scars from interoperability history, go back 10 or 15 years and everything, "Oh, my server BIOS doesn't work on that latest "kernel.org version of what we're doing for Linux." Red Hat is probably better prepared than any company in the industry, to deal with that massive change happening from a code-based standpoint, I've heard you give presentations on the history of Linux and Kubernetes, and what's going forward, so when it comes to the release of Kubernetes, where are you with OpenShift, and how should people be thinking about upgrading from versions? >> Yeah, another excellent point, Stu, it's clearly been following us pretty closely over the years, so where we came at this, was we actually learned quite a bit from our experience in the company with OpenStack. And so what would happen with OpenStack is, you would have customers that are on a certain version of Openstack, and then they kept saying "Hey look, we want to consume close to trunk, "we want new features, we want to go faster." And we'd obviously spent some time, from the release in community to actually shipping our distribution into customer's hand, there's going to be some amount of time for testing and QE to happen, and some integration points that need to be certified, before we make it available. We often found that customers lagged, so there'd be let's say a small subset if you will within every customer or several customers who want to be consuming close to trunk, a majority actually want stability. Especially as time wore on, they were more interested in stability. And you can understand that, because now if you've got mission critical applications running on it you don't necessarily want to go and put that at risk. So the challenge that we addressed when we actually started shipping OpenShift four last summer, so about a year ago, was to say, "How can we provide you basically a way "to help upgrade your clusters, "essentially remotely, so you can upgrade, "if you will, your clusters, or at least "be able to consume them at different speeds." So what we introduced with OpenShift four was this ability to give you over the air updates, so the best way to think about it is with regard to a phone. So you have your phone, your new OS upgrades show up, you get a notification, you turn it on, and you say "Hey, pull it down," or you say at a certain point of time, or you can go off and delay it, do it at a different point in time. That same notion now exists within OpenShift. Which is to say, we provide you three channels, so there's a stable channel where you say "Hey look, maybe this cluster in production, "no rush here, I'll stay at or even a little behind," there's a fast channel for "Hey, I want to be up latest and greatest," or there's a third channel which allows for essentially features that are being in developed, or are still in early stage of development to be pushed out to you. So now you can start consuming these upgrades based on "Hey, I've got a dev team, "on day one I get these quicker," "I've got these applications that are stable in production, "no rush here." And then you can start managing that better yourself. So now if you will, those are capabilities that we're introducing into a Kubernetes platform, a standard Kubernetes platform, but adding additional value, to be able to have that be managed much much, in a much better fashion that serves the different needs of different parts of an organization, allows for them to move at different speeds, but at the same time, gives you that same consistent platform regardless of where you are. >> All right, so Ashesh, we started out the conversation talking about OpenShift anywhere and everywhere, so in the cloud, you talked about sitting on top of VMware, VM Farms is very prevalent in the data centers, or bare metal. I believe since I saw, one of the updates for OpenShift is how Red Hat virtualization is working with OpenShift there, and a lot of people out there are kind of staring out what VMware did with VSphere seven, so maybe you can set it up with a little bit of a compare contrast as to how Red Hat's doing this rollout, versus what you're seeing your partner VMware doing, or how Kubernetes fits into the virtualization environment. >> Yeah, I feel like we're both approaching it from different perspective and learnset that we come at it, so if I can, the VMware perspective is likely "Hey look, there's all these installations of VSphere "in the marketplace, how can we make sure "that we help bring containers there," and they've come up with a solution that you can argue is quite complicated in the way how they're achieving it. Our approach is a different one, right, so we always looked at this problem from the get-go with regard to containers as a new paradigm shift, it's not necessarily a revolution, because most companies that we're looking at are working with existing application services, but it's an evolution in the way you're thinking about the world, but this is definitely the long term future. And so how can we then think about introducing this environment, this application platform into the environment, and then be able to build a new application in it, but also bring in existing applications to the form? And so with this release of OpenShift, what we're introducing is something that we're calling OpenShift Virtualization, which is a few of our existing applications, certain VMs, how can we ensure that we bring those VMs into the platform, they've been certified, data security boundaries around it, or certain constraints or requirements have been put by your internal organization around it, and we can keep all of those, but then still encapsulate that VM as a container, have that be run natively within an environment orchestrated by OpenShift, Kubernetes as the primary orchestrator of those VMs, just like it does with everything else that's cloud-native, or is running directly as containers as well. We think that's extremely powerful, for us to really bring now the promise of Kubernetes into a much wider market, so I talked about 1700 customers, you can argue that that 1700 is the early majority, or if you will, almost the scratching of the surface of the numbers that we believe will adopt this platform. To get, if you held the next setup, whatever, five, 10, 20,000 customers, we'll have to make sure we meet them where they are. And so introducing this notion of saying "We can help migrate," with a series of tools that Rock's providing, these VM-based applications, and then have them run within Kubernetes in a consistent fashion, is going to be extremely powerful, and we're really excited about it, by those capabilities, bringing that to our customers. >> Well Ashesh, I think that puts a great exclamation point as to how we go from these early days off to the vast majority of environments, Ashesh, one thing, congratulations to you and the team on the growth, the momentum, all the customer stories, I'd love the opportunity to talk to many of the Red Hat customers about their digital transformation and how your cloud platforms have been a piece of it, so once again, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> Likewise, thanks a lot, Stuart, good chatting with you, and hope to see you in person soon sometime. >> Absolutely, we at theCUBE of course hope to see you at events later in 2020, for the time being, we of course fully digital, always online, check out theCUBE.net for all of the archives as well as the events including all the digital ones that we are doing, I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. 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>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin at AWS Reinvent 19. This is Day three of the Cubes coverage. We have two sets here. Lots of cute content are joined by Justin Warren, the founder and chief analyst at Pivot nine. Justin. How's it going? Great, right? You still have a voice? Three days? >>Just barely. I've been I've been trying to take care of it. >>Impressed. And you probably have talked to at least half of the 65,000 attendees. >>I'm trying to talk to as many as I can. >>Well, we're gonna talk to another guy here. Joining us from data ICU is well, Novak, the solutions architect will be the Cube. >>Thanks for having me. >>You have a good voice too. After a three day is that you >>have been doing the best I can. >>Yeah, he's good. So did ICU. Interesting name. Let's start off by sharing with our audience. Who did a coup is and what you guys do in technology. >>Yes. So the Entomology of date ICU. It's like hi cooze for data. So we say we take your data and, you know, we make poetry out of it. Make your data so beautiful. Wow, Now, But for those who are unaware Day like it was an enterprise data science platform. Eso we provide a collaborative environment for we say coders and clickers kind of business analyst and native data scientists to make use of organizations, data bill reports and Bill productive machine learning base models and deploy them. >>I'm only the guy's been around around for eight years. Eight years. Okay, >>so start up. Still >>mourning the cloud, the opportunity there That data is no longer a liability. It's an asset or should be. >>So we've been server based from the start, which is one of our differentiators. And so by that we see ourselves as a collaborative platform. Users access it through a Web browser, log into a shared space and share code, can share visual recipes, as we call them to prepare data. >>Okay, so what customers using the platform to do with machine learning is pretty hot at the moment. I think it might be nearing the peak of the life cycle pretty hot. Yeah, what a customer is actually actually doing on the platform, >>you know, So we really focus on enabling the enterprise. So, for example, G has been a customer for some time now, and Sergey is a great prototypical example on that. They have many disparate use cases, like simple things like doing customer segmentation for, you know, marketing campaigns but also stuff like Coyote predicted maintenance. So use cases kind of run the gamut, and so did ICU. Based on open source, we're enabling all of G's users to come into a centralized platform, access their data manipulated for whatever purposes. Maybe >>nobody talked about marketing campaigns for a second. I'm wondering. Are, is their integration with serum technologies? Or how would a customer like wanting to understand customer segmentation or had a segment it for marketing campaign? How would they work in conjunction with a serum and data ICU, for example? >>It's a great question. So again, us being a platform way sit on a single server, something like an Amazon ec2 instance, and then we make connections into an organization's data sources. So if using something like Salesforce weaken seamlessly, pull in data from Salesforce Yuka manipulated in date ICU, but the same time. Maybe also have some excel file someone you know me. I can bring that into my data to work environment. And I also have a red shift data table. All those things would come into the same environment. I can visualize. I can analyze, and I can prepare the data. I see. >>So you tell you it's based on open source? I'm a longtime fan of over. It's always been involved in it for longer than I care to remember. Actually, that's an interesting way t base your product on that. So maybe talk us through how you how you came to found the company based on basic an open source. What? What led to that choice? What? What was that decision based on? >>Yeah, for sure. So you talked about how you know the hype cycle? A. I saw how hot is a I and so I think again, our founders astutely recognize that this is a very fast moving place to be. And so I'm kind of betting on one particular technology can be risky. So instead, by being a platform, we say, like sequel has been the data transformation language do jour for many days now. So, of course, that you can easily write Sequel and a lot of our visual data Transformations are based on the sequel language, but also something like Python again. It's like the language de jour for machine law machine learning model building right now, so you can easily code in python. Maintain your python libraries in date, ICU And so by leveraging open source, we figured we're making our clients more future proof as long as they're staying in date ICU. But using data ICU to leverage the best in breed and open source, they'll always be kind of where they want to be in the technological landscape by supposed to locked into some tech that is now out of date. >>What's been the appetite for making data beautiful for a legacy enterprise, like a G E that's been around for a very long time versus a more modern either. Born in the Cloud er's our CEO says, reborn in the cloud. What are some of the differences but also similarities that you see in terms of we have to be able to use emerging tech. Otherwise someone's gonna come in behind us and replace us. >>Yeah, I mean, I think it's complicated in that there's still a lot of value to be had in someone says, like a bar chart you can rely on right, So it's maybe not sexy. But having good reporting and analytics is something that both you know, 200 year old enterprise organizations and data native organizations startups needs. At the same time, building predicted machine learning models and deploying those is rest a p i n points that developers can use in your organization to provide a data driven product for your consumers. Like that's amore advanced use case that everyone kind of wants to be a part of again data. Who's a nice tool, which says Maybe you don't have developers who are very fluent in turning out flashed applications. We could give you a place to build a predictive model and deploy that predictive model, saving you time to write all that code on the back end. >>One of the themes of the show has been transformation, so it sounds like data ICU would be It's something that you can dip your toes in and start to get used to using. Even if you're not particularly familiar with Time machine learning model a model building. >>Yeah, that's exactly right. So a big part of our product and encourage watchers to go try it out themselves and go to our website. Download a free version pretrial, but is enablement. So if you're the most sophisticated applied math PhD there is, like, Who's a great environment for you to Code and Bill predictive models. If you never built the machine learning model before you can use data ICU to run visual machine learning recipes, we call them, and also we give you documentation, which is, Hey, this is a random forest model. What is a random forest model? We'll tell you a little bit about it. And that's another thing that some of these enterprises have really appreciated about date I could. It is helping up skill there user base >>in terms of that transformation theme that Justin just mention which we're hearing a lot about, not visit this show. It's a big thing, but we hear it all the time, right? But in terms of customers transformation, journey, whatever you wanna call it, cloud is gonna be an essential enabler of being able to really love it value from a I. So I'm just wondering from a strategic positioning standpoint. Is did ICU positioned as a facilitator or as fuel for a cloud transformation that on enterprise would undergo >>again? Yes, great point. So for us, I can't take the credit. This credit goes to our founders, but we've thought from the start the clouds and exciting proposition Not everyone is. They're still in 2019. Most people, if not all of them, want to get there. Also, people want too many of our clients want the multi cloud on a day. Like who says, If you want to be on prim, if you want to be in a single cloud subscription. If you want to be multi cloud again as a platform, we're just gonna give you connection to your underlying infrastructure. You could use the infrastructure that you like and just use our front end to help your analyst get value. They can. I >>think I think a lot of vendors across the entire ecosystem around to say the customer choice is really important, and the customers, particularly enterprise customers, want to be able to have lots of different options, and not all of them will be ready to go completely. All in on cloud today. They made it may take them years, possibly decades, to get there. So having that choice is like it's something that it would work with you today and we'll work with you tomorrow, depending on what choices you make. >>It's exactly right. Another thing we've seen a lot of to that day, like who helps with and whether it's like you or other tools. Like, of course, you want best in breed, but you also want particularly for a large enterprise. You don't want people operating kind of in a wild West, particularly in like the ML data science space. So you know we integrate with Jupiter notebooks, but some of our clients come to us initially. Just have I won't say rogues that has a negative connotation. But maybe I will say Road road data Scientists are just tapping into some day the store. They're using Jupiter notebooks to build a predictive model, but then to actually production allies that to get sustainable value out of it like it's to one off and so having a centralized platform like date ICU, where you can say this is where we're going to use our central model depository, that something where businesses like they can sleep easier at night because they know where is my ML development happening? It's happening in one ecosystem. What tools that happening with, well, best in breed of open source. So again, you kind of get best of both worlds like they like you. >>It sounds like it's more about the operations of machine learning. It is really, really important rather than just. It's the pure technology. Yes, that's important as well, and you need to have the data Sinus to build it, but having something that allows you to operationalize it so that you can just bake it into what we do every day as a business. >>Yeah, I think in a conference like this all about tech, it's easy to forget what we firmly believe, which is a I and maybe tech. More broadly, it's still human problems at the core, right? Once you get the tech right, the code runs corrected. The code is written correctly. Therefore, like human interactions, project management model deployment in an organization. These are really hard, human centered problems, but so having tech that enables that human centric collaboration helps with that, we find >>Let's talk about some of the things that we can't ever go to an event and not talk about. Nut is respected data quality, reliability and security. Understood? I could facilitate those three cornerstones. >>Yeah, sure. So, again, viewers, I would encourage you to check out the date. ICU has some nice visual indications of data quality. So an analyst or data scientists and come in very easily understand, you know, is this quality to conform to the standards that my organization has set and what I mean by standards that could be configured. Right? So does this column have the appropriate schema? Does it have the appropriate carnality? These are things that an individual might decide to use on then for security. So Data has its own security mechanisms. However, we also to this point about incorporating best Retek. We'll work with whatever underlying security mechanisms organizations organizations have in place. So, for instance, if you're using a W s, you have, I am rolls to manage your security. Did ICU comport those that apply those to the date ICU environment or using something like on prime miss, uh, duke waken you something like Kerberos has the technology to again manage access to resources. So we're taking the best in breed that this organization already has invested time, energy and resources into and saying We're not trying to compete with them but rather were trying to enable organizations to use these technologies efficiently. >>Yeah, I like that consistency of customer choice. We spoke about that just before. I'm seeing that here with their choices around. Well, if you're on this particular platform will integrate with whatever the tools are there. People underestimate how important that is for enterprises, that it has to be ahead. Virginia's environment, playing well with others is actually quite important. >>Yeah, I don't know that point. Like the combination of heterogeneity but also uniformity. It's a hard balance to strike, and I think it's really important, giving someone a unified environment but still choice. At the same time. A good restaurant or something like you won't be able to pick your dish, but you want to know that the entire quality is high. And so having that consistent ecosystem, I think, really helps >>what are, in your opinion, some of the next industries that you see there really right to start Really leveraging machine learning to transfer You mentioned g e a very old legacy business. If we think of you know what happened with the ride hailing industry uber, for example, or fitness with Saletan or pinchers with visible Serge, what do you think is the next industry? That's like you guys taking advantage of machine learning will completely transform this and our lives. >>I mean, the easy answer that I'll give because it's easy to say it's gonna transform. But hard to operationalize is health care, right? So there is structured data, but the data quality is so desperate and had a row genius s, I think you know, if organizations in a lot of this again it's a human centered problem. If people could decide on data standards and also data privacy is, of course, a huge issue. We talked about data security internally, but also as a customer. What day to do I want you know, this hospital, this health care provider, to have access to that human issues we have to result but conditional on that being resolved that staring out a way to anonymous eyes data and respect data privacy but have consistent data structure. And we could say, Hey, let's really set these a I M L models loose and figure out things like personalized medicine which were starting to get to. But I feel like there's still a lot of room to go. That >>sounds like it's exciting time to be in machine learning. People should definitely check out products such as Dead Rock you and see what happens. >>Last question for you is so much news has come out in the last three days. It's mind boggling sum of the takeaways, that of some of the things that you've heard from Andy Jassy to border This'll Morning. >>Yeah, I think a big thing for me, which was something for me before this week. But it's always nice to hear an Amazon reassures the concept of white box. Aye, aye. We've been talking about that a date ICU for some time, but everyone wants performance A. I R ml solutions, but increasing. There's a really appetite publicly for interpret ability, and so you have to be responsible. You have to have interpret belay I and so it's nice to hear a leader like Amazon echo that day like you. That's something we've been talking about since our start. >>A little bit validating them for data ICU, for sure, for sure. Well, thank you for joining. Just to be on the kid, the suffering. And we appreciate it. Appreciate it. All right. For my co host, Justin Warren, I'm Lisa Martin and your work to the Cube from Vegas. It's AWS reinvent 19.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Hello, and happy taco Tuesday CUBE viewers! You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Scott Hanselman, he is the partner program manager at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE! >> Absolutely, my pleasure! >> Rebecca: And happy taco Tuesday to you! Will code for tacos. >> Will code for tacos. >> I'm digging it, I'm digging it >> I'm a very inexpensive coder. >> So you are the partner program manager, but you're really the people's programmer at Microsoft. Satya Nadella up on the main stage yesterday, talking about programming for everyone, empowering ordinary citizen developers, and you yourself were on the main stage this morning, "App Development for All", why is this such a priority for Microsoft at this point in time? >> Well there's the priority for Microsoft, and then I'll also speak selfishly as a priority for me, because when we talk about inclusion, what does that really mean? Well it is the opposite of exclusion. So when we mean inclusion, we need to mean everyone, we need to include everyone. So what can we do to make technology, to make programming possible, to make everyone enabled, whether that be something like drag and drop, and PowerApps, and the Power platform, all the way down to doing things like we did in the keynote this morning with C# on a tiny micro-controller, and the entire spectrum in between, whether it be citizen programmers in Excel using Power BI to go and do machine learning, or the silly things that we did in the keynote with rock, paper scissors that we might be able to talk about. All of that means including everyone and if the site isn't accessible, if Visual Studio as a tool isn't accessible, if you're training your AI in a non-ethical way, you are consciously excluding people. So back to what Satya thinks is why can't everyone do this? SatyaSacha thinks is why can't everyone do this? Why are we as programmers having any gate keeping, or you know, "You can't do that you're not a programmer, "you know, I'm a programmer, you can't have that." >> So what does the future look like, >> Rebecca: So what does the future look like, if everyone knows how to do it? I mean, do some imagining, visioning right now about if everyone does know how to do this, or at least can learn the building blocks for it, what does technology look like? >> Well hopefully it will be ethical, and it'll be democratized so that everyone can do it. I think that the things that are interesting, or innovative today will become commoditized tomorrow, like, something as simple as a webcam detecting your face, and putting a square around it and then you move around, and the square, we were like, "Oh my God, that was amazing!" And now it's just a library that you can download. What is amazing and interesting today, like AR and VR, where it's like, "Oh wow, I've never seen augmented reality work like that!" My eight-year-old will be able to do it in five years, and they'll be older than eight. >> So Scott, one of the big takeaways I had from the app dev keynote that you did this morning was in the past it was trying to get everybody on the same page, let's move them to our stack, let's move them to our cloud, let's move them on this programming language, and you really talked about how the example of Chipotle is different parts of the organization will write in a different language, and there needs to be, it's almost, you know, that service bus that you have between all of these environments, because we've spent, a lot of us, I know in my career I've spent decades trying to help break down those silos, and get everybody to work together, but we're never going to have everybody doing the same jobs, so we need to meet them where they are, they need to allow them to use the tools, the languages, the platforms that they want, but they need to all be able to work together, and this is not the Microsoft that I grew up with that is now an enabler of that environment. The word we keep coming back to is trust at the keynote. I know there's some awesome, cool new stuff about .net which is a piece of it, but it's all of the things together. >> Right, you know I was teaching a class at Mesa Community College down in San Diego a couple of days ago and they were trying, they were all people who wanted jobs, just community college people, I went to community college and it's like, I just want to know how to get a job, what is the thing that I can do? What language should I learn? And that's a tough question. They wonder, do I learn Java, do I learn C#? And someone had a really funny analogy, and I'll share it with you. They said, well you know English is the language, right? Why don't the other languages just give up? They said, you know, Finland, they're not going to win, right? Their language didn't win, so they should just give up, and they should all speak English, and I said, What an awful thing! They like their language! I'm not going to go to people who do Haskell, or Rust, or Scala, or F#, and say, you should give up! You're not going to win because C won, or Java won, or C# won. So instead, why don't we focus on standards where we can inter-operate, where we can accept that the reality is a hybrid cloud things like Azure Arc that allows us to connect multiple clouds, multi-vendor clouds together. That is all encompassing the concept of inclusion, including everyone means including every language, and as many standards as you can. So it might sound a little bit like a Tower of Babel, but we do have standards and the standards are HTTP, REST, JSON, JavaScript. It may not be the web we deserve, but it's the web that we have, so we'll use those building block technologies, and then let people do their own thing. >> So speaking of the keynote this morning, one of the cool things you were doing was talking about the rock, paper, scissors game, and how it's expanding. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the new elements to rock, paper, scissors. >> So folks named Sam Kass, a gentleman named Sam Kass many, many years ago on the internet, when the internet was much simpler web pages, created a game called Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, and a lot of people will know that from a popular TV show on CBS, and they'll give credit to that show, in fact it was Sam Kass and Karen Bryla who created that, and we sent them a note and said, "Hey can I write a game about this?" And we basically built a Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock game in the cloud containerized at scale with multiple languages, and then we also put it on a tiny device, and what's fun about the game from a complexity perspective is that rock, paper, scissors is easy. There's only three rules, right? Paper covers rock, which makes no sense, but when you have five, it's hard! Spock shoots the Rock with his phaser, and then the lizard poisons Spock, and the paper disproves, and it gets really hard and complicated, but it's also super fun and nerdy. So we went and created a containerized app where we had all different bots, we had node, Python, Java, C#, and PHP, and then you can say, I'm going to pick Spock and .net, or node and paper, and have them fight, and then we added in some AI, and some machine learning, and some custom vision such that if you sign in with Twitter in this game, it will learn your patterns, and try to defeat you using your patterns and then, clicking on your choices and fun, snd then, clicking on your choices and fun, because we all want to go, "Rock, Paper, Scissors shoot!" So we made a custom vision model that would go, and detect your hand or whatever that is saying, this is Spock and then it would select it and play the game. So it was just great fun, and it was a lot more fun than a lot of the corporate demos that you see these days. >> All right Scott, you're doing a lot of different things at the show here. We said there's just a barrage of different announcements that were made. Love if you could share some of the things that might have flown under the radar. You know, Arc, everyone's talking about, but some cool things or things that you're geeking out on that you'd want to share with others? >> Two of the things that I'm most excited, one is an announcement that's specific to Ignite, and one's a community thing, the announcement is that .net Core 3.1 is coming. .net Core 3 has been a long time coming as we have began to mature, and create a cross platform open source .net runtime, but .net Core 3.1 LTS Long Term Support means that that's a version of .net core that you can put on a system for three years and be supported. Because a lot of people are saying, "All this open source is moving so fast! "I just upgraded to this, "and I don't want to upgrade to that". LTS releases are going to happen every November in the odd numbered years. So that means 2019, 2021, 2023, there's going to be a version of .net you can count on for three years, and then if you want to follow that train, the safe train, you can do that. In the even numbered years we're going to come out with a version of .net that will push the envelope, maybe introduce a new version of C#, it'll do something interesting and new, then we tighten the screws and then the following year that becomes a long term support version of .net. >> A question for you on that. One of the challenges I hear from customers is, when you talk about hybrid cloud, they're starting to get pulled apart a little bit, because in the public cloud, if I'm running Azure, I'm always on the latest version, but in my data center, often as you said, I want longer term support, I'm not ready to be able to take that CICD push all of the time, so it feels like I live, maybe call it bimodal if you want, but I'm being pulled with the am I always on the latest, getting the latest security, and it's all tested by them? Or am I on my own there? How do you help customers with that, when Microsoft's developing things, how do you live in both of those worlds or pull them together? >> Well, we're really just working on this idea of side-by-side, whether it be different versions of Visual Studio that are side-by-side, the stable one that your company is paying for, and then the preview version that you can go have side-by-side, or whether you could have .net Core 3, 3.1, or the next version, a preview version, and a safe version side-by-side. We want to enable people to experiment without fear of us messing up their machine, which is really, really important. >> One of the other things you were talking about is a cool community announcement. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> So this is a really cool product from a very, very small company out of Oregon, from a company called Wilderness Labs, and Wilderness Labs makes a micro-controller, not a micro-processor, not a raspberry pie, it doesn't run Linux, what it runs is .net, so we're actually playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock on this device. We've wired it all up, this is a screen from our friends at Adafruit, and I can write .net, so somehow if someone is working at, I don't know, the IT department at Little Debbie Snack Cakes, and they're making WinForms applications, they're suddenly now an IOT developer, 'cause they can go and write C# code, and control a device like this. And when you have a micro-controller, this will run for weeks on a battery, not hours. You go and 3D print a case, make this really tiny, it could become a sensor, it could become an IOT device, or one of thousands of devices that could check crops, check humidity, moisture wetness, whatever you want, and we're going to enable all kinds of things. This is just a commodity device here, this screen, it's not special. The actual device, this is the development version, size of my finger, it could be even smaller if we wanted to make it that way, and these are our friends at Wilderness Labs. and they had a successful Kickstarter, and I just wanted to give them a shout out, and I just wanted to give them a shoutout, I don't have any relationship with them, I just think they're great. >> Very cool, very cool. So you are a busy guy, and as Stu said, you're in a lot of different things within Microsoft, and yet you still have time to teach at community college. I'm interested in your perspective of why you do that? Why do you think it's so important to democratize learning about how to do this stuff? >> I am very fortunate and I think that we people, who have achieved some amount of success in our space, need to recognize that luck played a factor in that. That privilege played a factor in that. But, why can't we be the luck for somebody else, the luck can be as simple as a warm introduction. I believe very strongly in what I call the transitive value of friendship, so if we're friends, and you're friends, then the hypotenuse can be friends as well. A warm intro, a LinkedIn, a note that like, "Hey, I met this person, you should talk to them!" Non-transactional networking is really important. So I can go to a community college, and talk to a person that maybe wanted to quit, and give a speech and give them, I don't know, a week, three months, six months, more whatever, chutzpah, moxie, something that will keep them to finish their degree and then succeed, then I'm going to put good karma out into the world. >> Paying it forward. >> Exactly. >> So Scott, you mentioned that when people ask for advice, it's not about what language they do, is to, you know, is to,q you know, we talk in general about intellectual curiosity of course is good, being part of a community is a great way to participate, and Microsoft has a phenomenal one, any other tips you'd give for our listeners out there today? >> The fundamentals will never go out of style, and rather than thinking about learning how to code, why not think about learning how to think, and learning about systems thinking. One of my friends, Kishau Rogers, talked about systems thinking, I've hade her on my podcast a number of times, and we were giving a presentation at Black Girls Code, and I was talking to a fifteen-year-old young woman, and we were giving a presentation. It was clear that her mom wanted her to be there, and she's like, "Why are we here?" And I said, "All right, let's talk about programming "everybody, we're talking about programming. "My toaster is broken and the toast is not working. "What do you think is wrong?" Big, long, awkward pause and someone says, "Well is the power on?" I was like, "Well, I plugged a light in, "and nothing came on" and they were like, "Well is the fuse blown?" and then one little girl said "Well did the neighbors have power?", And I said, "You're debugging, we are debugging right?" This is the thing, you're a systems thinker, I don't know what's going on with the computer when my dad calls, I'm just figuring it out like, "Oh, I'm so happy, you work for Microsoft, "you're able to figure it out." >> Rebecca: He has his own IT guy now in you! >> Yeah, I don't know, I unplug the router, right? But that ability to think about things in the context of a larger system. I want toast, power is out in the neighborhood, drawing that line, that makes you a programmer, the language is secondary. >> Finally, the YouTube videos. Tell our viewers a little bit about those. you can go to D-O-T.net, so dot.net, the word dot, you can go to d-o-t.net, so dot.net, the word dot, slash videos and we went, and we made a 100 YouTube videos on everything from C# 101, .net, all the way up to database access, and putting things in the cloud. A very gentle, "Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood" on-ramp. A lot of things, if you've ever seen that cartoon that says, "Want to draw an owl? "Well draw two circles, "and then draw the rest of the fricking owl." A lot of tutorials feel like that, and we don't want to do that, you know. We've got to have an on-ramp before we get on the freeway. So we've made those at dot.net/videos. >> Excellent, well that's a great plug! Thank you so much for coming on the show, Scott. >> Absolutely my pleasure! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman., stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. PALO ALTO, California It is a cute conversation, >> living welcome to this special Cuba conversation in Palo Alto, California We're here with our friends on Twitter and influences in the cloud computing edge and open source game. We have our distinguished power panel here talking about if every tech company, every company should be a tech company. And what does it mean in the air of a modern infrastructure? Police to have my kale with ct of everest dot org's from most Gatto's California Rob Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Rock n Calling in From Where You Calling in from >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin, Texas. Good to have you and Mark Theo Who's with EJ Gravity brand New opportunity. Congratulations calling in Las Vegas. Thanks for coming in, guys. Thanks for spending the time on this cube power panel from the influencers. Always great to see you guys on Twitter with this morning. I woke up, was very active at a Crouch said earlier this morning. And Mark, you wrote a post that got my attention. So I think you hit a nerve that has been sparking around the Internets around the role of technology as couples, they're starting to rethink and building out there enterprise architectures in their businesses. And we're seeing some signals around cybersecurity. Dev Ops certainly has been kind of banging on this drum with cloud computing, and that is that the role of technology plays as a percentage of the business part of the business. And your tweet was simply put, you said every bit. If every business needs to become a tech business, it business has to decide to own its own infrastructure something of that effect, which which triggered me because it's like That's a good question. It isn't just a part of an organization supporting it. Tech is becoming much more instrumental. So I want to get your reaction. What was the motivation behind that tweet? What's your what's your What was your point around it? >> Yeah, I mean, like many of my tweets, they're poorly worded and rushed out, so you know, it's not as clear as it could have been. But the real point of the message wasn't Thio highlight that a technology company has to be all in the cloud or has to own its infrastructure, but rather as a company makes a change towards becoming a technology company. I mean, if we go back Thio you know, 1995 or 1996 when we wanted a library, we went to the library. But now we have Google. We didn't know that Google was gonna become an online the equivalent of a library. But it became a digital company before anybody asked for that solution or anybody was running that kind of solution in some sort of company format and then changed it over. But, you know, Google Facebook, Microsoft's into it. Adobe PayPal. We could go down the long list there. All I t cos in the end, whether you call the technology that they built to run their businesses engineering with a CTO or I t. Is the material. They are in fact, large giant I t organizations that do what they do to make money. And so, as more companies look to make the change as digital transformation takes hold as more efforts are presented to try to get a closer handle on customers to build loyalty with customers, create new engagement models, maybe at the edge, even in traditional application environments, then companies have to make a decision about how they're going toe oh, nightie and whether they're goingto own any portion of the infrastructure of I T. And if they're going to do that, then I don't think that there's any question that they have to own it. Atleast following a model of the way the large providers and the facebooks, et cetera have provided for us cannot continue. In other words, what I've been known to say before, we can't continue to throw more hardware and people at the problem. >> My mike, I want to get your thoughts on this because one of the things that I know you have been involved a lot with security on dhe I t. As well in security, which which is a canary in the coal mine. For a lot of these architectural decisions are all kind of looking at how they hire and build on premise in house around tech stacks. And one of the things that became apparent to me at Amazon Aws reinforce, which is their Amazons first cloud security conference, was most of the ceases. When I talk privately was saying, we don't really believe in multi cloud. We have multiple clouds, but We're investing in people on certain stacks that fit our guiding principles of what we're building as a company. And they said we then go to the suppliers and saying, Here's the AP eyes we want you to support So you start to see the shift from being hiring the general purpose software vendors to come in and supply them with I t stuff Were hardware. As Mark pointed out, too much more, the customer saying No, no, this is our spec build that we built it. And so the trend that points to the trend of a reinvestment of building tech at the core of the business, which would imply to Mark's point around their tech companies. What's your thoughts on this? >> So a nuance. My answer. I think their tech enabled companies more than tech companies like Tech is enabling, whether it's Google or into it or pay power of the other companies. Mark mentioned technologies the base of their companies stack, um, then to go into your security portion, security has to be architected and embedded into the core solutions not bolted on after the fact with vendor solutions like it is today, and I think we've proven time and time again, including the capital one issue as a day or two ago that the current approaches are not working. And, uh, I agree with whomever See says you've been talking thio like being driving a P I integrations and be consumptive of them and telling what you need to build is a much better approach. Would you want to build a custom house with that actually talking to your builder and finding out later? What? What features and pictures have been installed in your home. But what do you wanna have a hand in that from the ground up? I think that's the mischief. >> Well, I want to come back to the capital. One point that's gonna be a separate talk track. So let's hold that thought. Rob, I want to go to you. Because StarBeat Joel, whose prolific on these threads you know, posting is nice Twitter cards on their um, he said, If you know, talk about leasing out extra capacity in a private data centers question Mark, you know, teasing out the question. And then Ben Haines responded and said, Why the hell would you want to be in that business when you have a real business to run again to what Mark was saying about, You know, Tech is going to be everywhere. Why should I even be in the data center? Because I don't want to be in that business. I gotta figure out Tech for the business. So Ben kind of brings that practitioner perspective. What's your thought? Because you're in the middle of this with the devil's movement. Bare metal, big part of it, Your thoughts. >> Yeah, And that's why we really focus on fixing the bear mental problem. Andi, I want to come back to where a bear metal fits with all this because you really can't get away from bare metal. I think the first question is really is every day to send is every business in I t business. And you know, not every business is a Google and strictly a nighty business. But what we're seeing with machine learning and Internet of things and just extension of what was traditionally siloed I t or data center, I t into everyday operations. You can't get away from the fact that if you're not able to take in the data, work with the data, manipulate and understand what your customers were doing. Then you are going to be behind. That's That's how you're gonna lose. You're gonna be out of business on. So I think that what we're doing is we're redefining business into not just a product that you're selling, but understanding how your customers air interacting with that product, what value they're getting from it. We really redefined supply chain in a very transformative way compared to anything else. And that's an I T enabled transformation. >> Ben brings up a good point, but the Brent wanted Friends Point is essentially teasing out mark and yourself a bare metal. All this stuff is complicated. Cut and make investments. Ben's teasing as What the hell business do you want to be in? I think that becomes a lot of this digital transformation. Conversation is Hey, Cloud is an easy decision. We were start up 10 years ago. We don't have I t. We have 50 plus people on growing. We're all in the cloud. That's fine for us. Dropbox started in the cloud. All these guys started class. It's easy as hell to do it. No, no debate there. But as you start thinking, Maurin Maur integration as a big enterprise which wasn't born in the cloud. This is where the transformations happening is what business? What the hell they doing? What's what's the purpose of their >> visit? Yeah, but the reality of you, a cloud infrastructure and how cloud infrastructure is structured does not really take you away from owning how you operate and run that infrastructure, right Amazons than an amazing marketing job of telling everybody that they're not smart enough to run their own infrastructure. And it's just not true way definitely let operations get very lax. We built up a lot of technical debt that we we need to be able to fix. An Amazon walked in and said, This is too hard for you. Let us take it off your plate. But the reality is people using Amazon still have toe owned their operations of that infrastructure. The capital one didn't doesn't get to just get a pass and say, I used Amazon. Oh, well, Too bad. Talk to them. You still own your infrastructure. >> Technically, it wasn't Amazons fall, so let's get the capital. One is this brings up a good point. Converged infrastructure was the Holy Grail, savior for the I t If you go back when we started doing Cuba interviews, stupidity and I would talk about converged is awesome. You got Nutanix kicked ass and grew like crazy. And so then you have the converge kind of meat's maker. When it sees the cloud, it's like, OK, I got great converged infrastructure, but yet the breach on capital one had nothing to do with a W s. It was basically an s three bucket that the firewall Miss configured. So it was really Amazon was a victim of its simplicity there. I mean, there's a >> I mean, this is this is what we're talking about with. To me with this tweet is that we need to look, we need to be better at operating the infrastructure we have, whether it's Amazon or physical assets on your premises. What we've really done is we've eroded our ability to manage those pieces well and do it in a way that builds on itself. And so as soon as we can get on improvement there, I mean, this this is where I went with this threat is if we can really improve our operational efficiency with the infrastructure we have, whether it's in the cloud on premises. You create benefits there than everything you build on top of that is gonna have a nim prove mint, right. We're gonna change the way we look at infrastructure. Amazons already done that on. We think about infrastructure in cloud terms, but I don't think that what they've done is the end destination. They just taught us how to be better running infrastructure. >> Well, it brings up that it brings up the point, and I have so Mike shaking his head to get his thought and mark on this. If I is that I tease problem our operational technologies problem because the world's not as simple as it used to be. It was not. It wasn't. It's not simple. You got edge. You get externally incest cloud players now multi cloud. So information technology teams and operational technology teams whose fault is it? Who is responsible thing? Could you just had a AI bots managing the the filtering and access to history buckets that could have been automated away? What, Whose problem was it? Operations, technology or I t. >> So that I think, to touch upon what Rob was talking about. There's my chain and technology, uh, from the classic sound byte is people process and technology. The core cause of literally every security breach, including capital one is a lack of sophisticated process and the root cause being people, and there's no amount of a I currently that can fix that. So you have to start focusing on your operational supply chain processes, which has, Rob said. Amazon has really solidified, and the company should look to emulate that forces trying to emulate the cloud infrastructure and some of your processed and your people challenges first. And then you can leverage the technology. >> Great point. Totally agree with you on that one >> market. Yeah, I would agree with everything that both Mike and Rob just said, and I would just add that we we don't have any choice but to face the future. That is, I t. And in order to provide the best possible service to our customers for our applications that even haven't been built yet, we have to look at the service is that are available to us and utilize them the best way possible and then find appropriate management and, like so correctly put it supply chain processes for managing them. So I've talked to people who are building unique cloud platforms internally to solve a specific business problem in ways that the individual clouds offered by the Big Three is an example can't do or can't do as well or can't do is cheaply. And the same thing applies to customers who are just using more than one of the big cloud providers. Even for some in some cases, for workloads. That might seem similar because each of the clouds provide a different opportunity associated with that specific set of requirements. And so we don't have any choice but to manage it better. And whether it's we make a choice to use it in our data center because it's more cost effective long term. And that's our single most important driver. Or whether we decide to leverage every tool in our tool belt, which includes a handful of cloud providers. And some we do our own, um, or we put it all in one cloud. It doesn't change our responsibility for owning it correctly, right? And my simple message really was that you have to figure out how to own and I'll steal from Mike again. You have to figure out how to own that supply chain. But more lower down more base is ifs. Part of that supply chain is delivering compute into a data center or environment that you own. Then you have to find the tools capabilities to ensure that you're not making the kind of mistakes that were made with capital or >> or, if you have tools are networks and tools you don't know and look at the quotes. So called scare with the China hack from Super Micro. That's a silly why chain problems? Well, it's on the silicon. So again, back to the process, people an equation. I think that's right on this brings us kind of through the next talking track. I want to get your thoughts on, which is cloud two point. Oh, I mean, I'm putting that term out there on Lee is a provocative way. Remember, Web to point. It works so well in debating about what it what it was. If one if cloud one data was Amazon Web service is, thank you very much. Public cloud. You could say cloud two point. Oh, our second inning would be just what happens next because you're seeing now a confluence of different dynamics edge, um, security, industrial edge. And then you know this all coming into on premises, which is hybrid and public, all working together. And then you throw multi cloud in there from a complexity standpoint. Do you wanna have support Microsoft's Stack, Azure Stack, Google and Amazon? This is this is the fundamental 2.0 question. Because things are more real time. Things are data specific. This costs involved. There's really network innovation needed what you guys thoughts on cloud to point out. >> I think the basic cloud 2.0, is moving to the shared responsibility model. And we should stop blaming people for teams for breaches as architectures become much more complex, including network computing, storage and in service orchestration layers like kubernetes, no one team or individual, individual or one team and manage all of that. So you're all responsible for infrastructure, scalability, performance and security. So I think it's the cultural movement more than the technology movement at the base of >> Rob. What's your definition? Cloud 2.0, from your perspective. >> Oh boy, I've been calling it Post Cloud Is my feeling on this? Yeah, it to me. It's it's about rethinking the way we automate. Um, you know, we really learned that we had to interact with infrastructure via automation and eliminate the human risk elements of. This doesn't mean that we have an automation is foolproof either It's not, but what? What I think we've seen is that people have really understood that we have to bring the type of automation and power that we're seeing in clouding the benefits because they're very riel. But back into everything that we do. There's no doubt in my mind that infrastructure is moving back into the environment. Where is what? Which is EJ from my perspective, and we'll see computing in a much more distributed way and those benefits and getting that right in the automation. Is this necessary to run autonomous zero touch infrastructure in environmental situations. That is gonna be justice transformative, freighted that that environment makes the cloud look easy. Frankly, >> Mark, what's your take? I want to get because, you know, security houses, one element get self driving cars. You got kind of a new front end of of EJ devices, whether it's a Serie Buy Me a song on iTunes, which has to go out to a traditional system and purchase a song. But that that Siri priest is different than what? The back end? Does this simply database, Get it? Moving over self driving cars, You're seeing all kinds of EJ industrial activity. You know, the debate of moving compute to the data. You got Amazon with ground station, all these new infrastructure physical activities going on that needs software to power it. What, you're in cloud to point. It seems to be a nice place not just for analytics, but for operational thing. Your thoughts on cloud to point out >> Well, I mean you you describe the opportunity relatively well. I could certainly go in. I've spent a lot of time going into detail about what EJ might mean and what might populate edge and why people would use it. But I think from if we just look at it from a cloud 2.0, standpoint, maybe I'm oversimplifying. But I would say, you know, if you add on to what Mike and Rob already so well pointed out is that it's best fit right, it's best fit from compute location, Thio CPU type Thio platform on, and historically, for I t they've always had to make pragmatic choice is that I believe, limit their ability on Helped to create Maur you know, legacy Tech that they have to manage, um on and create overhead tech debt, as they call it on DSO. I think judo. And in my book the best case for two Dato is that I can put best fit work where I need it when I need it for as long as I need it. >> That's that's really kind of gasp originals. Well, people got to get the software stood up. That's where I think Kubernetes has shown a nice position. I want to extend this track to another thought, another topic around networking. So if you look at the three pillars of computing computing mean industry, compute storage and networking, cloud one daughter, you can say pretty much compute storage did a good job. Amazon has a C two as three. Everything went great. Networking always got taken to the wood shed. You know, networking was getting, you know, people were pissing and moaning about networking. But if you look at kind of things were just talking about networking seems to be an area that this cloud 2.0, could innovate on. So wanna get each of your thoughts on? If you could throw the magic wand out there around the network doesn't take the same track as Dev ops that gets abstracted away because you see VM wear now doing deals. All the cloud providers they got they're going after Cisco with the networking PCC Cisco trying to be relevant. The big guys you got edge, which is power and network connection. You need those things. So what is the role of the network? And two point If you guys could wave the magic wand and have something magically happen or innovate, what would it be? >> Oh, wait, it's part complaining. It's your world. You know, it's ironic that I said this Thio competitors to my most previous company. Ericsson Company was away. They asked me after an event in San everything was a cloud expo. I just got off stage and the gentleman came up to me and asked me So mark you the way you talked about Cloud. I appreciate the comments you made yada, yada, yada. But what do you think about networking? And I said Well, network big problem right now is that you can't follow cloud assumptions as faras usage characteristics and deployment characteristics with networking. When that problem is solved, will have moved light years ahead in how people can use and deploy i t. Because it doesn't matter if you can define workload opportunity in 30 minutes on an edge device somewhere or on a new set of data centers belonging to Google or 10 Cent or anybody else. If you can't treat the network with same functionality and flexibility and speed to value that, you can the cloud then, um, it's Unfortunately, you're really reducing your opportunity and needlessly lengthening the time to value for whatever activity it is. You're really >> so network, certainly critical in 2.0, terms have absolutely that Mike any any thoughts there? >> So I think you know, there's there's easy answers to this that are actually the answer. You know, I P v six was the answer from a couple years ago, and that hasn't solved in the fantasy of the solved. All the problems, just like five G is not gonna magically transform our edge infrastructure into this brilliant network. The reality is, networking is hard and it's hard because there's a ton of legacy embedded stuff that still has to keep working. You can't just, you know, install a new container on container system and say, I've now fixed networking. You have to deal with the globally interconnected MASH insistence. I think when we look at networking, we have to do it in a way that respects the legacy and figures out migration strategies. One of the biggest problems I see that a lot of our technology stacks here is that they just assume we're gonna pave over the problems of yesteryear, nor them and with network, when you don't get that benefit, what you described with cloud networking, never living up the potential, it's because cloud networking isn't club networking. It's it's, you know, early days of the Internet. Networking is still what we use today. It's not. It's not something you can just snap your fingers and disrupt. >> Well, I mean, networking had two major things that were big parts of a networking and who build networks knows you provisioned them and you have policy stuff that runs on them, right? You moving paintings from A to B, then you got networks you don't own right so that's kind of pedestrian, old thinking. But if you want to make networks programmable to me, it just seems like they just seem to be so much more there that needs to be developed, not just moving package. Well, >> you just said it's traditional. Networks were built first, and the infrastructure was then built around them or leveraging them, so you need to take like in zero. Trust paper. When Bugsy Siegel built Las Vegas, he built the town first and then put the roads around the infrastructure. So you need to take that approach with networking. You need to have the core infrastructure of first and then lay down the networking around to support it. And, as Mark said, that needs to be much more real time or programmable. So moving from ah, hardware to find to a software to find model, I think, is how you fix networking. It's not gonna be fixed by a new protocol or set of protocols or adding more policies or complexity to it, >> so you see a lot of change then, based on that, I'd take away that you see change coming to networking in a big way because Vegas we're gonna build >> our if it has to happen. The current way is not working. And that's why we need the bottlenecks. Wherever >> Mark you live in is the traffic's brutal. But, you know, still e gotta figure out, You know, they got some more roads. The bill change coming. What are your thoughts on the change coming with this networking paradigm >> show? I mean, there are a few companies in the space already. I'm going to refuse to name anyway at this point because one of them is a partner of my new company, not my new company, but the new company I work for and I don't want to leave them out of the discussion. But there are several companies in the space right now that are attempting to do just then just that from centralized locations, helping customers to more rapidly deploy network services to and from cloud or two and from other data centers in a chain of data centers. Programmatically as we've talked about. But in the long run, your ability to lay down networking from your office without having to create new firewall rules and spend months on on contract language and things like that on being able to take a slice of the network you already have and deploy it on DDE, not have to go through the complex Mpls or Or VPN set ups that are common today on defectively reroute destinations when you want to or make new connections when you need to. Is far as I'm concerned, that's vital to the success of anything we would call a cloud two point. Oh, >> well, we're gonna try tracks when he's hot startups. So you guys see anyone around this area? I love this topic. I think it's worth talking a lot more about love. Love to continue on with you guys on that another. Another time. Final five minutes. I'd love to spend with you guys talking about the the digital transformation paradox. Rob, we're talking before we came on camera. He loved this paradox because it's simply not as easy to saying Kill the old man, bringing the new and everything's gonna be hunky dorey. It's not that simple, but but it also brings up the fact that in all these major waves, the hype outlives the reality, too. So you're seeing so I want to get your thoughts on digital transformation. Each of you share your thoughts on what's come home to be realistic in digital transformation, which what hasn't showed up yet in terms of benefits and capability. >> I mean, this is this to me is one of the things that we see happen in every wave. They people jump on that bandwagon really hard, and then they tell everybody who's doing the current stuff, that they're doing it wrong. Um, and that that to me, actually does a lot more heart. What we what we've seen in places where people said, burn the boats, you know, we don't care. They have actually not managed to get traction and not create the long term sustainability that you would get if you created ways to bring things forward. Networking is a good example for that, right? Automating a firewall configuration and creating a soft firewall or virtual network function is just taking something that people understand and moving it into a much more control perspective in a lot of ways. That's what we saw with Cloud Cloud took working I t infrastructure that people understood added some change but also kept things that people 1% and so the paradox. Is that you? Is it the more you tell people, they just have to completely disrupt and break everything they've done and walk away from their no nighty infrastructure, the less actually you create these long term values. And I know there are people who really know you got totally changed everything that disrupted value. But a lot of the disrupted value comes from creating these incremental changes and then building something on top of that. So what? So >> what did what Indigenous in digital transformation, what has happened? That's positive and what hasn't happened that was supposed to happen. >> So when I look att Dev ops on what people thought we were going to do, just automate all things that turned out to be a much bigger lift than people expected. But when we started looking at pipelines and deployment pipelines and something very concrete for that which let people start in one or two places and then expand, I think I think, uh, pipelines and build deploy pipelines are transformative, right? Going from a continuously integrated system all the way to a continuously integrated data center. Yeah, that's transformative. And it's very concrete just telling people automate everything is not been as effective >> guys. Other thoughts there on the digital >> transformation dream. I agree with everything that Rob just said, and I would just add just because, you know, it's the boarding piece that someone always has to say, and nobody in Tech everyone is he here? But you know, every corporation at one point or another in its Kurt in its life span faces a transformative period of time because of product change or a new competitor that's doing things differently, or has figured out a way to do it cheaper or whatever it is. And they usually make or break that transformation not because of technology, not because of whether they have smart people, not because of whether they implemented the newest solution, but because of culture and organizational motivation and the vast majority of like Everything, Rob said doesn't just apply to I. T. A lot of the best I T frameworks around Agile and Dev ops apply to how the rest of the organization can and should react to opportunity so that if I t can be and should be really time, then it only makes sense that the business should be able to be real time in responding to what is being created through I t systems. And right now I would argue that the vast majority of the 80% of transformations that don't see the benefit that they're looking for have nothing to do with whether they could have gotten the right technology or done the technology correctly. But it has to do with institutional culture and motivation. And if you can fix that, then the only piece all add on to that. That again I vociferously, really agree with Robin is that if you want to lower the barrier to entry and you want to get more people into this market, you won't get more people to buy more of your stuff and grow what they own. Then you have to be able to show them a path to taking, getting the most value out of what they already have. There is no doubt in my mind that that's the only way forward, and that's where some of the tools that we're talking about and what we're talking about today on Twitter or so important >> Mike final stops on the >> docks >> on your thoughts on the transmission paradox, >> so the paradox that Robb describe think is set, the contact is set incorrectly by calling it digital transformation should be digital revolution, where the evolution process doesn't end. Transformation makes people think that there's some end state, which means let's burn the votes. That's let's get rid of all over all on prime infrastructure moved to cloud and we're done. And really, that's only the beginning. Which is why we're talking about Cloud two point. Oh, do you have to take that approach that you want to have continuous evolution and improvements, which Segways into what Rob said about de box and automating all the things you don't automate your tasks and processes and you're done? You want to keep improving upon them. Figuring out how to improve the process is and then change the automation five that the is, Mark said. It's a cultural and mental shift versus trying to get to this Holy Grail and state of transforming transformation. >> Awesome. Well, why I got you guys here first off. Thanks for spending the time and unpacking these big issue. Well, two more of it. I'd >> love to just get >> your thoughts real quick on just your opinion of Capital One. The breach, survivability and impact of the industry. Since it's still in the news, who wants to jump for us? We'll start with Mike. Mike, start with you will go down the line. Mike, Robin Mara. >> I mean, the good news for Capital One is I don't think any personal information was breached that hasn't already been exposed by the various other massive reaches. Like I do my so security number as a throw away at this point which never should have been used for identity. But I want All >> right, So there were Do you think >> it's recoverable is not gonna be as critical, say, Equifax, which was brutal. >> It doesn't sound like there was negligence where Equifax seemed like it was Maura negligent driven than just ah ah, bad process or bad hygiene around a user or roll account and access to a certain subset of data. >> I mean, this was someone who stumbled upon open history bucket and said, >> Well, well, look at this >> bragging about it on Twitter and the user groups. I mean, this >> was like from from what the press said, I think there's other companies that may or may not be affected by this as well, so that it's just capital one, which will probably defuse the attention on them and lessen the severity or backlash. >> Rob your thoughts on Capital One. >> Yeah, I wish it would move the needle. I think that we have become so used to the security of breach of the week or the hardware. Very. You know, it is we We need to really think through what it's really gonna take toe treat security as a primary thing, which means actually treating operations and infrastructure and the human processes piece of this, um, and slowed down a little bit. Um, and I always saw >> 11 lawmaker, one congressman's woman said, More regulation. >> Yeah, they don't want this. I don't think regulation is the right is the right thing. I don't know exactly what it is because I think >> regularly, we don't understand. That's Washington, DC, >> But but we're building a very, very, very fragile I T infrastructure. And so this is not a security problem. It's a It's a fact that we've built this Jenga tower of I t infrastructure, and we don't actually understand how it's built, Um, and that I don't see that slowing down. Unfortunately, >> unlike Las Vegas is, Mike pointed out, it's was built with purpose. They built the roads around the town. Mark, you live there now What's your thoughts on this capital? One piece ends and >> I have been said I would say that what I'm hoping sort of like when you have, ah, a lack of employees for a specific job type. Like right now in United States, it's incredibly difficult to find a truck driver if you're a trucking company, So what does that mean? But that means it's gonna accelerate automation and truck driving because that's the best alternative, right? If you can't solve it the old way, then you find a new way to solve it. And we have an enormous number of opportunity. He's from a process standpoint, but also, from a technology standpoint, did not build on this. Pardon my French crap that we have already >> they were digital. Then, when I ruled by the FCC, >> had build it the right way from the start. >> Well, you know what was soon? How about self driving security? We needed guys. Thanks for spending the time this cube talk. Keep conversation. Appreciate time. Mike, Rob mark. Thanks for kicking it off. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> You're watching Cute conversation with promote guests. Panel discussion Breaking down. How businesses should look at technology as part of their business. Cloud 2.0, security hacks and digital transformation Digital evolution. I'm John free. Thanks for watching.