>>Oh, welcome back to the Cube here at aws Reinvent 22. As we continue our coverage here, the AWS Global Showcase, the Startup Showcase, John Wall is here hosting for the Cube as we've been here all week. Hope you're enjoying our coverage here. This is day three, by the way. We're wrapping it up shortly with us to talk about what's going on in the, kind of the hotel world in it and what's going on in the cloud, especially at I hg is Eric Norman, head of infrastructure, architecture, and innovation at I H G Hotels and Resorts. Eric, good to see you, >>Sir. Oh, thank you. And thank you for inviting me. Yeah, >>You bet. Glad to have you board here on the queue. First time, I think too, by the way, right? >>It is. And can I just tell you who IHG is >>Real quick? Yeah, wait a second. First I want another rest. I got Introduc to Rod Stuller, who is the Vice president and of Solutions marketing at Aviatrix and Rod. Good to see you, sir. Thanks a lot. Now let's talk about I ih. >>Great. Well, IHGs a a hospitality company, it's been around for 200 years, that has 17 brands globally in over a hundred countries. We sleek, you know, up could up to 888,000 people a night. So it's a pretty large company that we compete with, you know, all the hotel companies globally. >>So let's talk about your, your footprint right now in, in terms of what your needs are, because you've mentioned obviously a lot of, you have a lot of customers needs, you have a lot of internal stakeholder needs. Yeah. So just from that perspective, how are you balancing out, you know, the products you wanna launch as opposed to the, on the development side and the maintenance side? >>Yeah, I mean we, we have focused our, our attention to our, our guests and our hotels globally and, and taking technology and from a foundation, getting it at, at the edge so that way the consumer and the hotel owner can deliver a quality product to a guest experience. You know, we've have moved larger, a large deployment of our mission critical applications over the last five years really, of moving into more SaaS and infrastructure like AWS and GCP and, and leveraging their global scale to be able to deliver at the edge or get closer to the edge. And so we've, you know, I'm pretty sure you've seen, you know, kind of people building, you know, mission critical apps. You know, probably in the last three years it's probably escalating and more of like a hockey stick of moving stuff. I'd love to hear what AVIA is seeing. Oh >>Yeah. Now we're, we're seeing that quite a bit, right? As people move into the cloud, it's now business critical applications that are going there. So good enough isn't good enough anymore, right? It has to be, you know, a powerful capability that's business critical, can support that, give people the ability to troubleshoot it when something goes wrong. And then multi-cloud, you mentioned a couple different cloud companies, a lot of enterprises are moving to multiple clouds and you don't want to have to do it differently in every cloud. You want a infrastructure management layer that allows you to do that across >>Clouds. So how do you go about that, you know, deciding what goes where. I mean, it sounds like a simple question, but, but if you are dealing in a lot of different kinds of environments, different needs and different requirements, whatever, you know, how are you sorting out, delegating, you know, you know, you're, you're you're gonna be working here, you're gonna be >>Working there. Yeah. So we built some standards base that says, you know, certain types of apps, you know, transactional base, you know, go to this cloud provider and data analytics that's gonna go to another, another cloud provider based on our decision of key capability, native capability, and, and also coverage. You know, cuz we are in China, right? You know, you know, I, I've gotta be able to get into China and, and build not only a network that can support that, but also business apps locally to meet, compete with compliance, regulatory type activities. I mean, even in, in the US market, I got, you know, California privacy laws, you know, you have globally, you've gotta deal with getting data applications into compliance for those globally, right? >>Yeah. So, so you got that compliance slash governance Yeah. Issue. Huge issue. Yeah. I would think for you, you gotta decide who's gonna get to what when, and also we have to meet certain regulatory standards as you pointed out. And not just there, but you got European footprint, right? I mean, you're global. Yeah. So, so you know, handling that kind of scope or scale, what kind of nightmares or challenges does that provide you and how's Aviatrix helping you solve >>That? Yeah, in the early days, you know, we were using cloud native, you know, constructs for networking and a little bit of a security type angle to it. What we found was, you know, you can't get the automation you need. You can't get the, the scalability, you know, cuz we're, we're trying to shift left our, you know, our DevOps and our ability to deploy infrastructure. Aviatrix had come in and, and provided a, a solution that gets us there quicker than anybody else. It's allow us to, you know, build a mesh network across all our regions globally. I'm able to deploy, you know, new landing zones or, you know, public cloud fairly quickly with my, you know, networking construct. We also, we found that because we are a multi hybrid cloud, we, we introduced on the edge a a new network. We had to introduce a performance hub architecture that's using Equinix that sits in every region in every public cloud and partner. Cuz all our partners, you know, we, we've moved a lot of stuff to sas. You know, Amadeus is our centralized reservation system. That's our key, you know? Sure. You know, reservation tool, it's so sourced out. I need to bring them in and I need to get data that's closer to where, in a region to where it needs the land so I can process it. Right. >>And it's a big world out there too. I mean, you're, you're not in your head Rod. So talk about if you would share some of the, the aviatrix experience in that regard. When you have a client like this that has these, you know, multinational locations and, and yet you're looking for some consistency and some uniformity. You don't, you know, you can't be reinventing the wheel every time something pops up, right? >>Right. No. And then, and it's about agility and speed and, you know, being able to do it with less people than you used to have to do things, right? You, you want to be able to give the developers what they need when they need it. There was a time when people were going around it, swiping their credit card and, and saying, it doesn't give me what I need. And so cloud is supposed to change that. So we're trying to deliver the ability to do that for the developers a lot faster than had been done in the past. But at the same time, giving the enterprise the controls, the security, the compliance that they need. And sometimes those things got in the way, but now we're building systems that allow that to happen at, at the piece that developers needed to happen. >>But what Rod said about, you know, one of the big things you sparked my thinking is it also, you know, building a overlay of the cloud native construct allows for visibility that, you know, you didn't have, you know, from a developer or even a operations day two operations, now you get that visibility into the network space and controls and management of that space a lot easier now, you know? >>Yeah. I mean, business critical applications, right? People, the people, the business does not care about networking, right? They see it as electricity and if it's down somebody else's problem to fix it. But the people who do need to keep it up, they need the telemetry. They need the ability to understand, are we trending in the wrong direction? Should we be doing something so that we don't get to the point where it goes down? And that's the kind of information that we're providing in this multi-cloud environment. You mentioned Equinix, we, we just have a partnership with Equinix where we're extending the cloud operational model that Aviatrix delivers all the way out to Equinix and that global fabric that you're talking about. So this is allowing the, the comp companies to have that visibility, that operational ability all the way globally. >>Yeah. Because you know, when you start building all these clouds now and multi regions, multiple AZs or different cloud providers or SaaS providers, you're moving data all over the place. And if you, if you don't have a single pane of glass to see that entire network and be able to route stuff accordingly, it's gonna be a zoo. It's not gonna >>Work. We were, I was talking earlier with, with another guest and we were just talking about companies in your case, I, I IHG kind of knowing what you have and it's not like such a basic thing he said, but yeah, you'd be surprised how many people don't know what they have. Oh, yeah. And so they're trying to provide that visibility and, and, and awareness. So, so I'm kind of curious because you were just the next interview up, so sorry Ken, but, but do you know what you have, I mean, are you learning what you have or is how do you identify, prioritize? How valuable is this asset as opposed to this can wait? I mean, is that still an ongoing process for >>You? It, it's definitely an ongoing process. I mean, we've done over the last three years of constantly assessing all our inventory of what we have, making sure we have the right mo roadmaps for each of the apps and products that we have. Cause we've turned to more of a product driven organization and a DevOps and we're, we're moving more and more product teams onto that DevOps process. Yep. So we can shift left a lot of the activities that developer in the past had to go over a fence to ask for help and, and, you know, kind of the automation of the network and the security built in allows us to be able to shift that left. >>Did that, I, you were saying too three years, right? You've been on, on this path Yep. Going back then to 2019 right. Pandemic hits, right. The world changes. How has that affected this three year period for you? And where are you in terms of where you expected to be and, and Yep. And then what's your, what are your headlights seeing down the road as to what your, your eventual journey, how you want that to end? >>I probably, the biggest story that we have a success story is when the pandemic did happen, you know, all our call centers, all agents had to go home. We were able within 30 days be able to bring up remote desktops, you know, workspaces an a uws and give access to globally in China and in Singapore and in the Americas. There's >>No small task there, >>That's for sure. So we built a desktop, certified it, and, and agents were able to answer calls for guests, you know, you know, so it was a huge success to us. Sure. It did slow down. I mean, during the pandemic it did slow us down from what gets migrated. You know, our focus is, you know, again, back to what I was saying earlier is around our guests and our loyalty and, you know, how do we give value back to our hotel owners and our guests? >>And how do you measure that? I mean, how do you know that what you're doing is working with, with that key audience? >>We'd measured by, you know, one occupa >>There so many, how many people do we have in the rooms? Right? But in terms of the interface, in terms of the effectiveness, the applications, in terms of what you're offering. Yeah. >>It gets back to uptime of our systems and you know, being able to deploy an application in multiple regions elevates the availability of the product to our guest. You know, the longer I'm up, the more revenue I can produce. Right. So, you know, so we, we try to, you know, we measure also guest satisfaction at the properties, you know, them using our tech and that kind of stuff to >>Be so you surveying just to find out what, how they feel about, so some, >>Cause we have a lot of tech inside of our hotels that allow for, we have ISG connect, which allows for people to go from one hotel another and not ask for passwords and, you know, that kind of stuff. >>That would not be made by the way. I'd be begging for help. Let's talk about skills, because I hear that a lot. Talk a lot about that this week. Hearing that, that, you know, the advancement of knowledge is obviously a very powerful thing, but it's also a bit of a shortcoming right now in terms of, of having a need for skills and not having that kind of firepower horsepower on your bench. What, what do you see in that regard? And, and first off, what did you see about it? And then I'll follow >>Up with Yeah, I mean, over our journey, it started off where you didn't have the skills, you know, you didn't have the skill from an operations engineering architecture. So we went on a, you know, you know, how do we build training programs? How do we get, you know, tools to, to either virtual training, bringing teachers, we built, you know, daily, our weekly calls where we bring our experts from our vendors in there to be able to ask questions to help engineering people or architecture people or operations to ask questions and get answers. You know, we, we've been on a role of, you know, upscaling over the last three years and we continue to drive that, you know, we have lunch and learns that we bring people to. Yep. You know, and, and we, and we, we ta tailor the, the content for that training based on what we are consuming and what we're using as opposed to just a, you know, a broad stroke of, of public cloud or, it's >>Almost like you don't have to be holistic about it. You just need to, what do you need to know to >>Make >>Them successful, to be better at what you're doing here? Right. Sure. >>And that's been huge. And, >>And yeah, we, and we have a program called ace, which is AVIATRIX certified engineer. And there's a bunch of different types of classes. So if you're a networking person in the past it's like A C C I E, but we have about 18,000 people over the last three years who have gone through that training. One of them. One of them, right? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is not necessarily about aviatrix. What we're doing is trying to give multi-cloud, you know, networking expertise because a lot of the people that we're talking about are coming from the data center world. And networking is so different in the cloud. We're helping them understand it's not as scary as they might think. Right. If your whole career has been networking in the data center and all of a sudden there's this cloud thing that you don't really understand, you need somebody to help you sort of get there. And we're doing that in a multi-cloud way. And we have all kinds of different levels to teach people how to do, do infrastructure as code. That's another thing, you know, data center guys, they never did infrastructure as code. It was, you had to bolt it in and plug stuff in. Right. But now things are being done much faster with infrastructure as code. And we're teaching people how >>To do that. Yeah. I mean, yesterday, one of the keynotes is about the partner in the, the marketplace. And they use the image imagery of, of marathon runner, you know, a marathon runner. Yeah. You could do a marathon by yourself, but if you want to improve and become a, a great marathon runner, you need a coach, you need nutritionist, you need people running with you to, to make that engine go faster a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And you know, having a partner like Aviatrix helps you know the team to be successful. >>Well, it is, it is a marathon, not a sprint. That's for sure. And you've been on this kind of three year jog. You might feel like you've been running a marathon a little bit, but it sounds like you're really off to a great start and, and have a pretty good partnership here. So thank you. Congratulations on that, Eric. Thank you for being with us. And Rod, same to you. Thank you. Appreciate the time here on the AWS Global Showcase. I'm John Wal, you're watching The Cube. We're out in Las Vegas and of course the cube, as you well know, is the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Full stack observability is all the rage today. As businesses lean into digital, customer experience becomes ever more important. Why? Well, it's obvious, fickle consumers can switch brands in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse. Technology companies have sprung into action and the observability space is getting pretty crowded in an effort to simplify the process of figuring out the root cause of application performance problems without an army of PhDs and lab coats, also known as endlessly digging through logs, for example. We see decades old software companies that have traditionally done monitoring or log analytics and or application performance management stepping up their game. These established players, you know, they typically have deep feature sets and sometimes purpose-built tools that attack one particular segment of the marketplace. And now they're pivoting through M&A and some organic development trying to fill gaps in their portfolio. And then, you got all these new entrants coming to the market, claiming end to end visibility across the so-called modern cloud and now edge native stacks. Meanwhile, cloud players are gaining traction and participating through a combination of native tooling combined with strong ecosystems to address this problem. But, you know, recent survey research from ETR confirms our thesis that no one company has it all. Here's the thing. Customers just want to figure out the root cause as quickly and as efficiently as possible. It's one thing to observe the stack end to end, but the question is who is automating the observers? And that's why we're here today. Hello, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special Cube presentation where we dig into root cause analysis, and specifically, how one company, Zebrium, is using unsupervised machine learning to detect anomalies and pinpoint root causes and delivering it as an automated service. And in this session, we have two deep dives. First, we're going to dig into this exciting new field of RCaaS, Root Cause As A Service with two of the founders and technical experts behind Zebrium. And then we bring in two technical experts from Cisco, an early Zebrium customer who ran a POC with Zebrium's service, automating and identifying root cause problems within four very well established and well known Cisco product lines, including WebEx Client and UCS. I was pretty amazed at the results and I think you'll be impressed as well. So thanks for being here. Let's get started. With me right now is Larry Lancaster, who's a founder and CTO of Zebrium. And he's joined by Rod Bagg, who's the founder and vice president of engineering at the company. Gents, welcome. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> Okay. >> It's good to be here. >> It's good to be here >> All right Rod, talk to me. Talk to me about software downtime, what root cause means, all the buzzwords in your domain, MTTR and SLO. What do we need to know? >> Yeah, I mean, it's like you said. I mean, it's extremely important to our customers and to most businesses out there to drive uptime and avoid as much downtime as possible. So, you know, when you think about it, all of these businesses, most companies nowadays, either their product is software and it's running, you know, running on the web and that's how you get a point click. Or the business depends on, you know, internal systems to drive their business and to run it. When that is down, that is hugely impacting to them. So if you take a look, you know, way back, you know, 20, 30 years ago, software was simple. You know, there wasn't much to it. It was pretty monolithic and maybe it took a couple of people to maintain it and keep it running. There wasn't really anything complicated about it. It was a single tenant piece of software. Today's software is so complicated, often running, you know, maybe hundreds of services to keep that or to actually implement what that software is doing. So as you point out, you know, enter the sort of observability space and the tools that are now in use to help monitor that software and make sure when something goes wrong, they know about it But there's kind of an interesting stat around the observability space. So when you look at observability in the context or through the lens of the cost of downtime, it's really interesting. So observability tools are about a $20 billion market, okay? But the cost of downtime, even with that in place, is still hundreds of billions of dollars. So you're not taking much of a bite out of what the real problem is. You have to solve root cause and get to that fast. So it's all great to know that something went wrong but you got to know why. And it's our contention here that, you know, really, when you take a look at the observability space, you have metrics, that's a great tool. I mean, there's lots of great tools out there, you know, around metrics monitoring that's going to tell you when something went wrong. It's very rarely it's going to tell you why. Similarly for tracing, it's going to point you to where the issue is. It's going to take you through that stack and probably pinpoint where you're being, you know where it's happening or where something is running slow, potentially. So that's great. But again, the root cause of why it's happening is going to be buried in log files. And I can expand on that a little bit more but you know, when you're a software developer and you're writing your software, those log files are a wealth of information. It's just a set of breadcrumbs that are littered with facts about how the software is behaving and why it's doing what it's doing, or why it went wrong. And it's that that really gets you to the root cause very fast. And that's our contention, is that these software systems are so complex nowadays and that the root cause is lying in those logs. So how do you get there fast? You know, we would contend that you better automate that or you are just doomed for failure. And that's where we come in. >> Great. >> Getting to that root cause. >> Thank you, Rod. You know, it's interesting you talk about the $20 billion market. There's an analogy with security, right? We spend 80, $100 billion a year on securing our infrastructure, and yet we lose probably closer to a trillion dollars a year in breaches. And there's a similar analogy here. 20 billion could be 5X in downtime impacts or more. Okay, let's go to Larry. Tell us a little bit more about Zebrium. I'm interested always to ask a founder why you started the company. Rod touched on that a little bit. You guys have invented this concept of RCaaS. What does it mean? What problems does it solve, and how does it solve the problem? Let's get into it. >> Yeah. Hey, thanks, Dave. So I think when you said, you know, who's automating the observer, that that's a great way to think about it because what observability really means is it's a property of a system that means you can see into it. You can observe the internal state and that makes it easier to troubleshoot, right? But the problem is if it's too complicated, you just push the bottleneck up to your eyeball. There's only so much a person can filter through manually, right? And I love the way you put that. So that's a great way to think about it is automating the observer. Now, of course, it means that, you know, you reduce your MTTR, you meet your service level objectives, all that stuff, you improve customer experience. That's all true, but it's important to step back and realize like we have cracked a real nut here. People have been trying to figure out how to automate this part of sort of the troubleshooting experience, this human part of finding the root cause indicators for a long time. And until Zebrium came along, I would argue, no one's really done it right. So, you know, I think it's also important you know, as we step back, we can probably look forward five to 10 years and say, everyone's going to look back and say how did we do all this manually? You're going to see this sort of last mile of observability and troubleshooting is going to be automated everywhere because otherwise, you know, people are just... They're not going to be able to scale their business. So, you know, I think one more thing that's important to point out is, you know, I think Zebrium, you know, it's one thing to have the technology but we've learned we need to deliver it right where people are today. You can't just expect people to dive into a new tool. So, you know, we're looking at, you know, if you look at Zebrium, you'll put us on your dashboard and we don't care what kind of a dashboard it is. It could be, you know Datadog, New Relic, Elastic, Dynatrace, Grafana AppDynamics, ScienceLogic, we don't care. You know, they're all our friends. So we're more interested in getting to that root cause than trying to fight, you know, these incumbents and all that stuff. Yep. >> Yeah. So, interesting. Again, another analogy I think about. You know, you talked about automation. If we're to look back and say this is what... We're never going to do this again, it's like provisioning loans. Nobody provisions loans anymore, it's all automated. >> Larry: (chuckling) That's right. >> So Larry, I'll stay with you, then the skeptic in me says, this sounds amazing, but if I, you know... It might be too good to be true. Tell us how it works. >> Larry: (chuckling) Yeah. So that's interesting. So Cisco came along and they were equally skeptical. So what they did was they took a couple of months and they did a very detailed study. And they got together 192 incidents across four product lines, where they knew that the root cause was in the logs. And they knew what that root cause was because they had had their best engineers, you know work on those cases and take detailed notes of the incidents that had taken place. And so they ran that data through the Zebrium software. And what they found was that in more than 95% of those incidents, Zebrium reflected the correct root cause indicators at the correct time. Like that blew us away. When we saw that kind of evidence, Dave, I have to tell you, everyone was just jumping up and down. It was like, you know, it was like the Apollo command center, you know when they finally, you know, touchdown on the moon kind of thing. So, you know, it's really an exciting point in time to be at the company, like just seeing everything finally being proven out according to this vision. I'm going to tell you one more story which is actually one of my favorites, because we got a chance to work with Seagate Lyve Cloud. So they're, you know, a hyper modern, you know, SaaS business, they're an S3 competitor. Zoom has their files stored on Lyve Cloud, you know, to let you know who they are. So essentially, what happened was they were in alpha, their early access, and they had an outage, and it was pretty bad. I mean, it went on for longer than a day, actually, before they were completely restored. And it was, you know, fortunately for them, it was early access. So no one was expecting, you know, uptime, you know, service level objectives and so on. But they were scared, because they realized, if something like this happens in production, you know, they're screwed. So what they did was they saw Zebrium. They went and did some research, they saw Zebrium. They went in a staging environment, recreated the exact (indistinct) that they had had. And what they saw was immediately, Zebrium pops up a root cause report that tells them exactly the root cause that they took over a day to find. These are the kind of stories that let us know we're onto something transformational. >> Dave: Yeah. That's great. I mean, you guys are jumping up and down, I'm sure. We're going to hear from Cisco later. I bet you, they were jumping up and down too because they didn't have to do all that heavy lifting anymore. So Rod, Larry's just sort of implying that, or actually, you guys both talked about that your tool is agnostic. So how does one actually use the service? How do I deploy it? >> Yeah. So let me step back. So when we talk about logs right? Like, you know, all these bread crumbs being in logs and everything else? So, you know, they are a great wealth of you know, information, but people hate dealing with them. I mean, they hate having to go in and figure out what log to look at. In fact, you know, we had one of our... Or we've heard from several of our customers now prior to using Zebrium, when they, you know, have some issue, and they know there's something wrong, something on their dashboard has told them that something's wrong, maybe a metric has, you know, taken a blip or something's happened that they know there's a problem. We've heard from them that it can take like a number of hours just to get to the right set of logs, like figuring out over these hundreds of services where the logs are, to get to them, maybe searching in a log manager. Just to get into the right context, even, can take hours. So, you know, that's obviously the problem we solve but, you know, we don't want them just looking at logs. I mean, you know, we don't want to put them back in the thing they don't like doing because people don't do that. They don't like doing it. So we put it up on the dashboard. So if something is going wrong with your metrics and that's the indicator, or maybe it's something with tracing that you're sort of digging through that you know something's wrong, we will be right on that same dashboard. So we're deployed as a SaaS service. You send us your logs, you click on one of our integrations and we integrate with all these tools that Larry's talked about. And when we detect anything that is a root cause report, it will show up on your dashboard in the same timeline as those blips in your metrics. So when you see something going wrong and you know there's an issue, take a look at the portion of your dashboard that is us, and we're going to tell you why. We're going to get you to the why that went wrong. No other work could be... You can, you know, also click down and click through to us so that you land up in our portal, if you want to do some more digging around, if you need to or whatever, maybe to get some context what have you, but it's fair that if you ever need to do that, the answer should be right there on your dashboard. And that that's how we expect people to use it. We don't want them digging in logs and going through things, we want it to be right in their workflow. >> Great. Thank you, Larry. So Rod, we talked about Cisco. We're going to hear more from them in a moment in Seagate. I would think this is like a perfect solution for a SaaS provider, anybody doing AI ops. Do you have some examples of those types of firms leaning into this? >> Rod: Yeah, a couple of great ones. Well, I mean, we've got many of them, but a couple that I'll touch on. We have an actual AI ops company that was looking for, you know, sort of some complimentary technology and so on. And so they decided to just put us through our paces by having one of their own SREs sign up for our service in our SaaS environment, and send the logs from their system to us, you know, and just see how we did. So it turned out we ended up talking back to this SRE like a week after he had installed the product, you know signed up and then, you know, started sending us logs. And, you know, he was hewing and hawing, saying that he was busy, like every SRE is, and that he didn't have a chance to really do much with us yet. And, you know, we were just, you know, having this conversation on the phone, and he comes to tell us that, yeah I've been busy because we had this, you know, terrible outage, like, you know, five days ago. And we said like, "Okay did you actually look on the Zebrium dashboard?" (chuckles) And he goes, "You know what? I didn't even think to do it yet. I mean, I'd just been so busy and frazzled." So we have an integration with that company, he hadn't put that integration in, so it wasn't in his dashboard yet, but it was certainly on ours. So he went there, and he looks and he looks on the day, you know, on the time range of when he had had this incident. And right at the very top of the page on our portal was that incident with that root cause. And he was flabbergasted. It literally would've saved him hours and hours and hours. They had this issue going on for over 24 hours. And we had the answer right there in five minutes, and it was crazy. And we get that kind of stories. It's just like the Seagate one. If you use us and you have a problem, we're going to detect it. And you're going to hear from Cisco how successful we are at detecting things. I mean, it'll be there when you have a problem. In SaaS companies, you know, one of our customers is Alchera. They do cost optimizations for cloud properties, you know, for AWS optimization, Google, Google cloud, and so on. But they use our software, and they have a lot of interaction, obviously with these cloud vendors and the APIs of those cloud vendors. So, you know, in order to figure out your costing at AWS, they're using all those APIs. So it turned out, you know, they had some issue where their services were breaking. And we had that root cause report right on the screen, again within five minutes, that was pointing to an API problem with Google. And they had changed one of their APIs and Alchera was not aware of it. So their stuff was breaking because of a change downstream that we had caught. And I'll just tell you one last one because it's somewhat related to one of these cloud vendors. You know, it was a big cloud vendor who had an outage a couple of months ago. And it's interesting because, you know, a lot of our customers will set up shared Slack channels with us, where we're monitoring or seeing their incidents as well as they are. So we get a little Slack representation of the incident that we detected for them or the root cause that we detected for them, and that's in a shared community channel. So we could see this happening when that AWS outage happened. We could see our customers getting impacted by that AWS outage, and the root cause of what was going on there in AWS that was impacting our customers that was showing up in our incidents. Now we didn't obviously, you know, have the very root cause of what was going on in AWS, per se but we were getting to the root cause of why our customer's applications were failing. And that was because of issues going on at AWS. >> Very interesting. I mean, I think one of your biggest challenges is going to be getting people's attention because these SREs are so busy, their hair's on fire. >> Rod: That's it. Right. (chuckling). You know, when you say, hey, (indistinct). >> I tell you, if you get their attention, they love it. I mean, this AI ops company, I didn't even tell you the punchline there, but, you know, they had this incident that occurred that we found. And quite literally, the next week, they ended up signing up as a paid customer. So... >> Dave: that's great. And Larry, to give you the last word. I mean, you know, Rod was talking about, you know, changes in APIs and you know, there's still a lot of scripts out there. You guys, if I understand it correctly, run both as a service in the cloud and you can run on-prem, which is important because there's a lot of sensitive information in logs that people are trying not to leave. >> Larry: That's right. Absolutely. >> Dave: But close it out here. >> Yeah. I mean, that's right, you can run it on-prem. Just like we run it in our cloud, you can run it in your cloud or on your own infrastructure. Now that's all true. You know, I think the one hurdle now that we have left as a company is getting the word out and getting people to believe that this is actually possible and try it for themselves. You don't believe it, do a POC, try it yourself. And you know, people have become so jaded by the lack of, you know, real, sort of, innovation in the software industry for the last 10 years that it's hard to get people to... But guys, you got to give it a shot, I'm telling you. I'm telling you right now, it works. And you'll hear more about that from one of our customers in a minute. >> All right guys, thanks so much. Great story. Really appreciate you sharing. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. Thanks Dave. Appreciate the time. >> Okay. In a moment, we're going to hear from Cisco who is the customer in this case example and a company that has... Look, they have quite an impressive suite of observability tooling, and they've done a pretty compelling proof of concept with Zebrium using real data on some Cisco products that you've heard of, like WebEx. So stay tuned and learn about how you can really take advantage of this new technology called Root Cause As A Service. You're watching theCube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright intro music) >> Full stack observability is all the rage today. As businesses lean in to digital, customer experience becomes ever more important, why? Well, it's obvious. Fickle consumers can switch brands in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse. Technology companies have sprung into action, and the observability space is getting pretty crowded in an effort to simplify the process of figuring out the root cause of application performance problems without an army of PhDs and lab coats, also known as endlessly digging through logs, for example. We see decades-old software companies that have traditionally done monitoring or log analytics and/or application performance management stepping up their game. These established players, you know, they typically have deep feature sets and sometimes purpose built tools that attack one particular segment of the marketplace, and now, they're pivoting through M&A and some organic development trying to fill gaps in their portfolio, and then you got all these new entrants coming to the market claiming end to end visibility across the so-called modern cloud and now edge-native stacks. Meanwhile, cloud players are gaining traction and participating through a combination of native tooling combined with strong ecosystems to address this problem, but, you know, recent survey research from ETR confirms our thesis that no one company has at all. Here's the thing. Customers just want to figure out the root cause as quickly and efficiently as possible. It's one thing to observe the stack end to end, but the question is who is automating the observers? And that's why we're here today. Hello, my name is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this special "CUBE" presentation where we dig into root cause analysis and, specifically, how one company, Zebrium, is using unsupervised machine learning to detect anomalies and pinpoint root causes and delivering it as an automated service. In this session, we have two deep dives. First, we're going to dig into this exciting new field of RCA, root cause as a service, with two of the founders and technical experts behind Zebrium, and then we bring in two technical experts from Cisco, an early Zebrium customer who ran a POC with Zebrium's service, automating and identifying root cause problems within four very well established and well-known Cisco product lines including Webex client and UCS. I was pretty amazed at the results, and I think you'll be impressed as well. So thanks for being here. Let's get started with me right now is Larry Lancaster who's a founder and CTO of Zebrium, and he's joined by Rod Bagg who's a founder and Vice-President of Engineering at the company. Gents, welcome, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> (indistinct). >> To be here. >> Great to be here. >> All right, Rod, talk to me. Talk to me about software downtime, what root cause means, all the buzzwords in your domain, MTTR and SLO, what do we need to know? >> Yeah, I mean, it's like you said. I mean, it's extremely important to our customers and to most businesses out there to drive up time and avoid as much downtime as possible. So, you know, when you think about it, all of these businesses, most companies nowadays, either their product is software and it's running, you know, running on the web, and that that's how you get a point click or their business depends on it and, you know, internal systems to drive their business and to run it. Now, when that is down, that is hugely impacting to them. So if you take a look, you know, way back, you know, 20, 30 years ago, software was simple. You know, there wasn't much to it. It was pretty monolithic, and maybe it took a couple of people to maintain it and keep it running. It wasn't really anything complicated about it. It was a single tenant piece of software. Today's software is so complicated, often running, you know, maybe hundreds of services to keep that or to actually implement what that software is doing. So as you point out, you know, enter the sort of observability space and the tools that are now in use to help monitor that software and make sure when something goes wrong, they know about it, but there's kind of an interesting stat around the observability space. So when you look at observability in the context or through the lens of the cost of downtime, it's really interesting. So observability tools are about a $20 billion market, okay? But the cost of downtime, even with that in place, is still hundreds of billions of dollars. So you're not taking much of a bite out of what the real problem is. You have to solve root cause and get to that fast. So it's all great to know that something went wrong, but you got to know why, and it it's our contention here that, you know, really, when you take a look at the observability space, you have metrics. That's a great tool. I mean, there's lots of great tools out there, you know, around metrics monitoring that's going to tell you when something went wrong. It's very rarely it's going to tell you why. Similarly for tracing, it's going to point you to where the issue is. It's going to take you through that stack and probably pinpoint where you're being, you know, where it's happening or where something is running slow potentially. So that's great, but again, the root cause of why it's happening is going to be buried in log files, and I can expand on that a little bit more, but, you know, when you're a software developer, and you're writing your software, those log files are a wealth of information. It's just a set of breadcrumbs that are littered with facts about how the software is behaving and why it's doing what it's doing or why it went wrong, and it's that that really gets you to the root cause very fast, and that's, our contention is that these software systems are so complex nowadays, and that the root cause is lying in those logs. So how do you get there fast? You know, we would contend that you better automate that or you're just doomed for failure, and that's where we come in. >> Great. >> Getting to that request. >> Thank you, Rod. You know, it's interesting. You talk about the $20 billion market. There's an analogy with security, right? We spend 80, $100 billion a year on securing our infrastructure, and yet we lose, probably, closer to a trillion dollars a year in breaches, and there's a similar analogy here. 20 billion could be 5x in downtime impacts or more. Okay, let's go to Larry. Tell us a little bit more about Zebrium. I'm interested always to ask a founder why you started the company. Rod touched on that a little bit. You guys have invented this concept of RCAs. What does it mean? What problems does it solve? And how does it solve the problem? Let's get into it. >> Yeah, hey, thanks, Dave. So I think when you said, you know, who's automating the observer? That's a great way to think about it because what observability really means is it's a property of a system that means you can see into it. You can observe the internal state, and that makes it easier to troubleshoot, right? But the problem is if it's too complicated, you just push the bottleneck up to your eyeball. There's only so much a person can filter through manually, right? And I love the way you put that. So that's a great way to think about it is automating the observer. Now, of course, it means that, you know, you reduce your MTTR, you meet your service level objectives, all that stuff, you improve customer experience, that's all true, but it's important to step back and realize like we have cracked a real nut here. People have been trying to figure out how to automate this part of sort of the troubleshooting experience, this human part of finding the root cause indicators for a long time, and until Zebrium came along, I would argue no one's really done it right. So, you know, I think it's also important, you know, as we step back, we can probably look forward five to 10 years and say, "Everyone's going to look back and say, 'How did we do all this manually?'" You're going to see this sort of last mile of observability and troubleshooting is going to be automated everywhere because otherwise, you know, people are just, they're not going to be able to scale their business. So, you know, I think one more thing that's important to point out is, you know, I think Zebrium, you know, it's one thing to have the technology, but we've learned we need to deliver it right where people are today. You can't just expect people to dive into a new tool. So, you know, we're looking at, you know, if you look at Zebrium, you'll put us on your dashboard, and we don't care what kind of a dashboard it is. It could be, you know, Datadog, New Relic, Elastic, Dynatrace, Grafana, AppDynamics, ScienceLogic, we don't care. You know, they're all our friends. So we're more interested in getting to that root cause than trying to fight, you know, these incumbents and all that stuff, yeah. >> Yeah, so interesting. Again, another analogy I think about, you know, you talked about automation, where to look back, and say, "This is what- We're never going to do this again." It's like provisioning LANs. Nobody provisioned LANs anymore. It's all automated. >> That's correct. >> So, Larry, stay with you. The skeptic in me says, "This sounds amazing," but if, you know, it probably too good to be true. Tell us how it works. >> Yeah, so that's interesting. So Cisco came along and they were equally skeptical. So what they did was they took a couple of months, and they did a very detailed study, and they got together 192 incidents across four product lines where they knew that the root cause was in the logs, and they knew what that root cause was because they'd had their best engineers, you know, work on those cases and take detailed notes of the incidents that had taken place, and so they ran that data through the Zebrium software, and what they found was that in more than 95% of those incidents, Zebrium reflected the correct root cause indicators at the correct time. Like that blew us away. When we saw that kind of evidence, Dave, I have to tell you, everyone was just jumping up and down. It was like, you know, it was like the Apollo Command Center, you know, when they finally, (Dave laughs) you know, touchdown on the moon kind of thing. So, you know, it's really exciting at a point in time to be at the company, like just seeing everything finally being proven out according to this vision. I'm going to tell you one more story, which is actually one of my favorites, because we got a chance to work with Seagate Lyve Cloud. So they're, you know, a hyper modern, you know, SaaS business. They're an S3 competitor. Zoom has their files stored on Lyve Cloud to give, you know, to let you know who they are. So, essentially, what happened was they were in alpha, in their early access, and they had an outage, and it was pretty bad. I mean, it went on for longer than a day, actually, before they were completely restored, and it was, you know, fortunately, for them, it was early access. So no one was expecting, you know, uptime, you know, service level objectives and so on, but they were scared because they realized if something like this happens in production, you know, they're screwed. So what they did was they saw Zebrium, they did some research, they saw Zebrium. They went in a staging environment, recreated the exact (indistinct) that they'd had, and what they saw was, immediately, Zebrium pops up a root cause report that tells them exactly the root cause that they took over a day to find. These are the kind of stories that let us know we're onto something transformational. >> Yeah, that's great. I mean, you guys are jumping up and down. I'm sure, we're going to hear from Cisco later. I bet you, they were jumping up and down, too, 'cause they didn't have to do all that heavy lifting anymore. So Rod, Larry's just sort of implying that or, actually, you guys both talked about that your tool's agnostic. So how does one actually use the service? How do I deploy it? >> Yeah, so let me step back. So when we talk about logs, right? Like, you know, all these red crumbs being in logs and everything else. So, you know, they are a great wealth of, you know, information, but people hate dealing with them. I mean, they hate having to go in and figure out what log to look at. In fact, you know, we had one of our, or we've heard from several of our customers now prior to using Zebrium, but when they're, you know, have some issue, and they know there's something wrong, something on their dashboard has told them that something's wrong, maybe a metrics is, you know, taken a blip or something's happened that they know there's a problem, we've heard from them that it can take like a number of hours just to get to the right set of logs, like figuring out over these hundreds of services where the logs are to get to them, maybe searching in a log manager, just to get into the right context even can take hours. So, you know, that's obviously the problem we solve, but, you know, we don't want them just looking at logs. I mean, you know, we don't want to put 'em back in the thing they don't like doing 'cause people don't do what they don't like doing. So we put it up on the dashboard. So if something is going wrong with your metrics, and that's the indicator or maybe it's something with tracing that you're sort of digging through now that you know something's wrong, we will be right on that same dashboard. So we're deployed as a SaaS service. You send us your logs. You click on one of our integrations, and we integrate with all these tools that Larry's talked about, and when we detect anything that is a root cause report, it will show up on your dashboard in the same timeline as those blips in your metrics. So when you see something going wrong, and you know there's an issue, take a look at the portion of your dashboard that is us, and we're going to tell you why. We're going to get you to the why that went wrong. Not no other work could be- You can, you know, also click down and click through to us so that you land up in our portal if you want to do some more digging around if you need to or whatever, maybe to get some context, what have you, but it's fair that you ever need to do that. The answer should be right there on your dashboard, and that's how we expect people to use it. We don't want them digging in logs and going through things. We want it to be right in their workflow. >> Great, thank you, Larry. So Rod, we talked about Cisco. We're going to hear more from them in a moment and Seagate. I would think this is like a perfect solution for a SaaS provider, anybody doing AIOps, do you have some examples of those types of firms leaning into this? >> Yeah, a couple of great, well, I mean, we got many of them, but couple that I'll touch on. We have an actual AIOps company that was looking for, you know, sort of some complimentary technology and so on, and so they decided to just put us through our paces by having one of their own SREs sign up for our service in our SaaS environment and send the logs from their system to us, you know, and just see how we did. So it turned out we ended up talking back to this SRE like a week after he had installed the product, you know, signed up, and then, you know, started sending us logs, and, you know, he was hemming and hawing saying that he was busy like, you know, like every SRE is, and that he didn't have a chance to really do much with us yet, and, you know, we just, you know, having this conversation on the phone, and he comes to tell us that, "Yeah, I've been busy because we had this, you know, terrible outage like, you know, five days ago," and we said like, "Okay, did you actually look on the Zebrium dashboard?" (laughs) And he goes, "You know what? I didn't even think to do it yet. I mean, I'd just been so busy and frazzled." So we have an integration with that company. He hadn't put that integration in so it wasn't in his dashboard yet, but it was certainly on ours. So he went there and he looks on the day like, you know, on the time range of when he had this incident, and right at the very top of the page on our portal was the incident with the root cause, and he was flabbergasted. It literally would've saved him hours and hours and hours. They had this issue going on for over 24 hours, and we had the answer right there in five minutes, and it was crazy, and we get that kind of story. It's just like the Seagate one. If you use us and you have a problem, we're going to detect it, and you're going to hear from Cisco how successful we are at detecting things. I mean, it'll be there when you have a problem. In SaaS companies, you know, one of our customers is Archera. They do cost optimizations for cloud properties, you know, for AWS optimization, Google cloud, and so on, but they use our software, and they have a lot of interaction, obviously, with these cloud vendors and the APIs of those cloud vendors. So, you know, in order to figure out you're costing at AWS, they're using all those APIs. So it turned out, you know, they had some issue where their services were breaking and we had that root cause report right on the screen, again, within five minutes that was pointing to an API problem with Google, and they had changed one of their APIs, and Archera was not aware of it. So their stuff was breaking because of a change downstream that we had caught, and I'll just tell you one last one because it's somewhat related to one of these cloud vendors of, you know, big cloud vendor who had an outage couple of months ago, and it's interesting because, you know, lot of our customers will set up shared Slack channels with us where we're monitoring or seeing their incidents as well as they are. So we get a little Slack representation of the incident that we detected for them or the root cause that we've detected for them, and that's in a shared community channel. So we could see this happening when that AWS outage happened. We could see our customers getting impacted by that AWS outage and the root cause of what was going on there in AWS that was impacting our customers, that was showing up in our incidents. Now, we didn't obviously, you know, have the very root cause of what was going on in AWS per se, but we were getting to the root cause of why our customer's applications were failing, and that was because of issues going on at AWS. >> Very interesting. I mean, I think one of your biggest challenge is going to be getting people's attention because these SREs is so busy, their hair's on fire. (all laughs) You know, he's like, "Hey, chap, I'm going to show you, look at this." >> I tell you. You get their attention, they love it. I mean, this AIOps company, I didn't even tell you the punchline there, but, you know, they had this incident that occurred that we found and, quite literally, the next week, they ended up signing up as a paid customer, so. >> That's great, and Larry, give you the last word. I mean, you know, Rod was talking about, you know, changes in APIs, and, you know, there's still a lot of scripts out there. You guys, if I understand it correctly, run both as a service in the cloud and you can run on-prem, which is important because there's a lot of sensitive information in logs and people don't want to leave. >> That's right, absolutely. >> But, yeah, close it out here. >> Yeah, I mean, you can, that's right, you can run it on-prem, just like we run it in our cloud. You can run it in your cloud or on your own infrastructure. Now, that's all true. You know, I think the one hurdle now that we have left as a company is getting the word out and getting people to believe that this is actually possible and try it for themselves. You don't believe it? Do a POC, try it yourself. And, you know, people have become so jaded by the lack of, you know, real sort of innovation in the software industry for the last 10 years that it's hard to get people to... But guys, you got to give it a shot. I'm telling you. I'm telling you right now, it works, and you'll hear more about that from one of our customers in a minute. >> Alright guys, thanks so much. Great story, really appreciate you sharing. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate the time. >> Okay, in a moment, we're going to hear from Cisco who is the customer in this case example, and a company that is... Look, they have quite an impressive suite of observability tooling, and they've done a pretty compelling proof of concept with Zebrium using real data on some Cisco products that you've heard of like Webex. So stay tuned and learn about how you can really take advantage of this new technology called root cause as a service. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (bright outro music)

>>Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cube covering ifs world conference 2019 brought to you by ifs. >>Well going back to Boston and everybody, this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here day one at the ifs world conference at the Hynes convention center in Boston. Cindy shutdown is here. She's the president of America's at ifs and she's joined by to my right, K in Blackwell, who's a controller at PPC partners, one of the divisions of PPC Metro power. And rod is the CIO of PPC partners. Welcome folks. Good to see you. I said, let me start with you. So you were on last year in the cube down at Atlanta. You still kind of set some, set some goals, you're a little competitive with your other brethren within then ifs. We love it. You know, we're Americans. Okay. So how's it going in North America? >>Um, well it's, it's growing well. We've had fantastic growth and it's been, you know, a little bit of competition within ifs, but you know, certainly we were very proud. We were named region of the year last year. So we won the coveted cup, which, uh, means, uh, we, uh, we want to keep that cup. So that's some of the, some of the competition that we've got going, right? >>Yeah. Well, of course, most of us based companies, they'll do, they'll start up 79, you know, 90% of their businesses, U S if not 100%, and then they'll slowly go overseas as some of the opposite. Right? >>Very much. I mean, ifs is a European based company. We've been in the, in the U S for quite awhile and, but we've really been investing in our growth and we've had fantastic growth over the last few years. And I think, you know, one of the reasons for that growth is our customer satisfaction in the fact that we really want to listen to our customers. You know, I, um, I, I travel quite a lot as you can imagine. And when I travel, I always try to make sure I can visit customers and hear what they have to say, you know, and of course we love to hear the good things, but I also like to hear when they can give us some ideas for improvement and um, you know, then that gives us something to work on and to, you know, to keep moving forward. Um, I also think that, you know, the good thing about that is, um, it gives us a chance to listen and um, you know, I heard something really great from one of our customers, they went live two weeks ago and they called up and said, Hey, can we do a customer story? I love things like that. Yeah. >>I always love that. Uh, let me think about it. I'll get back to you. Okay. What's your relationship between ifs and PPC part? >>Well, PPC partners is one of our newer customers in there in the middle of an implementation and they're doing some great things around digital transformation. And when I had this opportunity to be here on the cube, I thought it would be great to invite rod and can with me and to, you know, tell some of the things that they're doing. >>Cool. So I kind of recruited Cindy as my cohost, your, they're going to be the defective coho. So welcome to the queue and then we're going to show you right to the fire. Okay. So, uh, can you describe your, your role, your when one of the divisions of PPC partners, right? So maybe maybe set up sort of PPC partners and then your role. >>Right. Okay. So PPC is a specialty contracting company and we have four subsidiary companies that operate in the upper Midwest and then also the Southeastern United States. And we provide, um, um, customers within a base innovative, innovative solutions in the electrical and mechanical contracting. So there are those four companies. I was one of the controllers, um, of those four companies for a lot of years. And now I'm on the core team. There's four of us, five of us now, um, that are involved in the implement. >>Okay. So you got all the numbers in your head. And then rod, you're the CIO and you guys are a service organization for all the divisions. Is that correct? That is correct. >>We sit at the holding company and we're responsible for technology across all four of those specialty contractor companies that can just mention. >>So I love these segments, Cindy, because you know, we, here you go, we go to a lot of conferences in the cube and um, you hear a lot about digital transformation, but, so I'd like to ask the practitioners, what does that mean for you guys? We've got somebody who's very close to the line of business, like I say, knows the numbers, but at the end of the day you've got to deliver the technology services. So what does digital transformation mean to you? What's the company doing in that regard? So a great question actually. >>Um, you'll find companies like ours that have been on the same platform for quite a while, uh, 50 plus years, uh, five zero five, six, zero, uh, probably North of five zero, but we'll go with five zero. Uh, and what happens over time is just, you know, with the system can't grow with the organizations, you resort to a lot of manual paper pushing a lot of file flinging, lots of Excel. And so there's just a ton of duplication of effort and those types of things going on. So from a technology standpoint, that's really the stuff that I come in and see and go, you know. Um, but overall I think that getting to the ifs platform, getting a lot of those redundant processes, a lot of the file flinging out of there, it's just going to be beneficial for all of them. >>Okay. So you guys have had to make the business, you're in the middle of the implementation, right? Is that correct? So she had to go through the business case. Um, it sounds like the business case was, you know, we're, we're basically struggling with running our business because, you know, data's all over the place. We don't have a single view of our business, our customers, et cetera. So we have to come to grips with that. But, but, so what was the business case like? I presume that you were involved as well. >>Right. So I've was really involved in building the software that we've used for that 40 plus years though I haven't used it all of them two years. Um, and, and it was really. It was built by accountants. We, you know, intended for it to meet the needs of the whole, the whole organization. But really it was built by accountants. So, um, we've found that we just really weren't able to keep up with meeting the needs of all of the users. Um, so when we started looking at that, we also had, we were running on a couple of different, um, I'm going to call them boxes. We run it on IBM. So, um, we were not able to look across the entire organization and see a consolidated view of the whole organization. So that was one of the things that we were looking to do, was to really bring all four companies under one umbrella and be able to get a picture of the whole mainframe or, yes, we had a couple of mainframes and all of that software was internally written. Um, and it was good. It was, it was good, but it met, you know, just the needs that those of us within the company saw. Um, so I think we were missing a whole lot of opportunity, um, to really, you know, see what else was out there and see new things and really get outside of our sphere of understanding, you know, >>so PPC, >>no, I was going to say as SKM pointed out and the sort of running joke within the companies is the system we have today does numbers really well. Words not so much because it was designed by accountants for accounting, tracking the financials primarily. Yeah. >>In PPC you do construction of course, or construction club, but you also do some service as well, right? You've got people out in the field that are, that are doing, doing service. So when you were looking, um, I'm assuming that you were trying to find a system that could do both, both solutions. Yeah. Did. >>Absolutely. Uh, one of the things that's been concerning to the entire core team is it's great to go out and find a system and there's plenty of them that can handle your back office. Most systems do that fairly well. But what about you feel services, uh, any in our particular industry, electrical contracting, you might have residential, you know, we could very well be working on the buck stadium or a military installation or even the school, you know, those folks have to be able to process invoices, do all sorts of things from a handheld, et cetera, et cetera. That was a big, big driving factor for us. So has a lot of COBOL code running? Is that, is there right here? So you said 50 years, I mean, um, so now I'm interested in the, in the, in the migration and, and you know what that looks like. >>Yeah, I'll bet. So do you, do you have to freeze the existing sort of systems and then sort of bring the other ones up to speed? Is this cloud-based? What does that all look like? That great question. So, uh, we are, uh, we subscribe to the managed cloud solution. Um, you know, for most construction companies, electrical contracting companies like ours, you know, technology is important, but it is not what really makes our wheels turn. It's a con. It's a competitive advantage if you use it wisely. And so, um, you know, for us it was very important to think about this holistically and try to figure out if we're gonna bring in a solution, what does that solution need to look like and will it work for all of our companies, not just one, not just residential, commercial, et cetera. Okay. All right. So, so w w what's that journey look like? I mean, um, when did, when did it start? What's your >>sort of timeline? So about two and a half years ago, we really started looking at what we had in on hand now and what we had in place and thinking about did we really want to make a move? And so, um, we had a team that came together about 15 people across the organization from operations and also the back office to really evaluate what we had evaluated our needs. Um, we decided, yes, we needed something new. And then we actually brought in a second team, um, that started looking at what that new thing would be. We had a consultant assisting us with that and uh, we kinda narrowed it down to two players if you will. And ifs was one of those. Um, and we, even though, um, one of the things that we liked was the fact that that ifs had, um, a broad reach over different types of industries and we felt like that would give us, um, something in addition to a construct and centric view know domain expertise. Yeah, >>exactly. You know, and you know, with our core industries, you know, construction is a big part of that. But one of the things that we're seeing in the construction industry today is the trend to go to what we call prefabrication. The fact that you know, you can really speed up a project if you aren't trying to build everything on site and you can also do it much more cheaper. McKinsey has a study out and they believe that over time if, if of comp of construction company will engage with prefabrication, they can reduce the project timelines 20 to 50% and lower the cost up to 20% and with ifs is heritage in manufacturing. It's really a perfect marriage for construction companies because construction companies need the project management, the installation, you know, the change management that goes along with some of those back-office things. They also a lot of time have to do service. But if you really want to get that competitive advantage, if you can take advantage of the prefab, which is really manufacturing high, if this is heritage, he could really have a, a full, complete S, you know, solution from one supplier. >>There's a huge trend in home-building actually. You would, you see, you know, modular homes and kind of the future of it. But uh, so how does that affect you guys? I mean you, you prefab something that resonates with you, is that sort of more of a generic statement across the customer base or >>it's certainly an area where we're focusing on more. Um, we also have an automation, uh, division that really focuses on, um, automation for industries. And that's an area that it's kind of a manufacturing type of thing. They build panels and those sorts of things. So we're definitely seeing it >>well. So, okay. So I got to ask you, so when you pulled out the Gartner magic quadrant, I said, okay, it always is. Ifs isn't the leader that, that, that, that might've helped. Right. Okay. So you don't get fired now, but choose the leader, but then you started peeling the onion. He had to do due diligence. So what kinds of things did you look at? What kind of tires did you kick? Piers, did you talk to and be, I'm interested in what your, what you learned. Well, I'll touch on one key element and >>we can get in as many sub elements as you like. The selection process for us took several months. Um, I think initially we really pared it down to about eight packages that we were seriously considering. Then down to four and then eventually down to two. And what really, really intrigued us about ifs was the fact that they are not construction centric. So we really had a big decision to make internally, which was do we want to just get on the bandwagon and do what everyone else in construction is doing or do we really wanna you know, risk versus reward and go after something special. So ifs, they are in, you name it, manufacturing is obviously key. Aerospace engineering, race cars I saw today, I didn't know that. So that was a big selling point for us. And the plan is to retire your mainframe and go into the cloud. >>Yes, yes, yes. So IBM got you in a headlock. >>We've been friends for a long time. Good company. Um, w what's that been like just to sort of, uh, that the thought of, you know, going to the cloud. W how, how is, you know, the it folks you know, responded to that. Um, how has that changed their sort of role brokers versus all? Again, I think in construction organizations, technology is important, but it is not what makes the wheels turn. So I'm trying to bring in all of that iron and infrastructure and build it out and configure it ourselves and then maintain it for the long haul. Just not something that was value added for us. In addition, um, if you've ever worked with Oracle, which is a close partner of ifs, but there is a lot of licensing caveats and a lot of things you've got to worry about if you're going to go it alone by going with the managed cloud solution, we're sort of partnering and trusting ifs to take that on for us so we can focus on taking care of our companies, our customers, and doing what we do best. Right? So, okay, so you're still going to be an Oracle. You just won't be, it won't be as visible. We use Oracle too. We're a Salesforce customer, so Hey, Oracle is behind there, but no offense. >>Ah, I know you guys did >>for the distinction as well, right? Because even if you are going to have portions of Oracle that are running your system, you've got to have some Oracle experts on staff. You know, if you're going to have all of the infrastructure, you gotta have infrastructure folks who understand how it all ties together. So on the surface it could seem like a simple decision to do it in house or go to the cloud. Far from it. >>Yeah. You know, I think certainly one of the things that we see in a lot of different industries, but certainly in construction, the plant had always been that you bring together different, different solutions and you try to both and together and then some of that becomes a lot more concerning. You know, some of the technology behind it. But one of the things that with the ifs solution is the fact that from one provider you can do, you know, do the whole life cycle. So then some of the have it in the managed cloud where we take care of it for you. So then that takes away some of those technology issues and then you can focus on your core competencies. So Rhonda would agree generally >>with what you're saying. I mean some probably say that for most companies that you know, the technology is not the core differentiator. Obviously this for Google, sure. For Amazon, for Facebook, but for CIO is I talked to, they go people process, technology, technology is the least of my problems. It's like I was going to come and go, it's going to change. I can deal with that. It's the, if the people in the process issues. So having said that, I'm still interested in how concerned you were about peeling the onion on the cloud, what's behind it, the security model, all that stuff in terms of your due diligence, you know, with any cloud based solution, there's some concern obviously. But, but in working with ifs, we, we asked a ton of questions and they gave us a ton of answers. So the comfort level was there. Um, the industry's been going to the cloud now for quite some time. And to be brutally honest, if you're not going there, um, you need to be strongly considered >>in Microsoft is our partner with the cloud. We're on, you know, using Microsoft Azure. So it's not like, you know, it's one of the largest cloud provider. So it's not like, you know, it's, it's something that you have to worry about. You've got the, you know, the backstop of Microsoft behind you as well. You know, I'm sorry, go, go, go. I was going to say, I think one of the things that's interesting is you talk about all your different divisions and you're really trying to bring a lot of different companies together on one system. And one of the things that I, you know, as I've seen the things that's change management becomes really something that you really have to consider. I mean, how have you seen that part of the implementation going? Has there been stepping in the easy piece for you? It's not been an easy piece and that's one of the pieces that we're still working on. >>Um, I don't know if any organization that says that they're really, really good at change. Um, but we've recognized that really the, our organization is a group of entrepreneurs and we've encouraged people to have their own business, but we're really trying to streamline and get some consistency across the organization. That's a little bit of a culture shift for us. So that change management piece is a piece that we're really trying to get our arms around now and prepare, um, the organization for that team. Just trying to get my head around your software still. You guys do change management? I TSM. Well, you'll change management is really some of the, um, consulting that goes along with it and certainly ifs and AR, we've got many partners who can, you know, help our customers go through that. Because when you're going through a digital transformation, you know, you're taking people who have been using something for 50 years, being out, especially out in the field doing those things. And now you're trying to figure out what are the right processes to put in place to get what the business needs. And in some cases they might have to do things differently. So you really have to think that through and how you're going to roll those out. >>So now, is this your first ifs world? Yes, it is. It is. What final thoughts, you know, things you've, you've taken away or you're going to bring back to your teams? >>Well, yeah, Boston is a favorite city of mine. I was just glad to be here just for that. But, and we've just been here a little bit. I've already picked up some things on leadership. I was involved the um, >>Oh, the women's leadership breakfast this morning. So there's already been some things that I think we can take back to users and share with them, particularly around change management and trying to get people comfortable and understanding why they're uncomfortable with change. You know? So it, rod, you're next on the line. So I'm sure you were taking notes, pretty attentive in the sessions and just getting started, right? >>No, you know, I have, and one of the things for me that was most, I guess rewarding is, is the partner network. All of the vendors. There's a number of things with our implementation that we're still trying to sort out OCR for example, being one of them. Are we going to go there or are we gonna wait until later? Just different technologies and maybe add ons that we may want to take advantage of. All you've got to do is walk down the hallways and there's, there's people ready to talk to you about it. So that's, that's been kind of intriguing. >>Okay. Excellent. Well yeah, I said earlier I was, I was surprised and impressed at the sort of size of the ecosystem and its great. Well good luck to you guys. Really wish you the best and thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your story Cindy. Great to see you. Always pleasure. All right, take care. Thank you for watching everybody. We're back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube from Boston ifs world 2019 right back.

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well good afternoon, and welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 2018, live from Washington, DC. We're in the Washington Convention Center centrally located, I got to tell ya. The White house less than a mile that way, Capital Hill's just right up the street as well. We're kind of caught in the middle. Bad spot to be these days! (laughing) >> I hope you're not setting the tone for this. >> We'll leave that alone. >> I like being in the middle, personally. (laughing) I'll take it from both sides. >> When you sit in the middle of the road, there's a six inch yellow line, you get it equally hard from both sides. >> Bring it on! >> So, lets stay away from that. Dave Vellante, John Walls and Rod Johnson, who is the EVP of Manufacturing and Supply Chain, and the GT Nexus Business Unit at Infor. Rod, good to see you Sir! >> Great to be here, thanks guys. >> You're okay with being in the middle? >> Yeah, sure! Yeah, of course. >> Independent thought, right? I love it. >> Middle of the road. It's the place to be. >> So you're the new kid on the block, right? >> One of them, yeah. >> You've been here, just at Infor for a few months now, assuming the EVP role. How's it been for you so far? >> Hey, it's been a breath of fresh air. I was 11 years with one of our competitors, the Oracle Corporation. Its quite a breath of fresh air. Go with a company that's agile, innovative, much more customer centric. I think the timing is perfect for a company like Infor, that's really grown up in these key industries and working with customers for over decades. Now its made this transition to the Cloud, and now I think all the markets are waking up. It's not just CRM or HR, they're looking at: How do I take advantage of all this innovation, the Cloud's the platform, and who's the companies that really understand our type of business, whether you're a distribution company, or a food company, or an A&D Company. So it's a great time to be here, there's a lot of good energy, a lot of good innovation. A lot of good buzz from the customers about what we're doing. >> Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. I mean, you're right. The model of just having an install base that you can have locked in and just keep milking is very hard to do these days. Unless, you know, some of the private equity guys have done it, that's clearly not the case here at Infor. You know, Oracle is successful at it. I think it's because they do spend a lot of money on R&D, but boy oh boy! That model, you can't just go and reinvent that. >> Right. >> You're going to fail. >> Right. >> And if you're trying to hold on to that model, maybe they're the exception that proves the rule, but you're going to be toast. You know, in the long run. So you see what Amazon's doing, you see what Microsoft; how Microsoft completely pivoted away from that model. >> Right, Right. >> And Infor's riding that wave. >> Right, right. Hey, this is a business model. Fundamental business model change. You know, we can talk a lot about the technology, but transitioning from a product company that sells a license that sits on a maintenance base is a model that's no longer viable for what customers expect. They want a service provider that's delivering continuous innovation in service, and that's a big change. That's a big change to how we engage with our customers, how we support them, the service levels we're committing to. So, I lived through a bunch of that stuff at Oracle, transitioning to the cloud had a role for the last six years; doing that both from a sales and a global strategy role. Here, we're trying to do it better, faster, and never lose sight of the customer. >> So, you've serviced the manufacturing sector. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's still a lot of Infor's business that install base and that maintenance. You're in the process of transitioning those customers. >> Yeah. >> So, that takes a lot of care, a lot of feeding, cause anytime there's a transition everybody wants a piece of that action. So how's that going, what's the conversation like, and why should they stay with Infor? >> The conversation is, One: We really believe in a pragmatic business-led path to the Cloud. There's not going to be any forced march, no technology agenda that's going to drive us. It's got to be driven by value. We've got to present a business case to them that makes sense. That makes them more productive, now allows them to better engage with their customers, delivers innovation to their supply chain. So that's what we're spending a lot of time talking about. What's the case for change? What's the business case for change? I mean, all of the stuff about operating the Cloud, the service levels, potential total co-services, great! But, at the end of the day we deal with pretty, we're dealing with manufacturers. They're pretty down to earth. They know that they make their money building stuff, and shipping stuff and servicing that product. So we got to be engaged at that level, to show them how we help them do that better. I think the excitement is growing. That they recognize that there is real net new business value, new innovation that could really help their business. >> So lets talk about that. Forced march is a powerful phrase and you certainly see that in the industry. Thinking about supply chain, and the opportunities to drive even more efficiencies out of the supply chain, maybe through automation, we've heard a lot about RPA. >> Yeah. >> Maybe even bring back some of that offshore manufacturing. >> Right. >> That's certainly a conversation >> Right. >> that's going on in your world, so talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so one of our diamonds in the Infor portfolio is a product called GT Nexus. Which is, its been around for about 20 years. We have 65,000 companies around the world who are operating on a common network based platform that provides supply chain visibilities, supplies supply chain financial processing. Connects brands to their manufacturers to provide all the visibility and control and that. So, that's a powerful capability because you're right, it's an incredibly dynamic time. With the change of trade wars, weather events that are ever increasing. The supply chain's a very hard thing to manage. So if the asset is we've got a platform that enables companies to connect much deeper in their supply chain then use that information to make far better decisions on how they get their products to their customer at the right cost. So, and I see, you know the supply chain market, I always think of this transition to Cloud in waves. You know, we had the first wave breaking was the sales. Then the HR, the finance function. Operations in supply chains is the one that's cresting on the horizon. And you know, keep that going, we've got our surfboards in the water, we've got great capability. And we're really, really excited about what we can do for our clients! >> You got to ride the waves or you'll become driftwood >> How big is that wave? >> Well, hey that's the biggest market, right? I mean, you look at the size of the Enterprise software spend. Core ERP supply chain industry functionality is the big piece. It's probably two. It's probably by an HR, CRM, financials together, and it's not even as big as sort of the industry supply chain, manufacturing, procurement market core ERP market. So, its big! Its a big opportunity, but it requires a much more sophisticated response because you talk to our customers they're like hey, we operate our plants 365 days a year, three shifts sometimes in peak seasons. We can't afford an environment that isn't mission critical, that doesn't step up to service levels. So, you know, we're working really hard to address the mission critical system challenge, not just the benefits and payroll. >> So, there's certainly an opportunity with AI, with machine learning, certainly more analytics, bringing that to the manufacturing world. >> Oh yeah. >> So that's clearly fundamental to your strategies. >> Yeah. >> Is that, in your view, the tipping point to get really this whole market moving? >> I think. I mean I would agree with you. Its sort of an accumulation of digital capabilities. Certainly, mobility's sort of proved that its important, but its a little bit of a nice-to-have. Some of the innovations around user experiences, is really important but nice-to-have. I think that is the game changer. When you can use data as a weapon, a competitive weapon that you can make decisions faster, and how you discount your product or how you identify shortage faster than someone else. That's where, there's real money that comes out of that. >> What about Block Chain? We hear a lot about Block Chain in the supply chain and cutting out the middle man. We haven't heard much here about it, its not something. We're going to ask Charles. Somebody said to me, Once Charles gets on it, boom the company is behind it. >> Yeah. >> But, how real is that in manufacturing and supply chain specifically? Is it just way too early? Do you think there's potential there? Have you looked at it? >> Obviously we've looked at it, we've worked on with customers on prototypes. There's a couple areas, you know, there's a lot of hype as you guys know. You talked to a lot of us, a lot of hype in that space. It's certainly unproven in a lot of areas. But we think in the area of supply chain financing, Block Chain has a very, very powerful, you know, where you have multi parties, you've got suppliers and logistics companies and banks all who need a piece of information. We need distributed capabilities around that. We think there's a big potential in some of that area. We're talking. We're working with some of the banks on that. We think in the area of getting deeper into the supply chain around sustainability, to the ethical and traceability of the Supply Chain. You know, where you're goin down. Yeah we got customers in the pero business that are going down to the farms. They want to know exactly the lineage of all of their stuff that's going into their product that's ending up in a consumer. That's potentially a more efficient mechanism, to have all these different entities collaborating on a distributed model. So, I mean; and especially if we talk about the GT Nexus Network. There's natural extensions to it. That it already is a common platform that is serving a wide variety of companies, logistics companies, and manufacturers. So there's a lot of natural exit points from that, sort of, that integrated network to support a couple of these more extended processes that are a little bit more distributed. >> Yes, the smart contracts maybe fits there, and you talked about distributed a couple of times. What about IOT? The pendulum seems to be swinging now. Obviously Cloud is hot. Its got a re-centralization. But IOT's a whole new world. You get a lot of IT companies kind of pushing the IT model top down into operations technology and we don't think that's the way it's going to work. That the OT guys are actually going to drive the standards and the trends. What are you seeing? >> Well I think yeah hey, the people that have the, that make the equipment, you know, make the pipelines. Hey, obviously they got a big stake in this. You know, they understand how their kipid works, they know how to attach the sensors. They know how to translate things that are going on in the machines into data. We're going to be, and we're going to be taking that data, and how do you connect it to a business process. That's something that they don't understand. They don't understand how a heat event could translate, could connect to a maintenance process and how do you deploy a technician with the right part to go in there so they can offer some proactive service? So I think there's going to be a very tight partnership, where people coming from the equipment up, or the asset up, connect with the people that understand process analytics and sort of execution. >> Yeah. You talked about sustainability there just a moment ago, so obviously companies, their focus is changing in that regard. Right? People are paying more attention, a lot of that is being customer driven. >> Right >> At the same time too, in terms of distribution, in terms of manufacturing, customer expectations are changing too. Right? >> Right. >> We expect things on a much different time table. >> Absolutely. >> So how are you helping your clients recognize all those things? Like you're thinking about tomorrow today, and trying to get them to address that in terms of their technology plays down the road to meet these really fast changing demands. >> Yeah, I mean one of our really dominant industries is distribution. You know, probably three out of five distribution companies around the world run our software. So distribution is a space, typically between the manufacturing world and the consumer or the retail world is under tremendous pressure. While Amazon is inching into distribution centric industry so there's a lot of pressure from that, but there's also rising expectations that you have to do instantaneous fulfillment. That you have to provide complete visibility into where my order is, when am I going to get it, because I don't want to carry this supply. You got to carry it. So we're seeing a big rejuvenation of that industry, a little because of the pressures driving them to rethink e-commerce, to rethink the types of services they're providing to their companies. That even in some cases they're sneaking into retail, and having that type of experience because they need to compete in different ways. And I think that's always, the industry change is good for companies like us that have a lot of experience in the industry cause we can help them! Ya know, and they need a catalyst, right? They need a catalyst to go out and change and rethink how they operate, and it's created a pretty interesting opportunity. >> So, I wonder Rod if you could talk a little bit about, I know you're only a few months in, but just your impressions of the differentiation. Give us the bumper sticker pitch. Why Infor? How are you different? >> So, I mean, three things. Just netted out three things. Industry, and we talk a lot about industry. We talk a lot about last mile, its real. Its compelling to our customers. They're tired of having to finish the software for the vendor at their site. They want the provider to finish the software and take it to meet their unique needs. Two is I think even though we're smaller than some of the big, big names out there, I think pound for pound we out innovate almost every company. And I can talk very specifically, transitioning from a very, very large competitor. When you're actually looking into the detail of what we've actually delivered around AI, or what we've actually delivered around analytics or mobility, and pound for pound we fight way above our weight on that front. And I think, you know, if you look at even what we've done at Hook and Loop Digital over the years, the types of proof points we have with customers are something that very few of our competitors could boast. So I think, digital over use term, but just sort of understanding how this new technology works and being able to translate that to our customers is huge. And three, is culture. I think we have a fast oriented culture. There's not a lot of levels. We can cut through the nonsense for our customers pretty quickly. We organize around our customers, we don't have 3,000 sales teams trying to sell them piece parts so we can do the solution thing. And we're really working hard to differentiate on customer centricity. I made the comment yesterday at our executive forum that, in general, service at Enterprise Software stinks. You wouldn't accept, ya know, if a retailer was treating you the way the average Enterprise Software, you wouldn't accept it, right? You'd go somewhere else. We've had the benefit, or we've had customers that have such big investments in us, they have to deal with it. And we need to, we have an opportunity to fix that, to change that, to really reorganize and reorient our customer around the outcomes that matter to them. And its so important, if they're going to trust us. And its really about trust. They got to trust us to run their applications, our mission critical applications in our Cloud. We need to really change the game on that front, and we're doing a lot of things structurally. Like for example, maybe someone talked about were taking development customer support in Cloud operations, integrating that into a common organization. So, there's no finger pointing. If something goes down, its not well its the network, Its a bug, Its a knowledge issue. It's one team that's accountable for making sure that we resolve that issue rapidly. Same on the field side. So now we're organizing for manufacturing and distribution. Really, all the resources we need to both sell and service, deliver for our customers in a common team, so there's accountability. And on both sides. There's our product side, product and Cloud ops side, there's accountability and from a sort of customer engagement or accounts management accountability. And then, you know, we got to do a lot of things around service and automation, and better, proactive. We're running their cloud, we should be able to tell them, hey, this isn't running optimally. We need to come in and do this change. I mean, that's where we need to get. That's where the industry needs to get. And we want to get there first. >> Well, you're on the right path. >> Yeah. >> Again, congratulations on the new position, >> Yeah, thank you! >> and we appreciate the time here today, and wish you all the best down the road. >> I appreciate what you guys do. I love your show and content. >> Thank you, Rod. We appreciate that. Thank you sir. Back with more here on theCUBE. We are at Inforum 2018. We're in Washington, DC. (electronic jingle)

(upbeat music) >> Live, from New York City, it's theCUBE! Covering Lenovo Transform 2.0, brought to you by Lenovo! >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We've got two guests on the show right now, we've got Naj Husain, the CEO of Cloudistics, and we're welcoming back Rod Lappin, who is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to be here. Nice to meet you. >> So... >> Rod, why are you so lazy at this show? MCing the show, on theCUBE twice... (laughter) >> I know, it's been an exciting day, hasn't it? I've actually done a few meetings between I saw you last time as well so, I'm living on 2 and a half hours of sleep last night, and I'm running hot so I'm looking forward to a drink at the end of the night. >> Yeah, a well-deserved drink. >> Sleep fast, sleep fast. >> Exactly. So I want to start with you Naj. >> Yeah. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about Cloudistics, it's based in western Virginia, what do you do? >> Yeah, so we build a private cloud with a premium experience. We founded the company in 2013 on the idea of simplifying infrastructures. In our previous world, we actually lived the problem. So in our previous company, we actually took Amazon as an analog, and tried to move our resources at Amazon and simplify it. Because we were tired of managing complex infrastructure. So as a company of 500 people and a software development company, we wanted to simplify our world. So we went to Amazon, we spent 3 months or so developing codes of implement QA. Great, real simple. Don't have to worry about hardware at all. It's a great value proposition. All of a sudden we started to implement this thing, after month one it was 100,000 bucks. After month two, it was 150,000 a month. After month three, we're creating the 200,000 a month in fees to run Amazon, right. While the value proposition's all about "simplicity is awesome." The problem is, it's very very expensive. So as the company of 500 like I said, we had to figure out what to do next. So I spoke to my CTO and I said, how can we solve this problem? So he said, okay I can bring the infrastructure back on prep, great. So he priced that out, it cost less than one month of opex in Amazon. So we did, and then we had a problem where okay, now we need software to run on it, to make it work. We needed a virtualization platform. So we looked up what was out there, and the cost for it at the time in 2012, 2011, it was a million dollars in commercialization software. I said we can't do this, right? We're too small, we don't have the funds to do that. So we decided at that point, we're going to found the company to solve that problem, and democretize IT to give companies of any size the ability to implement cloud computing behind the firewall, at an affordable price. >> And you call it "Composable Cloud". >> We do. So when we looked at the market at that point, there was different types of technologies out there, and there was things called hyper-converged and traditional converged infrastructure. And what we did, is we took a page out of how the public cloud operated. And the way the public cloud operates is they have composable resources so you can scale resources independently. So I can scale networks separate from computes, separate from storage. And that's a big deal when you're running a cloud because you have to worry about economics. So when we architected the product, we started there. So we started with this scale-able architecture that's composable, so company's grow as they need to grow. They don't have to tie resources together, right, so there's no resource drift, we call it. It's independent scaling. And that's one of the big differentiators in our platform. >> So Rod, why don't you help bring in some of your customer views that you hear on this. I'm sorry but I smirk a little bit when I hear, "We're going to simplify things." (laughter) In my career, I've talked to lots of companies, and everybody, we always have the goal to be simple. >> Yes. >> "But, oh wait I need to change this a little bit, I need this other thing, oh wait I've got this Lenovo product, but oh, you've got this other product that's good, how do I manage all of these?" And Cloud was supposed to be, you know, just an easy button and low-cost and everything, and it's helped but it's also added new silos, and new things that I now have to get my arms around. So maybe set up for why you-- >> Yeah, sure. Well I think to Naj's point firstly, I think the Cloudistics solution is really unique. And it's very compelling, actually. It's a very compelling offering. Firstly because I know one management said that you could basically run storage, compute, as well as networking, sitting over the top of a hypervisor, on prem, his point? So to Naj's point, you had like 50% of the cost of a normal cloud infrastructure that would be going out into the market pool, and still have the management suite sitting up in the cloud that they obviously manage for you. That's very cool. But one of the other things that's very cool about the Cloudistics offering is you can scale up and scale out, depending on customers' requirement. So once you've got yourself in this composable cloud model, right? And you're actually running with Cloudistics, instead of saying okay, my business is growing, now it's getting bigger, I have to pay this much for an extra amount of x, whatever it might be, if you want more compute, you can have more compute. If you want more storage, you can have more storage. You can actually add the components of the cloud that you require, based on the consumption that your business is actually running to. And that's one of the very very compelling events that Cloudistics' offering actually has. >> Composable and customizable. >> Yeah, and very simple. One of the key tenants of the platform is making this thing really really simple. So when we designed the product when we started, we started with the application first because at the end of the day, that's what you're trying to run. You're not here to manage infrastructure, you're here to develop being agile in your business. So we focused everything on making it really simple to deploy, and making the hardware invisible, automating all of the updates, so you never have to see hardware. And all you can focus on is delivering your services. >> So I want you to get really specific for a second. >> Yeah. >> Because many of the things that I hear, they think, oh, reminds me of what the companies that do hyper-convert say that they're doing. >> Right. >> Simplicity in the enterprise... >> Right. >> Easy to manage, things like that. >> Yes. >> Is there a software offering, is there hardware involved-- >> Correct. >> How does this all go together, is this a management suite that ties in to what I have? >> That's a great question. >> Make sure I understand. >> Yeah, so it's a completely integrated hardware-software platform, so think of it like your iPhone. When you buy an iPhone, it's hardware-software beautifully integrated... >> Motorola's the same by the way. (laughter) Yeah, okay, Motorola, fine. But it's a phone that's integrated with hardware-software. You connect to the network, you're up and running, you download your apps, and you're done. It's a beautiful experience. So we took that as an analog for our platform. So literally, it's completely plug-in play cloud, you roll it in, plug it into your network, go to our Marketplace, log in, download apps and start running. You can run Containers, you can run Docker, you can run Windows Sequel, all those apps are available for you to run with a click. So businesses now can be much more agile, right? Because now they're worried about delivering services, not messing with multi-solid hardware. Right so now generalists now can manage this platform. DevOps can manage this platform. Just like the public cloud. Yep. >> So to make this setup really simple, what we're doing is we're taking the thick agile solution, which is that pre-configured, pre-set, rackable solution. So compute, storage and networking all in one solution. At factory, we're setting it up with all the Cloudistics structure that we need to send it out, and basically ship it on site for customers. They only need two plugs, right? A plug for the network, and a plug for power and basically it's ready to go. >> It's amazing. >> Rod can you help, so we were just talking about the big news with NetApp. >> Right. >> You know, you've got new relationships with tenants, how does this fit in the work folio? What are the customer kind of pain points as to when Lenovo would lead with this? >> I think that's a fair question, Stu. I think if you have a look at what our go-to-market strategy is in the hyper-conversion space. This is largely guided by customer demand. So, basically at a customer demands point, we'll go in and we'll obviously lead with our customers and understand what are the pain points they actually have in their environment. Because many customers have got different environments, and three years ago, everyone was like "I'm going to be an AWS jumper, or I'm going to be..." The reality is everyone's got so many different clouds in their environment, they've got so many different environments set up. You know, whether that's the Adobe Cloud and Marketing, or AWS, whatever it might be, you've got to manage all of these different environments. So it sort of is dependent purely on what the customers' environment is, where we actually go. Now, from our perspective, this is a brand new relationship, only 6 months old, we are setting up dedicated people specifically to sell this with Cloudistics, and I feel like it's got a really good future. We just got to get this business growing, and I think we're going to be talking to more customers about it. >> Yep. >> So who is your sweet spot? You said that the emphasis of starting this company was that companies of any size could be able to do these things, and act more agile, as you said. >> Right. >> So who is your sweet spot, what's your target? >> Yeah so we target a medium-sized enterprise. So you know, 500 employees to 5,000, kind of in that range is our initial target. And we drive the applications like Window Sequels applications, applications that rely on performance potentially, or even general purpose work clouds where they just want to simplify management of the stack. And as Rod was saying, the management of the platform's pretty unique, and the fact that that's in the cloud, the management of the platform is in the cloud. So it makes it very simple to manage. So from one central spot, I can manage my multiple stacks throughout my company, and it makes it very easy to employ applications and manage everything. >> Do you have any specific examples of sort of the pain points that you helped solve? >> Yeah, so in our case, it was really around driving simplicity. So in many companies, many medium-sized companies, they struggle with the complexity of multi-tiered infrastructure. So I have to have a virtualization expert, I have to have storage expert, I have to have a network expert. And I have to have an app expert as well. Right, I've got to make all those people work together. So businesses now are trying to be more agile to push applications out the door so they can run their business. So by all those interdependencies, it creates a lot of complexity. So we've cut out all of that and we've created a platform where you don't need all of those interdependencies. It's done for you. So it's literally plug and play, so businesses can get right to their work at deploying applications. >> So, there are a number of things that we've looked at, from a research standpoint of what makes a private cloud, and a lot of it is kind of measuring the bar against a public cloud. You said, simplicity, absolutely a good one. One of the ones that we're starting to see some movement in the private cloud, it's starting to go more opex. >> Right. >> As a service office. >> Correct. >> I was walking through the show before and talking to Lenovo people about that. Is that part of the discussion today, and maybe talk about how that works. >> It is, and the platform is fully tenanted for example. We took a page out of the public cloud where, if you go into any public cloud, you create yourself a virtual data center. And within that virtual data center, you can deploy your applications. With our platform you can do the same. You can have a pool of resources, we've extracted everything to pool. RAM, cores, and stores, that's all you need. You can allocate those to your constituents, your customers, your departments. And they have a completely multi-tenanted, fully secure environment to work under. Without impacting anybody else. And with our core technology around networking, we've completely isolated the layer 3 networking layer, to make sure it's highly secure within that box. >> I understand. So they can almost be like a service provider themselves? >> Yes. >> So I guess one of the things is, what about from the financial standpoint? Are things still allowing me to scale up and scale down, is it just in that box I can carve it up? You know Lenovo has an option that was like oh hey, I need to burst up for a certain season, but I'm not going to have to pay, or are there certain things they can do financially. >> Very, very interesting. So the platform is elastic in a sense, where you can plug in and play resources. You can add memory, you can add cores, you can add storage, you can network on demand. And jack it in and scale the resources. We are working on coming out in a future period a hybrid where you can burst and scale into public clouds, which is a big deal, right? Because we have very unique layer 3 networking technology, we can potentially stretch those networks into some other cloud, which is very interesting. So that means that our Lenovo customers can then burst into on demand, on the monthly payroll system, into a public cloud if necessary. So that's a future thing we're working on. >> To your points as a service, you heard today obviously as we had a little bit of a keynote up there, Kirk hinted at the fact that we're trying to drive as a service solution around on the hardware, which really matches perfectly with the Cloudistics solution that Naj was just talking about. >> Yes. >> We're really, really close to this. I would have loved to have been one of our announcers today. But we've got a few other things going on. So we will come forward in the market as a service, fully metering as a service solution that we think is very compelling in market to match up with the Cloudistics offering very, very shortly actually. >> It's fun. >> So how are you getting the word out? I mean we already know you need to increase your budget, that was our last guest who said that. (laughter) >> Exactly, so Naj and I went on our focal about this decision this week. >> Yes. >> We need to get the word out a lot more aggressively, and a lot more compelling than we are today. So we have dedicated resources now in Western Europe and North America, we're about to expand our dedicated resources into China and the Asian Pacific, and then down into Latin America. So we start off by dedicating people on the street that are actually going to be at the start talking to customers. Then we're going to have to drive into a marketing campaign of some description, so we can actually start to drive a more compelling story to market, so they actually get to know what Naj's company has developed. Because once again, it's really compelling. >> Right, great. Well Naj, Rod, thanks so much for coming on the show, it was great having you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight with Stu Miniman, we will have more from Lenovo Transform and theCUBE's live coverage in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Live from New York City, It's theCUBE! Covering Levnovo Transform 2.0. Brought to you by Lenovo. (techno music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Rod Lappin. He is the senior vice president in marketing here at Lenovo. And Roger Cox, the research vice president at Gartner. Thank you much, gentlemen for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us! Excited. >> So the big news for the day, NetApp, Lenvovo Two global powerhouses joining forces I want to hear Rod, the Lenovo speil, and then I want to hear your analysis of the deal and what you make of it. So why don't you go ahead. >> Yes, so obviously we're really really excited, Rebecca. It's a great day for us. I think it's something that we've been really planning with NetApp for obviously a long time, and to actually have it come to fruition is really exciting for all of us, right. So as you would have known, probably, our storage offering in market has been quite small up until now. We're addressing about 15% of the market. With this new deal with NetApp we're sort of in the TAM the target market. We can after up to about 92%. We've been quite good at storage. We've been growing about 2X the market average in Flash, over 100% year on year, but we haven't really had the full product range that we've needed to really address out customers' needs, and so, now having this, having this deal now with NetApp means we can go after our customers and really bring value to them the way that we have wanted and definitely the way our customers are asking us to. >> And so that's my question. Was it customer driven? Was it them saying: We just need you to able to do more or what? >> I think if you look at our core business last quarter, Gartner, obviously, ranked us as the fastest growing server business globally. We grew 68% year on year on our revenue last quarter. And so, with the momentum we've got now as a business, we're seeing our customers want us to do more. We're number one in customer satisfaction, number one in reliability, so they see value in us generally but we had sort of what I would classify as a subsegment of the storage market that we want to address. And of course our customers are saying to us: Hey, we want you to do more for us because we like the way you've performed. So it's been good for us. We're excited >> Yeah. >> So, Rodger you know a thing or two about the storage industry and NetApp specifically. So give us the customer viewpoint. You talked to a lot of them. >> Well, first of all let's say this is one of the better kept secrets because it never leaked out. So really haven't been getting customer calls on this event yet but I'm sure we will starting today be getting a lot >> Yeah, they brought a few analysts down to RTP in July and I remember, Rodger you said: What do I do when the customers call? and they're like, shh, shh. Customers aren't going to call. We're going to keep it under wraps. >> And they did a good job of it. But anyways, what it means, I think, to Lenovo is it really elevates Lenovo's standing as a provider of IT technology for the data center. So they now have, not only a very competitive server offering, which Rod's talked about quite a bit, they have what many believe to be one of the best storage offerings in the business. And now they can go compete head to head against Dell EMC, as well as with HPE, which would be the two larger competitors that they have to deal with. So it's going to be very good in terms of providing an alternative to clients for data center technology-involved storage. Good thing. We like competition. >> Absolutely, and we want to be part of it. I think up until now we probably haven't been able to. So when you look at how we're going to market, my field sales team has been planning with the NetApp field's also. We've been basically coordinating how we go to market where do we attack together, where do we have conflict, where do we not. So we actually go in and really focus in on those core competitors that Roger's just described which is where we want to go. >> In the keynote this morning it said from a channel standpoint, there's not a lot of overlap which, on the one hand, I'm saying: Well, sounds like we'll need a lot of training then. But how do you hit the ground running fast? >> So we are already ready to go. We start shipping tomorrow, so that's the good thing about this announcement. Like Roger said, we kept it under wraps, but we are ready to manufacture and go. So, I think it's a really exciting spot for us. From a go-to-market perspective in the channel, NetApp has traditionally been very much about engaging end users, fulfilling through the channel, but engaging end users. Where Lenovo's got a much stronger forte around mid-market and SMB. And we've got a much stronger forte in emerging market, so if you actually start to split geographically the world up a little bit and then you can start to split how we got to market a little you can actually find some really big parts of the market that we don't conflict at all that we can go after. >> But you see, from my point of view, the bigger challenge they have is to go to market. Now they could say there's not much overlap, but you know there's always overlap. There's going to be certain accounts where Lenovo already has a position, and maybe NetApp has a position, too. Then, who's going to do what given a time? So, the biggest challenge that Lenovo has here is also a challenge for NetApp is how they manage together the go to market motion, as well as the service and support because Lenovo's going to have level one, level two support responsibility. They're going to have that revenue to go for support. We'll see how that works out over time. >> I want to ask you what your advice would be to Lenovo leadership in terms of, this deal enables it to go after bigger players and to take over more of the market. But when it's now going head to head with Dell EMC , what do you think it should focus on? >> I think it should focus more on marketing. The products speak for themselves. The competency of these products are well-known. Besides this, it gives Lenovo the opportunity to become more cloud-friendly, too. Because they also have access to all of the software out of NetApp's cloud data services organization. So my main advice would be to Rod, because he's responsible for this, (Rod and Rebecca laugh) is put more wood behind arrow. Get Huawei to put up more money to accentuates the marketing of the product. Create more enthusiasm about the fact that you're now up at another level in terms of being an IT provider to the data center. >> It's a well kept secret as you started out by saying >> Yeah! >> That's right so we've got a business case that we've put together that's starting today obviously. Which involves us getting out and starting to hit the ground running with a lot of media. There's a lot of social media noise today on it obviously. Thanks very much to people like yourselves which is great. And I think we're going to see a lot more marketing-based initiative that run both through the channel as well as to the end users across our, what I classify as our T-1 countries to start with. To Roger's point, though, when we look at the go-to-market, we basically categorize in all the accounts into four boxes. Those accounts where NetApp's very strong and Lenovo's very strong which means Lenovo's strong from the server perspective. NetApp's very strong from the storage perspective. >> FAP would be one of those. >> That's right. That's a very good example. And in that environment, we're going to collaborate and show them we're communicating with each other and ultimately, not fight with each other. We're going to recognize that we want to continue to protect our server business. They're protecting their storage business. We don't want to touch that. In a place where Lenovo, for example, may be weak and NetApp very strong, so they're got a very good storage relationship, we want them to bring our servers into that space. Because obviously if they don't bring us in, then one of our key competitors that is also competitive in NetApp is going to have a foot in the door there somewhere. So, we're going to drive a little bit of a different strategy in that environment. Then, we've got obviously the third environment where Lenovo's very strong from a server perspective and NetApp's nowhere. In that environment, it's free fields for Lenovo to go after that with our new storage array. And then obviously, where we're both neither engaging those customers, it's in acquisition for both. We're going to play and ultimately go after them. There's some really great things that we've been able to put together with this relationship. Like for example, comp neutrality. So, the NetApp teams when we go into that third and fourth box I was just talking about, the NetApp sales force is going to paid the same whether it goes on a Lenovo hardware or goes on the NetApp hardware. So, we've got some pieces that sort of ensure that we don't have conflicts and we're all aligned to ultimately grow and compete with Dell EMC and HPE. >> So, Roger There have been some interesting server and storage partnerships. I think back a decade ago, Dell and EMC did billions of dollars together. It eventually broke up, and then what do you know, it went back together. I think five years ago, NetApp had pretty strong server partnership there. The storage market has changed a lot in the five to ten years. Tell our audience a little bit how NetApp's different, how the storage market's different, and how customers should be thinking about an arrangement like this. >> Well, the storage market's different because there's more alternatives for storage. There's the Cloud: AWS, Azure, even Google Cloud. You get over to Asia, Alibaba over in Asia and so forth. So that's had a very large impact on on-premises storage. The other one is hyper converged. Lenovo's very much a hyper converged business. They have relationships with Nutanix. They've got them with VMware. They have them with Pivot3 and some others. And so, all of these things come together to create a different alternative to the classical three-tier infrastructure: server, networking, and storage. So, all those things are going to exist. And, the upright storage market, while it may be a declining market from a revenue perspective, has a long payoff. It's going to be like mainframe, so it'll be here forever. Like Tate, here forever. It's like me. I'll be here forever. (Rod and Rebecca laugh) So right now, Stu, we're seeing a little bit of a bubble. So we are getting a bubble interns of, this is a good time by the way for Lenovo to have this partnership because there is more likelihood of increase spending for IT. Good economy in the States, good economy over in Europe. Good economy around the world for that matter. I think it's going to last another couple years. 2018, 2019, maybe in the 20's before it starts tailing off again. So the way people are talking to me now, it's kind of like a flush. Hey, we got all this money. We're going to go spend it. Refresh everything. Get more over into Flash. I think they will sell a lot of Flash, even with the entry product, what they call a DE. I think they'll sell a lot of Flash there. And of course up in the DM series, which is the equivalent of NetApp's A200, A300 which are top tier products. They'll sell a lot of Flash there, too. >> I would say as what you just mentioned, the traditional storage market is reducing, but Flash is obviously growing. NetApp last quarter was the number one Flash company in the world. 27.6% market share-- >> Where do I check that out? (Rebecca laughs) That comes from another source >> That comes from another source, yeah sorry. But they hit number one last quarter according to an unknown source. But I think that's really encouraging, right? And at that part of the market Flash is about 30-40% of the overall storage market right now and easily the fastest growing. So this product range really drives an all-Flash array type solution that we can actually take advantage of. >> Rod, we want to get your perspective China, too. That's a big piece of this announcement. Maybe you an talk a little bit about that. I think Roger's got some comments on it. >> Well, think this is a good deal for NetApp. This is the reason why I think maybe the channel conflict won't be as bad as it was for the Dell EMC guys. This is the way for NetApp. NetApp wants to go more and more towards the Cloud. You look at their strategy. It's going more and more towards the Cloud with all of the Cloud data services software that they're developing. And so they're putting more and more emphasis on that. At the same time, the relationship they have with Lenovo gives them the opportunity to get really a creative revenue that otherwise would not get. Allows them maybe to reduce the burden that they would have under manufacturing SGNE expenses and stuff like that. But the big benefit is China. They JB in China is going to give NetApp a entry into China that otherwise would not be able to get because of the laws that the People's Republic of China have. It's a big deal. >> I think we're really excited about China. Obviously that's one of the cornerstones of the deal. So it's an independent organization that's going to be set up. Lenovo will have 51% ownership. NetApp will have 49. Seven board members. Four of them will be Lenovo. Three of them will be NetApp. And ultimately we are going to have that organization just purely specializing on the Lenovo product that is designed by NetApp originally. And it's going to be doing joint IP. We'll have joint developers in there. We'll be able to leverage my existing sales force in China, that's our traditional sales force, to go and drive for everything from a tier one city all the way down to a tier six, tier seven city in PRC. But, that joint venture itself will just be a specialist organization specifically on storage. It's really exciting. >> The thing about the JB it's very very important. Whatever is developed by the JB has to stay in China. That software cannot be taken outside of China because of all the geopolitical issues that you have around the world. Big point. >> Yeah, and a challenge. >> Absolutely It's a challenge that both NetApp and Lenovo have to manage with respect to each other. >> Just for the record, I'm not totally sure. If we develop something in the joint venture, I'm not totally sure that we have to keep that in China. >> I'm not saying that legally you have to. I'm saying emotionally you should. >> Emotional we should. >> Ahhh... >> I was going to say... >> There might be some government concerns on some of that. >> I think it's always going to depend on the government. And we don't want to get into a geopolitical conversation. I think Europe for example will be a lot more liberally open to that sort of stuff >> Speak a little bit about the cultures coming together. NetApp. You've been working on this deal together. sometimes that can be the strength or the challenge. >> I think company cultures are always challenging. And when you get two companies that are, especially right now, as we've heard this morning in some of the sessions, turning the corner. They're both growing. They're both doing very well at the moment. So, there's always a level of confidence, shall we say, in both those situations that you've just got to break down. And I think what we've done very successfully this time is Wei Wei, and George and Kirk, and George and Henri Ricard and myself and Brad Anderson, you saw today who was actually up on stage with us today as well working with us as the executive sponsor on that side. We're lining up our executives globally. All of the field team for Henri Ricard's team and my field team globally have all been interlocking with each other. They're account planning. They're territory planning. We're really trying to break down any of the walls the way may have from a cultural perspective. And really drive a much more open conversation, so we don't get caught out early in the deal. There's a escalation process in the deal. So it goes to a geo level up and then ends up with Henri and myself to actually manage worldwide if something was to get really out of control. But, at the moment, day one, don't see any issues. Seems to be going okay, touch wood. >> They both, Brad and Kirk, said they're complementary companies. Is that your perspective, too? Would you agree with that? >> Well, I think they gave complementary purposes. The interesting thing here is this thing's coming together when both companies are on the uptick. It's not because, go back three years ago and look at where NetApp was three years ago versus where they are today. So it's coming together when both companies, and matter of fact, go back to look at Lenovo two years ago as well >> Absolutely. >> So it's been an uptick that happened here over the last three years, so this thing's coming together when both companies are doing quite well in that respect. >> So-- >> By the way I want to mention Gartner will be publishing a report in September on this transaction from NetApp's point of view. And we'll be publishing a report on in November on this transaction from Lenovo's point of view. >> Great, so one of the things people like Roger and I have to do is, we look at how we would say whether something's successful or not. So I want to get your point first too and then when you look out six, 12, 18 months from now, whether it is successful and the thing I have to say is Kirk and Brad said, well, our goal is to number three in China, and I said isn't that a low bar? Aren't you practically on day one? I mean you're two joint companies. It's going to be there? >> I can't count on my boss to be honest with you. >> You've got the sales team. I know you can do that. >> I would love to. I think at the moment let's just talk about the joint venture for a second. I think the point is at the moment we are only 15% addressable market with our existing range. And so at the moment, we're saying, hey we can address 15% of the market. That puts us way outside of the number 10 slot in PRC. So, to say we want to be number three, is quite ambitious. Especially because we want to try to do it in the next couple of years. So, I actually feel like he's being quite aggressive from a growth perspective, so I think that's quite balanced. Outside of that, I really want to measure us on profitable growth. We really want to diversify our share of wallet and our customer base. We've got a great customer base now from a server perspective. We need to really expand that to ensure that we're taking advantage of the customer feedback we've had. So, I think that's a pretty good spot. >> At the end of the day, the success of non-success of this program is in Rod's hands. (laughing) On the one hand, >> I love the pressure you're putting me under >> And then Laura, on the services support side. People will support this program if they get good quality service and support. So, you have to keep that up for this program. >> Absolutely, and at the moment, the services model is level one and level two is run by Lenovo internally and then level three escalation runs into the NetApp program. We believe we've got a model that runs well. >> A good note to end on. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE Rod and Roger. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us I appreciate it very much. It's my inaugural time here. >> First of many. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE at Lenovo Transform just in a little bit. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it theCUBE. Covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host Keith Townsend. And while this is the North America show, we've seen the expansion of it, we actually have two guests coming in from the Asia-Pacific region. Happy to welcome Rod Lappin. Rod, SVP with Lenovo, thank you so much for joining us all the way from Singapore. >> Yep, absolutely, great to be here. >> Stu: And we have Deepu George, who's the Senior Director with Capgemini Group IT, in from Bangalore Thank you also for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so Deepu, let's start with you. We always love conferences like this. We get to talk to the users. Tell us a little bit about your group inside Capgemini, some of the challenges that your IT team's been tackling. >> Yes. So I'm part of the group IT, responsible for handling all the data centers, group data centers within Capgemini, and we are responsible for delivering data sorting services and processing services, et cetera. So, one of the key ideas we started last year was DC modernization and consolidation. And one of the key strategies we were looking at was hybrid cloud and extra DC stack, completed as revision stack, support for that and plus, you know, automation. So these were the three areas where, which was a key strategic areas for that data center modernization and consolidation. And when we looked at the various options available, one thing stood out from the Nutanix side was, I mean it checked all the boxes and they had a very good roadmap on certain areas which were not available at this particular point of time. So then we chose, okay let us have a PoC done, we did a PoC along with Lenovo and it was successful. And then we went ahead with this relationship with Nutanix. >> Great, Rod just want to bring you in here, we've been talking about really the growth and expansion of Netanix, one of the big pieces is the OEM. Lenovo have been hearing good growth rates. Give us a little bit of a customer viewpoint, what you've been seeing. Nutanix in general and the Lenovo HX specifically. >> Yeah I think obviously Stuart, the very exciting thing is Nutanix is the leader in the industry, right, and with them Lenovo this last year, we grew about 197%, year-on-year. So it makes us their fastest-growing partner. And in the North American channel environment, for example, you're at 280% actually, so we're growing very, very rapidly with them, and there's real reasons. Customers are seeing the value obviously in the solution, the consolidation of the data center footprint, and obviously as customers are being pushed more, as Deepu just mentioned, to the hybrid cloud, or what we're calling really the multi-cloud these days, right, because customers are really looking at and choosing their cloud solutions based more on the workloads and what they're actually trying to do longer-term. You know I think we're best positioned to do that with Nutanix, it's a great solution, I think Capgemini's really one of our great global, strategic global systems, integrated partners, that's taken a choice to run with Lenovo and Nutanix. It's been a great HX solution for us. >> So Rod, before we get too deep, let's ask a basic question. Lenovo, tier one server provider. You guys consistently in one of the leadership positions, and in number of units shipped, obviously you guys have the chops to field a similar solution. Why partner with Nutanix? >> Yeah I think Nutanix, firstly from a software perspective I think that's definitely where we're seeing, you know, if you jump back sort of 10, 15 years, that three-tiered architecture was where everyone was going, SAN and all that sort of stuff. Now when you're seeing the solutions that Nutanix and the hyper-converged market is growing so rapidly at, you're really seeing customers recognize that they get a lot more value out of the software suite, data center consolidation, data center footprint consolidation, and really the ability to manage on-prem and off-prem workloads seamlessly, you know with the prism solution and we integrate that with our Xclarity offering, our management suite, and as a result, it's a real match made in heaven. It's actually doing really well. >> So Deepu? >> I'll talk to that, if you look at software-defined, and that is a key area where we are going right now. Most of the organizations for this data consolidation, they are looking at software-defined, and when you look at the network stack, you have SDNs and all these things, so when you have Nutanix with an NCI, with the complete SD stack, it all ties up together. It's pretty easy for us to, you know, completely scale out the data centers. It's flexibility we have with software-defined and it's a good match, it's a good fit. >> Deepu can you walk us through a little bit of the application side of what you're doing? What did you start with? What have you rolled out? What haven't you touched yet? >> Yeah so once we started our PoC, once we know that data centers, so what we did was, we had our first data center consolidation exercise, modernization exercise, which just happened in Brazil. We had our own three data centers which we wanted to consolidate into one as part of our consolidation and modernize strategy. So we had a mix of upload there, we had basic things, we had normal applications, we had VMs running, we had physical nodes running. And what we did was we consolidated, moving into a single data center on 10 nodes of Nutanix, and we closed down all the other data centers and it was a pretty good experience that we had. The support we received from Lenovo and Nutanix and most of this work was done completely from off-shore. So we had a couple of our engineers posted in Brazil for the coordination activities, but the physical work was completely done from off-shore interfaced our support engineers. So it was a pretty good exercise. We got very good support from Nutanix. We got very good support from Lenovo to get consolation done in the correct time. >> So Deepu, Capgemini has a pretty capable consulting firm, I'm sure you guys got plenty of advice internally as you set out to select the vendor. Let's talk about that selection process. How did that conversation initially go, where you guys kind of threw out Nutanix and Lenovo as potential solutions? >> So if you look at the commercialization world right, I mean it's already pretty much standard. So when we looked at the key modernization initiatives, I already talked about this with VC and stuff like that. We came out with a list of parameters that we wanted to look at, just so that there cannot be any compromise on that. And then what we are looking for in the future when we, so modernization cannot happen in a day or two. So it is a journey. So we have a two- to three-year window in which we wanted to consolidate all our data centers, modernize everything, so the Nutanix roadmap on the various automation, STDC, as to the complete hybrid cloud journey, was pretty strong. And we had the complete management commitment from Nutanix, that they will stick to this particular roadmap and these features will not be compromised in any way. So that is one of the key decisions for us to go with the Nutanix way. >> Well let's talk about performance. You guys have been Nutanix customers for a while, how has the roadmap matched with the promises? >> So from a performance point-of-view, so if you look at only the pure CIA performance, right, wherever you have a high-performance workload, we have an option to go with a complete full SDN stack, where the BIOS in not absolutely a challenge or anything there's a huge throughput available. So from a performance point-of-view, we don't think, that's not an issue as of now. Even for the traditional storage, performance has never been an issue but the actual issue is how do we make the complete software available? How do we make the completely controlled from the software point-of-view. So there is where we found that that the CI use of very good challenging, you know, what do you call, user complete flexibility in how you want to define your data centers. >> Actual performance performance, that's really great. But I meant from the promises Nutanix made from a roadmap thing. This feature will be available on what day, you know, three months from now, a year from now. Were they actually able to deliver based on your own internal roadmap, and the capability you needed? >> Let me put it now this way. So if you look at the kind of investment that we have been making, in Nutanix and Lenovo, so you can be pretty much assured that these promises are kept 'cause otherwise we would not be making that. So Brazil was just a start that we are just going ahead. We are just looking at different workloads now. We have already looked at exchangeable close, which is currently in January and getting installed now. We have looked at video close one of the largest in Capgemini, we have 42 nodes of Nutanix running for 410,000 medias. So based out of Bangalore and Mumbai. So if we just, the performance, if it was not met I don't think we would have expanded the way we have expanded. >> Changed decisions. I think really ultimately, as Deepu mentioned, they started off with a pilot, as you mentioned, obviously in Brazil, and he's ended up taking this globally, which has been a great success story for both of our organizations. >> Right, could you give some more color on the partnership? >> Yeah sure, so I think Capgemini's a great global systems integrator for us. Both to sell to, obviously, as well as sell through, and they're doing some pretty amazing things with their customers and I think one of the great things that we're seeing in this particular instance, as we mentioned, Nutanix, leader in the hyper-converged space, and Deepu's made a call on them, based on their performance, and their basic feature set in their suite. And then ultimately Lenovo, who's number one customer service, number one reliability, number one quality in industry on independence, so you put 'em together, we ended up having a great relationship from that point, and then it's built confidence inside Capgemini now, for us to be going out to their customers and driving this solution out into their customer base. So it's once again, a great outcome for both of our organizations. >> Lenovo's been a traditional partner for us, it's not that new to us, so one of the major reasons is that they want a global reach and we have global data centers, and we have got global footprints, and it's a pretty good time. >> Deepu, how are you measuring the relationship? Any success metrics, from either the application deployments or you know, how do you measure internally and share that with your teams? >> So we have timelines on our consolidation, modernization, et cetera, as long as that is met, together with Lenovo, Nutanix, we are very good. >> So I'd love to hear about day two operations. What are some of the benefits you've seen from a people, resource talent, have you seen resources freed up to do other projects? What are some of the interesting projects that you've done as a result of freeing up time? >> So currently we are progressing through this particular journey, so this year we have a huge focus on the automation piece of the data center. So we are in the beginning stages of getting automation, automation in the sense that the normal proactive activates, all are given. So we are not talking about that, we are talking about the repetitive task, which is less part of the data center and that we have started. So basically we are looking around for any virtually reduction in our ticket volumes, our, you know, the normal work which is being done by the normal engineers so that the can be freed up for these kind of modernization projects. So that's what we are looking at, so let's see how it goes. >> Deepu, one of the things that we're talking about at this show is beyond just the HCI, it's cloud, even edge, what kind of futures do you see for Capgemini in general, and maybe with Nutanix and Lenovo relationship. >> As I said in the beginning, hybrid cloud was one of the requirements for choosing the correct partner for our data center modernization. So currently as we are beginning this part of the journey so moving the data seamlessly into the cloud is one of the key requirements of Capgemini. From an applications standpoint, from a visibility standpoint, et cetera, so we will be looking at which applications easy target for moving into the cloud, and we will be doing that and we believe that Nutanix, hybrid cloud technology will be able to help us in achieving that. >> And I think Stu, that's a really good point because I think what Deepu's just describing is effectively what we see happening in the industry everywhere. You know, we go back 20 years in the industry, a few of us have been around that long, and we remember like a homogeneous environment, everyone would say, I'm this vendor shop, they've got network administrators patching servers, when we're getting hardware put on site and customers are doing all of the integration on site themselves. That's just what the industry did back then. Now, as we see workloads changing it's a little bit like cloud. Three years ago everyone was like, I'm going to be this cloud vendor. That's it, that's my cloud vendor solution, right. However now it's become really acquiring the workload infrastructure and the software suites in line with customers' specific workload requirements, and so now, instead of going after the one cloud provider, now you've got a cloud provider in marketing, you've got a cloud provider in ERP, you've got a cloud provider in IT. So that's why this whole multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, type scenario's really starting to proliferate throughout the customer base. And you really find that, as Deepu just mentioned, they're starting, customers are really looking for how do they manage cloud, multiple clouds in multiple ways, with different workloads, and they're really going out and looking and exploring, how to best address that and I thing once again the Nutanix-Lenovo solution's fantastic for that. I mean you're going to see that proliferate more and more in the industry over the next couple of years. >> So one of the, sorry Stu, one of the comments throughout the show has been, you know what, and this is not a pick on Nutanix or anyone else, I just, both of you guys are not from North America or Western Europe, is that the focus, a lot of vendor's focus has been on Western Europe and America, from a cloud perspective. How do you feel that Nutanix relationship from both a customer and as a partner, has been, on expanding capability beyond North American and Western Europe clouds? >> Rod: Why don't you go first, Deepu. >> Yeah, so if you look at, traditional Amazon Azure, so we have their clouds which are already available in India. So we have been checking that now, we have been looking at various options for the biggest workloads. But predominantly, our predominant workloads have been on the European and the North American cloud for lots of reasons, because if you look at Amazon or Azure, they're coming recently into the Asian footprint with (mumbles) if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, but I mean I think we will get there. >> So I think from our perspective, we break the world into five different geographies. So China, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America and South America. And when you look at our earnings this last quarter, I'm only about two weeks away from our next earnings so I can't say anything about Q1, but the Q4, calendar Q4, we grew about 17% year-on-year but we grew double-digit growth in every one of those geographies, consistently. So in Nutanix, with our HX solution, which is really what we're talking about today, my Asia-Pacific team is growing just as fast, if not actually a little bit faster, than my North America teams. So we see that this technology actually being a real world-wide phenomenon and it's really growing everywhere. Japan is fantastic, India's fantastic for me. Obviously Western Europe. Deepu's a great example, 'cause he's deploying this globally across all of the geographies and I think we're seeing a lot of our G2000 customers, really addressing that, that way. But we see a lot of local companies as well, driving it across the geographies. Asia-Pacific's a great example. >> So if you look at, again, from a CA Nutanix-Lenovo standpoint, we have been going evening everything out so we have recently done that on 16 nodes within Bangalore and Mumbai, so that's a pretty good story. >> Alright, well, Deepu George, thank you so much for joining us, Rod Lappin, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> Thanks Stu, thanks Keith. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we've got a full day of Day 2 coverage here of theCUBE and Nutanix .NEXT 2018, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live! From Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE's Cube exclusive coverage of three days of wall to wall interviews here at HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier, your host with Dave Vellante, cohost. And our next two guest is Rod Bagg, VP of Analytics, Customer Support, Data Center, Infrastructure, HPE, formerly Nimble now HPE. and Paul Sabin, Senior Network and Infrastructure Manager at Baker Botts LLP. Guys, thanks for joining on theCUBE. >> Male Voices: Thanks for having us. >> So we talked before we came on camera about all the great stories Nimble obviously part of the fold here at HP Enterprise. Your customer stories. Let's get right into it. Tell your story about how Nimble put you out of a job. That's my favorite one. Go. >> Okay, so when I started or when we bought Nimble Storage, I was the senior storage engineer. So we purchased it, we brought it in-house. It was up within, within an hour, I was already starting carve out LUNs. At that point, I'm using the restful APIs to carve out the rest of the 200 LUNS that we needed. Presenting it to the hosts. And by the end of it, it ran itself. Between InfoSight and the fact that the product just is so easily automated, I kid you not, true story, at the end of the year when we were doing our self evaluations, my evaluation said, and congratulations, you don't need me anymore. My position is obsolete. And the management came back and said, Paul, you're absolutely right. We agree that we don't need this position anymore so we're going to promote you to the senior network infrastructure team. (John laughs) So I manage that now. >> So you got promoted. But this is a trend in automation. This is the DevOps, this is the programmable infrastructure world we're moving into with hybrid. >> Exactly. Rod, this is big deal. >> Yeah, yeah exactly. InfoSight as we see it plays a big role in that. Really the product is simple and being able to automate that. But InfoSight giving our customers sort of visibility at a very deep level into how the systems are performing. And what we do on the backend to drive availability really takes a lot of pain off of our customers. Not sure that we put everybody out of work but we certainly make life easier. So that they can focus on the business aspect. >> And you automate those tasks the way that really should be automated and that's a cool thing. >> Yup. >> Take a minute. I'll like you to take a minute just to explain what the product is and what you guys are doing. Just so we can get that out there as context. And then jump into some more stories. >> Yeah so from an InfoSight perspective? >> John: Yeah. >> So InfoSight is our predictive cloud analytics platform that uses machine learning to predict and prevent problems from occurring to our customers. So we're not disrupting their business. And so we collect somewhere in the order of, about maybe 25 million pieces of information from every array and the virtual environment. Everyday from every single array. All of that gets into a galactic database, where we have a team of data scientists working with our support engineers and our product engineers to build wellness rules. We have about eight hundred health checks that are really looking out at every part of the infrastructure for our customers and really avoiding issues for them. >> So you take the data across your entire install base. >> Rod: Yup. >> I'm sure you take care of the data so it's not all-- >> Rod: Oh yeah, it's all secure. >> Secure and nanomized. And then use that as predictive to prescribe or both or how are you-- >> Yeah both. So our real goal there is that if we know of an issue, that's either we found in our labs or maybe one customer has experienced it. Really, we're doing everything we possibly can to analyze that issue across the entire install base. So we're learning from peers. >> Male Voice: Yup. >> And applying those learnings across the install base and preventing other customers from hitting that issue. >> The system is autodidactic in this sense. It learns and then applies, is that right? >> Yeah. So we do machine learning. Semi-supervised in a lot of cases. So where we've seen and issue and we can train the models. And then it will look out for those sort of issue across the entire install. >> John: I like the notion of wellness. >> Yup. >> Brings some of the people we relate to. We also heard terms like self-driving storage. >> Yup. >> Layoff testers. >> Yeah. >> But this is again, the trend that really is needed. Share other stories that you have because this is really where IT is going as it moves to a different kind of application and consumption model for you guys. >> Right so, well, kind of touching about what he was talking about, when you're as a storage guy, what's the number one thing that us storage guys have to do, is we have to prove that it's not the storage that's the problem. So usually, what happened was, in the old world, I would produce some statistics of, okay, and here's the IOPS that we're producing and here's the latency during this time. So based on this, it wasn't me, I don't know who it was. I'm just going to tell you it's not me. In the new world-- [John] That was the finger pointing world. >> Yes it was! >> The other guy got it. >> But with InfoSight, it's like hey, I can tell you but you're also welcome to go here as well. But let me show you VMM site where it's going to show you, not only what was happening at the storage. But let me take you all the way down to the host and then the VM and we're going to find this problem. And yeah, turns out sometimes it's going to be the VM that's all of a sudden taking whatever reason adding a huge amount of latency. And that, is something that, there's no more finger pointing in it anymore. All of a sudden, we're in the same team, it's like this kumbaya thing. >> That's awesome. It's good for the cohesiveness as a team. But also it's time savers too. When you reduce the steps to do things, you get your weekends back as you guys say before you came on camera. Tell the story about how you had to do all this work on the provisioning on the replication side, >> Sure. When we deployed the arrays, we decided it was business decision to go ahead and put the production arrays into our production data center and then we would do the DR at a later time. So I've got all of my data live, on production. And they say, okay, we're adding our Nimble storage at our DR site. Paul, how much replication bandwidth do we need? And so, same story. In the old world, you go and you pull your statistics from your replication technology, you put it in excel spreadsheet, you figure out, okay, here's my peaks and I just want to say, if we fall behind just a little bit, this is what we can do. And so usually what happens is, I say, guys, in my best guess, based on what I can see from my limited scope because my eyes are bleeding at this point. >> From the spreadsheet. You're in a spreadsheet right now. >> Paul: Yes, exactly. >> You're in spreadsheet hell. >> I'm in spreadsheet hell. And so what I do is, after about a weekend's worth of work, I put in this recommendation and I usually fluff it because I could be wrong in my statistics and so this is what I end up creating. >> You don't want to be under. You want to be over. >> Exactly, I'm always trying to do that. So the firm, I'm, hopefully this is, nobody's watching at the office, but sometimes they maybe overpaying for something because I just don't want to make that chance. In the new world, this is actually the coolest thing ever. So I'm on InfoSight and I go to this little dropdown, it's like the tool planner, okay, what's that? Where it's going to tell you what you need for bandwidth based on your actual real data. So then I'm pulling, like okay, based on this time, what is the replication if I want to do it every hour. And what if I want to do it every two hours? So then I just take that and I turn it into this report that I got to present to the executive team and they're like, oh my goodness, you have certainly stepped up. How many weekends did you use on this one? And you know, I'm not going to tell them it took me five minutes in InfoSight (John laughs) to be able to create this report. >> Now that they. >> But now they know. >> Cat's out, but you already got promoted. >> Oh that's true. >> Hey Rod, can you talk about the decision to acquire Nimble. What was the genesis. Obviously there's a portfolio component, tuck-ins, fill in some gaps. But there's this other sort of IP piece. Maybe take us back. >> Yeah, so certainly, there was the portfolio fit with the storage platform. So that was obviously a big part of it. I think the other obviously big part was InfoSight. So the idea that what we're doing there with our customers and approving the availability of the systems and the operational performance of the system and keeping a close eye on that to make sure it's optimized. So all that value prop around InfoSight was a big part of the decision I think. We are working on extending InfoSight into the HP product line. Starting with 3PAR so we are working already with that engineering team. To be able to bring some of these features out as quickly as we can into the 3PAR world as well. >> So what is that, from an engineering standpoint, is that sort of the requirement there is to point InfoSight at the data, the 3PAR data? >> Yeah exactly. So 3PAR does collect a lot of data already. >> Yeah sure do. >> So really, we're just pulling that data into our pipelines and so on within InfoSight and taking advantage of some of the machine learning and algorithms and so on that we already do. Things like DMVision, would be possible and so on in that environment as well if you're a 3PAR customer. >> It's interesting. Back in, maybe 10 years ago, 3PAR was sort of the gold standard of what we used to call the hero report. >> Rod: That's right, yup, yeah. People love that. >> Thin provisioning. What impact it was. >> Rod: Yup. How much you save, et cetera. And then that predated the whole big data analytics years right? >> Rod: Yeah, exactly. >> So when Nimble started, they could have started with that premise. Right around that time. >> Yeah, yup. >> I remember when I first saw it, I was like wow this is magic. >> Yeah exactly. That was the premise, was to really apply data science to all of that data that was coming in. Really transform the support experience for Nimble. And I think that's the other big element for HP as well. There's lots of that we do in our support organization that, to be honest, it's quite enviable, by a lot of storage and high tech vendors. >> You guys took a different approach. I think what's really notable for me, which I'm impressed with is, everyone talks about this but very few put into action, is making the user experience center, >> Rod: Yeah exactly. >> Of the value. I mean all of the things you talk about, the benefits, is really centered around your experience right. Saving you time, making your life easier, shifting the automation, that could be automated with the right things. And moving into higher value things. So Paul, what's your thoughts on this as it goes forward. This world is evolving. We're hearing the message here, simplifying, hybrid IT, you got cloud right on the doorstep, multiple clouds are going to be the endgame, we'll know all this, so all said and done. Whole new infrastructure is going to be out there. What's your view of how that user experience for the practitioners will evolve. What's your vision. How do you see it playing out. >> Rod: Be out of a job again. (Paul laughs) >> No, true story. The firm decided that they were going to bring us some people to help us look into what cloud we should, or how we should utilize the cloud because even from us, we're trying to keep ourselves agile as a law firm. Because if we can provide our services in a better, more meaningful and faster way, that gives us a competitive edge. So we brought in this team and they went over all of our IOPS and at the time it was under the different storage system so it took at least 20, 30 hours of my time to get all these numbers that they wanted. And then they created this report for us. Which I thought was really meaningful and valuable. The last line was, you should do cloud work, cloud makes sense. So that was it. Solid advice you know. Money well spent. (laughs) >> And that's what Meg's basically saying in the key note. The right mix of cloud versus on-prem. Certainly law firms have proprietary information and they want it secure. I guess my question really is, fundamentally is, a provocative one, I'd love to get your thoughts on. Serious question, you can laugh at at it a little bit but with AI bots coming, you can almost see these kinds of legal tasks being automated away. So, you might be, next promotion is taking over the firm. That's where big data can in. So how are you guys looking at that as a firm because I'm sure the lawyers are saying, hey you know what, I can shift my value to higher yield activities >> Paul: Exactly. >> Where that makes sense. You guys talk about that at all? >> We do. And I actually use the example of NASA. I really love NASA, I'm a huge fan. And NASA decide, they declared, we're going to go to Mars. We're going to do this. How are we going to do this? We have to let go of our operational stuff. We have to let go, I mean we can launch the shuttle all day long, we're comfortable with that. We can go into the space station, we're comfortable with that. But now, we've got to go new. And the way we have to do that is, we have to drop this stuff. Let's let other people do this. Let's let the InfoSight team start handling a lot of that work for me. And now, I'm asking my team, guys, I want you to start dreaming. Get out of the operational work. Start dreaming out loud. Let's figure out ways we can deliver value to our attorneys. >> Exactly. >> To free them. And let's let them just, again, take that same freedom, with the business intelligence and the machine learning, you're right that they're document management, which is their bread and butter, is their document production. Even that's getting scrutinized or transformed through this machine learning. And so, you could take this as a, as a way of saying no, there goes my job. Or you can say no, now I've got the opportunity to do something even better and cooler and really bring the value. >> And stretching. That's the whole stretch goal. Having that moonshot, in this case Mars. >> Paul: Mars right. >> It's the stretch and leverage right. >> Paul: Yes. >> That's the concept. How do you apply that to storage because now HP's got the composability, they got synergy. >> Paul: Yeah, yup. >> They have all kinds of. Now glue layer's kind of developing. We heard Antonio Neri in the press and analyst queue. We heard Meg Whitman talk about, you know, most her acquisitions have been in software, except for maybe one or two, over the past couple years, have been software. >> Paul: Yup. >> So, hardware, software kind of blending. >> Yeah. I think so, from the storage perspective certainly, I think that's happening. I think from the InfoSight perspective, where we see that going, is again, today when we put a lot of effort into our recommendation models. And that's an area that's very much in the deep data sciences realm. So when we come up with those recommendations, >> John: Umhmm. >> you know, we do things where we can prevent people from hitting issues and not just sort of happen automatically but some of these things are, something needs changing in their environment. So maybe, maybe there's a QoS policy that should be applied on the array to optimize performance because of some peak workload during Christmas, something of that nature. So that's still a last mile problem for us because you've got a human at the other end that's got to go in there and fix it and hopefully do it right and not ignore it and everything else. >> I can see the headline now, storage wellness coming to HP. >> Rod: Yeah exactly. >> But this is really interesting, comes with self-healing right. >> So that's where we want to go with that. That is really the thing we're working towards in the vision is, how do go and do that, change those QoS policies for the customer where we could inject, let's say, a change control within their change management system. They can go hit a button which we orchestrate that change for them. It's all documented and well controlled. >> It's not just storing the data, it's being data driven for the data being stored in the self crafting storage. >> Rod: Exactly, yeah, exactly. >> Rod, Paul thanks so much for sharing the stories and congratulations on the promotion. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations on InfoSight. You guys got great story there. >> But I never get promoted. (everyone laughs) >> Come in theCUBE, >> great story right. >> get promoted. >> Birds of a feather. >> Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. More live coverage here from theCUBE. Here at HP Discover 2017 after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (lively music)

from galvanized San Francisco extraction signal from the noise it's the kue cover the apache spark community event brought you IBM now your host John free George okay welcome back everyone we are live in San Francisco for this special q presentation with the IBM sparkman the event here live at galvanized in San Francisco workspace incubator great place for developer education IBM's big announcement today their commitment to spark they didn't see any numbers but I'm counting in the hundreds of millions of years to quote Papa Chiana on my call with him on Friday with rod $17 fuck yeah holler last for hundreds of millions yeah hundred millions of dollars getting late in the day going to be your coming rod Smith's our next guest rod welcome to the cube thank you very much with a catalyst behind spark at IBM worked hard on it yeah you guys tell a story what's the story well we worked on big data and I have a group of folks that go out and work with customers all the time and what we were doing Hadoop we would do these cool applications that sometimes you know small clusters 20 minutes you get a result and a customer would say can you do that in a couple seconds kind of look around and go what changed it means it did the business problem and they couldn't tell us but it's one of those data points in your head that go something's not quite right you know what's what's changing or what are they trying to tell me that they can't and that's when we started learning you know customers were looking for technology that they could iterate on quickly you know open-ended questions it wasn't the give me a problem do the game pew pew output I'm done this was oh gee there's the journey I now see some interesting insights I have other questions was it was something not right the data that they got didn't match their hypothesis or was it the expectation that if I can do it fast on google and find a Thai restaurant down the block well so I can it went that way something doesn't right what was with me that said why can't you tell me what you're really trying to accomplish what I learned is that as we go through these kind of digital transfer mation real real time they were thinking about how their business is going to change so fast and so the problems always been for technologists and vendors like IBM tell us the problem we pick out the technology and you're pretty well stuck with it it stays that way and they wanted more flexibility open-ended questions lots of different data sources on demand when they had to have it on this they wanted to see results along the way and they would rather have analytics be approximation that they could use quickly rather than after the fact and more accurate okay so you know when you went through that it wasn't they couldn't find a bi person to talk bad about and I couldn't find a data person so you know it was fun to try to put piece puzzles together and that's where spark came into this so I see a lot of other trends are kind of vectoring into that convergence which is in-memory databases you know the community flash for persistence store on the storage side so this you as a close to all that action what was the aha moment for for within IBM is han hey you know what this spark thing is the next Linux me we got to get out in front of this and help the community go faster and then kind of rising tide floats elbows what was that flash point flow we we had two of them one was that in our commerce group there's ways that they work on online pricing and there's a vendor stander which takes about a week when you get data off of a site or retail site they analyze that they correct the analytics they put it back up again takes about a week but we showed them a spark we could do it in about four hours a week down to four hours and now they started to think oh you know what do we offer customers now we have ways to have not just one product many products let's bring in other data location data traffic data weather data social data so that kind of exploded internally on this is a big change this is something that we can relate to cus of multiple data source of the need for unification and speed and and speed speed first because be first that's a heck all the speed i want to bring other data sets and it's time to value i mean if you're going to be a digital business and look at real time where it's going Netflix others have really set the standard on ok so then i'm a so let's take a next level so rod you're crazy we can't do that it would disrupt all these other businesses we have so how does that conversation happen within IBM the way that happens in IBM is rod you are crazy and you're going to cause me odds it up so please go away and I don't go away easily but you keep pushing on this and part of my job is to work with customers can I show value so I can take the product team saying you need to take this more seriously I've got currency now and then as you just said the marketplace starts to light up spark is on the front page as people are talking about how they're using it well Hadoop is growing too at the same time so it loop does it seeds the market seats the Mars you see you're playing ahead do but if you see the customer challenges and you're like you guys just connect the dots and and then it's back to the customer is talking about what their problems they want to use or the solutions are looking for so yeah it takes time because it's it's risky meaning that all of us have quarterly is what we're doing but how do we now make it safer for people in IBM jump in the water so that eventually they don't hate me so what's your what's your comment when a friend says hey rod you know linux was great but it's a different era oh you know here with cloud and mobile open source with the patch he's evolved to the point where it's very manageable for vendors to be contributed as well with with non company contributors how do you guys see the difference between those two worlds because really this is a Linux moment but there's no big bad main many many computer companies name frames out there but their specialized for like the Z systems are great but like this is scale out commodity hardware a dupe now that's growing how do you how do you describe that because there is a Linux correlation what linux was for open source then operating systems now this is kind of distributed analytics I think you're you're you know the the part of this is kind of real-time digital business transformations and while there is not a you know bad company out there you know amazon and others have shown how they can be online businesses and use analytics and be very effective but i'm a brick and mortar company and an online business how do i do the same thing and spark starts to really show that no they don't have a corner on the market we can compete so that's the big factor on this is well it's not one company doing this it's I need to be able to compete at the speed the businesses that didn't have to see that Amazon started kind of post recession or you know Dom bubble bursting you know web services was just kind of kicking through if we remember our history lessons and what happened was they really had no traction they built some building blocks right they made a good decision to integrate to core building blocks compute and storage and they built from there so in a way you guys can enable companies to have their own amazon like extensive experience because it's a fresh clean cute paper right it is and I think we're spark it's interesting is like you said in two verticals what do i do to retail what do I do in health care what are we doing finance right very specialized I we've shown in Watson you can do Watson for cancer research you can do Watson for cooking right but they're very vertical now so specialized domain expertise becomes really interesting right that's the big part and that's the part I really liked about spark they were the community really thought about solution developers you know they stayed away kind of middle ground I you don't have to be a deep dated person or a deep analytics API person what's the problem you want to solve how can I help you do that I think that's a you know that's interesting is that that's because most people go Jay this is speeds and feeds software we look at the solutions more holistic but then you're really talk about customer problems right the so-called outcomes that go on well that's what and I think that's the part that I've enjoyed is I want to talk to you you know about what your problem is I don't want to talk technology I you know I don't want to have to make a technology choice from stay one spark helps me with that I don't notify programming while all those things come together so I can concentrate we can concentrate on talking to the customer but you know learn from them what are you trying to accomplish so you watch the next things on your list good I just gonna say you know looking at your LinkedIn page i love this at BP emerging technologies for 20 some odd years so you see here you've seen a lot of technology's come a lot of emerging technologies and the acceleration of these technologies is only going more right you have a whole lot more in your portfolio you have to look at today then then you did yesterday or five years ago yeah why is sparks a special in the cornucopia of technologies that you've seen coming over the years it's a good question and and as I've done merging technologies I've learned that I have to you know listen to customers very carefully on it and when I hear those kind of repeatable business patterns do I see an economic change a transformation that really sticks with me and sometimes the old things have start really big you know they start out good and then they fade away but I always look for technologies that seem to have lots of dimensions to them from a business value standpoint that's what attracted me to spark and my team working with some customers on pocs we could do them quickly you know I really like to get to the point where you know we an industry we with notebooks and others we can do solutions in less than four hours for a customer what better thing to take your you know employee to lunch and spat them on the back for you know something that you didn't expect for weeks well one of the exciting things that you guys have done is you shine the spotlight on spark and you opened up the conversation globally around IBM is making a big move spark was a little bit of an outlier and the mainstream press I mean the press we're picking up spark oh yeah berkeley some credibility of great people behind it but now it's like wow it's going to get the attention of CX cxos out there and they're going to be like hmm if ibm's looking at it must be relevant because of the history you guys have with innovation but they're going to ask you the question I'm going to ask you which is it's not baked out yet where are we with this what are you guys going to do how does IBM work with the community to continue to bake out spark because a lot of people are using it bringing it in but it's evolving super fast and that's going to be the question is it baked and how does it get baked faster so I think there is lots of areas that if we just talked about if I'm doing retail or health care or fine it's going to be lots of specialized analytics because that's what spark for me is is enabling custom analytics on this second part is as you think about how you want to look at bigger problems I think that many times are learning is to try to you know once we got a technology lets make everything fit it rather than starting to separate it by business problems and I think we can do that now or we can bring to the table technology learning best practices around this and solutions I think you know at the end of the day it's house part can be integrated into a business solution and our customers very quickly and hopefully those customers see it broadly from interoperability standpoint of what they're going to do so the final question I have for you is what was the biggest learning that you've taken away from this process that was magnified through this whole journey of a taking IBM from being a participant in the as a citizen in the community early on as a founding member of spark this is back in two thousand nine so it wasn't like no one knew he was going on and you know we bird cover on Hadoop from the beginning so we'd love to watch these ecosystems grow but from from the early days to now today mmm what was the biggest thing that you learned that was magnified out of all the reactions all the feedback all the customers what can you share I I think for me when we did a spark hack you know our hackathon piece when 28,000 IBM ER showed up with ideas that told us twenty eight thousand 28,000 so now you stopped and 28,000 people who were focused on the customer so they had a thought of how this could be relevant this is great I mean this isn't like back talking for this isn't one little vein with a little stream it's big and it big was what we can do for our customer when was that um about two months ago how did you pull that off just out an email blast all the IBM's put on the message board to a crowd chat what did you do well when you put out an email blast the second one is you put on a webcam to explain to people what you're going to do with it what you'd like them to do and I'll we're setting it up and and then you step back and you know kind of cross your fingers hope people show up and then when you know you invite ten thousand and twenty eight thousand show up you kind of know that we're turning a corner as a company on understanding how we can use that for this this also highlights this whole connectedness apps internet of things and people are things to so their mobile device when you have that kind of people close to the action the creativity is there right there on the front lines and they don't feel like that the work they do is going to be taken by the machinery in the old days I got to go back all these hurdles I gotta jump now they could instantly be there with some solutions so that's that's super compelling the next question is security and how does how do you see that leaving in because now one of the things that came up will first meeting let me back up but I get this you think about security question for a second last week ahead dupe summit we were talking with the Hadoop ecosystem Hortonworks ODP conversations etc but when you looked at kind of like reading the tea leaves it was sparked that was kind of stealing the show the subtext was smart all the spark sessions were packed the developers had was salivating over sparks like to hear that I did why why is that why are the Hadoop developers salivating over spark is it because they wanted to go faster do they see extensions any thoughts I think that I've say it two ways one is I think there was and since I did who do for quite a while I think people thought for a while Hadoop was going to be an analytics platform and it it kind of went down the path of being immoral generalized platform so you can do more than MapReduce jobs so there's been this pent-up demand for really analytics focus and spark offered that focus and the performance side I think that's the parts in Hadoop sold kind of a false dream or it didn't materialize fast but I don't think of material out of false treaty I'm saying if they promise them around yeah it well and people set those you know well the fresh maybe yeah I don't think the vendors all I think was more than well vendors you know it did to unstructured data does that unstructured data does that storing data and I didn't be able to act on it creates some interesting dynamics I mean I've worked with customers who you know started to put data in Hadoop but to have put data dupe you know we're only going to do a year's worth of data and then putting three years of data because they want to do monte pucker up my Carlo simulations against a Monty Python it's time you threw water on us and we love yours we on the cube but the problem says we're talking about before like you know our internal use we can produce you know interesting innovations in days that's going to attract audiences because now they can show their you know business people what they can do for them that's what's really driving this I mean if you gotta see XO you know CMO says you know show me what you can do you know do segmentation on my population for these products they want it in in minutes not so you know going to run it in different jobs and the over a certain period of time I was just talking with the CEOs of docusign box 18 1018 Syrian kinky was executive director and then EVP a platform that Salesforce the common thread amongst those executives was the new digital transformation has such a dynamic or impactful economic impact yes I mean dr. Sanyal using examples how literally Deutsche Telekom saved 230 million dollars on one process yes one process yes with analytics and yeah process improvements extreme it sounds funny but it's extremely low hanging fruit they haven't had technology and the economics and be able support it now we do and now you're seeing the solution developer go I think I can make a business result faster yeah and if they can show it then businesses react and I think that's the beautiful thing about what Hadoop is done I mean I brought that up earlier trying to tease that out with reality we're seeing is that that mark is continuing to grow but there's a world beyond Hadoop yep I mean Hortonworks this public company I mean IBM is massive so you got Hadoop and then sparks a beautiful extension to that that enables so much more well I think spark will go further because it's more to me is another dimension it's an integration technology so i can have sparked up to legacy systems without hadoop you know in there doing analytics in there being an avenue for doing joins on data doing analytics on unstructured and transactional data whether data pulling it all together and I think that's the again talking about multi-dimensional that's what that was hard even five years ago so any relational database that's a nightmare yeah and you're asked about security so you want to touch on yeah okay go ahead so part of the things that I like about spark is the technology is called resilient distributed data sets r dds so I read data from a source and I make it into this r DD I can work on it that gives me a great data point or a great interaction with a Cassandra datastax did a really great job of a spark driver so you think about this in businesses for a db2 or something now I know where I can put my security and my governance I can put those at certain endpoints now as i'm reading in my application writing these things out so again back to my point of an integration it's not something that i'm trying to get around a business i'm at integrating extending their life and/or capabilities that's right so I got to ask you the internal IBM question my last question is it what's the vibe like at IBM because you know I've been you know I worked at IBM way back in the day back in the 80s and the cultures changed right so much mm-hmm but there's still a huge technical group of people at IBM so I got to ask you the question with all this new cloud innovation all this new capabilities to do stuff differently what's it like for all the technical guys at IBM right now because they got to be like Hayden we can now do this we can so new capabilities are emerging what's the what's the vibe like and what are some of the things that that are low-hanging fruit that are that our game change because low-hanging fruit is game-changing today oh yes I what's the vibe eternally at idea I've internally is very hot I mean the guys and gals at this you look at cloud computing look we've done with bluemix it got is getting you know great recent press it's getting great results with customers back to this time to value piece it's new to us I mean there's only a small group that started that so now the rest of the IBM arts are going this is really cool how do we do it now you've got analytics that you know we're starting you've been you know competencies are on this now you can take the real-time aspect so yeah the five is really all those little silos you know identity system here I got to build all the software now you can gotta go horizontal yeah so you know that's kind of a new thing that's kind of exciting it's gonna be fun to watch my final question I guess is my final final question is have you been keeping track this is the sixth and final time analytics well rods great to have you on the cube you're awesome great great commentary great great insight spark in the cloud is what data bricks announce what about an on-premise i'm a customer i want i want on prem I don't necessarily want to do what's next I 40 s or other stuff oh I think you're going to see you know like hybrid models for cloud where spark as a service is there on prem i think one of the really exciting parts to me is that one the unified program model to the portability of the analytic models so let's say I start on prom because I'm worried about security and other things and then I want to move it to a cloud service well I don't have to go rewrite it I can just move the analytics over from a model standpoint so I think you're going to see this evolved very fast as people want to do either on prem or hybrid or you know dedicated cuz of the integration capabilities and the distributed nature of it that's the point yep awesome well I'll let you get the last word on the segment share what the folks who's not or aren't watching what is this all about today why is in San Francisco today IBM's announcement what's so groundbreaking about it I know you're part of it a little bit biased but share the folks why what why now what's this all about what's what's what's going on here well we think that the kind of epicenter for spark innovation is here in San Francisco amp lab with data bricks and others are doing here and we want to be a part of that and I think spark technology senator setting up is about how we can contribute and learn and you know help the community grow we think this is gonna you brought some food to the party I mean you are I said earlier beer right you bring a you know the ml yeah you got them back other wine napa valley of course you got to go to wine well craft beers good north north bay thanks so much for coming on the cube really appreciate the insight because it is a great color from an expert IBM here we're on the ground this is the cube special presentation live in San Ruby back with more with live coverage of the breakouts in the event tonight IBM spark community event here in san fran at the galvanized workspace education center we write back

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Miami, Miami Beach. Specifically, not a bad location to have a conference. Lisa Martin here with the Cube live at IFS Unleashed. We're gonna be having a great conversation next about Ization moments of Service Rules. Royces here, as is the C of IFS for aerospace and defense. Scott Camani. Nick Ward joins us as well, the VP of Digital Systems at Roll Royce. Guys, excited to have you on the program and welcome back. >>Thank you very much. Nice to be back. It's >>Been three years since the last IFS show. I love How's Scott? I was talking with Darren Roots earlier today and I said, Well, didn't it used to be IFS world? And he said, Yes. And I said, I love the name. I would love to, to unpack that with your cheek marketing officer because it, there's a lot of, of, of power behind Unleash. A lot of companies do such and such world or accelerate, but we're talking about unleashing the power of the technology to help customers deliver those moments of service. Yes. Love it. So Scott, start us off here. Talk about ization. That's a relatively new term to me. Sure. Help me understand what it means, because IFS is a pioneer in this sense. >>We are. So one of the things that IFS is always trying to do is to try to find a way to help our customers to realize a moment of service. And that moment of service is really when they found the ability to delight their customers. And when we look at the way in which we're trying to drive those business outcomes for our customers, ization seems to be at the core of it. So whether it's the ability for a company to use a product, a service, or an outcome, they're driving ization in a way where they're shaping their business. They're orchestrating their customers and their people and their assets behind a val value chain that helps them to provide a delightful experience for their customers. And with IFS being focused on Lifecycle asset management, we no longer have customers that have to choose from best of suite or best of breed. They can actually have both with ifs. And that's something we're really excited to provide to our customers and more excited for our customers to realize that value with their customers, their partners. Along the way. >>You, you mentioned customer delight and it's a term that we, we all use it, right? But there's so much power and, and capabilities and metrics behind that phrase, customer delight, which will unpack Nick bringing you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about what your role is at Rolls Royce. My first thought when I saw you was, oh, the fancy cars, but we're talking about aerospace and the fence, so give us a little bit of a history. >>Okay. So yes, we don't make cars is the first point. So we are, we are power, we do power as a service. So we are most well known, I guess for large aircraft airliners. You know, if you've, if you've flown here to Miami, there's probably a 50 50 chance you've flown on a Rod Roy powered aircraft. Our market segment is what we call wide bodied aircraft where you go on, there's two aisles. So the larger section of the market, and we, we provide power, so we provide the engines, but more importantly, we've been a ization company, a service company for at least two decades. We, we have a, a service relationship we call total care. And the whole idea of total care is, yes, I have my engine, it's on my aircraft, but I take care of it. I make sure it's available to fly when you need to fly it. And all of the things that have to come together to make that happen, it's a service company. >>Service company. Talk to me a little bit about, and I wanna get got your perspective as well, but the relationship that Roll Royce and IFS have this is a little bit unique. >>Well, I can start, but I I think Nick's gonna be better served to tell us about that as our customer. Nick and I actually started this journey about four years ago, and what we did was, is we were working closely with our perspective customer Rolls-Royce identified what they were looking for as a desired business outcome. And then we found a way through the technology and the software that we provide to all of our enterprise customers globally to find a solution that actually helped to provide a, an outcome not only to Rolls-Royce, but also to our collective downstream customers, commercial operators around the globe. So that's where we started the journey and we're continuing our discussions around other solutions, but that's how we started and it's been an incredible partnership. We're so happy and proud to have Nick as a customer and a advocate of all things ifs and I'll let him kind of continue from his point of view how he sees the partnership in the relationship. >>No, thank you Scott. I think we've, we've always, we've valued the kind of relationship that we have because I think IFS has always got Rolls Royce in terms of strategic direction. What do we try to do? I said, we're a service company. You know, we, we are, we have to have a service relationship with our, our customers, our airlines. To have a service relationship, you have to be able to connect to your service customer. And ifs is a big part of how we connect for data. That's how do we understand what the airline is doing with the engines, but it's also how we return data back into the airline. So we are, we're get a very close integrated relation between us, our airlines, through a bridge that, that ifs create through the maintenance product. Got it. So it works really well. >>I I think I'd make one other point. One of the things that we've always focused on is quantifiable business value. The only way a partnership like this could possibly work is if we have a desired business outcome, but if we're providing value, So the value work that we did in conjunction with Rolls Royce and really identifying that helped to support the business case that allowed this partnership to really begin and flourish. So I I, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that business value element that's really core to everything we do and all the, the conversations that Nick and I have. >>Well, it's all about outcomes. Absolutely. It's all about outcomes. It >>Is, it has to be about, it's about moments of service, right? That's why we're here, right? So perhaps a moment of service for Robs Royce is every time you're a passenger, you're going through the terminal. You expect your aircraft to be there, ready, waiting for you to get on and depart on time. And our moment of service is every aircraft takes off on time, every time we live. When we die by the quality of that statement, how well we live up to that statement, I think I checked this morning, there's something alike, 600 aircraft in the sky right now with Rolls Royce power carrying passengers. All of those passengers have relied on that moment. Service happening regularly like clockwork. Every single time you don't get any forgiveness for a delay, you get very little forgiveness for a cancellation that has to happen. And then so many things have to come together for that to happen. >>Those 600 aircraft, that's maybe 200,000 people right now in the sky, Wow. Those 200,000 people are trying to connect, They're trying to connect with friends, they're trying to connect with loved ones, family, colleagues, whatever the purpose is of that trip. It's really important to them. And we just have to make sure that that happens for us. We've had something like a million flights so far this year, 300 million people relying on that moment of so is happening. So I really resonate with, with the language that Scott users about the importance of sort of that focal point on when does it all come together? It comes together when as a passenger, I get on the plane and it goes and I get no issues. >>Right. Well people don't tolerate fragmented experiences anymore. No, no. I think one of the things that was in short supply during the pandemic was patience and tolerance. Sure. Not sure how much of that's gonna come back, right? But those integrated connected experiences, as you described so eloquently, Nick, those are table stakes for the customers, but also the brands behind them because of customers are unhappy, the churn rates go way up. And you see that reflected in obviously the success of the business and what you guys are doing together is seems to be quite powerful. Now then when you were on the cube with us three years ago in Boston at IFS back then you first introduced the intelligent engine and the Blue Data thread. Let's talk about the intelligent engine. Just give our audience a refresher of what that actually entails. >>So perhaps if we just step one one step back for that, just to understand how this fits in. So Roro is a service organization. We talked about that. What that means is we take a lot of the, the risk and the uncertainty away from our airline customers on the availability, the costs and maintenance effort associated with having a, having a chat engine. These are incredibly complicated and complex and sophisticated pieces of equipment. The most expensive, most sophisticated pieces of an aircraft. Managing that is, is difficult. And every airline does not want to have to focus on that. They wanna focus on being able to get the passenger on the air after, fly it, look after the airframe. So our role in that is to take that risk away, is to manage those engines, look after their health, look after their life, make sure they're available to fly whenever they need to fly. >>So for us to understand that, we then have to have data, we have to understand the state of every engine, where it is, the health of the engine, the life of that engine, what do we need to do next to that engine? And we can't do that unless we have data and that data flows into a digital platform. The intelligent engine, which is our cloud based ai, big data, all of the iot, all of the big buzzwords are there, right? So the data flows into that, that lets us run the models. It lets us understand, I can see something maybe it's a, it's a small issue, but if I leave it alone, it become a bigger issue. And maybe that will cause disruption further down the line. So we need to understand that we need to preempt it. So preemptive predictive maintenance is a, is a big part of the intelligent engine, but it's more than just that. >>It's also, we can understand how that engine is being flown. We can understand is it having a really intense flight? Is it having a more benign, gentle flight? Wow. That change time after the flight, typically after the flight. But what that means is we can then understand, actually we can keep that engine on the wing longer then you might otherwise have to do, If you have no data, you have to be conservative, safety rules, everything. Sure. So data allows you to say, actually I'm being overly conservative in this space. I can get more flying bios, flying hours from my product by extending the interval between maintenance and the intelligent engine has a large part to play in us justifying that we're able to do that. And then the final part that it does is eventually the engine is gonna have to come off from maintenance. >>These things fly 5 million miles between overhauls. You imagine you try to do that in your family car. It's, it doesn't happen. It's incredibly sophisticated thing can fly 5 million miles and then we take it off for a major overhaul. But there are thousands of these engines in the fleet. We have to understand which engine is going to come off when for what reason, and prepare our maintenance network to then receive the engine and deal with it and get it back to the customer. So the intelligent engine has a massive part to play in understanding the maintenance demand that the flying fleet is then creating. >>Wow, that's fascinating. And so you talked about that three years ago. What's next for that? I imagine there's only more evolution that's gonna happen. >>It keeps growing. It keeps growing. It's driven by the data. The more data we have, the more that we can do with that. I think as well that, you know, one of the big places that we've we've gone is you can do as much predictive analytics as you, like, there's a lot of people we'll talk about doing predictive analytics, but if you don't do the hard yards of turning predictive analytics into outcome Yeah. Then what did you get? You, you got a bit of smart advice. So we, we take that maintenance demand, we then have to understand how that drives the orchestration and the management of all the parts, the people, the work scope definition, the allocating an engine into a maintenance slot, exactly when it's gonna go. And what are we gonna do to, how do we control and manage our inventory to make sure that engine is gonna go through. >>How do we then actually execute the work inside our, our our overall shops? How do we get that engine back and and integrate our logistics process. So the intelligent engine is, if you like, the shiny front end of a process, it's all the buzzwords, but actually the hard yards behind the scene is just as if not more important to get right. And again, this is why I really like the moment of service concept. Because without that, the moment of service doesn't happen. The engine's not there, the part wasn't there. The field service maintenance guy wasn't there to go fix it. >>And brands are affected >>An, an aircraft on the ground earns no revenue for anybody. No. It's, it's a cost. It's it's a big sink of cost. It >>Is, it is. Absolutely. >>And you're helping aircraft only earn engines only earn when they fly. Yeah, >>Yeah. Absolutely. And what a fascinating, the intelligent engine. Scott, talk a little bit about, we talking about power, we can't not talk about sustainability. Yes, I understand that IFS has a new inaugural awards program that Rolls Roys was a recipient of the Change for Good sustainability awards. Congratulations. Thank you very much. And to Scott, talk to me a little bit about the Change for Good program sustainability program. What types of organizations across the industries of expertise are you looking for and why does Rules ROY really highlight what a winner embodies? >>So since Darren has joined IFS as the ceo, he's had a lot of intentional areas that we focused on. And sustainability has been one that's at the top of the list. IFS has a US ambassador Lewis Pew, who's our Chief Sustainability officer, and he helps us to provide worldwide coverage of the efforts around sustainability. So it's not just about ifss ability to become a more sustainable organization, but it's the solutions that IFS is putting together in the five verticals that we focus on that can help those organizations achieve a level of sustainability for their, for their downstream customers, their partners, and for their enterprises themselves. So when we look at, you know, the social ability for us to be more conscientious about leaving the world a better place or trying to do our best to leave the world not as bad as we came into it, sustainability is a real focus for us. And, you know, the way in which we can support an organization like Rolls Royce and Nickel obviously share those areas of focus from Rolls Royce. It's a perfect fit. And congratulations again for the award. Thank you. We're, we're, we're so excited to, to have shared that with you. We have some other customers that have achieved it across different categories, but it's an area of current and continuous focus for ifs. >>Nick, talk to us, take us out here as our last question is the, the focus on sustainability at Rolls Royce. Talk to us a little bit about that and what some of the major efforts are that you've got underway. >>I think, you know, very similar as, as, as Scott taught there, the focus within Rolls Royce as a strategic group level is really high aviation particularly, I mean we're a, we're an engineering company. We're a power company. Power inherently consumes natural resources. It tends to generate climate affecting outcomes. But at the same time, we are an innovative organization and if anybody's gonna help solve climate challenges, it's gonna be organizations like Rolls Royce who are able to bring different technologies into the market. So we have a responsibility to manage and, and optimize the behavior of our, our existing product suite. But we also have a, a vested interest in trying to move aviation on into the next, the next phase. We talk about sustainable aviation. Aviation has to earn the right to exist. People have choices. We've come out of covid, people are used to doing zoom and not flying. >>People are used to doing things when they don't necessarily get on an aircraft and do something. The aviation business always has to earn the right from the public to exist. And increasingly people will make choices about how they fly when they fly, how far they fly based on the sustainability footprint. So it's really important to us to help both our customers operate the aircraft in as sustainable and climate friendly way as we can. It's really important to find those, those balance points between the cost of an operation and it's the impact of an operation. If you go all over and say, I am going to be net, well, not even net to, but zero carbon by almost inference, that means I'm not gonna operate. You have to operate to get to an outcome. But how do I do that? Why I manage my cost, I manage the, the profitability, the organization doing it, right? >>So it has to be financially sustainable, it has to be sustainable for the people operating within it. It has to be sustainable for the planet, right? So we do that in lots of different ways in small places and, and in big places. So small things we do is we help the operator understand if you change your flight profile, you'll generate fewer emissions. You may avoid controls if you flying a different way, maybe you create trails, you'll lose, you'll lose less fuel while you're doing that. So it's cost effective for you. There was always a balance point there between the wear and tear on the engine versus the, the, the environmental impact. And you find that optimum place. One of the first things we started doing with, with Scott is we have a, a way that we life our engine components. And one of the very simple outcomes of that is using that data, the blue data for connection to the customer. >>If we can see, effectively see inside the engine about how well it's wearing and we can extend those maintenance intervals as we talked about, what that eventually does is it reduces the need to take the engine off, ship it around the world. Probably on a great big 7, 4 7 or maybe year or two ago on an Anson off four big engines flying a long distance trek, shipping our engine to an overhaul facility. We're avoiding something like 200 of those shop visit overhauls a year. So every year that's 200 flights there and back again, which don't happen, right? Collectively that's around about 15,000 automobile equivalent emissions just don't happen. So simple things we can do just starts to have accumulative effect, >>Right? Simple things that you're doing that, that have a huge impact. We could talk for so much longer on stability, I'm sure we're out of time, but I can see why Roll Royce was, was the winner of the Inocular award. Congratulations. Well deserved. Well >>Deserved. I well >>Deserved. So interesting to hear about the intelligent engine. So you're gonna have to come back. Hopefully we'll be here next year and we can hear more of the evolution. Cuz I have a feeling there's never a dual moment in what you're doing. >>It's never a dull moment. There's never an end point. >>No. >>Okay, >>Going Scott, Nick, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to have you talk through what's going on at ifx and the partnership with Rolls Royce. We >>Appreciate, and again, Nick, Nick, thank you for your continued support in the partnership. >>I thank you, Scott. We appreciate it. Likewise, thank >>You. Kudos all around. All right, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a Cube live from Miami. We're at IFS unleashed. We'll be back shortly after a break with our next guests. So stick around.

>>Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of Monaco, crypto summit presented by digital bits. It's a conference where a lot of the people using digital bits and the industry coming together around the future of crypto in the applicates got a great guest garage, rod cot, founder, and CEO of an innovative company. Love this co I love this company, Luke mogul, Rob, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Oh, >>Thank you for having >>Us. Yeah. So I checked out what you guys are doing. You've got the sports metaverse angle going on with super valuable, cuz sports is super entertaining. Uh, people are engaged. There's huge fan base, huge online now, digital convergence going on with the physical, you know, you see all kinds of sports betting going on now everything's going digital. There's a whole nother consumer experience going on with sports and the game is still the same on the, on the field or so to, or the court. That's correct. Yeah. Now it's going to digital take a minute to explain what you guys are working on. >>Yeah, so yes, we are building out a sports ERs where we are bringing athletes, whether they're NBA stars, NFL stars, w N B a many of those athletes into meows giving them the ownership of the entire, um, meows commerce along with gameplay. So that's something from our perspective, this, uh, this is something that we're focused on. We're building out stadiums. Athletes can own stadiums. Athlete can create their own training centers, media hubs. Um, and imagine Lisa, Leslie for example, is building out a woman leadership sports academy, right? We have Michael Cooper building out defensive academy. So those are all the brands. We have 174 NBA w N B stars. And, um, and we are building out this, >>The brand is the brand, is the platform that's correct. That's the trend we're seeing. And it's, it's also an extension of their reach in community. So there's, they can convert their star power and athlete with owner's approval. If they probably write it on to the contracts, he, they can imagine all the complications, but they bring that online and extend that energy and brand equity yep. To fans and social network. Yeah. >>And many of these athletes are tremendous successful in their web two careers, right? Yeah. Um, some are current athletes, some are former athletes, but they have built such a brand persona where people are following them on Instagram. For example, Carlos Boozer. He has like almost 6 million followers between Twitter and Instagram and those kind of brands are looking or how do I give back to the community? How do I engage with my community and web three? And especially with our platform, we are giving that power back to the players. >>So you guys got some big names booers on there. You mentioned Carlos Boozer. You mentioned that Lisa, Leslie others among others, Michael Cooper throw back to the old Lakers, uh, magic. Johnson's kind actually here in crypto. We just saw him in the lobbies and in dinner and the other night, um, at Nobu, um, you got a lot of NBA support. Take a take, take, even explain how you're working this angle. Uh, you got some great traction, uh, momentum. Um, you got great pedigree, riot games in your career. Uh, you kind of get the world, the tech world, the media world, as it comes together. What's the secret sauce here? Is it the NBA relationship combination of the team explained >>It's really focusing on what, uh, we are building on me was focusing on players first, right? So players are literally, we call our platform as, uh, owned by the players, made for the players. Uh, and engagement is really all done through the players, right? So that's our key sauce. And when we worked out with NBA, we, we are part of the NBA BPA acceleration program for 2022 that is funded by a six Z, uh, and, and many others. Um, and our partnership with league is very critical. So it's not only partnered with player association partnered with leagues, whether it's NBA, w N B a NFL. So those are the venues. And this becomes almost a program, especially for athletes to really generate this lifetime engagement and royalty model because some of this famous athletes really want to give back to the communities. So like for example, I use Lisa Leslie a lot, but Lisa, Leslie really wants to empower women leadership, leadership, and really help, um, women in sports, for example. Right? So those are the angles that, um, that really people are excited about. >>Well, for the people watching that might not understand some of the ins and outs of sports and, and rod, your background in your team, it's interesting. The sports teams have been on the big day to train for many, many years. You look at all the stadiums. Now they've got mobile devices, they got wifi under the chairs. They use data and technology to manage the team. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> manage the stadium and venue and operations suppliers, whatnot. And then also the fans. So you, they, they got about a decade or so experience already in the digital world. This is not new to the, to the sports world. Yeah. So you guys come to the table kind of at a good time. >>Yeah. Especially the defi of the sports, right? So there's a defi of the finance, but this is the really, uh, a, a decentralization of the sports is something that there's a lot of traction. And there are many companies that are really focusing on that. Our focus obviously is players first, right? How do we give power to the players? Uh, and those are really driving the entire engagement. And also the brands >>How's the NBA feel about this because, you know, you got the NBA and you get the team, you got the owners. I mean, the democratization of the players, which I love by the way that angle kind of brings their power. Now's the new kind of balance of power. How is the NBA handling this? What's some of the conversations you've had with the, the organization. >>Yeah. So obviously there are a lot of things that, uh, people have to be careful about, right? They have existing contracts, existing, digital media rights. Um, so that's something that, uh, we have to be very tactful when we are working with NBA and NPA, uh, on what we can say, we cannot say. So that is obviously they have a lot of existing multimillion or billion dollar contracts that they cannot void with the web because the evolution of web three, >>You know, I love, uh, riffing on the notion of contract compliance when there's major structural change happening. Remember back in baseball, back in the days before the internet, the franchise rights was geographic territory. Mm-hmm <affirmative> well, if you're the New York Yankees, you're doing great. If you're Milwaukee, you're not doing too good, but then comes the internet. That's good. That's no geography. There's no boundaries. That's good. So you're gonna have stadiums have virtual Bo. So again, how do they keep up with the contracts? Yeah. I mean, this is gonna be a fundamental issue. >>That's >>Good. Good. And I think if they don't move, the players are gonna fill that void. >>That's correct. Yeah. And especially with this, this an IL deal, right. That happened for the players, uh, especially college athletes. So we are in process of onboarding 1.5 million college athletes. Uh, and those athletes are looking for not only paying for the tuition for the colleges, but also for engagement and generating this early on, uh, >>More okay. Rod, we're gonna make a prediction here in the cube, 20, 20 we're in Monaco, all the NBA, NHL, the teams they're gonna be run by player Dows. Yeah. What do you think? A very good prediction. Yeah. Very good prediction. Yeah. I mean you, I mean, that's a joke, I'm joking aside. I mean, it's kind of connecting the dots, but you know, whether that happens or not, what this means is if this continues to go down this road, that's correct. Get the players collectively could come together. Yeah. And flip the script. >>Yeah. And that's the entire decentralization, right. So it's like the web three has really disrupted this industry as you know. Um, and, and I know your community knows that too. >>Of course, course we do. We love it. >>Something from sports perspective, we are very excited. >>Well, I love it. Love talking. Let's get to the, to the weeds here on the product, under the hood, tell about the roadmap, obviously NFTs are involved. That's kind of sexy right now. I get the digital asset model on there. Uh, but there's a lot more under the coverage. You gotta have a platform, you gotta have the big data and then ultimately align into connecting other systems together. How do you view the tech roadmap and the product roadmap? What's your vision? >>Yeah. So the, the one thing that you had to be T full, uh, as a company, whether it's LUT, mogul or any other startup, is you have to be really part of the ecosystem. So the reason why we are here at Monaco is that we obviously are looking at partnership with digital bits, um, and those kind of partnership, whether it's fourth centric, centric are very critical for the ecosystem in the community to grow. Um, and that's one thing you cannot build a, another, uh, isolated metaverse right? So that's one thing. Many companies have done it, but obviously not. >>It's a wall garden doesn't work. >>Exactly. So you have to be more open platform. So one things that we did early on in our platform, we have open APIs and SDKs where not only you as an athlete can bring in your, uh, other eCommerce or web, uh, NFTs or anything you want, but you can also bring in other real estate properties. So when we are building out this metaverse, you start with real estate, then you build out obviously stadiums and arenas and academies training academies, but then athletes can bring their, uh, web commerce, right. Where it's NFT wearables shoe line. So >>Not an ecosystem on top of Luke Mo. So you're like, I'm almost like you think about a platform as a service and a cloud computing paradigm. Yeah. Look different, not decentralized, but similarly enabling others, do the heavy lifting on their behalf. Yeah. Is that right? >>So that's correct. Yes. So we are calling ourself as the sports platform as a service, right. So we want to add the word sports because we, uh, in, in many contexts, right. When you're building metaverse, you can get distracted with them, especially we are in Los Angeles. Right. >>Can I get a luxury box for the cube and some of the metaverse islands and the stadiums you're doing? >>We, we are working >>On it. We're >>Definitely working on, especially the, uh, Los Angeles, uh, stadium. Yeah. >>Well, we're looking for some hosts, anyone out there looking for some hosts, uh, for the metaverse bring your avatar. You can host the cube, bro. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate. What's the, what's next for you guys, obviously, continuing to build momentum. You got your playful, how many people on the team what's going on, give a plug for the company. What are you looking for share with the audience, some of the, some of your goals. Yeah. >>So, uh, the main thing we're looking for is really, um, from a brand perspective, if you are looking at buying properties, this would be an amazing time to buy virtual sports stadium. Um, so we are, obviously we have 175 stadiums in roadmap right now. We started with Los Angeles. Then we are in San Francisco, New York, Qatar, Dubai. So all those sports stadiums, whether they're basketball, football, soccer are all the properties. And, uh, from a community perspective, if you want to get an early access, we are all about giving back to the community. Uh, so you can buy it at a much better presale price right now. Uh, so that's one, the second thing is that if you have any innovative ideas or a player that you want to integrate into, we have an very open platform from a community engagement perspective. If you have something unique from a land sale perspective yeah. Or the NFD perspective plug, contact us at, at Raj lumo.com. >>And I'm assuming virtual team, you in LA area where where's your home. >>So, yeah, so I live in Malibu, um, and our office is in Santa Monica. We have an office in India. Uh, we have few developers also in Europe. So, uh, and then we are team of 34 people right now >>Looking to hire some folks >>We are looking for, what >>Are you, what are you looking for? >>So, uh, we are looking for a passionate sports, uh, fanatics. >>It's a lot, not hard to find. Yeah. >><laugh> who knows how to also code. Right? So from blockchain perspective, we are, uh, chain agnostic. Uh, but obviously right now we are building on polygon, but we are chain agnostic. So if you have any blockchain development experience, uh, that's something we, we are looking for. Yeah. >>RA, thanks for coming out. Luke Mo check him out. I'm John furry with the cube here in Monaco for the mono crypto summit presented by digital bits. We got all the action, a lot of great guests going on, stay with us for more coverage. Um, John furrier, thanks for watching.

>>hello. >>Welcome to the special key conversation. I'm John ferry, host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California, featuring star dog is a great hot start-up. We've got a great guest, Rob Harris, vice president of solutions consulting for star dog here talking about some of the cloud growth, um, knowledge graphs, the role of data. Obviously there's a huge sea change. You're seeing real value coming out of this COVID as companies coming out of the pandemic, new opportunities, new use cases, new expectations, highly accelerated shift happening, and we're here to break it down. Rob, thanks for joining us on the cube conversation. Great to be here. So got, I'm excited to talk to you guys about your company and specifically the value proposition I've been talking for almost since 2007 around graph databases with Neo four J came out and looking at how data would be part of a real part of the developer mindset. Um, early on, and this more of the development. Now it's mainstream, you're seeing value being created in graph structures. Okay. Not just relational. This has been, uh, very well verified. You guys are in this business. So this is a really hot area, a lot of value being created. It's cool. And it's relevant. So tell us first, what is star dog doing? What's uh, what is the company about? >>Yeah, so I mean, we are an enterprise knowledge graph platform company. We help people be successful at standing up knowledge graphs of the data that they have both inside their company and using public data and tying that all together in order to be able to leverage that connected data and really turn it into knowledge through context and understand it. >>So how did this all come about this from a tech standpoint? What is the, what is the, uh, what was the motivation around this? Because, um, obviously the unstructured wave hit, you're seeing successes like data bricks, for instance, just absolutely crushing it on, on their valuation and their relevance. You seeing the same kind of wave hit almost kind of born back on the Hadoop days with unstructured data. Is that a big part of it? Is it just evolution? What's the big driver here? >>Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's a great question. The driver early is as these data sets have increased for so many companies trying to really bring some understanding to it as they roll it out in their organizations, you know, we've tried to just try to centralize it and that hasn't been sufficient in order to be able to unlock the value of most organization status. So being able to step beyond just, you know, pulling everything together into one place, but really putting that context and meaning around it that the graph can do. So that's where we've really got started at, uh, back in the day is we really looked at the inference and reasoning part of a knowledge graph. How do we bring more context and understanding that doesn't naturally exist within the data? And that really is how we launched off the product. >>I got to ask you around the use cases because one of the things that's really relevant right now is you're seeing a lot of front end development around agile application. Dev ops is brought infrastructure as code. You're seeing kind of this huge tsunami of new of applications, but one of the things that people are talking about in some of the developer circles and it's kind of hits the enterprise is this notion of state because you can have an application calling data, but if the data is not addressable and then keeping state and in real time and all these kinds of new, new technical problems, how do you guys look at that? When you look at trying to create knowledge graphs, because maintaining that level of connection, you need data, a ton of it it's gotta be exposed and addressable and then deal dealt with in real time. How do you guys look at it? >>Yeah, that's, that's a great question. What we've done to try to kind of move the ball forward on this is move past, trying to centralize that data into a knowledge graph that is separate from the rest of your data assets, but really build a data virtualization layer, which we have integrated into our product to look at the data where it is in the applications and the unstructured documents and the structure repositories, so that we can observe as state changes in that data and answer questions that are relevant at the time. And we don't have to worry about some sort of synchronous process, you know, loading information into the graph. So that ability to add that virtualization layer, uh, to the graph really enables you to get more of a real time, look at your data as it evolves. >>Yeah. I definitely want to double, double click on that and say, but I want to just drop step back and kind of set the table for the folks that aren't, um, getting in the weeds yet on this. There's kind of a specific definition of enterprise knowledge graph. Could you like just quickly define that? What is the enterprise knowledge graph? Sure. >>Yeah, we, we really see an enterprise knowledge graph as a connected set of data with context. So it's not just storing it like a graph, but connect again and putting meaning around that data through structure, through definitions, et cetera, across the entire enterprise. So looking at not just data within a single application or within a single silo, but broadly through your enterprise, what does your data mean? How is it connected and what does it look like within context each other? >>How should companies reuse their data? >>Boy, that's a broad question, right? Uh, you know, I mean, one of the things, uh, that I think is very important as so many companies have just collected data assets over the years, they collect more and more and more. We have customers that have eight petabytes of data within their data Lake. And they're trying to figure out how to leverage it by actually connecting and putting that context around the data. You can get a lot more meaning out of that old data or the stale data or the unknown data that the people are getting right today. So the ability to reuse the data assets with in context of meeting is where we see people really be able to make huge licks for in their organization like drug companies be able to get drugs to market faster. By looking at older studies, they've done where maybe the meeting was hidden because it was an old system. Nobody knew what the particular codes and meaning were in context of today. So being able to reuse and bring that forward brings real life application to people solving business problems today. >>Rob, I got to get your thoughts on something that we always riff on here on the cube, which is, um, you know, do you take down the data silos or do you leverage them? And you know, this came up a lot, many years ago when we first started discussing containers, for instance, and then that we saw that you didn't have to kill the old to bring in the new, um, there's one mindset of, you know, break the silos down, go horizontal scalability on the data, critical data, plane control, plane, other saying, Hey, you know what, just put it, you know, put a wrapper around those, those silos and you know, I'm oversimplifying, but you get the idea. So how should someone who's really struggling with, or, or not struggling, we're putting together an architecture around their future plans around dealing with data and data silos specifically, because certainly as new data comes in there's mechanism for that. But as you have existing data silos, what do companies do? What's the strategy in your opinion? >>Yeah, you know, it is a really interesting question. I was in data warehouse and for a long, long time and a big proponent of moving everything to one place. And, uh, then I really moved into looking into data virtualization and realized that neither of those solutions are complete, that there are some things that have to be centralized and moved the old systems aren't sufficient in order to be able to answer questions or process them. But there are many data silos that we've created within organizations that can be reused. You can leverage the compute, you can leverage the storage that already exist within us. And that's the approach we've taken at start off. We really want to be able to allow you to centralize the data that makes sense, right. To get it out of those old systems, that should be shut down from just a monetary perspective, but the systems that are have actual meeting or that it's too expensive in order to, to remove them, leverage those data silos. And by letting you have both approaches in the same platform, we hope to make this not an either or architectural decision, which is always the difficult question. >>Okay. So you got me on that one. So let me just say that. I want to leverage my data silos. What do I do? Take me through the playbook. What if I got the data silos? What is the star dog recommendation for me? >>Sure. So what, what we generally recommend is you start off with building kind of a model, uh, in the, in the lingo, we sometimes say ontology Euro, some sort of semantic understanding that puts context around what is my data and what does it mean? And then we allow you to map those data silos. We have a series of connectors in our product that whether it's an application and you're connecting through a rest connector, or whether it's a database and you're connecting through ODBC or JDBC map that data into the platform. And then when you issue queries to the startup platform, we federate those queries out to the downstream systems and answer as if that data existed on the graph. So that way we're leveraging the silos where they are without you having to move the data physically into the platform. So you guys are essentially building a >>Data fabric. >>We are, yeah. Data fabric is really the new term. That's been popping up more and more with our customers when they come to us to say, how can we kind of get past the traditional ways of doing data integration and unified data in a single place? Like you said, we don't think the answer is purely all about moving it all to one big Lake. We don't think the answer is all about just creating this virtualization plane, but really being able to leverage the festival. >>All right. So, so if you, if you believe that, then let's just go to the next level then. So if you believe that they can, don't have to move things around and to have one specific thing, how does a customer deal with their challenge of hybrid cloud and soon to be multi-cloud because that's certainly on the horizon. People want choice. There's going to be architectural. I mean, certainly a cloud operations will be in play, but this on-premise and this cloud, and then soon to be multiple cloud. How do you guys deal with that? That question? >>Yeah, that's a great question. And this is really a, an area that we're very excited about and we've been investing very heavily in is how to have multiple instances of StarTalk running in different clouds or on prem on the clown, coordinate to answer questions, to minimize data movement between the platforms. So we have the ability to run either an agent on prem. For example, if you're running the platform in the cloud or vice versa, you can run it in the cloud. You are two full instances that start off where they will actually cope plan queries to understand where does the data live? Where is it resident and how do I minimize moving data around in order to answer the question? So we really are trying to create that unified data fabric across on-prem or multiple cloud providers, so that any of the nodes in the platform can answer question from any of the datas >>S you know, complexity is always the issue. People cost go up. When you have complexity, you guys are trying to tame it. This is a huge conversation. You bring up multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. And multi-cloud when you think about the IOT edge, and you don't want to move data around, this is what everyone's saying, why move it? Why move data? It's expensive to move data processes where it is, and you kind of have this kind of flexibility. So this idea of unification is a huge concept. Is that enough? And how should customers think about the unification? Because if you can get there, it almost, it is the kind of the Holy grail you're talking about here. So, so this is kind of the prospect of, of having kind of an ideal architecture of unification. So take us, take me through that one step deeper. >>Well, it is, it is kind of interesting because as you really think about unifying your data and really bringing it together, of course it is the Holy grail. And that's what people have been talking about. Um, gosh, since I started in the industry over 20 years ago, how do I get this single plain view of my data, regardless of whether it's physically located or, uh, somehow stitched together, but what are the things that, you know, our founders really strongly believed on when they started the company? Was it isn't enough. It isn't sufficient. There is more value in your data that you don't even know. And unlocking that through either machine learning, which is, of course, we all know it's very hot right now to look at how do I derive new insights out of the data that I already have, or even through logical reasoning, right? And inference looking at, what do I understand about how that data is put together and how it's created in order to create more connections within the data and answer more questions. All those are ways to grow beyond just unifying your data, but actually getting more insights out of it. And I think that is the real Holy grail that people are looking for, not just bringing all the data together, but actually being able to get business value and insights out of that data. Yeah. >>Looking for it. You guys have obviously a pretty strong roster of clients that represent that. Um, but I got to ask you, since you brought up the founders, uh, the company, obviously having a founders' DNA, uh, mindset, um, tends to change the culture or drive the culture of the covenant change with age drives the culture of the company. What is the founder's culture inside star, dog? What is the vibe there, if you could, um, what do they talk about the most when you, when they get in that mode of being founders like, Hey, you know, this is the North star, what is, what's the rap like? What's the vibe share? It takes that, take us through some star star, dog culture. >>Sure. So our three founders came out of the rusty of Maryland, all in a PhD program around semantic reasoning and logical understanding and being able to understand data and be able to communicate that as easily as possible is really the core and the fiber of their being. And that's what we see continually under discussion every single day. How can we push the limits to take this technology and your gift easier to use more available, bring more insights to the customers beyond what we've seen in the past. And I find that really exciting to be able to constantly have conversations about how do we push the envelope? How do we look beyond even what Gartner says is five or eight years in the future, but looking even further ahead. So there >>They're into they're into this whole data scene. Then big time they are >>That they are very active in the conferences and posts and you know, all that great. >>They love this agility. They got to love dev ops. I mean, if you're into this knowledge graph scene, so I gotta, I gotta ask you, what's the machine learning angle here, obviously, AI, we know what AI is. AI is essentially combination of many things, machine learning and other computer science and data access. Um, what is the secret sauce behind the machine learning and, and the vibe and the product of, of, uh, >>Yeah, a lot of times w we, the way that we leverage machine learning or the way that we look at it is how do we create those connections between data? So you have multiple different systems and you're trying to bring all that data together. Yeah. It's not always easy to tell, is this rod Harris the same as that rod Harris is this product the same as that product. So when possible we will leverage keys or we'll leverage very, uh, you know, systematic type of understanding of these things are the same, but sometimes you need to reach beyond that. And that's where we leverage a lot of machine learning within the platform, looking at things like linear regression or other approaches around the graph, you know, connectivity, analysis, page rank, things like that to say, where are things the same so that we can build that connections in that connectivity as automatically as possible. >>You don't get a lot of talks on the cube. Also. Now that's new news, new clubhouse app, where people are talking about misinformation, obviously we're in the media business. We love the digital network effect. Everything's networks, the network economy. You starting to see this power of information and value. You guys carved the knowledge graph. So I gotta, I gotta ask you, when you look at this kind of future where you have this, um, complexity and the network effect, um, how are you guys looking at that data access? Because if you don't have the data, you're not going to have that insight, right? So you need to have that, that network connection. Is that a limitation or for companies? Is that an, um, cause usually people aren't necessarily their blind spot is their data or their lack of their data. So having things network together is going to be more of the norm in the future. How do you guys see that playing out? Yeah, >>I think you're exactly right. And I think that as you look beyond where we are today, and a lot of times we focus today on the data that a company already has, what do I know? Right. What do I know about you? What, how do I interact with you? How have I interacted with you? I think that as we look at the future, we're going to talk more about data sharing, but leveraging publicly available information about being able to take these insights and leverage them, not just within the walls of my own organization, but being able to share them and, uh, work together with other organizations to bring up a better understanding of you as a person or as a consumer that we could all interact with. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, Metcons law still holds true that, you know, more network connections bring more value. I certainly see that growing in the future, probably more around, you know, more data sharing and more openness about leveraging publicly available. >>You know, it's interesting. You mentioned you came from a data warehouse background. I remember when I broken the businessmen 30 years ago, when I started getting computer science, you know, it was, it was, there was, there was pain having a product and an enabling platform. You guys seem to have this enabling platform where there's no one use case. I mean, you, you have an unlimited use case landscape. Um, you could do anything with what you guys have. It's not so much, I mean, there's, low-hanging fruit. So I got to ask you, if you have that, uh, enabling platform, you're creating value for customers. What are some of the areas you see developing, like now in terms of low-hanging fruit and where's the possibilities? How do you guys see that? I'm sure you've probably got a tsunami of activity around corner cases from media to every vertical we do. And that's, you know, >>The exciting part of this job. Uh, part of the exciting part of knowledge press in general is to see all the different ways that they are allowed to use. But we do see some use cases repeated over and over again. Uh, risk management is a very common one. How do I look at all the people and the assets with an organization, the interactions they have to look at hotspots for risk, uh, that I need to correct within my organization for the pre-commercial pharma, that has been a very, very hot area for us recently. How do we look at all the that's available with an organization that's publicly available in order to accelerate drug development in this post COVID world, that's become more and more relevant, uh, for organizations to be able to move forward faster and the kind of bio industry and my sciences. Um, that's a use case that we've seen repeated over and over again. And then this growing idea of the data fabric, the data fabric, looking at metadata within the organization to improve data integration processes, to really reduce the need for moving data without or around the organization as much. Those are the use cases we've seen repeated over and over again over the last >>Awesome Rob. My last question before we wrap up is for the solution architect that's out there that has, you know, got a real tall order. They have to put together a scalable organization, people process and technology around a data architecture. That's going to be part of, um, the next gen, the next gen next level activity. And they need headroom for IOT edge and industrial edge, uh, and all use cases. Um, what's your advice to them as they have to look out at and start thinking about architecture? >>Yeah, that's, it's a great question. Uh, I really think that it's important to keep your options open as the technology in the space continues to evolve, right? It's easy to get locked into a single vendor or a single mindset. Um, I've been an architect most of my career, and that's usually a lot of the pitfalls. Things like a knowledge graph are open and flexible. They adhere to standards, which then means you're not locked into a single vendor and you're allowed to leverage this type of technology to grow beyond originally envisioned. So thinking about how you can take advantage of these modern techniques to look at things and not just keep repeating what you've done in the past, the sins of the past have, uh, you know, a lot of times do reappear. So fighting against that as much as possible as gritty is my encouragement. >>Awesome, great insight. And I love this. I love this area. I know you guys got a great trend. You're riding on a very cool, very relevant final minute. Just take a quick minute to give a plug for the company. What's the business model. How do I deploy this? How do I get the software? How do you charge for it? If I'm going to buy this solution or engage with star DOE what do I do? Take me through that. Sure. >>Yeah. We, uh, we are like, uh, you've sat through this whole thing. We are enterprise knowledge graph platform company. So we really help you get started with your business, uh, uh, leveraging and using a knowledge graph fricking organization. We have the ability to deploy on prem. We have on the cloud, we're in the AWS marketplace today. So you can take a look at our software today, who generally are subscription-based based on the size of the install. And we are happy to talk to you any time, just drop by our website, reach out we'll we'll get doctors. >>Rob. Great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. That gradients said, looking forward to seeing you in person, when we get back to real life, hopefully the vaccines are coming on. Thanks to, uh, companies like you guys providing awesome analytics and intelligence for these drug companies and pharma companies. Now you have a few of them in your, on your client roster. So congratulations, looking forward to following up great, great area. Cool and relevant data architecture is changing. Some of it's broken. Some it's being fixed started off as one of the hot startups scaling up beautifully in this new era of cloud computing meets applications and data. So I'm John. Forget the cube. This is a cube conversation from Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

>> Over and welcome to this special cube conversation here in the Palo Alto Studios of Cube. Part of our People. First project with Mayfield Fund and Co creation with Cuban John Very your host. Very special guest. Judy Estrin. She's the CEO of J Labs and author of the book Closing the Innovation Gap. She's also well known for being an Internet entrepreneur. Pioneer worked on the initial TCP IP protocol with Vin Cerf from When the A Stanford Great History Computer Science. You have computer systems in your blood, and now you're mentoring a lot of companies. Author you a lot of work, and you're lending your voice to some cutting edge issues here in Silicon Valley and around the world. Thanks for joining me today for the conversation. >> Thank you. It's fun to be here, >> So I love the fact that you're here. You're a celebrity in the commute computer industry circles. You were there at the beginning, when the computer systems or the Internet were being connected as they built out of stone of the whole system's revolution in the eighties, and the rest is history. Now we have cloud computing, and now we're seeing a whole nother level step function of scale. And so you've kind of seen it all. You've seen all all the waves. Actually, something like make is they have seen some of the ways, but you've seen all of them. The most compelling thing I think that's happening now is the convergence of social science and computer science. Kind of our motto. Silicon Angle. You recently wrote to Post on Medium that that has been kind of trending and going viral. I want to get your perspective on that. And they're They're interesting because they they bring a little bit of computer science called the authoritative Authority Terrian Technology Reclaiming Control far too attention, part one. We go into great detail to lay out some big picture computer industry discussions. What's it all about? What's what's the What's the idea behind these stories? >> So let me back up a little bit in that, a Sze Yu said. And we can go into this if you want. I was very involved in a lot of thie, ah, innovation that happened in the Village Valley in terms of microprocessors, the Internet, networking, everything that laid the foundation for a lot of the things we see today incredible opportunities for my career for problems we solved over the last ten years. Ten, twelve years. Um, I began to see a shift and a shift in the culture and a shift in the way technology was impacting us. And it's not all good or bad. It's that it felt like we were out of balance and that we were becoming shorter and shorter, term focused and actually my book in two thousand eight closing the innovation gap. The main message there is let's not forget about the seeds you plant that all of this comes from because we're reaping the benefit of those seeds. We're not planning new seats and that we were becoming in the Valley in the nation the way we thought about things more and more short term focused and technology was causing some of that and benefitting and not been and at a disadvantage because of that. So that started with my book in two thousand eight and then in twenty fourteen, I think it was I did a Ted talk a Ted X talk called Balancing our Digital Diets, and I was even Mohr concerned that we were out of whack in terms of the consequences of innovation, and I drew an analogy to our food's systems, where so much innovation and creating cheap calories and energy and things like high fructose corn syrup that it took years to realize that, Oh, there's some negative consequences of that innovation. And so that was kind of a warning that, um, we weren't thinking enough about the consequences of at that point. Social media. That was before fake news, and I talked about tweets and how truth that lies went faster than truth, not knowing how bad that situation was going to be and then leading up to the election and after the election. We all know and have all learned now about the impacts of these technologies on our democracy, and I believe on our society and humanity. And I don't think it's just about our election system. I think it's about our psyches and how the technology's air impacting the way we think our fear and anxiety level of our kids and us is adults. So I been talking to people about it and advising, and I finally decided as, uh, I was collaborating with people that I felt that a lot of the awareness was in pockets that we talked about data privacy or we talked about addiction. But these air things were all interrelated, and so I wanted to one ad. My voices is technologists because I think a lot of the people who are writing the building, the awareness and talking about it if you are in government or a journalist's or even a social scientist people, it's really easy to say, Yeah, you say that, but you don't understand. It's more complicated than that. You don't understand the technology. So one, I do understand that technology. So I felt adding my voice as a technologist. But I'm also, uh, just increasingly concerned about what we do about it and that we take a more holistic view. So that's what, what what the pieces are about. And the reason I broke it into two pieces is because they're too long for most people, even the way they are. But the first is to build awareness of the problems which we can dig into it a high level if you want. And then the second is to throw out ideas as we move towards discussing solutions. So let me take a breath because you were goingto jump in, and then I can. >> No, it's just because you're connecting the foundational of technology foundation technology, identifying impact, looking at pockets of awareness and then looking at how it's all kind of coming together when you talk like that The first time I saw O subsystem interrupt us connection so someone could get like a operating system. And I think the society that you're pointing out in the article, the first one intention was there only to relate. And I think that's the key part. I think that's interesting because we run into people all the time when we do our cue broadcasts that have awareness here and don't know what's going on this. So this context that's highly cohesive. But there's no connection, right? So the decoupled right but highly cohesive, That's kind of systems. Architecture concept. So how do we create a robust technology's society system where technology and I think that's a threat that we're seeing this? What I cleaned out of the articles was your kind of raising the flag a little bit to the notion of big picture right system, kind of a foundational, but let's look at consequences and inter relationships, and how can we kind of orchestrate and figure out solutions? So what was the reaction to expand on that concept? Because this is where I was. It was provocative to me, >> right? So I think there are two thought trains that I just went down. One is that one of the problems we have that has been created by technology and technology is suffering from again. It's causing both cause and effect is not enough seats, system thinking and so one issue, which is not just this is not just about social media and not just about a I, but over the last twenty years we've increasingly trained, I think, are, Ah, engineers and computer scientists in Mohr transactional thinking. And as we move quicker and quicker to solve problems, we are not training our leaders or training our technologist to think in terms of systems. And so what I mean by systems is two things that you can break, that any problems have pieces. But those pieces air inter connected. We are interconnected, and that you, if you don't keep those things in mind, then you will not design things in a way, I believe that have the longevity and make the right type decisions. The second is the law of consequences when you have a system, if you do something here, it's going to impact something here. And so that whole notion of taking was thinking through consequences. I'm afraid that we're training people as we are focusing on being more and more agile, moving more and more quickly that it's in technology and in society that we're losing some of that system, thinking >> that they kind of think that's the trade off is always around. Whenever he had systems conversations in the past, but my old systems had on trade offs, we have overhead, so we have more memory. How do we handle things? So this is kind of That's just what happens. You tell about consequence, but >> we don't have all those we I'm older than you. But we started at a time when that we were limited. We were limited by memory. We were limited by processing. We were limited by band with and a different times. As thie industry emerged, the constraints were in different areas. Today, you don't have any of those constraints. And so, if you don't have any of those constraints. You don't get trained in thinking about trade offs and thinking about consequences. So when when we come into just what drove me to write, this one set of things are foundational issues and what I mean by foundational it's it's our relationship to technology. And the fact of the matter is, as a society, um, we put technology on a pedestal, and we have, uh, this is not to be taken out of Cut is not to be taken the extreme of talking about people, but overall, our relationship with technology is a bullying, controlling relationship. That's why I called it authoritarianism. >> Upgrade your iPhone to the new version. >> Well, whether it's as a user that you're giving up your your your authority to all these notifications and to your addiction, whether it is the fact that it is the control with the data, whether it is predictive ai ai algorithms that are reading your unconscious behaviors and telling you what you think, because if it's suggesting what you by putting things in front of you. So there are all of these behaviors that our relationship with technology is not a balanced relationship and you could one. You have a culture where the companies that are that have that power are driving towards. It's a culture of moving fast growth only don't think about the consequences. It's not just the unintended consequences, but it's the consequences of intended use. So the business models and at which we don't need to go into, because I think a lot of other people talk about that all end up with a situation which is unhealthy for us as people and humanity and for us as a society. So you take that part and it is. There's a parallel here, and we should learn from what happened with industrial Ah, the industrial revolution. We want progress. But if we don't pay attention to the harm, the harmful byproducts and trade offs of progress, it's why we have issues with climate. It's why we have plastic in our oceans. It's because you, you judge everything by progresses just growth and industrialization without thinking about well being or the consequences. Well, I believe we now face a similar challenge of digitization, so it's not industrialization. But it's digitalization that has byproducts in a whole number of areas. And so what the the article does is get into those specifics, whether it's data or anxiety, how we think our cognitive abilities, our ability to solve problems, All of those things are byproducts of progress. And so we should debate um, where we what we're willing to give up one last thing. And then I'll have to come in, which is one of the problems with both of these is is humans value convenience. We get addicted to convenience, and if somebody gives us something that is going to make things more convenient, it sure is held to go backward. And that's one of the reasons the combination of measuring our goodness as a country or a CZ. Globalization by economic growth and measuring our personal wellness by convenience, if something is more convenient, were happier. Take those two together, and it makes a dangerous cop combination because then our need for community convenience gets manipulated for continued economic growth. And it doesn't necessarily end up in, Ah, progress from, ah, well being perspective. >> It's interesting point about the digitization, because the digital industrial revolution, when the digital revolution is happening, has consequences. We're seeing them and you point them out in your post Facebook and fake news. There's also the global landscape is the political overlay. There's societal impact. There's not enough scholars that I've been trained in the art of understanding into relationships of technology, and Peg used to be a nerd thing. And now my kids are growing up. Digital natives. Technology is mainstreams, and there it is. Politics. You know, the first hack collection, Some of the control, The first president actually trolled his way. That president, I said that I'm the kid. That was my position. He actually was a successful troll and got everyone he trolled the media and you got the attention. These air new dynamics, This is reality. So is you look forward and bring these ideas, and I want to get your thoughts on ideas on how to bring people together. You've been on a CTO Cisco Systems. I know you've been sleeping on a board. This is a cross pollination opportunity. Bring people together to think about this. How do you do You look at that? How do you view how to take the next steps as a as an industry, as a society and as a global nations? It eventually, because cyber security privacy is becoming polarized. Also on a geography bases in China they have. GPR is hard core there. In Europe, he got Asia. With Chinese. You got America being American. It's kind of complicated as a system architecture thinking. How do you look at this? What is the playing field where the guard rails? What's your thoughts on this? Because it's a hard one, >> right? So it is a hard one and it isn't. It isn't easy to pave out a path that says it's solvable. Um, nor does Climate right now. But you have to believe we're going to figure it out because we have to figure it out. So I think there are a lot of pieces that we need to start with, and then we need to adjust along the way. And, um, one piece is and let me back up. I am not. I don't believe we can leave this up to the industry to solve the incentives and the value systems and the understanding of the issues. The industry is coming from an industry perspective, and you can't also. You also can't leave it just two technologists because technologists have a technology person perspective. I don't believe that you just can have government solve it for a variety of reasons. One is, if it takes a spectrum of things to legislation, tends to be retroactive, not forward looking. And you need to be really careful not to come up with regulation that actually reinforces the status quo as opposed to making something better. But I think we need to. We do need to figure out how to govern in a way that includes all of these things. So once >> it's running, it's clear that watching the Facebook hearing and watching soon dark sky in front of the house. Our current elected officials actually don't even know how the Internet works, so that's one challenge. So you have a shift in its every beat >> and it and it's actually, if you think about the way legislation often gets made one of the problems with our democracy right now, I'm not going to put it in quotes. But I want to put it >> out. >> Is that the influence of money on our democracy means that so often the input toe legislation comes from industry. So whether it's again big tech, big pharma, big Oil, big. That's the way this cycle works in places where we have had successful legislation that industry input, what you need industry input. You just don't want industry to be the on ly input that is balanced with other input. And so we need infrastructure in the world. In the country that has policy ideas, technology. This needs to come from civil society, from the academy from non profits. So you need the same way we have environmental sciences. We need to fund from government, not just industry funded that science. That's number one. And then we need ways to have conversations about influencing companies to do the right thing. Some of it is going to be through legislation some of it is going to be for through pressure. This, in some ways is like tobacco in some ways, like it's like food. In some ways, it's like climate on DH. It's so and an underlying any of this to happen. We need people to understand and to speak up because awareness amongst whether it's individuals, parents, teachers, we need to give people the information to protect themselves and to push back on companies and to rally pushback on government. Because if if there's not an awareness of people are walking around saying, Don't take away my service, don't make this less convenient don't tax my soda. Don't tell me my text messages. That's right, so and I'm not saying taxes of the way. But if there isn't what what I'm focused on is, how do we build awareness? How do we get information out? How do we get companies like yours and others that this becomes part of >> our >> messaging of understanding so we can be talking about I >> think it's, you know back, Teo, The glory days of the TCP epi Internet revolution. He sent a package from here to there. It's a step. Take a first step. I personally listening to you talk feel and I said, It's on The Cuban people know that. You know, my my rap know that I've been pounding this. There's a counter culture in there somewhere. Counter culture's is where action happens, and I think you know, tax regulation and, you know, the current generations inherited. It is what it is we have. You're laying out essentially the current situation. John Markoff wrote a great book, What the door Mail said, talking about how the sixties counterculture influence the computer industry from breaking in for getting computer time for time sharing, too hippy revolution question I have for you put you on the spot. Is Is there a counterculture in your mind? Coming a digital hippie quotes is because I feel it. I feel that that let the air out of the balloon before it pops. Something has to happen and I think has to be a counterculture. I yet yet can't put my finger on it. Maybe it's a digital kind of a revolution, something compelling that says Whoa time out. >> All right? I think we need a couple of counter culture's in that in layers of it, because, um, I think there is going to be or is starting to be a counterculture amongst technologist and the technology industry and entrepreneurs who are some it's still small who are saying, You know what? This chasing unicorns and fastest growth and scale, you know, move faxed and break things. But, um, we want to move fast, but we want to think about whether we're breaking what we're breaking is really dangerous, you know, move fast and break things is fine, but if it's oops, we broke democracy. That isn't something that, uh that is I'm sorry you have to think about and adapt more quickly. So I think there is Are people who are talking about let's talk openly about the harm. Let's not just be tech optimists. Let's understand that it's small, but it's beginning and you're seeing it in a I for instance, the people who are saying Look, were technologists, we want to be responsible. This is a powerful weapon or tool. And let's make sure we think about how we use it. Let me just say one thing, which is, I think we needed another kind of counterculture, which I'm hoping is happing in a number of areas, which is societally saying, You know, we have a slow food movement. Maybe we just need a slow down, a little bit movement. So if you look at mindfulness, if you look at kids who are starting to say, You know what? I want to talk to someone in person, I don't. So we we need some of that counter movement where I'm hoping the pedestal starts to come back. In terms of people looking for real connectivity and not just numbers of connections, >> it's interesting, You know, everything has a symmetrical, responsible thing about it. For every fake news payload and network effect is potentially an opposite reaction of quality network effect. It's interesting, and I don't know where it is, but I think that's got it could be filled, certainly on the economic side, by new entrepreneurial thinking, like one observation I'm making is you know this. Remember, they'll bad boys of tech and he's smiling. Now It's bad gals, too, which is growing still lower numbers. So I think there's gonna be a shift to the good, the good folks right moment. But she's a she's a good entrepreneur. She's not just out there to make a quick buck or hey, mission driven za signal we're seeing. So you start to see a little bit more of a swing to Whoa, hey, let's recognize that it's not about, you know, could Buck or >> so, yes, but between you and I, it's teeny compared to the other forces. So that's what those of us who believe that needs to happen need to continue to >> one of those forces money making. >> I think it's a combination of, Ah, money and how much money, Dr. Celebrity culture, um, the forces, the power that's in place is so strong that it's hard to break through, um, short term thinking, not even being trained. So like so many things in our culture, where you have entrenched power and then you see uprising and you get hope and that's where you need the hope. But, um, we've seen it so often in so many movements, from race to gender, where you think, Oh, that's solved, it's not solved and then you come back in and come back at it. So I just I would argue that there is little bits of it, but it needs fuel. It needs continuity. It it. And the reason I think we need some government regulation is it needs help because it's not gonna >> happen. You should question, you know, some successes that I point out Amazon Web services, Google even having a long game kind of narrative they're always kind of were misunderstood at first. Remember, Google was loud by search is not doing too well. Then the rest is history. Amazon was laughed. Amazon Web services was laughed at. So people who have the long game seemed to be winning in these transitions. And that's kind of what you're getting at. You think long term, the long game. If you think in terms of the long term vision, you then going look at consequences differently. How many people do you run in? The valleys actually think like that. Okay, >> so we're talking about two different things. One is long term thinking, and I do think that apple, Google, Amazon have taken long term thinking's. So there are a good example. But if you look at them, if we look at the big companies in terms of the way they approached the market and competition and their potential negative impacts on overall society, they're part of the power. They're not doing anything to change the systems, to not >> have good and continue to benefit. The rich get richer. >> So there this This is why it's complicated. There are not good guys and bad guys there are. These people are doing this and that. So do I think overall dough? I see more long term thinking. Um, not really. I think that the incentives in the investment community, the incentives in the stock market. The incentives culturally are still very much around shorter term thinking. Not that there aren't any, but >> yeah, I would agree. I mean, it tends to be, you know, Hey, we're crushing it. We're winning, you know? Look at us. Growth hack. I mean, just the languages. Semantics. You look at that. I think it's changed. I think Facebook is, I think, the poster child of short term thinking growth hacks move fast, break stuff and look where they are, you know, they can't actually sustaining and brand outside of Facebook, they have to buy Instagram and these other companies to actually get the kind of growth. But certainly Facebook is dominate on the financial performance, but they're kind of sitting in their situation. I think you know the bro Grammer movement, I think is kind of moving through the white common ear culture of Okay, let's get some entrepreneurship going. Great. Rod. I think that's stabilising. I think we're seeing with cloud really science and thinking for good. That's a positive sign. >> Well, I'm I'm glad to hear that from you, you know, and all >> you're probably going with. >> No, no, no, I'll take that and take that into feeding my hope because I hope, >> well, the movement is classic. Look, we're not gonna tolerate this anymore. I think transparency in my final question to you before you get to some of the more entrepreneur Question says, If you look at the role of community on data, science and connectedness, one of the things about being connected is you got potential potential for collective intelligence. So if you look at data, as I said, networks, what if there was a way to kind of hone that network to get to the truth fast? Esther, something we've been working on here, and I think that's something that, you know changes media. It changes the game. But collective intelligent, the role of the community now becomes a stakeholder and potentially laying out. So his problems and you're part of the Mayfield community was co created this video with roll community, super important people. The rule of the of the person your thoughts on >> so I community is a word that is has takes on a lot of meetings, and the problem is when you mean it one way and use it the other way, the same as data driven. So I think there's at one level which is community and conductivity that has to do with collecting input from lots of sources. And when you talk about investigative journalism or they're in environmental situations or all sorts of areas where the ability to collect information from lots of sources that air interested and analyze that information that is one level of community and connectivity and networking because of people you know which is great, there's another type. When people talk about community, they mean a sense of community in terms of what humans need and what that connectivity is. And most online networks don't give you that level. The online needs to be augmented by, Ah, inter personal understanding. And one of the problems. I think with today's technology is we're fitting humans into bits that technology Khun Support, as opposed to recognizing what are our human needs that we want to hold on to and saying There are some things that are not going to fit into somebody's data set. So in that first type of community than absolutely, I think there's lots of benefits of the cloud and wisdom of the crowd. But if you're talking about humans connecting in people. You don't have the same type of, uh, that that really community online tools can help. But we should never confuse what happens in our online world >> with your final question for, you know, we got We're pushing the time here. Thank you for spending time. First of all, it's great conversation. You've seen the movie with venture capital from the beginning. You know, all the original players seeing what is now just where's that come from? Where are we? What's the state of VC? Then? He hope to the future, they all adding value. How do you see that evolving and where are we with? >> You know, I would. I think venture capital has gone through a lot of different phases. And like so many things, especially those of us who want computers, we liketo lump them all together. They're not altogether. There are some small, Yes, like they field. And the I do think, though, that something shifted in the lead up to the dot com. Ah, and later the burst. And what shifted is venture capitalists. Before that time were company builders. They were the financiers, but they saw themselves with the entrepreneur building companies because of the expansion leading up to two thousand, and the funds grew and the people coming into the field were, they became more bankers and they took more financial supposed to balancing financing and entrepreneurship. It felt like it moved. Maurin toe. This is a private equity play, Um, and I think the dynamic with entrepreneurs and the methodology overall shifted, and I don't know that that's changed Now again, not across the board. I think there are some, uh, those firms that have identified our partners within firms who still very much want Teo filled companies and partner with entrepreneurs. But I think the dynamic shifted, and if you view them as that's what they are, is private equity investors. And don't expect something else. If people need money, that's a good pick. Ones that are the best partner >> is your partner. If you want a banker, go here. If you want Builder, go their key distinction. Judy. Thanks for sharing that insight. We're Judy Estrin. Sea of Jail as author of Closing Innovation. Gabbas Wellman's well known entrepreneur advisor board member formally CTO of Cisco. And again, Great gas. Thanks for coming on I'm John for Herewith. Cube conversation. Part ofmy Mayfield. People first with the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hello Rod, we are here live in Las Vegas where Amazon Web Services' AWS re:Invent 2018. It's our sixth year covering re:Invent. We've been there from the beginning, as a customer using EC2 when it first launched in 2006, one of my first start-ups. What a scene it is here. Everyone in the industry is here full on, it's a Super Bowl of technology, Amazon is leading in the cloud game, and we're breaking it down for you in theCUBE. Our next guest is Holland Barry, Senior Vice President in Cybersecurity for Cyxtera, a hot company. Welcome to theCube, thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, it's great to have a senior people, start-ups, technical people on theCube. Kind of extracting, kind of squint through the volume of data that's being announced here at the show. Huge set of announcements already out the door. More coming. I'm expecting to hear a big connectivity announcement at 11:30 involving satellite and remote coverage for IoT devices, VM containers, micro VMs, all this massive amount of tech. Putting it into reality is critical. This is what customers want to do, they want to lower their costs, they want more performance, lower cost, more capability. Ushering in a true programing model for DevOps. How do you guys fit here? What's your story? Why are you here? What's the value proposition? >> So we're really focused, especially at this show around the DevOps community, and enabling agility for those folks. Ten years ago, the word DevOps and the term DevOps came to life, and there was this tug-o-war going on between the development teams and the operations team. Where development team wanting to move fast, and have all the agility. And the operations team wanted to have stability, and then all these things. They came together in a matrimony, and 10 years later we're highly automated, everything looks great from a DevOpps perspective, but what we're seeing now is security, being a bit of a speed bump. They're having a hard time catching up with that. That's our focus on the show is unleashing the DevOps folks >> and letting security move at the speed of DevOps. >> Lets drill down on security. Obvious cyber security is a global issue. It's also a national security issue in the United States, but other countries too. It's a global policy thing. There's tech involved, right? Cyber warfare all those, we hear about the news. But for a basic enterprise, the perimeter's no longer there with cloud. You got to think differently around how you're going to secure things. Amazon is now seeing security, not a blocker. Used to be no cloud implementation, it's not secure at all. Now you're hearing people saying, it's actually pretty secure, but there's more things going on keep raising the bar on capabilities that are needed. Could you share your expert opinion on, state of security of the cloud. What are the key areas? Where are they kind of leveled out? What's the baseline now? How acceptable is that? And what are the gaps, what are people working on? >> I think we're seeing a lot more security components, move into that infrastructure as code conversations. Amazon is fantastic about launching stacks, via cloud formation template, or maybe using TerraForm And now we're seeing the need for security components to move into that as an extension, of that infrastructure type deployment. That's another are of deep focus for us. >> Is there a tech trend that's a tail win for this? Is there anything helping? Or is there more headwins then tailwins? What's the big focus? >> I think one of the big trends we're seeing, and we're getting a lot of analyst conformations on this trend too is, the whole thing around software to find perimeters. So a new approach to describing access, for the users, kind of getting away from the VPN model, where you have a central concentration entry point. And then having the traverse complicated, to maintain back haul lines right? We're seeing software define perimeter, allow users and DevOps professionals access multiple environments simultaneously, without the need of these more archaic architectures if you will. >> Now the way it works braided to VP is absolutely great. Very secure malware transmission to the inpoint. >> Absolutely, I mean you think about the old style of connectivity, and you've got a user, that has nearly unfettered access wants that VPN connection isn't created. They have way more access, they have way more ability to spread malware laterally, with a VPN connection. Software to find perimeter, greatly reduces that attack surface, by giving those users only access to those items, within the perpend infrastructure, that they're vetted to have access to, and nothing more. >> So hold on, I got to ask you a question around cloud architects, the hottest area that we're seeing from an educational, learning, progressionary, knowledge seeking area, what is a cloud architect? And what are the things that make up, how would you describe and ideal cloud architecture? So I'm enterprise, I realize I've got to straighten my data center down, I'm using the cloud, lot of great things about the cloud, lot of great things about having something around perimeters of low latency. Now we've got IOT Edge, I'm going to want to power that with power, and then have connectivity now, that's over the top. How do I architect this? 'Cause data is going to live there, human computes can move around from Amazon, that's the direction that they're going. How do I lay it all out? What's your view on Cloud architect these days, and how they should be thinking? >> Well the Cloud architect role I think has evolved a lot, So start off with right? It's no longer just being an infrastructure person, you've got to be sort of an expert on security, some of an expert on networking, and a lot of storage all these other components. I think it's different, the organization, I think there's a series of best practices. I think AWS does a fantastic job of delivering templatized best practices to folks who are looking to adopt a cloud architecture. I think that's a great guide post to go by. Is the recommendations. >> How about staffing? What are you seeing in the makeup of the kind of, you know, I don't want to sound....Ninja or pirate, or whatever metaphor you want to use. You see kind of a new bread of, DevOps engineering, >> Absolutely. >> Mixed with app developer emerging. >> Yeah I think you got it, I think that matrimony that happened between the develop and the operations team has continued to evolve, and we're seeing this new kind of combined specialty. Where you've got great programming chopped, You're a python or JavaScript ninja, and you also know a lot more about the infrastructure than traditionally, your development role would of necessitated in the past. >> What are the top security conversations are you having in a DevOps environment, because there's some really great DevOps shops, and DevOps thinking in a lot of companies. And then you've got the people who're now learning DevOps they're kind of getting cloud native. They see Kubernetes around the corner. They see.. they put containers around things. I could keep my work loads on premises. Okay I got some cloud. What is some of the thinking around that? What's your view on all this? >> So I think access is a big piece, I think, you know developers needing to get to heterogeneous set of hybrid environments. They might have some legacy, or new stuff on prem. They might have a couple of clouds they're working with, how do you have a single unified policy contract that talks about how it's users can interact with it. And we're also hearing a lot about DevSecOps to moving that detection of vulnerabilities, and code imperfections earlier on in that development cycle. And we're enabling a big compliment to that, we're not DevSecOps ourselves, but we're involved in that conversation from an access perspective. >> Can't you explain what you guys do I want to get that out there because board. What do you guys actually do? How do you make money? What's your business model? What's the product? >> Yeah, so Cyxtera is a cyber security company, that also happens to have a colocation data center footprint in 29 markets. We've got 50+ data centers. We're here focused on, once of our access products called Appgte STP Appgate is a secure access solution, that was really built with developers in mind, that allows that simultaneous secure access, to a multitude of environments. So if you're a native U.S customer, and you've got 20 or 30 accounts, we can seamlessly allow that connectivity with a very robust policy structure, to allow all those developers, those users, to interact with those environments, without having to do that VPN switching that we discussed earlier. A real real clean in sophisticated way to connect your users into your internal and sensitive infrastructure. >> And what're the...who's the buyer of the product? And why are they using you guys? >> It's typically going to be the security team, sometime we'll have the networking in the cloud, infrastructure teams involved in the conversations, but this is a security product. This is secured access product. And this is really a evolution, of what people are using for the VPN, and jumpboxes and things like that for these days. >> How dead is the VP if you had to put it on a scale? One being on life support, 10 being still state of the art. I mean VP is still around, people are using VPNs a lot. >> Totally. >> There's a role for VPNs. Is it a rip and replace? Or is it more of a functional, some spots VPNs are great, some spots they're not. What's the role of VPN? >> We're seeing them, and I think Gartner has a statistic, that 60% of VPNs will be dead by 2021, or something like that. We're seeing that evolution occur. Looking simple environment, A VPN might be a really appropriate approach. But when you have cloud workloads everywhere, you got on premise data, you've got your users everywhere. It simply can't keep up. That's really the problem space part of it. >> Where's the action for security in terms of good developing trends? Is it at the network layer? Is it the virtualization layer? The identity layer? Where are you seeing, security really advancing and excelling with cloud? What specifically, where's the action happening? >> I think it's at all airs. I mean, we've seen the identity access management, identity provider market explode. We're seeing great new technologies around, container security, virtual machine security. I can't pick any one category, I just wouldn't. I would argue though, that this access category in the software to find perimeter trend, is something. We're tuned into it obviously, maybe a little more than most. But we are seeing a huge uptake. >> Well what's the alternative? I mean most IT guys, obviously they're scared. I mean they're not... They're kind of running scared. They've been doing perimeter based security for years. Firewalls, routers, all classic all lock down. Now in comes API economy, and now they're like, "Okay." I got to figure out, buy them everything in the planet to figure it out. What are they doing now? What's state of the art for people who are moving off the perimeter completely? >> I think the adoption of, more cloud native controls. A lot folks right now, are very familiar with traditional firewall vendor, and they'll tend to take that, and implement a software version of that hardware box up in the cloud. And we're not arguing that, you need to get away from something, like a next generation firewall. This traffic exception is does a lot of things, that our solution specifically doesn't do on a lot of the SDP soluntions don't. Taking that layer approach, and seeking out the solutions that are, that are cloud native. Forcing an uptech on that, and it's really changing the way people think about the architecture in their environments too. We're familiar with one thing from OnFarm We try to shoehorn that, that methodology in the cloud >> So single sign on is critical >> SSO is critical, we're seeing a huge check up on that. Absolutely. >> How do I handle the sprawl of new environments, with IOT Edgefor instance, you'll see a lot more things connect in. How do you do that? Is it manual, was there any animation or machine learning? How are you guys bringing that to scale? Because that's a big challenge we hear a lot. >> Absolutely. One of the things we're doing, at Cyxtera, is allowing you to templatize what secured access should look like for these new environments. So just like you're deploying that infrastructure as code, we're just a secured access piece of that. All the connectivity has already been described, by the security team. So back to the comment about DevOps Where operations team needing to move fast. Thinking that would deploy a brand new environment, with that access me and you >> So you're splitting up the auto building, you're standing it up quickly. >> Yeah >> All built in a preconfigured policy just goes out. >> Absolutely. Data dog, one of our reg AWS customers a great example of someone who is highly automated everything. They don't even touch our UI They use APIs for everything. They've codeified all the elements of our platform, and so when they spin up a new environment, you know they'll actually check out, a configuration from their, whatever, get hub get lab they're using. And inject that into the spin up of the new environment. Super sophisticated, high level of automation. Really at the end of the day, what's it helping them do? Why are we doing any of this? Why are we doing DevOps? We can move faster to the live product and services, quicker to our customers. >> So you guys are basically DevOps version of security, you're instrumenting everything DevO.. Data Ghost is a great example. They're instrumenting every, all the application areas. You guys are taking the sim.... Devops approach to security. Is that your approach? >> DevOps approach to security and user access, yeah, very much so. >> And what's the big conversation you're having here, at reInvent? Obviously a lot going on, what's most exciting for you here? Every event. >> I think it's everything that we just talked about, we're hearing people finally get ready for this, message you know, we're practitioners and users of this platform ourselves, and the SDP speck. I use it everyday. I flip up my laptop in the morning, I get instantly connected from anywhere to seven and 10, what we call sites right? We're familiar with the power, we're leveraging the power internally. Now seeing other people come over, what people like Data Dog and Voicebase or tour AWS clients, seeing what they've done, seeing their story, and having them say, "Hey how did they do that, we want to do that too." >> And how 'about a global scale, you guys are agnostic on geography, so they play into it. >> Completely neutral to the underlying infrastructure, the geography our solution acts the same. It doesn't matter public, private, cloud, bare metal, it's a unified policy framework that allows you to, to whatever level of granularity you want. Just grab access from the user, even including, ingredient from a third party system. For instance, I may have a developer that's assigned to a task, or a story, or an epic. Inside a Jira project for instance. Popular development tool. I can dictate, his or her access, to the infrastructure. And the projects are working on, based on an API called the Jira saying, "Okay this person has access to these things." Now I have a conditional response to, should someone have access to this resource. It's well, it depends, are they working on this project? Are they in the office? Is there a machine patched? Who are they and the identity provider? All these things should feed in to.. >> And they're automated too. They're automating in? >> This is all completely automated, and all these checks that I just described, are actually done our system, preauthentication. So you're vetted first, and then you're handed an access passport, we call Live Entitlement. And that gets you to the infrastructure, and only the infrastructure and applications you're vetted to do. Based on that evaluation that happened preautentication >> How agile are you guys when new things have to change? There's a security threat, or something on the landscape or surface area changes. How do you guys respond to it from aj Jilly standpoint? >> Yeah so, our system can take hints VN and API as well, so if you have a, you know, a threat system or something giving you signals that something might be going on. You could come into our system for instance, and revoke everyone's accces, you could prompt someone, maybe for a step up authentication, to make the reprove who they are, they got a one time password. So lot of options. We want to take hints from third party systems, we're designed that way. We can adjust, network access and program the network, based on other things that are happening. >> Final question before we wrap up here. Let get a plug in for the company. How old is the company? How many people... So how about some of your customers? Give the plug for Cyxtera. >> 1500 employees, I think I mentioned, 50+ data centers across 29 markets, hundred and hundreds of customers on the security access product that I talk about. You know, many thousands of customers in our data center. >> So business is good? >> Business is good. Yeah. In terms of like focus areas for next year, we're all in on DevOps, we're investing heavily in this area. Expect to hear more about a richer API set. More prebundled integrations, and also a bigger focus on containers. >> Well I think you guys are a great example of, success with using cloud. Lot more work to do. >> Yep. >> I mean you've got, Global, you've got all kinds of new landscapes changes. Final question, What's the one problem you saw, summarize it in a sound bite, why do people buy Cyxtera? Why do they use you? >> For network platform access for your user with a single security contract. I can't stress that. It's a huge competitive differentiation, versus some of the web application proxys that are out there. I invite everyone to dig into the details about what we provide. You can go to appgateforaws.com if you want to test dive the product. Get a feel for the admin UI, the client setup all that stuff. It's really simple and I give ya real good taste. And please come by the booth and see a demo as well. >> Tell th em Johnathan, you get a 10% discount. Only kidding. Hey, thanks for sharing your insight on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> We're here at reInvent, lot of action happening. Obviously a crowd of great people. Lot of great networking, but more importantly than industry continues to power forward, with cloud, on premise, in the world. It's cute bringing all the action her in Las Vegas. We'll be back with more after this short break.