(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2023 live from Stanford University. This is Lisa Martin. My co-host is Tracy Yuan. We're excited to be having great conversations all day but you know, 'cause you've been watching. We've been interviewing some very inspiring women and some men as well, talking about all of the amazing applications of data science. You're not going to want to miss this next conversation. Our guest is Gabriela de Queiroz, Principal Cloud Advocate Manager of Microsoft. Welcome, Gabriela. We're excited to have you. >> Thank you very much. I'm so excited to be talking to you. >> Yeah, you're on theCUBE. >> Yeah, finally. (Lisa laughing) Like a dream come true. (laughs) >> I know and we love that. We're so thrilled to have you. So you have a ton of experience in the data space. I was doing some research on you. You've worked in software, financial advertisement, health. Talk to us a little bit about you. What's your background in? >> So I was trained in statistics. So I'm a statistician and then I worked in epidemiology. I worked with air pollution and public health. So I was a researcher before moving into the industry. So as I was talking today, the weekly paths, it's exactly who I am. I went back and forth and back and forth and stopped and tried something else until I figured out that I want to do data science and that I want to do different things because with data science we can... The beauty of data science is that you can move across domains. So I worked in healthcare, financial, and then different technology companies. >> Well the nice thing, one of the exciting things that data science, that I geek out about and Tracy knows 'cause we've been talking about this all day, it's just all the different, to your point, diverse, pun intended, applications of data science. You know, this morning we were talking about, we had the VP of data science from Meta as a keynote. She came to theCUBE talking and really kind of explaining from a content perspective, from a monetization perspective, and of course so many people in the world are users of Facebook. It makes it tangible. But we also heard today conversations about the applications of data science in police violence, in climate change. We're in California, we're expecting a massive rainstorm and we don't know what to do when it rains or snows. But climate change is real. Everyone's talking about it, and there's data science at its foundation. That's one of the things that I love. But you also have a lot of experience building diverse teams. Talk a little bit about that. You've created some very sophisticated data science solutions. Talk about your recommendation to others to build diverse teams. What's in it for them? And maybe share some data science project or two that you really found inspirational. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I do love building teams. Every time I'm given the task of building teams, I feel the luckiest person in the world because you have the option to pick like different backgrounds and all the diverse set of like people that you can find. I don't think it's easy, like people say, yeah, it's very hard. You have to be intentional. You have to go from the very first part when you are writing the job description through the interview process. So you have to be very intentional in every step. And you have to think through when you are doing that. And I love, like my last team, we had like 10 people and we were so diverse. Like just talking about languages. We had like 15 languages inside a team. So how beautiful it is. Like all different backgrounds, like myself as a statistician, but we had people from engineering background, biology, languages, and so on. So it's, yeah, like every time thinking about building a team, if you wanted your team to be diverse, you need to be intentional. >> I'm so glad you brought up that intention point because that is the fundamental requirement really is to build it with intention. >> Exactly, and I love to hear like how there's different languages. So like I'm assuming, or like different backgrounds, I'm assuming everybody just zig zags their way into the team and now you're all women in data science and I think that's so precious. >> Exactly. And not only woman, right. >> Tracy: Not only woman, you're right. >> The team was diverse not only in terms of like gender, but like background, ethnicity, and spoken languages, and language that they use to program and backgrounds. Like as I mentioned, not everybody did the statistics in school or computer science. And it was like one of my best teams was when we had this combination also like things that I'm good at the other person is not as good and we have this knowledge sharing all the time. Every day I would feel like I'm learning something. In a small talk or if I was reviewing something, there was always something new because of like the richness of the diverse set of people that were in your team. >> Well what you've done is so impressive, because not only have you been intentional with it, but you sound like the hallmark of a great leader of someone who hires and builds teams to fill gaps. They don't have to know less than I do for me to be the leader. They have to have different skills, different areas of expertise. That is really, honestly Gabriela, that's the hallmark of a great leader. And that's not easy to come by. So tell me, who were some of your mentors and sponsors along the way that maybe influenced you in that direction? Or is that just who you are? >> That's a great question. And I joke that I want to be the role model that I never had, right. So growing up, I didn't have anyone that I could see other than my mom probably or my sister. But there was no one that I could see, I want to become that person one day. And once I was tracing my path, I started to see people looking at me and like, you inspire me so much, and I'm like, oh wow, this is amazing and I want to do do this over and over and over again. So I want to be that person to inspire others. And no matter, like I'll be like a VP, CEO, whoever, you know, I want to be, I want to keep inspiring people because that's so valuable. >> Lisa: Oh, that's huge. >> And I feel like when we grow professionally and then go to the next level, we sometimes we lose that, you know, thing that's essential. And I think also like, it's part of who I am as I was building and all my experiences as I was going through, I became what I mentioned is unique person that I think we all are unique somehow. >> You're a rockstar. Isn't she a rockstar? >> You dropping quotes out. >> I'm loving this. I'm like, I've inspired Gabriela. (Gabriela laughing) >> Oh my God. But yeah, 'cause we were asking our other guests about the same question, like, who are your role models? And then we're talking about how like it's very important for women to see that there is a representation, that there is someone they look up to and they want to be. And so that like, it motivates them to stay in this field and to start in this field to begin with. So yeah, I think like you are definitely filling a void and for all these women who dream to be in data science. And I think that's just amazing. >> And you're a founder too. In 2012, you founded R Ladies. Talk a little bit about that. This is present in more than 200 cities in 55 plus countries. Talk about R Ladies and maybe the catalyst to launch it. >> Yes, so you always start, so I'm from Brazil, I always talk about this because it's such, again, I grew up over there. So I was there my whole life and then I moved to here, Silicon Valley. And when I moved to San Francisco, like the doors opened. So many things happening in the city. That was back in 2012. Data science was exploding. And I found out something about Meetup.com, it's a website that you can join and go in all these events. And I was going to this event and I joke that it was kind of like going to the Disneyland, where you don't know if I should go that direction or the other direction. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And I was like, should I go and learn about data visualization? Should I go and learn about SQL or should I go and learn about Hadoop, right? So I would go every day to those meetups. And I was a student back then, so you know, the budget was very restricted as a student. So we don't have much to spend. And then they would serve dinner and you would learn for free. And then I got to a point where I was like, hey, they are doing all of this as a volunteer. Like they are running this meetup and events for free. And I felt like it's a cycle. I need to do something, right. I'm taking all this in. I'm having this huge opportunity to be here. I want to give back. So that's what how everything started. I was like, no, I have to think about something. I need to think about something that I can give back. And I was using R back then and I'm like how about I do something with R. I love R, I'm so passionate about R, what about if I create a community around R but not a regular community, because by going to this events, I felt that as a Latina and as a woman, I was always in the corner and I was not being able to participate and to, you know, be myself and to network and ask questions. I would be in the corner. So I said to myself, what about if I do something where everybody feel included, where everybody can participate, can share, can ask questions without judgment? So that's how R ladies all came together. >> That's awesome. >> Talk about intentions, like you have to, you had that go in mind, but yeah, I wanted to dive a little bit into R. So could you please talk more about where did the passion for R come from, and like how did the special connection between you and R the language, like born, how did that come from? >> It was not a love at first sight. >> No. >> Not at all. Not at all. Because that was back in Brazil. So all the documentation were in English, all the tutorials, only two. We had like very few tutorials. It was not like nowadays that we have so many tutorials and courses. There were like two tutorials, other documentation in English. So it's was hard for me like as someone that didn't know much English to go through the language and then to learn to program was not easy task. But then as I was going through the language and learning and reading books and finding the people behind the language, I don't know how I felt in love. And then when I came to to San Francisco, I saw some of like the main contributors who are speaking in person and I'm like, wow, they are like humans. I don't know, it was like, I have no idea why I had this love. But I think the the people and then the community was the thing that kept me with the R language. >> Yeah, the community factors is so important. And it's so, at WIDS it's so palpable. I mean I literally walk in the door, every WIDS I've done, I think I've been doing them for theCUBE since 2017. theCUBE has been here since the beginning in 2015 with our co-founders. But you walk in, you get this sense of belonging. And this sense of I can do anything, why not? Why not me? Look at her up there, and now look at you speaking in the technical talk today on theCUBE. So inspiring. One of the things that I always think is you can't be what you can't see. We need to be able to see more people that look like you and sound like you and like me and like you as well. And WIDS gives us that opportunity, which is fantastic, but it's also helping to move the needle, really. And I was looking at some of the Anitab.org stats just yesterday about 2022. And they're showing, you know, the percentage of females in technical roles has been hovering around 25% for a while. It's a little higher now. I think it's 27.6 according to any to Anitab. We're seeing more women hired in roles. But what are the challenges, and I would love to get your advice on this, for those that might be in this situation is attrition, women who are leaving roles. What would your advice be to a woman who might be trying to navigate family and work and career ladder to stay in that role and keep pushing forward? >> I'll go back to the community. If you don't have a community around you, it's so hard to navigate. >> That's a great point. >> You are lonely. There is no one that you can bounce ideas off, that you can share what you are feeling or like that you can learn as well. So sometimes you feel like you are the only person that is going through that problem or like, you maybe have a family or you are planning to have a family and you have to make a decision. But you've never seen anyone going through this. So when you have a community, you see people like you, right. So that's where we were saying about having different people and people like you so they can share as well. And you feel like, oh yeah, so they went through this, they succeed. I can also go through this and succeed. So I think the attrition problem is still big problem. And I'm sure will be worse now with everything that is happening in Tech with layoffs. >> Yes and the great resignation. >> Yeah. >> We are going back, you know, a few steps, like a lot of like advancements that we did. I feel like we are going back unfortunately, but I always tell this, make sure that you have a community. Make sure that you have a mentor. Make sure that you have someone or some people, not only one mentor, different mentors, that can support you through this trajectory. Because it's not easy. But there are a lot of us out there. >> There really are. And that's a great point. I love everything about the community. It's all about that network effect and feeling like you belong- >> That's all WIDS is about. >> Yeah. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Like coming over here, it's like seeing the old friends again. It's like I'm so glad that I'm coming because I'm all my old friends that I only see like maybe once a year. >> Tracy: Reunion. >> Yeah, exactly. And I feel like that our tank get, you know- >> Lisa: Replenished. >> Exactly. For the rest of the year. >> Yes. >> Oh, that's precious. >> I love that. >> I agree with that. I think one of the things that when I say, you know, you can't see, I think, well, how many females in technology would I be able to recognize? And of course you can be female technology working in the healthcare sector or working in finance or manufacturing, but, you know, we need to be able to have more that we can see and identify. And one of the things that I recently found out, I was telling Tracy this earlier that I geeked out about was finding out that the CTO of Open AI, ChatGPT, is a female. I'm like, (gasps) why aren't we talking about this more? She was profiled on Fast Company. I've seen a few pieces on her, Mira Murati. But we're hearing so much about ChatJTP being... ChatGPT, I always get that wrong, about being like, likening it to the launch of the iPhone, which revolutionized mobile and connectivity. And here we have a female in the technical role. Let's put her on a pedestal because that is hugely inspiring. >> Exactly, like let's bring everybody to the front. >> Yes. >> Right. >> And let's have them talk to us because like, you didn't know. I didn't know probably about this, right. You didn't know. Like, we don't know about this. It's kind of like we are hidden. We need to give them the spotlight. Every woman to give the spotlight, so they can keep aspiring the new generation. >> Or Susan Wojcicki who ran, how long does she run YouTube? All the YouTube influencers that probably have no idea who are influential for whatever they're doing on YouTube in different social platforms that don't realize, do you realize there was a female behind the helm that for a long time that turned it into what it is today? That's outstanding. Why aren't we talking about this more? >> How about Megan Smith, was the first CTO on the Obama administration. >> That's right. I knew it had to do with Obama. Couldn't remember. Yes. Let's let's find more pedestals. But organizations like WIDS, your involvement as a speaker, showing more people you can be this because you can see it, >> Yeah, exactly. is the right direction that will help hopefully bring us back to some of the pre-pandemic levels, and keep moving forward because there's so much potential with data science that can impact everyone's lives. I always think, you know, we have this expectation that we have our mobile phone and we can get whatever we want wherever we are in the world and whatever time of day it is. And that's all data driven. The regular average person that's not in tech thinks about data as a, well I'm paying for it. What's all these data charges? But it's powering the world. It's powering those experiences that we all want as consumers or in our business lives or we expect to be able to do a transaction, whether it's something in a CRM system or an Uber transaction like that, and have the app respond, maybe even know me a little bit better than I know myself. And that's all data. So I think we're just at the precipice of the massive impact that data science will make in our lives. And luckily we have leaders like you who can help navigate us along this path. >> Thank you. >> What advice for, last question for you is advice for those in the audience who might be nervous or maybe lack a little bit of confidence to go I really like data science, or I really like engineering, but I don't see a lot of me out there. What would you say to them? >> Especially for people who are from like a non-linear track where like going onto that track. >> Yeah, I would say keep going. Keep going. I don't think it's easy. It's not easy. But keep going because the more you go the more, again, you advance and there are opportunities out there. Sometimes it takes a little bit, but just keep going. Keep going and following your dreams, that you get there, right. So again, data science, such a broad field that doesn't require you to come from a specific background. And I think the beauty of data science exactly is this is like the combination, the most successful data science teams are the teams that have all these different backgrounds. So if you think that we as data scientists, we started programming when we were nine, that's not true, right. You can be 30, 40, shifting careers, starting to program right now. It doesn't matter. Like you get there no matter how old you are. And no matter what's your background. >> There's no limit. >> There was no limits. >> I love that, Gabriela, >> Thank so much. for inspiring. I know you inspired me. I'm pretty sure you probably inspired Tracy with your story. And sometimes like what you just said, you have to be your own mentor and that's okay. Because eventually you're going to turn into a mentor for many, many others and sounds like you're already paving that path and we so appreciate it. You are now officially a CUBE alumni. >> Yes. Thank you. >> Yay. We've loved having you. Thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> For our guest and for Tracy's Yuan, this is Lisa Martin. We are live at WIDS 23, the eighth annual Women in Data Science Conference at Stanford. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a few minutes. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, girls and guys. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Stanford University, covering the 8th Annual Women in Data Science Conference. One of my favorite events. Lisa Martin here. Got a couple of guests from Total Energies. We're going to be talking all things data science, and I think you're going to find this pretty interesting and inspirational. Please welcome Alexandre Lapene, Tech Advisor Data Science at Total Energy. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> And Myriam Fayad is here as well, product and value manager at Total Energies. Great to have you guys on theCUBE today. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you for - >> Thank you for receiving us. >> Give the audience, Alexandre, we'll start with you, a little bit about Total Energies, so they understand the industry, and what it is that you guys are doing. >> Yeah, sure, sure. So Total Energies, is a former Total, so we changed name two years ago. So we are a multi-energy company now, working over 130 countries in the world, and more than 100,000 employees. >> Lisa: Oh, wow, big ... >> So we're a quite big company, and if you look at our new logo, you will see there are like seven colors. That's the seven energy that we basically that our business. So you will see the red for the oil, the blue for the gas, because we still have, I mean, a lot of oil and gas, but you will see other color, like blue for hydrogen. >> Lisa: Okay. >> Green for gas, for biogas. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And a lot of other solar and wind. So we're definitely multi-energy company now. >> Excellent, and you're both from Paris? I'm jealous, I was supposed to go. I'm not going to be there next month. Myriam, talk a little bit about yourself. I'd love to know a little bit about your role. You're also a WiDS ambassador this year. >> Myriam: Yes. >> Lisa: Which is outstanding, but give us a little bit of your background. >> Yes, so today I'm a product manager at the Total Energies' Digital Factory. And at the Digital Factory, our role is to develop digital solutions for all of the businesses of Total Energies. And as a background, I did engineering school. So, and before that I, I would say, I wasn't really aware of, I had never asked myself if being a woman could stop me from being, from doing what I want to do in the professional career. But when I started my engineering school, I started seeing that women are becoming, I would say, increasingly rare in the environment >> Lisa: Yes. >> that, where I was evolving. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So that's why I was, I started to think about, about such initiatives. And then when I started working in the tech field, that conferred me that women are really rare in the tech field and data science field. So, and at Total Energies, I met ambassadors of, of the WiDS initiatives. And that's how I, I decided to be a WiDS Ambassador, too. So our role is to organize events locally in the countries where we work to raise awareness about the importance of having women in the tech and data fields. And also to talk about the WiDS initiative more globally. >> One of my favorite things about WiDS is it's this global movement, it started back in 2015. theCUBE has been covering it since then. I think I've been covering it for theCUBE since 2017. It's always a great day full of really positive messages. One of the things that we talk a lot about when we're focusing on the Q1 Women in Tech, or women in technical roles is you can't be what you can't see. We need to be able to see these role models, but also it, we're not just talking about women, we're talking about underrepresented minorities, we're talking about men like you, Alexander. Talk to us a little bit about what your thoughts are about being at a Women and Data Science Conference and your sponsorship, I'm sure, of many women in Total, and other industries that appreciate having you as a guide. >> Yeah, yeah, sure. First I'm very happy because I'm back to Stanford. So I did my PhD, postdoc, sorry, with Margot, I mean, back in 20, in 2010, so like last decade. >> Lisa: Yeah, yep. >> I'm a film mechanics person, so I didn't start as data scientist, but yeah, WiDS is always, I mean, this great event as you describe it, I mean, to see, I mean it's growing every year. I mean, it's fantastic. And it's very, I mean, I mean, it's always also good as a man, I mean, to, to be in the, in the situation of most of the women in data science conferences. And when Margo, she asked at the beginning of the conference, "Okay, how many men do we have? Okay, can you stand up?" >> Lisa: Yes. I saw that >> It was very interesting because - >> Lisa: I could count on one hand. >> What, like 10 or ... >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Maximum. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And, and I mean, you feel that, I mean, I mean you could feel what what it is to to be a woman in the field and - >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> Alexandre: That's ... >> And you, sounds like you experienced it. I experienced the same thing. But one of the things that fascinates me about data science is all of the different real world problems it's helping to solve. Like, I keep saying this, we're, we're in California, I'm a native Californian, and we've been in an extreme drought for years. Well, we're getting a ton of rain and snow this year. Climate change. >> Guests: Yeah. We're not used to driving in the rain. We are not very good at it either. But the, just thinking about data science as a facilitator of its understanding climate change better; to be able to make better decisions, predictions, drive better outcomes, or things like, police violence or healthcare inequities. I think the power of data science to help unlock a lot of the unknown is so great. And, and we need that thought diversity. Miriam, you're talking about being in engineering. Talk to me a little bit about what projects interest you with respect to data science, and how you are involved in really creating more diversity and thought. >> Hmm. In fact, at Total Energies in addition to being an energy company we're also a data company in the sense that we produce a lot of data in our activities. For example with the sensors on the fuel on the platforms. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Or on the wind turbines, solar panels and even data related to our clients. So what, what is really exciting about being, working in the data science field at Total Energies is that we really feel the impact of of the project that we're working on. And we really work with the business to understand their problems. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Or their issues and try to translate it to a technical problem and to solve it with the data that we have. So that's really exciting, to feel the impact of the projects we're working on. So, to take an example, maybe, we know that one of the challenges of the energy transition is the storage of of energy coming from renewable power. >> Yes. >> So I'm working currently on a project to improve the process of creating larger batteries that will help store this energy, by collecting the data, and helping the business to improve the process of creating these batteries. To make it more reliable, and with a better quality. So this is a really interesting project we're working on. >> Amazing, amazing project. And, you know, it's, it's fun I think to think of all of the different people, communities, countries, that are impacted by what you're doing. Everyone, everyone knows about data. Sometimes we think about it as we're paying we're always paying for a lot of data on our phone or "data rates may apply" but we may not be thinking about all of the real world impact that data science is making in our lives. We have this expectation in our personal lives that we're connected 24/7. >> Myriam: Yeah. >> I can get whatever I want from my phone wherever I am in the world. And that's all data driven. And we expect that if I'm dealing with Total Energies, or a retailer, or a car dealer that they're going to have the data, the data to have a personal conversation, conversation with me. We have this expectation. I don't think a lot of people that aren't in data science or technology really realize the impact of data all around their lives. Alexander, talk about some of the interesting data science projects that you're working on. >> There's one that I'm working right now, so I stake advisor. I mean, I'm not the one directly working on it. >> Lisa: Okay. >> But we have, you know, we, we are from the digital factory where we, we make digital products. >> Lisa: Okay. >> And we have different squads. I mean, it's a group of different people with different skills. And one of, one of the, this squad, they're, they're working on the on, on the project that is about safety. We have a lot of site, work site on over the world where we deploy solar panels on on parkings, on, on buildings everywhere. >> Lisa: Okay. Yeah. >> And there's, I mean, a huge, I mean, but I mean, we, we have a lot of, of worker and in term of safety we want to make sure that the, they work safely and, and we want to prevent accidents. So what we, what we do is we, we develop some computer vision approach to help them at improving, you know, the, the, the way they work. I mean the, the basic things is, is detecting, detecting some equipment like the, the the mean the, the vest and so on. But we, we, we, we are working, we're working to really extend that to more concrete recommendation. And that's one a very exciting project. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Because it's very concrete. >> Yeah. >> And also, I, I'm coming from the R&D of the company and that's one, that's one of this project that started in R&D and is now into the Digital Factory. And it will become a real product deployed over the world on, on our assets. So that's very great. >> The influence and the impact that data can have on every business always is something that, we could talk about that for a very long time. >> Yeah. >> But one of the things I want to address is there, I'm not sure if you're familiar with AnitaB.org the Grace Hopper Institute? It's here in the States and they do this great event every year. It's very pro-women in technology and technical roles. They do a lot of, of survey of, of studies. So they have data demonstrating where are we with respect to women in technical roles. And we've been talking about it for years. It's been, for a while hovering around 25% of technical roles are held by women. I noticed in the AnitaB.org research findings from 2022, It's up to 27.6% I believe. So we're seeing those numbers slowly go up. But one of the things that's a challenge is attrition; of women getting in the roles and then leaving. Miryam, as a woman in, in technology. What inspires you to continue doing what you're doing and to elevate your career in data science? >> What motivates me, is that data science, we really have to look at it as a mean to solve a problem and not a, a fine, a goal in itself. So the fact that we can apply data science to so many fields and so many different projects. So here, for example we took examples of more industrial, maybe, applications. But for example, recently I worked on, on a study, on a data science study to understand what to, to analyze Google reviews of our clients on the service stations and to see what are the the topics that, that are really important to them. So we really have a, a large range of topics, and a diversity of topics that are really interesting, so. >> And that's so important, the diversity of topics alone. There's, I think we're just scratching the surface. We're just at the very beginning of what data science can empower for our daily lives. For businesses, small businesses, large businesses. I'd love to get your perspective as our only male on the show today, Alexandre, you have that elite title. The theme of International Women's Day this year which is today, March 8th, is "Embrace equity." >> Alexandre: Yes. >> Lisa: What is that, when you hear that theme as as a male in technology, as a male in the, in a role where you can actually elevate women and really bring in that thought diversity, what is embracing equity, what does it look like to you? >> To me, it, it's really, I mean, because we, we always talk about how we can, you know, I mean improve, but actually we are fixing a problem, an issue. I mean, it's such a reality. I mean, and the, the reality and and I mean, and force in, in the company. And that's, I think in Total Energy, we, we still have, I mean things, I mean, we, we haven't reached our objective but we're working hard and especially at the Digital Factory to, to, to improve on that. And for example, we have 40% of our women in tech. >> Lisa: 40? >> 40% of our tech people that are women. >> Lisa: Wow, that's fantastic! >> Yeah. That's, that's ... >> You're way ahead of, of the global average. >> Alexandre: Yeah. Yeah. >> That outstanding. >> We're quite proud of that. >> You should be. >> But we, we still, we still know that we, we have at least 10% >> Lisa: Yes. because it's not 50. The target is, the target is to 50 or more. And, and, but I want to insist on the fact that we have, we are correcting an issue. We are fixing an issue. We're not trying to improve something. I mean, that, that's important to have that in mind. >> Lisa: It is. Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Miryam, I'd love to get your advice to your younger self, before you studied engineering. Obviously you had an interest when you were younger. What advice would you give to young Miriam now, looking back at what you've accomplished and being one of our female, visible females, in a technical role? What do you, what would you say to your younger self? >> Maybe I would say to continue as I started. So as I was saying at the beginning of the interview, when I was at high school, I have never felt like being a woman could stop me from doing anything. >> Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. >> So maybe to continue thinking this way, and yeah. And to, to stay here for, to, to continue this way. Yeah. >> Lisa: That's excellent. Sounds like you have the confidence. >> Mm. Yeah. >> And that's something that, that a lot of people ... I struggled with it when I was younger, have the confidence, "Can I do this?" >> Alexandre: Yeah. >> "Should I do this?" >> Myriam: Yeah. >> And you kind of went, "Why not?" >> Myriam: Yes. >> Which is, that is such a great message to get out to our audience and to everybody else's. Just, "I'm interested in this. I find it fascinating. Why not me?" >> Myriam: Yeah. >> Right? >> Alexandre: Yeah, true. >> And by bringing out, I think, role models as we do here at the conference, it's a, it's a way to to help young girls to be inspired and yeah. >> Alexandre: Yeah. >> We need to have women in leadership positions that we can see, because there's a saying here that we say a lot in the States, which is: "You can't be what you can't see." >> Alexandre: Yeah, that's true. >> And so we need more women and, and men supporting women and underrepresented minorities. And the great thing about WiDS is it does just that. So we thank you so much for your involvement in WiDS, Ambassador, our only male on the program today, Alexander, we thank you. >> I'm very proud of it. >> Awesome to hear that Total Energies has about 40% of females in technical roles and you're on that path to 50% or more. We, we look forward to watching that journey and we thank you so much for joining us on the show today. >> Alexandre: Thank you. >> Myriam: Thank you. >> Lisa: All right. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Stanford University. This is our coverage of the eighth Annual Women in Data Science Conference. We'll be back after a short break, so stick around. (upbeat music)

(lively music) >> Good morning. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage at Supercomputing Conference 2022, live here in Dallas. I'm Dave Nicholson with my co-host Paul Gillin. So far so good, Paul? It's been a fascinating morning Three days in, and a fascinating guest, Ian from AWS. Welcome. >> Thanks, Dave. >> What are we going to talk about? Batch computing, HPC. >> We've got a lot, let's get started. Let's dive right in. >> Yeah, we've got a lot to talk about. I mean, first thing is we recently announced our batch support for EKS. EKS is our Kubernetes, managed Kubernetes offering at AWS. And so batch computing is still a large portion of HPC workloads. While the interactive component is growing, the vast majority of systems are just kind of fire and forget, and we want to run thousands and thousands of nodes in parallel. We want to scale out those workloads. And what's unique about our AWS batch offering, is that we can dynamically scale, based upon the queue depth. And so customers can go from seemingly nothing up to thousands of nodes, and while they're executing their work they're only paying for the instances while they're working. And then as the queue depth starts to drop and the number of jobs waiting in the queue starts to drop, then we start to dynamically scale down those resources. And so it's extremely powerful. We see lots of distributed machine learning, autonomous vehicle simulation, and traditional HPC workloads taking advantage of AWS Batch. >> So when you have a Kubernetes cluster does it have to be located in the same region as the HPC cluster that's going to be doing the batch processing, or does the nature of batch processing mean, in theory, you can move something from here to somewhere relatively far away to do the batch processing? How does that work? 'Cause look, we're walking around here and people are talking about lengths of cables in order to improve performance. So what does that look like when you peel back the cover and you look at it physically, not just logically, AWS is everywhere, but physically, what does that look like? >> Oh, physically, for us, it depends on what the customer's looking for. We have workflows that are all entirely within a single region. And so where they could have a portion of say the traditional HPC workflow, is within that region as well as the batch, and they're saving off the results, say to a shared storage file system like our Amazon FSx for Lustre, or maybe aging that back to an S3 object storage for a little lower cost storage solution. Or you can have customers that have a kind of a multi-region orchestration layer to where they say, "You know what? "I've got a portion of my workflow that occurs "over on the other side of the country "and I replicate my data between the East Coast "and the West Coast just based upon business needs. "And I want to have that available to customers over there. "And so I'll do a portion of it in the East Coast "a portion of it in the West Coast." Or you can think of that even globally. It really depends upon the customer's architecture. >> So is the intersection of Kubernetes with HPC, is this relatively new? I know you're saying you're, you're announcing it. >> It really is. I think we've seen a growing perspective. I mean, Kubernetes has been a long time kind of eating everything, right, in the enterprise space? And now a lot of CIOs in the industrial space are saying, "Why am I using one orchestration layer "to manage my HPC infrastructure and another one "to manage my enterprise infrastructure?" And so there's a growing appreciation that, you know what, why don't we just consolidate on one? And so that's where we've seen a growth of Kubernetes infrastructure and our own managed Kubernetes EKS on AWS. >> Last month you announced a general availability of Trainium, of a chip that's optimized for AI training. Talk about what's special about that chip or what is is customized to the training workloads. >> Yeah, what's unique about the Trainium, is you'll you'll see 40% price performance over any other GPU available in the AWS cloud. And so we've really geared it to be that most price performance of options for our customers. And that's what we like about the silicon team, that we're part of that Annaperna acquisition, is because it really has enabled us to have this differentiation and to not just be innovating at the software level but the entire stack. That Annaperna Labs team develops our network cards, they develop our ARM cards, they developed this Trainium chip. And so that silicon innovation has become a core part of our differentiator from other vendors. And what Trainium allows you to do is perform similar workloads, just at a lower price performance. >> And you also have a chip several years older, called Inferentia- >> Um-hmm. >> Which is for inferencing. What is the difference between, I mean, when would a customer use one versus the other? How would you move the workload? >> What we've seen is customers traditionally have looked for a certain class of machine, more of a compute type that is not as accelerated or as heavy as you would need for Trainium for their inference portion of their workload. So when they do that training they want the really beefy machines that can grind through a lot of data. But when you're doing the inference, it's a little lighter weight. And so it's a different class of machine. And so that's why we've got those two different product lines with the Inferentia being there to support those inference portions of their workflow and the Trainium to be that kind of heavy duty training work. >> And then you advise them on how to migrate their workloads from one to the other? And once the model is trained would they switch to an Inferentia-based instance? >> Definitely, definitely. We help them work through what does that design of that workflow look like? And some customers are very comfortable doing self-service and just kind of building it on their own. Other customers look for a more professional services engagement to say like, "Hey, can you come in and help me work "through how I might modify my workflow to "take full advantage of these resources?" >> The HPC world has been somewhat slower than commercial computing to migrate to the cloud because- >> You're very polite. (panelists all laughing) >> Latency issues, they want to control the workload, they want to, I mean there are even issues with moving large amounts of data back and forth. What do you say to them? I mean what's the argument for ditching the on-prem supercomputer and going all-in on AWS? >> Well, I mean, to be fair, I started at AWS five years ago. And I can tell you when I showed up at Supercomputing, even though I'd been part of this community for many years, they said, "What is AWS doing at Supercomputing?" I know you care, wait, it's Amazon Web Services. You care about the web, can you actually handle supercomputing workloads? Now the thing that very few people appreciated is that yes, we could. Even at that time in 2017, we had customers that were performing HPC workloads. Now that being said, there were some real limitations on what we could perform. And over those past five years, as we've grown as a company, we've started to really eliminate those frictions for customers to migrate their HPC workloads to the AWS cloud. When I started in 2017, we didn't have our elastic fabric adapter, our low-latency interconnect. So customers were stuck with standard TCP/IP. So for their highly demanding open MPI workloads, we just didn't have the latencies to support them. So the jobs didn't run as efficiently as they could. We didn't have Amazon FSx for Lustre, our managed lustre offering for high performant, POSIX-compliant file system, which is kind of the key to a large portion of HPC workloads is you have to have a high-performance file system. We didn't even, I mean, we had about 25 gigs of networking when I started. Now you look at, with our accelerated instances, we've got 400 gigs of networking. So we've really continued to grow across that spectrum and to eliminate a lot of those really, frictions to adoption. I mean, one of the key ones, we had a open source toolkit that was jointly developed by Intel and AWS called CFN Cluster that customers were using to even instantiate their clusters. So, and now we've migrated that all the way to a fully functional supported service at AWS called AWS Parallel Cluster. And so you've seen over those past five years we have had to develop, we've had to grow, we've had to earn the trust of these customers and say come run your workloads on us and we will demonstrate that we can meet your demanding requirements. And at the same time, there's been, I'd say, more of a cultural acceptance. People have gone away from the, again, five years ago, to what are you doing walking around the show, to say, "Okay, I'm not sure I get it. "I need to look at it. "I, okay, I, now, oh, it needs to be a part "of my architecture but the standard questions, "is it secure? "Is it price performant? "How does it compare to my on-prem?" And really culturally, a lot of it is, just getting IT administrators used to, we're not eliminating a whole field, right? We're just upskilling the people that used to rack and stack actual hardware, to now you're learning AWS services and how to operate within that environment. And it's still key to have those people that are really supporting these infrastructures. And so I'd say it's a little bit of a combination of cultural shift over the past five years, to see that cloud is a super important part of HPC workloads, and part of it's been us meeting the the market segment of where we needed to with innovating both at the hardware level and at the software level, which we're going to continue to do. >> You do have an on-prem story though. I mean, you have outposts. We don't hear a lot of talk about outposts lately, but these innovations, like Inferentia, like Trainium, like the networking innovation you're talking about, are these going to make their way into outposts as well? Will that essentially become this supercomputing solution for customers who want to stay on-prem? >> Well, we'll see what the future lies, but we believe that we've got the, as you noted, we've got the hardware, we've got the network, we've got the storage. All those put together gives you a a high-performance computer, right? And whether you want it to be redundant in your local data center or you want it to be accessible via APIs from the AWS cloud, we want to provide that service to you. >> So to be clear, that's not that's not available now, but that is something that could be made available? >> Outposts are available right now, that have this the services that you need. >> All these capabilities? >> Often a move to cloud, an impetus behind it comes from the highest levels in an organization. They're looking at the difference between OpEx versus CapEx. CapEx for a large HPC environment, can be very, very, very high. Are these HPC clusters consumed as an operational expense? Are you essentially renting time, and then a fundamental question, are these multi-tenant environments? Or when you're referring to batches being run in HPC, are these dedicated HPC environments for customers who are running batches against them? When you think about batches, you think of, there are times when batches are being run and there are times when they're not being run. So that would sort of conjure, in the imagination, multi-tenancy, what does that look like? >> Definitely, and that's been, let me start with your second part first is- >> Yeah. That's been a a core area within AWS is we do not see as, okay we're going to, we're going to carve out this super computer and then we're going to allocate that to you. We are going to dynamically allocate multi-tenant resources to you to perform the workloads you need. And especially with the batch environment, we're going to spin up containers on those, and then as the workloads complete we're going to turn those resources over to where they can be utilized by other customers. And so that's where the batch computing component really is powerful, because as you say, you're releasing resources from workloads that you're done with. I can use those for another portion of the workflow for other work. >> Okay, so it makes a huge difference, yeah. >> You mentioned, that five years ago, people couldn't quite believe that AWS was at this conference. Now you've got a booth right out in the center of the action. What kind of questions are you getting? What are people telling you? >> Well, I love being on the show floor. This is like my favorite part is talking to customers and hearing one, what do they love, what do they want more of? Two, what do they wish we were doing that we're not currently doing? And three, what are the friction points that are still exist that, like, how can I make their lives easier? And what we're hearing is, "Can you help me migrate my workloads to the cloud? "Can you give me the information that I need, "both from a price for performance, "for an operational support model, "and really help me be an internal advocate "within my environment to explain "how my resources can be operated proficiently "within the AWS cloud." And a lot of times it's, let's just take your application a subset of your applications and let's benchmark 'em. And really that, AWS, one of the key things is we are a data-driven environment. And so when you take that data and you can help a customer say like, "Let's just not look at hypothetical, "at synthetic benchmarks, let's take "actually the LS-DYNA code that you're running, perhaps. "Let's take the OpenFOAM code that you're running, "that you're running currently "in your on-premises workloads, "and let's run it on AWS cloud "and let's see how it performs." And then we can take that back to your to the decision makers and say, okay, here's the price for performance on AWS, here's what we're currently doing on-premises, how do we think about that? And then that also ties into your earlier question about CapEx versus OpEx. We have models where actual, you can capitalize a longer-term purchase at AWS. So it doesn't have to be, I mean, depending upon the accounting models you want to use, we do have a majority of customers that will stay with that OpEx model, and they like that flexibility of saying, "Okay, spend as you go." We need to have true ups, and make sure that they have insight into what they're doing. I think one of the boogeyman is that, oh, I'm going to spend all my money and I'm not going to know what's available. And so we want to provide the, the cost visibility, the cost controls, to where you feel like, as an HPC administrator you have insight into what your customers are doing and that you have control over that. And so once you kind of take away some of those fears and and give them the information that they need, what you start to see too is, you know what, we really didn't have a lot of those cost visibility and controls with our on-premises hardware. And we've had some customers tell us we had one portion of the workload where this work center was spending thousands of dollars a day. And we went back to them and said, "Hey, we started to show this, "what you were spending on-premises." They went, "Oh, I didn't realize that." And so I think that's part of a cultural thing that, at an HPC, the question was, well on-premises is free. How do you compete with free? And so we need to really change that culturally, to where people see there is no free lunch. You're paying for the resources whether it's on-premises or in the cloud. >> Data scientists don't worry about budgets. >> Wait, on-premises is free? Paul mentioned something that reminded me, you said you were here in 2017, people said AWS, web, what are you even doing here? Now in 2022, you're talking in terms of migrating to cloud. Paul mentioned outposts, let's say that a customer says, "Hey, I'd like you to put "in a thousand-node cluster in this data center "that I happen to own, but from my perspective, "I want to interact with it just like it's "in your data center." In other words, the location doesn't matter. My experience is identical to interacting with AWS in an AWS data center, in a CoLo that works with AWS, but instead it's my physical data center. When we're tracking the percentage of IT that's that is on-prem versus off-prem. What is that? Is that, what I just described, is that cloud? And in five years are you no longer going to be talking about migrating to cloud because people go, "What do you mean migrating to cloud? "What do you even talking about? "What difference does it make?" It's either something that AWS is offering or it's something that someone else is offering. Do you think we'll be at that point in five years, where in this world of virtualization and abstraction, you talked about Kubernetes, we should be there already, thinking in terms of it doesn't matter as long as it meets latency and sovereignty requirements. So that, your prediction, we're all about insights and supercomputing- >> My prediction- >> In five years, will you still be talking about migrating to cloud or will that be something from the past? >> In five years, I still think there will be a component. I think the majority of the assumption will be that things are cloud-native and you start in the cloud and that there are perhaps, an aspect of that, that will be interacting with some sort of an edge device or some sort of an on-premises device. And we hear more and more customers that are saying, "Okay, I can see the future, "I can see that I'm shrinking my footprint." And, you can see them still saying, "I'm not sure how small that beachhead will be, "but right now I want to at least say "that I'm going to operate in that hybrid environment." And so I'd say, again, the pace of this community, I'd say five years we're still going to be talking about migrations, but I'd say the vast majority will be a cloud-native, cloud-first environment. And how do you classify that? That outpost sitting in someone's data center? I'd say we'd still, at least I'll leave that up to the analysts, but I think it would probably come down as cloud spend. >> Great place to end. Ian, you and I now officially have a bet. In five years we're going to come back. My contention is, no we're not going to be talking about it anymore. >> Okay. >> And kids in college are going to be like, "What do you mean cloud, it's all IT, it's all IT." And they won't remember this whole phase of moving to cloud and back and forth. With that, join us in five years to see the result of this mega-bet between Ian and Dave. I'm Dave Nicholson with theCUBE, here at Supercomputing Conference 2022, day three of our coverage with my co-host Paul Gillin. Thanks again for joining us. Stay tuned, after this short break, we'll be back with more action. (lively music)

foreign [Music] my name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited to be coming to you today from the cube in Palo Alto we're going to be talking about kubecon giving a little preview of the hype and what you might be able to expect in Detroit with the one and only co-founder and CEO of the cube and siliconangle John ferriere John hello how are you today thanks for hosting and doing the preview with me my goodness a pleasure I we got acquainted this time last year how do you think the ecosystem has changed are you excited well first of all I missed kubecon Valencia because I had covid I was so excited to be there this big trip plan and then couldn't make it but so much has gone on I mean we've been at every kubecon the cube was there at the beginning when openstack was still going on kubernetes just started came out of Google we were there having beers with Lou Tucker and a bunch of The Luminaries when it all kind of came together and then watch it year by year progress through and how it's changed the industry and mainly how open source has been really the wave behind it combining with the Linux foundation and then cncf and then open source movement and good kubernetes has been amazing and under it all containers has been the real driver and all this so you know Docker containers Docker was a well-funded company they had to Pivot and were restructured now they're pure open source so containers have gone Supernova on top of that kubernetes and with that's a complete ecosystem of opportunity to create the next operating system in in software development so to me kubecon is at the center of software software 2030 what do you want to call it super cloud it's that it's really action it's not where the old school is it's where the new school is excellent so what has you most excited this year what's the biggest change from this time last year and now well two things I'm looking at this year uh carefully both from an editorial lens and also from a sponsorship lenses where is the funding going on the sponsorships because again a very diverse ecosystem of Builders but also vendors so I'm going to see how that Dynamics going on but also on the software side a lot of white space going on in the stack or in the map if you will you know the run times you've got observability you got a lot of competition maybe projects might be growing some Rising some falling maybe merge together I'm going to see how that but there's a lot of white spaces developing so I'm curious to see what's new on that area and then service meshes is a big deal this year so I'm looking for what's going on so it's been kind of a I won't say cold war but kind of like uh you know where is this going to go and because it's a super important part of of the of the orchestration and managing containers and so be very interested to see how service mesh does istio and other versions out there have been around for a while so that and also the other controversy is the number of stars on GitHub a project may have so sometimes that carries a lot of weight but we're going to look at which ones are rising which ones are falling again um which ones are getting the most votes by the developers vote with their code yeah absolutely well we did definitely miss you down in Los Angeles but it will be great to be in Detroit what has you most excited do you think that we're going to see the number of people in person that we have in the past I know you've seen it since the beginning so I think this year is going to be explosive from that psychology angle because I think it was really weird because La was on they were a bold to make that move we're all there is first conference back it was a lot a lot of like badges don't touch me only handshakes fist pumps but it was at the beginning of the covid second wave right so it was kind of still not yet released where everyone's was not worried about it so I think it's in the past year in the past eight months I mean I've been places with no masks people have no masks Vegas other places so I think it's going to be a year where it will be a lot more people in person because the growth and the opportunities are so big it's going to drive a lot of people in person just like Amazon reinvent those yeah absolutely and as the most important and prominent event in the kubernetes space I think everyone's very excited to to get back together when we think about this space do you think there that anyone's the clear winner yet or do you think it's still a bit of a open territory in terms of the companies and Partnerships I think Red Hat has done a great job and they're you know I think they're going to see how well they can turn this into gold for them because they've positioned themselves very well open shift years ago was kind of waffling I won't say it in a bad way but like but once they got view on containers and kubernetes red has done an exceptional job in how they position their company being bought by ibms can be very interesting to see how that influences change so if Red Hat can stay red hat I think IBM will win I think customers that's one company I like the startups we're seeing companies like platform nine Rafi systems young companies coming out in the kubernetes as a service space because I think whoever can make kubernetes easier because I think that's the hard part right now even though that the show is called kubecon is a lot more than kubernetes I think the container layer what docker's doing has been exceptional that's the real action the question is how does that impact the kubernetes layers so kubernetes is not a done deal yet I think it hasn't really crossed the chasm yet it's certainly popular but not every company is adopting it so we're starting to see that we need to see more adoption of kubernetes seeing that happen it's going to decide who the winners are totally agree with that if you look at the data a lot of companies are and people are excited about kubernetes but they haven't taken the plunge to shifting over their stack or fully embracing it because of that complexity so I'm very curious to see what we learn this week about who those players might be moving forward how does it feel to be in Detroit when was the last time you were here I was there in 2007 was the last time I was in that town so uh we'll see what's like wow yeah but things have changed yeah the lions are good this year they've got great hockey goalies there so you know all right you've heard that sports fans let John know what you're thinking your Sports predictions for this season I love that who do you hope to get to meet while we're at the show I want to meet more end user customers we're gonna have Envoy again on the cube I think Red Hat was going to be a big sponsor this year they've been great um we're looking for end user project most looking for some editorial super cloud like um commentary because the cncf is kind of the developer Tech Community that's powering in my opinion this next wave of software development Cloud native devops is now Cloud native developers devops is kind of going away that's killed I.T in my opinion data and security Ops is the new kind of Ops the new it so it's good to see how devops turns into more of a software engineering meet supercloud so I think you're going to start to see the infrastructure become more programmable it's infrastructure as code so I think if anything I'm more excited to hear more stories about how infrastructure as code is now the new standard so if when that truly happens the super cloud model be kicking into high gear I love that let's you touched on it a little bit right there but I want to dig in a bit since you've been around since the beginning what is it that you appreciate or enjoy so much about the kubernetes community and the people around this I think there are authentic people and I think they're they're building they're also Progressive they're very diverse um they're open and inclusive they try stuff and um they can be critical but they're not jerks about it so when people try something um they're open-minded of a failure so it's a classic startup mentality I think that is embodied throughout the Linux Foundation but CNC in particular has to bridge the entrepreneurial and corporate Vibe so they've done an exceptional job doing that and that's what I like about this money making involved but there's also a lot of development and Innovation that comes out of it so the next big name and startup could come out of this community and that's what I hope to see coming out here is that next brand that no one's heard of that just comes out of nowhere and just takes a big position in the marketplace so that's going to be interesting to see hopefully we have on our stage there yeah that's the goal we're going to interview them all a year from now when we're sitting here again what do you hope to be able to say about this space or this event that we might not be able to say today I think it's going to be more of clarity around um the new modern software development techniques software next gen using AI more faster silicon chips you see Amazon with what they're doing the custom silicon more processing but I think Hardware matters we've been talking a lot about that I think I think it's we're going to shift from what's been innovative and what's changed I think I think if you look at what's been going on in the industry outside of crypto the infrastructure hasn't really changed much except for AWS what they've done so I'm expecting to see more Innovations at the physics level way down in the chips and then that lower end of the stack is going to be dominated by either one of the three clouds probably AWS and then the middle layer is going to be this where the abstraction is around making infrastructure as code really happen I think that's going to be Clarity coming out of this year next year we should have some visibility into the vertical applications and of the AI and machine learning absolutely digging in on that actually even more because I like what you're saying a lot what verticals do you think that kubernetes is going to impact the most looking even further out than say a year I mean I think that hot ones Healthcare fintech are obvious to get the most money they're spending I think they're the ones who are already kind of creating these super cloud models where they're actually changed over their their spending from capex to Opex and they're driving top line revenue as part of that so you're seeing companies that wants customers of the I.T vendors are now becoming the providers that's a big super cloud Trend we see the other verticals are going to be served by a lot of men in Surprise oil and gas you know all the classic versus Healthcare I mentioned that one those are the classic verticals retail is going to I think be massively huge as you get more into the internet of things that's truly internet based you're going to start to see a lot more Edge use cases so Telecom I think it's going to be completely disrupted by new brands so I think once that you see see how that plays out but all verticals are going to be disrupted just a casual statement to say yeah yeah no doubt in my mind that's great I'm personally really excited about the edge applications that are possible here and can't wait to see can't wait to see what happens next I'm curious as to your thoughts how based given your history here and we don't have to say number of years that you've been participating in in Cape Cod but give them your history what's the evolution looked like from that Community perspective when you were all just starting out having that first drink did you anticipate that we would be here with thousands of people in Detroit you know I knew the moment was happening around um 2017-2018 Dan Coney no longer with us he passed away I ran into him randomly in China and it was like what are you doing here he was with a bunch of Docker guys so they were already investing in so I knew that the cncf was a great Steward for this community because they were already doing the work Dan led a great team at that time and then they were they were they were kicking ass and they were just really setting the foundation they dig in they set the architecture perfectly so I knew that that was a moment that was going to be pretty powerful at the early days when we were talking about kubernetes before it even started we were always always talking about if this this could be the tcpip of of cloud then we could have kind of a de facto interoperability and Lou Tucker was working for Cisco at the time and we were called it interclouding inter-networking what that did during the the revolution Cloud yeah the revolution of the client server and PC Revolution was about connectivity and so tcpip was the disruptive enable that created massive amounts of wealth created a lot of companies created a whole generation of companies so I think this next inflection point is kind of happening right now I think kubernetes is one step of this abstraction layer but you start to see companies like snowflake who's built on AWS and then moved to multiple clouds Goldman Sachs Capital One you're going to see insurance companies so we believe that the rise of the super cloud is here that's going to be Cloud 3.0 that's software 3.0 it's software three what do you want to call it it's not yesterday's Cloud lift and shift and run a SAS application it's a true Enterprise digital digital transformation so that's that's kind of the trend that we see riding in now and so you know if you're not on that side of the street you're going to get washed away from that wave so it's going to be interesting to see how how it all plays out so it's fun to watch who's on the wrong side it is very fun I hope you all are listening to this really powerful advice from John he's dropping some serious knowledge bombs on us well holding the back for kubecon because we've got we got all the great guests coming on and that's where all the content comes from I mean the best part of the community is that they're sharing yeah absolutely so just for old time's sake and it's because it's how I met your fabulous team last year Define kubernetes for the audience kubernetes is like what someone said it was a magical Christmas I heard that was a well good explanation with that when I heard that one um you mean the technical definition or like the business definition or maybe both you can give us an interpretive dance if you'd like I mean the simplest way to describe kubernetes is an orchestration layer that orchestrates containers that are containing applications and it's a way to keep things running and runtime assembly of like the of the data so if you've got you're running containers you can containerize applications kubernetes gives you that capability to run applications at scale which feeds into uh the development uh cycle of the pipelining of apps so if you're writing applications and you want to scale up it's a fast way to stand up massive amounts of scale using containers and kubernetes so a variety of other things that are in the in the in the system too so that was pretty good there's a lot more under the hood but that's the oversimplified version I think that's what we were going for I think it's actually I mean it's harder to oversimplify it sometimes in this case it connects it connects well it's the connective tissue between all the container applications yes last question for you John we are here at the cube we're very excited to be headed to Detroit very soon what can people expect from the cube at coupon this year so we'll be broadcasting Wednesday Thursday and Friday we'll be there early I'll be there Monday and Tuesday we'll do our normal kind of hanging around getting some scoop on the on the ground floor you'll see us there Monday and Tuesday probably in the in the lounge too um come up and say hi to us um again we're looking for more stories this year we believe this is the year that you're going to hear a lot more storytelling coming out of this community as people get more proof points so come up to us share your email your your handle give us yours give us your story we'll publish it we think we think this is going to be the year that cloud native developers start showing the signs of the of the rise of the supercloud that's going to come out of this this community so you know if you got something to say you know we're open to share stories so we're here all that speaking of John how can people say hi to you and the team on Twitter at Furrier at siliconangle at thecube thecube.net siliconangle.com LinkedIn Dave vellantis they were open on all channels all right signal Instagram WhatsApp perfect well pick your channel we really hope to hear from you John thank you so much for joining us for this preview session and thank you for tuning in my name is Savannah Peterson here in Palo Alto at thecube Studios looking forward to Detroit we can't wait to hear your thoughts do let us know in the comments and let us know if you're headed to Michigan cheers [Music] thank you

>>from >>around the >>globe, it's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM, >>Think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube, had a great line up here talking sustainability. Kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains, career great to see you and wayne both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you. What's driving? IBMS investment sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>you know, johN what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM is 100 10 year old company. We've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation, that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental, our stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. C. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense. It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson that IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error. How is that evolved in today's focus? Because you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have uh A I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So, you know, these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that. And that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they say, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. We supported the Paris agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council, which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term >>action. That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna. We leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you've got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're in the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right? Is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, all of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and the context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those needs. >>You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because this waste involved is also disruption to business a security issues. But when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne? Because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right? So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network, where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you onboard them and off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A. I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours, he uses maximum to really focus on the maintenance and sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection, actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging ai to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed um for our clients. >>It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, It's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh, how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now, thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation, which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, NGos and Academia. Some examples. There's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zar in that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment programs science policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'm just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under Call for Code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much, Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being in what we like to turn clients zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing, that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative. Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>From around the globe, it's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube. We had a great line up here talking sustainability, kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains going great to see you and wayne, both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you what's driving? IBMS investment in sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>You know, jOHn what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM 110 year old company, we've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's a long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental a stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. E. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence, really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense, It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson, the IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error, how has that evolved in today's focus? Because, you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have a I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials, waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that and that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they said, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. He supported the Paris Agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term action. >>That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna we leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're on the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, All of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those >>needs. You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about on the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because there's waste involved is also disruption to business, a security issues, but when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne, because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right. So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you on board in an off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours he uses maximum too rarely focus on the maintaining sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection. Actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging AI to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed for our >>clients. It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, it's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with Korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, Ngos and Academia. Some examples, there's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zarin that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment Programs science Policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of Environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'll just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under call for code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's, that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer, both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being and what we like to turn client zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative, Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. >>Mm. Mhm.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's the theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco, brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Alright, welcome to theCUBE coverage here at RSA Conference in San Francisco and Moscone Halls, theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, in a cyber security is all about encryption data and also security. We have a very hot startup here, that amazing guest, Dr. Ellison Anne Williams, CEO and Founder of Enveil just recently secured a $10 million Series A Funding really attacking a real problem around encryption and use. Again, data ,security, analytics, making it all secure is great. Allison, and thanks for coming on. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> So congratulations on the funding before we get started into the interview talking about the hard news, you guys that are around the funding. How long have you guys been around? What's the funding going to do? What are you guys doing? >> Yeah, so we're about three and a half years old as a company. We just announced our Series A close last week. So that was led by C5. And their new US Funds The Impact Fund and participating. Other partners included folks like MasterCard, Capital One Ventures, Bloomberg, Beta 1843, etc. >> So some names jumped in C5 led the round. >> For sure. >> How did this get started? What was the idea behind this three years you've been actually doing some work? Are you going to production? Is it R&D? Is it in market? Give us a quick update on the status of product and solution? >> Yeah, so full production. For production of the product. We're in fact in 2.0 of the release. And so we got our start inside of the National Security Agency, where I spent the majority of my career. And we developed some breakthroughs in an area of technology called homomorphic encryption, that allows you to perform computations into the encrypted domain as if they were in the unencrypted world. So the tech had never existed in a practical capacity. So we knew that bringing seeds of that technology out of the intelligence community and using it to seed really and start the company, we would be creating a new commercial market. >> So look at this, right? So you're at the NSA, >> Correct >> Your practitioner, they're doing a lot of work in this area, pioneering a new capability. And did the NSA spin it out did they fund it was the seed capital there or did you guys bootstrap it >> No. So our seed round was done by an entity called Data Tribe. So designed to take teams in technologies that were coming out of the IC that wanted to commercialize to do so. So we took seed funding from them. And then we were actually one of the youngest company ever to be in the RSA Innovation Sandbox here in 2017, to be one of the winners and that's where the conversation really started to change around this technology called homomorphic encryption, the market category space called securing data in use and what that meant. And so from there, we started running the initial version of a product out in the commercial world and we encountered two universal reaction. One that we were expecting and one that we weren't. And the one that we were expecting is that people said, "holy cow, this actually works". Because what we say we do keeping everything encrypted during processing. Sounds pretty impossible. It's not just the math. And then the second reaction that we encountered that we weren't expecting is those initial early adopters turned around and said to us, "can we strategically invest in you?" So our second round of funding was actually a Strategic Round where folks like Bloomberg beta,Thomson Reuters, USA and Incue Towel came into the company. >> That's Pre Series A >> Pre Series A >> So you still moving along, if a sandbox, you get some visibility >> Correct. >> Then were the products working on my god is you know, working. That's great. So I want to get into before I get into some of the overhead involved in traditionally its encryption there always has been that overhead tax. And you guys seem to solve that. But can you describe first data-at-rest versus data-in-motion and data-in-user. data at rest, as means not doing anything but >> Yeah, >> In flight or in you so they the same, is there a difference? Can you just tell us the difference of someone this can be kind of confusing. >> So it's helpful to think of data security in three parts that we call the triad. So securing data at rest on the file system and the database, etc. This would be your more traditional in database encryption, or file based encryption also includes things like access control. The second area, the data security triad is securing data- in- transit when it's moving around through the network. So securing data at rest and in transit. Very well solution. A lot of big name companies do that today, folks like Talus and we partner with them, Talus, Gemalto, etc. Now, the third portion of the data security triad is what happens to that data when you go use or process it in some way when it becomes most valuable. And that's where we focus. So as a company, we secure data-in-use when it's being used or processed. So what does that mean? It means we can do things like take searches or analytics encrypt them, and then go run them without ever decrypting them at any point during processing. So like I said, this represents a new commercial market, where we're seeing it manifest most often right now are in things like enabling secure data sharing, and collaboration, or enabling secure data monetization, because its privacy preserving and privacy enabling as a capability. >> And so that I get this right, the problem that you solved is that during the end use parts of the triad, it had to be decrypted first and then encrypted again, and that was the vulnerability area. Look, can you describe kind of like, the main problem that you guys saw was that-- >> So think more about, if you've got data and you want to give me access to it, I'm a completely different entity. And the way that you're going to give me access to it is allowing me to run a search over your data holdings. We see this quite a bit in between two banks in the areas of anti-money laundering or financial crime. So if I'm going to go run a search in your environment, say I'm going to look for someone that's an EU resident. Well, their personal information is covered under GDPR. Right? So if I go run that search in your environment, just because I'm coming to look for a certain individual doesn't mean you actually know anything about that. And so if you don't, and you have no data on them whatsoever, I've just introduced a new variable into your environment that you now have to account for, From a risk and liability perspective under something like GDPR. Whereas if you use us, we could take that search encrypt it within our walls, send it out to you and you could process it in its encrypted state. And because it's never decrypted during processing, there's no risk to you of any increased liability because that PII or that EU resident identifier is never introduced into your space. >> So the operating side of the business where there's compliance and risk management are going to love this, >> For sure. >> Is that really where the action is? >> Yes, compliance risk privacy. >> Alright, so get a little nerdy action on this one. So encryption has always been an awesome thing depending on who you talk to you, obviously, but he's always been a tax associate with the overhead processing power. He said, there's math involved. How does homeomorphic work? Does it have problems with performance? Is that a problem? Or if not, how do you address that? Where does it? I might say, well, I get it. But what's the tax for me? Or is your tax? >> Encryption is never free. I always tell people that. So there always is a little bit of latency associated with being able to do anything in an encrypted capacity, whether that's at rest at in transit or in use. Now, specifically with homomorphic encryption. It's not a new area of encryption. It's been around 30 or so years, and it had often been considered to be the holy grail of encryption for exactly the reasons we've already talked about. Doing things like taking searches or analytics and encrypting them, running them without ever decrypting anything opens up a world of different types of use cases across verticals and-- >> Give those use case examples. What would be some that would be low hanging fruit. And it would be much more higher level. >> Some of the things that we're seeing today under that umbrella of secure data sharing and collaboration, specifically inside of financial services, for use cases around anti-money laundering and financial crimes so, allowing two banks to be able to securely collaborate with with each other, along the lines of the example that I gave you just a second ago, and then also for large multinational banks to do so across jurisdictions in which they operate that have different privacy and secrecy regulations associated with them. >> Awesome. Well, Ellison, and I want to ask you about your experience at the NSA. And now as an entrepreneur, obviously, you have some, you know, pedigree at the NSA, really, you know, congratulations. It's going to be smart to work there, I guess. Secrets, you know, >> You absolutely do. >> Brains brain surgeon rocket scientist, so you get a lot of good stuff. But now that you're on the commercial space, it's been a conversation around how public and commercial are really trying to work together a lot as innovations are happening on both sides of the fence there. >> Yeah. >> Then the ICC and the Intelligence Community as well as commercial. Yeah, you're an entrepreneur, you got to go make money, you got shareholders down, you got investors? What's the collaboration look like? How does the world does it change for you? Is it the same? What's the vibe in DC these days around the balance between collaboration or is there? >> Well, we've seen a great example of this recently in that anti-money laundering financial crime use case. So the FCA and the Financial Conduct Authority out of the UK, so public entity sponsored a whole event called a tech spread in which they brought the banks together the private entities together with the startup companies, so your early emerging innovative capabilities, along with the public entities, like your privacy regulators, etc, and had us all work together to develop really innovative solutions to real problems within the banks. In the in the context of this text spread. We ended up winning the know your customer customer due diligence side of the text brand and then at the same time that us held an equivalent event in DC, where FinCEN took the lead, bringing in again, the banks, the private companies, etc, to all collaborate around this one problem. So I think that's a great example of when your public and your private and your private small and your private big is in the financial services institutions start to work together, we can really make breakthroughs-- >> So you see a lot happening >> We see a lot happening. >> The encryption solution actually helped that because it makes sense. Now you have the sharing the encryption. >> Yeah. >> Does that help with some of the privacy and interactions? >> It breaks through those barriers? Because if we were two banks, we can't necessarily openly, freely share all the information. But if I can ask you a question and do so in a secure and private capacity, still respecting all the access controls that you've put in place over your own data, then it allows that collaboration to occur, whereas otherwise I really couldn't in an efficient capacity. >> Okay, so here's the curveball question for you. So anybody Startup Series today, but you really got advanced Series A, you got a lot of funding multiple years of operation. If I asked you what's the impact that you're going to have on the world? What would you say to that, >> Over creating a whole new market, completely changing the paradigm about where and how you can use data for business purposes. And in terms of how much funding we have, we have, we've had a few rounds, but we only have 15 million into the company. So to be three and a half years old to see this new market emerging and being created with with only $15 million. It's really pretty impressive. >> Yeah, it's got a lot of growth and keep the ownership with the employees and the founders. >> It's always good, but being bootstrap is harder than it looks, isn't it? >> Yeah. >> Or how about society at large impact. You know, we're living global society these days and get all kinds of challenges. You see anything else in the future for your vision of impact. >> So securing data and your supplies horizontally across verticals. So far we've been focused mainly on financial services. But I think healthcare is a great vertical to move out in. And I think there are a lot of global challenges with healthcare and the more collaborative that we could be from a healthcare standpoint with our data. And I think our capabilities enable that to be possible. And still respecting all the privacy regulations and restrictions. I think that's a whole new world of possibility as well. >> And your secret sauce is what math? What's that? What's the secret sauce, >> Math, Math and grit. >> Alright, so thanks for sharing the insights. Give a quick plug for the company. What are you guys looking to do? Honestly, $10 million in funding priorities for you and the team? What do you guys live in to do? >> So priorities for us? privacy is a global issue now. So we are expanding globally. And you'll be hearing more about that very shortly. We also have new product lines that are going to be coming out enabling people to do more advanced decisioning in a completely secure and private capacity. >> And hiring office locations DC. >> Yes. So our headquarters is in DC, but we're based on over the world, so we're hiring, check out our web page. We're hiring for all kinds of roles from engineering to business functionality >> And virtual is okay virtual hires school >> Virtual hires is great. We're looking for awesome people no matter where they are. >> You know, DC but primary. Okay, so great to have you gone. Congratulations for one, the financing and then three years of bootstrapping and making it happen. Awesome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for coming ,appreciate it. So keep coming to your RSA conference in Moscone. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching more after this short break (pop music playing)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Today is November 8, 2019 and I'd like to address one of the most important topics in the minds of a lot of executives. I'm talking about CEOs, CIOs, Chief Information Security Officers, Boards of Directors, governments and virtually every business around the world. And that's the topic of cyber security. The state of cyber security has changed really dramatically over the last 10 years. I mean, as a cyber security observer I've always been obsessed with Stuxnet, which the broader community discovered the same year that theCUBE started in 2010. It was that milestone that opened my eyes. Think about this. It's estimated that Stuxnet cost a million dollars to create. That's it. Compare that to an F-35 fighter jet. It costs about $85-$100 million to build one. And that's on top of many billions of dollars in R&D. So Stuxnet, I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks. That the future of war was all about cyber, not about tanks. And the barriers to entry were very, very low. Here's my point. We've gone from an era where thwarting hacktivists was our biggest cyber challenge to one where we're now fighting nation states and highly skilled organized criminals. And of course, cyber crime and monetary theft is the number one objective behind most of these security breaches that we see in the press everyday. It's estimated that by 2021 cyber crime is going to cost society $6 trillion in theft, lost productivity, recovery costs. I mean, that's just a staggeringly large number. It's even hard to fathom. Now, the other C-change is how organizations have had to respond to the bad guys. It used to be pretty simple. I got a castle and the queen is inside. We need to protect her, so what do we do? We built a mote, put it around the perimeter. Now, think of the queen as data. Well, what's happened? The queen has cloned herself a zillion times. She's left the castle. She's gone up to the sky with the clouds. She's gone to the edge of the kingdom and beyond. She's also making visits to machines and the factories and hanging out with the commoners. She's totally exposed. Listen, by 2020, there's going to be hundreds of billions of IP addresses. These are going to be endpoints and phones, TVs, cameras, tablets, automobiles, factory machines, and all these represent opportunities for the bad guys to infiltrate. This explosion of endpoints that I'm talking about is created massive exposures, and we're seeing it manifest itself in the form of phishing, malware, and of course the weaponization of social media. You know, if you think that 2016 was nuts, wait 'til you see how the 2020 presidential election plays out. And of course, there's always the threat of ransomware. It's on everybody's minds these days. So I want to try to put some of this in context and share with you some insights that we've learned from the experts on theCUBE. And then let's drill into some of the ETR data and assess the state of security, the spending patterns. We're going to try to identify some of those companies with momentum and maybe some of those that are a little bit exposed. Let me start with the macro and the challenged faced by organization and that's complexity. Here's Robert Herjavec on theCUBE. Now, you know him from the Shark Tank, but he's also a security industry executive. Herjavec told me in 2017 at the Splunk.com Conference that he thought the industry was overly complex. Let's take a look and listen. >> I think that the industry continues to be extremely complicated. There's a lot of vendors. There's a lot of products. The average Fortune 500 company has 72 security products. There's a stat that RSA this year, that there's 1500 new security start-ups every year. Every single year. How are they going to survive? And which ones do you have to buy because they're critical and provide valuable insights? And which ones are going to be around for a year or two and you're never going to hear about again? So it's a extremely challenging complex environment. >> So it's that complexity that had led people like Pat Gelsinger to say security is a do-over, and that cyber security is broken. He told me this years ago on theCUBE. And this past VM World we talked to Pat Gelsinger and remember, VMware bought Carbon Black, which is an endpoint security specialist, for $2.1 billion. And he said that he's basically creating a cloud security division to be run by Patrick Morley, who is the Carbon Black CEO. Now, many have sort of questioned and been skeptical about VMware's entrance into the space. But here's a clip that Pat Gelsinger shared with us on theCUBE this past VM World. Let's listen and we'll come back and talk about it. >> And this move in security, I am just passionate about this, and as I've said to my team, if this is the last I do in my career is I want to change security. We just not are satisfying our customers. They shouldn't put more stuff on our platforms. >> National defense issues, huge problems. >> It's just terrible. And I said, if it kills me, right, I'm going to get this done. And they says, "It might kill you, Pat." >> So this brings forth an interesting dynamic in the industry today. Specifically, Steven Smith, the CISO of AWS, at this year's Reinforce, which is their security conference, Amazon's big cloud security conference, said that this narrative that security is broken, it's just not true, he said. It's destructive and it's counterproductive. His and AWS's perspective is that the state of cloud security is actually strong. Kind of reminded me of a heavily messaged State of the Union address by the President of the United States. At the same time, in many ways, AWS is doing security over. It's coming at it from the standpoint of a clean slate called cloud and infrastructure as a surface. Here's my take. The state of security in this union is not good. Every year we spend more, we lose more, and we feel less safe. So why does AWS, the security czar, see if differently? Well, Amazon uses this notion of a shared responsibility security model. In other words, they secure the S3 buckets, maybe the EC2 infrastructure, not maybe, the EC2 infrastructure. But it's up to the customer to make sure that she is enforcing the policies and configuring systems that adhere to the EDIX of the corporation. So I think the shared security model is a bit misunderstood by a lot of people. What do I mean by that? I think sometimes people feel like well, my data's in the cloud, and AWS has better security than I do. Here I go, I'm good. Well, AWS probably does have better security than you do. Here's the problem with that. You still have all these endpoints and databases and file servers that you're managing, and that you have to make sure comply with your security policies. Even if you're all on the cloud, ultimately, you are responsible for securing your data. Let's take a listen to Katie Jenkins, the CISO of Liberty Mutual, on this topic and we'll come back. >> Yeah, so the shared responsibility model is, I think that's an important speaking point to this whole ecosystem. At the end of the day, Liberty Mutual, our duty is to protect policyholder data. It doesn't matter if it's in the cloud, if it's in our data centers, we have that duty to protect. >> It's on you. >> All right, so there you have it from a leading security practitioner. The cloud is not a silver bullet. Bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. So unfortunately the battle goes on. And here's where it gets tricky. Security practitioners are drowning in a sea of incidents. They have to prioritize and respond to, and as you heard Robert Herjavec say, the average large company has 75 security products installed. Now, we recently talked to another CISO, Brian Lozada, and asked him what's the number one challenge for security pros. Here's what he said. >> Lack of talent. I mean, we're starving for talent. Cyber security's the only field in the world with negative unemployment. We just don't have the actual bodies to actually fill the gaps that we have. And in that lack of talent CISOs are starving. We're looking for the right things or tools to actually patch these holes and we just don't have it. Again, we have to force the industry to patch all of those resource gaps with innovation and automation. I think CISOs really need to start asking for more automation and innovation within their programs. >> So bottom line is we can't keep throwing humans at the problem. Can't keep throwing tools at the problem. Automation is the only way in which we're going to be able to keep up. All right, so let's pivot and dig in to some of the ETR data. First, I want to share with you what ETR is saying overall, what their narrative looks like around spending. So in the overall security space, it's pretty interesting what ETR says, and it dovetails into some of the macro trends that I've just shared with you. Let's talk about CIOs and CISOs. ETR is right on when they tell me that these executives no longer have a blank check to spend on security. They realize they can't keep throwing tools and people at the problem. They don't have the bodies, and as we heard from Brian Lozada. And so what you're seeing is a slowdown in the growth, somewhat of a slowdown, in security spending. It's still a priority. But there's less redundancy. In other words, less experimentation with new vendors and less running systems in parallel with legacy products. So there's a slowdown adoption of new tools and more replacement of legacy stuff is what we're seeing. As a result, ETR has identified this bifurcation between those vendors that are very well positioned and those that are losing wallet share. Let me just mention a few that have the momentum, and we're going to dig into this data in more detail. Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Okta, which does identity management, Cisco, who's coming at the problem from its networking strength. Microsoft, which recently announced Sentinel for Azure. These are the players, and some of them that are best positioned, I'll mention some others, from the standpoint spending momentum in the ETR dataset. Now, here's a few of those that are losing momentum. Checkpoint, SonicWall, ArcSight, Dell EMC, which is RSA, is kind of mixed. We'll talk about that a little bit. IBM, Symantec, even FireEye is seeing somewhat higher citations of decreased spending in the ETR surveys and dataset. So there's a little bit of a cause for concern. Now, let's remember the methodology here. Every quarter ETR asks are you green, meaning adopting this vendor as new or spending more? Are you neutral, which is gray, are you spending the same? Or are you red, meaning that you're spending less or retiring? You subtract the red from the green and you get what's called a net score. The higher the net score, the better. So here's a chart that shows a ranking of security players and their net scores. The bars show survey data from October '18, July '19, and October '19. In here, you see strength from CrowdStrike, Okta, Twistlock, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. You see Elastic, Microsoft, Illumio, the core, Palo Alto Classic, Splunk looking strong, Cisco, Fortinet, Zscaler is starting to show somewhat slowing net score momentum. Look at Carbon Black. Carbon Black is showing a meaningful drop in net score. So VMware has some work to do. But generally, the companies to the left are showing spending momentum in the ETR dataset. And I'll show another view on net score in a moment. But I want to show a chart here that shows replacement spending and decreased spending citations. Notice the yellow. That's the ETR October '19 survey of spending intentions. And the bigger the yellow bar, the more negative. So Sagar, the director of research at ETR, pointed this out to me, that, look at this. There are about a dozen companies where 20%, a fifth of the customer base is decreasing spend or ripping them out heading into the year end. So you can see SonicWall, CA, ArcSight, Symantec, Carbon Black, again, a big negative jump. IBM, same thing. Dell EMC, which is RSA, slight uptick. That's a bit of a concern. So you can see this bifurcation that ETR has been talking about for awhile. Now, here's a really interesting kind of net score. What I'm showing here is the ETR data sorted by net score, again, higher is better, and shared N, which is the number of shared accounts in the survey, essentially the number of mentions in that October survey with 1,336 IT buyers responded. So how many of that 1,300 identified these companies? So essentially it's a proxy for the size of the install base. So showing up on both charts is really good. So look, CrowdStrike has a 62% net score with a 133 shared account. So a fairly sizable install base and a very high net score. Okta, similar. Palo Alto Networks and Splunk, both large, continue to show strength. They got net scores of 44% and 313 shared N. Fortinet shows up in both. Proofpoint. Look at Microsoft and Cisco. With 521 and 385 respectively on the right hand side. So big install bases with very solid net scores. Now look at the flip side. Go down to the bottom right to IBM. 132 shared accounts with a 14.4% net score. That's very low. Check Point similarly. Same with Symantec. Again, bifurcation that ETR has been citing. Really stark in this chart. All right, so I want to wrap. In some respects from a practitioner perspective, the sky erectus is falling. You got increased attack surface. You've got exploding number of IP addresses. You got data distributed all over the place, tool creep. You got sloppy user behavior, overwork security op staff, and a scarcity of skills. And oh, by the way, we're all turning into a digital business, which is all about data. So it's a very, very dangerous time for companies. And it's somewhat chaotic. Now, chaos, of course, can mean cash for cyber security companies and investors. This is still a very vibrant space. So just by the way of comparison and looking at some of the ETR data, check this out. What I'm showing is companies in two sectors, security and storage, which I've said in previous episodes of breaking analysis, storage, and especially traditional storage disk arrays are on the back burner spending wise for many, many shops. This chart shows the number of companies in the ETR dataset with a net score greater than a specific target. So look, security has seven companies with a 49% net score or higher. Storage has one. Security has 18 above 39%. Storage has five. Security has 31 companies in the ETR dataset with a net score higher than 30%. Storage only has nine. And I like to think of 30% as kind of that the point at which you want to be above that 30%. So as you can see, relatively speaking, security is an extremely vibrant space. But in many ways it is broken. Pat Gelsinger called it a do-over and is affecting a strategy to fix it. Personally, I don't think one company can solve this problem. Certainly not VMware, or even AWS, or even Microsoft. It's too complicated, it's moving too fast. It's so lucrative for the bad guys with very low barriers to entry, as I mentioned, and as the saying goes, the good guys have to win every single day. The bad guys, they only have to win once. And those are just impossible odds. So in my view, Brian Lozada, the CISO that we interviewed, nailed it. The focus really has to be on automation. You know, we can't just keep using brute force and throwing tools at the problem. Machine intelligence and analytics are definitely going to be part of the answer. But the reality is AI is still really complicated too. How do you operationalize AI? Talk to companies trying to do that. It's very, very tricky. Talk about lack of skills, that's one area that is a real challenge. So I predict the more things change the more you're going to see this industry remain a game of perpetual whack a mole. There's certainly going to be continued consolidation, and unquestionably M&A is going to be robust in this space. So I would expect to see continued storage in the trade press of breaches. And you're going to hear scare tactics by the vendor community that want to take advantage of the train wrecks. Now, I wish I had better news for practitioners. But frankly, this is great news for investors if they can follow the trends and find the right opportunities. This is Dave Vellante for Cube Insights powered by ETR. Connect with me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com, or @dvellante on Twitter, or please comment on what you're seeing in the marketplace in my LinkedIn post. Thanks for watching. Thank you for watching this breaking analysis. We'll see you next time. (energetic music)

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I. F. S. >>Welcome back to Boston, everybody. You're watching The Cube. The leader in live tech coverage is Day one coverage of the I. F s World Conference. Darren Russo's here is the CEO of F S Darren. Thanks for coming back in the Cube. Great TV again. So last year was your first year. He was kind of laid out your vision at the World Conference. How's progress? >>Yeah, Look, it's going incredibly well. We were really focused on how we go from being a pretty fragment of global business to being, you know, an integrated business where we were able to operate. You know, its scale globally in a very homogenous way, where the customer experience was the same, irrespective where they engaged with us. And, you know, we've made a tremendous amount of progress with it, So you know, the business is growing really strongly. Net revenues up 22% year on year. I lost its revenues up 40% year on year are clouds up in the triple digits, so you know it's tough to be critical of how it's going so far. >>That's great, Great. You're growing faster than your peers. I think the stat was you gave us three Ex factory except in the industry would be awesome. Is that means that your primary benchmark do you want? You want to gain share? You want to go faster than the big whales, I presume. I >>think two things One is customer satisfaction, we believe, is the key indicator of long term success. S O. You know, we're the number one ranked European efforts. Salmon gotten appearance sites. That's that is and always will be my number. One metric. Can we be way the number one from a customer satisfaction perspective? And then I believe the revenue stats will follow and you know that's where we are. So certainly, if you look at our our core peers, the big G R P vendors, all of them are flat on. Dhe were growing 20 ships since >>one of the things you mentioned in your Cube interview last year was one of the things that you wanted to focus on was I'll call regional alignment. Paul and I used to work for I D. G. I worked for I. D. C. You were editor in chief of Computer World. We work for a company, had more offices overseas and IBM, and it was really hard to herd the cats. And that was one of the things that you cited. Have you been able to get people generally poor or at the same time? And how has that affected your business? Yeah. Look, I >>think the big challenge before I arrived was that there wasn't really a strategy of global strategy for the business. My face had a way of working and there was a strong culture, but there wasn't really a strategy. And obviously it's difficult to be critical of people when they not following the strategy when there isn't one s o. You know, Step one was really making sure that we had a strategy on DDE that was really about being focused on the five industries that we focused on, focused on three solutions on dhe focused on the six segments of customer, which is half a 1,000,000,000 to 5 billion. So now, globally, you know, irrespective the office that you go to, um anywhere in the world, they're focused on those five industries they focused on those three solutions and they're focused on their customer segments. So it helps me. P. M >>I said during our preview video video this morning that I've been around this industry as long as I f s has, until last year had never even heard of it. Is that just me being clueless? There's something there >>that we were just saying before we started that we're the definitely the biggest software business you've never heard of. Um, and and and that's common, I think, you know, we were There are a couple of factors. One is that the business was very European centric. Andi didn't really engaged in a tremendous amount of marketing and media prison. So, you know, those are elements that, you know, I think we're doing a better job off now, But we have a long way to go. The challenge that we have is that where we compete, we win when we get in and were able to tell our story, and we're able to show the value we win. We just don't get into as many deals as we need to. And that's the challenge we have. >>Yeah, there was a lot of talk this morning about the importance of those five pillars of those five industries. If you're going to become the next S A P, you're gonna have to branch out beyond that. What is your thinking about diversify >>becoming the next? They say he is definitely not my ambition, You know, I think way remain focused on customer satisfaction. And, you know, I think that there's a there's a difference. Whatever it is leading them, it's not customer satisfaction. You worked >>there for four years. >>I worked there for four years. I know. I think the big thing for me is is that we've got to stay focused on their customer voice. They focused on what delivers value for our customers beyond just the rhetoric and hyperbole. You know, I think when you when you listen to a lot of the complexity that our customers are facing today, any customers are facing. Companies are facing increasingly disruptive times, and the tech industry is making life more difficult for them. The more best of breed solutions get both. The more fragments that potential the landscape is, the more complex it becomes for customers if they have to try and figure out. How do we integrate these things and derive value from this highly fragmented landscape? So you know, we're trying to solve that problem. How do we make it easier for customers to challenge in their industry? And that's where this whole for the challenges has check comes from. How do we help him to be disruptive in their industry? Have competitive advantage? >>That seems to be a sort of a fundamentally different thing about your approach, though. Is this focus on those vertical industry's most e r P companies did not do that. Is that something that is core to your values? >>Look, I >>think what we recognize is that as you move to the cloud, you have to drive to standard. That's just the reality of going to the cloud on what's happening for the horizontal E. R B vendors. So the locks of ASAP and Oracle is that they have one e r P solution that fits every industry. So if it's good for health insurance and it's good for a bank, then it's difficult to really get your head around the fact that it could be good for a defense manufacturer, but the functional requirements is simply vastly different on that means that you have to customize them. If you have to customize that, they can go to the cloud. So what we believe is that you have to have this vertical specialization, the five industries that we serve us all. A lot of commonality in the process is that they use. And that's why that vertical strategy is so key to our success. So you won't see us going into financial service is, or health care or retail worth that core application. We may in time in many years to come branch out. That will be a different solutions. >>So your tailor, that app for that module for that industry, Yes, just go deep, deep functionality. You're known for that, but at the same time you're also messaging. You want your customers to be able to tailor this for their environment. So square that circle for me. >>So I think when we talk about a choice and and I think tailoring is the wrong word, we talk about choice. We're talking about choice of deployments on Prem or in the cloud choice of customer choice of partner, rather who they're going to deploy with on Dhe, then The solution is really an industry solution that comes with that functional death. And we don't we don't advocate their customers customized that all. We really don't want them to customize it. What we explain to them in some detail is that the real value comes from adopting the solution for two standard and staying on a vanilla application. Because that vanilla application, you're going to be able to withstand future upgrades, the total cost of ownership gets lower. The processes that are embedded in that application or best of breed at the box. That's what they're intended to do, and that works when you have a vertical application. When you have a horizontal application and you're trying to have a do things that it shouldn't naturally be doing, that becomes company. >>Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that essentially the message ASAP had when it went through? It's hyper growth in the late nineties. I mean, there was a Y two k thing there, too, but ah, lot of the message was around. Do it our way and and then you don't have to get stuck in a rut, >>So I think that when it came out with that generation of application. That certainly was what they had hoped would happen. But what happened in practice is that the system integrators came in and the whole business process reengineering explosion happened on Dhe. That's not how it how it manifested itself. So what you see is, you see, he's very large, monolithic ASAP applications that were customized over in some cases decades, not not. You know, if a customer is deploying for two standard, then they should be able to deploy in a period mission. In weeks, we spoke about our deployment with Racing Point. If one team and going live in 12 weeks, you know, we're a 700 million global business. We deployed a knife s in 24 weeks. You know, if a customer's deploying for two standard, it's measured in weeks. As soon as they start to talk about two years or three years or five years or seven years there, customizing the solution significantly. Yeah, I >>mean, it became just sort of a perpetual upgrade, maintenance and up for the time it had a business impact. But boy, you think a cloud today agility, you know, getting rid of waterfall approaches, Missus. Antithetical to today's Look >>what I don't point fingers here. I think that this just maturity come with experience. The line of business applications you'll see our EMS and your HR solutions have taught people that you can, if you think about this is look at sea. Are Emma's an example? You had Siebel before people would implement stable. They would customize Siebel that would take long implementations. They were highly bespoke applications and then sells. Force came along and just destroyed them, and they destroyed them. Because what people learned very quickly was that there was a really easy to consume, really easy to use application that functionally might be inferior. But the compromises that you'd make from a functionality perspective will weigh, outweighed by their time to value in ease of use. And and the learnings from CR mnh are in procurement. Those line of business applications have now being backed into in the e. R. P >>world. So in terms of capital allocation, you're owned by private equity, which is actually a public company. I'm interested in how you're allocating capital R and D, where you're where your emphasis is. You don't have to you have to do stock buy back, but, you know, describe the P relationship. >>So look, one of my learning's to see survive this is that not all private equity firms or equal they have different strategies are very fortunate to be with Ekiti, who are a growth investor. They're known as a growth investor on dhe, and they buy companies that are strong growth tech firms on dhe. They've been hugely supportive of us investing because they understand that the investment in technology is important. So, you know, just looking at some detail today we invest twice as much in R and D as we did three years ago, just to give you, you know, one data point. So there's a big focus on technology, and the thing is, is that we we have to invest in technology to drive those attributes that are discussed earlier. How do we How do we enable customers to adopt a solution? It's a standard so they can go alive quicker. How do we enable customers to be able to sit down in the front of the application like we do with the mobile phone and intuitively know how to use it? How do we reduce the total cost of ownership through automation. Those are capabilities that you know that they don't come for free. We have to invest in them. So big investments in technology. And >>I think the private equity guys, at least the modern ones, have realized Why should the V. C's have all the fun they realize? Hey, we can actually put some money in tow and the transforming we can have a bigger exit and actually make much better returns than sucking the company drive. Yeah, well, look, I think the other >>thing is is that you know, in public companies, you have the downside off. You know this this courtly metric Ondas quarterly cadence. Andi, you see very compromising decisions being made because you know, people can't afford to miss 1/4. There's no long term planning that's done on dhe. That's fundamentally not the case and the private equity world, you know, not unusual now for four p firms to hold companies for 5678 years on, and that allows you to take a very long term strategic view. If if if a shift from perpetual to subscription is the right thing to happen, they can do that without worrying that, you know, because of the definite earnings are revenue that you're going to get caned by the market next quarter. Andi. I think that that needs to, I think, better decision making for the long term. >>A lot of companies are struggling. >>If you have the right P for because you get bought by the firm of events, you want to go public. But the the you said something this morning that 50% of your customers each year or net knew, How are you pulling that off >>That 50% of our license revenue? Eso way we went about 300 odd new customers a year. Obviously, that's growing, as I said, you know, 40%. But you know, it's ah, I think, having done this for 25 years, there are companies that are or good at extracting revenue from their installed based. One of the analysts here has as a hashtag wallet Fracking is what do you think It's such a great So you know, they're good at Wallick fracking and and I think the customers that that our customers off those vendors know exactly who they are and you know I think that for us to that the fact that we're able to go out and win 50% of our license revenue from net new name customers, I think is a really strong indicator of the health of the business. It's much harder to do than just extracting revenue out of the install base. You know, we don't have a compliance practice. We've never charged a customer for you in direct access. You know, these are principles that we stand by, and it's easier to say that your customer centric on get 80% of your revenue, have your installed base because you're doing compliance rounds. But, you know, we put our money where our mouth is, and that's not that's not how we do it. >>Are these net new customers? Are they? Are they migrating from QuickBooks or they migrating from a Competitors >>know, because of the segment that we're in this half a 1,000,000,000 to 5 billion? I would say the majority of them are what I would call first generation the Rp solution. So you know you're talking about you know, the original generation of Microsoft's acquisitions, the divisions and the eggs actors and the Solomon's and so on on. And then, you know, it's a P R two and our three customers you're talking about customer sitting on, you know, the solutions that in for hoovered up the matrix B picks type customers, ace 400 customers. So they're you know, they're first generation your P solutions that simply don't have the flexibility to deal with the complexity and demands of modern business world. >>From 2009 about 2017 I f. S was pretty inquisitive and then just actually, I was gonna ask you >>when I started, you stopped >>it, right? But then, you know, today you announced an extra small acquisition, But how should we think about M and a >>look? The first year for me was really about trying to build a functional business. You know, we spoke about how fragmented this really hit to Jenna's business. Andi just occurred to me. You know, if we go out and we start to buy things, how do we integrate them into a business that's completely fragments? And you know, it had no identity or culture. So, you know, the last year has been focused on how do we build their common understanding of what it is that we're doing. We now have a very clear strategy. Five industries, three solutions, one segment. And you know, when you when you have that clarity of vision that it's really easy to guard and do him and I because you know what fits and what doesn't fit, you can understand exactly how you're gonna build value for customers on dhe. That's why the S t a deal is so good for us. Because we're now the undisputed leader in field service management, you know, 8000 our customers globally, which is way more than anybody else. Scott, Andi, you know, you should absolutely expect more from us. But it will be in the five industries, three technology segments and one customers. Isaac. >>Well, in the A p I enablement should obviously facility. >>Absolutely. I mean, I was just with a partner of ours now, and they have this amazing augmented reality solution. You know, it will be a combination of off going out there to build market, share a cz well, as finding you know, really innovative solutions that can help us advance the technology that we provide customers. >>You have a new slogan this year for the challengers, which seems to be aimed at companies that that imagine themselves as challenging the Giants, which is great. But if you're not a company that season sees themselves that way. Are the studies level home with I have s Look, >>I I think I was with a group of CEOs from one of the big analyst rooms, and they had the portfolio companies and their private equity firm and analysts that CEOs of the companies are having a conversation with him about digital transformation. And I I made a rather provocative statement which, you know, got unanimous agreement, which is that all of the CEOs there with either in an industry that was being disrupted and we're trying to figure out how they respond to that disruption or they would soon not every job and they all acknowledge that they absolutely fit into that category. In other words, all of them were being disrupted. All of them were facing a challenge. It was kind of like, you know, if it is happening to all of us at a more rapid pace than we have ever had before. So my view is, is that you know if if you're in the room and you're going, you know, if it's might not be for us because we're not a challenger. Yeah, The lights may not be on >>for Long s o double click on that. What role does I s play in terms of digital transformation? >>If I could just hold on there because the thing is, there are leaders in Mama, there challenges. And there are leaders. The leaders typically are gonna go with seif solution. They're gonna go with one of the legacy our peace. So I'm not suggesting that everybody necessarily is a challenger. There are leaders, you know, Nokia was a leader until they weren't because they were complacent. Andi, I think they you know, they didn't run on I office. So, you know, I think there are two segments. There are leaders and there are challenges, and we're there for the ones that are ready to disrupt. Sorry. >>Please clarify that. No. Good. So So get back to it. Sort of digital transformation and disruption. What do you see? Is the role of AARP generally, but specifically I f s. >>Look, I think we digital information. A lot of discussion about it on the stage this morning. I've just touched on it now. I think that it takes very different forms. What most industries are finding is that they're facing a lot of non traditional competition and they're having to innovate around their business models. They can't going to market in the same way as they did before. They're having to innovate because of this non traditional competition. Andi. Understanding your your customer's understanding, your your staff, understanding your supply chain understanding your financials are all critical parts of being able to respond to whatever their changes, and that's where the RP solution comes into it. I think there's an interesting challenge now, which is that as those applications have become more fragmented and you've got more based debris cloud applications Ah, lot of the value often E. R P was that you had this integrated set of applications that you had this one source of the truth andan. Fortunately for many customers today, they don't have that because they've got import all of these best of breed applications and they don't have one source of the truth that multiple invoices made it multiple versions of their customer in the databases. Andi we still stand for a single integrated the r p. So, you know, I think understanding those elements of your businesses key. I was with a customer of ours in Nebraska a short while ago, and they were talking about our existing office customer. They were talking about the steel import duties that were imposed through the trade war with China. And they were saying, Look, that they had been able to respond to that in a way that they had good visibility of the supply chain, who was improved, imposing the tariffs, how they were going to impact them when they were going to impact them. And because they had this integrated Siara AARP. They were able to pass those pricing changes onto their customers, and they survived this. What could have been a cataclysmic event for their business had they not had an integrated your pee? They not being able to have this visibility into the supply chain and the customer base. They may well have gone out of business just because of that one change >>to meet all day and all comes back to the data, putting their putting data at the core of their business. That integrated data pipeline is essentially what they get out of that last question. So thinking about the next 18 to 24 months, what are the milestones that observers should look for? One of the barometers that we should be watching. >>So look, in the next two years, it's it's really about us building incremental scale. We have, ah, four year plan, which I built when I came in. We're halfway through that plan. We've hit all of the metrics and exceeded most the metrics that we had on their plan. It's really continue to focus on the strategy. As I said, we focus on those five industries, continue to build market share, continue to focus on those three solution types and build market share and market dominance on those three solutions. Andi in that segment that I defined before, so no change from a strategy perspective. I think there's really value in the consistency that we bring on on their talk track and, you know, along the way we passed the $1,000,000,000 mark, which we will do, I think, in 2021 organically if we accelerate, some of the money will pass the 1,000,000,000 before, but you know business. The margins continue to expand. We focus on customer satisfaction and, you know, it's a It's a pretty straight, you know, traditional prey book that we have to execute on now. >>Well, congratulations. It's a great playbook, and you're growing very nicely. So love that. Look, we really an honor to the last couple of years. Learn a little bit about the company in your industry. So appreciate meeting you guys. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching over right back with our next guest. Ready for this short break day Volonte with Paul Gill in. You're watching the Cube from I f s World Conference from Boston 2019 right back.

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I f s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I >>f. S, I say, What a minute. I didn't cash it. Everybody welcome to I f s World 2019. You watching the Cube? The leader in live tech coverage on day Volante with my co host, Paul Galen. Marty Martin is here. She is the president of the service management division of I F s and C e o of work wave. Marty, good to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm so excited. >>A lot of action going on. You guys. Service management, Field Service management particular. You guys had an acquisition today. We're gonna talk about Let's start with your role you came in and 2017 with the >>pretty acting. Actually, >>2018 finalized the acquisition. I think they announce it in 2017. So tell us about how you came in and where you're at today with >>Certainly. So work wave the company. I lied. Join the effects family in 2017. Darren Ruess, who joined I f s in April 2018 recruited me into form a global business unit around service in August of 2018 and the reason why we did this is service isn't only a part of our economies all over the world, but it's a super great growth area that almost every business can go after in in progress both revenue and margins. So we had a lot of great software products, and we really wanted to improve our go to market around this. >>So why, why all of a sudden today, this talk about service management? Why's it becoming so hard? I mean, everybody's always been focused on customer service, but why this service management generally and field service management while the buzz. >>So first off, you've had the evolution of a number of line of business applications and service certainly has been a part of maintenance organizations or break fix where you're going out in repairing thing. What we're realizing now when you talk about service ization, how o E EMS air building what's called aftermarket revenue? There is literally $100 billion of revenue that you can get from that you look, we had Melissa did a nano from Souza. If you think about open source software, they make money from sirve ties, ing, open source software and the products. You look at apple how they're doing APs. So people are starting to realize that service is an engine for brand loyalty, customer experience, not just a cost center. How it used to be, what the >>customers do. Ah, companies do wrong with service one of the areas where they tend to have the greatest inefficiencies where you can help him. >>So first off, I'd say that often in the C suite, unless they're pure place service companies. They don't understand how transformative service is and how important it is to their brand. Many times now, if you have digital enablement of a new customer, the first time they see a face of your brand might be your service technician. So getting the awareness of the C suite is Step one, because we want to start talking about outcomes that grow revenue and profits and getting them to invest in service. So you know, many times will say, Oh, I want to do a C. R M project. I want to do an E r P project. That's certainly things were good at it. Here I a fest, but we can coach them through how you take the market opportunity for your company and service enabled by our technology and transform. Tomorrow I'll be with Accenture, one of our many great partners, and we're talking about adapting the business, the service transformation, sometimes digitally, sometimes with workflow transformation. But that opportunity and service is huge and almost never. There's no company I know of that's taking 100% of their service market share. That's the difference, especially in slower growth. Asset manufacturing are more mature verticals. >>So I was here last night walking the floor, and I went to the extent you Booth, you know, anytime you see, except you're in a show like this. Okay, Censure. You think Large company Global. I was actually quite impressed a little bit surprised to see you know, their presence here because they they go where the money is, right? And so my specific question is, think, except you think big companies. But you guys obviously focused on what range of companies smaller midsize company. So what's the landscape? Looked like? What's the difference is between sort of smaller and larger companies, >>so that's a great question. I'll take it in part So if you think about a neck censure definitely they looked a large. I also have had meetings with the Lloyd McKinsey Cap gem and I dxc etcetera Also tcs Tech Mahindra which a little bit or more telco focused. So if you think about at the very large and you have telco utilities, large manufacturing O e ems that our customers and definitely the customers I'm pursuing Maur with this focus But we also with work with go down to the S and B We had panels also of, for example, female owners of franchises and also males as well that are creating new service businesses and they're starting maybe with one truck in out providing service. So the fact that we can handle not only the breath and depth of complex service needs, but through work wave we also can encourage the small service businesses to reach their full potential is fantastic. And you know that makes me excited every day. And part of why I focused on service specifically is you are delighting customers. You are the face of a brand and you're making a difference. It's not something that s 02 is esoteric. This is about really value that we're delivering, >>always interested in the dynamics of serving the SNB market >>because one of >>these small companies don't really have that. Maybe family owned there found her own. They don't really put a lot of value on technology. How >>do you >>get in the door? How do you convince them that automating the service function is actually worth the investment? >>Well, first off, I'd say that even the big companies are struggling to go paperless. Okay, so, you know, I think some of the challenges we see survive, if you will, big to small, especially when you look globally in different countries. What have you. But the approach we take in the S and B is that we want to be a software as a service provider, and we were to really handle everything they need in their business. So everything from how they grow leads how they have c r m type functionality. How, then they're delivering service, how they're cross selling service, how they're billing service. So at the at the S M B level, we're putting that kind of all in one technology and there's really not that much integration or I T Service is around that right. We want it to be easy and fast, etcetera, as you go more into the mid market and then definitely into the enterprise. Then you start getting more complexity. You get more I t service's integrations, more configurable ity, sometimes even some customized software. So there is a definitely a difference in the complexity. But the fundamentals of what a service business needs really isn't that much different to your >>customers that you mentioned customize and you guys were SAS space. That's one of the text that we'd like to sort of explore a little bit. A lot >>of >>times SAS companies want to avoid, you know, custom mods. But at the same time, you guys are trying to offer a choice. So help us square that circle. How do you What's the conversation like with customers in terms of how you advise them, You guys obviously do a lot of deep functionality, you know? How do you sort of advise them whether or not to go heavily custom or try to go out of the box? >>Certainly. So in the true, I'd say the small business of a medium you start getting some crossover, but in the small business, Absolutely avoid customization because you won't be able to stay evergreen. It's going to be too hard to maintain. You don't have the subject matter experts, et cetera, so that's really a truce. Ask that from a community. A product engagement. We need to be driving the partnership with the customers that they can use a software out of the box in ways that matter to them. As you start getting into the mid market and especially the enterprise, then it becomes more of a choice, right? How much money do you have to spend? How robust is your organization and set trek? And in general, I advise customers if they care about evergreen software, et cetera. If they care about ease of upgrades, don't customize that Being said, we recognize sometimes in the field with your brand experience Custom mobile. You may need to customize a little bit, so it's Ah, say, a chicken and an egg. You have to weigh the benefits of the costs, and that's what we work through with our >>customers. Specifically morning. What's the upgrade cycle like? There's a customer having the choice Thio upgrade at a particular time, Or do they have a window? >>So it varies primarily, there's a few exceptions, but in general, with the work way, Family of products is true SAS. So it's almost like you're Apple Phone. We pushed the upgrade and you have to take it. Okay, And that's the true SAS model at I. F. S. And this is something Darren talked about in his keynote. We pride ourselves on offering choice. So even though we do have regular release cycles, we encourage customers to upgrade regularly. They have the choice on when they take upgrades and also how they deploy. We have some markets with things like data, privacy and what have you that they may, for that reason or for other reasons, go on premise even still today. So we give them the choice on how they upgrade as well as where they host. >>I'm fascinated by your product line. You have products for pest control. H V. A. C. Plumbing cleaning service is long and landscape. How different are these industries really in terms of their their automation needs? >>Well, I'll tell you one of the personal factors that Darren wanted to make sure I was comfortable with was multitasking. And that definitely is the case, because an I f s, we serve five key industries. So if you think about manufacturing utilities, telco service providers and Andy Okay, that's more at the enterprise level. If you think then when you go toe work wave. Those verticals that you mentioned are all the ones we service at work wave, and they are different. So you know what? Work wave. It's primarily service industries where you're going into ah, home and a little bit The commercial aspect and I effects were also doing more some heavy industries, some very large asset base, things like that. So I like to think about it as a product I service consumer based service. And then you can also differentiate across verticals with what are called high value assets versus, you know, Mork consumer size assets. >>So what >>are >>the one of the key technology enablers that are driving service management today? I mean, obviously, cloud, we talked about sas a lot of push on you X and customer experience, but what other key ones? >>So all the three that you mentioned mobile is huge. You know, Pete and even today, like I run. I work mainly from my phone, and that's really what people want. They want efficient work flows that are configurable on mobile, tied to the customer, the asset, the business. And that's an area that we're continuing to make investment. We also try to prioritize how we bring in the new technology trends into service. Because every technology trend that you see has applicable ity and service supply chain and how you run spare parts specially globally, you can see applications for Blockchain augmented emerged Reality how you can connect the field tech with an expert resource or remote resource to the consumer. That is obvious, right? So you talked about the enabling technologies like Cloud, how we're thinking about data platforms and Data's the currency. Of all of that, we need to d'oh. His service is really about a an execution engine, right? Because to deliver a customer experience that makes people come back to your brand. To purchase Maur, you need great service, so any time somebody talks about customer experience, but they don't talk about service. I want to say you're really naive because you can just get the customer. You have to delight the customer. >>Uh, the, uh, there's a lot of interesting technology going on now in the area. Fleet Management making fleets more efficient How does that figure into the service is? You offer. >>So Fleet management is an important part, and it's one that you have a very tangible return on investment when you deploy route management route optimization, fleet management. So you have the aspects that are very tangible, relate to how do you get the person or the truck where it needs to be when it needs to be okay, and that's pretty well understood. Then how do you get the most efficient schedule that minimizes miles driven gas, used et cetera? And then, of course, you also are thinking about health and safety. There's some cool things now that you can partner that if you have these fleet technologies installed in a way that is integrated in your service business, you can actually get lower insurance premiums, right? So it's not just the conventional use. Cases were starting to think in this kind of gig economy, how you can also be thinking about bringing in Maura what's called a contingent workforce. So if you have surge capacity in a certain period or you want to just do more third party service, probably your appliances. You know they're not the employees, if you will, of a g e or a world polar and LG right there Probably a contingent workforce. And that's a model that's also evolving. But to do Fleet Management across say, contractors, not just employees is an area that were thinking more and more led by some of the uber ization, if you will, of the of the marketplace >>right up against the clock, Marty. But to last questions You made an acquisition today, Vashti Uh, yeah, uh, I thought of it as a tuck in acquisitions, although Darren essentially sort of said, it's gonna make you the leader now in service management. Um And then I want to understand how you guys differentiate from some of the big whales. >>So, you know, overall, we're on track to be about 700 revenue this year in service management. We're working to get to 200 million, right? So this year will probably be around maybe 1/5 50 ish per se. Don't quote me on that check with our coms team, but the point being is that we have the ability to use these tuck in acquisitions and service to accelerate our lead, not just from a revenue perspective, which is what we were just talking about. But from a product perspective, you might have followed Salesforce acquiring Click. That means we are the only independent. Aye, aye. Optimization engine that is field tested. Battle ready. So that's great. This s t a is how we consolidate our dominance and complex service. So what darren was speaking to is not on Lee the service management segment of our revenue and how we continue to accelerate over the oracles in the S a. P s and the service maxes et cetera of the world. But how we take what we're already dominant in and really put the hammer down. Honesty is part of that. >>Your differentiation then if I infers, is focus. Um, you're you're deep customer customs agent deep >>domain expertise. Yeah, So really, when you think about a i optimization, which drives a ton of business value and the ability to handle the complex service cases that then drive business outcomes and outcomes based service models, we are number one and s dea tucks into that, even though it is very strategic on how we position ourselves with leadership and service. >>All right, Challenger becomes number one, Marty. Thanks very much. All right, Keep it right, everybody. Dave A lot with Paul Galen. You're watching the Cube from Boston Mass. I f s world 2019 right back.

>>from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I F s. Hi, buddy. Welcome to Boston. You're watching the cubes coverage of I s s World in the Heinz Auditorium in Boston. I'm Day Volonte with my co host, Paul Gill and Paul. This is the the largest enterprise resource planning software company that our audience probably has never heard of. This is our second year covering I f s World. Last year was in Atlanta. They moved to Boston. I f s is a Swedish based company. They do about $600 million in annual revenue, about 3700 employees. And interestingly, they have a development center in Sri Lanka, of all places. Which is kind of was war torn for the last 15 years or so, but nonetheless, evidently, a lot of talent and beautiful views, but so welcome. >>Thank you, Dave. I have to admit, before our coverage last year, I had never even heard of this company been around this industry for more than 30 years. Never heard of this company. They've got 10,000 customers. They've got a full house next door in the keynote and very enthusiastic group. This is a focus company. It's a company that has a lot of ah ah, vision about where wants to go some impressive vision documents and really a company that I think it's coming out of the shadows in the U. S. And it will be a force to be reckoned with. >>So I should say they were founded in the in the mid 19 eighties, and then it kind of re architected their whole platform around Client server. You remember the component move? It was a sort of big trends in the in the nineties. In the mid nineties opened up offices in the United States. We're gonna talk to the head of North America later, and that's one of the big growth areas that growing at about three. They claim to be growing at three x the overall market rate, which is a good benchmark. They're really their focus is really three areas e r. P asset management software and field service management, and they talk about deep functionality. So, for instance, they compete with Oracle ASAP. Certainly Microsoft and in four company we've covered in four talks a lot about the last mile functionality. That's not terminology that I f s uses, but they do similar types of things. I'll give you some examples because, okay, what's last mile? Functionality? Things like, um, detailed invoicing integration, contract management. Very narrow search results on things like I just want to search for a refurbished parts so they have functionality to allow you to do that. Chain. A custom e custody chain of custody for handling dangerous toxic chemicals. Certain modules to handle FDA compliance. A real kind of nitty gritty stuff to help companies avoid custom modifications in certain industries. Energy, construction, aerospace and defense is a big area for that. For them, a CZ well as manufacturing, >>there's a segment of the e r P market that often is under uh is under seeing. There's a lot of these companies that started out in niches Peoples off being a famous example, starting out on a niche of the market and then growing into other areas. And this company continues to be very focused even after 35 years, as you mentioned, just energy aerospace, a few construction, a few basic industries that they serve serve them at a very deep level focused on the mid market primarily, but they have a new positioning this year. They're calling the challengers for the challengers, which I like. It's a it's a message that I think resonates. It's easy to understand there position their customers is being the companies that are going to challenge the big guys in their industries and this time of digital transformation and disruption. You know, that's what it's all about. I think it's a great message of bringing out this year. >>Of course I like it because the Cube is a challenger, right? Okay, even though we're number one of the segments that we cover, we started out as a sort of a challenger. Interestingly, I f s and the gardener Magic Corners actually, leader and Field Service Management. They made an acquisition that they announced today of a company called Asked. He asked, U S he is a pink sheet OTC company. I mean, they're very small is a tuck in acquisition that maybe they had a They had a sub $20 million market cap. They probably do 25 $30 million in revenue. Um, Darren rules. The CEO said that this place is them is the leader in field service management, which is interesting. We're gonna ask him about that to your other point. You look around the ecosystem here that they have 400 partners. I was surprised last night. I came early to sort of walk around the hall floor. You see large companies here like Accenture. Um and I'm surprised. I mean, I remember the early days when we did the service. Now conferences 2013 or so you didn't see accent. You're Delloye E Y p W c. Now you see them at the service now event here that you see them? I mean, and I talked to essential last night. They said, Yeah, well, we actually do a lot of business in Europe, particularly in the Scandinavian region, and we want to grow the business in the U. S. >>Europe tends to be kind of a blind spot for us cos they don't see the size of the European market, all the activities where some of the great e. R. P. Innovation has come out of Europe. This company, as you mentioned growing three times the rate of the market, they have a ah focus on your very tight with those customers that they serve and they understand them very well. And this is a you can see why it's centuries is is serving this market because, you know they're simply following the money. There's only so much growth left in the S a P market in the Oracle market. But as the CEO Darren said this morning, Ah, half of their revenues last year were from net new customers. So that's that's a great metric. That indicates that there's a lot of new business for these partners to pursue. >>Well, I think there's there's some fatigue, obviously, for big, long multi year s AP integrations, you're also seeing, you know, at the macro we work with Enterprise Technology Research and we have access to their data set. One of the things that we're seeing is a slowdown in the macro. Clearly, buyers are planning to spend less on I T in the second half of 2019 than they did in the first half of 2019 and they expect to spend less in Q four than they expected to in July. So things are clearly softening at the macro level. They're reverting back to pre 2018 levels but it's not falling off a cliff. One of the things that I've talked to e t. R about the premise we put forth love to get your thoughts is essentially we started digital transformation projects, Let's say in earnest in 2016 2017 doing a lot of pilots started kind of pre production in 2018. And during that time, what people were doing is they were had a lot of redundancy. They would maintain the legacy systems and they were experimenting with disruptive technologies. You saw, obviously a lot of you. I path a lot of snowflake and other sort of disruptive technology. Certainly an infrastructure. Pure storage was the beneficiary of that. So you had this sort of dual strategy. We had redundancy of legacy systems, and then the new stuff. What's happening now is, is the theory is that we're going into production. Would digital transformation projects and where were killing the legacy stuff? Okay, we're ready to cut over >>to a new land on that anymore, >>right? We're not going to spend them anymore. Dial that down. Number one. Number two is we're not just gonna spray and pray on all new tech Blockchain a i rp et cetera. We're gonna now focus on those areas that we think are going to drive business value. So both the incumbents and the disruptors are getting somewhat affected by that. That slowdown in that narrowing of the focused. And so I think that's really what's happening. And we're gonna, I think, have to absorb that for a year or so before we start to see new wave of spending. >>There's been a lot of spending on I t over the last three years. As you say, driven by this need, this transition that's going on now we're being going to see some of those legacy systems turned off. The more important thing I have to look at, I think the overall spending is where is that money being spent is being spent on on servers or is it being spent on cloud service is, and I think you would see a fairly dramatic shift going on. They're so the overall, the macro. I think it's still healthy for I t. There's still a lot of spending going on, but it's shifting to a new area there. They're killing off some of that redundancy. >>Well, the TR data shows couple things. There's no question that server and storage spending is has been declining and attenuating for a number of quarters now. And there's been a shift going on from that. Core infrastructure, obviously, into Cloud Cloud continues its steady march in terms of taking over market share. Other areas of bright spots security is clearly one. You're seeing a lot of spending in an analytics, especially new analytics. I mentioned Snowflake before we're disrupting kind of terror Data's traditional legacy enterprise data warehouse market. The R P. A market is also very hot. You AI path is a company that continues to extend beyond its its peers, although I have to say automation anywhere looks very strong. Blue Prison looks very strong. Cloudera interestingly used to be the darling is hitting sort of all time lows in the E. T R database, which is, by the way, that one of the best data sets I've ever seen on on spending enterprise software is actually still pretty strong. Particularly, uh, you know, workday look strong. Sales force still looks pretty strong. Splunk Because of the security uplift, it still looks pretty strong. I have a lot of data on I f s Like you said, they don't really show up in the e t R survey base. Um, but I would expect, with kind of growth, we're seeing $600 million. Company hopes to be a $1,000,000,000 by 2022 2021. I would think they're going to start showing up in the spending >>service well again in Europe. They may be They may be more dominant player than we see in the US. As I said, I really had not even heard of the company before last year, which was surprising for a company with 10,000 customers. Again, they're focused on the mid market in the mid market tends to fly a bit under the radar. Everyone thinks about what's happening in the enterprise is a huge opportunity out there. Many more mid market companies and there are enterprises. And that's a that's been historically a fertile ground for e. R. P. Companies to launch. You know J. D. Edwards came out of the mid market thes are companies that may end up being acquired by the Giants, but they build up a very healthy base of customers, sort of under the radar. >>Well, the other point I wanted to make I kind of started to about the digital transformation is, as they say, people are getting sort of sick of the big, long, ASAP complicated implementations. As small companies become midsize companies and larger midsize companies, they they look toward an enterprise resource planning, type of, of platform. And they're probably saying, All right, wait. I've got some choices here. I could go with an an I F. S, you know, or maybe another alternative. T s a p. You know, A S A P is maybe maybe the safe bet. Although, you know, it looks like i f s is got when you look around at the customers, they have has some real traction, obviously a lot of references, no question about it. One of things they've been digging for saw this gardener doing them for a P I integrations. Well, they've announced some major AP I integrations. We're gonna talk to them about that and poke it that a little bit and see if that will So to solve that criticism, that what Gardner calls caution, you know, let's see how real that is in talking to some of the customers will be talkinto the executives on members of the ecosystem. And obviously Paul and I will be giving our analysis as well. Final thoughts >>here. Just the challenge, I think, is you note for these midmarket focus Cos. Has been growing with their customers. And that's why you see of Lawson's in the JD Edwards of the World. Many of these these mid market companies eventually are acquired by the big E R P vendors. The customers eventually, if they grow, have to go through this transition. If they're going to go to Enterprise. The R P you know, they're forced into a couple of big choices. The opportunity and the challenge for F s is, can they grow those customers as they move into enterprise grade size? Can they grow them with with E. I. F s product line without having them forcing them to transition to something bigger? >>So a lot of here a lot of action here in Boston, we heard from several outside speakers. There was Linda Hill from Harvard. They had a digital transformation CEO panel, the CEO of soo say who will be on later uh PTC, a Conway, former PeopleSoft CEO was on there. And then, of course, Tony Hawk, which was a lot of fun, obviously a challenger. All right, so keep it right there, buddy. You're watching the Cube live from I F s World Conference at the Heinz in Boston right back, right after this short break.

(techy music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018, brought to you by theCUBE. (techy music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back. This is the live CUBE coverage here in Toronto, Ontario here in Canada for the Untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference. This is day two of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage. We've got great presentations going on, live content here on theCUBE as well as in the sessions, great networking, but more important all the thought leaders in the industry around the world are coming together to try to set the standards and set up a great future for cryptocurrency and blockchain in general. Our next two guests are very special guests for theCUBE and we're excited to have them on, the Honorable Wayne Caines, Minister of National Security for the government of Bermuda, and Kevin Richards, concierge on the Fintech business development manager, part of the Bermuda Business Development Agency. Thank you guys for coming on, really appreciate the time. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Why this is so important is that we heard your presentation onstage, for the folks, they can catch it online when they film it and record it, but the Bermuda opportunity has really emerged as a shining light around the world, specifically in the United States. In California, where I live, Silicon Valley, you guys are now having great progress in hosting companies and being crypto-friendly. Take a minute to explain what's happening, what's the current situation, why Bermuda, why now, what's developing? >> This has all happened over the last eight months. We were looking in November of 2017 to go in the space. In January we went to the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland. When we went to Davos in Switzerland something very interesting happened. People kept coming up to us, I was like the Hound of the Baskerville, or the Pied Piper if you please, and so, so many people were coming up to us finding out more information about Bermuda. We realized that our plan that we thought we could phase in over 18 months, that it had to be accelerated. So, whilst we were at the World Economic Forum in Davos we said to people, "Listen, if you want to change the world, "if you want to help Bermuda to grow, if you're serious," this is a Thursday, "Meet us in Bermuda on the Monday morning." On the Monday morning there are 14 different people in the room. We sat in the room, we talked about what we wanted the world to be, how could Bermuda be in place, what are the needs in this industry, and by the Wednesday we had a complete and total framework, and so we split up into industries. Number one was ICOs, we wanted to look at how to regulate the ICO market. Number two, we wanted to look at digital asset exchanges or cryptocurrencies or how do we regulate security tokens and utility tokens and what do exchanges look like, how do we do exchanges in Bermuda, and then we wanted to talk about education and setting up incubators. And so, come fast forward to July, August, we have an ICO bill in place that allows us to look at setting up ICOs in Bermuda. We wanted to focus on the legal and the regulatory framework, so this is a nascent space. A number of people are concerned about the dark actors, and so we wanted to set up a jurisdiction that traded on our international reputation. Now, remember for the last 60 years reinsurance, finance, captives, hedge funds, people in the financial services market have been coming to Bermuda because that's what we do well. We were trading on the reputation of our country, and so we couldn't do anything to jeopardize that. And so, when we put in place the ICO legislation we had consultants from all over the world, people that were bastions and beasts in industry, in the ICO industry and in the crypto world came to Bermuda and helped us to develop the legislation around setting up an ICO. So, we passed the ICO legislation. The next phase was regulating cryptocurrencies, regulating digital assets, and we set up a piece of legislation called the Digital Asset Business Act, and that just regulates the digital asset space exchanges, and the last piece we wanted to do was a banking piece, and this is the last and we believe the most significant piece. We were talking to people and they were not able to open up bank accounts and they were not able to do, so we said, "Listen, "the Bermuda banking environment is very strong." Our banking partners were like, "Listen, "we love what you guys are doing, "but based on our corresponding banking relationships "we don't want to do anything to jeopardize that space," but how could we tell people to come to Bermuda, set up your company, and they can't open bank accounts? And so, we looked at, we just recently passed creating a new banking license that allows people to set up their business in Bermuda and set up banking relationships and set up bank accounts. That simply has to receive the governor's Royal Assent. As you know, Bermuda's still a British pan-territory, and financial matters have to get the okay of the Queen, and so that is in the final stages, but we're excited, we're seeing an influx, excuse me, a deluge of people coming to Bermuda to set up their companies in Bermuda. >> So, the first two pieces are in place, you have the legislation... >> Mm-hm. >> Mm-hm. >> You have the crypto piece, and now the banking's not yet, almost approved, right? >> It's there, it simply has to get the final sign-off, and we believe that it should take place within the next two weeks. So, by the time this goes to air and people see it we believe that piece will be in place. >> So, this is great news, so the historical perspective is you guys had a good reputation, you have things going on, now you added on a new piece not to compromise your existing relationships and build it on. What have you guys learned in the process, what did you discover, was it easy, was it hard, what are some of the learnings? >> What we've learnt is that KYC, know your customers, and the AML, anti-money laundering, and terrorist financing pieces, those are the critical pieces. People are looking in this space now for regulatory certainty, so when you're talking about people that are in the space that are doing ICOs of $500 million or exchanges that are becoming unicorns, a billion dollar entity in three months, they want a jurisdiction that has regulatory certainty. Not only do they want a jurisdiction with regulatory certainty, they want to open up the kimono. What has this country done in the past, what do they have to trade on? We're saying you can go to a number of countries in the world, but look at our reputation, what we're trading on, and so we wanted to create a space with regulatory certainty, and so we have a regulatory body in Bermuda called the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and they are an independent regulator that they penned the Digital Asset Business Act, and so the opportunity simply for people around the world saying, "Listen, we want to do an ICO, "we want to set up an exchange. "Where's a country that we can go to that has a solid reputation? Hold on, how many countries have law surrounding"-- >> Yeah. >> "The Digital Asset Business Act, how many ICO countries have laws. Guess what, Bermuda becomes a standout jurisdiction in that regard. >> Having a regulation signaling is really important, stability or comfort is one, but the one concern that we hear from entrepreneurs, including, you know, ourselves when we look at the market is service providers. You want to have enough service providers around the table so when I come in and domicile, say, in Bermuda you want to have the banking relationships, you want to have the fiduciary-- >> Yes. >> You want to have service providers, law firms and other people. >> Yes. >> How are you guys talking about that, is that already in place? How does that fit into the overall roadmap for your vision? >> I don't want to beat a horse (laughs) or beat a drum too much, that is what we do as a country. So, we have set up, whether it's a group of law firms and the Bermuda, excuse me, the Bermuda Monetary Authority, the Bermuda that's the register of companies that sets up the companies. We have Kevin, and Kevin will tell you about it, he leads our concierge team. So, it's one throat to choke, one person that needs, so when you come to really understand that the ease of business, a county that's business-friendly with a small country and with a small government it's about ease of reference. Kevin, tell us a little about the concierge team. >> It's like the Delaware of the glove, right? >> Absolutely. >> Come in, domicile, go and tell us how it works. >> I'll give you a little bit of background on what we do on the concierge side. So, one thing that we identified is that we want to make sure that we've got a structure and a very clearly defined roadmap for companies to follow so that process from when they first connect with the BDA in Bermuda to when they're incorporated and set up and moved to Bermuda to start running their business is a seamless process that has very clearly identifiable road marks of different criteria to get through. So, what I do as a concierge manager is I will identify who that company needs to connect with when they're on the ground in Bermuda, get those meetings set up for when they come down so that they have a very clearly mapped out day for their trip to Bermuda. So, they meet with the regulator, they meet with the government leaders, they meet with the folks who've put together legislation that, obviously you mentioned the service providers, so identifying who's the right law firm, corporate service provider, advisory firm on the ground in Bermuda, compliance company, and then making sure that depending on what that company wants to achieve out of their operation in Bermuda they've got an opportunity to connect with those partners on their first trip so that they can put that road map together for-- >> So, making it easy... >> Making it very easy to set up in Bermuda. >> So, walk me through, I want to come down, I want to do business-- >> Yeah. >> Like what I hear, what do I do? >> So, you send me an email and you say, "Listen, Wayne, we're looking at "doing an ICO launch in Bermuda. "I would like to meet with the regulator. "Can you put a couple law firms in place," in an email. I zip that over to Kevin or you go on our Fintech.bm website-- >> Yeah, I was going to say... >> Fintech.bm website, and Kevin literally organizes a meeting. So, when you come to Bermuda for your meeting you have a boardroom and all the key players will be in the boardroom. >> Got it. >> If you need somebody to pick you up at the airport, if you need a hotel, whatever you need from soup to nuts our team actually makes that available to you, so you're not running around trying to find different people to meet, everyone's there in the room. >> And the beauty of Bermuda is that, you know, the city of Hamilton's two square kilometers, so your ability to get a lot done in one day is, I think, second to nowhere else on the planet, and working with the BDA concierge team you're, you know, we connect with the client before they come down and make sure we identify what their needs are. >> The number one question I have to ask, and this is probably the most important for everyone, is do they have to wear Bermuda shorts? (laughs) >> When you come you tell us your size, you tell us what size and what color you want and we'll make sure, so the... I tell this story about the Bermuda shorts. The Bermuda shorts, Bermuda's always had to adapt and overcome. Bermuda, we have something called the Bermuda sloop and it's a sailing rig, and so we... The closest port to Bermuda is Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and we wanted to cut down the time of their voyage, so we created a sailing rig called the Bermuda rig or the Bermuda sloop. Over the years that has become the number one adopted rig on sailing boats. We've always had to adapt and become innovative. The Bermuda shorts were a way to adapt and to get through our very hot climate, and so if you look at just keep that in mind, the innovation of the Bermuda sloop and the Bermuda shorts. Now, this Fintech evolution is another step in that innovation and a way that we take what's going on in the world and adapt it to make it palatable for everyone. >> What's the brand promise for you guys when you look at when entrepreneurs out there and other major institutions, especially in the United States, again, Silicon Valley's one of the hottest issues around-- >> Yes. >> Startups for expansion, right now people are stalled, they don't know what to do, they hear Malta, they hear other things going on. What's the promise that you guys are making to the law firms and the people, entrepreneurs out there trying to establish and grow? >> The business proposition is this, you want a jurisdiction that is trading on years of solid regulation, a country and a government that understands business, how to be efficacious in business. When you come to Bermuda you are trading on a country that this is what we've done for a living. So, you don't have to worry about ethical government, is your money going to be safe. We have strong banking relationships, strong law firms, top tier law firms in Bermuda, but more importantly, we have legislation that is in place that allow you to have a secure environment with a clear regulatory framework. >> What should people look for as potentially might be gimmicks for other countries to promote that, you know, being the Delaware for the globe and domiciling, and what are some of the requirements? I mean, some have you've got to live there, you know, what are some of the things that are false promises that you hear from other potential areas that you guys see and don't have to require and put the pressure on someone? >> When you hear the people say, "We can turn your company around in the next day." That we don't require significant KYC and AML. Red flags immediately go up with the global regulatory bodies. We want when a person comes to Bermuda to know that we have set what we believe is called the Bermuda Standard. When you come to Bermuda you're going to have to jump through some legal and regulatory hoops. You can see regulation, the ICO regulation and the Digital Asset Business Act on BermudaLaws.bm. BermudaLaws.bm, and you can go through the legislation clause by clause to see if this meets your needs, how it will affect your business. It sets up clearly what the requirements are to be in Bermuda. >> What's the feedback from business, because you know, when you hear about certain things, that's why Delaware's so easy, easy to set up, source price all know how to do in a corporation, let's say in the United States-- >> We don't have the SEC handicaps that they have in America, going from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. You're dealing with a colony that allows you to be in a domicile that all of the key players finances... We have a number of the key elements that are Bermuda. We're creating a biosphere that allows a person to be in a key space, and this is, you have first move as advantage in Bermuda. We have a number of things that we're working on, like the Estonia model of e-residency, which we will call EID, that creates a space that you are in Bermuda in a space that is, it's protected, it's governed. We believe that when companies set up in Bermuda they are getting the most secure, the strongest business reputation that a country could have. >> The other thing I would add, I'll just say, you know, quality, certainty, and community is what that brand represents. So, you know, you've got that historical quality of what Bermuda brings as a business jurisdiction, you have the certainty of the regulation and that pathway to setting your company up and incorporating in Bermuda, and then the community piece is something that we've been working on to make sure that any of the players that are coming to Bermuda and connecting with Bermuda and setting up there, they feel like they're really integrated into that whole community in Bermuda, whether it be from the government side, the private sector side. You can see it with the companies that have set up that are here today, you know, they really have embraced that Bermuda culture, the Bermuda shorts, and what we're really trying to do as a jurisdiction in the tech space. >> What can I expect if I domicile in Bermuda from a company perspective, what do I have to forecast? What's the budget, what do I got to do, what's my expectation? Allocate resources, what's going to be reporting, can you just give us some color commentary? >> So, with reference, it depends what you're trying to do, and so there will be different requirements for the ICO legislation. For the ICO legislation a key piece of the document actually is the whitepaper. Within the whitepaper you will settle what your scope of business is, what do you want to do, what you know, everything, everything that you require will be settled in your whitepaper. After the whitepaper is approved and if it is indeed successful, you go to the Bermuda Monetary Authority and they will outline what they require of you, and very shortly thereafter you will able to set up and do business in Bermuda. With reference to the digital asset exchanges, the Digital Asset Business Act, such a clear guideline, so you're going to need to have a key man in Bermuda, a key woman in Bermuda. >> Yeah. >> You're going to need to have a place of presence in Bermuda, so there are normal requirements-- >> There's levels of requirements based upon the scope. >> Absolutely. >> So, if you run an exchange it has to be like ghosting there. >> Yeah, yeah, you need boots on the ground. >> And that's why the AML and the KYC piece is so important. >> Yeah. Well, I'm super excited, I think this is a great progress and this has been a big uncertainty, you know, what does this signal. People have, you know, cognitive dissonance around some-- >> Yes. >> Of the decisions they're making, and I've seen entrepreneurs flip flop between Liechtenstein, Malta, Caymans. >> Right. >> You know, so this is a real concern and you guys want to be that place. >> Not only, we will say this, Bermuda is open for business, but remember, when you see the requirements that we have some companies won't meet the standard. We're not going to alter the standard to accommodate a business that might not be what we believe is best for Bermuda, and we believe that once people see the standard, the Bermuda Standard, it'll cascade down and we believe that high tides raises all boats. >> Yeah. >> We have a global standard, and if a company meets it we will be happy for them to set up and do business in Bermuda. >> Well, I got to say, it's looking certainly that leaders like Grant Fondo in Silicon Valley and others have heard good things. >> Yeah. >> How's been the reaction for some of the folks on the East Coast, in New York and around the United States and around the world? What has been some of the commentary, what's been the anecdotal feedback that you've heard? >> We're meeting three and four companies every day of the week. Our runway is full of Fintech companies coming to Bermuda, from... We have insurtech companies that are coming in Bermuda, people are coming to Bermuda for think tanks, to set up incubators and to do exploratory meetings, and so we're seeing a huge interest in Bermuda the likes have not been seen in the last 20 years in Bermuda. >> Well, it's been a pleasure chatting with you and thanks for sharing the update and congratulations. We'll keep in touch, we're following your progress from California, we'll follow up again. The Honorable Wayne Caines, the Minister of National Security of the government of Bermuda, and Kevin Richards, concierge taking care of business, making it easy for people. >> Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. >> We'll see, I'm going to come down, give me the demo. >> We're open for business and we're looking forward to seeing everybody. (laughs) >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Major developments happening in the blockchain, crypto space. We're starting to see formation clarity around, standards around traditional structures but not so traditional. It's not your grandfather's traditional model. This is what's great about blockchain and crypto. CUBE coverage here, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching, stay with us. More day two coverage after this short break. (techy music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in Toronto for the Blockchain Cloud Summit, part of the Blockchain Futurist event happening tomorrow and Thursday here in Toronto. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here with Gabriel Abed who's the founder of Bitt and also the Digital Asset Fund. Great story he's been there from the beginning. President at creation in the movement that's now changing the world. Blockchain and cryptocurrency certainly. Infrastructure and token economics, changing how things are doing. And rolling out, reimagining everything from infrastructure to value exchanges. Gabriel welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you it's great to be here. >> So we were just talking on camera, you like to go after the big changes. You're an entrepreneur, you have that fire in your belly. You've been very successful. Where are we? I mean, you've been part of the movement, we're now on the cusp of mainstream adoption, there's still work to do. >> Oh, plenty of work. Lots of infrastructure still to build, many regulators and legislators still to educate, lots of laws still to be amended and changed. And, at the end of the day, it's happening and it's happening quickly and beautifully right now. The entire industry is changing. >> One of the things that you've done, you've taken on some big projects and you've made change happen. Regulation is one of the hottest topics we're hearing certainly in the United States, it affects innovation and there's so much entrepreneurial activity happening right now. There's so many entrepreneurs, alpha entrepreneurs really want to do great things, and regulation is just a blocker. It's an antibody for innovation. And you've busted through that. And it's probably going to continue. The old guard is either going to be replaced or adapting to the technology. You've done that, and a lot of people want to do what you've done. What's the secret? What's the secret of your success? How have you taken on these big, incumbent positions and taken them over >> But you're not running from regulators, you're embracing them. >> No, no, I think regulators are important to a responsible and sophisticated market. When my partner and I started Bitt in 2013, 2014, we immediately realized that if we wanted to build a product for the monetary authorities around the world, we needed to have the buy-in from the regulators. So from day one we were regulator-friendly. And it's not to say that we don't believe in a decentralized future, I'm as big of an advocate for decentralization and the freedom of information as anyone else, but I'm also a big believer in if you're a product for a market in the traditional world you have to involve the regulators in order to ensure that product does its job, keeps the consumers safe, and ensures that the economy around it doesn't collapse. So regulators are critical in this field. >> Talk about what you guys have done. Take a minute to explain the project you did, how it worked out, the tenacity, but also, what was the outcome? What were you trying to do in the project and where is it right now? >> It depends on the project you're referring to >> Maybe start at the beginning >> The Caribbean >> Let's start at the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, so, Gabriel Abed, born, raised, educated in Barbados, around the age of 19, I decided I was going to take my computer science education a bit further. I went to Canada, I did a Bachelor of IT, where I majored in network security. In Ontario, the University of Ontario. And, unlike the rest of of my peers, who usually stay in Canada, I decided to go back to my little nation with the education that I had just received. And I took that education home, and started one of the world's first blockchain companies, but at the time I didn't understand blockchain per se, I understood it as a commodity, as a cool investment, I didn't understand the true nature behind the protocol itself. It was only until 2013 that my partner and I ran one of the larger mining operations in the world, that we realized a commodity was actually a protocol. A network tool. A system that you could build on top of. So in 2014, we actually created one of the world's first blockchain assets, on Bitcoin's blockchain. And that a representation of a digital dollar for a central bank. And the notion behind Bitt.com in 2014 was, let's compete with cash, because it's inefficient, it's costly, and it slows down the movement of society. So what we wanted to do is create a digital version of that, that would save economies hundreds of millions of dollars. Cash is expensive to to create, that linen, plastic, paper money, it's easily forged, it can be counterfeited, it's hard to transport, it has an expense to transport, it has an expense to count, it has an expense to secure, and then it has overheads around the entire ecosystem of accountability. Whereas, a blockchain-based digital dollar eliminates all of those efficiencies, and increases the ability for a monetary authority to trace, track, and have a better form of anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing and a better overview of their entire society. So that all, we took that notion, went to the central bank of Barbados, who at the time was being led by Dr. DeLisle Worrell, and our very first meeting he had asked me to excuse his office. And 13 meetings later, and a whole two years, lots of development, building out infrastructure around compliance, around finance, around security, and around regulation, we finally got the nod of approval from Dr. DeLisle Worrell to operate a fiat example of a digital dollar in Barbados. And since then, we have been working with several central banks around the world, bitt.com today is the leading central bank provider for digital dollars. A lot has changed, I've developed other tools since, and other businesses, but bitt.com continues to be the best friend for central banks looking to move and transition into the digital arena. >> Why, I mean other than a closed mindset, why wouldn't every government around the world want to move in this direction? Initiate some kind of FedCoin, for example. >> Education, education, it's the fear that the system may not be scalable, it's the fear that the system could be hacked, it's the fear that they could be cut out, their control, at the end of the day, monetary authorities, like the Federal Reserve, they have a control on the money supply. Whereas, something like decentralized cryptographic currencies, there is nobody in control of the money supply. Hence, inflation versus deflation systems. Then there's the issue of hacking and the threat of digital and cybersecurity. Typically, the head of these monetary authorities are older gentlemen who are traditionally conservative. And who are not (mumbles) with cybersecurity. So the fear of hacking is very real for someone like them, whereas someone like me who is trained as a network security expert, those fears can be mitigated with good policy and procedure, cold wallets, and the right process, to ensuring the environment can run without the risk or the fear of malicious attacks. So it really boils down to education. The educated governors of central banks, like there's one, for example, Timothy Antoine. Dr. Antoine is the governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. And they govern and mandate the currency union of eight islands below them. St. Lucia, Grenada, Antigua, et cetera. Now, he's a governor that gets this and has wrapped his head around it, and understands that this is the future. He gets it so much that he signed an agreement with bitt.com to begin exploring a pilot for his currency union to have a digital dollar implemented in it. You also have governors and presidents like that of Curacao. Or the central bank of Curacao, where we've just signed an agreement to move forward with a phase of looking at the implications of rolling out a digital dollar in a society like Curacao and St. Maarten. What is the ramifications? What is the feasibility study behind that? So, to answer your question, it's not every single regulator, governor, and central bank manager is going to head toward this technology tomorrow. But with more education, and more lobbying, you will see more and more central bank governors moving in this direction, because it's better, cheaper, faster, makes their job easier, gives them more control, gives them more oversight, and provides all the things that they would want as a central bank to continue to do their job for their society. Which is to protect their dollar from alien threats. And to ensure that the dollar remains stable, and to just generally ensure that the society is functioning the way it should. >> Gabriel, what's your vision on what this will enable for the citizens? What's the impact that you see happening? If this continues down the trajectory, what is the adoption look like, impact to people's lives on a everyday basis. >> Well, for a very starting point, you democratize payment. Right now, if I want to make a payment, I have to go through a utility company called a bank. And this bank typically has frictional costs, and frictional overheads and time. That's one of the biggest problems, is that these monopolistic infrastructures hinder the ability for the average participation of a free-flowing payment system. So what you end up having is rather than me being able to make a digital payment in seconds, with no cost, I have to wait days, I have to use manual-based systems whether it's check, cash or the bank's Visa Mastercard system. And then it has frictional costs. So right off the bat, you democratize payment. What does that do for a society in a developing nation? It empowers people. And you're empowered because now as a developer, I can build on this payment system. As an entrepreneur, I can tap in to this payment system. As a merchant, I can utilize this low-cost payment system. As a society, I now have GDP growth because of financial inclusion. The underbanked, who do not have access to banking facilities for one reason or another, maybe they don't like the bank, maybe the banks don't like them. Maybe they don't have two proofs of ID. Maybe they don't have a fixed place of abode. Maybe they don't have the minimum deposit amount. All of these features keep the poor and the underbanked out of the system. Whereas, in developed nations, we have mobile penetration rates that are through the roof. In some cases, like Barbados, over 100 percent. So if you have 100 percent penetration rate of this mobile platform, this thing in my pocket, but I cannot access the banking system, well flip that around, democratize the payment system, allow payments to exist on this mobile phone, and watch how quickly society becomes banked. So what you end up having is full adoption. Why would we not have full adoption when it's cheaper, it's faster, it's more inclusive. >> And the data from that collective intelligence only creates a digital nation >> A more responsible environment. >> Wealth creation environment. >> It creates a more traced, tracked, and accountable society so that the monetary authorities in the government can now start making educated decisions on data. They now know who's buying milk, who's gambling, who's paying their taxes and who's not. >> The downstream benefits of this are massive. >> The downstream benefits are massive, enormous. They're disruptive. This is a brand new fiscal tool, a monetary tool, being given to central banks to start eroding the field of private e-money systems, and to start bringing about a uniform standard towards payments. Plain and simple. We're going to the central banks and introducing a new monetary instrument, that they're in control of. That now the commercial banks, the financial institutions, the corporatocracies, the citizens, and the merchants can all fall under one roof issued by their monetary authority. And this is not a cell phone company or a bank building their own private system that I have to jump through some hoops and some red tape and sign away my first born and give away my left arm to enter. This is a free and open source standard system. >> And it's networked, as you said, penetration is 100 percent on mobile or roughly that, it's a network society that now has digital fabric built into it. This is the future. >> But I played this out in terms of, when you talked about this in your panel, now every device, every thing, every physical asset will be instrumented. >> Yes. >> And as a result, theory can be coconuts. >> You're building the deep infrastructure. I remember we met with World Bank back in 2014 and they coined this term for me. Because they were saying we want to help entrepreneurs and it's important to help entrepreneurs in developing nations because they're the lifeblood of it. But what we are building is the deep infrastructure. And that's exactly what it is. It's the infrastructure that would allow the entrepreneur and the developer to now have a framework that they can build against to provide more uplift. So in essence, it's really going to be exponential growth once systems like this are implemented. The stock market can move digital, and people could buy stocks using digital dollars. E-commerce can occur because I can now buy things online or sell things online with digital dollars. I can now be part of a global, financial ecosystem, with my smartphone and my wallet. >> That's a great use case, congratulations on amazing success, so much is on your plate, you've had great success in this new era, what's on your plate now, what are you working on, what's happening in your world now? >> So in 2017, we realized Bitt was entering a new growth phase. It was no longer a battle of trying to convince regulators and central banks, our product had been proven. Our reputation had been proven. It was time now to scale the company into a professional level of dealing with these regulators around the world. At the end of the day, we would like to digitize cash, wherever cash exists. And to provide those tools for central banks around the world. That would require professional management, and that is not I. >> (laughs) >> So, our investors and shareholders were quite comfortable with our proposal of bringing on that professional management, so in 2017 I resigned as CEO, retained a board position and still single largest shareholder, but with the idea of what other types of infrastructure can I build, now that a deep infrastructure had been put in place. So I've been attacking three major markets, the banking sector, an actual commercial banking enterprise working with a group from the United States towards looking at deploying the future of where we think commercial banking is going. I think that the community, the crypto community in general, there's a lot of noise happening in the chats. And therefore we built a machine learning chat bot to start looking at market sentiments and aggregating market information and of course building common tools for community members. So we've launched a agent called Gabby, the form to gab. My name's Gabriel and my mom calls me Gabby, so it works out quite well. >> You have the gift of gab that's for sure. >> And then I launched a mutual fund with a very sophisticated former managing director of JPMorgan. A guy named Richard Galvin. And we launched the world's first protocol-only fund. We focus only on protocols. And that's called Digital Asset Fund. And we launched that in late 2017 and got full regulatory approval to become a professional fund, that handles 100 percent, solely crypto. And that's basically been my ride, and then outside of that, just your standard consulting, because everybody from World Bank, to IADB, to some government agency to some private organization wants to know about blockchain they want advice, and they need a team of people to give them that advice. So it's just been, all around, looking at how I can be an entrepreneur in this space, while finding great leaders, and partnering with those leaders to build out great companies. While still focusing on ensuring bitt.com becomes the solution for dollars, digital dollars, worldwide. >> Got a great mission, entrepreneur, builder, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Industry's lucky to have you, congratulations. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you guys. >> CUBE coverage here, live in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in concert with the Blockchain Futures Conference happening in the next two days after today. More coverage from theCUBE we're live here, stay with us for more great coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President Global Channel Sales for IBM Storage. CUBE alum, great to see you. Thanks for comin' by. >> Great, we always love comin' and talkin' to theCUBE. >> Love havin' you on. Get the insight, and you get down and dirty in the storage. But I gotta, before we get into the storage impact, the cloud, and all the great performance requirements, and software you guys are building, news is that the CEO of Cisco swung by your booth? >> Yes, Chuck did come by today and asked how-- Chuck Robbins came by today, asked how we're doin'. IBM has a very broad relationship with Cisco, beyond just the storage division. The storage division, the IOT division, the collaboration group. Security's doin' a lot of stuff with them. IBM is one of Cisco's largest resellers through the GTS and GBS teams. So, he came by to see how were doin', and gave him a little plug about the VersaStack, and how it's better than any other converge solutions, but talked about all of IBM, and the strong IBM Cisco relationship. >> I mean, it's not a new relationship. Expand on what you guys are doin'. How does that intersect with division that he put on stage yesterday with the keynote. He laid out, and said publicly, and put the stake in the ground, pretty firmly, "This is the old way." Put an architecture, a firewall, a classic enterprise network diagram. >> Right, right. >> And said, "That's the old way," and put in a big circle, with all these different kinda capabilities with the cloud. It's a software defined world. Clearly Cisco moving up the stack, while maintaining the networking shops. >> Right. >> Networking and storage, always the linchpin of cloud and enterprise computing. What's the connection? Share the touch points. >> Sure, well I think the key thing is everyone's gotta realize that whether you're in a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud configuration, storage is that rock solid foundation. If you don't have a good foundation, the building will fall right over, and it's great that you've got cloud with its flexibility, it's ability to transform, the ability to modernize, move data around, but if what's underneath doesn't work, the whole thing topples over, and storage is a cruel element to that. Now, what we've done at IBM is we have made all of our solutions on the storage side, VersaStack, our all-flash arrays, all of our software defined storage, our modern data protection, everything is what we'll say is cloudified. K, it's, I designed for multiple cloud scenarios, whether it be private, hybrid, or public, or, as you've probably seen, in some the enterprise accounts, they actually use multiple public cloud providers. Whether it be from a price issue, or a legal issues, because they're all over the world, and we're supporting that with all our solutions. And, our VersaStack, specifically, just had a CVD done with Cisco, Cisco Validated Design, with IBM Cloud Private on a VersaStack. >> Talk about the scale piece, because this becomes the key differentiator. We've talked about on theCUBE, many of the times with you around, some of the performance you guys have, and the numbers are pretty good. You might wanna do a quick review on that. I'm not lookin' for speech and feeds. Really, Eric, I'd like to get your reaction, and view, and vision, on how the scale piece is kicking, 'cause clients want scale optionality. They're gonna have a lot of stuff on premise. They have cloud goin' on, multi cloud on the horizon, but they gotta scale. The numbers are off the charts. You're seein' all these security threats. I mean, it's massive. How are you guys addressing the scale question with storage? >> So, we've got a couple things. So first of all, the storage itself is easily scalable. For example, on our A9000 all-flash array, you just put a new one, automatically grows, don't have to do anything, k? With our transparent cloud tiering, you can set it up, whether it be our Spectrum Scale software, whether it be our Spectrum Virtualize software, or whether it be on our all-flash arrays, that you could automatically just move data to whatever your cloud target may be. Whether that be something with an object store, whether that be a block store, and it's all automated. So, the key thing here on scalability is transparency, ease of use, and automation. They wanna automatically join new capacity, wanna automatically move data from cloud to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to on premise, and IBM's storage solutions, from a software perspective, are all designed with that data mobility in mind, and that transportability, both on premise, and out to any cloud infrastructure they have. >> What should Cisco customers know about IBM storage, if you get to talk to them directly? We're here at Cisco Live. We've talked many times about what you guys got goin' on with the software. Love the software systems approach. You know we dig that. But a Cisco deployment, they've been blocking and tackling in the enterprise for years, clouds there. What's the pitch? What's the value proposition to Cisco clients? >> So, I think they key thing for us talkin' to a Cisco client is the deep level of integration we have. And, in this case, not just the storage division, but other things. So, for example, a lot of their collaboration stuff uses under pitting software from IBM, and IBM also uses some software from Cisco inside our collaboration package. In our storage package, the fact that we put together the VersaStack with all these Cisco Validated Designs, means that the customer, whether it be a cloud product, for example, on the VersaStack, about 20 of our public references are all small and medium cloud providers that wheel in the VersaStack, connect 'em, and it automatically grows simply and easily. So, in that case, you're looking at a cloud provider customer of Cisco, right? When you're looking at a enterprise customer of Cisco, man, the key thing is the level of integration that we have, and how we work together across the board, and the fact that we have all these Cisco Validated Designs for object storage, for file storage, for block storage, for IBM Cloud Private. All these things mean they know that it's gonna work, right outta the box, and whether they deploy it themselves, whether they use one of our resellers, one of our channel partners, or whether they use IBM services or Cisco service. Bottom line, it works right out of the box, easy to go, and they're up and running quickly. >> So, Eric, you talked a bunch about VersaStack, and you've been involved with Cisco and their UCS since the early days when they came up, and helped drive, really, this wave of converged infrastructure. >> Right. >> One of the biggest changes I've seen in the last couple years, is when you talk to customers, this is really their private cloud platform that they're building. When it first got rolled out, it was virtualization. We kinda added a little bit of management there. What, give us your viewpoint as to kinda high-level, why's this still such an important space, what are the reasons that customers are rolling this out, and how that fits into their overall cloud story? >> Well, I think you hit it, Stu, right on the head. First of all, it's easy to put in and deploy, k? That is a big check box. You're done, ready to go. Second thing that's important is be able to move data around easily, k? In an automated fashion like I said earlier, whether that be to a public cloud if they're gonna tier out. If I'm a private cloud, I got multiple data centers. I'm moving data around all the time. So, the physical infrastructure and data center A is a replica, or a DR center, for data center B, and vice versa. So, you gotta be able to move all this stuff around quickly easy. Part of the reason you're seeing converge infrastructure is it's the wave of what's hit in the server world. Instead of racking and stacking individual servers, and individual pieces of storage, you've got a pre-packed VersaStack. You've got Cisco networking, Cisco server, VMware, all of our storage, our storage software, including the ability to go out to a cloud, or with our ICP IBM Private Cloud, to create a private cloud. And so, that's why you're seeing this move towards converge. Yes, there's some hyperconverged out there in the market, too, but I think the big issue, in certain workloads, hyperconverged is the right way to go. In other workloads, especially if you're creating a giant private cloud, or if you're a cloud provider, that's not the way to go because the real difference is with hyperconverged you cannot scale compute and storage independently, you scale them together, So, if you need more storage, you scale compute, even if you don't need it. With regular converge, you scale them independently, and if you need more storage, you get more storage. If you need more compute-- If you need both, you get both. And that's a big advantage. You wanna keep the capex and opex down as you create this infrastructure for cloud. 'Member, part of the whole idea of cloud are a couple things. A, it's supposed to be agile. B, it's supposed to be super flexible. C, of course, is the modern nomenclature, but D is reduce capex and opex. And you wanna make sure that you can do that simply and easily, and VersaStack, and our relationship with Cisco, even if you're not using a VersaStack config, allows us to do that for the end user. >> And somethin' we're seeing is it's really the first step for customers. I need to quote, as you said, modernize the platform, and then I can really start looking at modernizing my applications on top of that. >> Right. Well, I think, today, it's all about how do you create the new app? What are you doin' with containers? So, for example, all of our arrays, and all of our arrays that go into a VersaStack, have free persistent storage support for any containerize environ, for dockers and kubernetes, and we don't charge for that. You just get it for free. So, when you buy those solutions, you know that as you move to the container world, and I would argue virtualization is still here to stay, but that doesn't mean that containers aren't gonna overtake it. And if I was the CEO of a couple different virtualization companies, I'd be thinkin' about buyin' a container company 'cause that'll be the next wave of the future, and you'll say-- >> Don't fear kubernetes. >> Yeah, all of that. >> Yeah, Eric Herzog's flying over to Dockercon, make a big announcement, I think, so. (laughing) >> Evaluation gonna drop a little bit. I gotta ask you a question. I mean, obviously, we watch the trends that David Floy and our team, NVMe is big topic. What is the NVMe leadership plan for you, on the product side, for you? Can you take a minute to share your vision for what that is gonna be? >> Sure, well we've already publicly announced. We've been shipping an NVMe over fabric solution leveraging InfiniBand since February of this year, and we demoed it, actually, in December at the AI Conference in New York City. So, we've had a fabric solution for NVMe already since December, and then shipping in February. The other thing we're doing is we publicly announced that we'd be supporting the other NVMe over fabric protocols, both fabric channel and ethernet by the end of the year. We publicly already announced that. We also announced that we would have an end to end strategy. In this case, you would be talking about NVMe on the fabric side going out to the switching and the host infrastructure, but also NVMe in a storage sub-system, and we already publicly announced that we'd be doing that this year. >> And how's the progress on that plan? You feel good about it? >> We're getting there. I can't comment yet, but just stay tuned on July 1st, and see what happens. >> So, talk about the Spectrum NAS, and other announcements that you have. What's goin' on? What are the big news? What's happening? >> Well, I think that, yeah, the big thing for us has been all about software. As you know, for the analysts that track the numbers, we are, and ended up in 2017, as tied as the number one storage software company in the world, independent of our system's business. So, one of the key powers there is that our software works with everyone's gear, whether it be a white box through a distributor or reseller, whether it be our direct competitors. Spectrum Protect, which is a, one of the best enterprise backup packages. We backup everybody's gear, our gear, NetApp's gear, HP's gear, Pure's gear, Hitachi's gear, the old Dell stuff, it doesn't matter to us, we backup everything. So, one of the powers that IBM has, from a software perspective, is always being able to support not only our own gear, but supporting all of our competitors as well. And the whole white box market, with things that our partners may put together through the distributors. >> I know somethin' might be obvious to you, but just take me through the benefits to the customer. What's the impact to the customer? Obviously, supporting everything, it sounds like you guys have done that with software, so you're agnostic on hardware. >> Right. >> So, is it a single pane of glass? What's the benefit to the customer with that software capability? >> Yeah, I feel there's a couple things. So, first of all, the same software that we sell as standalone software, we also sell on our arrays. So if you're in a hybrid configuration, and you're using our Flashsystem V9000 in our Storwize family, that software also works with an EMC, or NetApp box. So, one license, one way to do everything, one set of training, which in a small shop is not that important, but in a big shop, you don't have to manage three licenses, right? You don't have to get trained up on three different ways to do things, and you don't have to, by the way, document, which all the big companies would do. So it dramatically simplifies their life from an opex perspective. Makes it easier for them to run their business. >> Eric, we'd love to get your opinion on just how's Cisco doin' out there? It's a big sprawling company. I looked at the opening keynote, the large infrastructure business doing very well in the data center, but they've got collaboration, they do video, they're moving out in the cloud. Wanna see your thoughts as to how are they doing, and still making sure they take care of core networking, while still expanding and going through their own transformation, that they're talkin' very public about. How do we measure Cisco as a software company? >> Well, we see some very good signs there. I mean, we partner with 'em all the time, as I mentioned, for example, in both the security group and our collaboration group, and I'm not talkin' storage now, just IBM in general, we leverage software from them, and they leverage software from us. We deliver joint solutions through our partners, or through each of the two service organizations, but we also have products where we incorporate their software into ours, and they incorporate software in us. So, from our perspective, we've already been doing it beyond their level, now, of expanding into a much greater software play. For us, it's been a strong play for us already because of the joint work we've been doing now for several years on software that they've been selling in the more traditional world, and now pushing out into the broader areas, like cloud, for example. >> Awesome work. Eric, thanks for coming on. I gotta ask you one final, personal, question. >> Sure. >> You got the white shirt on, you usually have a Hawaiian shirt on. >> Well, because Chuck Robbins came by the booth, as we talked about earlier today, felt that I shouldn't have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on, however, now that I've met Chuck, next time, at next Cisco Live, I'll have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on versus my IBM traditional shirt. >> Chuck's a cool guy. Thanks for comin' on. As always, great commentary. You know your stuff. >> Great, thank you. >> Great to have the slicing and dicing, the IBM storage situation, as well as the overall industry landscape. At Cisco Live, we're breakin' it down, here on theCUBE in Orlando. Second day of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more live coverage after this break.