>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It's International Women's Day 2018, there's stuff going on all around the world. We're up at the Accenture event at downtown San Fancisco. 400 people at the Hotel Nikko, lot of great panels, a lot of interesting conversations, a lot of good energy. Really about diversity and inclusion and not just cause it's the right thing to do, but it actually drives better business outcomes. Hm, how about that? So we're really excited to have our next guest, it's Vivienne Ming. She's a founder and chair of Socos Labs, Vivienne, welcome. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Yeah, so what is Socos Labs? >> So, Socos Labs is a think tank, it's my fifth company, because apparently, I can't seem to take a hint. And we are using artificial intelligence and neuroscience and economic theory to explore the future of what it means to be human. >> So who do you work with? Who are some of your clients? >> So we partner with enormous and wonderful groups around the world, for example, we're helping the Make A Wish Foundation help kids make better wishes, so we preserve what's meaningful to the child, but try and make it even more resonant with the community and the family that's around them. We've done wonderful work here with Accenture to look at what actually predicts the best career and life outcomes, and use that to actually help their employees. Not for Accenture's sake, but for the 425,000 people get to live better, richer lives. >> Right, right. That's interesting, cause that's really in line with that research that they released today, you know, what are these factors, I think they identified 40 that have a significant impact, and then a sub set of 14 within three buckets, it's very analytical, it's very center, it's great. >> I love numbers. I'm you know, by training, I'm a theoretical neuroscientist, which is a field where we study machine learning to better understand the brain, and we study the brain to come up with better machine learning. And then I started my first company in education, and to me, it's always about, not even just generating a bunch of numbers, but figuring out what actually makes a difference. What can you do? In education, in mental health, in inclusion, or just on the job, that will actually drive someone to a better life outcome. And one of those outcomes is they're more productive. >> Right, right. >> And they're more engaged on the job, more creative. You know, a big driver behind what I do is the incredible research on how many, it's called the Lost Einsteins Research. >> The Lost Einsteins. >> Lost Einsteins. >> So a famous economist, Raj Chetty at Stanford just released a new paper on this, showing that kids from high wealth backgrounds, are 10 times as likely as middle class peers to, for example, have patents or to have that big impact in people's lives. In our research, we find the same thing, but on the scales of orders of magnitude difference. What if every little kid in Oakland, or in Johannesburg, or in a rural village in India, had the same chances I had to invent and contribute. That's the world I want to live in. It's wonderful working with a group like Accenture, the Lego Foundation, the World Bank, that agree that that really matters. >> Right, it's just interesting, the democratization theme comes up over and over and over, and it's really not that complicated of a thing, right? If you give more people access to the data, more people access to the tools, it'd make it easier for them to manipulate the data, you're just going to get more innovation, right? It's not brain surgery. >> You get more people contributing to what we sometimes call the creative class, which you know, right now, probably is about 1.5% of the world population. Maybe 150, 200 million people, it sounds like a big number, but we're pushing eight billion. What would the world be like not if all of them, just imagine instead of 200 million people, it was 400. Or it was a billion people, what would the world be like if a billion people had the chance to really drive the good in our lives. So on my panel, I had the chance to throw out this line that I was quoted as saying once. "Ambitious men have been promising us rocket ships and AI, "and self-driving cars, "but if every little girl had been given the reins "to her own potential, we'd already have them". And we don't talk not just about every little girl, but every little kid. >> Right, right. >> That doesn't have the chance. You know, if even one percent of them had that chance, it would change the world. >> So you must be a happy camper in the world though, rendering today with all the massive compute, cloud delivery and compute and store it to anyone, I mean, all those resources asymptotically approaching zero cost and availability via cloud anywhere in this whole big data revolution, AI and machine learning. >> I love it. I mean, I wouldn't build AI, which that's, I'm a one trick pony in some sense. I do a lot of different work, but there's always machine learning under the hood for my companies. And my philanthropic work. But I think there is something as important as amazing a tool as it is, the connectivity, the automation, the artificial intelligence as a perhaps dominant tool of the future, is still just a tool. >> Jeff: Right. >> These are messy human problems, they will only ever have messy human solutions. But now, me as a scientist can say, "Here's a possible solution". And then me as an entrepreneur, or a philanthropist, can say, "Great. "Now with something like AI, we can actually share that "solution with everybody". >> Right. So give us a little bit of some surprise insights that came out of your panel, for which I was not able to attend, I was out here doing interviews. >> So you know, I would say the theme of our panel was about role modeling. >> So I was the weirdo outlier on the panel, so we had Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, we had the CFO of the Warriors, Jennifer was great, and we talked about simply being visible, and doing the work that we do in AI, in sports, in politics. That alone changes people's lives, which is a well studied phenomenon. The number one predictor of a kid from an underrepresented population, taking a scholarship, you know, believing they can be successful in politics is someone from their neighborhood went before them and showed them that it was possible. >> And seeing somebody that looks like them in that role. >> And so seeing a CFO of the Warriors, one of the great sports teams in the world today... >> Right. >> Is you know, this little Filipino woman, to put it in the way I think other people would perceive her and realize no, she does the numbers, she drives the company, and it's not despite who she is, it's because she brought something unique to the table that no one else had, plus the smarts. >> Jeff: Right. >> And made a difference to see Libby Schaaf get up there, with a lot of controversy right now, in the bigger political context. >> Jeff: Yes, yes. >> And show that you can make a difference. When people marginalize you, when I went out and raised money for my first company, I had venture capitalists literally pat me on the head and treat me like a little girl, and what I learned very quickly is there are always going to be some one that's going to see the truth in what I can bring. Go find those people, work with them, and then show the rest of the world what's possible. >> Right. It's pretty interesting, Robin Matlock is a CMO at VMware, we do a lot of stuff with VMware, and they put in a women in tech lunch thing a couple years ago, and we were talking, and I was interviewing her, she said, you know, I'd never really took the time to think about it. I was just working my tail off, and doing my thing, and you know, suddenly here I am, I'm CMO of this great company, and then it kind of took her a minute, and somebody kind of said, wait, you need to either take advantage of that opportunity in that platform to help others that maybe weren't quite so driven or are looking for those role models to say, "She looks kind of like me, "maybe I want to be the CMO of a big tech company". >> Well part of what's amazing you know, I get to work in education and work force, and part of what's amazing, whether you're talking about parents or the C Suite, or politicians is... A lot of that role modeling comes just from you being you. Go out, do good work in the world. But for some people, you know, there's an opportunity that doesn't exist for a lot of others. I'm a real outlier. I was not born a woman. I went through gender transition, it was a long time ago, and so for most people like me, being open about who you are means losing your job, it means not being taken seriously in any way, I mean, the change over the last couple of years has been astonishing. >> Jeff: It's been crazy, right? >> But part of my life is being able to be that person. I can take it. You know, my companies have made money, my inventions I've come up with have literally saved lives. >> Right. >> No one cares, in a sense, who I am anymore. That allows me to be visible. It allows me to just be very open about who I am and what I've experienced and been through, and then say to other people, it's not about me, it's not about whether I'm happy. It's about whether I'm serving my purpose. And I believe that I am, and does anything else about me really matter in this world? >> Right. It really seems, it's interesting, kind of sub text of diversity inclusion, not so much about your skin color or things that are easy to classify on your tax form, but it's really more just being your whole you. And no longer being suppressed to fit in a mold, not necessarily that's good or bad, but this is the way we did it, and thank you, we like you, we hired you, here you go, you know? Here's your big stack of rags, here's your desk, and we expect you to wear this to work. But that to me seems like the bigger story here that it's the whole person because there's so much value in the whole versus just concentrating on a slice. >> You know, it's really interesting, again, this is another area where I get to do hard numbers research, and when I do research, I'm talking looking at 122 million people. And building models to explain their career outcomes, and their life outcomes. And what we find here is one, everybody's biased. Everybody. I can't make an unbiased AI. There are no unbiased rats. The problem is when you refuse to acknowledge it. And you refuse to do something about it. And on the other side, to quote a friend of mine, "Everybody is covering for something. "Everybody has something in their life that they feel like "compromises them a little bit". So you know, even if we're talking about you know, the rich white straight guy, everyone's favorite punching bag. And I used to be one of them, so I try and take it easy. It is, the truth is, every one of them is covering for something, also. And if we can say again, it's not about me, which amazingly, actually allows you to be you. It's not about what other people think of me, it's not about whether they always agree with everything I say, or that I agree with what my boss says. It is about whether I'm making a difference in the world. And I've used that as my business strategy for the last 10 years of my life, and even when it seems like the worst strategy ever, you know, saying no to being chief scientist after you know, Fortune 50 company, one after another. Every time, my life got better. And my success grew. And it's not just an anecdote. Again, we see it in the data. So you build companies around principles like that. Who are you? Bring that person to work, and then you own the leadership challenge up, and I'm going to let that person flourish. And I'm going to let them tell me that I'm wrong. They got to prove it to me. But I'm going to let 'em tell it me, and give them the chance. You build a company like that, you know, what's clear to me is over the next 10 years, the defining market for global competition will be talent. Creative talent. And if you can't figure out how to tap the entire global work force, you cannot compete in that space. >> Right. The whole work force, and the whole person within that work force. It's really interesting, Jackie from Intel was on the panel that I got to talk, to see if she talked about you know, four really simple things, you know? Have impact. Undeniable, measurable impact, be visible, have data to back it up, and just of course, be tenacious, which is good career advice all the time, but you know. >> It's always good. >> Now when you know, cause before, a lot of people didn't have that option. Or they didn't feel they had the option to necessarily be purpose driven or be their old self, because then they get thrown out on the street and companies weren't as... Still, not that inclusive, right? >> Vivienne: I get it, believe me. >> You get it. So it is this new opportunity, but they have to because they can't get enough people. They can't get enough talent. It's really about ROI, this is not just to do the right thing. >> If even if you look at it from a selfish standpoint, there is the entire rest of the professional world competing for that traditional pipeline to get into the company. So being different, being you, it's a-- I mean, forgive me for putting it this way, but it's a marketing strategy, right? This is how you stand out from everyone else. One of my companies, we built this giant database of people all over the world, to predict how good people were at their job. And our goal was to take bias out of the hiring process. And when I was a chief scientist of that company, every time I gave a talk in public, 50 people would come up afterwards and say, "What should I do to get a better job?" And what they really meant was, what should I write on my resume, you know, how should I position myself, what's the next hot skill? >> Right. >> And my advice, which I meant genuinely, even though I don't think they always took it as such, was do good work and share it with the world. Not just my personal experience. We see it again and again in these massive data sets. The people that have the exceptional careers are the ones that just went out there and did something because it needed to get done. Maybe they did it inside their last job, maybe they did it personally as a side project, or they did a start up, or philanthropy. Whatever it was they did it, and they did it with passion. And that got noticed. So you know, again, just sort of selfishly, why compete with the other 150 million people looking for that same desirable job when the person that you are, I know it's terrifying, it is terrifying to put yourself out there. But the person you are is what you are better at than everyone else in the world. Be that person. That is your route to the best job you can possibly get. >> By rule, right? You're the best you you can be, but by rule, you're not as good at being somebody else. >> It sounds like a corny line, but the science backs it up. >> That's great. All right Vivienne, I could go on for a very long time, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. I really enjoyed the conversation. >> It was a lot of fun. >> And thanks for spending a few minutes with us. All right, she's Vivienne, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from the Accenture Women in Tech event in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, It's The Cube. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco, everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Scott Dietzen is here, the CEO of Pure Storage, hot off the keynote. Scott, great to see you. >> Great to be back on The Cube. >> So I love the nickname. I grew up in a town where everybody had a nickname. We got Dietz, we got Hat, we got Danzig, we got Kicks, I dunno. You can call me V. He's, I guess, just S-tu. >> V works. >> I mean, that's it, you know. So, again, great show here, I love the venue. How'd you guys pick this place? >> So I can't say I was involved in the choice and this place has a really illustrious history. I mean, it goes back to the 1800's. And actually they manufactured steel here during World War II. I think they were turning out two battleships a week. But another piece of history that maybe isn't as nice is this is the last time this venue's going to be used. So it is scheduled to be brought down to make way for new condos I guess. So we really wanted to celebrate the venue and its history. It's just a great industrial feel to it. >> And they're tearing down a bunch, the new Warriors facility is going to be in Dogpatch, right? >> Yes, and so, yeah, we can't feel too bad about it because we are indeed celebrating the Warriors success. >> You needed a bigger house for all those trophies. (Scott laughs) >> I think they're poised to have a really good run. But I think Cleveland's going to be there contending with them for the next several years to come and it's really exciting. >> Well, hopefully my Celtics will get there in the next four or five years with some draft picks. So, I want to talk about sort of the ascendancy of Pure. When we first met you, you had a pretty simple message. It was like, look, we think we can deliver way better performance for lower cost. I mean, boom. It wasn't the same cost. I remember you were very forced. I said, "About the same, right?" You said, "No, no, lower. "We have the best data reduction technology "in the business." I remember talking to you at Oracle OpenWorld about that. >> Yep. >> And that's fundamentally what happened. And you attacked the legacy and stall base. And you won that game. But you're not resting on that, you've got to take it now to a next level. Talk about that next level. Well, talk about where you came from and then the next level of data and beyond just sort of public cloud. >> You guys have talked about this too, right. If you look at the curb of Moore's law. I mean, mechanical disk doesn't follow Moore's law. And so the cost reduction curbs, we did the math and we said, look, we're going to be able to drive down the cost of storage. We're going to be able to drive up the density and power cooling space. Simplicititly you can dramatically reduce the cost of storage. But Flash is going to help us, right? You know, we've gotten to the point where Flash is, you know, even with a tighter component market, it's cheaper to buy raw than fast disks. And way cheaper to deploy. World Bank talked about saving millions of dollars by deploying Pure Storage and getting a 5x performance boost at the same time. So if we can help customers pay for their storage both in terms of cost savings as well as new business value, that's a great outcome. >> Wikibon's been on the right side of that prediction since early on. >> That's very true, I've used your data. >> We're very aggressive about that. But the thing that excited us most was the second thing you said. Which was the business impact, the business value. So I want to come back a little bit and get a history. It used to be I would buy EMC for block and NetApp for file. You're sort of attacking that premise. Talk about that. >> Well, so we started in the performance end of the storage market, which is dominated by block. Because we knew that one was going to be the first to shift to all Flash. And we've already seen that play out. I mean, even the legacy vendors and their install base are inclined to use Flash. Cause it's actually cheaper than 15k disk to put in. That tech is about to hit a wall because as SSD's get bigger. You know, we've grown SSD's almost 400 fold since Pure got started. But we haven't changed the pipe, right? So if you make a vessel 400 times larger but you have the same pipe going in and out of it you're losing a lot of access to data. This is this new sea change to new protocols where we're shedding all of the disk. And I think the second big change is we're bringing the same wave to big data. Right, so we've been playing in the block market now we're playing in the file and object market. Because big data workloads, especially those that require deep learning, you just need massively parallel storage. And you're never going to be able to get that with, you know, 20-plus year old storage designs. >> So, Scott, when you talk to your customers, especially when you're talking to C-suite, how does storage fit into that discussion? I loved in the keynote, there's a lot of discussion of, you know, next generation applications. Everything from the, you know, buzzwords of the AI and ML type pieces out there. But, you know, what are the big challenges that your customer's facing? And how much is it a storage discussion? How much is it kind of a digital transformation? >> Yeah, I think we see all of it. We'll talk to customers that find that they can't innovate quickly, right? And they want to get so much more value from their data. One of the studies we cited in the keynote today was 80% of companies think they can make 20% more on the top line if they can just get insights out of their current data. I mean, that's a staggering statistic. 20% top line for every company if they could just get more out of their data. We want to make that possible. Their constrained with very expensive legacy technologies. That they simply can't give them the access to the data. They don't have the performance to mind those insights. And the infrastructure is so cumbersome, they just can't evolve and move their business forward. And so providing that recipe, you know, giving customers the ability to get dramatically more value out of their data and do it for lower cost is working. >> Yeah, and it's been interesting to watch kind of the data center to the cloud, and now cloud to the edge. And you've got solutions that are spanning across them. How do you see that maturing in really the vision to expand where Pure fits in the discussion. >> So, you know, from early on we targeted the cloud market. Because we knew that this is where the future lies, right? Even traditional enterprises still want all the benefits of the cloud inside of their own icy environments. >> And when you say cloud, you're meaning SaaS providers, service providers, as well as, you know? >> Yeah. We talk about the model that the big three are using. But, you know, this is very popular in many other clouds. The world is not moving to three data centers. Companies like Apple and Facebook are very committed to their own data center investment. And we seek to be a supplier to that consumer internet. The softwares of service and infrastructures service of providers. Because that's where the data center's going. But, you know, what we've seen recently with the proliferation of internet of things in sensor data is customers are just growing these huge data footprints that are just too big to move across public networks. So we talked about, in the keynote, in three years only one, out of every 20 bites that's generated, can fit on the internet that year. >> 2.5 out of 50, I think was the number. >> 2.5 out of 50 zettabytes. 50 zettabytes will be produced that year but only 2.5 is going to be transferred across the internet for the entire year. So we've got to get better as an industry at helping customers capture that data where it's generated, right? We call that edge. Sometimes it'll be on the devices, or it'll be in data centers that are close to the edge. And they've got to mine insights from it right there. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> One of the exciting demos we're showing here is actually AI co-processing with the public cloud. So we've got an edge data center that we're running deep learning in. But then we're selecting particular data sets through the deep learning to transfer it up to the public cloud for more machine learning. >> Those key nuggets, the needles maybe you transfer. Cause otherwise it's too expensive to transfer all the data. >> You can't transfer all of it. So if it's a self-driving car, you know, if I'm just routinely driving along, no big deal, you keep the data. But if I slam on the breaks because a dog's in the crosswalk that's the thing you want to do the training on. >> That can't be an asynchronous operation, right? So, okay, you're already getting the hook, I can't believe it, he just got here. (Scott laughs) Cube is a comfortable place but we got to throw some hard questions at you. So >> Please. >> Stu asked me the other day, or, actually, today, "Who's going to reach a billion dollars first?" And you don't have to predict, you can leave that to us. "Nutanix or Pure?" Okay, so talk about HCI. You made some comments up on stage about hyper-converged. Said that, you know, it's good for its own specific use cases. What's your point of view on that? >> So first of all, Nutanix has built a great business. >> Dave: Awesome, yeah, sure. >> We're absolutely fans. I will say, in the markets, those two new markets that we're playing in, in the cloud market and in the next gen applications and deep learning, we don't see hyper-converged infrastructure. We do see hyper-converged in business and enterprises. But it's usually the smaller scale deployments. The reason is, at scale, you don't want to collocate applications, data, and storage all in a single tier. It limits the ability to easily scale independently. You know, if you need more capacity you need more application compute versus data compute. You want to be able to flex those independently. Which is why all the big clouds and enterprise data centers run converged rather than hyper-converged. But the change that's coming is fast networks are changing this even more. So what I believes going to turn hyper-converged inside out is it's now more efficient to access remote storage than it is the same storage on your local chassis. And that's because we're offloading compute to the server net cards on there. So these new protocols NVMe over fabrics are actually making the network finally really the computer. There's no longer a chassis that's even meaningful. >> Big fan of that infrastructure and NVMe over fabric. Okay, next tough question is the narrative, from the big guy, EMC in particular, Pure is small, they're losing money. And your return narrative is tell EMC they're large, they're slow, they're outdated and confused. Okay, we love that, you know, it gets a little juices flowing. But here's my question. A lot of customers are large and slow and outdated and confused. So how do you get that fat middle to move faster and become a tailwind for you guys? >> So I think it's happening. I mean, customers just want technology to be made easily. I mean, one of the disrupters that's really helped is the AWS user experience, right? AWS has reset the bar for IT everywhere because people are like, why am I paying for consultants to visit my data center and take care of this mainframe or client server error technology that used to be so expensive. You know, consultants coming along with it. And permanently staying with it was okay. That's not okay, right? The world needs to move to self-driving infrastructure and they need radically better performance if they're going to use these new techniques. And so I think the key motivation is customers need to get more value from their data and they need to drive down costs. And we're in the sweet spot of being able to provide it. And these 20-plus year old designs can't. There's no way. >> So it's inevitable is really what I'm taking away from that. And you've got a lead that you can sustain in your view. >> You know, it's been very interesting to watch our competitors talk about the new FlashArray//X. With all NVMe and the new FlashBlade. They've said these are science projects that won't be real for three years. And, yet, we've won one of the biggest AI platforms in the world. You know, 25% or more of our business is coming from cloud customers. So, you know, from where we sit, things are going exactly as we'd hoped. >> Love it, we're talking about the edge, you're pushing the envelope at the edge. Alright, Scott, we'll give you the last word. I know you're super busy, but give us the wrap up. The bumper sticker on Accelerate 2017. >> Oh, it's such a phenomenal group coming together to talk about innovation. We've already shipped the hardware form factors this year, with our new FlashArray and the new FlashBlade. But the thing that I'm so excited about is we've got more than two years of software innovation teed up that we've been very quite about. So when you can bring two years of innovation and pack it into six months like we have this year, it makes things really exciting. >> Well congratulations on getting to this point. We're really excited about the future. Scott Dietz Dietzen, thanks for coming on The Cube. Great to see you again. >> Thank you, always good to be on the cube. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is Pure Accelerate, live from San Fancisco. We'll be right back. (soft electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. (lively music) >> Good morning, welcome to The Cube I'm Lisa Martin, and we are live at day three of the NAB Show in Las Vegas. Very excited to introduce you to our first guest this morning, Michael Harbin, the VP of Pac-12 Networks. Good morning Michael, welcome to the cube. >> Good morning, how are you today? >> Very good, very energized. >> Oh good (laughter) >> Day three. So Michael, tell us about Pac-12 Networks, The content arm of the Pac-12 Conference. >> Sure, we have a six regional sports networks in the western US, and then one national feed, we also have digital properties and some over-the-top services on Twitter and Facebook Live, so we're involved as we can be in all forms of distribution. We're located in San Francisco, the conference itself is over 100 years old; it was 100 last year. The networks launched four years ago, this will be our fifth season coming up in August. We're very proud, very happy of our distribution, and our student athletes, and our partnership schools, and it's a great place. >> So you are the first and only sports media company that is owned by its 12 universities. >> That's right, so the SEC is partnered with ESPN, and the Big 10 Networks are partnered with Fox, so we're on our own, we stand on our own, and we do the best we can with what we have. >> Give us an idea of the genesis of the network. >> It started with the new commissioner, Larry Scott on the Pac-12 side, he came in and had a vision for helping the Pac-12 realize what it could be, as opposed to... Being on the West Coast has its disadvantages; our audience size isn't that big, our games start when the East Coast is going to sleep sometimes, so he wanted to get rid of an East Coast bias that existed in collegiate sports, and really make Pac-12 what it should be. We have the best geography, we have the best schools, we have land in... Tech and entrainment, so we have a lot going for us, and I think he brought those things to the forefront, and helped position Pac-12 in a much stronger position than it had been. In the world of liscencing content, we leapfrogged at the time the rest of the conferences in our deal with ESPN and Fox for our football and basketball games. With the games that weren't sold to Fox and ESPN, commissioner Scott thought to create a media company that we would own and control, and that would distribute the rest of our collegiate and athletic events that we have that are controlled by the Pac-12. >> So you mentioned basketball, football, you do big events, but you also do small events. Give us an idea of what it's like to produce a big event in the fall; a big football event, versus some of the smaller Olympic sports like field hockey? >> Sure. We have our three seasons; fall, winter, and spring, so obviously winter, the mostly indoor sports, but in the fall we kickoff big with our football season, and there's 12 or 13 weeks, and we have a championship game in early December which is a big event. That's one of the reasons the Pac-10 went to the Pac-12; the NCA says if you have 12 football teams, you can have a championship game. >> Okay. >> If you have less than 12, whoever has the best record is the winner, so we added two schools, and we have a champ game; those media rights were sold to Fox and ESPN, so it was a nice deal for us. So we start off with football; those are more traditional productions that everybody's used to. Big 53-foot truck pulls up, we do our production compliment with seven, eight or nine cameras depending on the game, depending on the market, depending on the week, the time of broadcast. We usually get- we choose our games after Fox and ESPN chooses theirs, so sometimes we get good games, sometimes we don't. They're all good; they're all Pac-12 games, so they're all good. But those are very traditional productions that are done in very traditional methodologies that everyone would see. As we start getting into basketball, those two are typical productions, but the volume of basketball games is such that we found a new way to do those games a little bit less expensively than the others. >> So less resources? >> Yeah. And then of course the spring sports where you're into baseball and softball, track and field. Track and field is a very expensive sport to produce because there's a lot going on at any one time. In that way, we've gotten away from video as a means of transmission and done IP transmission, which saved us a lot of money, and as we've got that IP path between our schools and ourselves, we've learned to do new things with it. We're doing content sharing back and forth, advanced production techniques, multiple camera paths that we normally wouldn't have on a production of that size. All of our shows, no matter where they are or what sport they are are produced in surround sound 5.0, so we think we lend a lot to the smaller sports that get smaller audiences, but we think we put a lot of production value to them to do the athletes and the sport justice. >> Talk to us about the underlying technologies that are necessary to support going from video to IP so that you can really open up the types of content and where it's distributed. >> Right, so one of the difficulties- we have around 100 venues in the 12 schools that we have to be able to broadcast from. Depends on the university; at Standford, those soccer and lacrosse fields could be way out. They call the campus 'the farm' for a reason. There's a lot of acreage there to cover. And some of our venues aren't even on campus. UCLA football is at the Rose Bowl, USC is at the Coliseum, so we had to find a way to get away from video which is just a single path and costs a lot. We needed more bidirectional service, we needed something that was secure and had really low latency so that when we did our productions we did the coaches interviews afterwards, it's basically like a phone call. We also provided internet services to the production, which everybody needs internet connectivity. The Chyron people, whomever. The crew itself, just for checking in and their report times and things like that, and we also provide four-digit extension dialing for our in-house phone systems. It's a very efficient and cost-effective way for us to do our production out there, and provide this suite of services that if I was just using a video circuit, I wouldn't have access to unless I paid extra for it. >> So presumably, creating a ton of content, how do you maintain all this content and be able to retrieve things, be able to livestream, have things on demand, that's that underlying archival storage strategy? >> So we produce 850 events throughout a year, and that's just to give you an idea, I think Big 10 and SCC are around 400, 450. We have a lot of volume going on, and we do a very good job, I think, of archiving that, logging those games, adding metadata, as much metadata as we possibly can to it. Including repurposing the closed caption files, we attach that as data, we get articles, stills, whatever we can gather about that particular game, we add it as metadata, and then we archive that. We keep it on very fast, short-term storage in our building on spinning disk, and after it ages, after about the second season, we push it into Amazon Cloud. It goes right into Glacier if it's that old, but immediately when we do a game, we push it up to S3 in Amazon, where we share and monetize our content at that point, and then from there it just goes to Glacier, so we have, we think, a very efficient workflow, it's highly automated, we have a great media management department that does a terrific job with very few people, very scarce resources, they do what I think is one of the best jobs in the industry in terms of saving that content in an effort to monetize it in the future. So if you can find it and search through it and get clips from it, it's going to be that much more valuable for us. >> So one of the prevailing things that we've been hearing all week, and not just here, is the democratization of content. The audience, we're very much empowered, right? As a viewer of anything we want; we're binge-watching, we're streaming, we're time-shifting, we're sharing it on social media. What is the process that Pac-12 Networks goes through to understand your audience as well as you can to deliver them the experience that you think they want? >> We have the data that comes back from our TV Everywhere product, there are OTT platforms that we can gather up and sift through. We've undertaken a fan engagement project to work with our universities about the type of people and who attend their football games, or their sporting events, and a way of better understanding who our audience is and tailoring our program to that. Understanding who they are, what their preferences are, it will help us, I think, to fine-tune the kind of content we put in front of them. Everybody loves a winning team, and you have no problem filling seats or getting an audience when your team is winning, so we understand that; we just want to be better during those times where the team might not be undefeated, so we'd like to get people in there anyway. It's a challenge for us, it really is. >> What about this concept of original content? You're now producing original content. There are three shows? >> Yes. We have some anthology shows; The Drive, and All Access during football and basketball season that give a behind-the-scenes look akin to the HBO shows on the professional side that look at professional sports. We go behind the scenes, and the stories for some of our athletes and some of our teams are quite compelling, and it makes good television. That gets also supported by our shoulder programming for our live events; pre and post-game SportsCenter-type shows that we do, and we try to do live halftimes that are topical for every one of our sports events that are played, so that's a lot of volume, a lot of churn that goes through a small studio in a small facility. We think it helps the live events look better, I mean, live events are what people are tuning in to watch. You can't fast-forward through a sporting event which advertisers just love, you kind of have to consume it in the moment, unless you can keep yourself away from the internet or your phone for a few hours until you get a chance to watch the game. We think being in live sports is a really special place to be, because you can't fast-forward through it. Any support that we give those live events, that's really what the other original content is geared to, is to build interest in those teams and those events, and attract people to them. >> So you have this concept of TV everywhere. Original content, traditional content, how is the cloud helping the Pac-12 Network to really collaborate across all the content, all of the connected fans and wherever they are? >> Sure. Just to make a distinction, we have the TV Everywhere which is the authenticated platforms that our cable providers use, and we have our own digital properties as well that still need to be authenticated, and then there's the over the top platforms like Facebook Live that are everything but the 850 events that go on the air. So behind the scenes, sideline reporters in the locker rooms, whatever else we could produce, pep rallies, that we think could be compelling content for Facebook Live we do. On Twitter, we've licensed out the 851st event and beyond, so we do some very limited productions, but still quality, that gets distributed on Twitter. So that's kind of this thing. TV Everywhere is basically the high-end product, and then these kind of ancillary second-screen experience, whatever you want to call them that don't need to be authenticated, that anybody can pick up and watch. That's how we make that distinction. I'm sorry, what was the second part of that question? >> How does cloud help collaboration? >> So we were really early adopters of producing those streams ourselves, so with Elemental Technologies who is a wonderful vendor and partner of ours, they're now owned by AWS, I point over there, they're somewhere in the building. >> (laughs) >> We're a big early adopter of their technology, we've really tried to strive for a business partnership with our vendors, rather than just a check-writer, check-casher relationship, which doesn't do us well, we don't think. We developed this relationship with them, and they helped us deliver our mezzanine streams to Occami and distribute from there, but we do that encoding in-house on their equipment. Eventually I think we'll move that to the cloud and get it all virtualized, but for right now we run their servers in our house, and they understand that we would like to get it out as quickly as we can as some point, but we're working on emptying our CER as fast we can; I don't want any blinking lights in my CER if I could get there someday, but that's a dream. >> So last question, we just have about thirty seconds left, you're in San Fancisco, >> Yep. >> With a really cool opportunity; sports entertainment technology. When you're looking for young talent who could potentially be swayed by the big Googles of the world and Facebook, what is really unique and cool about working with Pac-12 Network? >> For us, it's a two-edged sword. We love being in San Francisco; it gives us access to young people, a new way of thinking, different technology companies that are more IP/IT centric than TV centric. So we think that gives us a real advantage. The other edge of the sword is that we lose a lot of network engineering especially, systems engineers to the tech companies; they would prefer to work at Uber or LinkedIn, something like that. TV's kind of a dying tech, you have to jazz it up a little bit to gain their interest. >> But it's evolving based on what you're talking about-- It is. It's very much that skillset for being an old-time TV engineer is becoming less and less important than network engineering or systems engineering skillsets; that's what we really look for. If somebody has a Cisco certification, he gets our- or she gets our interest, rather than just 'I've worked in television for 20 years,' because we know which direction we're going in. >> One of the things that you articulate as we wrap things up here is that every company this day and age is a tech company, so we wish you the best of luck. You've said you've been at this show for 30 years >> 30 years. >> I can't even imaging all the things that you've seen. Michael Harbin, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube. >> Thank you very much, it was a pleasure being here. >> We want to thank you for watching, we are live from NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)