>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin of the cube here, HPE and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment. And I'm here with four guests. Please. Welcome Charlie Mulrooney global presales engineering manager at Athi John saws also of Shi joins this global pre-sales technical consultant. And back with me are Terry Richardson, north American channel chief and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Welcome gang. Great to have you all here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thanks. You good to be here? >>All right, Charlie, let's go ahead and start with you. Keeping the earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses, right? Everywhere. Globally. Can you talk Charlie about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable? It? >>Sure. So starting about a year and a half, two years ago, we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports, their chairman's letters, their sec filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral or carbon zero goals starting with 2050 dates. And then since then we've seen 20, 40, and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and RFPs, RFIs that we're fielding. Certainly all now contain elements of that. So this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers, our fortune two 50 and fortune 500 customers. For sure. We're, we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this. We get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand, you know, here's what we have today. What can we do better? What can we do different to help make an impact on those goals? >>So making an impact top of mind, pretty much for everyone, as you mentioned, John SAS, let's bring you into the conversation. Now, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the things that you talk about with respect tohis approach to sustainability, sustainable it, are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space? >>Well, so Charlie touched on something really important that, you know, the, the wake up moment for us was receiving, you know, proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability. And it was really around two years ago, I suppose, for the first time. And those requests started coming from European based companies, cuz they had a bit of a head start over the us based global companies even. And what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to use renewable energy for data centers utilize the, they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance cost and other factors that you typically have at the top. So as we started working with them, I guess at beginning it was more tactical cuz we really had to find a way to respond. >>We were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability, we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second headquarters in Austin, Texas, those are lead gold certified. We've been installing solar panels, reducing waste across the company, recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles, all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in, in, in our offices and in our headquarters. But it's a lot more than that. And what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of, of customers and partners. We have over 30,000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers. And we wanted to find best practices and technologies and services that we could talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a, as a really large global reseller and integrator. We can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple partners that we work with to help solve customer problems. And so over time it's become more strategic and we've been as a company building the, the, the, the, the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that, and then also reporting for CDP Ecova and so forth. And it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years. And we take it very seriously. >>It sounds like, and it also sounds like from the customer's perspective, they're shifting from that tactical, maybe early initial approach to being more strategic, to really enabling sustainable it across their organization. And I imagine from a business driver's perspective, John saws and Charlie, are you hearing customers? You talked about it being part of RFPs, but also where are customers in terms of, we need to have a sustainable it strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers. Charlie, John, what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, that's top of mind with, with all the folks that we're talking to, I would say there's probably a three way tie for the importance of attracting and retaining investors. As you said, plus customers, customers are shopping, their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities and sustainable priorities with their own and who is gonna help them with their own reporting of, you know, scope two and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining talent. It's another element now of when you're bringing on new talent to your organization, they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align. So we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with, with the customers we're talking to. And it was a little surprising, cuz it, we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors, but it really has become quite a bit more than that. And it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization >>More comprehensive across the organization. Let's bring Dr. John Fry into the conversation and Terry your next. So stay tuned. Dr. Fry, can you talk about HPE and S H I partnering together? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them. No one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our collective customers the same way. From an HPE perspective, we bring the expertise on our products. We bring in sustainable it point of view, where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies implement a sustainable it program. But our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers. And in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table. So they extend the reach, they bring their own expertise. Their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just enterprise products. So by working together, we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs, give them the right technology solutions and enhance that customer experience because they get more value from us collectively. >>It really is better together, which is in a very appropriate name for our segment here. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about AMD. How is it helping customers to create that sustainable it strategy? And what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that, that are able to be delivered through partners like Shi? >>Well, Lisa, you used the word enabling just a short while ago. And fundamentally AMD enables HPE and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers. So in the data center space, we began our journey in 2017 with some fundamental design elements for our processor technology that were really keenly focused on improving performance, but also efficiency. So now the, the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about is really that measure of performance per wat. And you'll continue to see AMD enabled customers to, to try to find ways to, to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing, whether it's availability of power data center space, or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals. So we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to HPE and two Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers. >>Sounds like to me, Terry, that it's, that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler, but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability. >>You you're right about that. And, and we actually have tools, greenhouse gas, TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the, the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals. So we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like HPE and Shi >>Better together. As we said at the beginning in just a minute ago, Charlie, let's bring you back in, talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable it and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives. >>So for quite a while, we've had some offerings to help customers, especially in the end user compute side. A lot of customers were interested in, I've got assets for, you know, let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and, you know, those need to be refreshed. What do I do with those? How do I responsibly retire or recycle those? And we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time. It's within the last year or two, when we started offering for them guarantees and assurances assurances of how they can, if that equipment is reusable by somebody else, how can we issue them? You know, credits for carbon credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else. So it's not necessarily going to be e-waste, it's something that can be recycled and reused. We have other programs with helping extend the life of, of some systems where they look at well, I have a awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the, the, the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically. We can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment. So we've been able to come up with some creative solutions specifically around end user compute in the past, but we are looking to new ways now to really help extend that into data center infrastructure and beyond to really help with what are the needs, what are the, the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them. >>That's a great point that you bring up. Charlie and security kind of popped into my head here, John Saul's question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about, or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling, where are you having those customer conversations? Cause I know sustainability is a board level, it's a C level discussion, but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization? >>Well, so it's a, it's a combination of organizations within the customer. These are these global organizations. Typically when we're talking about asset life cycle management, asset recovery, how do you do that in a sustainable green way and securely the customers we're dealing with? I mean, security is top sustainability is right up there too. O obviously, but Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are global rollouts, tens of thousands of employees typically to, to have mobile devices, laptops, and phones, and so forth. And they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to, to the employees. And how do you do that in a sustainably? You need to think about that. Does it all go to a central location or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way? >>And I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that, well for, for example, one European pharmaceutical that states in their reports that they're already in scope one in scope two they're fully net zero at this point. And, and they say, but that only solves 3% of our overall sustainability goals. 97% is scope three, it's travel, it's shipping. It's, it's, it's all the, the, all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times, but they're coming to us now as a, as a supplier and as, and, and we're filling out, you know, forms and RFPs and so forth to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal >>Sustain sustainable supply chain. Absolutely. Yes. Dr. John Fry and Terry, I want to kind of get your perspectives. Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective, customers coming through RFP saying, Hey, we've gotta work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway, HPE and AMD hearing the same thing Dr. Fry will start with you. And then Terry >>Sure, absolutely. We receive about 2,500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year. And that's come up from a few hundred. So yeah, absolutely accelerating. Then the conversations turn deeper. Can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption? Then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can HPE offer net zero or carbon neutral technology solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those solutions in their own carbon footprint. So the questions are getting more sophisticated, the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing. And as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions, I think this trend is just gonna continue up. >>Yeah. And we see the same thing. We get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals. But the surveying that survey work that we've done with customers has led us to, you know, understand that, you know, approximately 75% of customers are gonna make sustainability goals, a key component of their RFIs in 2023, which is right around the corner. And, and, you know, 60% of those same customers really expect to have business level KPIs in the new year that are really related to sustainability. So this is not just a, a kind of a buzzword topic. This is, this is kind of business imperatives that, you know, the company, the companies like HPE and AMD and the partners like I, that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really gonna be ahead of the game. >>That's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't, we're not talking about a buzzword here. We're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all industries and Dr. Far, you mentioned regulations. And something that we just noticed is that the S E C recently said, it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions. If they were, if that were to, to come into play, I'm gonna pun back to Charlie and John saws. How would Shi and, and frankly at HPE and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of regulation were to be implemented. Charlie. >>Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that, with the reporting, we know reporting is a challenge. The scope two reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was gonna be a ways out now, all of a sudden, Hey, if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three targets, then you have to report on them. So that, that has become really important very quickly as word about this requirement is rumbling around there's concern. So we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose, but stay tuned, cuz we have something coming. That's interesting. >>Definitely PED my, my ears are, are, are perk here. Charlie, we'll stay tuned for that. Dr. Fry. Terry, can you talk about together with Shi HPE and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the da data obviously, which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it. We talked a little bit about security, but how are from a better together perspective, Dr. Fry will start with you, how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it? And at these days what it's real time requirements. >>Yeah. It's, it's an increasing challenge. In fact, we have changed the H HP story the way we talk about H HP's value proposition to talk about data first modernization. So how often do you collect data? Where do you store it? How do you avoid moving it? How do you make sure if you're going to collect data, you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value. And then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable it, because when I talk to technology executives, what they tell me again, and again, is there's this presumption within their user community, that storage is free. And so when, when they have needs for collecting data, for example, if, if once an hour would do okay, but the system would collect it once a minute, the default, the user asks for of course, once a minute. And then are you getting insights from that data? Or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge, because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network. There's huge power and carbon implications of doing that. So it's really making a better decision about what do we collect, why do we collect it, what we're gonna do with it when we collect and how we store it. >>And, and for years, customers have really talked about, you know, modernization and the need to modernize their data center. You know, I, I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that catalyst to really drive true modernization. And as they think forward, you know, when we work with, with HPE, you know, they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in, you know, specific customer workloads from the largest, super computers down to kind of general purpose servers. And when we work with partners like Shi, not only can they deliver the full suite of offerings for on premise deployments, they're also very well positioned to leverage the public cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there. And, and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end to end sustainability goal. >>That's a great point that, that it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be an end to end goal. We're just about out of time, but I wanted to give John saws the last word here, take us out, John, what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest, but what are some of the things that you are excited about as HPE AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives? >>Sure. Couple comments here. So Charlie, yeah, you touched on some upcoming capabilities that Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management. See, this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way. This is a train coming at everybody very quickly and they're not ready. Most customers aren't ready. And if we can help as, as a reseller integrator assessments, to be able to understand what they're currently running compare to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state, that seems valuable if we can help in that way. That's, those are things that we're looking into specifically, you know, greenhouse gas, emissions, relevant assessments, and, and, and within the comments of, of, of Terry and, and John around the, the power per wat and the vast portfolio of, of technologies that they, that they had to address various workloads is, is fantastic. >>We'd be able to help point to technologies like that and move customers in that direction. I think as a, as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers, I saw an article on BBC this morning that I, I, I think if, if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems. The BBC article mentioned this was Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, and they have a big project called merge. And today was a go live date. And BBC us news outlets have been reporting on it. They basically changed the model from a model called power of work, which takes a, a lot of compute and graphic, GPU power and so forth around the world. And it's now called power of stake, which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct. >>They have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency. And if they're wrong, it's taken from them. This new model reduces the emissions of their environment by 99 plus percent. The June emissions from Ethereum were, it was 120 telos per, per year, a Terra terat hours per year. And they reduced it actually, that's the equivalent of what the net Netherlands needed for energy, so comparable to a medium sized country. So if you can think differently about how to solve problems, it may be on-prem, it may be GreenLake. It may be, it may be the public cloud in some cases or other, you know, interesting, innovative technologies that, that AMD HPE, other partners that we can bring in along, along with them as well, we can solve problems differently. There is a lot going on >>The opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting. We thank you so much for talking together about how HPE AMD and SSHA are really working in partnership in synergy to help your customers across every organization, really become much more focused, much more collaborative about sustainable it. Guys. We so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My >>Pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

(ethereal music) >> Good morning, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's day-two coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We are live in Las Vegas at Caesar's Forum, looking forward to an action-packed day here on theCUBE. Our first guest joins us, Bill Stratton, the global industry lead, media, entertainment and advertising at Snowflake. Bill, great to have you on the program talking about industry specifics. >> Glad to be here, excited to have a conversation. >> Yeah, the media and entertainment industry has been keeping a lot of us alive the last couple of years, probably more of a dependence on it than we've seen stuck at home. Talk to us about the data culture in the media, entertainment and advertising landscape, how is data being used today? >> Sure. Well, let's start with what you just mentioned, these last couple of years, I think, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of trends and impact to the media industry. I think there were some things happening prior to COVID, right? Streaming services were starting to accelerate. And obviously, Netflix was an early mover. Disney launched their streaming service right before the pandemic, Disney+, with ESPN+ as well. I think then, as the pandemic occurred these last two years, the acceleration of consumers' habits, obviously, of not just unbundling their cable subscription, but then choosing, you know, what services they want to subscribe to, right? I mean, I think we all sort of grew up in this era of, okay, the bundle was the bundle, you had sports, you had news, you had entertainment, whether you watched the channel or not, you had the bundle. And what the pandemic has accelerated is what I call, and I think a lot of folks call, the golden age of content. And really, the golden age of content is about the consumer. They're in control now, they pick and choose what services they want, what they watch, when they watch it. And I think that has extremely, sort of accelerated this adoption on the consumer side, and then it's creating this data ecosystem, as a result of companies like Disney having a direct-to-consumer relationship for the first time. It used to be a Disney or an NBC was a wholesaler, and the cable or satellite company had the consumer data and relationship. Now, the companies that are producing the content have the data and the consumer relationships. It's a fascinating time. >> And they're still coming over the top on the Telco networks, right? >> Absolutely right. >> Telco's playing in this game? >> Yeah, Telco is, I think what the interesting dynamic with Telco is, how do you bundle access, high speed, everybody still needs high speed at their home, with content? And so I think it's a similar bundle, but it takes on a different characteristic, because the cable and Telcos are not taking the content risk. AT&T sold Warner Media recently, and I think they looked at it and said, we're going to stay with the infrastructure, let somebody else do the content. >> And I think I heard, did I hear this right the other day, that Roku is now getting into the content business? >> Roku is getting into it. And they were early mover, right? They said the TVs aren't, the operating system in the television is not changing fast enough for content. So their dongle that you would slide into a TV was a great way to get content on connected televisions, which is the fastest growing platform. >> I was going to say, what are the economics like in this business? Because the bundles were sort of a limiting factor, in terms of the TAM. >> Yeah. >> And now, we get great content, all right, to watch "Better Call Saul", I have to get AMC+ or whatever. >> You know, your comment, your question about the economics and the TAM is an interesting one, because I think we're still working through it. One of the things, I think, that's coming to the forefront is that you have to have a subscription revenue stream. Okay? Netflix had a subscription revenue stream for the last six, eight, 10 years, significantly, but I think you even see with Netflix that they have to go to a second revenue model, which is going to be an ad-supported model, right? We see it in the press these last couple days with Reid Hastings. So I think you're going to see, obviously subscription, obviously ad-supported, but the biggest thing, back to the consumer, is that the consumer's not going to sit through two minutes of advertising to watch a 22 minute show. >> Dave: No way. >> Right? So what's then going to happen is that the content companies want to know what's relevant to you, in terms of advertising. So if I have relevancy in my ad experience, then it doesn't quite feel, it's not intrusive, and it's relevant to my experience. >> And the other vector in the TAM, just one last follow-up, is you see Amazon, with Prime, going consumption. >> Bill: That's right. >> You get it with Prime, it's sort of there, and the movies aren't the best in the world, but you can buy pretty much any movie you want on a consumption basis. >> Yeah. Just to your last quick point, there is, we saw last week, the Boston Red Sox are bundling tickets, season tickets, with a subscription to their streaming service. >> NESN+, I think it is, yeah. So just like Prime, NESN+- >> And it's like 30 bucks a month. >> -just like Prime bundling with your delivery service, you're going to start to see all kinds of bundles happen. >> Dave: Interesting. >> Man, the sky is the limit, it's like it just keeps going and proliferating. >> Bill: It does. >> You talk about, on the ad side for a second, you mentioned the relevance, and we expect that as consumers, we're so demanding, (clears throat) excuse me, we don't have the patience, one of the things I think that was in short supply during COVID, and probably still is, is patience. >> That's right. >> I think with all of us, but we expect that brands know us enough to surf up the content that they think we watched, we watched "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", don't show me other things that aren't relevant to the patterns I've been showing you, the content creators have to adapt quickly to the rising and changing demands of the consumer. >> That's right. Some people even think, as you go forward and consumers have this expectation, like you just mentioned, that brands not only need to understand their own view of the consumer, and this is going to come into the Snowflake points that we talk about in a minute, but the larger view that a brand has about a consumer, not just their own view, but how they consume content, where they consume it, what other brands they even like, that all builds that picture of making it relevant for the consumer and viewer. >> Where does privacy come into the mix? So we want it to be relevant and personalized in a non-creepy way. Talk to us about the data clean rooms that Snowflake launched, >> Bill: That's right. >> and how is that facilitating from a PII perspective, or is it? >> Yeah. Great question. So I think the other major development, in addition to the pandemic, driving people watching all these shows is the fact that privacy legislation is increasing. So we started with California with the CCPA, we had GDPR in Europe, and what we're starting to see is state by state roll out different privacy legislations. At some point, it may be true that we have a federal privacy legislation, and there are some bills that are working through the legislature right now. Hard to tell what's going to happen. But to your question, the importance of privacy, and respecting privacy, is exactly happening at the same time that media companies and publishers need to piece together all the viewing habits that you have. You've probably watched, already this morning, on your PC, on your phone, and in order to bring that experience together a media company has to be able to tie that together, right? Collaborate. So you have collaboration on one side, and then you have privacy on the other, and they're not necessarily, normally, go together, Right? They're opposing forces. So now though, with Snowflake, and our data clean room, we like to call it a data collaboration platform, okay? It's not really what a data warehouse function traditionally has been, right? So if I can take data collaboration, and our clean room, what it does is it brings privacy controls to the participants. So if I'm an advertiser, and I'm a publisher, and I want to collaborate to create an advertising campaign, they both can design how they want to do that privacy-based collaboration, Because it's interesting, one company might have a different perspective of privacy, on a risk profile, than another company. So it's very hard to say one size is going to fit all. So what we at Snowflake do, with our infrastructure, is let you design how you create your own clean room. >> Is that a differentiator for Snowflake, the clean rooms? >> It's absolutely a very big differentiator. Two reasons, or probably two, three reasons, really. One is, it's cross cloud. So all the advertisers aren't going to be in the same cloud, all the publishers aren't going to be in the same cloud. One big differentiator there. Second big differentiator is, we want to be able to bring applications to the data, so our clean room can enable you to create measurement against an ad campaign without moving your data. So bringing measurement to the data, versus sending data to applications then improves the privacy. And then the third one is, frankly, our pricing model. You only pay for Snowflake what you use. So in the advertising world, there's what's called an ad tech tax, there is no ad tech tax for Snowflake, because we're simply a pay-as-you-go service. So it's a very interesting dynamic. >> So what's that stack look like, in your world? So I've pulled up Frank's chart, I took a picture of his, he's called it the new, modern data stack, I think he called it, but it had infrastructure in the bottom, okay, that's AWS, Google, Azure, and then a lot of you, live data, that would be the media data cloud, the workload execution, the specific workload here is media and entertainment, and then application development, that's a new layer of value that you're bringing in, marketplace, which is the whole ecosystem, and then monetization comes from building on top. >> Bill: Yes. >> So I got AWS in there, and other clouds, you got a big chunk of that, where do your customers add value on top of that? >> Yeah. So the way you described it, I think, with Frank's point, is right on. You have the infrastructure. We know that a lot of advertisers, for example, aren't going to use Amazon, because the retailer competes with Amazon, So they want to might be in Google or Azure. And then sort of as you go up the stack, for the data layer that is Snowflake, especially what we call first-party data, is sitting in that Snowflake environment, right? But that Snowflake environment is a distributed environment, so a Disney, who was on stage with me yesterday, she talked about, Jaya talked about their first-party datas in Snowflake, their advertisers' datas in their own Snowflake account, in their own infrastructure. And then what's interesting is is that application layer is coming to the data, and so what we're really seeing is an acceleration of companies building that application natively on Snowflake to do measurement, to do targeting, to do activation. And so, that growth of that final application layer is what we're seeing as the acceleration in the stack. >> So the more data that's in that massive distributed data cloud, the more value your customers can get out of it. And I would imagine you're just looking to tick things off that where customers are going outside of the Snowflake data cloud, let's attack that so they don't have to. >> Yeah, I think these partners, (clears throat) excuse me, and customers, it's an interesting dynamic, because they're customers of ours. But now, because anybody who is already in Snowflake can be their customer, then they're becoming our partner. So it's an interesting dynamic, because we're bringing advertisers to a Disney or an NBCU, because they already have their data in Snowflake. So the network effect that's getting created because of this layer that's being built is accelerated. >> In 2013, right after the second reinvent, I wrote a piece called "How to Compete with the Amazon Gorilla." And it seemed to us pretty obvious at the time, you're not going to win an infrastructure again, you got to build on top of it, you got to build ecosystems within industries, and the data, the connection points, that network effect that you just talked about, it's actually quite thrilling to see you guys building that. >> Well, and I think you know this too, I mean, Amazon's a great partner of ours as well, right? So they're part of our media data cloud, as Amazon, right? So we're making it easier and easier for companies to be able to spin up a clean room in places like AWS, so that they get the privacy controls and the governance that's required as well. >> What do you advise to, say, the next generation of media and advertising companies who may be really early in the data journey? Obviously, there's competition right here in the rear view mirror, but we've seen services that launch and fail, what do you advise to those folks that maybe are early in the journey and how can Snowflake help them accelerate that to be able to launch services they can monetize, and get those consumers watching? >> I think the first thing for a lot of these brands is that they need to really own their data. And what I mean by that is, they need to understand the consumer relationship that they have, they need to take the privacy and the governance very seriously, and they need to start building that muscle. It's almost, it's a routine and a muscle that they just need to continue to kind of build up, because if you think about it, a media company spends two, three hours a day with their customer. You might watch two hours of a streaming show, but how much time do you spend with a single brand a day? Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 10 seconds, right? And so, their need to build the muscle, to be able to collect the data in a privacy-compliant way, build the intelligence off of that, and then leverage the intelligence. We talked about it a few days ago, and you look at a retailer, as a really good example, a retailer is using Snowflake and the retail data cloud to optimize their supply chain. Okay? But their supply chain extends beyond their own infrastructure to the advertising and marketing community, because if I can't predict demand, how do I then connect it to my supply chain? So our media data cloud is helping retailers and consumer product goods companies actually drive demand into their reconstructed supply chain. So they both work together. >> So you have a big focus, obviously, on the monetization piece, of course, that's a great place to start. Where do you see the media data cloud going? >> Yeah. I think we'll start to expand beyond advertising and beyond marketing. There's really important sub-segments of media. Gaming is one. You talk about the pandemic and teenagers playing games on their phones. So we'll have an emphasis around gaming. We'll have an emphasis in sports. Sports is going through a big change in an ecosystem. And there's a big opportunity to connect the dots in those ecosystems as well. And then I think, to what we were just talking about, I think connecting commerce and media is a very important area. And I think the two are still very loosely connected today. It used to be, could I buy the Jennifer Aniston sweater from "Friends", right? That was always the analogy. Now, media and social media, and TikTok and everything else, are combining media and commerce very closely. So I think we'll start to see more focus around that as well. So that adds to your monetization. >> Right, right. And you can NFT that. (Lisa laughs) >> Bill: That's right, there you go, you can mint an NFT on that. >> It's the tip of the iceberg. >> Absolutely. >> There's so much more potential to go. Bill, thank you so much for joining us bright and early this morning, talking about what snowflake is doing in media, entertainment and advertising. Exciting stuff, relevant to all of us, we appreciate your insights and your forward-looking statements. >> Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Good >> Bill: Bye now. >> For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're up early with us watching theCUBE's day-two coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. We'll be back in a moment with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>>okay. >>Just about a year ago, governments around the world forced shutdowns of their respective economies. We've never seen anything like it. Central banks took immediate action and effective monetary policy like none we've ever seen before. They dropped interest rates to near zero, injected a huge amount of cash into the system, and they fueled this liquidity boom to support those individuals and businesses that were in greatest need. Banks were overwhelmed with the volume of paperwork, for instance, small business P, P P loans and other things. Home buying boomed as mortgage rates hit all time lows for several weeks in the spring, it was complete chaos, but the tech industry stepped up and accommodated work from home. Cloud infrastructure was spun up instantly as access to data centers was really restricted, and Saas companies became a fundamental staple of not only keeping the lights on but helping customers thrive in the face of a pandemic. Automation became a >>mandate >>as humans, they couldn't possibly keep up with the tidal wave of demand, a document overload that was hitting the system. Now, one of the companies that was there to help financial firms in particular, get through the knothole was Oculus, a company that focuses on intelligent automation to deploy the power of machines to allow humans to focus on what they do best. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Volonte, and we're profiling the most interesting SAS startups that are reimagining how we work. And with me is Sam Bobbly, the co founder and CEO of Oculus. Sam, welcome to the Cube. First time. >>Hey, Dave. Thanks so much for having me excited to have the conversation. >>Yeah, me too. So, listen, I know you've told the story of a zillion times, but I want a community here. How and why did you start the company >>for sure. So when I was in college, I was having a conversation with my dad. Uh, he was telling me about a meeting he just had with his elder law attorney. And the other law attorney was complaining about having to review hundreds or thousands of pages of financial documents for every long term care Medicaid application. When you apply for Medicaid coverage to enter a nursing home, you're required to submit 60 months of financials along with your application. And traditionally the elder law attorney or a nursing home would review those documents literally page by page, line by line to find high value transactions, transfers and other financial trends. And when I heard about this, it just it didn't make sense to me. I said, You know why? In this day and age isn't there? Why isn't there a technology solution that can ingest the documents and spit out a digital report replacing the cumbersome manual page by page review? So it really just started as a research project, trying to learn more about optical character recognition, which is the technology of transforming images into text. And, you know, as we kind of kicked around different products in the market, we we realized that there was an opportunity to build a unique platform that could ingest documents of any format quality and produce perfectly accurate results. And that was the genesis behind what ultimately became Oculus. >>You were a young man at this time. How old were you at that time? >>I was 22 when we started >>so fearless. And, uh, now my friend Eddie Mitchell started a company about 20 years ago. We hacked together a >>Dell >>system and this camera. It was all about the modern operating room in the future, and he showed it to a doctor and and it was just a prototype, she said. How much? He said 10 grand. She wrote a check right there. You have a similar story? How did you see the company? >>So we we we do have a pretty similar experience. You know, Our our concept was we want to get perfect results the customer every time. So if a customer sends us a clean bank statement from Chase or a blurry cell phone image with someone's thumb in the picture from a community bank in Maine, and it's rotated sideways or upside down like we want to give consistent, perfectly active results every single time. And you know, our our view was to completely solve the business problem. So the very first version of the software that we built, we had a rudimentary machine process to extract 60 or 70% of the data, and then we had a little tool built on the back end, where literally, me, myself and some of our early employees would clean up the data output, make sure it's perfect and then return When we couldn't submit, we'd returned to the customer accurate data that could be used at the time for for a Medicaid decision. And what happened is, while we were in our beta period, customers fell in love with the product. They felt it was magical and really just superior from an accuracy standpoint to anything they had ever tested before. And And one of our beta testers said to us, uh, where do I submit credit card information? So at that time, I turned to my colleagues and I said, I think we're ready to I think we're ready. Start charging for this thing and and roll it out for prime time. >>When I was researching the company, I learned that you leveraged. At least some of the idea came from the capture, and I never knew this, But the capture that we all hate came from Google where they write, they had at one point you could maybe you still can. You can go online. You can read books and have to It's just scanned. You can't even read the stuff half the time. So they were putting the capture in front of us, quite brilliant to try to solve for those those those white spaces that they didn't know. So So how did you learn from that? Was there an A P I that you could plug into Google's data set, or did you do your own? What was that? How did that all work? >>The the concept of humans in the loop is super powerful, right? So when we first started, we recognize that OCR and machine data capture couldn't do the job completely. OCR, generally speaking, can process financial documents with roughly 80 to 85% accuracy plus or minus machines, particularly struggled with semi structured and unstructured documents where the format is unpredictable as well as lower quality images. So pretty early on, we recognized that we needed human intervention in the process in order to achieve perfect accuracy every single time, and also to create training data to constantly teach our machine learning models to get smarter and drive additional automation. So, as I mentioned, the very first version was myself and other employees verifying the data on our own. But as we started thinking about how to scale this up and, you know, take on millions and millions of documents, we needed to, uh, you know, learn how to better parallelized task and really build the system for for efficiency and for scanning. So we we we learned about the Google Books Initiative and their ability to leverage capture technology and a distributed workforce to verify pieces of information that their systems couldn't automatically read from books. And we took a lot of those learnings into building our human in the loop infrastructure. And, you know, a way to think about our our product is it's the marriage of machines and humans that makes us unique. As much of the heavy lifting as we can do with machines we do. But whatever we can't do automatically, we slice into smaller tasks and intelligently route those tasks to humans to perform verification. We then layer in algorithmic checks to make sure our humans did the review correctly. The customer gets perfect results, and that same perfect output is used in a feedback loop to train our machine learning models to get smarter and smarter, which dynamically improves the product on an ongoing basis. And, you know, the folks at Google were we're onto this pretty early with the capture technology, and we were following in their footsteps with our own unique take on it, but specifically applying it to financial documents. >>I mean on the Cube. We know a lot about this because we were looking at transcriptions of video all the time, and it just keeps getting better and better and better in our systems. Get smarter and smarter, smarter. So we're sort of closing that gap between what humans can can do and machines can't. And I would expect that you're seeing the same thing. I mean, you think there's always going to be kind of humans in the loop in terms of the quality or is that gap going to be, you know, six nines in the, you know, near near term. >>I think it's gonna take a while to get rid of all the edge cases. You know, you mentioned the PPB program like we've been on the back end processing P p P loans for some of the leading players, like Cross River Bank, blue Vine, Square Capital and others. And you know, what we've seen during the ppb process is just a a wide variety of different documents and inputs, Uh, and a lot of difficult to read documents that are, you know, very challenging to automate. So I think we will, you know, incrementally continue to automate more and more of the process. But the value of having humans plus machines is much more powerful than just having machines alone or just having humans alone. And as it relates to the end customer, our our goal is to do as much of the mundane work as possible to free our customer up to do the more cerebral analysis. So in a lending context and and for the record, you know, our our biggest market opportunity is in the limbic space. Despite the fact that we started with medicating attorneys, we quickly pivoted and realized that our technology was super valuable to to lenders to help them automate the underwriting process. And our our thesis is, if we can take out all of the necessary evils like document review and allow underwriters to focus on the actual analysis of financial health, it's a win win win and creates a really fantastic, complementary relationship between us and our customers. >>Yes, I want to ask you about the pivot to financial services. You said you started well, you have the inspiration from elder law because Jimmy McGill. Okay. Saul Goodman breaking bad. You got started. An elder law. But then you made the pivot to financial services. Really pretty early on. You had really good, great product market fit, but you kind of went for it. I get early twenties. You know, you didn't have a big family at the time. I didn't have a lot of a lot of risks. So you went for it, right? But talk about that pivot because a lot of companies wouldn't do that. They get comfortable and just, you know, stay where they're at. But you made that >>call. It was a big risk, for sure. I mean, look, the product was working. We launched the paid version of our product in 2016. Pretty quickly were onboarding dozens of accountants and attorneys, you know, doing Medicaid work. Um, in mid to late 2016, we got introduced to a large small business lender in New York City called strategic funding Source. They've since renamed them their company Capital as the current name, but we met with the CEO and the head of product and showed them a demo of the technology. And they said, You know, quote unquote, we've been looking for this for years. We've been looking for something exactly like this for years, and we said back to them about how many pages of financial documents to review every single month. They pointed out to a bullpen of dozens of people sitting there tearing through bank statements, page by page, line by line. And they said, You know, it's hundreds of thousands. My eyes almost fell out of my head. I couldn't believe the volume, and it was much bigger than what the, you know, single accountants or attorneys were doing. Uh, so we made the strategic decision to pivot at that time and focus on FINTECH. Lenders continue to tailor the product and build additional features for the fintech lending space. And and, you know, lending in general had the perfect mix of short sale cycle and high average customer value that allowed a company like ours to scale and ramp our revenue quite quite quickly. Um, and then the other thing that happened is kind of as we were getting deeper and deeper into the space, the fintech space as a whole started growing massive. So we we kind of had the perfect storm of product market fit, plus the market growing that allowed us to really ramp significantly grow revenue. And, uh, you know, despite the fact that it was the risk it was, it was totally right. Decision to to focus the business on financial services >>much bigger Tam. And you could subjectively measure it by the size of the stack of papers. Um, how how does this relate to our p A. As you know, the R p. A hot space. You probably get this question a lot, and it sounds like there are some similarities with software bots. What's the similarity? What's the difference? >>Good question. It's It's totally a synergistic offering, right? So rrp a companies like UI path and automation anywhere they typically provide a horizontal toolkit to allow you know, banks and lenders to automate much of the mundane work like, for example, collecting information from emails or doing onboarding for a new employee. Or, you know, different types of tasks that a manual worker would have done but could be automated with relatively simple code. Um, what happens in our p a. Workflows is they get hung up on tasks that can't be completely automated. So, for example, a robot might be, uh, trying to complete an intend lending flow. But when a bank statement is submitted as part of that flow, the robot can't parse it. So what they do instead, is they routed to an underwriter who performs a manual analysis, keys information into a back office system that the bank is using and that information then gets handed back to a robot and continues the automation flow. What we do is we plug the gaps that used to be manual so a robot can pass US documents like bank statements or pay stubs or tax stops. We run our unique human in the loop process. We return structure Jason output directly to a robot, and it continues into the, you know, to the next step of the flow. And, you know, in in summary, the combination of robotic process automation and human in the loop, which is what we're doing, creates true and and automated flows rather than R P. A mite by itself might get you 80% of the way there. >>So do you have, like, software integrations or partnerships with those companies. How are you integrating with them? >>We do. We have software integrations with both UI path and automation anywhere in our core fintech lending business. R P A isn't as prevalent, but we are now expanding beyond fintech lenders into mortgage lending and traditional banks. And we're also expanding use cases, right? Like historically small business lending was the core of our business. More recently, we've moved into consumer auto mortgage, additional asset classes. And as we've gotten deeper with financial institutions, we've seen even more opportunity to partner and coexist with broader r p a player's >>Yeah, great. I mean, I was just staring at their s one. I guess it was came up Monday. Half over half a billion dollars in a are are they're actually cash flow positive as you iPad. So we're going to see we're going to see them hit the public market shortly. Um, hang on, folks. Uh, now it's okay. So this is you sell a sas, right? A SAS service. Even though there's that human in the loop, that's all part of the service. How do you How do you price? >>So usage based model. So we we kind of try to model are themselves nerve. A massive company is super powerful. We apply that same concept document processing, so it's a usage based model. Customers will pay us either per application per document or per page, and if they want to subscribe for, you know, one document per month or millions of documents per month, it's up to them. And we're able to flex up and flex down to meet the supply and demand. Um and that that concept that scalability and flexibility was particularly powerful in the P P P program, right? P P. P. Was kind of a very unique situation in the sense that lenders weren't able to predict the amount of loans they needed to process in normal lending. A small business lender can tell you Hey, we expect to get roughly 10,000 applications in the month of April with P P p. They could tell us, Hey, we're going to send out 200,000 marketing emails and we expect 30% of people might reply, but we really don't have any idea, right? So what happened is the big banks ended up hiring without exaggeration. Thousands of temporary employees to come in and review documents and kind of scrambled to do this in a work from home setting during the pandemic. Whereas Cross River, they took a technology first approach. They implemented our A P I in the back end, and it enabled them to instantly scale up their resources. And the result of that is Cross River ended up becoming a top three pp, a top three p p. P lender nationally, outperforming many of the big banks with a super efficient and fast document review process. Because we were able to help them on the back end with the automation. >>That's awesome. I love the pricing model you mentioned. You mentioned Amazon. Is that the cloud you use or >>we do Our Our product is hosted in AWS and we, you know, take a lot of learnings from them from a business model and and positioning point of view. >>Yeah, and and I'm thrilled to hear you say I mean, I think a lot of forward thinking startups are doing the consumption model. I mean, you certainly see that with companies like snowflake and data dog and stripe. I mean, I think that that SAS model of okay, we're gonna lock you into a one year, two year, three year term. Sorry if if you get acquired, you're stuck with some, you know, stranded licenses. That's your problem. I think that, you know, you really thought that out. Well, um, you mentioned you're sort of expanding your your your total available market now, looking at at new markets, what are some of the big trends that you want to ride over the coming decade as you scale your company? >>The biggest one for us is mortgage automation. You know, the kind of the one of fintech small business and consumer loans were optimized, and we went from a place where, uh, you know, you would deal with a loan officer and have an in person transaction to modern day. You can get a loan from small business. If you're a small business, you can get a loan from PayPal online effectively instantly. If you're a consumer, you can get a loan from Sofia or lending club super smooth digital experience and really revolutionized the way that you know, the market thinks about financial products. I think the next wave of that is mortgage, and that's what we're focused on. Uh, you know, mortgage is a massive market in the sense of thousands of lenders. The average application contains a couple 100 pages worth of financial documents, and the pain points of the back end of the mortgage process were really accentuated. During covid, right refi Valium went way up and mortgage lenders were forced to process that volume in a work from home setting. So what happened is mortgage lenders were struggling with the concept of sending personally identifiable financial information to underwriters who aren't working in an office there, working at home and, you know, kids running around a million things going on. And it's just more difficult to manage than ever before. Um, and you know, as as the the volume kind of normalized debate and mortgage lenders thought about their own future of automation, I think there was just clear recognition across the board that these these mortgage lenders needed to learn from some of the fintech and really focus on automating the back office peace and you know, to your point earlier about business model, what we think about is translating cost that used to be a fixed cost and turning them into a variable costs So now, instead of worrying about having to match supply and demand and hire or fire people, depending on the volume that's coming in on any given month, a mortgage lender can instantly flex up, reflects down and have a super fast, accurate process to handle the darks. Um, and you know, we're seeing just awesome traction in the market with that with the mortgage space and we're excited to push >>forward there. That's great. Thank you. I mean you, Sam. You describe the chaos that work from home. The financial industry is very overly officious. If you know it's very security conscious. How do you handle security? Maybe you could comment on that. How you think about that? >>Sure. I mean, we we take a compliance first approach. We built the product from the ground up with compliance in mind, knowing that we were selling into financial institutions. We have a sock to type one and type two certification, which is, you know, an industry standard. All of our our verification happens with the Oculus employees. So there's no third parties involved in our process whatsoever. Um and then lastly, But perhaps most importantly, our product in and of itself is innately, um, you know, innately drives compliance. So every data point that we process from a financial document, we not only return the data, we return an exact bounding box coordinates of where that data field appeared on the original source so that that audit trail lives with the loan throughout its life cycle. What we saw prior to Oculus is a mortgage would go through an underwriting process. They make a decision, and then that loan might be sold downstream and a diligence firm as to come in. And they don't have the resources to review all the loans. So they review 15% of the loan tape and then they say, you know, they give a rating and what we do is we proactively tackle that by creating a a perfect audit trail upon origination that can live with the loan throughout its life cycle and that that process and that traceability has been super valuable to our mortgage and banking partners. >>So you can ensure the providence there. So let me end just by talking about the company a little bit. So you incubated you nailed the product market fit the and you pivoted and re nailed the product market fit. And like a lot of companies in your position, I would imagine you saw your growth come from just having a great product. You know, initially, word gets around, but then you got a scale. Uh, maybe you could talk a little bit about how how you did that. How you're doing that. You know where your hiring how you're hiring, what your philosophy is on on scaling. >>Sure. Look, I think the key for us is just surrounding ourselves with the right people. You know, the right mentors, advisors and investors to help us really take the business to the next level. Uh, you know, we had no pride of authorship. We're building this and recognize that there are a lot of people out there who have been there, done that and can really guide us and show us the way. I know you had interviewed Marc Roberge on on the show previously. Formerly the C r. O of hubspot. Mark was someone that we you know, we we read his book and had taken sales advice from him from an early age. And over the over time, we got him a little bit more familiar with the company. And and ultimately, Mark and his partner, J Po at Stage two Capital ended up investing in Oculus and really helping us understand how to build the right go to market engine. Um, as the company got bigger, we took on investments from really reputable firms in the financial services space. So our largest investors are okay, H C F T fintech collective and and QED investors. Uh, you know, QED was was founded by Nigel Morris, who is the co founder of Capital One. They backed Sophia and Prosper and a lot of big fintech lenders and, you know, bringing the collective expertise from the fintech sector as well as you know, from a sales and go to market strategy. Point of view created the right mix of ingredients for us to to really ramp up significantly. Uh, we had an awesome run over the years. We were pretty recently recognized by magazine as the number one fastest growing fintech company. And, you know, as the momentum is increased and the market conditions have been very favorable to us, we we just want to double down and expand. Mortgage is the biggest area of opportunity for us. And what we're seeking from a hiring perspective is, you know, go to market sales account executive type resources on the mortgage side as well as you know, deeper products expertise both on the mortgage side as well as with machine learning our product. Because we have the human in the loop piece, we create massive amounts of training data on a daily basis. So it's a, I think, a really exciting place for cutting edge machine learning developers to come and and innovate. >>What can you share with our audience about, you know, your company, any metrics and whatever you're comfortable with, how much money you've raised on my head count? If you want to get some companies comfortable giving a r r others on. But what what do you What can you share with us? >>Sure. Um, you know, we we've raised about 50 million in venture capital. We have grown from one to north of 20 million in revenue in the in the last three years. So particularly since you know, 2017, 2018 is what we really started to see. The growth take off, uh, company size. We have about 800 to 900 employees globally. Now we have about 200 corporate employees who perform the, you know, the the day to day functions of Oculus. And then we have a long tail of about 600 or so verifiers who perform data verification and quality control work again, Speaking to the human in the loop piece of the bottle. Uh, we're, you know, we're focused on expanding beyond the fintech customer base, where we serve customers like plaid PayPal lending club so fi square, etcetera into the mortgage space and ultimately into the traditional banking space where you know, the problems, frankly, are extremely similar. Just on a much larger scale. >>San Bobbly. Congratulations on all the success. You You've got a great road ahead. I really appreciate you coming on the Cube, >>Dave. Thanks so much. It's been a great chat. Look forward to keeping in touch. >>Alright, Did our pleasure. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. We'll see you next time

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this episode of "CXO Insights." As you know, we've been grabbing the perspectives of leaders throughout this pandemic and assessing their tips for managing in a crisis and of course, managing in good times as well. But now, as we enter the post-isolation economy, we really want to look at not just how you manage through the crisis but how you manage beyond the crisis. And I'm really excited to have Chris Riley here. He's the newly minted Chief Revenue Officer at Automation Anywhere. Chris, my friend, how you doing? I hope you and the family are well. >> Thank you, David. I wish the same for you. I think getting by as most folks are, it's the new normal, we're all getting used to it but I'm happy to be here and happy to be at Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, I want to talk about that in detail. Eddie Walsh calls it the new abnormal but so congratulations on the new role. I want to start with your career. I met you in 1987, which ironically was the same year I met Dave Donatelli, the same year I met Michigan I. and Saul Koi, talk about great timing. And then, you came into the industry at a time, really different time. It was, the IBM people don't remember this but IBM was the dominant player and you guys unseated them amazing 12-year career at EMC and then you kind of went to the .com boom. That was amazing. You relive that ride, did a stint at HP and really turned that business around and then came back to Dell, top go to market executive. One of the top in the industry that I know and now, of course at Automation Anywhere we're going to talk about. My first question to you is, a lot of changes have occurred since 1987. What has changed the most? Now we're talking diversity, we're talking all kinds of your different sales models. From your career looking back, what's changed the most? >> I think everything has changed and candidly for the better, Dave. You just led with one of the key areas in an area I'm deeply passionate about and that is diversity and inclusion and I think there's no stronger time, at least in our country's history where the inequalities that exist have been so exposed. So I view this as an opportunity, as I did at Dell to make a difference, lead from the front and make this a destination and a company whose culture really supports and drives diversity and inclusion. So I'd say that's one area, and I know it's very passionate for you as well. The others, it was a time before laptops, desktops. I think Ken Olsen once said, who would ever need a laptop in their home and boy, the world has changed. So I think some of the things though that haven't changed and this is why I'm so excited about Automation Anywhere. At the manual processes we have our workers doing and I think there is a real opportunity. I've lived through explosive growth at EMC, top company performing stock during the 90s, I get to see VMware firsthand. I've seen what's happened with ServiceNow and I believe this RPA space, as to you is in its infancy. It's seeing 30% compounded annual growth and we're just at the beginning and I think it's going to change the way people work and really lead to that digital transformation that so many of us have been talking about for the last decade. >> Yeah and you know kind of my position. Quick aside, I don't know if you saw the Netflix announcement this morning and I've been wondering as a small business, what can we do? What more can we do for inclusion and diversity? Netflix announced they're going to take 2% of their cash and put it into banks, financial institutions that support black causes and I just talked to our CFO. I said, look, why don't we take some of our cash, let's take 2% and stick it into banks, community banks. There's 30 million small businesses in the United States. If just 1% puts 10 grand in each, that's $3 billion that go into black community. So I'm going to start a mission and I just thought I'd share that 'cause I know it's a passion of yours. >> Yeah, and we all need to be in a position to provide equal opportunity for employment and that is reaching out into those communities and starting early on in creating the opportunities for advancement professionally, mentorship and just the path forward. And I'm excited to see what Netflix is doing. I'm sure you'll come up with the right answer for your company and I think all of us are searching, what's the right answer for our respective companies? >> Yeah, so now let's get into it. You're a month in and I want to talk about this project. I've learned a lot about not only RPA but about automation. I've just had a deep dive with your team and it really brought some things into focus. Guys, if you bring up the first slide, I want to get some thoughts on the table here. So this is a chart that sort of came into my focus with a friend of mine, Dave Moschello, who really big thinker on this stuff and he pointed out, this is data from the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics and the EU and it shows the lackluster productivity that's going on in the past decade. So you can see, we had the boost in the 80s and the 90s, we had this sort of productivity uptick from laptops but now, look what's happened since 2007. And the point that Moschello made on the right hand side is we have all these huge issues that we face, whether it's climate change, we have this massive debt, healthcare, an aging population, feeding everyone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and his point was, there's no way we're going to be able to solve all these problems by throwing humans at the problem. So I've really begun to sort of think about this just in terms of machines and the roles that machines will play. I think overnight, Chris, we've gone from, wow, I'm afraid that machines are going to take my job to you can't operate if you're not digital. >> Yeah, well digital transformation is not a new term. I think it's meant something different each year for the last 10 years and I look at this as an opportunity. The World Economic Forum projected that IA and RPA will create 58 million new jobs. It's an astounding number. What COVID-19 has exposed is this work from home phenomenon that really exposes the risk of manual processes within the enterprise. So I think those two things combined is almost a perfect storm and I think what it'll do is accelerate the adoption of RPA and IPA. So something that might've taken years or decades to really be adopted in force, in this new normal, I think is going to be accelerated quite dramatically. >> So, the combination of your go to market execution, you managed complex sales motions before. Automation Anywhere obviously has some great product capabilities. Guys, I want to bring up the next slide and Chris, you might have seen this in some of the stuff that I wrote but this is data from ETR Enterprise technology research. They're a data partner of ours. Now it's clear that Automation Anywhere has the right product market fit and you can see on this chart, this is a methodology that we use. ETR goes out and they ask people, are you adopting a platform new? Are you increasing spending relative to last year? Are you flat, decreasing or replacing? And you can see here, there is zero churn in the Automation Anywhere base. And so obviously you got product market fit. Churn is the silent killer, obviously of SAS companies and so, you've picked a winner and I'm learning more about this. At first I thought the team office is quite large, I sized it. I actually think it's bigger than I originally thought. Chris, I thought this was going to be a winner-take-all type of market. I'm really rethinking that after, especially the deep dive I've had with your team in terms of how you guys go to market with an end-to-end sort of life cycle approach as opposed to sort of putting point products in. So I wonder if that narrative that I just laid out, resonates with you, is it sort of consistent with what you're seeing and then maybe some of the reasons why you joined Automation Anywhere? >> Yeah, I would say the most aggressive software growth that I've seen in the last decade or so, and two companies stand out for me. That's VMware and ServiceNow. They don't have a point product, they have a platform and that's what attracted me to Automation Anywhere is this platform approach. And Dave as you know, I've spent most of my career calling on the enterprise' strong relationships with those types of companies and they aren't looking to develop a point product solution and then cobble together lots of disparate islands of solutions. They're looking for a platform that can grow as they grow. They can extend from the back office to the front office but all centered around workforce, transformation, productivity and just as importantly, resiliency. And as we start to develop more and more capabilities that will be delivered through this platform approach, I think we're going to see explosive growth as the industry goes through its explosive growth. >> Well, I know your approach and your approach is to stay very close to customers. So as you were doing your due diligence on Automation Anywhere and as you enter your sort of first part of your 100-day journey here, I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers. What are they telling you? What are the big takeaways right now that you're hearing? >> Yeah, so I think some of the data you pointed out with 4,000 customers in essence, zero churn, the opportunity to upsell those customers with more products and solutions clearly is there. New account acquisition has been a tremendous source of growth for the company in a strong professional services organization that actually is able to deliver the outcomes that our customers expect. From an enterprise perspective, I couldn't have come into a better situation with 4,000 customers, 50% of the fortune 500, 2 million bots deployed, those types of strategic relationships are going to be more and more critical as this company continues to accelerate its growth. Most of the RPA solutions really got in through the back office and candidly, really weren't even a component of an IT solution. Now, as you go to the front of the house, where you're looking at customer facing applications and worker productivity, these are CEO, CFO, COO and IT initiatives. So I really believe we're coming into our own, at the front of the house with senior executives that really want to create a better working environment for their employees and de-risk a lot of these manual processes that have existed for years. >> So I know why you chose Automation Anywhere. My question is, why did Automation Anywhere choose Chris Riley? I know your capabilities but obviously when somebody hires a executive like yourself, they say, "Hey, Chris, we want you to help us "get to the next level," but what does that mean? Are we talking about changes in the go to market? Are we talking about your ability to recruit and coach, to manage complex of sales motions? What is it that you want to bring to Automation Anywhere? >> I think it's all those, Dave. Having built a reputation throughout my 30 plus year career around a people-centric focus, a customer-centric focus and those two things kind of aren't interchangeable. When you look at customers, they put their faith and confidence in people and they put their faith and confidence in companies. And what I see here at Automation Anywhere is that the ability to kind of expand upon the great culture that the company already has but do it with someone whose role in a company at scale globally and can put a lot of the best practices and disciplines in place to do that 'cause it is difficult but also, how do we start to do larger, more complex deals and build relationships with the CIO, the CFO, the CEO? And I think a big reason why I'm here is, that experience in doing that, doing large complex multi-year opportunities but also being able to deliver upon the outcomes that we told our customers we could achieve and do that together with our customers and again we have a strong professional services organization and an incredible ecosystem of partners that have demonstrated year over year, the company's ability to actually deliver upon its promise. >> That was my next question to you, was the ecosystem. One of the big changes from when you started in this business, was it used to be just belly to belly, hardcore, direct sales, the importance and leverage that you get from a partner ecosystem. You point out VMware. In fact ServiceNow, it's interesting. When we first started covering ServiceNow, one of the things we said is we want to see as an indicator of success, the partner ecosystem evolve and then sure enough, it exploded with the SIs and all the kinds of developers. So maybe talk about AA's ecosystem, The Partner System. You obviously have a lot of experience there in your career, how do you see that as a leverage point? >> Yeah, it's huge. This market is far larger than we can cover with a direct sales organization and requires substantial services engagements that go well beyond the kind of professional services organization we want to build out organically in the company. So when you look at that, the company today has 1,900 partners. The global systems integrators are key, especially those with VPO type practices, the regional SIs and candidly, the regional VARs who've built out a strong service malpractice, a strong VMware practice and have the professional services capabilities to do some of these complex automation or automation type work that have also built the trust and confidence of their customers. So, in partnership with these types of companies, we believe we can expand our reach. We believe we can offer a more comprehensive outcome and solution to our customers and we, what I'm going to be looking at is, how do we enhance our channel programs to be the kind of company that the channel partners want to engage with, built upon the reputation of the company, the leadership position we have in the technology and also our willingness to go after this space together. >> So I got to go but last question is, what can you share with us about your 100-day plan? Where are you going to focus? >> On the people. There is a strong culture here, there's incredible sales talent and there's talent throughout the organization. I think Dave, you've seen for me over the years, a clarity of our mission, keep things simple and try and drive a repetitive process to deliver results. I'm very accountability focused. So I think what I'm going to look to assess is where the organization is today, how to get more out of the great talent we have, build stronger and deeper relationships with our customers and really scale and grow through our ecosystem of channel partners. >> Well, Chris, I'm super excited for you. A great hire by Automation Anywhere obviously got my attention. I think it'll get the industry's as well. Best of luck, and of course we'll be watching. >> Good, always great to see you, Dave, take care. >> Yeah, ditto, thanks so much for coming on and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it here because this month we're going to be really digging into the ETR data we've been reporting on that horse race between Automation Anywhere and UI Path. The ETR data is in the field and we'll be reporting on that. So look for that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host Still, Minutemen >>Hi and welcome to the Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back two of our Cube alumni, both from Active e o Brian Regan, the C M O of the company. And it took Rommel. Who's the vice president and general manager of Cloud? Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Happy New Year's too great to be here. >>Yeah, 2020 way we're talking about. We don't all have flying cars and some of these things, but there are a lot of exciting things and ever changing in the tech world. We're gonna talk a lot about N. C. Which, of course, is active use announcement. If I heard the sea, it's about clouds, about containers and about copy data management. With course, you know we know act as always quite well, Brian. Let's start with a company update first. Of course, you know, copy data management is where activity really created a category, but all of these new waves of technology that activity is fitting into Well, 2000 >>19 was an incredible year for us, you know, continued accelerating our growth in the market in the enterprise particularly, You know that the secular trends around hybrid and multi cloud really played well to our existing strengths. And 10 c really builds on those strengths will talk more about that. I know in a moment we also saw continued, you know, as digital transformation as as application modernization initiatives to cold. In just about every enterprise, our database capabilities really played again a cz a strength that we could capitalize on to land significant enterprise accounts, get started with them and then really start to expand overall data platform data management platform in those accounts >>s Oh, sure, before we get into the 10 see stuff specifically. But Brian, Brian teed up some of those cloud trends and how I think about data protection. Data management absolutely has changed. You know, I remember a couple years ago we said, Oh, well, you know, people are adopting all these clouds. All of these concerns still exist. You know. It doesn't go away. It's not magically Oh, I did office 3 65 I don't need to think about all the things that I thought about without. Look, when I do public cloud and build new applications. Oh, wait. You know, somebody needs to take care of that data. So bring us inside your customers. The team that's building these products and some of those big trends should >>happen. You're still so happy to be back in the Cube. So 2019 really defined. There were a lot of for enterprises really started moving. Production will look to the cloud multi cloud become a reality for active field way. We're running production workloads on seven o'clock platforms. So the key elements off being infrastructure agnostic wherein active you can do everything in all clark platforms. Basically, infrastructure neutral was a key element. On the other element was a single pane of glass. You could have an Oracle worker running on prime with the logic application running in azure and not know the difference. S o. The seamless mobility of data was the key element. That lot of our enterprises took advantage from elective standpoint on a lot of the 10 see capabilities adds onto those capabilities and you see more of these adoptions happening in 2020. So I think 10 seat eases up absolutely perfectly for that market. >>Yeah, let's talk a little bit about activities, place in the market, that differentiation there, that direct connection with the application and the partner's eyes. Real big piece of it. >>It's a huge piece and something we really not just double triple down on in 2019. Certainly for us our database capabilities, which we believe are really second to none in the industry, we continue to expand and enrich the capabilities, including ASAP Hana obviously already Oracle and sequel server D B two, as well as the linen space databases, the new and no sequel databases. We also understood, and as our customers were talking to us about their application modernization, they were moving Maur of their front and capabilities two containers, and they wanted that the data to come with it a t east temporarily on. So that was a big focus for us as well was making sure that we could bring the data whether it was into a V M, into a container into a physical server into any number of clouds in order to support that application. At that time, it was a critical part of our differentiation. For two dozen 1 19 >>I'd love just a little more on the database piece because you go to Amazon, reinvent and you know, the migrations of databases to the cloud, of course, is a major conversation. You look at Amazon, they have a whole number of their offerings as well, as if you want to use any database out there, they'll let you use it. Course Oracle might charge him or if you're doing it on the Amazon, the Amazon partner. The azure partnership with Oracle was big news in the back and 1/2 of 2019. So when you're working with their customers, you know, databases still central to you know how they run their business and one of the bigger expenses on the books, they're So you know what we look at 2020. You know, what is the landscape specifically from a database? Well, we continue >>to see and in most of our large enterprise accounts that Oracle and sequel servers continue to dominate the majority of the payload of databases. We don't see that changing, although we do see net new applications being built on new database platforms. Thio complement the oracle and sequel server back end. So we are seeing a rise of the bongos and the new and no Sequels out there. We're also seeing Maur consideration of building in the cloud, as opposed to starting on Prem and then potentially leveraging the cloud sort of post facto and in terms of the application architecture's. So our ability to support both the the legacy big iron database platforms as well as the new generation platforms, regardless of application architectural, regardless of the geometry of the application, is a big part of our differentiation >>going forward. >>All right, so let let's Wave hinted about it. But 10 c major announcement. Let's get into how that extends what we've been talking about. >>Absolutely so you know, we've made a lot of the new databases, particularly the no sequel databases, the Mongols and Hannah's first class citizens intensity, which means we understand not just the database. He also he also the ecosystem that the database lives. We all know Hannah's a fairly big database in terms of the number of machines that consumes number off, you know, applications that you use it and toe capture and actually provide value for Hannah. You need to understand where the Honda database lifts and so some of the capabilities we've added in 10 C's to kind of figure out this ecosystem, and when you migrate, you might need the ecosystem, not just the holiday. The peace because you know that is that is a key element. On the second aspect is the containers that that Brian touched on. Now we're seeing legacy data being presented into containers, and there's a bridge too quiet for that. Now. How do you present that bridge containers could be brought up, but they're lifeless unless you give them data. So the actors of bridge ready and you bring up the container using communities of whatever framework you have and be married the data into the container framework. So most organizations, you know, as they evolved from yesterday's architecture to today's architect. And they need this bridge, which helps them navigate that that my creation process and an active field being the data normalization platform is helping them live on both segments, Right? Nobody does us turn the switch off of the old one and move to the new That'll be co exist. That is the key element >>way spent a lot of time over the last couple of years hearing about cloud native architectures and that discussion of data, it is kind of something you need to kind of dig in to understand. I'm glad to hear you talking about, You know, when you talk about storage and container ization, you know where that fits today? Because originally it was only stateless. But now we know we could do state full environment here. But while container ization is, you know, growing at huge leaps and bounds, customers aren't taking their Oracle database and shoving Brian A lot of discussion about the partnerships. I think it was seven. You know, major cloud providers. That activity is there talk a little bit about the common native. The relationships with some >>of those partners? Absolutely. I mean, way made great strides from a go to market standpoint with our cloud partners this past year. Google Cloud is probably our most significant go to market partner. From a cloud standpoint, we've done a lot of joint engineering works in order to support both our existing, uh, software platform as well as our SAS control plane in the Google Cloud. We have landed many significant deals with with Google this past year on dhe. They have been as they continue to really increase their focus on enterprise accounts and both hybrid as well as public cloud sort of architectures. We are hand in glove with them as their backup in D R partner for those club >>workloads. >>Great eso We talked quite a bit about the database peace, but in general, back into the cloud archive in the cloud. What is 10 see specifically an active you, in general, enhance in those environments >>so tense he bring It brings in you know, the key elements of the recovery orchestration. So if I have to bring up, let's say, 500 machines in any club platform, how did I do it? Well, I can go and bring up one machine at a time and take two days to bring it up or with active fuels. Resiliency. Director. You can create a recovery plan and a push pardon Recovery happens, so we've seen a lot of customers adopt that, particularly customers that want to leverage the Google platform for its infrastructure capabilities. Wants an orchestration, that is, that is, that understands the applications that are coming up, so there is a significant benefit from a PR standpoint of the recovery orchestrations will be invested a lot of time and tuning the performance and understanding Google and Amazon and Azure to make sure this was built, right. The other big push we're seeing for the clock platforms ASAP, ASAP, as an enterprise has taken a mission to say, there's no more data centers. Everything is going to the cloud. So an escapee workloads are not the easiest were close to manage. And so they did the the intersection point of S A P and the cloud is very active. Field becomes really valuable because, though, did this data sets by definition or large, their complex and there were distributed. And the D artists of paramount importance because these air crown jewels So so those segments of the R orchestration forward with, you know ASAP and Hannah, which is to get our strength of databases. It's kind of their tense. He really hits, hits, hits a home run >>when we're talking to users in the discussion of multi Cloud in general, one of the challenges is Yoon hee. Different skill sets across. One of those powerful things I've heard from active use really is a normalization across any cloud or even in a cloud. Oh, wait. I was gonna stuck six up again in an archive. That means I'm never going to touch it again. Ingress and egress fees. You know, I have to figure these out or I need toe dedicated engineer to those kind of environments. So it seems that just fundamentally the architecture that you built it active eo is toe help customers really get their arms around those multi cloud >>environments? Absolutely. And I think there are two additional components that really one of which has lived with activity from the very beginning of the company, which is a p a p I. First, the cloud is very much an AP I centric type of operating model on with active fio We don't change the management system were operating model. But in fact we incorporate in eso all of this orchestration that it shook talked about can be actuated via a P I. The second piece, which we really started in 2017 with our eight Dato platform release, is the the consumption and the intelligent consumption of object with 10 see, we've continued to advance our object capabilities. In fact, we published a paper with the SG in late 2019 that talked about mounting 50 terabyte Oracle databases directly out of object with actually increased performance versus the production block >>storage behind it. >>So we have really with 10 C, actually added cashing to even further performance optimized object workloads, which speaks to both the flexibility but also the economic flexibility of being able. Thio contemplate running workloads in the cloud out of object at a lower cost platform without necessarily the compromise of performance that you would normally expect >>absolutely. And like you said, the skill set required. Do I need to put it in object to any reported in block? We can eliminate that right. Be neutralized that to say you want to leverage the cloud, give us your cost point and you can dial the cost up or down, depending on what you see for performance, and we will be the day that back and forth, so that flexibility is enormous for customers. >>That's greater if you talk to anybody that's been in the storage industry for a while, and you want to make them squirm, say the word migration s O. We know how painful it has been if you go talk to any of the triple vendors, they have so many tools and so many service is to help do that in a cloud era. It should be a little bit easier, but it sounds like that's another key piece. Intensity? >>Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, 10 See, you know, hits the home. I think with the A P. I integration. So the other element 2019 Saul, was the scale of deployment effective. You know, when you have to manage hundreds of thousands of machines across different geo's, that is a scale that comes to the data protection that you know, people. Really? You have a seat to actually build for it and and work with it and be sorry in 2019 and 10 See, incorporates a lot of that capabilities as well, making it ask Cloud needed as possible. So basically, around these applications globally. All >>right, uh, I was wondering if you might have a customer example toe really highlight the impact that NBC's having understand if you can't name them specifically, but, uh, yeah, >>well, actually, shook has already talked about 11 customer slash partner. Who is I think still the world's largest software company in the world based out of Germany. And they are powering their enterprise cloud on the data management data protection. Beneath that enterprise cloud across four different hyper scale er's using, active you on. I think they're on record in a weapon. Our earlier in December, talking about their evaluation of pretty much every technology out there on the one that could really deliver on performance at scale across clouds was activity >>on. The key element was they wanted a single platform with a single pane of glass across all platforms, and an active feel was the solution to each other. So >>and certainly I think we credit them and are the rest of our enterprise customers for pushing us to make 10 see more powerful and more a capable across any clout, you know, Ultimately, an inter enterprise is going to make a decision that they've probably already made the decision to incorporate cloud into their enterprise architecture. What we give them is the freedom and the flexibility to choose any cloud. And, by the way, any cloud today that might change tomorrow and having the ability to seamlessly migrate and or convert from cloud eight o'clock be. Is something that active powers as well? >>Yeah, just make sure we're clear as to what's happening there. It's great that you've got flexibility there when we're talking about data and data gravity. Of course, we're not talking about just lifting an entire database land, you know, ignoring the laws of physics there. But it's the flexibility of using a ll These various things, any way Talk about A S, A P, of course, needs to live across all these clouds. But when you talk about an enterprise, you know what is kind of that? That killer use case? Because we said we're not at a point where cloud is not a utility. I don't wake up in the morning and look at the sheet and say, Oh, I'm gonna, you know, use Cloud a versus cloud be s o. You know what is? You know the importance of that flexibility for us >>today. The majority of our business starts with company saying I need to deliver my data faster to my developers or my tester's, or even increasingly, my data scientists and analysts and my data sets have become so large that it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to do that with regularity. So the currency of the data is starting to suffer. That is the first use case for us and that that powering that enterprise transformational initiative around a new application or an updated application based on a historical app using those enterprise databases delivering that seamlessly quickly, regardless of how big the data is still remains our first use case. And then, increasingly, those customers air realizing that they can start to achieve the other benefits of active eo, including I can start to back that up to the cloud. Aiken actually orchestrate recoveries in the cloud. Not just bulk sort of transfer, but actually the entire application stack. And bring that up in the cloud. I can start Thio, take those those data sets and actually amount them into containers for my next generation application. So that starting point of give me my data as quickly as possible, regardless of how big it is, starts to become universal in terms of its applicability for all use cases. >>Yeah, I guess I shook. The last thing I wanna understand from you is in 2019. We saw a lot of large providers putting out their vision for how I manage in this multi cloud environment. You were at the Google Cloud event where Anthros was unveiled. I was at Microsoft ignite when as your ark was unveiled. VM wear has things like tans you out there. So this moldy cloud environment how do I manage across these disperse environments? What? What What are all those move mean to active you on how you look at things. >>And I think you know, the Tennessee release and with the core architecture that if you had in place, which was multiple already and a P I ready. So those are the two elements that are kind of building blocks that you can tie into any one of those construct you talked about. All right, so we've had we have customers, innovated us with Antos. If customers get up service now we have customers doing Vieira with us, right? So there are many, many integration platforms. The latest I saw was an Alexa app, but we were mounting an oracle database on a voice command. So So you know, there's endless possibilities as thes equal systems evolve because active feel stays behind the cowards powering the data delivering the data available if needed on the target. So that is the key element in the neighbor that we see that helps all these other platforms become super successful. >>So, Brian, it sounds very much a hell wind. The big trends that we're seeing here keep partnerships and, you know, meeting your customers where they need to >>pay. Absolutely. We continue Thio play in the enterprise market, where these thes are absolutely top of mind of every CEO and top of their agenda. Onda, we are working hand in glove with them to make sure that our platform not only anticipates their needs but delivers on their current state of needs as well. >>Brian, thank you so much. Congratulations on the 10 sea launch Cloud containers. Copy data management. Look forward to watching your customers and your continued Thanks. As always, Very much. All right, I'm still Minutemen. Lots more coverage here in 2020. Check out the cube dot net for all of it. And thank you for watching the Cube

>>live from San Diego, California It's the Q covering Koopa and Cloud Native Cot brought to you by Red Cloud. Native Computing Pounding and its ecosystem March >>Welcome back. This is the cubes coverage. Fourth year of Q Khan Cloud native Khan, 2019 Here in San Diego. I am still Minutemen like co host for this afternoon is Justin Warrant and happy to welcome to the program A first time guests, but was on the keynote stage yesterday Sougou Super Marine, who is the co founder and CEO of Planet Scale and also one of the, uh, we're gonna be talking about the test which graduated, announced on the stage. They didn't put a cap and gown or roll everything out, which they did a couple of years ago. But first, thanks so much for joining us. And congratulations. Thank you. All right, so, Sougou, bring us back. You know, we're talking about a cloud native database and we'll dig into that and everything, but bring us back to what you were working on. And you know why of what we now call >>so the When we started with us, we were really not thinking of cloud native itself. for say, it was kind of a sequence of events that kind of forced with us to become cloud native long before cloud native was actually born as even the term was born. Which was when we had to move the test from YouTube on print into Google's board, which use the predecessor off Cooper natives. Um, the reason why the test is kind of one of the leading storage projects in Cloud Native was because it was probably the first project that remained open source, even though we managed to ram it with >>work. Yeah, you know what? One of things we've been talking about at the show here is you know, in the early days, you know, we were very much talking about infrastructure, but we know the reason we have infrastructure is to run applications, and one of the most important applications is databases, and I talk to customers. It's not just one database. Often they have many different databases on, and that is one of the big challenges today. So, you know, you kind of look at that landscape, help us understand how this fits into that. That overall picture. >>Yeah, so that kind of goes back in tow, Google's history and how that can influence kubernetes itself. So if you look at Google's board, most off its features are meant for running stateless application. So within Google, people who wrote applications when they wanted to store state they just called out into a service that was semi part of board but wasn't itself run by board as if you would run your application. So many of those properties were inherited by Cooper natives. So which is the reason why? Um, right from the beginning, it was hard to make storage work for cover natives on Dhe. For that reason, even a zoo recently as early this year, If you look at the tweets from Kelsey Hightower, don't just move your database into communities. You're going to regret it. People still say that, but at the same time, because we test way, we're able to figure out howto make storage work under the stringent rules that Borg had, which was mainly to support stateless applications. In other words, we actually land because, as if it was a stateless application, while still managing while still making state state will not survive this stateless behavior, which is actually why we just managed to be launched within communities as soon as it was born. Ah, but it has been a struggle for other people because they didn't have the luxury of preparing for it without even knowing. Uh so I think that more effort needs to be made on both sides, both from people who are writing storage to make them work with communities as well as kubernetes itself, trying to meet them halfway, trying to add features to help the storage developers. >>It has been a real struggle. I remember from even the very first show I came to four years ago in Seattle looking at the set. My media thing is an ex storage guy and has a backup guy was to go and look at things and say OK, this is lovely for stateless applications, you said. But riel applications have data in them and they need to maintain state. Where's the state looking at all of the group in any type of things, like there were no state full sets with another thing that has changed a lot in four years, and people have come to the party and we need to be able to manage state. But now that you we have a database like a test, isn't that just taking things to the point where I as an app developer, I can just write my stateless application and then my data can live inside a data management service like a test? So I don't actually need to deal with any of that state management problem myself. >>That's what it amounts to. Uh, the the one property of the test is that it can run both in communities and outside. So there are people who run tests on Prem and they have their own orchestration layer. So that has given some challenge where we just cannot depend on communities. You cannot call into communities a p I s o. The way we have the architect of the test is that it knows when it runs within a orchestrated environment, how to interact with it, but it doesn't assume that it exists. So >>why have you provided that functionality? Is that because customers said that I actually want to be able to run the test, But I don't wanna have to deal with kubernetes >>exactly like so not everyone has migrated to communities. It is surprising that everybody wants to migrate communities. But then many of them are saying, I don't know how many years out it is on. Then for them, we just solved a different problem, which is the problem of sheer massive scale ability on dhe for them. They want to be able to still run with us on print s. So for that reason, that is actually a small gap between communities and the test itself. On dhe, we're filling that gap with health charts in the open source on Dhe Planet Scale, which is the company that I founded has built an operator that we're also going to open source so that people can use that to launch community >>before we talk about planet scale You. No, no, no, no. Absolutely. In the keynote you had some customer stories on might might help illustrate some what we're talking about, you know, the scalability of the environment, everything. So you know, I'll let you choose that kind of a short example. You know, the slack One you know, is one that I think president in the audience there. But >>I would choose slack. Ah, Jerry's always obviously enormous, but I will choose slack and nozzle because they represent two very different but really genuine needs in the industry. Slack once not just massive scale, but they want flexibility with manipulating data on DDE. That is something that is manipulating data really, really hard. Onda. We believe that we found the secret sauce to make that work with tests, and that is the reason you saw those statements from Slack. They're so passionate and with so much conviction, that is because they were fascinated by what we could do with their data. So that is one example and slack does not run on communities. They don't run on cloud. They run on AWS, but they don't they run it like they their own claim. They have very fixed I p addresses fixed instance names, but they're on it like a cloud. Sometimes I would say they are more coordinated behavior than some applications that run on kubernetes like they treat everything as disposable. When something goes away, they don't try to recover it or anything destroyed out. Replace it with something new, which is property off cloud native behavior. And on the other hand, a company like nozzle because they're they're actually a startup on dhe. It is surprising that why would the start of one to use? Ah, something that is Mento scale. Massively. That's when we realized that the cloud native nature of it does fills a gap that currently is not filled by many people, which is I want to run everything in Cooper natives all in one. And we didn't realize until they showed us what they did with it, which is, like, completely migrate from one cloud to another. They're a super amazing. And I heard it on dhe. They did that without even telling me are telling anybody in the community because one day I talked to them. They say they are on a key s on. A few days later, I still assumed that they are Nikki s and they know of your booty. Jakey, when did you do this? Oh, we did that last month because we got some really good deal with them, super exciting, >>and that that is a surprising, exactly affected. That's surprising. It is a bit of a concern to me because we hear a lot of talk about multi cloud and the idea of applications being being mobile between different clouds. Data movement is really hot. Exactly. So the fact that someone has actually managed to do that and haven't moved from one community service across to another one is that we find that remarkable because we know it's such a hard problem. But that's one of the great things I think about kubernetes, which is possibly under appreciated, is that it's not that it makes everything easy, but it makes what What used to be hard is now >>possible. Yes, yes, yes, that is very true. Yeah, it's, um uh, like it took It took us a while to, uh, think to make this mind shit, because some of these things, even though they're like it looks, looks looks very obvious. But for the longest time, we were, you're saying, tested for massive scale ability. It's for It's what this and that and even two years ago, up sport came and said, We're going to use the tests for communities orchestration. Weird, but okay, feel free. We don't have a problem with it. And then nozzle came out, and now suddenly you see Oh, this is this is why. And this Saul's really, really difficult problem on. They all did especially hot Spot. Did a lot of work in with tests to actually make it easier. But now we see Now we see the light. >>So Sougou Planet scales the company. Help us understand Vitesse planet scale. How that fits together. What's kind of the business model for your company? >>Yeah. So, um uh, so the test was originally developed at YouTube by you, too. There was one thing That was some pressure. We were beginning to feel when we developed it. We didn't mean for anybody to use it. Really. It was open source, more for academic reasons to show that we can do these things on. But it was interesting when people started adopting it. You're adopting this system. Okay, so we'll see what we can do to help you. But after a while, when the community started growing, some of them were contributing. But definitely storage is a difficult software to write, too. It's not like a pitiful software. Any anybody can understand the cord and start writing. It was obvious that the number of people wanting to use with death and wanting peaches from it are also people that we're not really capable of. writing those features because they're really hard features, too. Right on DDE. That pressure was going and they were saying all I wish you two could do this for me. You know, YouTube is a video company. They're not in the We just did this for ourselves. There's no reason for us to spend so many person years they've left in the future for you. And that time it became obvious that we need to start a company to support this community where there's this huge growing demand, Which is kind of what motivated towards us, uh, thinking about starting planet scale and one requirement waas It cannot remain a YouTube project at that point. So which is why we work it out that way, will actually move it to see NCF. And then I ended up leaving. You do have to start planet scale with my co founder. Then >>so is just from a business standpoint, is that service is on their customers ask for things and fun that that that gets contributed upskirt stream. >>So that was initially what we thought we will do. Initially we thought it was just get out laptops and start helping people that that was our initial thinking. But what we realized was at the same time the industry has shifted towards this new business model which is to actually run everything as a service. And we realized, Oh, my God, years All we have to do is we know how to run with us. You've done it at YouTube. You help people deployed with testing various companies. You know exactly what it takes to run with us. All we have to do is take this. I'm does the service. And that's exactly what people want. Because otherwise, because of the fact that we tested this flexible, it is also extremely complex, too confident because it can run on frame. Then you have to sit all these flags. You runnin carbonate is you said all these flags. So all this has to be managed and we realized, OK, we can manage this and we know exactly how to make it work. And we actually just announced two days ago that our planet scale CNDP Cloud native database is available for people to come in use. >>Well, congratulations on the progress of the business as well as the test graduation and thank you. So much for joining us here on the Cube. Thank you. Alright for Justin Warren. I'm stupid Men. We will be back with more of our day. Two of three days. Whoa! Wall coverage here from San Diego. Thank you for watching the Cube.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live Cube coverage here in San Francisco, California Mosconi North were in the lobby for VM World 2019. I'm John for a day. Volante are 10 years covering VM World's been exciting, Dave, and we've watched all the changes and our next guest is going to illuminate all the benefits at the top of the stack, as I call the end user experience. Shaker Ire, Who's the V S v. P. And general manager End User Computing within VM, where what that means is, he takes care of all the stuff that we're virtualization creates those efficiencies. I think what Palmer's just called end user computing still, but they still have that name back then, if I remember correctly, >> yeah, you >> know the name is stuck because it's ah, it's sort of income, passes all the technologies and uses use right as digital interface is. So that's why it's and use the computing. It's any digital interface that anybody at work uses. Now, the interesting thing is people don't work in an office anymore, and the interface is no longer just a laptop. >> Well, I want to get into some stupid questions around the work environment cause whether you working at a cafe or at home is all kinds of security issues. Also, user experiences. Collaboration software. But let's first get the news out of the way. Digital work, Space news What's the What's going on? The show? What you guys announcing? Yeah, so >> before we get to >> the news that we met me, frame it up a little bit right? Because when you think about organizations today, especially with the changing demographics, where they're going in terms of new devices, the mobility phenomenon, right, the transformation they're going through in terms of just their own cloud and APS and so on, right it. Every every one of those things effects employees, right. And at the end of the day, you know what organizations want is for the employees to have a great experience all the way, as we call it from higher to retire. Not to do that, you know you need a platform because I can just give you a pretty apt running in the laptop and say, Great, that's That's the end of the employees experience, right? It's fundamentally transforming the own whole environment. That's why it's still retains its term and use the computing. And to do that, you have to hit at least three facets, right? One is, of course, How do you deliver a great experience for the employees where they can get any app, any device, anywhere, any form? Anyway, that's one aspect of it. The second aspect of it is from a nightie standpoint. I've gotta manage all this complexity, right, and it's only growing. It's not shrinking with all the head virginity, so there's a management angle of it, and then the tone angle of it is, you know, security. As you pointed out, right security so important. In fact, what you users want is they don't want any security driven compromises. What is an example of security, even compromise, that I have to go through three passwords because he simply don't trust me? Heck, figure it out. Is what the user's Saito I t especially the millennials. Right. So s So you gotta address that. So the platform that we have workspace one actually addresses all three So we have innovations today and news in all three areas, right? So it's an example. Employ experiences, something we've been driving with enterprises and corporations for at least two years. Now we've upped the ante. We have now introducing a virtual assistant that employees can use either through voice or text to essentially ask questions. Hey, what's how do I get into WiFi? What's my employee directory? Um, you know who I go to first? You know this and that, right? As employed onboard the organization. Those examples of virtual assistant can do it. So we released the virtual assistant. That's a big piece of news in the employ experience. Sadie. Another big piece of news is we are introducing a tech preview of what we call digital employees experience management, which means I t now has a user expedient score that they can look at and say, Hey, is David getting a great expedience? No, it's poor, and I can die right in. I can find out the root cause I can fix the issue, and I could do that automatically. >> KP eyes can come out of that right? Absolutely serviceability. >> Absolutely. And I think you know, I've talked to many Cee Io's and we you know, we drive works based one and they for awhile sort of told me, Hey, this is all good. But >> I don't know how I'm doing all my >> doing with respect to, you know, your best best customer. Um, I ahead and behind and far behind. So this really helps them. >> Here. Let me ask the questions. That's a good point I want because this gets down to the heart of the issue. What is the top requests that you're getting from your customers or top two or three features? That pattern that continued comes back from your customer base when it comes to end user computing. These the experience, >> it spends all three things, right? So the first thing is, they're saying, Listen, I want to be able to deliver a great employee experience some, you know, help me do that. Helping measure and make sure I know what journey, Eman That's one right. Second is I've got to set virginity. I've got this complexity of God. You know, I always phones. I've got android tablets. I've got a you know, Dell laptop. I've got a Mac book. I've got you know a rugged device. I've got some work space I ot devices like printers and ex sector X factor. I've got this head virginity. Just help me manage this complexity in a sort of a unified, seamless, uniform way. Right? And third is help me secure my enterprise. So there's a whole model emerging called zero Trust. Where in the old world, what you do is you just build a huge wall around the enterprise, right? A pedometer, and say I'm inside the wall. I need to be domain joined on that inside the fire world. Therefore, I'm good. I mean, you got to throw that out of the window anymore. >> Doesn't exist in your model, because if a millennial or workaround working at home, that means every single i p device on my network potentially a compromise point. >> Correct. So you have You have to start with that device never ought to be trusted. And every network is hostile, right? If you start out for that reminds, then you build trust over time, right? And how do you build trust? You first say you leverage user identity, You say Okay, Davis who he is, right? And so that becomes an identity. You say this device is trusted or partially trusted. So one of the things we're announcing its part of innovations today is what we call workspace to risk analytic, which means we're able to provide a risk or write for the device. And we can say, Hey, this device is a risk on a score of 1 to 10 of eight, which means I can mostly trust it. Maybe you don't trust the sensitive apse. So therefore, a block access to the most sensitive apse, right? So use a combination of different things. They use things like NSX micro segmentation to your point about how we build on the Via Mary Stack. The carbon black acquisition is phenomenal because it gives us that intelligence. So collectively, we're able to sort of implement the zero trust model. Right. So >> those are the >> three main topics, right? Is employed expedience, unified management and zero trust security are really, really >> important. I want to ask you about your tenure, gm, where coincided with the air watch expedition. And prior to that event theme, we're struggled in this space. Ana Citrix dominated your pre Gerald. You know, your former company kind of fumbling around in air watch now. Air watch, if I recall correctly from wrong was not like the number one player. Just like people are saying carbon blacks, not the number one player. Absolutely. And then you get into the VM where flywheel effect or Sanjay Putin came in and it was great leader. But I wonder if you could sort of describe the ascendancy of the end user computing business at at VM wear. And I'm curious you mentioned carbon black and you kind of replicate that with our end point cloud security, peace. There's obviously a security use case. You clearly just described it, but take us back to >> great, great, great question. So actually, I joined right when literally, maybe a month before the air watch acquisition. Right then. So a Sandy and I and the rest of the team sort of worked this. We said, Hey, listen, a watch is a phenomenal sort of mobile management and security player. We had a very good product and horizon VD I, but it was a little bit isolated, and there were others, like, say, tricks that are sort of motor head in that space. So what? The first thing we did is we have three assets. Actually, the third I said what we had a Fed rated identity asset that we had purchase, but not leverage. So we said he know what the identity really has to get coupled with. You know, the death star pulled the mobile world, so we actually took these three piece parts and started integrating it as he started integrating it. We said, You know, this actually forms a very interesting work space, and we said It's a digital work space to be sort of coined that term and started to really tight together. The experience is a user would have, whether they were in a mobile device, a physical desktop or a virtual desktop right and made that seamless. So that's when the work's based one app was born and this was probably around the 2015 time frame. So we started releasing it, and then we started to stitching together basically all the back and integrations, right, So out >> of >> this out of that was born a workspace. And so, in 2016 with the momentum of the workspace, desktop business came back because now it had it been on. We've done a lot of work on the desktop businesses. Well, we made it very competitive with Citrix. We bought volumes. We integrated that we made it actually the best media solution. The markets, with a tremendous traction by itself in the horizon space and then integrating it works with people, said You know what, I need to get that workspace. And why am I dealing with Citrix this horizon solution within workspace in a more than salts my problem. In fact, it's better in certain areas. So that sort of got momentum going around that we really built that workspace momentum. And that was, I would say, till about 2016 or so. And then we saw these three things coming up. One is Hey, employees, experience matters. We really started pouring effort into the employees experience from, you know, day one day two and beyond. And then recently, including this show, we added divided sort of Day zero and then the off boarding pieces. Well, so employees experience became sort of the lightning rod for why somebody would adopt this workspace one platform which were built by then, right, and then we added on this ability to do modern management, especially on Windows and Mac, which was really starting to take off last year completely. Darden rounded out that portfolio and handsome capability, and then we added Now zero trust model, which is which is now sort of bolstered by the acquisition of carbon black. So you can see this a set off cascading talk, full moves. But we did it in a way where, you know, it was really truly integrated. So when as we come out with carbon black now, one of the most interesting things is right when carbon black comes into the fold, we've already done the integration. We're actually going to show it on my keynote right after this, right? We're actually showing the integration between workspace one intelligence and carbon backs You There you have it. You already have an asset that's completely integrated. >> So the risk or is interesting to me as well, so as endpoint security, because much, much more importantly, no fishing is you know, the big way that people get give up credentials. Does >> any of >> this seep into machines and I ot and edge? >> Yeah, and fabulous question. >> Wonder if you could come. >> Absolutely. I think listen, be if you think about risk oars and if >> you think about >> risks at large and devices they've been largely and Windows devices and not to and blame it on Windows, I think they might accept in a fabulous job of sort of progressing windows. But by far it's the most used operating system in the enterprise, right? But Mobile is getting used there. There, you know, it's starting to make a huge starting take a large part of the real estate of the enterprise. So I think we have a unique opportunity now through the data we collect on mobile devices with workspace one using the underlying air watch technology coupled with some of the, um, you know, data that, you know, data analytics tools we have in the carbon black cloud and the way they do sort of threat analysis and, uh, and determine potential attack vectors. We have an opportunity to leverage that intelligence. And that day, the lake and that technology, coupled with the data, we have to really now build a broader sort of threat surface understanding across multiple devices, and eventually that goes into a I ot. Right. So we're actually going to be working with some of the other technologies we have in Wimmer called Paul's Right. Pulse is very interesting because they have the ability to speak multiple device protocols that nobody does. Okay, so we're gonna take advantage of them potentially to sort of be able to start to poke into devices that are attached to the office, but not quite attached to the office. In the sense they're not mainstream devices you and I would use. But indirectly, you may use it, right? So be able to sort of get a much broader view off a visibility of devices. Second is how to manage them through a combination of workspace, one impulse and third, to get the data so that we can feed it into this federated cloud of workspace one intelligence and carbon black to understand the risk. And that way you have this three prom thing, right? I >> wanna ask you a personal question. Pat gal singer was very prolific this week again. Props of in social Media, Mojo doing a selfie on stage with Craig. Job ate up. Yeah, um, doing a little morning thing, telling people how he prepares for his keynote. Yeah. So how do you prepare for your keynote. Do you like, give it for a M and hit the gym and get a job coming up right after this interview? >> I do. I I I'm not fat. That's incredibly disciplined, I think. I think it's been waking up at 4 a.m. for a long time, so I'm not that much of an early bird. But I prepare because, you know, I've been involved in the construction of the keynote. So for me, it's, um, be started work on this, probably about three months ago, because the story came together. It's very natural to me. Just like you asked me the question. You know, tell me about the evolution. It's just a very natural thing because, like telling you >> on relevant story, not just beady eye. Yeah, it's so much more now. >> It's so much more And, you know, and I've lived through this and I participated in most of the decision making, so, you know, when my head of product marketing company said, Hey, what should we do with the keynote? I said, You know, I have the storyline in mind, right? And sit on the same three or four pillars I'm talking to you about, right? How do we tell the story to the audience about what is the platform? Why should they sort of bet on it? How did they sort of deploy it, show them some real world examples and then basically sprinkling all the innovations? That sounds exciting. So? So because of that story lines always being in my head. So it's not that hard. It's just sometimes you just need to sort of a CZ. You're unstable. >> You're preparing Saul, you're part of Yeah, I was handing it to you. Nobody related it. So >> for me, I think it's just sometimes just rehearsing some of the key parts. And then, of course, the visual cues. And they >> want to slam home the big point. They go. You know, I've been looking at your career. You have to check your technologies, but also, you're pretty much been a product leader. Yeah, and your career definite. So I gotta ask you around from the big movements in the innocent. Like your perspective as a participant. This was a product leaders Well, executive in there and done that. Amazon introduced their first conference around cloud security called reinforces. Here we get Cube coverage there. It was interesting because it wasn't like a typical security conference like black hat. Definitely on our say wasn't so much I t is really about cloud security. And so Dave and I were speculating like, this is the first cloud security show. I mean, dedicated to kind of cloud security didn't say cloud security, but essentially, cloud security. >> What is >> your take on the cloud security? Because a >> little bit >> of a different view, little bit architectural change. If you gotta have the on premises, you're gonna have the cloud if things any working together, some things you're doing and security quite frankly, around isolation to, you know, working in in any environment. You're that year in the middle of it all. >> Yeah. >> What is cloud >> security and why I have a conference isn't relevant with your thoughts. >> That's a >> great question. I think you know, you see many of these trends, I think, you know, listen, many of these conferences, they provoke their thought provoking, so it forces you to think right? So when I think about cloud security now, traditionally when you think about cloud security, you would think about technologies like Cass be light cloud access service broker. You would think about encryption to means much more than I do >> all the usual stuff in the back. If he's there, other people are there. But no. >> Yeah, I mean more than my coffee. I think you know you. It's sort of you think of the the the NL unlocked to cloud securities Data center security where you think of the sort of Amazon cloud living in Amazon Data Center. And, you know, how can we protect the, you know, the data and the egress access into those cloud and in the same technology sort of apply, but to your point that you sort of just touched upon its That cloud is not living in isolation. First of all, that Amazon Cloud is connected to a whole bunch of, you know, applications that are still sitting in the data center. Right. So they were not there. Potentially not moving the Oracle database today isn't there moving some workloads to the cloud, right? That's what most most companies are. Hey, guess what? There's all these end points of the connecting the connecting both the data center in the cloud. You're not gonna proxy to the cloud to get to the data center. So there's gateways. So do me. Cloud security can't be an isolated, you know, sort of technology that companies have to sort of think about now is there Is there opportunity to leverage the cloud to manage security better and get visibility in the security environment to do security? Analytics? Absolutely. So I think to me, that's where it's going. Because security, I think, has been proven, is no longer. You know, the one sing single thing. It's just you have to do multiple things. Every time I go talk to CSO's, they tell me they got this technology. I said, Hey, wait a minute. You you have 20. Did you cut down any yet? We've got down a few, but you know, they're just nervous about cutting down too much. Because of that one piece of software >> insurance policy. They're insecure. >> They cut to the added four, >> another tool. Bullshit. I think I think the architecture will get simpler because it's way too complex, but the same time I think you have to. There's no sustenance, cloud security and network security or endpoint security, and >> maybe there's a whole new group emerging within VM where that you could add to your repertoire en Pointe computing group your end user computing. Why don't have endpoint computing? That's >> what you're holding >> is you know is all about what do we need to do for the user? Both as I t and the end user? Okay. And now he now folks like hr and so on, the securities has to be built into it, right? So much like that. I think when you go build our data centers are the public cloud and build this hybrid clouds, security is to be built into that as >> well. We'll shake our thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. A super important area. We're gonna be covering this. This is cloud to point of this end user computing. This is where the edge of the network is. That's where the people are. They are part of the edge. A thin part of the edge of a big part of the edge. You're gonna be in the middle of it will be following the attraction. Thanks for coming on. You So much for having me having played Cuba, Cuba live here in San Francisco on chopper develop the state tune from or we have two sets. Three days of wall to wall coverage, worldly in day one. Stay with us. We gotta have Michael Dell. Pat Nelson. Come on Tomorrow and a lot more guests coming onto. They stay with us. We'll be right back.