(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We are at Oracle Park, formerly AT&T Park, recently named Oracle Park. Right on the shores of McCovey Cove, in downtown San Francisco. We haven't been here since Sport's Data, I think 2014. I can't believe it's been five years. So maybe now the Giants' situation will turn as we make a run for the pennant. We're here at a really interesting event, it's called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. And we're here with kind of the master of ceremonies, if you will, he's Mike Proman, the Managing Director of Scrum Ventures. Mike, great to see you. >> Great to be here. Thanks again for the time. >> Absolutely. So what is this day all about? Give us the low down. >> Yeah so, start up frenzy, right? Sports tech community's just in it's infancy right now. There's a lot of fragmentation though, in this world. And how do we best connect start ups to best-in-class companies, right? Japanese companies, there's a lot of excitement in Japan right now. We have Rugby World Cup coming up next month, we have the Olympics next year. How do we enable the start up community to realize those opportunities from a partnership perspective? So, we set out on this journey about a year ago. Bringing together companies of all different stages, all different geographic regions, and all different areas of focus within sports tech. And our job was to connect them to opportunities in Japan. What we kind of uncovered along the journey right, is that this is a community. And that we're building a platform here that transcends Asia, right. We want to help this community, and whether it's connecting them with the venture audience, or otherwise, we feel this is a great reflection of innovation coming in to this industry. >> Now you took kind of an interesting tact. You've called them, before we turned the cameras on, kind of a cohort, kind of an incubator, not really an incubator. So how is this thing structured, how do people get involved? What are some of the benefits of being part of this group versus out there slogging it on your own? >> Well, absolutely, and I think everyone's first reaction is, oh, this is just another accelerator, right? And we've really made a point of not identifying ourselves as an accelerator, for a variety of reasons. Number one, it's a stage-agnostic cohorts, right. So a lot of the companies that are representative here today, the 159 in our cohort, they've raised 10, 20, 30, $40 million. In many respects, they're all grows up, right. They don't need a quote unquote, a traditional accelerator. But our reality is, everybody needs acceleration. And particularly in Asia, Japan in particular, right? You need allies, you need advocates, you need facilitators. And people who are going to help revenue optimization, as well as just breaking the door in some cases. There's a lot of high profile content coming to that region, and if we can help people, it all comes back to us, long term. >> Right, right. And then the other piece, obviously, is the investment piece. 'Cause you work with a number of Japanese investment firms, so that's really kind of part of the, you know, we're sitting in San Franscisco, the event's called Tokyo, the Olympics are a year way, and you're from the Mid-West. So, you're kind of bringing it all together here in San Franscisco. >> You know, sport is the great unifier, right. So this is a great opportunity for us to speak to other industries, and bring the venture community into this conversation. Because, as you know, it's about top-line growth for a lot of these startups, but in many cases, they need capital to be able to accelerate into that growth. And so, you know, it's a very exciting time, and we're here to help support everybody. Our DNA, we're investors, right. We're a venture capital firm. But at the end of the day, what ends up happening is, these companies needs advocacy and connections, and that's what we're here to provide. >> Right, so, you said 100 plus companies in cohort. So, there's a lot of things going on in sports tech, but what are some of the really oddball ones that you're seeing a little further out than maybe most people aren't thinking about. >> Yeah, you know, the trends to me that I'm really excited about personally, are those opportunities that transcend the industry, right. Where is there opportunity for us to democratize things, from just a lead athletes, right, into things that you and I both need. So look at athlete performance. Look at recovery health, as an industry focus, right. Hydration, you look at mental health, sleep health, dietary health, you know. Players of the Giants, they need that, right? But you and I need that too. So where are those technologies that are innovators or thought leaders and leading the way in those spaces? The nice thing about Sports Tech Tokyo is we focus in athlete performance, stadium experience, and fan engagement, right. And there are 13 sub-categories, so it's a very broad based cohort, a lot of different areas of expertise. But bringing them all together is what's most rewarding. >> What's your favorite piece of it? I mean, it's hard to pick your favorite kid, but a couple of interesting companies in the portfolio that you'd like to highlight. >> Everyone's always saying, oh, you put me on the spot. No, absolutely not, Jeff. But in reality, my background is, I've been an entrepreneur for 10 plus years before this. And I've worked with brands like Coca Cola, and the NBA. What excites me most-- >> So we framed you up with a Coke bottle, by the way. >> Thank you very much. That was a nice product placement there. The nice thing is, I'm seeing technology today that didn't fundamentally exist a year or two ago. So I could tell you my favorite right now, in 2 weeks that might be entirely different, right. You're going to meet somebody from Misapplied Sciences, and they are doing some of the most breakthrough, cutting edge tech that, it's mind boggling, in terms of what they can do. And what's great about a company like Misapplied, is that they're doing it in sports, but they're also doing it in retail, and other high-dense environments. And so to me, those are the winners in this cohort. The ones that can transcend sport, and add value to so many other places. >> Right, so, before I let you go, you got a busy day ahead. What's the run of the day, what should people expect who are coming through the gates here at Oracle today? >> Well I said this is not your traditional accelerator. Well, this is not your traditional demo day, by any means, right. Traditionally, demo day is a bunch of company pitches, and then there's maybe some conversation afterwards. To us, this is a celebration of a broader cohort, right. Our 100 plus mentors that make up the Sports Tech Tokyo community. And we wanted to celebrate those individuals, right. The 100 mentors, the 400 plus attendees we have here today. So, think of it as an extended cocktail party, right. We want people to connect, and connect at scale. And so that's the back half of the day. The front half of the day is more content oriented. We have a lot of industry experts, again, common theme is transcending the vertical. Looking at opportunities to bring the venture community into the conversation. >> All right, well Mike, good luck and have a great and very busy day. >> Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate it Jeff. >> He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We're at Oracle Park in San Francisco on the shores of McCovey Cove, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat digital music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the BizOps Manifesto Power panel talking about, "Embracing Agility Across the Business." I'm Lisa Martin, there are three guests here with me today, to break down this topic. Pierre Viljoen, CTO at Global Head of Enterprise Technology and Governance at HTL Enterprise Studio. Hey Pierre, welcome. >> Thank you >> Lisa: Dave West is also here, the CEO of Scrum.org. Hey Dave, good to have you with us. >> Hi Lisa, hi everybody. >> Lisa: And Serge Lucio is here as well, the general manager of Broadcom's Enterprise Software Division. Hey Serge, good to have you on the program. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about the people and the process and technology requirements that businesses need to adopt to be able to embrace agility across the business. We're going to also be talking a lot about this inaugural BizOps industry research survey, on the state of digital business. A lot of very interesting findings that we're going to go through in the next 20 minutes or so. So the first question guys is, the BizOps survey found that over 519 individuals over five countries business and technology executives. This survey found, most organizations still expect this year to be as challenging as last year. I want you to kind of walk us through why that is, and how is that going to impact digital transformation initiatives? Pierre, we'll start with you, then Dave, then Serge. >> Sure, thank you Lisa. So, I think these days, disruption is no longer an exception. It's kind of become the norm or the rule, in terms of how we operate. And as executives in companies have learned over the last year, with everything that's happened is that, you can only modernize to a point, and then you need to do a little bit more. And what really is needed is for us to understand, going forward, how we're actually going to remodel our business by harnessing the resources that we have in a much more agile way, in a more fluent way, from an organizational perspective. And I think our current midterm goal, probably, is that we're capable of remodeling how we can remove roadblocks. These kinds of roadblocks in the future, and get us in a better position where we are. I don't expect things to change dramatically over the next year. More in line with us making sure that we're more future proof in the way in which we're working. >> We still have remote workers, global uncertainty, the vaccine. Dave, what are your thoughts on the impact of this year on digital transformation initiatives? >> Yeah, it's funny. When I think of, sort of uncertainty and chaos, I think that COVID really started it rolling down a hill, but unfortunately it's literally like rolling down a hill, these chaos and complexity. It's getting faster and faster and harder and harder. We're talking about the new norm, right? What is the new normal? We just don't know. And I think the reality is that most organizations were surprised by the impact of COVID-19 and because of that, they responded very quickly. Many of them, people were working at home, they're looking at their supply chain, looking at localization, all sorts of really important things happen, but very quickly, not very strategically. I think the next few years we're going to see, hopefully, some of that realizing into strategy and actually starting to fundamentally change how the business is looking at the world. We've sort of entered the digital age, Lisa, this next age of innovation, we have moved out of mass production and the age of oil, into something very, very different. And I think those organizations, every organization out there is going to have to get a handle on that and COVID was the wake up, right? And I think the next five years are going to be very interesting. >> I agree with you that that accelerant was, I didn't think of it before as a big ball rolling downhill. And now I don't think I'm going to be able to get that out of my head. But Serge, talk to us about your thoughts, the impacts to digital transformation initiatives. >> Yeah, I think back to what Dave was describing. The big challenge is the uncertainty. Many organizations are faced with, currently, a lot of unknowns about, if and when things will go back to, quote unquote, some kind of normality. And with that kind of uncertainty, there's a lot of challenges to the planning from an investment point of view. So, Dave was talking about a short-term versus long-term Like, a lot of these organizations are basically focused on just getting by over the next 12 months and trying to figure out what needs to happen over the next 12 months. At the same time, there's a lot of challenges with respect to readiness and uncertainty. And so, in that context, you got kind of this tension between, "How much do I invest short term "on basically tactical initiatives, "How do I care about teams? "How do I enable these teams "to deliver in weeks as opposed to months? "And then at the same time, "how do I continue to invest "to fundamentally change my operating model?" And that tension is very real. Within many of the organizations we serve. >> One of the things that the survey found was that most of the respondents were very willing to embrace being more agile in order to be able to better respond to rapidly changing market conditions. But I want to get your opinion on what that actually really means, that willingness to embrace being agile. What does it really mean? And what do organize organizations have to do differently? Pierre, I'll start with you. >> Sure, I think we had a discussion a while back and Dave actually got into something interesting where he said, without quoting a famous sneaker brand, just go out and do it. I think that's probably the most important part of this. Most organizations are struggling to figure out, "How should we embrace Agile? "Should we jump in at full scale now? "Should we be looking Scrum? "Should we be doing Scrum-Falls? "Should we be falling over our own feet?" Nobody knows exactly, what might be the right sector? I think the most important part is to pick up a pair of solid principles that you're going to embrace, start executing on them, start learning as you go, and basically improve as you move forward. Over the last year, we've embraced digital product management quite a lot on our side. And it's had tremendous benefits without us, per se, aiming for those benefits at the end of the day. And these are things that you learn as you go. And if you're going to wait around, analysis paralysis is going to be the killer of Agile at the end of day >> "Just do it," I like that. Good advice. Dave, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, I think that what's really interesting is, Agile has been around for 20 years. The manifesto was signed 20 years ago. Scrum came into the world 25 years ago. All of these sort of Agile approaches, but they were predominantly focused on technology. And I think that one thing that I've noticed, over and over again, is that the realization by C-level executives, level sevens, or whatever they're called, they've realized that it's not about technology. (chuckles) It's great, the technologies. I guess the technology's always worked in this complex world because customers never knew what they wanted. We didn't know how are we going to do it. We'd never worked together before. We didn't know how much it was going to cost. So, because of that (chuckles) we had to work in an agile way in technology. But ultimately, I think, one of the big differences going forward, is going to be that, there I say that intersection of business and technology, that BizOps kind of model that we talked about in the manifesto, and what the survey was really trying to tease out. I think that's really, really going to be interesting. And I don't know what that actually means, in terms of the execution. I hope it means that we're going to see teams better aligned to business outcomes. I hope it means that we're going to actually allow those teams that are actually know what they're approaching to make decisions. I hope it means that planning is going to be more directional rather than task level. I hope it means that we're going to start measuring the success in terms of business outcomes, not in terms of the work that we do. I hope it means all of these things. But we will wait and see, because experience would indicate that after a big disaster, lots of people tend to go back to exactly how they worked before, with that sort of emus kind of mentality or ostrich or whatever things sticks its head in the ground. I don't know. >> Sometimes we just want to go back to when things were safe and normal. But in terms of kind of following on, Dave, what you said, 94%, in this survey, 94% of respondents said we should adopt BizOps to increase competitiveness. So, that willingness is there in a vast majority of the respondents. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on what that willingness actually means and what they need to do differently. >> Yes. The problem is that, I think everybody understand that you have to be agile, right? You need to be able to respond quickly to your customer needs. You need to put the customer at the center of everything you do, right? So, conceptually, everybody understands that. The problem is really the operating model that many of these large organizations are dealing with to this day, right? So, you have these sort of Berkeley, kind of organized organization, with functional roles, specialized roles. And when you think about kind of generally, well, one of the big challenges is that you need to start to think horizontally, right? You need to start to start to think about what kind of value streams and what part of the cross functional teams that need to be organized and integrated to deliver on specific business outcomes. You need to start shifting from the traditional contract-based model that(indistinct) to a model which is much more based on trust, right? And we need to move away from vanity measurements and KPIs that many of the organizations typically lead by, to really focus on one thing and one thing only, which is that business value has been delivered. So, fundamentally, I think it requires a bit of a redesign of the operating model in these organizations. And one where, especially when you have a risk adversed kind of organizations, you need to start to be more accepting of risk, fundamentally. >> More accepting of risk. You brought something up there starts that I want to tackle in the next question with respect to culture. But one of the things that the survey uncovered was an interesting kind of seeming contradiction. The majority of respondents said, "We agreed, digital transformation "is about business outcomes "more than it is about technology." But 62% said, "We're still adopting technology for technology's sake." What does that actually mean? And what's the kind of cultural impact there for organizations to really get that more aligned on the digital transformation and the technology and the business outcomes? Pierre, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So, I think there were a number of reports this year talking about what's happened, what's not happened, and the majority of them focused on the fact that, as tech leaders, for years we've been praying to the gods to get budget approved to do all kinds of modernization activities to our infrastructure, our IT, tools, et cetera. And, lo and behold, the ball comes rolling down the hill, smashes a few things and we basically get some blank checks. So, we run around and we buy a whole bunch of stuff to modernize and to embrace this ability to do things differently. And in that whole process, what we basically did was buy more tools and buy more technology. And in that whole process, we didn't really embrace what it is that we're trying to achieve. So, basically aligning the technology to the actual business requirements getting closer to the customer, being able to understand where our market's moving, how we're capable of reducing the journey, if I can put it that way, and make sure that we're more aligned to where we need to be. So, although a lot of CIOs and CTOs got away with doing a lot of great stuff over the last year and users like me are like, "Ooh! I don't have to worry "about stupid VPNs and things anymore." That all went away. But in the same instance, I didn't really get anything that changed the organizational dynamic, which is a challenge. We still have the fundamental problems we have because the business leaders are not yet embracing the deep monitor of the processes that are supported by the technology. And then driving that in such a way that we can gain more business value which is important. To Serge's previous point, we're doing all these great things but we're not focusing on the incremental value that we're supposed to be getting. >> Dave, did it surprise you that there was this seemingly contradictory response? Yes, it's more about business outcomes and technology, but we're still adopting technology for technology's sake. What are your thoughts on that? And how can organizations actually start to move the needle on that? >> E-comm by cultural change, right? But you do know that your board and your leadership want you to do something, and the easiest thing you can do is buy something. I'm a sort of now an American, so, that's kind of my mantra in life, right? "When in doubt go shopping." Which is fantastic, just for the record. (Lisa laughs) But so, you've got to be seen to be doing something, whether it's replacing a VPN, which is always a fun thing to do, or whether it's getting on Slack. Everyone's going to be on Slack. that's going to help. But actually the core is that, exactly what Serge and Pierre have been saying all along, it's that, "Okay. So what is our business all about? "What are our customers? "what did they actually need? "What do our employees need? "How do we build a better value stream "from customer to the organization? "How do we align our teams to that? "How do we incentivize correctly "both the employees that are working "and our partners that are providing things "in this supply chain. How do we do all of those things?" Ultimately though, that means that we have to take a step back which is a very frustrating thing at the moment. And actually look at what is our business all about? What is the mission of it? Who are the customers? Take a moment to find what those are. And then, soon as we have that, and we don't have to do it. As Pierre said, we don't have to do it completely. We can do it incrementally. Organizations are very inward looking. That is the industrial mindset. That is that paradigm. It's looking, as Serge talked about, silos, "optimizing my department," "optimizing my budget, optimizing my kingdom." And what we're talking about is something that cross cuts all of that. So, the decision making is going to change around where the investments go and that's going to be really, really challenging. So, I'm not surprised, I'm not at all surprised that everybody says we should be doing this. And it's like classic. Everybody says we need to be fitter, but we're still all not fit. (Serge laughs) It's sort of, that's just the reality of the world that we live in, right? But we have to start making a stand. And the place we begin is customers. That's the place. And as soon as we start doing that, then everything else just becomes quite easy, actually. >> I like that. Focus on customers and it becomes easy. Serve, I'm kidding. What are your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I think Dave summarized it well. It's very easy to just buy a tool or buy something, right? Fundamentally changing kind of an operating model is very difficult, but you need to fundamentally rethink for instance, all the responding initiatives. So, something as mundane as, You know, as a leader in my organization I have a budget, right? What's my incentive of collaborating with my peers in terms of delivering credible analysis form. And so, that to me kind of a fundamental shift that we need to operate, and that's probably one of the reasons why many of our largest organizations that we're serving are starting to introduce some new roles like a Chief Digital Officer, as kind of a way to kind of bring kind of a slightly different organization design. The challenge, though, is that, well, all of these teams are still kind of integrated with this fabric of these large systems which exist. So when we look at these value streams, in fact they're not independent from one another. You have a bunch of interdependencies. You are looking at kind of networks of these value streams. But the fundamental shift that we need to see is what we want these organizations to think about, ultimately with the part of the products or services that need to be focused on, all of these become kind of the primary things that we measure from point of view, and how do we align teams and projects and funding along these kinds of outcomes? >> So being customer focused, also being more broadly focused you mentioned the Chief Digital Officer role, which has an interesting role. It's supposed to look more, holistically, internally and externally. And we know that these organizations know we need to be better at this. like Dave's joke about we know we need to be more fit. But what's it going to take to actually create that collaboration, so that IT and business leaders are really working in lockstep and doing so in a timely fashion, so, that they're able to stay competitive. I do want to know from each of you, are you seeing examples of this already in progress? Pierre, let's start with you. >> I can only give you another example and say, one of the interesting things that we did was we try to embrace the delivery of services at HR in kind of a different frame this year, and kind of productize the services that we deliver. Now, if you're most people, you're trying to think about, "How do I set up things like communities "of practice and collaboration between people so "that they can work together on developing new services "new features, new products, et cetera." And we set out with creating this agile way of working. What we didn't anticipate, which was a very nice side effect, is that, because of COVID, because of the catalyst that it provided us, the remote working, people sense of ownership is inherently there. Meaning that self-organization of teams started happening. Nobody needed to crack a whip to get a bunch of guys to talk together with one another to figure out how to get stuff done. It's not like you could walk over to the water cooler and have a chat to Bob. Bob is a thousand miles away, or Bobby's sitting in another State. So, all of a sudden, all dynamic changed. And I have to say, people are a lot more resilient than what they're being given credit for. And if, as organizations, we embrace the culture in such a way and harness it in a positive way, we can actually get this movement to happen. And we actually can make the sum of the parts to be more than the whole. And this year we've seen that happen. And by no means, are we done 'cause we still have a lot of work to do, like Serge said, we have budgets, and budgets give you finite amount of movement left or right. Then you have to do what's best and possible within the frame that you're given. But I think embracing the cultural change and helping people to really excel at that and empowering them makes a huge difference in the way that you can get stuff done. >> Absolutely. Dave, what are your thoughts on this? >> I'm going to say something a little bit controversial, I think. I'm not a big fan of Chief Digital Officers. It just seems like we've got a problem. And some would argue that, "Well, if you've got a problem with somebody "you should get a coach" and all this stuff "and you get it sorted." And that's probably a good thing. But most digital officers, they're going to build a long-term career and create yet another stove pipe and that stove pipe's responsible for bringing all the other stove pipes together. It sounds a bit odd. If a digital officer is really there as a short term enabler, 'cause you asked IT and business leaders, trying to get them to work together better. The best business leaders (bell dings) know about IT, right? The best business leaders are IT sanctuary. Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are great business leaders, but they know about technology, right? That's what brings them together. Technology is an asset and they may not be the most biggest expert in it, but they care deeply about learning about that stuff. So, I think the next few years we're going to see a lot of C-level and leaders in organizations become a lot more tech savvy, and maybe hire coaches to help them navigate. And the Chief Digital Officer will become more of a coach rather than a person that rolls out Slack or something, you know? (Pierre laughs) So, I think that is going to be the next big jump, really, when we realize that you don't get an additional thing. It's just part of what you do. >> Serge, agree, disagree? >> I agree. The reality is that it is happening, right? Don't get me wrong. We see that every day that so many States are highly integrated, organizations and teams are measuring business value, business outcomes. The problem is that it's oftentimes a very small subset of what these organizations are doing. And so, it's almost like the CEO is coming as kind of these new kind of, as Dave described. And it's got this new style organization which is really there to kind of scale what has been working with these organizations, but we're kind of creating this kind of almost shadow organization, as opposed to fundamentally rethinking and redesigning the organization and redesigning kind of the operating model. And so, we're kind of layering new stuff as opposed to fundamentally transforming. So, as long as it is just kind of just a step towards kind of a true transformation, I think that's fine. The challenge is to, again, create kind of a new set of silos, which are now called value streams, as opposed to young functional silos that we have today. >> So a lot of opportunities identified in this survey but there are still a lot of challenges there. So, I'd love to get you guys and our final question here in this panel to help us understand, from the BizOps coalition's perspective, how are you helping organizations to navigate these challenges, so, they can become successful, transform and actually become agile to respond to rapidly changing market conditions? Pierre, kick us off. >> Sure, from a coalition perspective, we're just trying to make sure that there's a set of sensible principles. That people can look at, can adopt that I think Dave mentioned it in another discussion, that give you that clarity of thought and mind in terms of what should you be thinking? How should you be thinking about it? What are the various aspects you need to consider? And then from that perspective, how do you implement these things in a sensible way for your organization? By no means is this this like, "Here are the 10 steps, you do them, and you're done." You'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams. It's not how it work. You're still going to have to work at it. You're still going to have to figure some stuff out. You're going to have to deep in yourself in your organizational policies, procedures, understand how the organization is actually working. You can't strap a V8 to Mini Cooper and expect to break the land speed record, without the wheels falling off, or something going wrong. So, you really need to harness that in a more sensible manner to move forward. And I think the coalition is on the right path to help organizations realize, "what is the sensible way to go?" "What are principles we can adopt "that we can abide by that will help us drive business "in a different way and close this chasm of disparity "between business and IT?" >> And Dave, your perspective on the BizOps coalition, helping organizations to sort through these challenges. >> Yeah. I'm going to share a little bit of a personal story. So, I must admit that I wasn't keen on the whole idea, and Serge sent me some stuff and he's like, "Could you just provide some feedback." And I did, and then there was a press release with my name on it. I saw, I was like, "Oh my God! "I better get involved because I don't want to "have my name associated "with something that doesn't make sense" But I've actually been surprisingly, I've actually found it a lot more positive than I thought because of exactly what Pierre's saying. So, basically, the coalition is a group of vendors, a bucolic of consultants, some pseudo thought leaders that think they are very thoughtful and maybe they're not, people like me. (Pierre laughs) And what we're doing though, is actually trying to get some clarity of terminology, get some clarity of, what are the principles? What are those key principles? How do they relate to each other? Get some, some synergy to allow, 'cause there's so much noise out there. And hopefully, this is going to say, "Okay, this is what BizOps is. "This is why it's important. "These are some simple things." And then hopefully, because of the breadth that Serge and others have managed to get in terms of membership, we're going to get all of those organizations to be consistently talking about these things, which will then create pressure on the market to actually start adopting these things in the way that we're proposing, or challenge those ideas and then make them better. So, I'm kind of excited about it, surprisingly, 'cause the last thing we need is yet another manifesto and group of people that spend their whole time talking about things and never getting anything done. But actually I think there might be some valuable stuff that comes out here and we're going to inspect and adapt to make sure it is valuable. And if it isn't, we will stop. (chuckles) (Lisa laughs) >> And Serge, strap us up with your thoughts and extending that value. >> Look, we started the BizOps manifesto really with kind of a very simple observation. Everybody's talking about the same stuff, right? But you have a value stream management church, the digital product management's church, the DevOps church, with Scrum church, the safe church. Right? But we're all saying the same thing. But we create so much confusion with our large enterprise customers, but it's just not a grain on a set of principles. And just saying like, look, fundamentally, we're all talking about the same thing. And there are process aspects, there are cultural aspects. There is what you measure. But fundamentally we agree on the same core set of principles. And so for me, the BizOps manifesto, first and foremost is to get the stakeholders from these different communities together, and recognize that, at the end of the day, we share the same values and create some clarity to the market as to how these pieces fit to one another. The second aspect, which is more from our point of view, as one of the vendors of tools, right? There's tons of tools out there. We talk a lot about kind of measuring business outcomes as a primary way to actually align to everybody in our organization. Well, today if you look at any of these organizations, on average, they use about 40 different tools on one of these value streams. None of that stuff integrates with one another. It's extremely difficult for an organization to be able to trace from an investment, all the way to stuff that delivers value and production to a customer. And so, one of my hopes for the coalition is that we start to actually provide some platform, data models, ontologies, to start to integrate those different tools to facilitate that kind of integration. So, those are kind of the two things which I think we can really help kind of develop and and improve on. >> Well, we know that there's a tremendous amount of folks out there that are wanting to embrace agility across the business, identifying areas where they need to do work. So, great advice from the three of you. Thank you so much for joining me on this power panel today and sharing what organizations can do to really embrace that agility across the organization. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Pierre Viljoen, Dave West and Serge Lucio. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright orchestral music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE Conversations here in Palo Alto Studios. For theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media inc. My next guest is Bruce Arthur, who's the Vice President of engineering at Banter.ai. Good friend, we've known each other for years, VP of engineering, developer, formerly at Apple. >> Yes. >> Worked on all the big products; the iPad-- had the the tin foil on your windows back in the day during Steve Jobs' awesome run there. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's good to be here. >> Yeah, great, you've got a ton of experience and I want to get your perspective as a developer, VP of engineering, entrepreneur, you're doing a startup around AI. Let's have a little banter. >> Sure. >> Banter.ai is a little bit a chat bot, but the rage is DevOps. Software really models change, infrastructure as code, cloud computing. Really a renaissance of software development going on right now. >> It is, it's changing a lot. >> What's your view on this? >> Well, so, years and years ago you would work really hard on your software. You would package it up in a box and you'd send it over the wall and you hope it works. And that seems very quaint now because now you write your software, you deploy it the first day, and you change it six times that day, and you're A/B-testing it, you're driving it forward, it's so much more interactive. It does require a different skillset. It also doesn't, how do I say this carefully? It used to be very easy to be craft, to have high craft and make a very polished product, but you didn't know if it was going to work. Today you know if it's going to work, but you often don't get to making sure it's high quality, high craft, high value. >> John: So, the iteration >> Exactly, the iteration runs so fast, which is highly valuable, but you sort of just a little bit of you miss the is this really something I am proud of and I can really work with it because you know, now the product definition can change so quickly, which is awesome but it is a big change. >> And that artisan crafting thing is interesting, but now some are saying that the UX side is interesting because, if you get the back end working, and you're iterating, you can still bring that artisan flavor back. We heard that cloud computing vendors like Amazon, and I was just in China for Alibaba, they're trying to bring this whole design artisan culture back. Your thoughts on the whole artisan craft in software, because now you have two stages, you have deploy, iterate, and then ultimately polish. >> Right, so, I think it's interesting, it used to be, engineering is so expensive and time-consuming. You have to design it upfront and you make one version of it and you're done. That has changed now that engineering has gotten easier. You have better tools, we have better things, you can make six versions and that used to be, so back in the day at Apple, you would make six versions, five of which Steve would hate and throw out, and eventually they would get better and better and better and then you would have something you're proud of. Now those are just exposed. Now everybody sees those, it's a very different process. So you, I think, the idea that you. Engineering used to be this scarce resource. It's becoming easier now to have many versions and have more engineers working on stuff, so now it is much more can I have three design teams, can they compete, can they make all good ideas, and then who's going to be the editor? Who evaluates them and decides I like this from this one, I like that, and now let's put this together to make the right product. >> So, at Apple, you mentioned Steve would reject, well, that's well-documented. >> Sure. >> It's publicly out there that he would like, really look at the design-side. Was it Waterfall-based, was it Agile, Scrum, did you guys, was it like, do you lay it all out in front of him and he points at it? What were some of the work flows like with Steve Jobs? >> So, when he was really excited about something he would want to meet with them every week. He'd want to see progress every week. He'd give lots of feedback every week, there'd be new ideas. It was very Steve-focused. I think the more constructive side of it was the design teams were always thinking about What can we build, how do we put it in front of him, and I remember there was a great quote from a designer that said. It's not that Steve designs great things, it's that you show him three things, and if you throw him three bad things, he'll pick the least bad. If you show him three great things, he'll pick the most great, But it's not, it was more about the, you've got to iterate in the process, you've got to try ideas, you take ideas from different people and some of them, like, they sound like a great idea. When we talk, it sounds really good. You build it, and you're like, that's just not, that's just not right. So, you want, how do I say this? You don't want to lock yourself in up front. You want to imagine them, you want to build them, you want to try 'em. >> And that's, I mean, I've gotten to know the family over the years, too, through some of the Palo Alto interactions, and that's the kind of misperception of Steve Jobs, was that he was the guy. He enabled people, he had that ethos that-- >> He was the editor, it's an old school journalism metaphor, which is, he had ideas, he wanted, but he also, he ran the team. He wanted to have people bring their ideas and come in. And then he decided, this is good, this is not. That's better, you can do better, let's try this. Or, sometimes, this whole thing stinks. It's just not going anywhere. So, like, it was much more of that. Now it's applied to software, and he was a marketing genius, about sort of knowing what people were going to go for, but there was a little bit of a myth for it, that there's one man designing everything. That is a very saleable marketing story. >> The mythical man. (laughs) >> Well, it's powerful, but no, there's a lot of people, and getting the best work of all those people. >> I mean, he's said on some of the great videos I've watched on YouTube over the years, Hire the best people, only work with the best, and they'll bring good stuff to the table. Now, I want to bring that kind of metaphor, one step further for this great learning lesson, again it's all well-documented on YouTube. Plenty of Steve videos there, but now when you go to DevOps, you mention the whole quality thing and you got to ship fast, iterate, you know there's a lot of moving fast break stuff as Zuckerberg would say, of Facebook, although he's edited his tune to say move fast and be reliable. (laughing) Welcome to the enterprise, welcome to software and operations. This is now a scale game at the enterprise side 'cause, you know, you start seeing open source software grow so much now, where a lot of the intellectual property might be only 10% of software. >> Right. >> You might be using other pieces. You're packaging it so that when you get it to the market, how do bring that culture? How do you get that innovation of, Okay, I'm iterating fast, how do I maintain the quality. What are some of your thoughts on that? Because you've got machine learning out there, you've got these cool things happening. >> Yup. So, you want, how do I say this? You just, you really need to leave time to schedule it. It needs to be in your list. There's a lot of figuring out what are we going to build and you have to try things, iterate things, see if they resonate with consumers. See if they resonate with people who want to pay. See if they resonate with investors. You have to figure than out fast, but then you have to know that, okay, this is a good prototype. Now I have to make it work better because the first version wouldn't scale well, now it has to scale, now it has to work right for people, now you have to have a review of: here's the bugs, here's the things that are not working. Why does this chatbot stop responding sometimes? What is causing that? Now, the great story is, with good DevOps, you actually have a system that's very good at finding and tracking those problems. In the old world, so the old world with the shrink-wrap software, you'd throw it over the fence. If it misbehaves, you will never know. Today you know. You've got alerts, you've got pagers going off, you've got logs, >> It's instrumented big-time. >> Yeah, exactly, you can find that stuff. So, since you can actually make, you can make very high-quality software because you have so much more data about what's going on with it, it's nice. And actually, chatbot software has this fascinating little side effect, with, because it's all chats and it's all text, there are no irreproducible bugs. You can go back and look at exactly what happened. I have a recording, I know exactly what happened, I know exactly what came in, I know what came out, and then I know that this failure happened. So, it's very reproducible, sort of, it's nice you can, it doesn't always work this way, but it's very easy to track down problems. >> It's event-based, it's really easy to manage. >> Exactly, and it's just text. You can just read it. It's not like I have to debug hacks, it's just these things were said and this thing died. >> No core dumps. (laughs) >> No, there's nothing that requires sophisticated analysis, well the code is one thing, but like, the sequence of events is very human-readable, very understandable. >> Alright, so let's talk about the younger generation. So, we've been around the block, you and I. We've talked, certainly many times around town, about the shifts, and we love these new waves. A lot of great waves coming in, we've seen many waves. What's going on, in your mind, with the younger generation? Because this is a, some exciting things happening. Decentralized internet. >> Bruce: Yup. >> There's blockchain, getting all the attention. Outside of the hype, Alpha VCs, Alpha engineers, Alpha entrepreneurs are really honing in on blockchain because they see the potential. >> Sure. >> Early people are seeing it. Then you've got cloud, obviously unlimited compute potentially, the new, you know, kind of agile market. All these young guys, they never shipped, actually never loaded Linux on a server. (laughing) So, like, what are you seeing for the younger guys? And what do you see as someone who's experienced, looking down at the next, you know, 20 year run we see. >> So, I think what I see that's most exciting is that we now have people solving very non-technical problems with technology. I think it used to be, you could build a computer, you could write code, but then, like, your space was limited to the computer in front of you. Like, I can do input and outputs. I can put things on the screen, I can make a video game, but it's in this box. Now everyone's thinking of much bigger, Solving bigger problems. >> John: Yeah, healthcare, we're seeing verticals. >> Yeah, healthcare's a massive one. You can, operation things, shipping products. I mean, who would've thought Amazon was going to be delivering things, basically. I mean, they're using technology to solve the physical delivery of objects. That is, the space of what people are tackling is massive. It' no longer just about silicon and programming, it's sort of, any problem out there, there's someone trying to apply technology, which is awesome and I think that's because these people these youngsters, they're digital natives. >> Yeah. >> They've come to expect that, of course video conferencing works, of course all these other items work. That I just need to figure out how to solve problems with them, and I'm hopeful we're going to see more human-sized problems solved. I think, you know, we have, technology has maybe exacerbated a few things and dislocated, cost a lot of people jobs. Disconnected some people from other sort of stabilizing forces, >> Fake news. (laughs) >> Fake news, you know, we need-- >> John: It's consequences, side effects. >> I hope we get people solving those problems because fake news should now be hard to solve. They'll figure it out, I think, but, like, the idea is, we need to, technology does have a bit of a responsibility to solve, fix some of the crap that it broke. Actually, there's things that need, old structures, journalism is an old profession. >> Yeah. >> And it used to actually have all these wonderful benefits, but when the classified business went down the tubes, it took all that stuff down. >> Yeah. >> And there needs to be a venue for that. There needs to be new outlets for people to sort of do research, look things up, and hold people to account. >> Yeah, and hopefully some of our tools we'll be >> I hope so. >> pulling out at Silicon Angle you'll be seeing some new stuff. Let's talk about, like just in general, some of the fashionable coolness around engineering. Machine learning, AI obviously tops the list. Something that's not as sexy, or as innovative things. >> Sure. >> Because you have machines and industrial manufacturing plant equipment to people's devices. Obviously you worked at Apple, so you understand that piece, with the watch and everything. >> Yup, >> So you've got, that's an internet, we're things, people are things too. So, machines and people are at the edge of the network. So, you've got this new kind of concept. What gets you excited? Talk about how you feel about those trends. >> So, there's a ton going on there. I think what's amazing is the idea that all these sensors and switches and all the remote pieces can start to have smarts on them. I think the downside of that is some of the early IoT stuff, you know, has a whole open SSL stack in it. And, you know, that can be out of date, and when you have security problems with that now your light switch has access to your tax returns and that's not really what you want. So, I think there's definitely, there's a world coming, I think, at a technical level, we need to make operating systems and tools and networking protocols that aren't general purpose because general purpose tools are hackable. >> John: Yeah. >> I need to have a sensor and a switch that know how to talk to each other, and that's it. They can't rewrite code, they can't rewrite their firmware, they can't, like, I want to be able to know that, you have a nice office here, if somebody came in and tried to hack your switches, would you ever know? And the answer's like, you'd have no idea, but when you have things that are on your network and that serve you, if they're a general, if they're a little general purpose computing device, they're a mess. Like, you know, a switch is simple. A microphone, a microphone is simple. There's an output from it, it needs, I think we, >> So differentiated software for device. >> Well, let's get back to old school. You studied operating systems back in the day. >> Yeah. >> A process can do whatever the hell it wants. It can read from memory, it can write to disk, it can talk to all these buses. It's a very, it can do, it's very general purpose. I don't want that in my switch. I want my switch to be sort of, much more of these old little micro-controller. >> Bounded. >> Yeah, it's in a little box. I mean, so the phone and the Mac have something called Sandbox, which sort of says, you get a smaller view of the world. You get a little piece of the disk, you can't see everything else, and those are parts of it, but I think you need even more. You need, sort of, this really, I don't want a general purpose thing, I want a very specific thing that says I'm allowed to do this and I'm allowed to talk to that server; I don't have access to the internet. I've got access to that server. >> You mentioned operating systems. I mean, obviously I grew up in the computer science genre of the '80s and you did as well. That was a revolution around Unix. >> Yes. >> And then Berkeley, BSD, and all that stuff that happened around the systems world, operating systems, was really the pioneers in computing at that time. It's interesting with cloud, it's almost a throwback now to systems thinking. >> Bruce: It's true, yeah. >> You know, people looking at, and you're discussing it. >> Bruce: Yeah, Yeah. >> It's a systems problem. >> Yeah, it is. >> It's just not in a box. >> Right, and I think we witnessed the, let's get everyone a general purpose computer and see what they can do. And that was amazing, but now you're like I don't want everything to be a general I want very specific, I want very little thing, dedicated things that do this really well. I don't want my thermostat actually tracking when I'm in the house. You know, I want it to know, eh, maybe there's someone in the house, but I don't want it to know it's me. I don't want it reporting to Google what's going on. I want it to track my temperature and manage that. >> Our Wikibon team calls the term Unigrid, I call it hypergrid because essentially it's grid computer; there's no differentiation between on-premise and cloud. >> Right. >> It's one pool of resource of compute and things processes. >> It is, although I think, and that's interesting, you want that, but again you want it, how do I say this? I get a little nervous when all of my data goes to some cloud that I can't control. Like, I would love if, I'll put it this way. If I have a camera in my house, and imagine I put security cameras up, I want that to sort of see what's going on, I don't want it to publish the video to anywhere that's out of my control. If it publishes a summary that says, oh, like, someone came to your door, I'm like, okay, that's a good, reasonable thing to know and I would want to get that. So, Palo Alto recently added, there's traffic cameras that are looking at traffic, and they record video, but everyone's very nervous about that fact. They don't want to be recorded on video. So, the camera, this is actually really good, the camera only reports number of cars, number of bikes, number of pedestrians, just raw numbers. So you're pushing the processing down to the end and you only get these very anonymous statistics out of it and that's the right model. I've got a device, it can do a lot of sophisticated processing, but it gives nice summary data that is very public, I don't think anyone's really >> There's a privacy issue there that they've factored into the design? >> Yes, exactly. It's privacy and it's also the appropriateness of the data, you don't want, yeah, people don't want a camera watching them when they go by, but they're happy and they're like, oh, yeah, that street has a big increase in traffic, And there's a lot of, there were accidents here and there's people running red lights. That's valuable knowledge, not the fact that it's you in your Tesla and you almost hit me. No. (laughs) >> Yeah, or he's speeding, slow down. >> Exactly, yeah, or actually if you recorded speeders the fact that there's a lot of speeding is very interesting. Who's doing it, okay, people get upset if that's recorded. >> Yeah, I'm glad that Palo Alto is solving their traffic problem, Palo Alto problems, as we say. In general, security's been a huge issue. We were talking before we came on, about just the security nightmare. >> Bruce: Yes. >> A lot of companies are out there scratching their heads. There's so much of digital transformation happening, that's the buzzword in the industry. What does that mean from your standpoint? Because engineers are now moving to the front lines. Developers, engineering, because now there's a visibility to not just the software, it's an end goal. They call it outcome. Do you talk to customers a lot around, through your entrepreneurial venture, around trying to back requirements into product and yet deliver value? Do you get any insight from the field of kind of problems, you know, businesses are generally tryna solve with tech? >> So, that's interesting, I think when we try to start tech companies, we usually have ideas and then we go test that premise on customers. Perhaps I'm not as adaptable as I should be. We're not actually going to customers and asking them what they want. We're asking them if this is the kind of thing that would solve their problems. And usually they're happy to talk to us. The tough one, then, is then are they going to become paying customers, there's talking and there's paying, and they're different lines. >> I mean, certainly is validation. >> Exactly, that's when you really know that they care. It is, it's a tough question. I think there's always, there's a category of entrepreneur that's always very knowledgable about a small number of customers and they solve their problems, and those people are successful and they're often, They often are more services-based, but they're solving problems because they know people. They know a lot of people, they know what their paying point are. >> Alright, so here's the real question I want to know is, have you been back to Apple in the new building? >> Have I been to, I have not been in the spaceship. (laughing) I have not been in the spaceship yet. I actually understand that in order to have the event there, they actually had to stop work on the rest of the building because the construction process makes everything so dirty; and they did not want everyone to see dirty windows, so they actually halted the construction, they scrubbed down the trees, they had the event, and now it's, but now it's back. >> Now it's back to, >> So, I'll get there at some point. >> Bruce Arthur it the Vice President of Banter.ai, entrepreneur, formerly of Apple, good friend, Final question for you, just what are you excited about these days and as you look out at the tooling and the computer science and the societal impact that is seen with cloud and all these technologies, and open source, what do you, what are you excited about? >> I'm most excited, I think we actually have now enough computing resources and enough tools at hand that we can actually go back and tackle some harder computer science problems. I think there's things that used to be so big that you're like, well, that's just not, That's too much data, we could never solve that. That's too much, that would take, you know, that would take a hundred computers a hundred years to figure out. Those are problems now that are becoming very tractable, and I think it's been the rise of, yeah, it starts with Google, but some other companies that sort of really made these very large problems are now tractable, and they're now solvable. >> And open source, your opinion on open source these days? >> Open source is great. >> Who doesn't love more code? (laughs) >> Well, I should back this up, Open source is the fastest way to share and to make progress. There are times where you need what's called proprietary, but in other words valuable, when you need valuable engineers to work on something and, you know, not knowing the providence or where something comes from is a little sticky, I think there's going to be space for both. I think open source is big, but there's going to be-- >> If you have a core competency, you really want to code it. >> Exactly, you want to write that up and you-- >> You can still participate in the communities. >> Right, and I think open source is also, it's awesome when it's following. If there's something else in front, it follows very fast, it does a very good job. It's very thorough, sometimes it doesn't know where to go and it sort of meanders, and that's when other people have advantages. >> Collective intelligence. >> Exactly. >> Bruce, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it, good to see you. This is a Cube Conversation here in the Palo Alto studio, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's theCUBE. On the ground at Serverlessconf. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman, here with theCUBE at Serverlessconf in New York City, really excited to have on the program one of the keynote speakers and a first time guest on theCUBE, it's someone I've know through the interwebs and have read his stuff for many years, Simon Wardley who's a researcher with a leading edge firm, Simon, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you ever so much for inviting me. It's a delight to be here. >> Alright, so my understanding is thanks to this event, you've reached a lifelong career goal. You're now a Sith Lord? (laughing) >> Well, somebody basically took a quote of mine and put it on a Star Wars poster with The Empire at the bottom, so yes, it is absolutely there you are, I am a Sith Lord, so delightful. >> The quote was that Serverless will just fundamentally change the architecture of how we build things. Something along those lines, I believe. >> Absolutely, yes. >> Alright, so let's start there. There are so many, come on, we all got really excited when containers came out. We're going to talk to John Willis >> You did. (laughing) >> We're going to talk about unikernels. The industry as a whole, there's frothiness and buzz >> Okay. >> So Serverless, you know, how's it different? How's it the same? Why's it so important from your standpoint? >> So, really good questions. So, to explain that question, we have to start off with a subject that is dear to my heart which is mapping. So when we look at the value chain of any organization, the components in that value chain are evolving and they evolve from the genesis, the novel and new to custom built examples and eventually products and rental services and then commodity and utility services. And that process is driven by supply and demand competition. It happens not only to activities, but to practice and data, but we give them different terms. They have all of the same characteristics as when they evolve. Now, when you look at that evolving environment, what you discover is there are two basic forms of disruption. There is the highly unpredictable form, which either occurs due to the appearance of something novel and new, which we don't know what it's going to impact or to product substitution. So that's the Nokia versus Apple, sort of battle, you don't know which way it's going to go until after the battle. And there is a second form of disruption, which is much more anticipatable or predictable and that is the product to utility change. So we know that when things evolve from product to utility we're going to see a rapid period of change and then there's a punctuated equilibrium. Explotion of higher order systems. We're going to see co-evolution of practice, disruption of past companies stuck behind inertia barriers. Yes it's going to be a bad efficiency, no we're not going to save any money 'cause we're just going to do more stuff with it and we're going to have all these new things as well. And we can anticipate that in advance. So when you start looking at value chains of organization, it's always the shift from product to commodity and utility which makes the big transformation in industry. And so one of them was compute. Shifting from products, as in servers, to utility as in cloud. Unfortunately dreadful term, cloud, an awful word, you know it's not a wispy thing up in the sky, it is something very specific, the shift from compute to utility. >> Would you put virtualization along that continuum? >> Okay, so virtualization was one of the underlying components, which actually helped with that happen. >> Yes. >> And so you've also got the explosion of practices around that co-evolution of practice, things like DevOps. Well, the same transition is now happening in the platform space. So, we're moving away from a product stack, things like, LAMP and .NET, to much more utility-based code execution environments. And that's what we're getting with Lambda. And we're going to see an explosion of new things built on top, inertia barriers, companies stuck behind, they'll die off, It'll be a rapid change punctuated equilibrium. You'll get all sorts of new things built. So we're going through that big transformation. Now, these transformations have been going on for about 300 years, some of them impact micro scale economics, some macro, the biggest we call ages. And that all depends upon how widespread that component is in other value chains, so when we're talking about software, we're talking about a component which is in almost all other value chains, it's shifting from product to utility, massive change, highly predictable. This is what Serverless is about. So, will it change everything? Absolutely it will. >> Alright, so Simon, I'm wondering, if you've mapped out for Serverless, where's the land of economic expection, the land of happiness and the land of despair? (laughing) >> Well, okay, happiness, despair and expectation? >> Yes. >> Okay interesting one. So the land of despair will be getting stuck behind the inertia barriers, dismissing it, saying it's not going to impact, it's not going to impact, no, no, because there's a punctuated equilibrium, it'll surprise you because it's an exponential growth, so you'll think you've got loads and loads of time and 10 years from now, you're like, be panicking, oh my gosh, it's impacting, I can't get the skills for people to help me do the transformation. My entire industry and business model is starting to disappear, so that is the land of despair that's coming to people, that's easy to defend against because most people can't see the environment. They're going to just walk straight into that one. The land of happiness. Well, obviously other than being the utility providers who'll be extremely happy about the growth of their industry, another area of happiness will be some of the novel and new things built on top. So, we're bound to see the, sort, of, one person, two person company who builds a fuction which is sold through something like the marketplace and everybody uses and they sell it for a billion. So, we'll get the two person billion dollar company and I'm sure that will make them delightfully happy. So, that's despair, happiness, also inflated expectations. So one of the big lies will be, Serverless is going to save me money in terms of reducing my IT budget. I'm afraid not. This is Jevons Paradox, this is being going on since 1865. All that's going to happen is yes, it becomes more efficient but we'll do more stuff because we're in competition so we'll spend exactly the same as we've always done, but just doing vastly more. But none the less, loads of consultants will write reports about how it will save you money and lots of people will be disappointed. >> I want to poke at that for a second. (laughing) I don't disagree with Javons Paradox when it comes to power, but example, say you know, our host for this event, A Cloud Guru. >> Yeah. >> They're priced to deliver per user is way lower than if they'd have done this the traditional way and I've heard many examples here at the show already where they've said, oh if I had built it this way, you know, it's now an order of magnitude less dollars, so. >> Let's forget order of mag, let's go many orders of magnitude. So from now to say the 1980s, for a thousand dollars, I can get a million times more compute resource than I could back then. Has my IT budget reduced a million fold during that time? And the answer is >> Yeah. >> What, my IT budget has reduced a million fold? >> No, no, no my IT budget has not reduced a million fold. >> Not at all, because we've just ended up doing vastly more stuff. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So the point is, yes. >> Budgets are always flat, yes. >> So the point is yes, we will be able to do the same things but more efficiently, but your IT budget doesn't reduce because we end up doing more things. So we're in competition, say, you and me and say you evolve, you use these environments you don't reduce your IT spending, you do more things, I'm now having to spend more and more just to try and keep up with you. So eventually I'm forced to adopt to that new world. So what happens is the individual acts become more efficient, but because we do more, we don't save anything. >> You know, want to look at kind of, maps versus strategy. >> Okay. >> I guess one of the things, if I'm talking to the typical Enterprise CIO or Board and they say, oh, well, a year ago I heard about Serverless, or today I heard about Serverless, you know, the strategy is going to change greatly because this is changing so rapidly, how do you help companies understand when things are changing so fast, how do I set a strategy for today? How long do I keep it? How often do I revisit it? >> So, if you map an environment, like all maps, they're dynamic, so you're constantly adapting and changing them as the environment is changing. So, when you look at, you have the purpose of your company, you have the landscape you're operating in, there are a number of climatic patents, about 30 of them, which impact that environment, will change it, so you need to understand those. Then there's sort of university useful patents known as doctrine, then there's game play. Now, for most organizations, because they cannot see the environment, they cannot distinguish, or may just be completely oblivious to any of this, so when they were talking about change, if I look at how things evolve from genesis, custom built product commodity, most organizations will go genesis, that's an innovation, every custom built feature differentiation of a product's an innovation, every shift in product to utility is an innovation, so all they see is innovation, innovation, innovation. And therefore, it's very easy to get sucked in to one size fits all methods work. One size innovation programs, where in fact, the genesis you would be using something like a lightweight XP, the product development, much more lean enterprise, so SCRUM and MVP and the utility is much more outsourcing or Six Sigma. So you should be using multiple techniques and multiple methods and most organizations aren't in that position. And if they're not in that position, of being able to see the environment, it's difficult to see where to attack, it's difficult to understand why here over there, it's difficult to manipulate the market. So, what happens is most organizations work on gut feel, whatever's popular in HPR and just act. And you can call that strategy if you wish. >> Alright, so I wish we could talk for another couple of hours, but want to give you the final take away >> Yes. >> Serverless today, how should people be thinking about it and what should they be looking for over the next six to 12 months in this space? >> So, the key thing about Serverless is we're seeing a shift from platform from product to utility, so you should be developing skills in that space. And we're seeing co-evolution of practice. By that, we mean there is a new set of practices combining finance and development together. What those practices are, we don't know yet. You have to experiment and explore. That's why attending events and being involved in building stuff will help you discover those practices. So today if your company, well it depends on your position, so if you're a company which is behind the game, you, say, haven't gone into infractructure as a service, you're not doing DevOps, you're own people are resistant to this change cause the other vendors say you're going to lose their jobs and blah, then rather then embarking on a five to seven year program, 'cause that's how long it will take to do that, you should move up the stack and start with Serverless and learning those practices. 'Cause no one knows them well, so you can take your people who've got inertia and re-train them in that space overcoming that inertia and give yourself a path forward. So, depends on your position, but I think most companies should be experimenting in this space. >> Alright, well Simon Wardley, it's a pleasure to catch up with you today. >> Delight. >> Hope to have you back on theCUBE at another event soon. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for the Oracle Modern Customer Experience conference. This is theCUBE's special coverage. I'm John Furrier, joined with my co-host, Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Roland Smart, Vice President of Social and Community at Oracle and also the author of The Agile Marketer book, which we'll get into in a minute. He'll hold it up so you can make sure, it's also available on audio books, you can hold it up, go ahead. The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experiences into Your Competitive Advantage. Roland, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks so much for the invite. >> Great to have that book there because it sets the table for what we want to talk about which is we love cloud, we've been loving dev-ops since the cloud hit the scene years and years ago, but now that it's gone mainstream, it's going into marketing, you're seeing marketing cloud, it really opens up this notion of agile and changing things, modern platforms, the replatforming. We heard Mark Heard on the keynote, we've heard through our interviews. There's a replatforming going on in the enterprise across the board, and so it's super exciting. I know that you're also doing some cool stuff, modernization inside Oracle, employing Oracle cloud for Oracle, it's pretty comprehensive, so let's start there. What's your role at Oracle? It's kind broad, social and community, which is cutting edge and being operationalized in real time. What are you working on? >> Yeah, so, I've worn a couple different hats in my tenure at Oracle. I've been with the company for about four years. I was one of those marketers who came into the company through an acquisition of a social technology company, and so, I ended up landing in the corporate marketing group. I've, as I said, done a couple different things. I've led the Oracle Technology Network for a while, I was involved in establishing and upgrading our corporate social programs, but right now, I'm really focused on some modernization initiatives, and those are very connected to our inbound marketing practice. That means taking some of these amazing solutions that are part of the Oracle marketing cloud and implementing them for the corporate marketing group. The ones that are really core to my focus are, because it's an inbound marketing focus it's Compendium, which is our content publishing platform. Of course, we also integrate that with Eloqua for subscription and there are other adjacent technologies that we're going to use to improve the service, things like Maximizer, which will allow us to iterate and do testing and improve the service over time. And of course, integrating into all the other major parts of the corporate marketing stack, which includes a DMP and a customer experience database and all the rest. >> So, here at the show, you're seeing marketing cloud being broader defined because it's the customer on a digital life cycle, no analog, I mean, from inception to the moment of truth the experience is digital. It changes things a bit. What is your observation that you could point to as you look at these changes that're going on, tweaks here and radical changes there, what's the big shift, what's the digital value in that digital journey of a customer when it comes to marketing? I mean, it seems that marketing's involved in all touch points. >> It is, I mean, I think, sorry, I think you're talking a little bit about the fact that digital transformation is kind of dominating the marketer's consciousness at the moment. We're very, very focused on really transitioning the experiences that we deliver and to engage with customers and to a digital environment, and that means that there's two side of that. Of course, there's the technology side, but there's also the practices side. I think that a lot of the conversation to date has really been dominated by just an incredible proliferation of marketing technology, the Martech stack, right, is growing at an incredible pace. One of the things that I see, for example-- >> Peter: It's almost daunting, it's huge. >> Rolad: It is. >> It's growing and churning. >> And there's still much more proliferation in the Martech space than there is consolidation even with companies like Oracle acquiring just an incredible number of companies in a relatively short period of time. We've built this amazing stack, but still, there's a lot of venture dollars that are still chasing unmet needs. There are niches that aren't being met, and that says something about the overall maturity of the marketing stack, right. We're still fairly early days in that process, and the technology, what's interesting is that the technology piece in some ways is actually easier than the process change and the culture change that is associated with actually trying to be, develop a strong competency when it comes to these digital channels. I think there's an agile transformation that needs to take place as the digital transformation takes place, and that is really focused on that cultural change and the way that we work, so that we can get the most value out of these digital channels. One of the things that I would just add about an agile transformation, though, is that I think it is a little bit broader than just digital transformation in the sense that you can apply agile to analog channels as well, it's more of an approach or a philosophy, a way of working that happens to be the best practice when it comes to digital platforms, 'cause agile came out of the software development world. Agile's not new, agile really started over 15 years ago when the Agile Manifesto was written by some very, very smart software developers. In the last 15 years, it's become the dominant approach to software development, but beyond that, product management has adopted it, and it's a big part of what has led to the empowerment of product management leaders, I think, is the most influential leader at the most influential, or innovative companies in the world, right. I think marketers have an opportunity to take a page from that book as, of course, marketers are managing more software than ever before. And as we transition to a world in which we're moving away from this campaign-oriented mindset where there's a campaign that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and more towards a product, a program-oriented mindset where there's an ongoing service. >> It's an always-on environment. >> It's an always-on environment where we need to continually iterate and evolve that experience. >> And I think that is the key, I mean, your book you held up called The Agile Marketer, it really does make sense, and I truly believe this, and people who know me, I always rant on this, but I believe that agile and these principles that are well-founded in practice, certainly on the software development side, are moving into data and apps, and ultimately, content and marketing and all the stuff that's in the platform because it's the same trajectory, it's the same concepts. You're doing things that require speed, there's a user component, app component, there's technology involved, so there's a lot of moving parts with it, but it's all threading together. Is that what the book is touching on? Talk about the book. >> Yeah, it is. I mean, so we touched on some of the reasons why marketers are coming to agile. One of them is kind of a no-brainer, we're managing more software than ever before. I don't think anybody's going to argue about that. I think there are some second order things, though, that you touched on with your comments there that are worth calling out. Marketers, well first off, agile is really an approach or a philosophy, which is predicated on this idea that we're working in contexts where it's very difficult to predict the future. There's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of disruption, so the traditional methods that we've used, waterfall which is really, waterfall is based on our ability to predict the future. Create a perfect strategy that's going to unfold over a period of time, but I would challenge you to talk to any marketer here and ask them what marketing plan that they've developed that survived implementation more than three months. Marketers are working in this environment with this tremendous amount of change, so. >> Well, Peter and I were talking about the intro, about the role of data, and I'll give you a case in point is that when, to be agile and to be fast and be, I won't say command and control, but to use that metaphor is, the CEO or business leader, or even someone in the trenches, a hero, an innovator, says, "Wow, there's an opportunity to move the needle," innovate or whatever they see, 'cause some data insight, surfaces insight, and they go, "Wow, that changes everything. "Deploy X, Y, and Z," or "Tweak this." >> Let's do something small, validate if we're heading in the right direction quickly, and then, if we get a signal that says, hey, there's something that's working here, we'll invest more and iterate, and it really removes waste from the process of developing marketing programs. >> This is the thing, I think you're on to something with this, and this is what we talk about in the cloud wards. In cloud, we hear things like standing up servers, Horizontally scalable. In marketing it's stand up that campaign now, which you might have an hour notice. Imagine rolling up and standing up a multi-geography campaign in an hour. >> Roland: Right. >> That should be doable. >> Absolutely, and I think, so, going back to some of the second order things, one of the things that marketers are challenged to do is if we want to stand up a campaign, it's not just that the marketer's world is changing more quickly, right. Product management adopted agile because their world is moving very quickly, so if you have a situation where product management is deploying something on a monthly basis or even on a daily basis, marketing needs to work at that same pace. And so, agile can be a collaboration layer where because they speak the same language and share a similar process, they can stay in sync. When you do that, you can deliver experiences that kind of blur the boundary between what I would call traditional marketing and what we think of as product. This is a really interesting space, and I would say one of the most fun spaces where I've ever had the opportunity to work is when you can blur that boundary. And so, having agile means not just that we can deploy our own programs quickly and test them quickly and validate that we're heading in the right direction, but it means that we can do that in close collaboration with our product management peers. And really, that's where you get to incredible value. >> One of the reasons why it's diffused into product management as aggressively as it has is because increasingly the products are being rendered as services that have significant digital components to them. You mentioned the idea of philosophy, and it's kind of an interesting case to show how the agile philosophy has hopped from software development into products, it's now into marketing. My observation, I want to test this with you and see if you have anything to add is that the agile philosophy is founded on three core principles. One is that you have to be empirical. Two is that you have to be iterative. And three is that you have to be opportunistic. And you can add others, like you got to be people focused, and you got to recognize time-bound, et cetera, and all those types of things, but as you look at marketing, is marketing starting to adopt that notion of you got to be empirical, you got to be iterative, and you got to be opportunistic? You can't, you know, hold onto your babies, so to speak. Is that kind of what's at the base of some of this new philosophical changes, or are you seeing some other things as well? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you've definitely touched on some of the drivers. I think that there are, something that I would recommend people who, marketers who are interested in agile should check out a document called The Agile Marketing Manifesto, which interprets The Agile Manifesto for marketers, and like The Agile Manifesto, it has a set of values and a set of underlying principles. The three things that you called out relate pretty tightly to some of the values that are baked into The Agile Manifesto and The Agile Marketing Manifesto. I think one of the central ideas is that because we can't predict the future, we need to do, or we're operating in sort of a chaotic domain where we're in this domain with this unknown unknowns. We don't really know how people are going to react, we can't predict that well, and so, we need to get into this different modality or mindset where we say, you know what, instead of trying to build a perfect strategy, we're just going to do lots of small things. We're going to test things, we're going to validate that we're heading in the right direction or not. >> Peter: Test empirical. >> Yeah, that's all about the testing and validation with empirical data. >> Peter: The iterative. >> Yep, and then, you just keep iterating on that and zeroing in on product market fit or the value that the program-- >> Or the option seems best, which is the opportunistic, and there are others as well, but are marketers having a hard time doing that, or in your experience, do they start? >> It's a pretty significant, yeah, it's a very significant change. Most marketers are, grew up with or started their career with waterfall, and waterfall is still very dominant. If you were to look, for example, what is the, what in the context of, or in the parlance of crossing the chasm, where are we with agile marketing? >> I think we've crossed that. >> I think we're at a place where we see early adopters who are out there really proving value but the pragmatists in the marketplace, the people who adopt something because they're getting on the bandwagon, because their peer are doing it, it's not there yet. It's on their radar, but it's not there yet. What I see happening is that there's, we're just at the beginning of starting an ecosystem that is going to support taking agile more mainstream. What I mean is if you look at, for example, the biggest management consulting firms, the McKinseys, the Bains, they are now building out agile transformation practices that are coupled to their digital transformation practice that already exists and has existed for a while. If you look at the company's out there that do certification and training, folks who will come into your organization and train you on Scrum or Kanban, the two most popular agile methods, they have traditionally been focused on engineers and product managers. They are now starting to build offerings for business-oriented folks. We're starting to see agile sessions and tracks at conferences like this one. Obviously, people like me are writing books, and there are more books coming to market, so these are the signals that marketers, this is getting on marketers' radar and that they're transitioning. I think where you see the most traction for agile, there are certain silos within the marketing function where you see more traction with it. >> Peter: Social being a big one. >> Social being a big one. >> Because the data's available. >> Marketing automation being a really big one, 'cause fundamentally, it's about testing and validation, and these programs are always running, so you're constantly evaluating the performance of messages that you're sending out, and tweaking them and optimizing them. Solutions like the ones, we have a solution in the Oracle marketing cloud called Maximizer, which is just, it is fundamentally an enabler, an enabling technology to allow a marketer to be agile. We can do things in the context of our publishing platform where we can show multi-variant, we can run multi-variant tasks and show them to users and quickly validate what's working and what's not, and so, that's a very different way of working than I think marketers have traditionally adopted. We talked already about the fact that just bringing in the technology is actually, I think, easier than trying to drive the cultural change. The cultural change is really, really hard, and we're still at the beginning of that process, I think. >> And your final thoughts, I want to get to the final question here on this evolution, the progress bar, if you will, crossing the chasm. This is a sea change, so I think a lot of people, we live in the bubble in Silicon Valley, but middle of the industry, middle of America, they're still doing waterfall, which they need, in my opinion, need to move to agile, but because of the benefits of having a platform and enabling technologies and products, 'cause apps is where the action is, we agree. What is your big takeaway from this year in terms of this show and the impact of this platform, this enabling concept that you guys are pushing for? What's the most important thing folks should understand about agile, social, platform, modern customer experience? >> We talked a minute ago about the Martech ecosystem, and the fact that overall the ecosystem is still, there's immaturity for the overall ecosystem, but within that ecosystem there are some very mature solutions, and I think that particularly for enterprises that are using those more mature solutions, they are now transitioning from this period where they've been very focused on building that technology stack, and they're starting to think about how do we more dramatically make changes to the way that we work so that we can develop a stronger competency in digital, and I think that this connects to, if you were to ask me, connecting this back to modern marketing, at what point can a company sort of say, okay, we meaningfully positioned ourselves. >> We're modern, we're modernized. >> What is modern? >> What is modern, and so, >> That's a great question. >> from my perspective, I would connect it back to the role that the CMO plays or the marketing organization plays within the larger company. We talked a little bit about the fact that the product management leader has really been empowered over a long period of time in large part because they've adopted agile, and they're working in a different way. They are serving as the steward of innovation. The marketer has this aspiration to really serve as the steward of customer experience. Now today, we're at a place where most marketers, we're really in the best position to measure and understand the customer experience, but we have limited influence when it comes to changing those touch points. A lot of those touch points aren't under our direct purview. So, we need to get that influence. One way to get that influence is to share the process of the people who have control over those things, that means when we, again, we have agile, we can share process with project management, we can influence those touch points more, that is when the marketer can step up and truly serve as the steward of customer experience, that's when I would say that we've sort of reached the status of modern era. >> A modern era. I think you're on to something. I think the checkbox immediately is are you agile. That's a quick acid test, yes or no. I think that's so fundamental, but I think the user experience is really key, and you've seen the platforms become the enabler where the apps are just coming out, it's a tsunami of apps, and that's an okay thing, but the platform has to be stable. I think that's just an evolution of the role of software, from shrink wrap, from downloading on the internet, to web 2.0 to mobile to platform. >> I'd step back even one level before that, John, and say are you empirical? At the end of the day, is your culture ready to make changes based on what the data says? Because then it says you're going to go out and get the data, you're going to use the data, then you can-- >> And the data has to be good, data has to be legit. >> It has to be good. >> And not dirty. >> 'Cause if you are, then you can have that, we talked about this earlier, then you can have that conversation with the leader and empower the leader to actually lead change. >> Data orientation, customer orientation is a really, those are both critical values that are baked into agile. >> Absolutely. You have to test your organization on whether or not they're really able to do those things. If they are, then a lot of the other stuff that you're talking about falls, starts falling a little bit more naturally into place. >> Well, Roland, we need to follow up, certainly, back in Palo Alto in our studio. This has been really, I think, an important conversation that's worthy of more dialogue, what is a modern organization in this new era of computing where the expectations of the customers and the users and the consumers are at an all-time high? You're seeing the demand and the need for a platform that's truly enabling innovation and value. Certainly great conversation, thanks for joining us on theCUBE today. Sharing the insight as we stay agile, modern here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Be right back with more after this short break. (electronic keyboard music)