>>And welcome back to the Cube everyone. I'm John Walls to continue our coverage here of AWS Reinvent 22. We're part of the AWS Startup Showcase is the global startup program that AWS so proudly sponsors and with us to talk about what they're doing now in the AWS space. Shaun Knapps, the CEO of AS Send IO and Sean, good to have here with us. We appreciate >>It. Thanks for having me, >>John. Yeah, thanks for the time. First off, gotta show the t-shirt. You caught my attention. Big data is a cluster. I don't think you get a lot of argument from some folks, right? But it's your job to make some sense of it, is it not? Yeah. Tell us about a Send io. >>Sure. As Send IO is a data automation platform. What we do is connect a lot of the, the disparate parts of what data teams do when they create ETL and E o T data pipelines. And we use advanced levels of automation to make it easier and faster for them to build these complex systems and have their world be a little bit less of a, a cluster. >>All right. So let's get into automation a little bit then again, I, your definition of automation and how you're applying it to your business case. >>Absolutely. You know, what we see oftentimes is as spaces mature and evolve, the number of repetitive and repeatable tasks that actually become far less differentiating, but far more taxable if you will, right to the business, start to accumulate as those common patterns emerge. And, and, you know, as we see standardization around tech stacks, like on Amazon and on Snowflake and on data bricks, and as you see those patterns really start to, to formalize and standardize, it opens up the door to basically not have your team have to do all those things anymore and write code or perform the same actions that they used to always have to, and you can lean more on technology to properly automate and remove the, the monotony of those tasks and give your teams greater leverage. >>All right. So, so let's talk about at least maybe your, the journey, say in the past 18 months in terms of automation and, and what have you seen from a trend perspective and how are you trying to address that in order to, to meet that need? >>Yeah, I think the last 18 months have become, you know, really exciting as we've seen both that, you know, a very exciting boom and bust cycle that are driving a lot of other macro behaviors. You know, what we've seen over the last 18 months is far greater adoption of the, the standard, what we call the data planes, the, the architectures around snowflake and data bricks and, and Amazon. And what that's created as a result is the emergence of what I would call is the next problem. You know, as you start to solve that category of how >>You, that's it always works too, isn't >>It? Yeah, exactly. Always >>Works that >>This is the wonderful thing about technology is the job security. There's always the next problem to go solve. And that's what we see is, you know, as we we go into cloud, we get that infinite scale, infinite capacity, capacity, infinite flexibility. And you know, with these modern now data platforms, we get that infinite ability to store and process data incredibly quickly with incredible ease. And so what, what do most organizations do? You take a ton of new bodies, like all the people who wanted to do those like really cool things with data you're like, okay, now you can. And so you start throwing a lot more use cases, you start creating a lot more data products, you start doing a lot more things with data. And this is really where that third category starts to emerge, which is you get this data mess, not mesh, but the data mess. >>You get a cluster cluster, you get a cluster exactly where the complexity skyrockets. And as a result that that rapid innovation that, that you are all looking for and, and promised just comes to a screeching halt as you're just, just like trying to swim through molasses. And as a result, this is where that, that new awareness around automation starts really heightened. You know, we, we did a really interesting survey at the start of this year, did it as a blind survey, independent third party surveyed, 500 chief data officers, data scientists, data architects, and asked them a plethora of questions. But one of the questions we asked them was, do you currently or do you intend on investing in data automation to increase your team's productivity? And what was shocking, and I was very surprised by this, okay, what was shocking was only three and a half percent said they do today. Which is really interesting because it really hones in on this notion of automation is beyond what a lot of a think of, you know, tooling and enhancements today, only three and a half percent today had it, but 88.5% said they intend on making data automation investments in the next 12 months. And that stark contrast of how many people have a thing and how many people want that benefit of automation, right? I think it is incredibly critical as we look to 2023 and beyond. >>I mean, this seems like a no-brainer, does it not? I mean, know it is your business, of course you agree with me, but, but of course, of course what brilliant statement. But it is, it seems like, you know, the more you're, you're able to automate certain processes and then free up your resources and your dollars to be spent elsewhere and your, and your human capital, you know, to be invested elsewhere. That just seems to be a layup. I'm really, I'm very surprised by that three and a half percent figure >>I was too. I actually was expecting it to be higher. I was expecting five to 10%. Yeah. As there's other tools in the, the marketplace around ETL tools or orchestration tools that, that some would argue fit in the automation category. And I think the, what, what the market is telling us based on, on that research is that those themselves are, don't qualify as automation. That, that the market has a, a larger vision for automation. Something that is more metadata driven, more AI back, that takes us a greater leap and of leverage for the teams than than what the, the existing capabilities in the industry today can >>Afford. Okay. So if you got this big leap that you can make, but, but, but maybe, you know, should sites be set a little lower, are you, are you in danger of creating too much of an expectation or too much of a false hope? Because you know, I mean sometimes incremental increases are okay. I >>Agree. I I I think the, you know, I think you wanna do a little bit of both. I think you, you want to have a plan for, for reaching for the stars and you gotta be really pragmatic as well. Even inside of a a suni, we actually have a core value, which is build for 10 x plan for a hundred x and so know where you're going, right? But, but solve the problems that are right in front of you today as, as you get to that next scale. And I think the, the really important part for a lot of companies is how do you think about what that trajectory is and be really smart around where you choose to invest as you, one of the, the scenes that we have is last year's innovation is next year's anchor around your neck. And that's because we, we were in this very fortunately, so this really exciting, rapidly moving innovative space, but the thing that was your advantage not too long ago is everybody can move so quickly now becomes commonplace and a year or two later, if you don't jump on whatever that next innovation is that the industry start to standardize on, you're now on hook paying massive debt and, and paying, you know, you thought you had, you know, home mortgage debt and now you're paying the worst of credit card debt trying to pay that down and maintain your velocity. >>It's >>A whole different kind of fomo, right? I'm fair, miss, I'm gonna miss out. What am I missing out on? What the next big thing exactly been missing out >>On that? And so we encourage a lot of folks, you know, as you think about this as it pertains to automation too, is you solve for some of the problems right in front of you, but really make sure that you're, you're designing the right approach that as you stack on, you know, five times, 10 times as many people building data products and, and you, you're, you're your volume and library of, of data weaving throughout your, your business, make sure you're making those right investments. And that's one of the reasons why we do think automation is so important and, and really this, this next generation of automation, which is a, a metadata and AI back to level of automation that can just achieve and accomplish so much more than, than sort of traditional norms. >>Yeah. On that, like, as far as Dex Gen goes, what do you think is gonna be possible that cloud sets the stage for that maybe, you know, not too long ago seem really outta reach, like, like what's gonna give somebody to work on that 88% in there that's gonna make their spin come your way? >>Ah, good question. So I, I think there's a couple fold. I, you know, I think the, right now we see two things happening. You know, we see large movements going to the, the, the dominant data platforms today. And, and you know, frankly, one of the, the biggest challenges we see people having today is just how do you get data in which is insanity to me because that's not even the value extraction, that is the cost center piece of it. Just get data in so you can start to do something with it. And so I think that becomes a, a huge hurdle, but the access to new technologies, the ability to start to unify more of your data and, and in rapid fashion, I think is, is really important. I think as we start to, to invest more in this metadata backed layer that can connect that those notions of how do you ingest your data, how do you transform it, how do you orchestrate it, how do you observe it? One of the really compelling parts of this is metadata does become the new big data itself. And so to do these really advanced things to give these data teams greater levels of automation and leverage, we actually need cloud capabilities to process large volumes of not the data, but the metadata around the data itself to deliver on these really powerful capabilities. And so I think that's why the, this new world that we see of the, the developer platforms for modern data cloud applications actually benefit from being a cloud native application themselves. >>So before you take off, talk about the AWS relationship part of the startup showcase part of the growth program. And we've talked a lot about the cloud, what it's doing for your business, but let's just talk about again, how integral they have been to your success and, and likewise what you're thinking maybe you bring to their table too. Yeah, >>Well we bring a lot to the table. >>Absolutely. I had no doubt about that. >>I mean, honestly, it, working with with AWS has been truly fantastic. Yep. You know, I think, you know, as a, a startup that's really growing and expanding your footprint, having access to the resources in AWS to drive adoption, drive best practices, drive awareness is incredibly impactful. I think, you know, conversely too, the, the value that Ascend provides to the, the AWS ecosystem is tremendous leverage on onboarding and driving faster use cases, faster adoption of all the really great cool, exciting technologies that we get to hear about by bringing more advanced layers of automation to the existing product stack, we can make it easier for more people to build more powerful things faster and safely. Which I think is what most businesses at reinvent really are looking for. >>It's win-win, win-win. Yeah. That's for sure. Sean, thanks for the time. Thank you John. Good job on the t-shirt and keep up the good work. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Sean Na, joining us here on the AWS startup program, part of their of the Startup Showcase. We are of course on the Cube, I'm John Walls. We're at the Venetian in Las Vegas, and the cube, as you well know, is the leader in high tech coverage.

(steady music) >> Oh, welcome back here on theCUBE. I'm John Walls, we're in The Venetian and day one of a jam-packed three days here at AWS re:Invent '22. This is the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture, and it is Merck time. And I mean, it is loaded with Merck time. We have quite the panel here, in fact. First threesome of the day, by the way. I see you guys have really loaded up nicely. Ron Kim is with us, the SVP and CTO of Merck. Ron, good to see you, sir. >> Thanks, John. >> Also, Fran Gaetens, who's the VP of Technology Infrastructure, Operations, and Experience, which I want to hear more about. Love that job title, Fran. >> Thanks, John. >> And Sean Finnerty, VP of Cloud and Infrastructure Technology. Again, everybody here from Merck. So fellows, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks, John. >> Appreciate the time. >> Yeah. >> So let's just talk about Merck, first off in general in terms of what's happening with the cloud. And Ron, I'll let you jump onto that first. I realize this talk of journey, right? >> Mm-hm. >> It's different for everybody, different slices depending upon where you are, where you start, where you need to finish. Where are you right now in terms of what you're doing with the cloud? >> Yeah, John, we've been on this journey for about two years, have done some great work and achieve some great results in proving we could move to the cloud, moving to the cloud at scale, achieving really measurable financial and operational results. Where we're focusing now going forward is transforming the business. And as you know, our business is saving and improving lives. And so when we talk about moving things to the cloud, it's much more than just moving servers or things like that. It's really contributing towards our business that saves and improves lives. So for our work that we work on together moving into the cloud, the stakes are high, but we think the opportunity's great. And the way to seize that opportunity is what we're doing now, is our BlueSky program and working with AWS and Accenture on it. >> Yeah, so two years, you're two years in. It's like nascent stage still, right? I mean, and it never ends, (laughs) frankly. >> Yeah. >> But talk about that progression and was it, you know, baby steps, was it diving in? I mean, how do you decide, you know, the batting order basically here about how you're going to get things going? >> The early parts of the the two-year journey so far, we're really starting small, primarily driven by a central team. And we did that consciously to get momentum, build the foundation, prove again we could move things to the cloud with success, we could start to scale. And then as that journey went on, now instead of just relying on the central team, we're starting to get the rest of the company involved. So this is not just this team doing the cloud journey. It's the whole company, and that's an ongoing journey, getting all the different stakeholders involved and things like that. But I think that's where we are on the journey now, is look, let's lock arms with everybody in the company. So it's a Merck-wide cloud transformation, not just the BlueSky team. >> Right, and of course, as you know, the C-suite's got to be behind all this. And we hear about how that it's now being driven in some cases, you know, these kind of transformations, whether it's from CEO level down the CTO and CIO and what have you. Fran, the experience part of your job. I just want to get to that real quick. So you know, how do you define that? >> Yeah. First of all, I'm delighted you asked. >> Okay. (laughs) >> And the focus on experience that my team's accountable for transcends, you know, our cloud journey. We have held for the last three years within my organization a priority that's focused on improving the experience that colleagues in our company have with workplace technology and services. And so I'd come into this role at the time and thought carefully, you know, about how to best title our organization in a way that would draw curiosity or inquisition. >> Sure. >> A very creative colleague that we have an opportunity to work with in our company suggested the term, and I loved it and ran with it. And today, it's, you know, still something that we spend a significant portion of cycles focused on. >> Well, it's a very clear signal, right? And a reminder as well that ultimately the experience whether it's your internal stakeholders or external, your customers, right, that you're delivering a very pleasant and efficient, and hopefully you said life-saving >> Yeah. >> experience as well. And I think that'd be a pretty good reminder for your team, isn't it? >> It is. >> "Hey, we're all part of the experience here." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Right, so Sean, let's talk about some of the things that we've discussed here, branching out within Merck. >> Yep. >> You know, and making it a company effort, not just an IT effort. Right, now all of a sudden, you're into everybody's business and everybody is sharing this. I mean, is there buying that's necessary here? I mean, how do you bring that bunch along? You've all lived it, you know it. They're experiencing it for the first time. >> Yeah, it's a great question and it's one we get quite a bit walking the halls here at re:Invent. We're very lucky in that we do have, you mentioned earlier, top-down support, right? So when we're talking about moving to the cloud, we're not just running around the halls of the technology, you know, cubes of all the people that are sitting there at computers banging away every day. We're meeting with the CEO and a significant portion of the executive team, talking about how does our cloud journey underpin our business transformation aspirations? How do we speed up scientific research? How do we do clinical trials more effectively? How do we manufacture medicine more effectively, more reliably? Those are all underpinned by this technology transformation that we're embarking on sort of from the bottoms up, and meeting in the middle with the top-down strategic imperative to transform the business by leveraging technology. So that clear and unambiguous support coming from the C-suite at our company allows us to prioritize very aggressively and point at that mission to say, "Hey, we're not just here to talk about moving a server or two. We're here to talk about how we transform scientific research and discovery in the interest of our patients and delivering medicine more effectively, more quickly." So it's really, really interesting. >> Yeah, and so being on one side of that, you know, obviously you're dealing with people, whether chemists, scientists, whomever doing computational chemistry whatever it might be. They know their business and you're trying to integrate these new capabilities into their business, right? How do you do that? I mean, how do you know what they need and how do they tell you what they need when they don't know what you have? (laughs) >> That's quite a question. >> Yeah. I got there. >> Yeah, I mean, my initial thought is, you know, there has to be a compelling value to anybody getting impacted by this. And that's what we all work to do. So whether it's faster, less lead time, reducing cycle times, more reliability, innovation, I mean, there has to be something in it for them, and the work we're doing crosses that whole spectrum. So some of the efforts we have, "Hey, this is a cost-savings effort, this is for agility, this is for speed." So you know, it can't be just we're just doing this for the sake of moving of the cloud. There has some business value in it. And you know, Sean and the team have done a great job on kind of putting the rigor behind how do we describe that value so people then say, "Is that value really there or not? And does it really add up?" And I think that's been one of the keys to our success, is the work that Sean and members of his team have been doing is there's a pretty rigorous way we track our progress. And we've involved finance from day one in that. So having their buy in, you know, gives the whole set of results a lot of credibility. >> But tell me about that, Sean, about in terms of identifying value and quantifying it, in terms that a bottom line can orient to that. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've been at the cloud migration game myself personally for years, right? I got into this game back in 2011. The challenge of those programs has always been articulating the value associated with migrating stuff. It's easy to say, "I'm going to take a server. I'm going to move it from here to here. Then that difference is X, point at that." That's easy, everyone can understand that. But the labor efficiencies and the business value and the business transformation that comes with moving a capability from on-prem or from another hosting service to the cloud and transforming how we deliver, manage, operate, and scale those solutions, that's really where the power of this comes from, is business value tied to discrete actions, moving systems with a plan from one point to another point. And then being able to clearly articulate the value by implementing, as Ron mentioned, models we've created. So we've created actually financial calculation models to put dollars and cents next to labor efficiencies, time liberated, you know, the ability to deliver with higher velocity, higher quality, higher reliability. Those now have dollar values associated with them, which we're able to take, apply to our portfolio, and look for those opportunities that jump out as, "Hey, you know, that one's worth a million bucks. Let's prioritize that one. The ones that maybe have lower value or less business impact, you know, let's put those to the side and get to those later." So we can constantly demonstrate that not only are we raising our ability to deliver for our patients, but we're also delivering value back to the corporation to invest in other things that need focus and attention. >> Yeah, so talk about AWS and Accenture a little bit about, I mean, obviously big players with this. I'm assuming that interaction, maybe Fran, you know, talk about the partnership and again, how they have helped you get to the point that where you currently reside. >> Yeah, our partnership with both firms has been longstanding. That said, you know, what's changed in a market way happened a couple years ago when we originated this cloud acceleration program that we called BlueSky. We worked directly with Accenture to develop a comprehensive business case that, you know, fundamentally lined out the detail of our intention, how we would prosecute this work, and you know, among other things be crystal clear about the value at stake and how we would capture and realize that over time. So you know, through that lens, it's really taken a village with parties from all three firms, you know, to come together, prosecute this important work, but likewise, as I like to say, keep score, you know, in the context of value because ultimately, it's the one thing that we can talk about unambiguously with the program in the context of measurable results. >> Because of the work you do, obviously, you know, invaluable in many respects. But just the thought about cloud, and I know governance, security, compliance, all these things are critical. You know, how do those weigh in, in terms of considerations you have to make? And especially going forward as you develop new ideas, new things, ideas you're trying to bring to market, >> Yeah. >> I mean, how much does that play and the cloud and what exposures there might be? >> Yeah, it plays in quite a bit. And no matter what type of work we do, cloud or on-premise, I mean, security is of utmost importance. That's how we operate. Now what's interesting is when we think about in AWS, you know, AWS has the ability, they have the the scale and the learnings from multiple clients, right? So rather than a single company like us trying to figure out security on our own, we can benefit from what are all the lessons that they've learned that they bake back into their platform. So that's been a great benefit. But regardless of our partner, we'll always be very, a lot of scrutiny about security no matter what. And that's how we should operate. But the benefits of the platform within AWS, I mean, there's a lot of security intelligence built in from their experience, so that's- >> If I can add to that- >> Sure. >> Yeah. To build on prior remarks that Sean had articulated, this migration to the cloud, right, happens to be a catalyst for a broader transformation. One where we're fundamentally changing our ways of working. Ways that consider, you know, topics like security, compliance, documentation, regulatory requirements. And choosing to bake those in to these solutions from the onset rather than consider them as an appendage or an afterthought. So you know, the cloud is a really important part of this. You know, there's no mistake about it, but it's also a powerful catalyst for something that's broader. >> Tremendously more efficient, right? With our thinking and how we're going to plan and how we're going to execute. >> Yeah, and to build on that even more, we view it as an opportunity to raise the bar on our compliance, security, and regulatory readiness game. As we're touching applications across our portfolio, rearchitecting, leaning in on things like the well-architected framework and other things that AWS and Accenture bring to bear. We set the bar higher when we move things from where they are today to a new destination and introduce automation so that that uplift of control does not come at the cost of additional time or labor. It's simply we're raising the bar in ourselves. We're using this transformational opportunity to implement that change. Our customers are along for the ride and reap the benefits of the fact that, you know, we've raised the bar on ourselves, basically. >> Well, you said two years, so the first steps, and I'm sure the next ones are going to be just as successful. I really appreciate the time. Thanks for sharing that and for bringing so much expertise at the table. >> Thanks, John. >> Appreciate that, good to have you guys with us. >> Thanks. >> Talking about Merck and their cloud transformation. Love that word, we've been talking a lot about it this week. You're watching theCUBE, of course, here at the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And theCUBE being, of course, the leader at tech coverage. (calm music)

(theme music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, theCUBE's live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for AWS re:Inforce '22. Big show for ground security, Amazon re:Invent's coming up. That's the big event of all time for AWS. re:MARS was another one, re:Inforce, the re:Shows, they call them, theCUBE's got you covered. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, who's in an analyst session right now. He'll be back shortly. We've got 2 great guests from an amazing company, HackerOne, been on theCUBE many times, (mumbles) Marten Mickos, of course, a big time, (mumbles) We got two great guests. Sean Ryan, Sr. Principal Product Marketing Manager Will Kapcio, Senior Sales Engineer. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us John. >> So Marten's been on many times, he's such a character. He's such a legend. >> Yeah. >> Your company has had great traction, great community, just this phenomenal example of community meets technology and problem solver. >> Yeah. >> He's been part of that organization. Here at re:Inforce they're just kind of getting wind of it now, right? You hear an open, teamwork, breaking down the silos, a big theme is this whole idea of open community, but yet be hardcore with the security. It's been a big part of the re:Inforce. What do you guys think of the show so far? >> Loving it. Partly too, we're both local here in the Boston area. So the commute was pretty nice. (everyone laughs) And the heat wave broke the other day so that's wonderful, but yeah, great show. It's good to be back in person doing this kind of stuff and just, it's really lively. You get a lot of good energy. We've had a bunch of people stopping by trying to learn what we're all about and so, it's really fun. Great show so far. >> And you guys have a great company. Take a minute to explain for the folks who may not know HackerOne. Tell them what you guys do real quick in one minute. >> Okay, the quick elevator pitch. (chuckles) So really we're making the internet safer using a community of ethical hackers. And so our platform enables that so we can skill match the best talent that's out there around the world to help find all the vulnerabilities that your company needs to discover. So you can plug those holes and keep yourself safe. >> So in an era of a talent gap, Will, you know the technologies out there, but sometimes the skills are not there. So you guys can feel the void kind of a crowdsourced vibe, right? >> Yeah, exactly. If you're trying to build a security program, and apply defense in depth, we offer a terrific way to engage additional security talent either because you can't hire enough or your team is simply overloaded, too much to do, so. >> Hackers like to be a little bit, white hat hackers like to be independent, might want some flexibility in their schedule, live around the world. >> Yes. No question for hackers that do it full time, that do it part-time and then everything in between. >> Well, you guys are in the middle here with some real products. So talk about what's going on here. How vulnerable are the surface areas in organizations that you're seeing? >> Yeah, probably more so than you would think. So we ran a survey earlier this year, 800 security and IT professionals across North America and Europe. And one of the findings from that survey was that nearly a third, actually over a third, 37% of the attack surfaces, not secured. Some of it's not even known. They don't know what they don't know. They just have this entire area. And you can imagine, I mean there's a lot of reasons you know, real legitimate reasons that this happens. One of those really being that we don't know what we don't know. We haven't scanned our attack surface. >> And also it's about a decade of no perimeter anymore. >> Yes. >> Welcome to the cloud. >> For sure. Absolutely. And people are moving quick, right? You know, the Cloud perfect example. Cloud people are building new applications on top of these new underlying configurations happening on a constant basis. Acquisitions, you know, that's just a fast moving thing. Nobody can keep track of it. There's a lot of different skill sets you need you know. And yeah, skill shortage out there too. As we talked about. >> What's the attacker solution you guys have? You guys have this HackerOne attack resistance component, what's that about? >> That's right. So that is to solve what we call the attack resistance gap. So that area that's not protected, hasn't been secured, on top of just not knowing what those assets are, or how vulnerable they are. The other thing that happens is people are sort of doing status quo testing, or they're not able to keep up with effective testing. So scanners are great. They can catch common vulnerabilities, but they're not going to catch those really hard to find vulnerabilities. The thing that the really sophisticated attackers are going to go after. >> Yeah. >> So we use... This large community that we have of ethical hackers around the world to be able to skill match them and get them doing bug bounties, doing pen tests, really bulletproofing the organization, and helping them risk-rank what they find. >> Yeah. >> Triage these, do the retesting, you know, get it very secure. So that's how we do it on a high level. Will, you might have a-- >> Yeah. I mean there's a tremendous amount of automation out there, right? But you can't quite at least not yet replace critical thinking. >> Yeah. >> From smart security minds. So HackerOne has a number of solutions where we can apply those minds in different ways at different parts of the software life cycle at different cadences, to fit our customers' needs, to fit their security needs, and make sure that there's more complete human coverage throughout their software lifecycle, and not just automation. >> Yeah. I think that's a great point, Will and Sean, because you think about open source is like not only grown significantly, it's like's it is the software industry. If you believe that, which I do. Open source is there it's all software free. The integration is creating a DevOps movement that's going the whole level. So Devs are doing great. They're pumping out codes. In fact, I heard a quote here on theCUBE earlier this morning from the CTO Sequence Security that said: "Shift left but shield right." So shifting left is build your security into the code, but still you got to have a shield. You guys have this shielding capability with your attack module management service. So you now you got the Devs thinking: "I got to get better security native" So but they're pumping out so much code. >> Yep. >> There's more use cases, so there's going to be code reviews needed for stuff that she said, "What is this? We got to code review new stuff. A developer created something." >> Yes. >> I mean, that's what happened. That's what's going on everywhere, right? >> Exactly. We often hear that for every 100 developers, you've got one security professional. (John laughs) You know, talk about skill shortage that's just not sustainable. How are you going to keep up with that? >> Yeah. >> So-- >> Your phone is ringing off the hook. There's no phones anymore, but like technically-- >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, yeah, you need to go external find some experts who can help you figure that out, and keep up with that cadence, you know keeps going and going. >> So, HackerOne. I love the ethical thing. I mean, you know, I'm a big fan. Everyone who watches theCUBE knows I'm a big fan of Marten and your company, but it's not just bug bounties that you do. That's just people think of, they see that in the news. "Oh, I made a million dollars from saving Microsoft teams from being exploited" or something like that, or weird things big numbers. But you do more than that. There's code reviews, there's assessments, like a variety of different things, right? >> Yes, exactly. Exactly. >> What are the hottest areas? >> Yeah, I mean, that's exactly why we coined the term, Attack Resistance Management really is to help describe all those areas that we cover, so you're right, bug bounty is our flagship product. It's what we're best known for. And it's a terrific solution. But on top of that, we're able to layer things like vulnerability disclosure, pen testing and code review. >> Pen test is actually really important-- >> Attack surface management, you know, a whole suite of complimentary offerings to help you engage these hackers in new and interesting ways. >> Yeah. >> The bug bounty is very popular because it's fun. >> Yeah. >> I mean if your going to work on something... It's fun for the hackers but the white hat hackers, the companies they can see where's my bugs it's the fear of missing out and the fear of getting screwed over. That's the biggest driver, right, you Know-- >> Yes, definitely and we now have a product called assets. So this is attack surface management. And what we're able to do with that is bring that in leverage the ethical hackers to risk-rank. What's your assets out there? How vulnerable are these? What's critical? Feed that in, and then you know, as Will was saying we've got all kinds of different testing options. Sometimes bug bounty continuous that works. Sometimes you want pen test, you know, you want it bound. >> Well, the thing about the thing about the pen test, well the soccer report, Amazon's got soccer reports but pen test is a moving train. >> Yeah >> Cause if you're pushing new code, you got to pen test it all the time. It's not a one and done. >> Exactly. >> You got to keep it running. Just one and run, right? >> You can't do the old school penetration test once a year, big monolithic thing. You know, this is just a check the box for compliances like, no, you need to be focusing this on the assets that you're releasing, which are constantly changing. And doing ongoing smaller cadences of pen testing. >> I had someone at a conference had a few cocktails in them, confessed to me, that they forged a pen test report. >> Oh man. >> Wow! (everyone laughs) >> Because he's like, "Oh! It was three months ago. Don't Worry about it." Like, but a lot can happen in three months. No, this is reality, they are like, "I can't turn it around fast enough" They had an Apsec review... >> Yeah. >> In their company and... >> And that's it. >> I mean, I'm not saying everyone's doing bad behavior, but like people can look the other way that creates more vulnerabilities. >> It can happen. And even just that time space. Let's say you're only doing a pen test once a year or once every two years. That's a long time. It's a lot of dwell time, you can have an attacker inside mulling around your network. >> All right. So we get a big service here. This one, AWS, we're here at re:Inforce the trend that you see Amazon getting closer to the ecosystem, lot more integration. How are you guys taking HackerOne's attack surface area product management software, closer to Amazon? What's going involved? Because at the end of the day they're enabling a lot of value and their partners are growing and becoming platforms within of themselves. What is the connection with Amazon? Keeping those apps running? How do you guys do that? >> Yeah. So we've got a specific assessment type for AWS. So... On the one hand, we're bringing in the right group of ethical hack hackers who are AWS certified. They have the right skillset, we're matching them. We've got the right assessment type for them to be able to track against and find the right vulnerabilities, report on those. So this is our pen test offering geared particularly towards the AWS platform. And then we also have an AWS security hub integration. So if customers are using the AWS security hub, we can plug into that, feed that information. And that gets more to it, the defense and depth for your AWS. >> And you guys verify all the ethical hackers? Everything's verified? >> Oh yes, absolutely. Fully. >> Yep. So they're verified for their pen testing experience, and skills and of course their AWS skills in particular. And their work experience, making sure that it's long enough that it's good, background check, the whole nine, so. >> How far has Amazon come from your perspective, over the past few years with the security partnerships? I mean their services have grown every year. I mean, every Amazon re:Invent, thousands of new announcements, new services. I mean if they update the DNS server, it's a new thing. Right? So like everything's happening. >> Yeah. >> What's different now? >> It's great to see. I mean, you look around at how many different types of security solutions there are here how many different types of partners, and it just shows you that defense in depth again, it's a really critical thing. Been a wonderful partner for us. I mean that, they're a big fan of us. They tell us that all the time. >> Yeah, 'cause the customers use you. >> Cause they're customers too. Right. Exactly. Exactly. But no, it's, it's been great. So we're looking at, we've got some things on the roadmap, some continued integrations that we look forward to doing with AWS, but you know, again it's a great powerful platform. It gives customers a lot of freedom, but with that freedom comes the responsibility that's needed to actually-- >> Will, what's your take? We hear hybrid security keys, management systems, announced today, encrypt everything, don't have over permissive environments. Obviously they're talking about more platform and that type of stuff >> Absolutely. My take would be, I think our own partnership with the AWS security team is great evidence that they're thinking about the right things. We worked within conjunction with them to develop our pen test methodology. So that combined for proprietary HackerOne platform data and findings across all of our customers that are common issues found in AWS environments with their own knowledge and their own experiences from the AWS security team directly. So it's a pretty powerful checklist that we're able to run through on some of these customers and make sure that all of the most common miss-configurations and such are covered. >> Yeah. They're highly motivated to do that. 'Cause they get blamed for the S3 buckets being kept open. It's not even their fault. >> Right. (crosstalk) >> We got hack over in Amazon. Amazon's terrible! >> Yeah. You know, one of the things we like to talk about is the fact that, you know, cloud is really about automation, right? >> Yeah. >> Yep. >> But you can't automate that human ingenuity the skills that come with an actual human who has the experience and the know how to fix these things. >> It's a lot going on in Amazon. It's always been kind of like, you just described earlier in theCUBE. An erector set, not Lego blocks yet, but still kind of, you still got to build it. It's getting better in the Lego model, but there are challenges in protecting cloud, Will. I mean this is a big part of protecting cloud platforms like AWS. What are some of those challenges? >> I think some of the challenges are the ephemeral nature of the cloud can really result in developers, and you know really business units across an organization spinning up assets that IT or security don't know about. And so that's where things like HackerOne assets in those attack surface management style solutions come into play, trying to identify those assets proactively and make sure that they're receiving some sort of attention from the security team whether it's automated or manual or ideally both. >> You guys got a good solution. So how about the partnership? We got one minute left. Talk about your partnership with AWS. You guys are certified in their security group, with their team and marketplace, right? Talk about some of those things. >> Yeah, we've been in marketplace over a year. We've had that the specific solution that I mentioned the App Pen test for AWS in place and integrated with security hub for some time now. There's some other stats that we could probably share around the ethical hackers that we have working on that. We have a number of certified AWS hackers, who again they have the right skill set for AWS, and they've been a great partner. We are very focused on continuing to work with them, and build out some new offerings going forward. >> Well, you guys have done a great job. Will, tell your team congratulations on the tech side, on the product side, very strong community. You guys had a lot of success. Congratulations! And thanks for sharing on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us John. >> Thank you for your time-- We're here at re:Inforce where all the access tab is open, it's team oriented, we got cloud scale, data, encryption on everything. Big news coming out of re:Inforce, well, theCUBE's got it covered here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (theme music)

>> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22. Lisa Martin with you here on the ground. I've got one of our alumni back with me. Sean Scott joins me, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. It's great to have you here in person. >> Super great to be here in person. >> Isn't it nice? >> Quite a change, quite a change. >> It is a change. We were talking before we went live about it. That's that readjustment to actually being with another human, but it's a good readjustment to have >> Awesome readjustment. I've been traveling more and more in the past few weeks and just speaking the offices, seeing the people the energy we get is the smiles, it's amazing. So it's so much better than just sitting at your home and. >> Oh, I couldn't agree more. For me it's the energy and the CEO of DocuSign talked about that with Jennifer during her fireside chat this morning, but yes, finally, someone like me who doesn't like working from home but as one of the things that you talked about in your keynote this morning was the ways traditionally that we've been working are no longer working. Talk to me about the future of work. What does it look like from PagerDuty's lens? >> Sure. So there's a few things. If we just take a step back and think about, what your day looks like from all the different slacks, chats, emails, you have your dashboards, you have more slacks coming in, you have more emails coming in, more chat and so just when you start the day off, you think you know what you're doing and then it kind of blows up out of the gate and so what we're all about is really trying to revolutionize operations so how do you help make sense of all the chaos that's happening and how do you make it simpler so you can get back to doing the more meaningful work and leave the tedium to the machines and just automate. >> That would be critical. One of the things that such an interesting dynamic two years that we've had obviously here we are in San Francisco with virtual event this year but there's so many problems out there that customer landscape's dealing with the great resignation. The data deluge, there's just data coming in everywhere and we have this expectation when we're on the consumer side, that we're going to be that a business will know us and have enough context to make us that the next best offer that actually makes sense but now what we're seeing is like the great resignation and the data overload is really creating for many organizations, this operational complexity that's now a problem really amorphously across the organization. It's no longer something that the back office has to deal with or just the front office, it's really across. >> Yeah, that's right. So you think about just the customer's experience, their expectations are higher than ever. I think there's been a lot of great consumer products that have taught the world, what good looks like, and I came from a consumer background and we measured the customer experience in milliseconds and so customers talking about minutes or hours of outages, customers are thinking in milliseconds so that's the disconnect and so, you have to be focused at that level and have everybody in your organization focused, thinking about milliseconds of customer experience, not seconds, minutes, hours, if that's where you're at, then you're losing customers. And then you think about, you mentioned the great resignation. Well, what does that mean for a given team or organization? That means lost institutional knowledge. So if you have the experts and they leave now, who's the experts? And do you have the processes and the tools and the runbooks to make sure that nothing falls on the ground? Probably not. Most of the people that we talk to, they're trying to figure it out as they go and they're getting better but there's a lot of institutional knowledge that goes out the door when people leave. And so part of our solution is also around our runbook automation and our process automation and some of our announcements today really help address that problem to keep the business running, keep the operations running, keep everything kind of moving and the customers happy ultimately and keep your business going where it needs to go. >> That customer experience is critical for organizations in every industry these days because we don't to your point. We'll tolerate milliseconds, but that's about it. Talk to me about you did this great keynote this morning that I had a chance to watch and you talked about how PagerDuty is revolutionizing operations and I thought, I want you to be able to break that down for this audience who may not have heard that. What are those four tenants or revolutionizing operations that PagerDuty is delivering to ORGS? >> Sure, so it starts with the data. So you mentioned the data deluge that's happening to everybody, right? And so we actually do, we integrate with over 650 systems to bring all that data in, so if you have an API or webhook, you can actually integrate with PagerDuty and push this data into PagerDuty and so that's where it starts, all these integrations and it's everything from a develop perspective, your CI/CD pipelines, your code repositories, from IT we have those systems are instrumented as well, even marketing, more tech stacks we can actually instrument and pull data in. The next step is now we have all this data, how do we make sense of it? So, we think we have machine learning algorithms that really help you focus your attention and kind of point you to the really relevant work, part of that is also noise suppression. So, our algorithms can suppress noise about 98% of the noise can just be eliminated and that helps you really focus where you need to spend your time 'cause if you think about human time and attention, it's pretty expensive and it's probably one of your company's most precious resources is that human time and so you want the humans doing the really meaningful work. Next step is automation, which is okay. We want the humans doing the special work, so what's the TDM? What's the toil that we can get rid of and push that to the machines 'cause machines are really good at doing very easy, repetitive task and there's a lot of them that we do day in, day out. The next step is just orchestrating the work and putting, getting everybody in the organization on the same page and that's where this morning I talked about our customer service operations product into the customer service is on the front lines and they're often getting signals from actual customers that nobody else in the organization may not even be aware of it yet So, I was running a system before and all our metrics are good and you get a customer feedback saying, "This isn't working for me," and you go look at the metrics and your dashboards and all looks good and then you go back and talk to the customer some more and they're like, "No, it's still not working," and you go back to your data, you're back to your dashboards, back to your metrics and sure enough, we had an instrumentation issue but the customer was giving us that feedback and so customer service is really on the front lines and they're often the kind of the unsung heroes for your customers but they're actually really helping and make sure that everything, the right signals are coming to the dev team, to the owners that own it and even in the case when you think you have everything instrumented, you may be missing something and that's where they can really help but our customer service operations product really helps bring everybody on the same page and then as the development teams and the IT teams and the SRA has pushed information back to customer service, then they're equipped, empowered to go tell the customer, "Okay, we know about the issue. Thank you." We should have it up in the next 30 minutes or whatever it is, five minutes, hopefully it's faster than longer, but they can inform the customer so to help that customer experience as opposed to the customer saying, "Oh, I'm just going to go shop somewhere else," or "I'm going to go buy somewhere else or do something else." And the last part is really around, how do we really enable our customers with the best practices? So those million users, the 21,000 companies in organizations we're working with, we've learned a lot around what good looks like. And so we've really embedded that back into our product in terms of our service standards which is really helps SRES and developers set quality standards for how services should be implemented at their company and then they can actually monitor and track across all their teams, what's the quality of the services and this team against different teams in their organization and really raise the quality of the overall system. >> So for businesses and like I mentioned, DocuSign was on this morning, I know some great brand customers that you guys have. I've seen on the website, Peloton Slack, a couple that popped out to me. When you're able to work with a customer to help them revolutionize operations, what are some of the business impacts? 'Cause some of the things that jump out to me would be like reduction in churn, retention rate or some of those things that are really overall impactful to the revenue of a business. >> Absolutely. And so there's a couple different parts of it. One is, all the work what PagerDuty is known for is orchestrating the work for a service outage or a website outage and so that's actually easy to measure 'cause you can measure your revenue that's coming in or missed revenue and how much we've shortened that. So that's the, I guess that's our kind of the history and our legacy but now we've moved into a lot of the cost side as well. So, helping customers really understand from an outage perspective where to focus our time as opposed to just orchestrating the work. Well now, we can say, we think we have a new feature we launched last year called Probable Origin. So when you have an outage, we can actually narrow in where we think the outage and just give you a few clues of this looks anomalous, for example. So let's start here. So that still focus on the top line and then from an automation perspective, there's lots and lots of just toil and noise that people are dealing with on a day in, day out basis and then some of it's easy work, some of it's harder work. One of the ones I really like is our automated diagnostics. So, if you have an incident, one of the first things you have to do is you have to go gather telemetry of what's actually happening on the servers, to say, is the CPU look good? Does the memory look good? Does the disc look good? Does the network look good? And that's all perfect work for automation. And so we can run our automated diagnostics and have all that data pumped directly into the incident so when the responder engages, it's all right there waiting for them and they don't have to go do all that basic task of getting data, cutting and pasting into the incident or if you're using one of those old ticketing systems, cutting and pacing into a a tickety system, it's all right there waiting for you. And that's on average 15 minutes during an outage of time that's saved. And the nice thing about that is that can all be kicked off at time zero so you can actually call from our event orchestration product, you can call directly into automation actions right there when that event first comes in. So you think about, there's a warning for a CPU and instantly it kicks off this diagnostics and then within seconds or even minutes, it's in the incident waiting for you to take action. >> One of the things that you also shared this morning that I loved was one of the stats around customer sale point that they had 60 different alerts coming in and PagerDuty was able to reduce that to one alert. So, 60 X reduction in alerts, getting rid of a lot of noise allowing them to focus on really those probably key high escalations that are going to make the biggest impact to their customers and to their business. >> That's right. You think about, you have a high severity incident like they actually had a database failure and so, when you're in the heat of the moment and you start getting these alerts, you're trying to figure out, is that one incident? Is it 10 incidents? Is it a hundred incidents that I'm having to deal with? And you probably have a good feeling like there's, I know it's probably this thing but you're not quite sure and so, with our machine learning we're able to eliminate a lot of the noise and in this case it was, going from 60 alerts down to one, just to let you know, this is the actual incident, but then also to focus your attention on where we think may be the cause and you think about all the different teams that historically have been had to pull in for a large scale incident. We can quickly narrow into the root cause and just get the right people involved. So we don't have these conference bridges of a hundred people on which you hear about. When these large cottages happen that everyone's on a call across the entire company and it's not just the dev teams and IT teams, you have PR, you have legal, you have everybody's involved in these. And so the more that we can workshop their work and get smarter about using machine learning, some of these other technologies then the more efficient it is for our customers and ultimately the better it is for their customers. >> Right and hopefully, PR, HR, legal doesn't have to be some of those incident response leaders that right now we're seeing across the organization. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> So when you're talking with customers and some of the things that you announced, you mentioned automated actions, incident workflows, what are you hearing from the voice of the customer as the chief product officer and what influence did that have in terms of this year's vision for the PagerDuty Summit? >> Sure. We listen to our customers all the time. It's one of our leadership principles and really trying to hear their feedback and it was interesting. I got sent some of the chat threads during the keynote afterwards, and there's a lot of excitement about the products we announced. So the first one is incident workflows, and this is really, it's a no code workflow based on or a recent acquisition of a company called Catalytic and what it does is it's, you can think of as kind of our next generation of response plays so you can actually go in and and build a workflow using no code tooling to say, when this incident happens or this type of incident happens, here's what that process looks like and so back to your original comment around the great resignation that loss institutional knowledge, well now, you're building all this into your processes through your incident response. And so, I think the incident workflows, if you want to create a incident specific slack channel or an incident specific zoom bridge, or even just in status updates, all that is right there for you and you can use our out of the box orchestrations or you can define your own 'cause we have back to the, our customer list, we have some of the biggest companies in the world, as customers and we have a very opinionated product and so if you're new to the whole DevOps and full service ownership, we help you through that. But then, a lot of our companies are evolving along that continuum, the operational maturity model continuum. And at the other end, we have customers that say "This is great, but we want to extend it. We want to like call this person or send this or update this system here." And so that's where the incident workflows is really powerful and it lets our customers just tailor it to their processes and really extend it for them. >> And that's GA later this year? >> Later this year, yes, we'll start ING probably the next few months and then GA later this year. >> Got it. Last question, as we're almost out of time here, what are some of the things that as you talk to customers day in and day out, as you see you saw the chats from this morning's live keynote, the excitement, the trust that PagerDuty is building with its customers, its partners, et cetera, What excites you about the future? >> So it's really why I came to PagerDuty. I've been here about a year and a half now, but revolutionizing operations, that's a big statement and I think we need it. I think Jennifer said in her keynote today, work is broken and I think our data, we surveyed our customers earlier this year and 42% of the respondents were working more hours in 2021 compared to 2020. And I don't think anyone goes home and if I could only work more hours, I think there's some and if I could only do more of this like TDM, the TDM, more toils, if I could only do more of that, I think life would be so good. We don't hear that. We don't hear that a lot. We hear about there's a lot of noise. We have a massive attrition that every company does. That's the type of feedback that we get and so we're really, that's what gets me excited about, the tools that we're building that and especially when I think just seeing the chat even this morning about some of the announcements, it shows we've been listening and it shows the excitement in our customers when they're, lots of I'm going to use this tool, that tool, I can just use PagerDuty which is awesome. >> The momentum is clear and it's palpable and I love being a part of that. Thank you so much Sean for joining me on theCube this afternoon, talking about what's new, what's exciting and how you guys are fixing work that's broken that validated me thinking the work was broken so thank you. >> Happy to be here and thanks for having me. >> My pleasure. For Sean Scott. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22 on the ground from the San Francisco. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. We're back at VeeamON 2022, we're winding down coverage to The Cube day two. We've done a lot of VeeamON. We're at the Aria hotel, smaller physical audience, huge hybrid audience, little different program. Great keynotes, really loved the keynote yesterday and today kind of product day today. Sean Smith is here with myself and David Nicholson. He's the staff Solution Architect at VMware. Sean, thanks for coming on the Cube, taking some time with us. >> Hey guys. Great to be here and great to be in person again. >> Yeah, it sure is. Hoping to see VMworld is no longer VMworld, right? >> It's VMware Explore now. Yep. >> Okay. Awesome. Looking forward to that. That was one of the first shows we ever did. It's kind of got that same vibe, I hope you don't lose that, the core of VMware. >> What we've been told is it's still going to be, the core of what we do and it's going to be the showcase of VMware. >> Which is the ecosystem, great vibe. You always know a million people there, which is great fun. How's it going at VMware today? I mean, let's start there. It's been a while since we've talked physically with... >> Yeah. VMware is, we've come through the pandemic, fairly well, relative speaking to what others have done. I'm part of the VCPP Program, the VMware Cloud Provider Program, and I look after cloud service providers, cloud builders, people who are actually building out networks for customers and environments that are very specialized and focusing on their needs and VMware is forefront with cloud service providers these days, doing really well. >> The last time we were physically proximate to VMware executives, I think Pat Gelsinger was still the CEO, Dell still owned the majority of VMware. So that spin happened. So that's good. I think the ecosystem in particular is probably really happy about that. Does it have any effect on your world? >> From a day to day business perspective, not really, right. Obviously we still have a very tight relationship with Dell. We still do a lot of innovative solutions and products with the Dell team. We have a tight integration there. It really gives us the opportunity to also work with many other vendors as well. And focus on solutions that our customers are looking for really, is where VMware is tryna focus. >> Yeah. It's funny, we were at Red Hat Summit last week. IBM Think was right across the street there was very little mention, if any, I think they talked about an IBM mainframe at Red Hat Summit. That was it. I mean IBM fully owns Red Hat, but a lot of people said, we hope that it's going to be like VMware and you guys have always had that independent culture. >> Fiercely independent. >> Fiercely independent. Yes. >> Yes. It's like when you coach, I don't know me anyway, when I coach my kids baseball, I'm a tougher on them than am with the other kids. I think you guys were sometimes tougher on your own or... And rightly so, you have a huge ecosystem. >> We do. >> That is epic. And so you have to look out for that. VMware has always done that. VCPP the V is for a VMware what's what's the acronym. >> So the CPP is Cloud Provider Program. It's a program that's specifically aimed at our cloud service providers. There's several solutions within the program, which are really focused on helping them build business, helping them go to market, helping them with being able to, for certain part of it compete with the hyperscalers and our support several cloud providers, mostly out of the Northeast, and they're doing really well. They're doing well against the hyperscalers, they very often provide solutions that are not easy to get on a hyperscaler. When you want to have customer interaction and things like that. So the VCP Program as I said, is really tailored, it has solutions which are very much focused on allowing them to build their businesses as a cloud service provider. >> Just a follow up if I may. >> Yeah. >> So the history of VMware Cloud has been really interesting. At one point vCloud Air, we know what happened there. This is not vCloud Air. >> This is not vCloud Air. It's got nothing to do with vCloud Air. It's really a program where we provide solutions that the cloud builders build with, right? So it's software solutions. There's no hardware involved. There's no VMware having the environment, it's really cloud providers building solutions. >> So it's interesting, Dave, this has come full circle, you used to work at Virtustream. There was point Rodney was like, bring it on AWS, correlation and back said, we can't lose to a book seller and all that was just, fun marketing talk for media people like us. But the interesting thing is, well, so VMware Cloud on AWS. Huge success of VMware Cloud Foundation. Doing really well. And obviously you've got momentum. Everybody thought, not everybody. >> It's in Google's, in Azure, it's in Oracle. >> Yeah, yeah. Sorry. >> It's an IBM. >> IBM a... >> It's an IBM. >> Number one in IBM. Yeah. >> And so a lot of people thought, I shouldn't say everybody, but a lot of people thought, MSPs, the cloud service providers, non-hyperscalers are cooked through 2010, 2011. The exact opposite happened. >> It's 100%. >> It's growing like crazy. We want to understand why, but it's come full circle. >> Yeah, it certainly has. I mean, the industry has changed considerably and especially over the last few years with COVID, I will say that the cloud service providers that are support and by the way, Virtustream was one of them, when I first joined VMware, I supported Virtustream. And they have had to adapt their businesses, the hyperscalers have come at them with everything that they've got and honesty, the cloud service providers that I support are phenomenal growth. They they're growing on a par with what some of the hyperscalers are doing. So there's definitely a place for cloud service providers, they've got great business, they've got great customers, great relationships. And it's as I said, it's growing a huge business. >> So we've talked a lot about theme from the perspective of the idea of a Supercloud. Something that can overlay a variety of on-premises and off-premises providers and provide sort of a unified view, unified management methodology. How much is what at least was formerly known as the SDDC stack, the Software Defined Data Center stack, still a part of VMwares vision that is right in line with that, from what Veeam is doing. How much of your business is deploying SDDC stacks that are then customized in one way or another. >> 100% of it. >> 100% of it. Right, okay. >> Yeah. So, when you're talking about having that single view of everything in the cloud provider program, there's a product called VMware Cloud Director. and it is the multi-tenant view of the infrastructure and the environment that the cloud providers are building. Right. So VMware Cloud Director has gone through many iterations and we've recently launched Cloud Director Service, which is a SaaS offering of the product. But what it actually does is you put it on top of VMC on AWS. you put it on top of GCVE, you put it on top of the cloud service providers, SDDCs, right. All of these are SDDCs underneath. >> AVS and Azure. >> AVS and Azure. >> I was associated with that. So I must have it mentioned. >> Exactly. >> They're all SDDC's. >> SDDC's, yeah, yeah, exactly. And as well as your on premise environment. Right. So all of these federate together through the VMware Cloud Director, and you end up having a single pane of glass across all of those environments. So whether it's running in the hyperscale, or running on your premises, running in a cloud service provider's environment, you have a single view, a single interface that you log into and you can see everything that's going on inside your environment. So it really brings that holistic, single view of everything to reality. >> How about from a licensing perspective? >> So from a licensing perspective... >> I'm a non-premises customer, I'm running VMware on-prem, I have been, I was at world VMworld 2004 and enjoyed BattleBots. So hopefully you'll start bringing BattleBots back. >> We will have to. >> And now I'm dealing with a service provider. That is one of the partners that you're working with. How does that licensing work? >> So the Cloud Provider Program actually has a slightly different licensing model to what you would have on premises, right? They have a rental model with VMware, it's a PAYGo model, right. One of the great things about the program is that it's consumption based. So it makes it easy for cloud service providers to build a consumption based business, which is kind of where everything is moving, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> So whether you have an on-premise environment that's licensed through what we call perpetual or ELA licensing, from a VMware perspective, you can still layer on top, that cloud service provider solution VCD, right? And you would obviously have a financial relationship with the cloud service provider in terms of the environment that you have with them. And they will be able to hook up that environment to your on-premises environment and get that single view. So the licensing is not a restriction, right, you can still continue to have your traditional licensed environment in your data center, as well as being able to connect into these seamlessly, right. That's the great thing about it. And that's where VMC, AVS, GCVE, the OCVS, the Oracle version, the RBM one, you can bring all of these together and really look at it from a holistic perspective, bring in things like NSX-T and other solutions like that VM as well, it works seamlessly across all these environments. >> I am talking about Supercloud, I asked Raghu last year, who's virtually at VMworld, I kind of explained that concept of hiding the complexity, the abstraction layer, being able to hide the underlying primitives and APIs, seems like it's evolving. One of the things he said was yes, but if developers want to go there, we let them. And that was a key point, because you're getting more into that DevOps. >> Correct 100%. >> And I would imagine the cloud service providers really oftentimes need for their reasons to get to those underlying primitives and APIs. >> And actually VCD is the enabler, right? So VCD allows you to provide a container based service sitting right alongside your IAS in the same SDDC, right? We're not even talking about segregating them out, you can have it inside the exact same SDDC, all linked together, all taking a common security approach to what's going on and providing you with that ease of use. So from an end user perspective, the DevOps type of people, VCD is an awesome solution, because they can go in fire up a new VM, or fire up a new container or whatever, without having to go through the rigmarole of asking IT for a VM, or asking somebody's permission, as a organization, you would give your DevOps teams certain amount of resources, how they use it's up to them, right? Whether they put containers in there or they bring VMs, it's all there. And it's all in one single solution. >> You mentioned that your community is doing very well growing it let's call it 35, 40% a year. And it's a market that's quite large worldwide. Because it's a lot of local, regional CSPs, a lot of big country CSPs and you said... >> It's four and a 1/2 thousand of them. So, it's huge. >> There you >> Versus four hyperscalers. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Include Alibaba. So, they might be individually smaller, but collectively they're larger. But you said that the hyperscalers coming after them with everything they had was a comment that you made, are customers choosing CSPs over hyperscalers? If so, when and why. >> Sometimes they are choosing CSPs over hyperscalers, but not always, very often they're choosing CSPs and hyperscalers, right. And it really depends on what their needs are. So historically speaking, it's been everybody rushing to the hyperscalers because that's the flavor of the day let's move out of our data center. It's much cheaper to run everything in these hyperscalers, and they do it. And then the bill comes in and reality suddenly hits. And it's definitely not as cheap as they thought it was going to be, right. So there's many aspects that cause tenants to not only rethink that, but also repatriate, right. Repatriation is a big thing for our cloud service providers. Things like egress costs, most cloud service providers have no egress costs, right? They encourage movement of things amongst themselves and for their tenants, because that's what they want, right? So egress costs are a huge problem for many tenants who come into these environments and that's sometimes why they would choose a CSP over a hyperscaler. But really, it's more about choosing the right place for your workload. There are workloads that belong in hyperscalers, right? And if you have a solution with a CSP like VCD, that allows you not only to be able to connect your on premises and the CSP, but also the hyperscalers and actually have a much more holistic solution where you can determine where you want to put stuff and put it in the right place. It's more about that, than it is about choosing one over the other really. >> Yeah, and sometimes it's more of a business differentiation than a technical one. Is it a hyperscale or is it a CSP? If you're licensing the SDDC stack and you're running it on IAS in Amazon or in Google or Azure? >> I think the other thing too is the CSPs oftentimes they manage service providers, right? Is that true? >> The relationship, right? And that's one of the things if you talk to a cloud service provider and yesterday I was, I had a session and I was talking to a bunch of people about VMware stuff. And I said to them, how many of you have tried to pick up a phone and talk to somebody at AWS? And there was laughter, because the reality is that what AWS does is a kind of one size fits all approach, right? There isn't somebody on the end of the phone that you can pick up and call, if they have a major outage that outage is affecting 1000s of different customers and you one of those thousands really means nothing to them, right? Whereas a cloud service provider, generally speaking, has a very tight one-on-one relationship with both from an engineering perspective, right. With their tenants, but also at a higher managerial level. So they create those relationships and those relationships often drive these things. It's not always financial, there is a financial component to it, but very often it's the relationship, have they got somebody that they can talk to? If they getting many different solutions, can they get all those solutions from one provider? And if they can, it's much easier for them to manage from a... >> And I think so does that manage service... There's also a lot of things that despite their breadth and portfolio that the cloud service providers don't support, you can't do Oracle rack in the cloud, right? But you can in a service provider. >> Exactly. >> And Oracle, look you can negotiate with Oracle, so you can get similar pricing AWS, but this price is two x. They're either on-prem or in Oracle. So I could take my Oracle instance, stick it into a managed service provider or cloud service provider, do whatever I need to, and there are I'm sure 1000s of configurations like that, that aren't necessarily identically supported, security edicts that aren't necessarily exactly the same, so many specials that managed service say welcome to your point. AWS is as long as it's black, it's good. >> Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing, right? Those cloud service providers are doing exactly that. They have Oracle racks in there, they have all sorts of those solutions that are there in their data centers. And proximity is also an issue, right? Very often the people who are using those systems need their ancillary things to be close by, they can't be 10s or 20s or 30 milliseconds away, they need to be sub millisecond connectivity. And those are the areas where the cloud service providers really shine, they can offer those solutions that really enable their tenants to get what they want at the end of the day. Again to your point, you can negotiate with Oracle, but these cloud service providers do it day in and day out. Who wants their business? >> Who wants to do that with Oracle anyway, their lawyers are smarter than yours. Veeam, what are you doing with Veeam, in resilient architectures and cyber recovery? >> Yeah, we are a sponsor here at the event and Veeam is a great partner with VMware and we're great partner to them. A lot of cloud service providers actually use Veeam as their primary backup solution for their tenants, right. VMware Cloud Director that I was talking about just now, the thing that gives you a view of everything over the top, Veeam was actually one of the very first vendors to integrate with VCD. And you can use your Veeam environment directly from the screen, you right click, and you say do a backup and that's as easy as that from a Veeam perspective. So we have a lot of integrations with Veeam. We help the cloud service providers, ransomware is a big talking thing around this event, but all over the place, right? So a lot of the solutions that Veeam brings to the party, these cloud service providers are also deploying into their environments to help with ransomware. They have so many solutions that help those cloud service providers provide a holistic solution. >> Well, Veeam was basically founded saying, Hey, we're going to better our business on VMware. I first saw Veeam at a V mug, I think in Boston, and I was like, who is Veeam? VMware is that their product? It was just so you guys have had a long relationship, even though initially VMware was probably saying the same thing, who the heck are these guys? Well, how do you like them now? Sean, thanks so much for... >> Thank you. It's been great to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back shortly. We'll get a couple more segments left. Dave and I are going to wrap up later in the day, you watching The Cube at VeeamON 2022, be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session, theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics, Cloud Management Tools, featuring Ascend.io for the data and analytics track. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. Today, we're proud joined by Sean Knapp, CEO and founder of Ascend.io and Jason Robinson who's the VP of Data Science and Engineering at Steady. Guys, thanks for coming on and congratulations, Sean, for the continued success, loves our cube conversation and Jason, nice to meet you. >> Great to meet you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, the session today is really kind of looking at automating analytics workloads, right? So, and Steady as a customer. Sean, talk about the relationship with the customer Steady. What's the main product, what's the core relationship? >> Yeah, it's a really great question. when we work with a lot of companies like Steady we're working hand in hand with their data engineering teams, to help them onboard onto the Ascend platform, build these really powerful data pipelines, fueling their analytics and other workloads, and really helping to ensure that they can be successful at getting more leverage and building faster than ever before. So we tend to partner really closely with each other's teams and really think of them even as extensions of each other's own teams. I watch in slack oftentimes and our teams just go back and forth. And it's like, as if we were all just part of the same company. >> It's a really exciting time, Jason, great to have you on as a person cutting your teeth into this kind of what I call next gen data as intellectual property. Sean and I chat on theCUBE conversation previous to this event where every company is a data company, right? And we've heard that cliche. >> Right. >> But it's true, right? It's going to, it's getting more powerful with the edge. You seeing more diverse data, faster data, small, big, large, medium, all kinds of different aspects and patterns. And it's becoming a workflow kind of intellectual property paradigm for companies, not so much. >> That's right. >> Just the tech it's the database is you can, it's the data itself, data in flight, it's moving around, it's got value. What's your take-- >> Absolutely. >> On this trend? >> Basically, Steady helps our members and we have a community of members earn more income. So we want to help them steady their financial lives. And that's all based on data, so we have a web app, you could go to the iOS Store, you could go to the Google Play Store, you can download the app. And we have a large number of members, 3 million plus, who are actively using this. And we also have a very exciting new product called income passport. And this helps 1099 and mixed wage earners verify their income, which is very important for different government benefits. And then third, we help people with emergency cash grants as well as awards. So all of that is built on a bedrock of data, so if you're using our apps, it's all data powered. So what you were mentioning earlier from pipelines that are running it real time to yeah, anything, that's a kind of a small data aggregation, we do everything from small to real-time and large. >> You guys are like a multiple sided marketplace here, you've got it, you're a FinTech app, as well as the future of work and with virtual space-- >> That's right. >> Happening now, this is becoming, actually encapsulates kind of the critical problems that people trying to solve right now, you've got multiple stakeholders. >> That's right. >> In the data. >> Yes, we absolutely do. So we have our members, but we also, within the company, we have product, we have strategy, we have a growth team, we have operations. So data engineering and data science also work with a data analytics organization. So at Steady we're very much a data company. And we have a data organization led by our chief data officer and we have data engineering and data science, which are my teams, but also that business insights and analytics. So a lot of what we're building on the data engineering side is powering those insights and analytics that the business stakeholders use every day to run the organization. >> Sean, I want to get your thoughts on this because we heard from Emily Freeman in the keynote about how this revolution in DevOps or for premiering her talk around how, it's not just one persona anymore, I'm a release engineer, I'm this kind of engineer, you're seeing now all engineering, all developers are developers. You have some specialty, but for the most part, the team makeups are changing. We touched on this in our cube conversation. The journey of data is not just the data people, the data folks. It's like there's, they're developers too. So the confluence of data science, data management, developing, is changing the team and cultural makeup of companies. Could you share your thoughts on this dynamic and how it impacts customers? >> Absolutely, I think the, we're finding a similar trend to what we saw a number of years ago, when we talked about how software was eating the world and every company was now becoming a software company. And as a result, we saw this proliferation and expansion of what the software roles look like and thought of a company pulled through this entire new era of DevOps. We were finding that same pattern now emerging around data as not only is every company a software company, every company is a data company and data really is that field, that oil that fuels the business and in doing so, we're finding that as Jason describes it's pervasive across the team, it is no longer just one team that is creating some insights and reports around operational analytics, or maybe a team over here doing data science or machine learning. It is expensive. And I think the really interesting challenges that start to come with this too, are so many data teams are so over capacity. We did a recent study that highlighted that 96% of data teams are at, or over capacity, only 4% had spare capacity. But as a result, the net is being cast even wider to pull in people from even broader and more adjacent domains to all participate in the data future of their organization. >> Yeah, and I think I'd love to get your guys react to this conversation with Andy Jassy, who's now the CEO of Amazon, but when he was the CEO of AWS last year, I talked with him about how the old guard and new guard are thinking around team formations. Obviously team capacity is growing and challenged when you've got the right formula. So that's one thing, right? But what if you don't have the right formula? If you're in the skills gap, problem, or team formation side of it, where you maybe there was two years ago where the mandate came down? Well, we got to build a data team even in two years, if you're not inquisitive. And this is what Andy and I were talking about is the thinking and the mindset of that mission and being open to discovering and understanding the changes, because if you were deciding what your team was two, three years ago, that might have changed a lot. So team capacity, Sean, to your point, if you got it right, and that's a challenge in and of itself, but what if you don't have it, right? What do you guys think about this? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Basically trying to see, look and gaze into the crystal ball and see what's going to happen in a year or two years, even six months is quite difficult. And if you don't have it right, you do spend a lot of time because of the technical debt that you've amassed. And we certainly spend quite a bit of time with technical debt for things we wanted to build. So, deconvolving that, getting those ETLs to a runnable state, getting performance there, that's what we spend a bit of time on. And yeah, it's something that it's really part of the package. >> What do you guys see as the big challenge on teams? The scaling challenge okay. Formation is one thing, Sean, but like, okay, getting it right, getting it formed properly and then scaling it, what are the big things you're seeing? >> One of the, I think the overarching management themes in general, it is the highest out by the highest performing teams are those where the individual with the context and the idea is able to execute as far and as fast and as efficiently as possible, and removing a lot of those encumbrances and put it a slightly different way. If DevOps was all basically boiled down to, how do we help more people write more software faster and safely data ops would be very similarly, how do we enable more people to do more things with data faster and safely? And to do that, I think the era of these massive multi-year efforts around data are gone and hopefully in the not too distant future, even these multi-quarter efforts around data are gone and we get into a much more agile, nimble methodology where smaller initiatives and smaller efforts are possible by more diverse skillsets across the business. And really what we should be doing is leveraging technology and automation to ensure that people are able to be productive and efficient and that we can trust our data and that systems are automated. And these are problems that technology is good at. And so in many ways, how in the early days Amazon would described as getting people out of the muck of DevOps. I think we're going to do the same thing around getting people out of the muck of the data and get them really focused on the higher level aspects. >> Yeah, we're going to get into that complexity, heavy lifting side muck, and then the heavy lifting taking away from the customers. But I want to go back to real quick with Jason while we're on this topic. Jason, I was just curious, how much has your team grown in the recent year and how much could've, should've grown, what's the status and how has Ascend helped you guys? What's the dynamic there? ' Cause that's their value proposition. So, take us through that. >> Absolutely, so, since the beginning of the year data engineering has doubled. So, we're a lean team, we certainly use the agile mindset and methodologies, but we have gone from, yeah, we've essentially doubled. So a lot of that is there's just so much to do and the capacity problem is certainly there. So we also spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what the right tooling is. And I was mentioning the technical debt. So you have those, there's the big O notation of whatever that involves technical debt. And when you're building new things, you're fixing old things. And then you're trying to maintain everything. That scaling starts to hit hard. So even if we continue to double, I mean, we could easily add more data engineers. And a lot of that is, I mean, you know about the hiring cycles, like, a lot of of great talent, but it's difficult to make all of those hires. So, we do spend quite a bit of time thinking about exactly what tools data engineering is using day-to-day. And what I mentioned, were technologies on the streaming side all the way to like the small batch things, but, like something that starts as a small batch getting grow and grow and grow and take, say 15 hours, it's possible, I've seen it. But, and getting that back down and managing that complexity while not overburdening people who probably don't want to spend all their waking hours building ETLs, maintaining ETL, putting in monitoring, putting in alerting, that I think is quite a challenge. >> It's so funny because you mentioned 18 hours, you got to kind of being, you didn't roll your eyes, but you almost did, but this is, but people want it yesterday, they want real time, so there's a lot of demand-- >> Yes. >> On the minds of the business outcome side of it. So, I got to ask you, because this comes up a lot with technical debt, and now we're starting to see that come into the data conversation. And so I always curious, is there a different kind of technical debt with data? Because again, data is like software, but it's a little bit of more elusive in the sense it's always changing. So is there, what kind of technical debt do you see in the data side that's different than say software side? >> Absolutely, now that's a great question. So a lot of thinking about your data and structuring your data and how you want to use that data going into a particular project might be different from what happens after stakeholders have a new considerations and new products and new items that need to be built. So thinking about how that, let's say you have a document store, or you have something that you thought was going to be nice and structured, how that can evolve and support those particular products can essentially, unless you take the time and go through and say, well, let's architect it perfectly so that we can handle that. You're going to make trade-offs and choices, and essentially that debt builds up. So you start cutting corners, you start changing your normalization. You start essentially taking those implicit schema that then tend to build into big things, big implicit schema. And then of course, with implicit schema, you're going to have a lot of null values, you're going to have a lot of items to deal with. So, how do you deal with that? And then you also have the opportunity to create keys and values and oops, do we take out those keys that were slightly misspelled? So, I could go on for hours, but basically the technical debt certainly is there with on data. I see a lot of this as just a spectrum of technical debt, because it's all trade-offs that you made to build a product, and the efficiency has start to hit you. So, the 15 hour ETL, I was mentioning, basically you start with something and you were building things for stakeholders and essentially you have so much complex logic within that. So for the transforms that you're doing from if you're thinking of the bronze, silver, gold, kind of a framework, going from that bronze to a silver, you may have a massive number of transformations or just a few, just to lightly dust it. But you could also go to gold with many more transformations and managing that, managing the complexity, managing what you're spending for servers day after day after day. That's another real challenge of that technical debt stuff. >> That's a great lead into my next question, for Sean, this is the disparate system complexity, technical debt and software was always kind of the belief was, oh yeah, I'll take some technical debt on and work it off once I get visibility and say, unit economics or some sort of platform or tool feature, and then you work it off as fast as possible. I was, this becomes the art and science of technical debt. Jason, what you're saying is that this can be unwieldy pretty quickly. You got state and you got a lot of different inter moving parts. This is a huge issue, Sean, this is where it's, technical debt in the data world is much different architecturally. If you don't get it right, this is a huge, huge issue. Could you aluminate why that is and what you guys are doing to help unify and change some of those conditions? >> Yeah, absolutely. When we think about technical debt and I'll keep drawing some parallels between DevOps and data ops, 'cause I think there's a tremendous number of similarities in these worlds. We used to always have the saying that "Your tech debt grows manually across microservices, "but exponentially within services." And so you want that right level of architecture and composibility if you will, of your systems where you can deploy changes, you can test, you can have high degrees of competence and the roll-outs. And I think the interesting part in the data side, as Jason highlighted, the big O-notation for tech debt in the data ecosystem, is still fairly exponential or polynomial in nature. As right now, we don't have great decomposition of the components. We have different systems. We have a streaming system, we have a databases, we have documents, doors and so on, but how the whole data pipeline data engineering part works generally tends to be pretty monolithic in nature. You take your whole data pipeline and you deploy the whole thing and you basically just cross your fingers, and hopefully it's not 15 hours, but if it is 15 hours, you go to sleep, you wake up the next morning, grab a coffee and then maybe it worked. And that iteration cycle is really slow. And so when we think about how we can improve these things, right? This is combinations of intelligent systems that do instantaneous schema detection, and validation, excuse me, it's combinations of things that do instantaneous schema detection and validation. It's things like automated lineage and dependency tracking. So you know that when you deploy code, what piece of data it affects, it's things like automated testing on individual core parts of your data pipelines to validate that you're getting the expected output that you need. So it's pulling a lot of these same DevOps style principles into the data world, which is really designed to going back to how do you help more people build more things faster and safely really rapid iterations for rapid feedback. So you know if there's breaks in the system much earlier on. >> Well, I think Sean, you're onto something really big there. And I think this is something that's emerging pretty quickly in the cloud scale that I called, 2.0, whatever, what version we're in, is the systems thinking mindset. 'Cause you mentioned the model that that was essentially a silo or subsystem. It was cohesive in it's own way, but now it's been monolithic. Now you have a broken down set of decomposed sets of data pieces that have to work together. So Jason, this is the big challenge that everyone, not really people are talking about, I think most these guys are, and you're using them. What are you unifying? Because this is a systems operating systems thinking, this is not like a database problem. It's a systems problem applied to data where databases are just pieces of it, what's your thoughts? >> That's absolutely right. And I would, so Sean touched on composibility of ETL and thinking about reusable components, thinking about pieces that all fit together, because as you're building something as complex as some of these ETS are, we do think about the platform itself and how that lends to the overarching output. So one thing, being able to actually see the different components of an ETL and blend those in and you as the dry principal, don't repeat yourself. So you essentially are able to take pieces that one person built, maybe John builds a couple of our connectors coming in, Sean also has a bunch of transforms and I just want this stuff out, so I can use a lot of what you guys have already built. I think that's key, because a lot of engineering and data engineering is about managing complexity. So taking that complexity and essentially getting it out fast and getting out error free, is where we're going with all of the data products we're building. >> What are some of the complexity that you guys have that you're dealing with? Can you be specific and share what these guys are doing to solve that problem for you? That's, this is a big problem everyone's having, I'm seeing that all over the place. >> Absolutely, so I could start at a couple of places. So I don't know if you guys are on the three Vs, four Vs or five Vs, but we have all of those. And if you go to that five, four or five V model, there is the veracity piece, which you have to ask yourself, is it true? Is it accurate when? So change happens throughout the pipeline, change can come from web hooks, change can come from users. You have to make sure that you're managing that complexity and what we we're building, I mentioned that we are paying down a lot of tech debt, but we're also building new products. And one pretty challenging, quite challenging ETL that we're building is something going from a document store to an analytical application. So in that document store, we talked about flexible schema. Basically, you don't really know exactly what you're going to get day to day, and you need to be able to manage that change through the whole process in a way that the ultimate business users find value. So, that's one of the key applications that we're using right now. And that's one that the team at Ascend and my team are working hand in hand going through a lot of those challenges. And it's, I also watch the slack just as Sean does, and it's a very active discussion board. So it is essentially like they're just partnering together. It's fabulous, but yeah-- >> And you're seeing kind of a value on this too, I mean, in terms of output what's the business results? >> Yes, absolutely. So essentially this is all, so yes, the fifth V value. So, getting to that value is essentially, there were a few pieces of the, to the value. So there's some data products that we're building within that product and their data science, data analytics based products that essentially do things with the data that help the user. There's also the question of exactly the usage and those kinds of metrics that people in ops want to understand as well as our growth team. So we have internal and external stakeholders for that. >> Jason, this is a great use case, a great customer, Sean, you guys are automating. For the folks watching, who were seeing their peer living the dream here and the data journey, as we say, things are happening. What's the message to customers that you guys want to send because you guys are really cutting your teeth into a whole another level of data engineering, data platform. That's really about the systems view and about cloud. What's the pitch, Sean? What should people know about the company? >> Absolutely, yeah, well, so one, I'd say even before the pitch, I would encourage people to not accept the status quo. And in particular, in data engineering today, the status quo is an incredibly high degree of pain and discomfort. And I think the important part of why Ascend exists and why we're so helpful for our customers, there is a much more automated future of how we build data products, how we optimize those and how we can get a larger cohort of builders into the data ecosystem. And that helps us get out of the muck as we talked about before and put really advanced technology to work for more people inside of our companies to build these data products, leveraging the latest and greatest technologies to drive increased business value faster. >> Jason, what's your assessment of these guys, as people are watching might say, hey, you know what, I'm going to contact them, I need this. How would you talk about Ascend into your peers? >> Absolutely, so I think just thinking about the whole process has been a great partnership. We started with a POC, I think Ascend likes to start with three use cases, I think we came out with four and we went through the ones that we really cared about and really wanted to bring value to the company with. So we have roadmaps for some, as we're paying down technical debt and transitioning, others we can go directly to. And I think that thinking about just like you're saying, John, that systems view of everything you're building, where that makes sense, you can actually take a lot of that complexity and encapsulate it in a way that you can essentially manage it all in that platform. So the Ascend platform has the composibility piece that we touched on. It also, not only can you compose it, but you can drill into it. And my team is super talented and is going to drill into it. So basically loves to open up each of those data flows each of the components therein and has the control there with the combination of Spark Sequel, PI Spark SQL Scala and so on. And I think that the variety of connections is also quite helpful. So thinking about the dry principle from a systems perspective is extremely useful because it's dry, you often get that in a code review, right? I think you can be a little bit more dry here. >> Yeah. >> But you can really do that in the way that you're composing your systems as well. >> That's a great, great point. One quick thing for the folks that they're watching that are trying to figure this out, and a lot of architecture is going on. A lot of people are looking at different solutions. What things have you learned that you could give them a tip like to avoid like maybe some scar tissue or tips of the trade, where you can say, hey, this way, be careful, what's some of the learnings? Could you give a few pointers to folks out there, if they're kicking tires on the direction, what's the wrong direction? What's the right direction look like? >> Absolutely, I think that, I think it through, and I don't know how much time we have that, that feels like a few days conversation as far as ways to go wrong. But absolutely, I think that thinking through exactly where want to be is the key. Otherwise it's kind of like when you're writing a ticket on Jarrah, if you don't have clear success criteria, if you don't know where you going to go, then you'll end up somewhere building something and it might work. But if you think through your exact destination that you want to be at, that will drive a lot of the decisions as you think backwards to where you started. And also I think that, so Sean also mentioned challenging the status quo. I think that you really have to be ready to challenge the status quo at every step of that journey. So if you start with some particular service that you had and its legacy, if it's not essentially performing what you need, then it's okay to just take a step back and say, well, maybe that's not the one. So I think that thinking through the system, just like you were saying, John, and also I think that having a visual representation of where you want to go is critical. So hopefully that encapsulates a lot of it, but yes, the destination is key. >> Yeah, and having an engineering platform that also unifies the multiple components and it's agile. >> That's right. >> It gets you out of the muck and on the last day and differentiate heavy lifting is a cloud plan. >> Absolutely. >> Sean, wrap it up for us here. What's the bumper sticker for your vision, share your founding principles of the company. >> Absolutely, for us, we started the company as a former in recovery and CTO. The last company I founded, we had nearly 60 people on our data team alone and had invested tremendous amounts of effort over the course of eight years. And one of the things that I've learned is that over time innovation comes just as much from deciding what you're no longer going to do as what you're going to do. And focusing heavily around, how do you get out of that muck? How do you continue to climb up that technology stack? Is incredibly important. And so really we are excited to be a part of it and taking the industry is continuing to climb higher and higher level. We're building more and more advanced levels of automation and what we call our data awareness into the automated engine of the Ascend platform that takes us across the entire data ecosystem, connecting and automating all data movement. And so we have a very exciting vision for this fabric that's emerging over time. >> Awesome, Sean, thank you so much for that insight, Jason, thanks for coming on customer of Ascend.io. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it, gentlemen, thank you. This is the track on automating analytic workloads. We here at the end of us showcase, startup showcase, the hottest companies here at Ascend.io, I'm John Furrier, with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Mhm >>Hello and welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm john furrier here in Palo alto California, host of the cube we're here with Sean Knapp was the Ceo and founder of Ascend dot Io heavily venture backed working on some really cool challenges and solving some big problems around scale data and creating value in a very easy way and companies are struggling to continue to evolve and re factor their business now that they've been re platform with the cloud, you're seeing a lot of new things happening. So Sean great to have you on and and thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me john So >>one of the things I've been interesting with your company, not only do you have great pedigree in terms of investors and tech tech staff is that you guys are going after this kind of new scaling challenge um which is not your classic kind of talking points around cloud scale, you know, more servers, more more data more. It's a little bit different. Can you describe what you guys mean around this new scaling challenge? >>Absolutely. The classic sense of scaling, particularly when it comes to the data industry, whether it's big data data science, data engineering has always focused on bits and bytes, how many servers, how big your clusters are and You know, we've watched over the last 5-10 years and those kinds of scaling problems while not entirely solved for most companies are largely solved problems now and the new challenge that is emerging is not how do you store more data or how do you process more data but it's how do you create more data products, how do you drive more value from data? And the challenge that we see many companies today, really struggling to tackle is that data productivity, that data velocity challenge and that's more people problem. It is a how do you get more people able to build more products faster and safely that propelled the business forward? >>You know, that's an interesting topic, We talk about devops and how devops is evolving. Um and you're seeing SRS has become a standard position now in companies site reliability engineers at Google pioneered, which essentially the devops person, but now that you don't need to have a full devops team as you get more automation, That's a big, big part of it. I want to get into that because you're touching on some scale issues around people, the relationships to the machines and the data. It's it's an interesting conversation, but before we do that, can you just take a minute to explain uh what you guys do, what does this send? I o I know you're in Palo alto, it's where I live um and our offices here, what's a sandy all about? >>Absolutely. So what ascend really focuses on is building the software stack on top of modern day, big data infrastructure for data engineers, data scientists, data analyst to self serve and create active data pipelines that feel the rest of their business. Uh And we provide this as a service to a variety of different companies from Australia to Italy finance to IOT uh start ups to large enterprises and really hope elevate their teams, you know, as Bezos said a long time ago, out of the muck of of the underlying infrastructure, we help them do the same thing out of the muck of classic data engineering work, >>that's awesome Andy Jassy now the ceo of amazon who was the sea of avenue too many times over the years and he always has the line undifferentiated heavy lifting. Well, I mean data is actually differentiated and it's also heavy lifting too, but you got, you have differentiation with data but it's super important, it's really you gotta but there's a lot of it now, so there's a lot of heavy lifting, this is where people are struggling, I want to get your thoughts on this because you have an opinion on this around how teams are formed, how teams can scale because we know scales coming on the data side and there's different solutions, you've got data bricks, you've got snowflake yet red shift, there's a zillion other opportunities for companies to deploy data tooling and platforms. >>What's your hands to the >>changes in data? >>Well, I think in the data ecosystem is we're changing very, very quickly uh which makes it for a very exciting industry uh and I do think that we are in this great cycle of continuing to reinvest higher and higher up the stack if you will. Right and in many ways we want to keep elevating our teams or partners or customers or companies out of the non differentiated elements. Uh and this is one of those areas where we see tremendous innovation happening from amazon from data breaks from snowflake, who are solving many of these underlying infrastructure, storage processing and even some application layer challenges proteins. And what we find oftentimes is that teams after having adopted some of these stacks on some of these solutions, then have to start solving the problem of how do we build after, how do we build better? And how do we produce more on top of these incredibly valuable investments that we've made and they're looking for acceleration. There's they're looking for in many ways the autopilot self driving level of capabilities, intelligence to sit on top and help them actually get the most out of these underlying systems. And that's really where we need that big changes >>are self driving data, you gotta have the products first. I think you mentioned earlier a data product data being products, but there's a trend with this idea of data products. Data apps. What is the data product? Um that's a new concept. I mean it's not most, most people really can't get their arms around that because it's kind of new data data, but how how does it become product ties and and how do why is it, why is it growing so fast? >>Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, quickly uh talked through a lot of the evolution of the industry. Oftentimes we started with the, well let's just get the data inside of a lake and it was a very autumns up notion of what we just collected then we'll go do something with it. The very field of dreams esque approach. Right? And oftentimes they didn't come in and your data just sat there and became a swamp. Right? And the when we think about a data, product oriented model of building it is let's focus on the how do we just collect and store and process data and it's much more on the business value side of how do we create a new data set in architectural models would be how do we launch a new micro service or a new feature out to a customer? But the data product is a new refined, valuable curated live set of data that can be used by the business. Whether it's for data analysts or data scientists are all the way out to end consumers. It is very heavily oriented towards that piece because that's really where we get to deliver value for our end users or customers. Yeah, >>getting that data fastest key Again, I love this idea of data becoming programmable or kind of a data ops kind of vibe where you're seeing data products that can be nurtured also scaled up to with people as as this continues The next kind of logical question I have for you is okay, I get the data products now I have teams of people, how do I deploy them? How do the teams change? Because now you have low code and no code capabilities and you have some front end tools that make it easier to create new apps and, and um products where data can feed into someone discovers a cool new value metric in the company. Um they can say here boss is a new new metric that we've identified that drives our business now, they've got a product ties that in the app, they used low code, no code. Where do you guys see this going? Because you can almost see a whole, another persona of a developer emerging >>or engine. Team >>emerging. >>Absolutely. And you know, it's, I think this is one of the challenges is when we look at the data ecosystem. Uh we even ran a survey a couple of months ago across hundreds of different developers asking data scientists, data engineers, data analyst about the overall productivity of their teams. And what we found was 96% of teams are at or over capacity, meaning only 4% of teams even have the capacity to start to invest in better tools or better skill sets and most are really under the gun. And what that means is teams and companies are looking for more people with different skill sets, how and frankly how they get more leverage out of the folks where they have, so they spend less than any more than building. And so what ends up starting to happen is this introduction of low code and no conclusions to help broaden the pool of people who can contribute to this. And what we find oftentimes is there's a bit of a standoff happening between engineering teams and analyst teams and data science teams, teams where some people want low code, some people want no code, Some people just want super high code all day all all the time and what we're finding is and even actually part of one of the surveys that we ran, uh, most users very small percentage less than 10% users actually were amenable to no code solutions, But more than 70% were amenable to solutions that leaned towards lower no code but allowed them to still programs in a language of their choice, give them more leverage. So what we see end up happening is really this new era of what we describe as flex code where it doesn't have to be just low code or just no code but teams can actually plug in at different layers of the staff and different abstract layers and contribute side by side with each other all towards the creation of this data product with applicable model of flats code. >>So let's unpack flex code for a second. You don't mind to first define what you mean by flex code and then talk about the implications to to the teams because it sounds like it's it's integrated but yet decoupled at layers. So can you take me through what it is and then let's unpack a little bit >>Absolutely. You know, fuck. So it is really a methodology that of course companies like ours will will go and product ties. But is that the belief structure that you should be able to peel back layers and contribute to an architecture in this case a data architecture, whether it's through building in a no code interface or by writing some low code in sequel or down and actually running lower level systems and languages and it's it's become so critical and key in the data ecosystem. As what classically happened has been the well if we need to go deeper into the stack, we need to customize more of how we run this one particular data job, you end up then throwing away most of the benefits and the adoption of any of these other code and tools. End up shutting off a lot of the rest of the company from contributing. And you then have to be for example, it really advanced scholar developer who understands how to extend doctor runtime environment uh, to contribute. And the reality is you probably want a few of those folks on your team and you do want them contributing, but you still want the data analysts and the data scientists and the software engineers able to contribute at higher levels of the stack, all building that solution together. So it becomes this hybrid architecture >>and I love I met because it's really good exploration here because so what you're saying is it's not that low code and no codes inadequate. It's just that the evolution of the market is such that as people start writing more code, things kind of break down stream. You gotta pull the expert in to kind of fix the plumbing and lower levels of the stack, so to speak, the more higher end systems oriented kind of components. So that's just an evolution of the market. So you're saying flex code is the next level of innovation around product sizing that in an architecture. So you don't waste someone's time to get yanked in to solve a problem just to fix something that's working or broke at this point. So if it works, it breaks. So, you know, it's working that people are coding with no code and low code, it just breaks something else downstream, You're fixing >>that. Absolutely. And that's the um, the idea of being here is, you know, it's one of these old averages. Uh, when you're selling out to customers, we see this and I remember this head of engineering one time I told me, well, you may make 95% of my team's job easier. But if you make the last 5% impossible, it is a non starter. And so a lot of this comes down to the how do we make that 95% of the team's job far easier. But when you really have to go do that one ultra advanced customized thing, how do we make sure you still get all the benefits of Oftentimes through a low code or no code interface, but you can still go back down and really tune and optimize that one piece. >>Yeah, that's really kind of, I mean this is really an architectural decision because that's the classic. You don't want to foreclose the future options. Right? So as a developer, you need to think this is really where you have to make an architecture decision That's really requires you guys to lean into that architectural team. How do you guys do that? What those conversations look like? Is it work with a send and we got you covered or how does those conversations go? Because if someone swinging low code, no code, they might not even know that they're foreclosing that 5%. >>Yeah. Oftentimes the, you know, for them, they're uh, they're the ones that are given the hardest radius gnarliest problems to solve for um, and may not uh even have the visibility that there is a team of 30, you know analysts who can go right incredible data pipelines if they are still afforded a low code or no code interface on top. And so, you know, for us, we really partner heavily with our customers and our users. Uh we do a ton of joint architecture, design decisions, not just for their products, but we actually bring them in to all of our architecture and design and road mapping sessions as well. Uh And we do a lot of collaborative building very much how we treat the developer community around the company. It's all we spent a lot of time on that >>part of your partner strategy. You're building the bridge to the future with the customer. >>Yeah, absolutely. We we work, in fact, almost all of our communications with our customers happen in shared slack channels. We are treated like extensions of our customers team and we treat them as our internal customers as well. >>And that's the way, and that's the way it should be doing some great work, is really cutting edge and really setting the table for, you know, a decade of innovation with the customer if you get it right, if they get if they get it right. So I gotta ask you with this um architecture, you gotta be factoring in automation because orchestration automation. These are the principles of devops to kind of go on the next level. I love this, love this conversation. Devops two point oh four point or whatever you wanna call it. It's the next level. Devops, it's data automation, you're taking it to a whole nother level within your sphere. Talk about automation and how that factors in obviously benefits the automation. Autonomous data pipeline? It would be Cool. No coding. I can see maintenance is an issue. How do you offload developers so that it's not only an easy button but it's a maintenance maintenance button? >>Yeah, absolutely. What we find in the evolution of most technical domains is this shit happened at some point usually towards her from an imperative developer model to a declared developer model. For example, we see this uh in databases with the introduction of sequel, we see it in infrastructure definition with tools like a telephone and now kubernetes and what we do from an automation perspective for uh for data pipelines is very similar to what Kubernetes does for containers? We do for data pipelines, we introduce a declarative model and put in this incredible intelligence that tracks everything around how data moves. Uh for us, metadata alone is a big data problem because we track so much information and all that goes into this central brain that is dynamically adapting to code and data for our users and dynamically generated. So for us, when we look at the biggest potential to automate is to help alleviate maintenance and optimization burdens for users. So they get to spend more time building and less time maintaining and that really goes into the how do you have this central brain that tracks everything that build this really deep understanding of how data moves through an organization. >>That's an awesome vision. I gotta ask my my brains firing off like, okay, so what about runtime assembly as you orchestrate data in real time, you have to kind of pull the assembly to all and link and load all this data together. I can only imagine how hard that is. Right? So can you share your vision because you mentioned docker containers, the benefits of containers is, you know, they can manage state and stateless data. So as you get into this notion of state and stateless uh data, how do you assemble it all in real time? How does that work? How's that brain figured out? What's the secret sauce? >>Yeah, that's a really great question. Uh you know, for us and this is one of the most exciting parts for our customers in our users is uh we hope with this paradigm shift where the classic model has been the you're writing code, you compile it, you ship it, you push it out and then you cross your fingers like, gosh, I really hope that works. Um and it's a very slow iteration cycle. And one of the things that we've been able to do because of this intelligence layer is actually help hybridize that for users. You still have pipelines and they still run and they're still optimizing but we make it an interactive experience at the same time very similar to how notebooks for data science. Help make that such an interactive experience. We make the process of building data pipelines and doing data engineering work iterative and interactive. You're getting instantaneous feedback and evolving very quickly. So they the things that used to take weeks or months due to slow iteration cycles really now can be done in hours or days because you get such fast feedback loops as you build. >>Well, we definitely need your product. We have so much data on the media side all these events are like little, it's like little data but it's big data, it's a lot of little data that makes it a big data problem. And I do, I feel like I'm jumping out of the airplane with a parachute and will it open, you know, one of the >>work you just we >>don't, you know, we don't know right? So a lot of the fear is you know, split, we don't wanna crater and build data products that are you know, praying right? This is this is really kind of everyone's doing right now. It's kind of state of the industry. How do you guys make it easy? That's the question, right. Because you brought up the human aspect, which I love the human scale, the scale teams, nobody wants another project if they are already burnt out with Covid and they don't have enough resources, you know, it's almost like there's a there's a little bit of psychology going on the human mind now saying well enough or burn out or you know, the relationship to humans training data data is now got this human interaction, all of it is around, you know, these are views future of work and simplicity and self service, What's your thoughts on those? >>Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. I think the uh we need to continue to be pushing those boundaries around self service and around developer and frankly just outright data productivity, You know, and for us, I think it's become a really fascinating uh time in the industry, as uh you know, I would say in 2019, much of the industry and users and builders in the industry, I just embrace the fact that frankly the building data pipeline sucked. Uh and it was a badge of honor because it was such a hard and painful thing yet, what we're finding is now as the industry is evolving is an expectation that it should be easier. Uh and people are challenging that conventional wisdom and expecting building data pipelines to be much easier and that's really where we come in is both with a flex code model and with high levels of automation to keep people squarely focused on rapid building versus maintaining and tinkering to deepen the staff. >>You know, I really think you're on to something with the one that scaling challenge of people and teams huge issue to match that at the pace of, you know, cloud and data scale is a huge, huge focus and I'm glad you're focusing on that, that's a human issue and then on the data architecture? I mean we saw what to do, how to do a failed project? You require the customer to create all this, you know, undifferentiated support and heavy lifting and, and time lag just to get to value right? There is no value right in the cloud. So, so this is your on the right track. How do you talk to customers, take a minute to, to share at the folks who are watching or if it's a customer and enterprise or potential customer, what's in it for them? Why ascend why should they work with you? How do they engage with you guys? What's in it for them? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, what's in it for customers is time to value truncated dramatically. You get projects live and you get them faster, far faster than ever thought possible. Uh, you know, the way that we engage with our customers, uh, is we help partner them with them, We launched them on the, on the application. They can buy us from the marketplace, we will actually help even architect their first project with them, uh, and ensure that they have a full fledged live data product. Data products live within the first four weeks. Uh, not really, I think becomes the most keeping and frankly it doesn't features and functions and so on really don't matter. Ultimately, at the end of day, what really matters is can you get your data products live, Can you deliver business value and are your your team happy as they get to go build. Do they do they smile more throughout the day because they're enjoying that devil over experience. >>So you're providing the services to get them going. It's the old classic expression teaching them how to fish and then they can fish on their own, Is that right? >>Yep. Absolutely. >>And then doing whatever next next damn thing. Yeah >>and then then the, we're excited to watch quarter after quarter year after year our customers build more and more data products uh and their teams are growing faster than most of the other teams in their companies because they're delivering so much value and that's what's so exciting, >>you know, you know the cliche every company is a data company. I know that's kind of cliche but it's true right? Everyone has to have a core D. N. A. But they don't have, they shouldn't have to hire hardcore data engineering. They haven't data team for sure. That team has to create a service model for practitioners inside the company. >>Well how do they agree >>Sean great, great conversation. Um great to unpack the flex code. I love that approach, take it to the next level, take it low code to the next level with data. Great stuff and send I. O Palo Alto based company, congratulations on your success. >>Thank you so much, john >>okay this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, I'm john for your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

(upbeat digital music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for the cube Natalie Erlich. We're joined with a special guest, Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO of Wiley. Thank you very much for joining the program. >> Great to be here, Natalie. Thanks for having me. >> Terrific, well tell us about Wiley. What do you do? >> Sure, Wiley is really wonderful company. Wiley drives the world forward with research in education through publishing and services. We help researchers, professionals, students, universities, and corporations to achieve their goals. Wiley's primarily known as a publishing company, but really now more than ever, we're a tech enabled research and education company, and we have three major areas of impact, research, education, and professional learning. >> Well, obviously the pandemic, the big topic of the last year and hopefully new topics as we move forward, but how has education community evolved during this pandemic? And what's the next step for hybrid learning? >> Yeah, it's been amazing to be part of education and research during this pandemic, during a time when these things have never really been more important. Wiley is a company that's transforming at every level and to many extensive pandemic accelerated those changes and this is nowhere more evident than in the education space. For a long time we'd been building these online and computer-based education platforms and really trying to get folks to move there. And that's been a long, long process and it's been wonderful 'cause we've seen the pandemic has really accelerated that. And we've seen huge increases in usage on our online education platforms, which we've been pushing towards for years. So in many ways it's really enabled us to move forward in a way that that nothing else could have. >> Yeah, I mean, that's really incredible, you mentioned incredible silver lining with the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, especially in education. What do you see as the next phase now that this has really developed over the last year? >> So as I mentioned, we're transforming at every level and at a business level, we just talked a little bit about that. Education is moving more and more to on online and hybrid models. Research, we're moving more and more to open access models where everybody has access to research. Again with the pandemic this has been critical to make sure that we're getting out good medical research and that it's available as widely as possible. But we're also transforming internally. I've been with Wiley about a year and a half now. And when I started, so this is actually prior to COVID, our CEO Brian Napack, said that we're not in a single market that's not going through major disruption, and he's right. And it's so exciting to be part of this company. And on the internally, we have to make sure we're going through a transformation so that we can deliver the products and services that the world's demanding at the speed at which they're demanding them. And so we're also going through transformations from Agile to cloud to DevOps, and it makes it a really exciting place to be as a technologist and also someone who is passionate about education and research. >> Yeah, well terrific. Why did you choose PagerDuty? >> I think there are a few key elements that PagerDuty really enables for us. So as I mentioned, we're going through this DevOps transformation and some of the core competencies, the core principles of DevOps are ones that are enabled by PagerDuty. I think a couple of key ones that I love about it are the ability to empower the users rather than having a centralized service desk that is looking up things and paging out and needs to manage a registry of all the technology people. We can put that power, that control in the hands of what we at Wiley call the functional delivery teams. These teams that are fully responsible for their staff, fully responsible for their research and education solutions that they're delivering. And we using PagerDuty can put that responsibility and empower those teams to take full ownership of their on call schedules, their team management, without having to go through several hops to get there. And I think this also drives another key element, which is that accountability. Look, we're asking these functional delivery teams to take responsibility for their applications and services. We don't work in an environment where we say, "Oh, that's a operations team's responsibility," we're working in a DevOps model. And we can't rightfully ask teams to take responsibility if we don't provide them the tools to be in control of their own fate. And I really think that PagerDuty is a key element of that tool chain, which enables them to manage their full stack and thereby drives that accountability and ownership. >> Yeah, well, I'd love it if you could tell us some of the challenges you were trying to solve by implementing PagerDuty. >> There were several, I think it speaks to some of the underlying principles of DevOps and Agile that we were trying to enable. More than anything it's really about driving better, meantime to resolution when incidents do arrive through faster escalation directly to the right person. And breaking out of this tiered service model where it has to go through a tier one, a tier two, tier three, before the technical issue gets to the right person. Now with PagerDuty, the issue goes directly to the person who can solve it and they're there, they're able to solve it. And we have made huge strides in reducing our meantime to resolution. I have never seen improvements like I've seen in the past year and a half in Wiley using PagerDuty as a part of our overall tool chain. >> Yeah, I mean, if you have a concrete example that something really stood out, we'd love to hear that. >> So I'm not going to go bring up the charts and data to show you, but I'll tell ya the concrete data is there. We track how long it takes us obviously to resolve problems when they occur, and I was blown away by what this team has achieved. And I don't want to take away credit from all the work they've done either. Tools alone doesn't solve any problem, we have amazing technology team, an amazing team willing to take that responsibility. But if you look at the numbers over the past year and a half, in terms of the reduction in time to resolve across every team, it's truly impressive. >> And what are you looking forward to at the summit? >> Well, I'm always excited to hear about what's going on at PagerDuty. I think there are a couple key items or key sessions that I'm excited to see. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the future of work, the views from the C-suite. I think PagerDuty always has a really unique and fresh perspective, and so I think that's going to be very pertinent and timely as we look to what's coming next in hybrid world. I'm also excited about the what's next in DevOps presentation. Some great folks speaking there. And I think DevOps is maturing and we can... (laughing) for a longest time we were asking, What is DevOps? Can we define it? Can we define it in a consistent way? And I think we're at a point now where we can, and we know the components. So it's a really good time to ask what's next in DevOps. And finally, I'm just excited to hear what's next for PagerDuty. It's been a great tool for us and I'm excited to see where the company is going next. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, let's shift gears a bit. Staying on point with digital transformation. How is that in line with some of the broader organizational goals that Wiley has, such as bridging the higher education gap? >> Yeah, I think that as I mentioned, all our businesses are changing dramatically and we're not going to be able to meet the rapidly changing technology demands, unless we have technologies and teams that can rapidly change with those demands and rapidly expand with those demands. So whether that's auto scaling, whether that's more resilient systems, we need to be there. And I'll also mention the key element that security plays here, because the other change we're seeing is a huge increase in the threat landscape and the depth of some of the attacks we're seeing. And so this focus on security is another important part of the transformation and the transformation from just security to DevSecOps is something that's key for Wiley. It's critical because security for Wiley is security for our customers. And one of the things that we offer is the promise of reliable and secure services. >> And what are some of the innovative ways that Wiley is now delivering content solutions? >> So we're always trying to push the envelope of education in many different ways. I think that there's huge possibilities with AI, machine learning, adaptive learning to really push that envelope to really... I mean, one of the things that I love about being at Wiley is that I get to be involved with education and research. Like my job gets to be helping people learn better, helping people learn quicker. If we can, through technology, make learning easier, let's make it quicker to learn and also look at reducing the cost and availability of that education, we can make an impact around the world, and that's an exciting thing to be part of. >> So in terms of digital transformation, obviously that's a priority for you, security, tell us more about specifically the main points that you're going to be focusing on in this next year in 2021. >> There's a few key key elements that we're focusing on as we go into... It's actually coincidentally the start of our fiscal year, We have a bit of an interesting fiscal year. But that kicks off or just kicked off last month. So we've spent the last four months doing a lot of planning for this year. For me, I think some of the keys are going to be driving agility through simplicity. And one of the places that comes into play is through our tool chain. Making sure we don't have every tool, but we've got the right tools to connect our users, and that, that tool chain is very much interconnected so that we can hit on another key concept for me, which is the enablement of our business. We enable our developers, we enable content editors, we enabled all of Wiley to do the best job they can through technology. We want technology to be seamless for our users. And these three concepts, seamless, enablement and simplicity, agility through simplicity, really work hand in hand to enable our users, our community, to develop, to build at the speed that business demands. >> And obviously, security a really key feature of your role. We don't often think about security going hand in hand with education, but for some of our viewers that are not directly involved in education, why is that so critical? >> Well, I think anyone who's involved with technology today can grasp the criticality of security. Not many days go by that we don't hear of new threats, new ransomware attacks. And Wiley is now more than ever a technology enabled and driven business. When we talk about education, we're talking about technology. When we talk about research, we talk about technology and the underpinning systems and the threats that are out there, impact education and research technology just as they do any other research in education or any other line of business. We have amazing security team at Wiley. I am really blown away by the work this team does every day, and I'm excited about where it's going to. It's so critical for us because we need to provide... If we talk about enabling education for more people in a more effective way around the world, part of that is making sure that all of our users are secure and safe and confident. So we are investing heavily in security and going beyond just spending more money, but really taking a innovative DevSecOps approach, focusing on application security, focusing on making security, not just a team, but part of what everybody in Wiley does because technology can't just be a set of tools and it can't be one team that sits in a dark corner of the environment and tells people what they can't do. Security has to be core to everything we do. And so when we're talking about people building new products and services, we have to make sure that they're part of the security solution. When we talk about our finance users, they need to be part of our security solution. Only by making sure that security is integral to everything we do, are we truly going to be able to make sure we have a secure set of products and services for our users. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and thoughts on PagerDuty Summit as well as digital transformation at Wiley. Really appreciate it, Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO at Wiley. Thank you for joining the program. >> Great, thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. >> And that's all for this session of PagerDuty Summit coverage by "theCube." I'm your host Natalie Elrich. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit, I'm your host from theCUBE Natalie Erlich. Now we're joined by Sean Scott, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty, thank you very much for joining the program. >> Glad to be here, thank you for having me. >> Terrific. Well, you've been with PagerDuty for about six months, how's it going? >> It's going great. So, I joined PagerDuty because I saw the entire world was shifting to digital first and PagerDuty is key infrastructure for many of the world's largest companies, in fact over 60% of the Fortune 100 are customers. And more importantly, I see a much broader future our platform will play in digital operations for these companies going forward, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Terrific. Well, you have really robust experience, over 20 years in the Valley leading product, marketing, and engineering teams. What prompted the move? I mean, you explained a bit, but just really curious why you made that? >> Sure, so yeah I had a long career at Amazon where I was responsible for much of the shopping experience, I ran the homepage, product page, checkout, a lot of the underlying tools and tech that supports that worldwide across all devices. And then more recently I built and launched the Scout autonomous delivery robot from the ground up, so. But after 15 years, and I was starting to look for a change and I started talking to Jen, our CEO, and the more we talked, the more excited I became about the platform and what it can be going forward for our customers. You know, the fact that we are already integrated with so many customers around the world and playing such a critical role as part of their infrastructure, and yet, I think we're just getting started, and we can help out companies in so many more use cases across our organizations and really eliminate a lot of time and waste from their processes. Well, this is your first PagerDuty Summit, I would love it if you could share perhaps some insight what you're planning to announce this week? >> Yeah, sure. So, we have a few things that we're announcing. One is, we announced last year, probably the biggest news last September was our acquisition of Rundeck; and so as part of that we're announcing our first integration of PagerDuty and Rundeck in the form of Runbook actions. So this is a, you could think of it as kind of quick, kind of micro-automations or short automations to give responders much more insights into what's actually happening with an incident. So maybe it's running a MIM command or a script on a server, we can actually run that directly from the PagerDuty interface so you don't have to SSH into a box for example, which is all just takes time and effort, and so when you're trying to remediate an issue of maybe a site being down or a service being down, it all happens right there. And even your frontline responders can now do those remediations as well, and those automation actions, to again, before they need to escalate to the next tier or bring in other devs to help troubleshoot. So that's pretty exciting. We're also announcing Service Craft, which is a new way to model your services and to show your services, and really understand your dependency graph. So if you think about one of the biggest challenges often when you're trying to remediate an issue is understanding is it me, or is it one of my dependent services? And so now we actually have new visualizations to really show the responders exactly what's happening and you can quickly see is it you, or is it maybe some dependency, maybe multiple teams are having the same issue that because one of the core services that everybody leverages is down and you can quickly see that. So that's pretty exciting as well. We have change correlation and incident outliers. So change correlation, you know, most incidents occur because of changes that were made by us people, and so being able to spotlight things like here's a change that was recently made, or here's a change based on our machine learning algorithms that we detected that could be a culprit here. So providing much richer insights, to again, reduce that mean time to resolution. So this whole team, our Event Intelligence team, that's our whole purpose in life is really just to reduce that mean time to resolution for our customers. Imagine waking up, you know, tomorrow, and your mean time to resolution just magically goes down because of our software updates, and that's how that team focuses on. And then the last one in this group is internet outliers, which is all about telling you if an incident, is this rare, or is this a frequent incident? And just giving you a little more insights into what you're seeing, which will again, help the responders. We have some other announcements coming up, but I'll save that for Summit. >> Perfect. Well, you know, I'd love it if you could share some insight on the competitive landscape, and how PagerDuty is, how you see its product that they're offering different from the others? >> Sure. So, we go head-to-head with a lot of competitors, and we, we have the, you know, being in the fortunate position that we do have a few competitors coming after us and some big names as well. But, you know, when we go head-to-head with these companies, we generally win. And we see we're constantly getting put in bake-offs with these other competitors. We had one customer I was talking to a few weeks back and they paired us against the incumbent, and out of the box, we saw a 50% improvement in mean time to acknowledge, so this is how quickly we can pull in the responder. And then in addition, I thought was more interesting, is we saw a 50% improvement in the mean time to resolution over the incumbent. And so while we do have competitors coming at us, I'm really happy with the way our product performs and our customers are too. So after these bake-offs, it's usually pretty clear who's staying and who's going. >> Yeah, so, when you were helping develop this program this week, what were some of the key areas that you really wanted to highlight? >> Yeah, so one of the big areas is really talking about our vision, and what is our go forward plan. Because I think while we're really known for incident response, I think, you know, some of the exciting things you'll hear about at Summit are kind of where we're going in terms of four pillars to our vision. One is flexibility. Flexible workflows, and enabling flexibility. So, if you think about all the things that our product is doing beyond DevOps. So for example, you know, we had a customer telling us about they had put PagerDuty in front of everything they're doing, so their whole building is IP enabled, and so they had a contractor drill through a water main, and it was instantly able to shut off the water. So they, you know, within 30 seconds, PagerDuty had notified the right responders of building maintenance, and within a minute and a half the water was shut off, and they made the comment that PagerDuty just paid for itself with this one incident. We see IOT device management, we see even organ transplant delivery using our product, and so we want to continue to fuel that with our flexibility. Second pillar is connect to everyone. We see that we have a lot of people connected, but we just launched fairly recently a customer service offering, so now we can get customer service not only informed what's going on, but also connecting to the dev teams, and engineering teams, and the service owners, to really give them more insights into the blast radius and what they may be seeing. The next one is connect everything. So we have over 550 out of the box integrations, and so that makes it seamless to connect to apps like Datadog. But then also we work where our customers work, so we can actually do work in Slack or MS Teams and take action right in those tools. And the last one is automate away to toil. So we want to automate what can be automated, and this goes back to the Rundeck acquisition that I mentioned, and getting that more deeply integrated with the stack, and with processes across an organization. And we're seeing that when our customers really take advantage of that platform they can really automate away to toil, and automate a lot of redundant work, and work that is just busy work that keeps people from doing their day jobs, so to speak. >> Yeah, well, obviously we had a really unusual last year with the pandemic. How do you think that it changed up business for you? Did it inspire you to move in a new direction? What do you see next in the near future? >> For sure. So, I saw that, and it's probably the reason why I came to PagerDuty, because I saw the transformation industries are making to digital first. Right? And so there was a lot of teams, a lot of companies struggled, but then a lot of companies also, florists, you'd take companies like Instacart, and DoorDash, and Zoom, you know, had a terrific year. And so, you know, PagerDuty, even with the pandemic, and companies that were struggling, we still grew pretty rapidly last year, and that's, I think it's pretty exciting, and it really speaks to that migration to digital where digital is now becoming, you know, table stakes, and just part of what you have to do as a business as opposed to it used to be a goal that oh, we need to do more on digital platform, and now it's like, you have to, you know, focus on your digital platform if you want to simply stay relevant today. And so I think that's really important for PagerDuty because that's where we really help companies thrive. >> Sean, that's really interesting. To close out this interview, do you have any last thoughts? >> No, I think that covers it, I think we're, you know, really excited to grow with our customers and we're seeing great traction in the market, and look forward to a bright future, and our platform really helping customers solve new problems that they might've not even considered us for yet. >> Terrific. Well, thank you very much for your insights. Sean Scott, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. And that wraps up our coverage today for the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube conversation. >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host from the cube Natalie Ehrlich. Now we're joined by Sean Scott the Chief Product Officer of PagerDuty. Thank you very much for joining the program. >> Glad to be here, thank you for having me. >> Terrific, while you've been with PagerDuty for about six months, how is it going? >> Well and great. So I joined PagerDuty because I saw the entire world was shifting to digital first and PagerDuty is key infrastructure for many of the world's largest companies. In fact, over 60% of the Fortune 100 are customers. And more importantly, I see a much broader future our platform will play in digital operations for these companies going forward. I'm excited to be a part of that. >> Terrific. Well, you have really robust experience over 20 years in the value leading product, marketing and engineering teams. What prompted the move? I mean, you explained it but just really curious why you made that. >> So, yeah, I had a long career at Amazon where I was responsible for much of the shopping experience. I ran the homepage, product page, checkout a lot of the underlying tools and tech that supports that worldwide across all devices. And then more recently I built and launched the scout autonomous delivery robot from the ground up. So, but after 15 years and I was starting to look for a change and I started talking to Jen, our CEO and the more we talked the more excited I became about the platform and what it can be going forward for our customers. You know, the fact that we are already integrated with so many customers around the world and playing such a critical role as part of their infrastructure. And yet I think we're just getting started and we can help out companies and so many more use cases across our organizations and really eliminate a lot of time in a waste from their processes. >> Well, this is your first PagerDuty summit. Do tell us, what do you think is the vision for this year's program? >> Yeah, so we'll be launching a lot of new products that I'm excited to talk about and I'll be sharing some of the vision about what I've been thinking about and what I've been working on for my time that I've been here so far. And that starts with our vision, which is really how do we enable more flexibility across our platform. I mentioned our customers are using us for a lot of unique ways beyond DevOps. Things like IOT device management. You know, I heard one yesterday of, you know really doing building management. So the building was having a water leak and instantly it was hooked up to PagerDuty already beforehand. And so within 30 seconds they had alerted and within a minute and a half, they had the water shut off of the building. So way beyond the DevOps use case to even organ transplant delivery, if you can believe that our platform is being used on. So it's pretty exciting to think about all our product already does, but we want to continue to accelerate that. And so building much more flexibility into our product to really capture more of that value and more of the work that's happening across the organization, connect to everyone. >> That's really incredible. We'd love it if you could share perhaps some insight what you're planning to announce this week. >> Yeah, sure. So we have a few things that we're announcing. One is we announced last year by the biggest news last September was our acquisition of Rundeck. And so as part of that, we're announcing our first integration of PagerDuty in Rundeck in the form of Runbook action. So this is a, you can think of it as kind of quick kind of micro automations or short automations to give responders much more insights into what's actually happening with an incident. So maybe it's say running a MIM command or a script on a server, we can actually run that directly from the PagerDuty interface. So you don't have to SSH into a box, for example what does all just takes time and effort. And so when you're trying to remediate that issue of maybe a site being down or a service being down, it all happens right there. And even your frontline responders can now do those remediations as well and those automation actions, to again before they need to escalate to the next tier or bring in other devs to help troubleshoot. So that's pretty exciting. We're also announcing service graft which is a new way to model your services and show your services and really understand your dependency graph. So if you think about one of the biggest challenges often when you're trying to remediate issues is understanding, is that me, or is that one of my dependent services? And so now we actually have new visualizations to really show that our responders exactly what's happening and you can quickly see, is it you or is it maybe some dependency maybe multiple teams are having the same issue that because one of the core services that everybody leverages is down and you can quickly see that. So that's pretty exciting as well. We have change correlation and internet outliers. So change correlation, you know, most incidents occur because of changes that were made by us people. And so being able to spotlight things like here's a change that was recently made, or here's a change based on our machine learning algorithms that we detected that could be a culprit here. So providing a much richer insights to again reduce that meantime to resolution. So this whole team, our intelligence team that's our whole purpose in life is really just to reduce that meantime to resolution for our customers. Imagine waking up, you know, tomorrow and your meantime to resolution just magically goes down because of our software updates and that's how that team focuses on. And then the last one in this group is internet outliers which is all about telling you have an incident, is this rare or is this a frequent incident? And just giving you a little more insights into what you're seeing which will again help the responders. We have some other announcements coming up, but I'll save that for something. >> Terrific. Well, you know, I'd love it if you could share some insight on the competitive landscape and how PagerDuty is, how you see its product offering different from the others. >> Sure. So we go head to head with a lot of our competitors and we have the, you know, being in the fortunate position that we do have a few competitors coming after us and some big names as well. But you know, when we go head to head with these companies we generally win and we see we're constantly getting put in bake-offs with these other competitors. We have one customer, I was talking to a few weeks back and they paired us against the incumbent and out of the box, we saw 50% improvement in meantime to acknowledge. So this is how quickly we can pull the responder. And then in addition, I thought was more interesting as we saw a 50% improvement in the meantime to resolution over the incumbent. And so while we do have competitors coming at us I'm really happy with the way our product performs and our customers are too. So after these bake-offs, it's usually pretty clear who's staying and who's going. >> Yeah. So when you were helping develop this program this week what were some of the key areas that you really wanted to highlight? >> So one of the big areas is really talking about our vision and what is our go forward plan, because I think while we're really known for incident response, I think some of the exciting things you'll hear about at the summit are kind of where we're going in terms of four pillars to our vision. One is flexibility. Flexible workflows and enabling flexibility. So if you think about all the things that our product is doing beyond DevOps. So for example, you know we had a customer telling us about they had put PagerDuty in front of everything they're doing. So their whole building is IP enabled. And so they had a contractor drill through a watermain and it was instantly able to shut off the water. So they, you know, within 30 seconds they had the PagerDuty had notified the right responders of building maintenance and within a minute and a half the water was shut off and they made the comment that PagerDuty just paid for itself with this one incident. We see IOT device management. We see even organ transplant delivery using our product. And so we will continue to fuel that with our flexibility. Second pillar is connect to everyone. We see that we have a lot of people connected, but we just launched fairly recently a customer service offering. So now we can get customer service not only informed what's going on, but also connecting to the dev teams and the engineering teams and the service owners to really give them more insights into the blast radius and what they may be seeing. The next one is connect everything. So we have over 550 out of the box integrations. So that makes it seamless to connect to apps like Datadog. But then also we work where our customers work. So we can actually do work in Slack or MS Teams and take action right in those tools. And the last one is automated way to toil. So we want to automate what can be automated. And this goes back to the one deck acquisition that I mentioned and getting that more deeply integrated with the stack and with processes across an organization. And we're seeing that when our customer has really taken advantage of that platform they can really automate a way to toil and automate a lot of redundant work and work that is just busy work and that keeps people from doing their day jobs, so to speak. >> Yeah, well obviously we had a really unusual last year with the pandemic. How do you think that it changed a business for you? Did it inspire you to move in a new direction? What do you see next in the near future? >> For sure. So I saw that, I mean, it's probably the reason why I came to PagerDuty because I saw the transformation industries are making a digital first, right. And so there was a lot of teams a lot of companies struggled, but then a lot of companies also flourished you'd take, you know companies like Instacart and DoorDash and Zoom, you know had a terrific year. And so, you know, PagerDuty even with the pandemic and companies that were struggling, we still grew pretty rapidly last year. And that's, I think it's pretty exciting. And it really speaks to that migration to digital where digital is now becoming table stakes and just part of what you have to do as a business as opposed to it used to be a goal that we need to do more on digital platform. And now it's like, you have to, you know focus on a digital platform if you want to simply stay relevant today. And so I think that's really important for PagerDuty because that's where we really help companies thrive. >> Sean, that's really interesting. To close out this interview, do you have any last thoughts? >> No, I think that covers it. I think we're really excited to grow with our customers and we're seeing great traction in the market and look forward to a bright future in our platform. Really helping customers solve new problems that they might've not even considered us for yet. >> Terrific, well, thank you very much for your insights. Sean Scott the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. And that wraps up our coverage today for the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCube. Thank you for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for "theCUBE" Natalie Erlich. We're joined with a special guest, Sean Mack, the CIO and CISO of Wiley. Thank you very much for joining the program. >> Great to be here, Natalie. Thanks for having me. >> Terrific, well, tell us about Wiley. What do you do? >> Sure, Wiley is really wonderful company. Wiley drives the world forward with research and education. Through publishing and services, we help researchers, professionals, students, universities and corporations to achieve their goals. Wiley's primarily known as a publishing company but really now more than ever we're a tech enabled research and education company and we have three major areas of impact. Research, education, and professional learning. >> Terrific, well, you know obviously the pandemic the big topic of the last year and hopefully, new topics as we move forward, but how has education community evolved during this pandemic and what's the next step for hybrid learning? >> Yeah, it's been amazing to be part of education and research during this pandemic. during a time when these things have never really been more important. Wiley is a company that's transforming at every level and to many extensive pandemic accelerated those changes. And this is nowhere more evident than in the education space. For a long time we'd been building these online and computer-based education platforms and really trying to get folks to move there. And that's been a long, long process and it's been wonderful 'cause we've seen the pandemic has really accelerated that. And we've seen huge increases in usage on our online education platforms, which we've been pushing towards for years. So in many ways it's really enabled us to move forward in a way that nothing else could have. >> Yeah, I mean that's really incredible. You mentioned incredible silver lining with the pandemic, accelerating digital transformation especially in education. What do you see as the next phase now that this has really developed over the last year? >> Yeah, so as I mentioned, we're transforming at every level and at a business level that we just talked a little bit about that, education is moving more and more to online and hybrid models. Research, we're moving more and more to open access models where everybody has had access to research, again with the pandemic this has been critical to make sure that we're getting out good medical research and that it's available as widely as possible. But we're also transforming internally. I've been with Wiley about a year and a half now and when I started, so this is actually prior to COVID our CEO Brian Napack said that we're not in a single market that's not going through major disruption and he's right. And it's so exciting to be part of this company. And on the internally, we have to make sure we're going through a transformation so that we can deliver the products and services that the world's demanding at the speed at which they're demanding them, right? And so we're also going through transformations from Agile to Cloud to devOps, and it makes it a really exciting place to be as a technologist. And also someone who's passionate about education research. >> Yeah, well, terrific. Why did you choose PagerDuty? >> I think there are a few key elements that PagerDuty really enables for us. So as I mentioned, we're going through this devOps transformation and some of the core competencies, the core principles of devOps are ones that are enabled by PagerDuty. I think a couple of key ones that I love about it are the ability to empower the users rather than having a centralized service desk that is looking up things and paging out and needs to manage a registry of all the technology people. We can put that power that control in the hands of what we at wildly called a functional delivery teams. These teams that are fully responsible for their staff, fully responsible for their research and education solutions that they're delivering. And we were using PagerDuty can put that responsibility and empower those teams to take full ownership of their on call schedules, their team management without having to go through several hops to get there. And I think this also drives another key element which is that accountability. Look, we're asking these functional delivery teams to take responsibility for their applications and services. We don't work in an environment where you say, Oh, that's our operations team's responsibility, we're working in a devOps model. And we can't ask, we can't rightfully ask teams to take responsibility if we don't provide them the tools to be in control of their own fate. And I really think that PagerDuty is a key element of that tool chain, which enables them to manage their full stack and thereby drives that accountability and ownership. >> Yeah, well, I'd love it if you could tell us some of the challenges you were trying to solve by implementing PagerDuty. >> There were several, I think it speaks to some of the underlying principles of devOps and Agile that we were trying to enable. More than anything it's really about driving better meantime to resolution when incidents do arrive. through faster escalation directly to the right person, right? We breaking out of this tiered service model where it has to go through a tier one, a tier two, tier three before the technical issue gets to the right person right. Now with PagerDuty the issue goes directly to the person who can solve it, and they're there, they're able to solve it. And we have made huge strides in reducing our meantime to resolution. I have never seen improvements like I've seen in the past year and a half in Wiley using PagerDuty as a part of our overall tool chain. >> Yeah, I mean if you have a concrete example that something really stood out would love to hear that. >> So I'm not going to go bring up the charts and data to show you but I'll tell ya' the concrete data is there. We track how long it takes us obviously to resolve problems when they occur. And I was blown away by what this team has achieved. And I don't want to take away credit from all the work they've done either right. Tools alone doesn't solve any problem. We have a amazing technology team and amazing team willing to take that responsibility. But if you look at the numbers over the past year and a half, in terms of the reduction in time to resolve across every, every team, it's truly impressive. >> And what are you looking forward to at the summit? >> Well, I'm always excited to hear about what's going on at PagerDuty. I think there are a couple key items or key sessions that I'm excited to see. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the future of work, the views from the C-suite. I think PagerDuty always has a really unique and fresh perspective and so I think that's going to be very pertinent and timely as we look to what's coming next in a hybrid world. I'm also excited about the what's next in DevOps presentation, some great folks speaking there. And I think devOps is maturing and we can, (laughs) for a longest time we were asking, what is devOps, right? Can we define, can we define it in an inconsistent way? And I think we're at a point now where we can, and we know the components. So it's a really good time to ask what's next in devOps. And finally I'm just excited to hear what's next for PagerDuty. It's been a great tool for us and I'm excited to see where the company is going next. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, let's shift gears a bit, staying on point with digital transformation. How is that in line with some of the broader organizational goals that that Wiley has, such as bridging the higher education gap? >> Yeah, I think that as I mentioned all our businesses are changing dramatically and we're not going to be able to meet the rapidly changing technology demands unless we have technologies and teams that can rapidly change with those demands and rapidly expand with those demands. So whether that's auto scaling, whether that's more resilient systems, we need to be there. And I'll also mention the key element that security plays here because the other change we're seeing is a huge increase in the threat landscape and the depth of some of the attacks we're seeing. And so this focus on security is another important part of the transformation and the transformation from just security to DevSecOps is something that's key for Wiley. It's critical because security for Wiley is security for our customers. And one of the things that we offer is the promise of reliable and secure services >> And what are some of the innovative ways that Wiley is now delivering content solutions? >> So we're always trying to push the envelope of education in many different ways. I think that there's huge possibilities with AI machine learning, adaptive learning to really push that envelope, to really, I mean, one of the things that I love about being at Wiley is that I get to be involved with education and research. Like my job gets to be helping people learn better, helping people learn quicker, right. If we can, through technology, make learning easier, make it quicker to learn and also look at reducing the cost and availability of that education. We can make an impact around the world. And that's the exciting thing to be part of. >> Yeah, indeed. Well talk to us about some of the collaborations that you have with author, societies, libraries, and other members of the research community. >> So I'm probably >> At Wiley. >> Not the best one to talk to. (laughs) I focus a lot on enabling our researchers and educators. I focus a lot on enabling the teams that are building the platforms but you'd have to talk to the lines of business to get into a bit more depth about the many Nobel laureates that we're working with. >> Terrific, yeah. So in terms of digital transformation, obviously that's a priority for you, security, tell us more about specifically the main points that you're going to be focusing on in this next year in 2021. >> Yeah, there's a few key key elements that we're focusing on as we go into, it's actually coincidentally the start of our fiscal year. We have a bit of an interesting fiscal year but that kicks off or just kicked off last month. So we've spent the last four months doing a lot of planning for this year. For me, I think some of the keys are going to be driving agility through simplicity, right? And one of the places that comes into play is through our tool chain. Making sure we don't have every tool but we've got the right tools to connect our users. And that tool chain is very much interconnected so that we can hit on another key concept for me which is the enablement of our business, right. We enable our developers, we enable content editors. We enabled all of Wiley to do the best job they can through technology. We want technology to be seamless for our users. So, and these three concepts, seamless, enablement and simplicity, agility through simplicity, really work hand in hand to enable our users, our community, to develop, to build at the speed that business demands >> And obviously, security really, key feature of your role. We don't often think about security going hand in hand with education, but for some of our viewers that are not directly involved in education why is that so critical? >> Yeah, well, I think anyone who's involved with technology today can grasp the criticality of security. Not many days go by that we don't hear of new threats, new ransomware attacks and Wiley is now more than ever a technology enabled and driven business. When we talk about education we're talking about technology. When we talk about research, we talk about technology and the underpinning systems and the threats that are out there, impact education and research technology just as they do any other research and education or any other line of business. We have amazing security team Wiley, I am really blown away by the work this team does every day. And I'm excited about where it's going to. it's so critical for us because we need to provide, we talk about enabling education for more people in a more effective way around the world, part of that is making sure that all of our users are secure and safe and confident. So we are investing heavily in security and going beyond just spending more money but really taking a innovative DevSecOps approach, focusing on application security, focusing on making security not just a team, but part of what everybody in Wiley does. Because technology can't just be a set of tools and it can't be one team that sits in a dark corner of the environment and tells people what they can't do. Security has to be poor to everything we do. And so when we're talking about people building new products and services, we have to make sure that they're part of the security solution. When we talk about our finance users they need to be part of our security solution. If we're not, only by making sure that security is integral to everything we do are we truly going to be able to make sure we have a secure set of products and services for our users. >> Terrific, well, thank you so much for your insights and thoughts on PagerDuty summit as well as digital transformation at Wiley. Really appreciate it. Sean Mack, the CIO and CISO at Wiley. Thank you for joining the program. >> Great, thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. >> And that's all for this session of PagerDuty summit coverage by "theCUBE." I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering get lab commit 20, 20 Raji you buy get lab. >>Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the cubes coverage of get lab commit 2020. We're here in San Francisco. It's a little bit chilly but uh, my first guests, uh, on the program are used to the weather cause they're coming to us from Wisconsin. Uh, both from Northwestern mutual, uh, sitting to my left here is Kyle person who is a senior engineer and sitting to his left is Sean who is also a senior engineer. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Alright. We thought, you know, both of us coming from colder climates that may be coming to San Francisco would be a little warmer, but they have hand warmers, they have warm drinks and it is the warmth of the community that will warm our innards. I'm short right there. It says get warm. That's what we're here to do. All right, Kyle, let's start with you. Northwestern mutual. I think most people are familiar with the organization, but give us a little bit of a, you know, how people should think of Northwestern mutual in 2020 and, uh, your roles. >>Yeah. So obviously we mean we're a large insurance company but also into financial services and products and we're really trying to become more of a digital company as well. We think that that's going to be a differentiator in the marketplace. You know, having apps that our customers can interact with, um, trying to speed up underwriting, things like that. So we're really just trying to be a technology company as much of an insurance company. Okay, >>great. And Sean, I understand you're, you're on the same team as Kyle helping you along with that digital transformation that that's been all the buzz for the last couple of years. Yeah. He can't get rid of me. We flew, you know, 1200 miles and I'm still sitting next to, uh, but yeah, at Northwestern mutual, I mean, going back a number of years now, the, the company started down this path of doing a digital transformation where we wanted to be, you know, a software company that is providing financial service and financial stability for our clients. So it was a big shift that we, we started, we knew we needed to modernize everything. So we started down that path. Great. So we had that. So Kyle, maybe if you, it can, you know, when did get lab enter the picture, what was kind of the initial use case and, uh, let's, let's go from there. >>Yeah, it was before my time. I'm, Chad has been there for a long time. Most of the ride, but uh, yeah, it's been several years and it's been, uh, you know, starting out with SCM, moving into CEI and then, you know, adopted sustainer journey that you hear about even in the keynote today. That's pretty much how we charted our course. Okay. >>So Sean, you've been there since the beginning of a, uh, to get lab usage? Pretty much it, it showed up a couple months before I got there. But, uh, going back to your early mid 22, yeah, 2015, uh, we had kind of a more of a pilot group of engineers that were, were starting out, you know, to get us down this path to where we wanted to go and they needed a new tool, something that worked better than what we currently had at an M and a, they settled on, on get lab because it provided, you know, one being open source was a huge selling point for us. Um, and it was just ever-growing. So it allowed our developers to really get going and get going much faster. Okay, great. And in the keynote, okay, Kyle, they were talking about how it's not just about the dev, the second the ops, but really not allowing everybody into the same tooling, even marketing and finance. What's kind of the breadth of the organization is it is mostly devs that dev and ops does security, you know, who, who's involved in using this tooling. >>It's everybody. We're a, we're figuring out our, you know, everyone's kinda got their own spin on things. So we're in that, um, classic position where I think we have the tooling sprawl that everyone talks about and we're, we're constantly evaluating, you know, how does Gilad fit into that picture? What do we bolt on? You know, we have the luxury of being able to integrate with other things as well. But then if certainly if we can get an economy of scale where we can just use get lab, it's to provide that seamless interface. That's something we always look to do too. All right. >>So Sean, my understanding is a NM is also using Coubernetties and that's something that you're involved in. So very money you bring us in people, you know, sometimes get misconstrued as to the scope and the purpose of, of Kubernetes. We've been at the cube con cloud date of con for a number of years, but uh, why don't you set the stage for us and kind of walk us through the, the what and the why of Kubernetes? Yeah. For us at least being able to leverage something like Kubernetes, which when you really back out and you know, do the 10,000 foot view, it's container management and being able to go into a more modern architecture. We're leveraging containers for pretty much whatever we can, or at least what makes sense. Um, and that's kind of how we started down the path with get lab moving into Kubernetes. You know, we were, we were trying to figure out like, where do we want to go so, you know, let's not just push the boat out a little, let's drop, kick the boat off the end of the pier and see where we end up. >>So we started working down that path of deploying get lab into Kubernetes cause it allowed us to easily expand and make the application highly available. So even if some easies go down in AWS, which knock on wood never happens. Uh, we're still good to go. Our users are, wouldn't even notice. Okay. Um, so you mentioned AWS. Is that your primary cloud, your only cloud? What, what is your cloud situation? Yeah, that's, that's a Northwestern mutual is public cloud. Okay, great. And speak a little bit to, you know, Amazon does have plenty of its own tooling. Uh, maybe a little bit about how get lab and, how those fit together for you. Um, well, I mean, we use get lab CIS specifically to be able to provision different services in one, not that we need as long as they fit near within our security requirements. And, you know, everything we do, we get vetted out through our internal processes, but it's really allowed our developers to move forward so much faster. >>You know, it's kind of gone are the days of, let me fill out a request for, you know, X, Y, Z and, you know, wait two as it goes through somebody's work queue and they eventually get around to it. Um, allowing our developers to just, you know, do their commits, get their, you know, peer review and just deploy and provision right away, allows us to get our applications to market just so much faster than even a few years ago. Alright. So Kyle, the two of you are presenting here at the show, uh, you know, we, we love, we heard GitLab talking on stages. You know, customers don't just use it, they commit, they add feedback in and they speak at the show. So maybe speak a little bit of, uh, you know, NMS, you know, involvement as to uh, you know, are you committing code and what, what are you speaking about? >>So we're here to speak about our journey on Kubernetes. I'm trans covering the application side and I'm going to talk about our, our dabble in Kubernetes CII. So we're, we're really looking to, um, we're looking for efficiencies I guess in, in density. That's a primary driver behind trying to explore the trail. But also, um, one of the things I'll talk about in the talk is, is boosting our security posture using Kubernetes. So a lot of times people are using API keys and they're getting stale and not being rotated. Uh, we can do some neat things with Kubernetes and it's native. I am offerings to boost our security posture by moving towards role based access and getting those credentials that are rotating and providing us, uh, you know, non stale sort of authentication credentials, things like that. >>Sean, yeah, pretty much covers it. Uh, uh, and beyond with the CIA, you know, being able to run and get lab itself within Qube and having the different components broken out and we're alive. It's, it, it's enabling us to limit any kind of attack plane that could exist. You know, it's, you have to get through a lot to even get to it. So it's really just been a huge, a huge plus for us. OK. I, I'd love to hear both. Both of you have been to these events a number of times. You're speaking to event. What, what, what's the value of coming to get loud commit? I mean, for me it's a, a huge networking thing and being able to relay our experiences that we've gone through to other people that are out in the community. I mean, I know lots of, you know, everyone wants to see, you know, what can you do in Kubernetes and like, here's some of the things that we've done. >>Here's some of the things that you know, works that didn't work. You know, we would recommend you going this kind of route if we were to start it over again. And beyond that, you know, meeting people from all over the world, like, uh, we were talking with some, uh, some guy, gentleman Nico from white duck who is from Germany. It's not something you get to do, you know, face to face all the time. Alright. Sean, can you share with our audience any of those? You know, if we could do it over again, we'd change something. Is it an organizational thing or technical piece or until don't don't use EFS for getting repo data. It will not end well for you can take away. All right. Kyle, how about you? You've been to a number of these shows, uh, you know, the networking, the piece or you know, what else, what, what, what, what for you personally and for NM, uh, you know, brings you back. >>Yeah. Networking is a big thing. I think it's also getting feedback on, you know, what we're doing. Does it make sense? Just like get lab is throwing things out there early, trying to tighten up that contribution loop. We want to get our ideas out there and then this is an opportunity for people to ask questions about our presentation. If maybe we're off in the wrong direction, maybe we can get that steered back on course. Um, you know, we're just really here to get the feedback. Yeah. I always love talking to people in the financial industry and you talk about open source, you know, if, if you went back, you know, five years ago, you'd probably get a little bit of sideways looks as to wait, you know, you're doing what, um, are we past that? Do do you feel are most people, uh, you know, really understanding where we are with, with cloud and open source in general that it, you know, it makes perfect sense for a financial institution to be part of it. >>I'd say at NM we, we've finally gotten past that curve and now we're, we're trying to, you know, make it even easier for our internal developers to easier participate in open source, you know, their internal products and contribute more to the community. Uh, we've completely done an about face from, you know, probably 15 years ago where it was open source. You wanted to, what to, yeah, let's go. How can we make things better? It's, it's all about, you know, our, our customers. So we want to make sure we create the best product and experience for them. That's awesome. Yeah, there's still some barriers there. I mean, it's all about managing risk, right? So you have to do things diligently and make sure that your bases are covered. And so it's not like it can be a free for all. We have to do our due diligence, but we, you know, we love to contribute. And we love to get up without their there as we can. All right. Well, Kyle and Sean, thank you so much for sharing with our audience. Best of luck with your presentations and, uh, have a great time at the show. Thank you. All right. Uh, thank you to, to NM for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube.

>> Hi. I'm Stew Minimum. And this is a special on the ground here at the V Tug Summer Slam 2019. It is the 16th year of the event. We had hosted the Cube many times at the veto. Winter warmer and sad to say this actually the final interview for V tug it into the final V tug event. But before we can wrap up a friend of mine, Sean to lean, who is a vey architect with Delhi emcee. I've been promising him for years that we would one of these days do an interview on the Cube at the V tug. So it is the absolute final interview. So, Sean, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. All right. So, uh, not only do you work for Delhi emcee, but you're part of the social team, you know, here at the V tug event, I had conversations with Lee Ji. It was also his first time in a program on Matt. You know who I've spoken with in the past? Eso, you know, give us a little bit about your background at this event and what this community has meant to you. >> Oh, sure. Um So I'm trying to remember I think this is my fifth or sixth summer Slam. Um I mean, I basically once I started my professional career. You know, one of the first things that you know we did was look for user groups. And so when they usedto hold this event back a Gillette that was very close to home. Um and that was my first experience with the I think back then it was the New England V mug, but it's still the same community and community has always been a big part of my life and my career. I mean, I even joined, you know, AMC, Social Media Community team to basically work with influencers in the broader I t community. But I always make sure that I could do events like this, you know, in the New England area, because it's so important to be a part of this community and the I t crowd. Everybody knows everybody, and you can always learn something new just by talking to people. So, like I purposely go like during lunch and sit down with people who have never met before and introduce myself and see what they do for a living, and it's been a wonderful experience every year. It's a great >> point, you know, community is so important in these events, and especially in a regional event with local on your shirt doesn't matter as much because for the years we've been attending this, almost everybody has changed jobs. You know, companies have been acquired, companies go public, you know, people change their jobs. So it's about the learning as a community, the growth of what's happening, our careers more than kind of some of that day to day battle that, like you might happen in the storage community. >> Yeah, yeah, you got to be able to separate, Say, you know, your professional competitiveness and be able to, you know, just embrace people as people and be able to talk to them and share knowledge. And I think anyone else who's a part of the community is able to do that themselves as >> well. Yeah, it's been interesting. Virtualization was one of those galvanizing technology that brought a lot of people, you know, bloggers and people. Helping to participate in Cloud's been interesting in many ways. You know, there's some fragmentation. There's some tough competition out there yet we're all learning and you know it is most customers today. They've got, you know, hybrid cloud. They've got multi club, they've got lots of environment and therefore the user's, you know, don't necessarily look at some of those battles are going on, But they're looking to help run their business on and, you know, how are you seeing that environ? What? What? What do you hear from you know, users that you speak with today? >> So I'm here in a variety of things. There's a lot of people that are on different points. We'll call it in their cloud journey. There are some people who have just kind of gotten the edict from the board or upper management that says Cloud First, where we're gonna do everything in the cloud on dhe. Some people you know who have jumped all in with that are learning a very painful lesson, especially with their wallet. Um, we found that kind of the sweet spot in it is that hybrid cloud. There are some workloads that are absolutely great for cloud, and there are some that is just expensive. And so depending on the size of your infrastructure, you can actually save a good amount of money by setting up something local and having a cloud strategy as well. It's all about evaluating the workload. And I think earlier today during the keynotes this morning, that message was really coming across that it's not all about the cloud or even just one cloud. I mean, there's countless cloud providers out there with all sorts of different Ma operating models and pricing models. And the beauty of it is we're in a place now with the technology that people can almost nickel and dime and do what is best for them and not necessarily be told. This is how it's gonna be. This is your only option. >> Yeah. One of the things I took away from the keynotes this morning is you know, it is oh, so easy to get caught up on the latest cool tool or, you know, the wave or what people are talking about. But it's you know, what skill sets do I have? How do I make sure I understand what valuable for my business and my career? You know, it is. We bring this one to a close. You know, Sean, you know what you have on that >> Well, it's funny you brought up skill sets because a lot of that can be learned from the community. You know, if you don't have the professional skill sets Or maybe, you know, your employer might not pay the empty up for, you know, organized training. There are so many community based free trainings and webinar Siri's and stuff like that that can get you learned up in this. I remember, you know, in my career I was talking with a customer who was like, You know, we're making a shift. We're going to start being more cloud focused on here. My, I'm doing like updating their VM wear environment, and he's like, I need to get better at this. And I rattled off a few different community programs. I talked to him again six months later. He went through all that, and now he's playing around in Azure and Amazon and starting to learn some of that, and they almost gave him a promotion. They reorg, um, into a new role, where he's got more cloud responsibilities and effectively saved his job because he went to the out to the community and learned these skills. >> Yeah, but I always find in these events, right? If if you if you were open Thio, you know, new ideas, that intellectual curiosity. There is so much opportunity in tech these days. Sean won't want to give you the final word any, you know, memories you have from these events. Either you know, the main or the winter event. You know that you want to share, we bring our coverage to a close. >> I mean, you know, this event has been going on for so long, and it's always good stuff every single time. I'm going to miss the rubber chickens that that has always stuck out and to Mia's as one of the guys don't >> know that that's Hans from GM, where, you know, brings the rubber chickens will throw the little key chains at you when you go, Yeah, >> but you know, in general, you know, there's a lot of events out there where, you know, it's it's, you know, the morning and maybe the afternoon, the party afterwards and I'm not here to be like Party party party, but is almost just as important as the event itself. And I've never seen any other user group or event like that that really puts Satan's that time for networking. You get almost just as much business done. You know, they're talking to people, you know, when you're waiting in line for lobster and stuff like that Here, um, as you know, just kind of mingling around during the day. You meet so many people and make business connections and everything at the after party, Which is why I keep thinking they invest so much money in the after hours. Piece >> of it, I think Great point to end on, Shawn. The community is really central to what goes on there. This event. Listen to the customers and, you know, grew that the breath of the topics that they covered, they kept to keep on it. So 16 years of phenomenal run. I wanna have a big shout out to everyone that helped put the Vita gone. Of course, that is Chris and Don Harney at the court. Chris Williams did a lot of work there, but many other people that helped behind the scenes to make it happen. And of course, it was always the users at this event that with drivers for it, as well as the sponsors that helped participate And through this so Sean to lean. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the Cube alumni. And I'm still minimum. Thank you. As always, for watching this program has been our pleasure. Tiu c All of the V tugs. If you go to the cube dot net, go up in the search bar in touch via tug. You could see previous years We've had so many great guests on the program. You know, I got to interview some of the alumni from the Patriots, which were some definite highlight for me as well as great technical content and good friends that I've made over the years. So with that, we're signing off from the final V tug here in Maine and thank you, as always for watching the Cube.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World Here at the Sands Expo at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have Sean Kinney joining the program. He is a senior director primary storage marketing at Delhi emcee Thank you so much. Thrilled to redirect from Boston, >> the home of the universe, >> it's indeed well, we would say so so and so lots of news coming out this morning yesterday. Talk about some of the mean. If you want to start with talking about the storage platform, the mid range storage market in general sort of lay the foundation What you're seeing, what you're hearing, and then how the new the new products fit in with what with what customers air needing. We'LL >> break that a couple pieces. I believe that the mid range of the storage market is the most competitive. They're the most players. There are different architectures and implementations, and it's the biggest part of the market. About fifty eight percent or so so that attracts a lot of investments in competition. So what we announced today, it was the deli emcee Unity X t Siri's and that built on all the momentous on the success we had with Unity, which we actually announce basically the same conference three years ago. So we've sold forty thousand systems Good nowhere market leader, and the first part is the external storage market. It's declined, continues to be exaggerated. One of the Ellis firms predicted it wasn't gonna grow it all last year. Well, crew sixteen percent actually grew three billion dollars. It's with unity. Its original design points like the sort of Day one engineering principles were really around a couple of things. One was a true, unified architecture being told to do. Block storage, file storage and VM. Where've evils that was built in, not bolted on like no gateways, no extra window licensing, no limitations on file system size. The second was around operational simplicity and making it easy for a customer to install easier for custom manage. He was a customer of use remotely manage, and then we took that forward by adding all inclusive software, making it easy to own like not him to worry about software contracts. So all of that goodness is rolling forward in the engineering challenge that we took on with E x t wass. You know, a lot of mid range systems switch of those that have an active, passive architectural design. It's hard to do everything at once. Process, application data run, data reduction, run data services like snapshots of replications, all without significantly impacting performance. And a lot of cases, our competitors and other platforms have to make compromises. They say. Okay, if you want performance turned this function off. What was that challenge that our engineers took on? And that's what we came up with. No compromise for midrange storage. That's unity. Extinct. >> Yeah, Shawn, it's it's really interesting you could I could probably do a history lesson on some of the space thing back to, you know, early days when you know we were first to DMC. It was like, Oh, the data general product line. You know, getting merged in very competitive landscape is, as you said, most companies had multiple solutions, you know, unity in the name of it was to talk about Dell and AMC coming together, but what I want you coming on is there was often, you know, okay, somebody came out with, like, a new a new idea, and they sold that as a product. And then it got baked into a feature, and we saw that happened again and again and again. And the storage market, what are some of those key drivers is toe. You know what customers look for? How you differentiate yourself. Are we past that? You know, product feature churn way in the platform phase. Now, you know, we always say it would be great if software was just independent of some of these. But there's a reason why we still have storage raise. Despite the fact that, you know, it's been, you know, it's been nibbled at by some of the other, you know, cloud and hyper converge. You know, talk applications. >> Yeah. Uh, let's say that a couple ways in that, especially in the mid range. Our customers expect the system to do everything you know. It has to do everything Well, it doesn't get to be specialized for a lot of our customers. It is thie infrastructure. It is that data capital, which is the lifeblood of their business. So the first thing is it has to do everything. The second thing I would say is that because it has to do everything and one feature isn't really gonna break through anymore. The architecture's the intelligence, the reliability, the resiliency that takes years of hardening. Okay, the new competitors has to start a ground zero all over again. So I would say that that's part of the second thing I would say is, it's about the experience inside the box from the feature function and outside the box. How do we get a better experience? And for us, that starts with Cloud I. Q. It's a storage, monitoring and analytics platform that you can really you have infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand. You're not tied to a terminal, and if you want to be, of course you can. But you can now remotely monitor your entire storage environment. Unity, Power Max SC Extreme Io. Today we announce connect trick support for sandwiches in VM support. So we're going broader and deeper, you know, as well as making its water. So it's hard to have one feature breakthrough when you need the first ten to even get in the game. >> Well, as you said, for for these customers, this infrastructure has to do it all. And and so how do you manage expectations? And how do you How do you work with your customers? Maybe who have unrealistic expectations about what it can do. >> Our customers are the best. I mean, everybody says it, but because they push us and they push the product and they want to see how far it can go and they want to test it. So I love them. I love because they push us to be better. They push us to think in new ways. Uh, but yeah, there are different architectures. Have differences. Thumbs Power Max is an enterprise. High end, resilient architecture. It's never going to hit a ten thousand dollar price point like the architecture wasn't designed. And so for our customers that wants all these high end features like an end to end envy me implementation. Well, that's actually why we have power, Max. So you don't want to build another Power Macs with unity. So while the new unit e x t, it is envy Emmy ready and that'LL give us a performance boost We're balancing the benefits of envy. Emmy with the economics, the price point that come with it. >> All right, So, Sean, talk about Get front from the user standpoint, you know, we've We've talked about simplicity for a long time. I remember used to be contest. It's like All right, well, you know, bring in the kids and has he how fast they can go through the wizard Or, you know, he had a hyper converts infrastructure. It should just be a button you press and I mean had clouded. Just kind of does it. When we look at the mid range, you know, where are we in that? You know, management. You talked about Cloud like you, you know, how do we measure and how to customers look at you know how invisible their infrastructure is? >> I think every I don't think any marketing person worth his salt would say, My product is hard to use. It's easy to use the word simplicity, but I think it's we're evolving. And again, it's that outside the box experience now, the element manager Unisphere for um, for unity is very easy to use with tons of tests and research. But it's going beyond that is how do we plug into the VM? Where tools. How do we plug? How do we support containers? How do we support playbooks with Ansel? Forget it. It's moving the storage. Management's out of storage. Still remember, twenty years ago, we helped create the concept of a storage admin. You know, things that coming full circle. And except for the biggest companies, you know that it's becoming of'em where admin that wants to manage the whole environment. >> Okay, I wonder if you could walk us up the stack a little bit. You know, when you talk about these environments at the keynote this morning, we're talking about a lot of new application. You're talking about a I and M l. What's the applications, Stace? That's the sweet spot for unity. And, you know, you know, you mentioned kind of container ization in there, you know, Cloud native. How much does that tie into the mid range today? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to that. All of the above. Its some database, some file sharing, some management and movement of work loads to the cloud. Whether be cloud tearing. What? Running disaster recovery As a service where you know you need the replication You just don't want to pay for and manage and owned that second sight in the cloud. We'Ll do that as a service. So I, uh I think it's again. It goes back to that being able to do everything and with the rise of the Internet of things with the rise of new workloads, new workload types, they're just more uses for data and data continues to be the light flooding of business. But it you need the foundation. You need the performance. And with X t now twice as fast as the previous generation, you need the data reduction with compression. Indeed, implication with extra that's now up to five to one. You need the overall system efficiency so the system doesn't have a ton of overhead, and you need multiple paths to the cloud For those customers that already ofwork loads in the cloud. No, they're going to go there in the next twelve months or know that they have to at least think about it and so that we future proof them across all boys. So you need those sort of foundational aspects and we believe we're basically best in class across all of them. But then you get more >> advanced. I want to get your thoughts on where this market is going. As you said that analysts that the news of its demise has been greatly exaggerated, analysts are just not getting it right. I mean, they said it wasn't gonna grow a gross. Sixty grew sixteen percent. Why are they getting it wrong? Are there and also do? What do you see as sort of the growth trajectory of this market? I'm not >> sure they're getting it wrong. And they may be underestimating the new use cases and the new ways customers using data What I think we should probably do a better job of as an industry is realize that there is a lot of space for both best of breed infrastructure and converged infrastructure and things like Piper converge. It's not an or conversation, it's an and conversation, and no one thinks that I love working about Del Technologies is we have the aunt, you know, for us, it's not one or the other, and that's all we could sell. We have the aunt, and that allows us to really better serve our customers because over eighty percent of our customers have both. >> So, Sean, you mentioned working for Del Technologies. There are a couple people that have been at this show for a while there. Like boy, they didn't spend a lot of time in the keynotes talking about storage. Bring us in a little bit. And inside there, you know, still a deli emcee. You got still a storage company. >> Still, you've seen the name isn't there very much. So you know that we wouldn't be spending all this time and R and D and you've heard about the investments we've made in our stores sales organization and our partner organization. You don't do those investments. If you're not committed to storage it, you know, way struggled for a while. We're losing share for awhile, but that ship has turned for the last four quarters. We've grown market share in revenue, but we're pretty good trajectory. I like our chances. >> I want to ask you about something else that was brought up in the keynote. And that is this idea of a very changing workforce. The workforce is now has five generations in it. Uh, it is a much younger workforce in a in a work first that wants to work in different ways. Collaborate in different ways. Uh, how are you personally dealing with that with your team, Maybe a dispersed team. How are you managing new forms of creativity and collaboration and innovation in the workforce? And then how are you helping your customers think about these challenges? >> You know, I, uh, maybe I can't write for the Harvard Business Review. For me personally, this is my approach that is one guy's opinion for me. It's about people like you want to manage the project, not the people I expected. I trust my staff, and they range from twenty two to sixty two to be adults in to get the job done and whether they do it in the office or at home, whether they do it Tuesday at two o'Clock or Tuesday at nine o'Clock. If it's due Wednesday, I'm gonna trust them to get it done. So it's, uh, there's a little of professionals. It does require sometimes more empathy and some understanding of flexibility. But I participate in that change to I don't want to miss my kid's game, and I wanna make sure I bring my daughter to the dentist, So I, uh, I think it's for the best, because we're blurring the lines of on and off. I could see again. I don't write for our business, really a time in the next few years where vacation time is no longer tracked. I don't think that far away >> a lot of companies don't even have it at all. I mean, it's >> just you >> get your work done, do what you need to do. >> So I love it because then we come back to being more of it. It's even more about, um, a meritocracy and performance and delivery and execution. So, uh, I think it's only the better and more productive employees, happier employees. It's actually reinforcing cycle. What I found, >> and that's good for business. That's a bottom line. >> Employees. You good >> for Harvard Business Review. >> So, Sean, last thing I wanted to get is for people that didn't make it to show. Give them a beginning of flavor about what's happening from a mid range to orange around the environment here and tell us, how much time have you been spending at the Fenway and, you know, pro Basketball Hall of Fame sex mons you know, in the Expo Hall there because I know what a big sports got. You >> are not enough is the first question, quite simply, the best mid range storage just got better now the market leader, when all the advantages, we have immunity. We just rolled them forward to a new, more efficient, better performing platform. So it's, ah, our customers are gonna love over bringing forward, and I think it's our sales. Guys will find it much easier to sell. So we're, uh, we're thrilled with today's announcements. Were thrilled with where the marketplaces were thrilled with our market position and best is yet to come. >> Well, we were thrilled to have you on the cute. So thank you so much for coming on. >> It's always a pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stew Minutemen. We will have much more of the cubes Live coverage from Del Technologies World coming up in just a little bit

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering artists. A conference twenty nineteen brought to you by for scout. >> Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Geoffrey here with the cue, We're at the arse. A >> conference in Mosconi. They finally finished The remodel. Looks beautiful in the rain is not coming in. Which is a good thing. We're excited. >> Have a next guests of many time Keep alumni. >> He's Sean Connery, the VP and GM of Security and Risk Business Unit at service now Song. Great to see you. It's great Sea again, Jeff. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. So it's been probably six months or so since we last talked What's been going on its service down the security space? >> Well, one of the things that's been most interesting is, as our customers have started to get into production now with the security capabilities as well as our risk capabilities there, realizing the benefits of having I t security and risk on the same platform. So when we were talking last time, we're talking a lot about, you know, security, hygiene, vulnerability, management, security incidents and that's all very much mainstream now on R and R install base. But now folks are saying, Wait a minute if I've got it. Data risk, data, compliance, data and security and vulnerability to it on the same platform. What kinds of things could I now do that >> I couldn't do before? Right? So what are they doing? >> Well, big thing they're doing is they're starting to manage risk in a holistic way by leveraging operational data on the platform. So if you think about the way risk tools have historically worked, you know, you're basically in what is essentially a glorified spreadsheet building dashboards for how to represent the various risks to your organisation. But if you think about what auditors and compliance people need to do there, essentially checking the state of all these compliance tasked throughout an organization. But it's essentially a survey. Like I'll ask you like, Hey, tell me about the data protection strategy for your application. You have to tell me while we're using crypto or we're not using krypto. The data is in this country. Well, all that date is already in service now. So how do you now automate? So we take all those mundane tasks around compliance and risk and be able to roll that up to clear, visible risk indicators manage that in a continuous way, what we call continuous monitoring for risk, which is just a brand new way to think about this problem, >> right? I'm curious how the changing of the assessment of the risk changes over time you've got the compliance stuff, which you just have to do, right? You have to check the box you've got, you know, kind of your business crown jewels. But then now we're seeing with kind of these nation state attacks and political attacks and sees things that aren't necessarily just trying to steal your personal information and not trying to steal your your your big money. But they're looking for other data that maybe you wouldn't have assigned an appropriate risk level in a time before because you were kind of really protecting the money and the and the and the obvious crown jewels. How >> does that >> how's that risk kind of profile continue to modify and change over time? >> I think that that's gonna be the state, uh, for you know, forever, right? The right profile. Going to continue to modify. I think what's important for security team's risk teams teams is to make sure they're actually using risk as we talked about last time. Is there North Star for guiding their security investments were here surrounded, like in the lion's den. All these security vendors, I was just walking the halls, all the startups that air, trying to do different things. And, you know, there's always gonna be another tool that somebody's going to want to sell you to solve a problem. But ultimately you need to be looking at the risks to your organisation. As you said, the evolving risk people shipped a cloud. You know, they deal with nation state attacks. They deal with, you know, whatever is going to come tomorrow. And how do you guide your security investments in favor of that? What we're seeing it service now is a renewed interest in hygiene and back to basics. How do I manage my vulnerabilities? Is my patch program effective? How am I dealing with exceptions and that? What's that channel to it? Because, as you know, almost everything about security was actually done by from an operational standpoint. So that channel of communication is something that we've been really heavily focused on. >> Yeah, it's a pretty state, As you say. We're surrounded by many shiny many bright, shiny lights, and people have something yourself. But you can't you can't buy your way out of this thing. You can't technology. You're way out of it. You can't hire out of it. So you really need to use a kind of a sophisticated strategy of integrated tools with the right amount of automation to help you get through this morass. >> Absolutely. And one of the ways we liketo help our customers think about >> this is, >> you know, your teams want to be focused on the interesting parts of their jobs. They came into the security industry because they want to help save the world right now, they watch some movie, they imagine some amazing role. And then when they get into the role, if they're dealing with mundane, you know, uh, fishing response. You know, vulnerability, prioritization. It just, you know, it takes the wind out of their sails, right? But if you can, if you can automate those mundane task using a digital work folk platform like service now, then suddenly free that time up so they could be focused on what you were just describing much more advanced attacks where you want creative humans. Sort >> of. This is so funny, right? It's almost like any type of a job like painting. You know the more time he spilled, spend prepping the house and sanding everything except painting better. The painting goes, and it's kind of the same thing here. It's the Boring is the mundane is applying the patches, as you said, but it's all of those things that make the exciting part when you get there. Now you can focus on real problems was just shoot, you know, we forgot to apply that match two weeks ago, >> you reminded me. I think my dad taught me a measure twice cut once that. S O s. Oh, it's absolutely right. So one way to think about that is that a concrete example is attack surface. So people, a lot of people on this hall are talking about your attack surface. What are the areas that can be attacked within your organization? Well, one of the best ways to reduce your attack surfaces to manage your vulnerability program in an effective way. Because if you can deal with patching much more efficiently patching the right assets the ones that have active exploits that are available, then suddenly you're inflow of incidents reduces, and then you automate the incidents that remain. And then suddenly you've got a mass the time savings versus If you just sort of scattershot said All right, T Max is going to work on vulnerabilities. Team wise, going toe workout incidents. They're really not gonna coordinate. And they're especially not gonna coordinate with tea. That's when things start to fall apart. >> Right. Right. So we're here in the Fourth Scout Booth. Um, so how long have you guys been working for Scout? How does how did the two systems work together? >> Yeah. So we've been working for Scott for awhile. We've actually got a number of integrations that are live on the surface now store. Uh, in fact, we have customers in production using for scout. So we really see, with force got in service now is a couple of things. First off, just on the asset management asset Discovery side of the house for Scott has a wealth of capabilities around giving us information about endpoint assets, whether they be traditional assets or coyote assets. And we can feed that directly into the seem to be our configuration management database. Right To help manage the overall assets within an organization that's sort of step one for Scout is a terrific partner to help pull that data in. And then the second thing we can do is we can men using the security capabilities inside service. Now we can trigger actions inside for scouts environment to then block re mediate, isolate. When we see something bad happening related to an incident or a vulnerability >> that we discover, right, I just can't help, but they're gonna know Asset management is eighty beady little piece of of the service now offering and all we hear about force. God just going in and finding out all kinds of stuff that you had out there that can. And I'm like, who found it first. You guys in the asset management or were the four scout sniffer? But I I imagine a lot of that stuff is not in your asset management system because it's things that people have just plugged in here and there and along the way. >> Yeah, well, we've got our we have a discovery capability is part of service now, which is which is fantastic. And that is primarily focused on server assets and the relationship between those server assets. So you want to understand, What is the total footprint of my AARP infrastructure? The load balancers, the network equipment, the servers. We can do that very, very well. What? What we really rely on coming like forced God to help us with is like you said, somebody plugged something in on the wireless network on the local network. You know, we don't know what it is. And for school can help us, you know? What is it? Where is it on DH that that information's changing so quickly that it really helped us out tohave having integrated solution. We've actually got Customersdata, Utah was in production now, with sixty thousand devices being managed with force got in service now working together, it's curious >> if you somehow integrate those back in and say, You know, it's not just me plugging in my phone, but it's actually something that needs to be more actively managed. If there's a discovery process there within service in ours, and it's mainly just temporary stuff, plug it in, plug it in and out, plug it in, plug it out. >> Yeah, I wouldn't think of the integrations with force got his temporary in anyway. It's just more. It's more dynamic environment so that our people are people are plugging systems in, you know, typically, you want to do that in an agent lis way, right? You don't want to have a heavyweight agent on the end point. And that's what force guys really known for discovering, analyzing what these devices are. And for us, the more incoming data we have into our CM, D B, the more valuable that is to our customers. And so we're really excited Team to do more with force. Go >> right. All right, I give you the last word. What priorities? For twenty nineteen. >> Prices for twenty nineteen is really to build on what we what we just announced. So Madrid are major service not released. Just hit today, right? Thanks. Thanks very much. We have exploit enrichments and our vulnerability system now so we can know, you know. Is there a phone? How How How critical is it? But also has it been exploited or not? Right. Is it publicly available? Exploit doesn't require local access, remote access so that we've done that on the security side. Wait. Did some continuous monitoring that we already talked about. But the big thing for us, that service now is mobile in twenty nineteen. Right? So big capability we announced, is native mobile capabilities. So essentially, we're positioning everyday work is the next killer out for mobile? Because, as you know, service now is all about Inter connecting all these various departments and making these classic processes digital work clothes. And now you can have that same sort of consumer grade mobile experience on your enterprise infrastructure. And so being able to build that out about all of our products and continue to drive Alodor customers are really excited about it. >> I just can't help But think of Fred coming out. I think it like twenty fifteen with, like, the first. I might be off by year to the first, You know, service now on mobile and the crowd went wild. >> It was awesome at the time. Right now, that was a that was a essentially a scaled down web capability. Right foot inside of a container. Now, this is Native mobile. So GPS face I d three d touch to use IOS. Examples are all capabilities you can expose in a code lis environment tio to developers so you could build a custom application custom workflow. And you don't have to know anything about how to code and the APC and get pushed down to users devices right away. >> Very good. Well, I think that's a good place to focus on. Right, Sean? Well, thanks for taking a few minutes to stop >> by course. Thanks, Tio. Pleasure. All right. He shot on. Jeff. You're watching the cube? Where are say in San Francisco? Thanks for watching. >> We'LL see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost John Troyer and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in tech coverage and this is exclusive coverage from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Usually this time of year it is a little bit overcast, but for the second time the OpenStack Summit has been here, the sun is shining. It has been gorgeous weather but we are in here really digging in and understanding it One of the people I have gotten to know through this community especially, is our wrap up guest today, Sean Michael Kerner, who is a senior editor with eWeek, amongst other bi-lines that you have. Pleasure to see you. >> Great, good seeing you too Stu. >> Alright, so we let you keep on the Toronto Bluejays hat >> Thank you, there we go. >> We have had quite a few Canadians on our program here. >> Well, seeing as how you're here in Canada, it's not all that surprising. >> It's lovely. They have you working on Victoria Day. >> Yeah, that's unfortunate but I will take Memorial Day off in a week, so it works out. >> Excellent. So Sean, for our audience that might not know you, give us a little bit about your background. You've been to umpteen of these shows. >> Sure. I have been with the same publication roughly, I guess 15-16 years at this point. I've been writing before there was cloud, core living and Opensource stuff, networking. And then through the magic of technology, I shifted a little bit to security, which is a core focus for me. I have been to every OpenStack Summit since the San Diego Summit, I guess, 2011. Somebody can correct me afterwards. I did miss the Sydney Summit for various reasons, but yeah, I've been to a bunch of these things, so interesting to see how things have shifted over the years from nothing to certain heights to where we are now. >> Alright, so bring us up to that, as to where we are now. Attendance is down a little bit. They haven't been talking a lot about it but quality I guess is here. Sessions, they've broadened down a bit of the scope. We have been digging into it, but want to get your take so far. >> Yeah, well it's like anything else, there are standard hype cycles, as it were and there's a trough of disillusionment. I wouldn't call this a trough of disillusionment, but when you get to a certain plateau, people just, there'sn't as much interest. In the early days, I remember the San Diego Summit I went to. They didn't schedule it properly. They didn't know how many people they were going to have, and they had to line up around the corner and stuff. That was six years ago, but that is when OpenStack was new. There was no such thing as the Foundation, and everyone was trying to figure out what was what. And, there was no clue at this point. Cloud is a well understood thing. There are competitive efforts or complimentary efforts, as the Foundation would probably like to put it; whether it's CNCF, there's the public cloud and it's different. There is, with all respect to the OpenStack Foundation and its member projects, there's not as much excitement. This in now a stable, mature ecosystem and because of that, I don't think there's as much of a draw. When something is brand new and shiny, you get more of a draw. If they would have put the name Blockchain somewhere, maybe, maybe they would have had a few more. They put Kubernetes in there, which is fine, but no machine learning or artificial intelligence quite yet, though that's a topic somewhere in there too. >> Yeah, John, you've been making a lot of comments this week talking about we've matured and the lower layer pieces just work a bit more. Give us your take about that. >> Sure. That's the way it seems. There wasn't a whole lot of talk about the release, news release, and all the different components, even the keynotes. But, the people we have talked to, both on the vendor and the customer side, they have working production OpenStack environments. They're very large. They require very few admins. They work. They're embedded in telecom and banking, et cetera. It's here and it's working. >> Yeah, that's so something that happened, maybe three cycles ago at this point, because they used to have the release the same time as the Summit and the Design Summit. It was together, so, there was essentially a celebration of the release. People would talk about the release and then they desegrigated that. I think that took a lot of steam out of the reason why you got developers to attend. So, when you don't have the Design Summit, there's this separate open endeavor, there's the forum, I don't quite understand how that works here now. There isn't as much momentum. Yeah, I agree with you. There has been very little talk about Queens. In each of the project update sessions I have been to, and I have been to a couple, there has always been a slight on Rocky, what's coming. I think we are on the second milestone of Rocky, at this point, so there's some development, but at this point it is incremental featurettes. There is no whiz bang. OK, we're going to have flying cars, you know send a Tesla to outer space kind of Earth shattering kind of news, literally, because that's not where it's at. It's just incremental tuck in features in stability and that kind of thing. >> Alright, you talk space and thinks like that and it brings to mind a certain attendee of the program that has actually been to outer space and maybe one of the more notable moments of the show so far. Give us your take on Mr. Shuttleworth. >> Well, I'm a big fan of Mr. Shuttleworth, top to bottom. Hey Mark. Big fan, always have been. He has his own opinion on things of course. Usually in a keynote you don't tend to take direct aim at competitors and he chose to do that. It made some people a little uncomfortable. I happened to be sitting in the front row, where I like to sit, and there was some Red Hat people, and there were some frantic emails going back and forth. And people were trying to see what was going on et cetera. I think, for me, a little bit of drama is okay. You guys go to more shows than I do, and sometimes you get these kind of sales kind of things. But in an open community, there's almost an unwritten rule, which perhaps will be written after this conference, that whether or not everybody is a business competitor or not, is that this is neutral territory as it were and everybody is kind of friendly. In the exhibit hall, you can say this and that, we are better, whatever, but on the stage you don't necessarily do that, so there was some drama there. Some of my peers wrote about that and I will be writing about it as well. It's a, I prefer to write about technology and not necessarily drama. Whether somebody is faster, better, stronger than others, you let the number prove them out. When we talk about Opensource, Opensource Innovation without Canonical, there probably wouldn't have been an OpenStack. All the initial OpenStack reference and limitations are on Canonical. They got a number of large public clouds, as does Red Hat. I think they both have their tactical merits and I'm sure on some respects Red Hat's better and on some respects Canonical is better, but him standing up there and beating on the competition was something that across the 13 summits I have been I have never seen before. One guy I talked to my first OpenStack Summit was in San Diego and the CTO of VMware at the time came up to, VMware was not an OpenStack contributor at the time, they were thinking about it, and he was fielding questions about how it was competitive or not and he was still complimentary. So there has always been that kind of thing. So, a little bit of an interesting shift, a little bit of drama, and gives this show something memorable, because you and I and others will be able to talk about this five years from now, et cetera. >> You talked about something you would write up. I mean part of your job is to take things back to the readers at eWeek. >> Yeah. >> What are the things, highlights you're going to be covering? >> The highlights for me, Stu and I talked about this at one point off the camera, this is not an OpenStack Summit necessarily, they're calling it Open Infrastructure. I almost thought that they would change, we almost thought that they would change the name of the entire organization to the Open Infrastructure Foundation. That whole shift, and I know the foundation has been talking about that since Sydney last year, that they're going to shift to that, but, that's the take away. The platform itself is not the only thing. Enabling the open infrastructure is nice. They're going to try and play well and where it fits within the whole stack. That gets very confusing because talking about collaboration is all fine and nice, but that is not necessarily news. That is how the hot dog is made and that's nice. But, people want to know what's in that dog and how it is going to work. I think it's a tougher show for me to cover than it has been in past years, because there has been less news. There's no new release. There was Kata 1.0 release and there was the Zuul project coming out on its own. Zuul project, they said it was 3.0, it was actually March was Zuul 3.03. Kata Container project, okay, interesting, we'll see how it goes. But a tougher project, tougher event for me to cover for that reason. Collaboration is all fine and nice. But, the CNCF CloudNativeCon KubeCon event two weeks ago, or three weeks ago, had a little bit more news and a lot it's same kind of issues come up here. So, long winded answer, tough to come up with lessons learned out of this, other than everyone wants to be friends, well some people want to be. And, collaboration is the way forward. But that is not necessarily a new message. >> When I think about Kubernetes, we are talking about the multi cloud world and that's still, the last few years, where it's been. Where does OpenStack really fit in that multi cloud world? One of the things I have been a little disappointed actually, is most of the time, when I'm having a conversation, it's almost the, yeah, there's public cloud, but we are going to claw things back and I need it for governments, and I need all of these other things. When I talk to customers, it is I'm going to choose what I put in my data center. I'm going to choose how I use probably multiple public cloud finders. It is not an anti-public cloud message, and it feels a little bit on the anti-public cloud mass. I want to work with what you're hearing when you >> talk to users? >> When I talk to users, vast majority of people, unless it's something, where there's regulatory issues or certain legacy issues or private cloud, public cloud period. The private cloud idea is gone or mostly gone. When I think about private clouds, it's really VmWare. We have virtualized instances that sitting there. >> What's OpenStack? >> OpenStack is fine, but how many are running OpenStack as a private cloud premise? >> Yeah, so what's OpenStack then? >> When I think of OpenStack, Oracles public cloud. Oracle is not here surprisingly. Oracle's public cloud, Larry Ellison, who I know you guys have spoken to more than once on theCUBE at various points on Oracle World and other things. Oracle's public cloud, they want to compete against AWS. That's all. OpenStack IBM cloud, all OpenStack. The various big providers out of China are OpenStack based. OEH is here. So that's where it fits in is that underlying infrastructure layer. Walmart uses it. Bestbuy, all these other places, Comcast, et cetera; ATT. But individual enterprises, not so much. I have a hard time finding individual enterprises that will tell me we are running our own private cloud as OpenStack. They will tell me they're running VmWare, they will tell me they're running REV or even some flavor of Citrix end server, but not a private cloud. They may have some kind of instances and they will burst out, but it's not, I don't think private cloud for mid tier enterprises ever took off the way some people thought five years ago. >> That's interesting. Let's go meta for a second. You talked about things you do and don't write about, you don't necessarily write the VC's are not here necessarily, but you don't write about necessarily financial stuff. >> Sometimes. There was actually at the Portland summit, I did a panel with press and analysts at the time and afterwards there might have been four different VC's that came up to me and asked me what I thought about different companies. They were looking at different things where they would invest. And I remember, we looked at the board and one VC who shall remain nameless, and I said you know what, we'll look at this board with all these companies and five years from now, three quarters of them will not be here. I think I was probably wrong because it is more than that. There are so many. I wrote a story, I don't remember the exact name of it, but I wrote a story not that long ago about OpenStack deadpool. There are so, multiple companies that raised funding that disappeared. In the networking space, there were things like Plumgrid, they mminorly acquired for assets by Vmware, if I'm not mistaken. There was Pivotal, Joshua McKenzie, one of the co-founders of OpenStack itself, got acquired by Cisco. But they would have collapsed perhaps otherwise. Nebula Computing is perhaps, it still shocks me. They raised whatever it was 50 odd million, someone will correct me afterward. Chris Kemp, CTO of NASA who helped start it. Gone. So, there has been tremendous consolidation. I think when VC's lose money, they lose interest really fast. The other thing you have to think about, from the VC side, they don't write too much on the financial. My good friend Fredrick, who didn't make it, Where are you, Fredrick, where are you? Does more on that funding side. But has there been a big exit for an OpenStack company? Not really, not really. And without that kind of thing, without that precedence it's a tough thing, especially for a market that is now eight years old, give or take. >> Even the exits that had a decent exit, you know that got bought into the say IBM's, Cisco's of the world, and when you look a couple of years later, there's not much left of those organizations. >> Yeah. It's also really hard. People really don't want to compete against, well, some people want to compete against AWS. But, if you're going to try to go toe to toe with them, it's a challenge. >> Okay, so what brings you back here every year? You're speaking at the show. You're talking to people. >> What brings me back here is regardless of the fact that momentum has probably shifted, it's not in that really hype stage, OpenStack's core infrastructure, literally, core infrastructure that runs important assets. Internet assets, whether it certain public cloud vendors, large Fortune 500 companies, or otherwise. So it's an important piece of the stack, whether it's in the hype cycle or not, so that brings me back, because it's important. It brings me back because I have a vested interest. I have written so much about it so I'm curious to see how it continues to evolve. Specifically, I'm speaking here on Thursday doing a panel on defending Cloud Counsel Security as a core competence, a core interest for me. With all these OpenStack assets out there, how they're defended or not is a critical interest. In the modern world, cyber attacks are a given. Everybody should assume they're always under a constant state of attack and how that security works is a core area of interest and why I will keep coming back. I will also keep coming back because I expect there to be another shift. I don't think we have heard the end of the OpenStack story yet. I think the shift towards open infrastructure will evolve a little bit and will come to an interesting conclusion. >> Alright, last thing is what's your favorite question you're asking at this show. Any final things you want to ask us as we wrap? >> Yeah, my favorite, well, I want to ask you guys, what the most interesting answer you got from all the great people you interviewed because I'm sure some of it was negative and you got mostly positive as well. >> Well, we aren't used to answering the questions Stu. >> I'm used to being on the other side here, right. >> Well, I do say we got a lot of stuff about some interesting and juicy cases, like I say, the practitioners I talked to were real. I was always impressed by how few administrators it takes to run a huge OpenStack based cloud once it's set up. I think that's something interesting to me. You asked some folks about a public cloud a lot. >> Yeah, so it has been interesting. For me, it's, we've reached that certain maturity level. I was looking at technology. What's kind of the watermark that this is going to come to? We had said years ago, I don't think you're going to have somebody selling a billion dollars worth of distribution on OpenStack. So, that story with how Kubernetes and Containers and everything fits in, OpenStack is part of the picture, and it might not be the most exciting thing, but then again, if you watch Linux as long as most of us have, Red Hat took a really long time to get a billion dollars and it was much more than just Linux that got them there. This still has the opportunity to be tooling inside the environment. We have talked to a number of users that use it. It's in there. It's not that the flagpole, we're an OpenStack company anymore because there really aren't many companies saying that that is the core of their mission, but that is still an important piece of the overall fabric of what we are covering. >> Exactly right. >> Alright, we on that note, Sean Michael Kerner, we really appreciate you joining us. Please support good technology journalism because it is people like him that help us understand the technology. I read his stuff all the time and always love chatting with him off the record and dragged him on here and Fredrick from Techron Show we are disappointed you could not join us, but we'll get you next time. For Jon Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, be sure to join us for the third day tomorrow of three days of wall to wall live coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. And once again, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)