>>All we're back. We're wrapping up day two at Falcon 22 from the area in Las Vegas, CrowdStrike CrowdStrike. The action is crazy. Second day, a keynotes. Sean Henry is back. He's the chief security officer at CrowdStrike. He did a keynote today. Sean. Good to see you. Thanks for coming >>Back. Good. See you, Dave. Thanks for having me. >>So, unfortunately, I wasn't able to see your keynote cuz I had to come do cube interviews. You interviewed Kimbo Walden from, from, you know, white house, right? >>National cyber security >>Director. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about Overwatch, your threat hunting report. I want to share the results with our audience, but start with your, well actually start with the event. We're now in day two, you've had a good chance to talk to customers and partners. What are, what are your observations? Yeah, >>It's first of all, it's been an amazing event over 2200 attendees here. It's really taking top three floors at the area hotel and we've got partners and customers, employees, and to see the excitement and the level of collaboration here is absolutely phenomenal. All these different organizations that are each have a piece of cyber security to see them coming together, all in support of how do you stop breaches? How do you work together to do it? It's really been absolutely phenomenal. You're >>Gonna love the collaboration. We kind of talked about this on our earlier segment is the industry has to do a better job and has been doing a better job. You know, I think you and Kevin laid that out pretty well. So tell me about the interview with the fireside chat with Kimba. What was that like? What topics came up? >>Yeah. Kimba is the principal, deputy national cyber security advisor. She's been there for just four months. She spent over 10 years at DHS, but she most recently came from the private sector in cybersecurity. So she's got that the experience as a private sector expert, as well as a public sector expert and to see her come together in that position. It was great. We talked a lot about some of the strategies the white house is looking to put forth in their new cybersecurity strategy. There was recently an executive order, right? That the, the president put forth that talks about a lot of the things that we're doing here. So for example, the executive order talks about a lot of the legacy type of capabilities being put to pasture and about the government embracing cloud, embracing threat, hunting, embracing EDR, embracing zero trust and identity protection. Those are all the things that the private sector has been moving towards over the last year or two. That's what this is all about here. But to see the white house put that out, that all government agencies will now be embracing that I think it puts them on a much shorter footing and it allows the government to be able to identify vulnerabilities before they get exploited. It allows them to much more quickly identify, have visibility and respond to, to threats. So the government in infrastructure will be safer. And it was really nice to hear her talk about that and about how the private sector can work with the government. >>So you know how this works, you know, having been in the bureau. But so it's the, these executive orders. A lot of times people think, oh, it's just symbolic. And there are a couple of aspects of it. One is president Biden really impressed upon the private sector to, you know, amp it up to, to really focus and do a better job. But also as you pointed out that executive order can adjudicate what government agencies must do must prioritize. So it's more than symbolic. It's actually taking action. Isn't >>It? Yeah. I, I, I think it, I think it's both. I think it's important for the government to lead in this area because while a, a large portion of infrastructure, major companies, they understand this, there is still a whole section of private sector organizations that don't understand this and to see the white house, roll it out. I think that's good leadership and that is symbolic. But then to your second point to mandate that government agencies do this, it really pushes those. That might be a bit reluctant. It pushes them forward. And I think this is the, the, the type of action that as it starts to roll out and people become more comfortable and they start to see the successes. They understand that they're becoming safer, that they're reducing risk. It really is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy and we see things become much safer. Did, >>Did you guys talk about Ukraine? Was that, was that off limits or did that come up at all? >>It wasn't, it wasn't off limits, but we didn't talk about it because there are so many other things we were discussing. We were talking about this, the cyber security workforce, for example, and the huge gap in the number of people who have the expertise, the capability and the, and the opportunities to them to come into cyber security technology broadly, but then cyber security as a sub sub component of that. And some of the programs, they just had a big cyber workforce strategy. They invited a lot of people from the private sector to have this conversation about how do you focus on stem? How do you get younger people? How do you get women involved? So getting maybe perhaps to the untapped individuals that would step forward and be an important stop gap and an important component to this dearth of talent and it's absolutely needed. So that was, was one thing. There were a number of other things. Yeah. >>So I mean, pre pandemic, I thought the number was 350,000 open cybersecurity jobs. I heard a number yesterday just in the us. And you might have even told me this 7, 7 50. So it's doubled in just free to post isolation economy. I don't know what the stats are, but too big. Well, as a, as a CSO, how much can automation do to, to close that gap? You know, we were talking earlier on the cube about, you gotta keep the humans in the loop, you, you, the, the, the, the Nirvana of the machines will just take care of everything is just probably not gonna happen anytime in the near term, even midterm or long term, but, but, but how can automation play and help close that gap? So >>The, the automation piece is, is what allows this to scale. You know, if we had one company with a hundred endpoints and we had a couple of folks there, you could do it with humans. A lot of it when you're talking about hundreds of millions of endpoints spread around the globe, you're talking about literally trillions of events every week that are being identified, evaluated and determined whether they're malicious or not. You have to have automation and to have using the cloud, using AI, using machine learning, to sort through, and really look for the malicious needle in a stack of needle. So you've gotta get that fidelity, that fine tune review. And you can only do that with automation. What you gotta remember, Dave, is that there's a human being at the end of every one of these attacks. So we've got the bad guys, have humans there, they're using the technology to scale. We're using the technology to scale to detect them. But then when you get down to the really malicious activity, having human beings involved is gonna take it to another level and allow you to eradicate the adversaries from the environment. >>Okay. So they'll use machines to knock on the door when that door gets opened and they're in, and they're saying, okay, where do we go from here? And they're directing strategy. Absolutely. I, I spent, I think gave me a sta I, I wonder if I wrote it down correctly, 2 trillion events per day. Yeah. That you guys see is that I write that down. Right? >>You did. It changes just like the number of jobs. It changes when I started talking about this just a, a year and a half ago, it was a billion a day. And when you look at how it's multiplied exponentially, and that will continue because of the number of applications, because of the number of devices as that gets bigger, the number of events gets bigger. And that's one of the problems that we have here is the spread of the network. The vulnerability, the environment is getting bigger and bigger and bigger as it gets bigger, more opportunities for bad guys to exploit vulnerabilities. >>Yeah. And we, we were talking earlier about IOT and extending, you know, that, that threats surface as well, talk about the Overwatch threat hunting report. What is that? How, how often have you run it? And I'd love to get into some of the results. Yeah. >>So Overwatch is a service that we offer where we have 24 by seven threat hunters that are operating in our customer environments. They're hunting, looking for, looking for malicious activity, malicious behavior. And to the point you just made earlier, where we use automation to sort out and filter what is clearly bad. When an adversary does get what we call fingers on the keyboard. So they're in the box and now a human being, they get a hit on their automated attack. They get a hit that, Hey, we're in, it's kind of the equivalent of looking at the Bober while you're fishing. Yeah. When you see the barber move, then the fisherman jumps up from his nap and starts to reel it in similar. They jump on the keyboard fingers on the keyboard. Our Overwatch team is detecting them very, very quickly. So we found 77,000 potential intrusions this past year in 2021, up to the end of June one, one every seven minutes from those detections. >>When we saw these detections, we were able to identify unusual adversary behavior that we'd not necessar necessarily seen before we call it indicators of attack. What does that mean? It means we're seeing an adversary, taking a new action, using a new tactic. Our Overwatch team can take that from watching it to human beings. They take it, they give it to our, our engineering team and they can write detections, which now become automated, right? So you have, you have all the automation that filters out all the bad stuff. One gets through a bad guy, jumps up, he's on the keyboard. And now he's starting to execute commands on the system. Our team sees that pulls those commands out. They're unusual. We've not seen 'em before we give it to our engineering team. They write detections that now all become automated. So because of that, we stopped over with the 77,000 attacks that we identified. We stopped over a million new attacks that would've come in and exploited a network. So it really is kind of a big circle where you've got human beings and intelligence and technology, all working together to make the system smarter, to make the people smarter and make the customers safer. And you're >>Seeing new IAS pop up all the time, and you're able to identify those and, and codify 'em. Now you've announced at reinforced, I, I, in July in Boston, you announced the threat hunting service, which is also, I think, part of your you're the president as well of that services division, right? So how's that going? What >>What's happening there? What we announced. So we've the Overwatch team has been involved working in customer environments and working on the back end in our cloud for many years. What we've announced is this cloud hunting, where, because of the adoption of the cloud and the movement to the cloud of so many organizations, they're pushing data to the cloud, but we're seeing adversaries really ramp up their attacks against the cloud. So we're hunting in Google cloud in Microsoft Azure cloud in AWS, looking for anomalous behavior, very similar to what we do in customer environments, looking for anomalous behavior, looking for credential exploitation, looking for lateral movement. And we are having a great success there because as that target space increases, there's a much greater need for customers to ensure that it's protected. So >>The cloud obviously is very secure. You got some of the best experts in the planet inside of hyperscale companies. So, and whether it's physical security or logical security, they're obviously, you know, doing a good job is the weakness, the seams between where the cloud provider leaves off and the customer has to take over that shared responsibility model, you know, misconfiguring and S3 bucket is the, you know, the common one, but I'm so there like a zillion others, where's that weakness. Yeah. >>That, that's exactly right. We see, we see oftentimes the it piece enabling the cloud piece and there's a connectivity there, and there is a seam there. Sometimes we also see misconfiguration, and these are some of the things that our, our cloud hunters will find. They'll identify again, the equivalent of, of walking down the hallway and seeing a door that's unlocked, making sure it's locked before it gets exploited. So they may see active exploitation, which they're negating, but they also are able to help identify vulnerabilities prior to them getting exploited. And, you know, the ability for organizations to successfully manage their infrastructure is a really critical part of this. It's not always malicious actors. It's identifying where the infrastructure can be shored up, make it more resilient so that you can prevent some of these attacks from happening. I >>Heard, heard this week earlier, something I hadn't heard before, but it makes a lot of sense, you know, patch Tuesday means hack Wednesday. And, and so I, I presume that the, the companies releasing patches is like a signal to the bad guys that Hey, you know, free for all go because people aren't necessarily gonna patch. And then the solar winds customers are now circumspect about patches. The very patches that are supposed to protect us with the solar winds hack were the cause of the malware getting in and, you know, reforming, et cetera. So that's a complicated equation. Yeah. >>It, it certainly is a couple, couple parts there to unwind. First, when you, you think about patch Tuesday, there are adversaries often, not always that are already exploiting some of those vulnerabilities in the wild. So it's a zero day. It's not yet been patched in some cases hasn't yet been identified. So you've got people who are actively exploiting. It we've found zero days in the course of our threat hunting. We report them in a, in a, in a responsible way. We've gone to Microsoft. We've told them a couple times in the last few months that we found a zero day and give them an opportunity to patch that before anybody goes public with it, because absolutely right when it does go public, those that didn't know about it before recognize that there will be millions of devices depending on the, the vulnerability that are out there and exploitable. And they will absolutely, it will tell everybody that you can now go to this particular place. And there's an opportunity to gain access, to exploit privileges, depending on the criticality of the patch. >>I, I don't, I, I don't, I'm sorry to generalize, but I wanna ask you about the hacker mindset. Let's say that what you just described a narrow set of hackers knows that there's an unpatched, you know, vulnerability, and they're making money off of that. Will they keep that to themselves? Will they share that with other folks in the net? Will they sell that information? Or is it, is it one of those? It depends. It, >>I was just gonna say, it depends you, you beat me to it. It absolutely depends. All of, all of the above would be the answer. We certainly see organ now a nation state for example, would absolutely keep that to themselves. Yeah. Right. Their goal is very different from an organized crime group, which might sell access. And we see them all the time in the underground selling access. That's how they make money nation states. They want to keep a zero day to themselves. It's something they're able to exploit in some cases for months or years, that that, that vulnerability goes undetected. But a nation state is aware of it and exploiting it. It's a, it's a dangerous game. And it just, I think, exemplifies the importance of ensuring that you're doing everything you can to patch in a timely matter. Well, >>Sean, we appreciate the work that you've done in your previous role and continuing to advance education, knowledge and protection in our industry. Thank you for coming on >>You. Thank you for having me. This is a fantastic event. Really appreciate you being here and helping to educate folks. Yeah. >>You guys do do a great job. Awesome. Set that you built and look forward to future events with you guys. My >>Friends. Thanks so much, Dave. Yeah. Thank >>You. Bye now. All right. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there. We're gonna wrap up in a moment. Live from Falcon 22. You're watching the cube.

>>Welcome back to the aria in Las Vegas, Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Falcon 22, the Cube's continuous coverage. Sean Henry is here. He's the president of the services division and he's the chief security officer at CrowdStrike. And he's joined by Kevin mania, CEO of Mandy. Now part of Google Jens. Welcome to the cube. Thank you. Congrats on closing the Google deal. Thank you. That's great. New chapter, >>New >>Chapter coming fresh off the keynote, you and George. I really en enjoyed that. Let's start there. One of the things you talked about was the changes you've been, you've been in this business for a while. I think you were talking about, you know, doing some of these early stuff in the nineties. Wow. Things have changed a lot the queen, right? Right. You used to put the perimeter around the queen. Yeah. Build the Mo the Queen's left or castle new ballgame. But you were talking about the board level knowledge of security in the organization. Talk about that change. That's occurred in the last >>Decade. You know, boards are all about governance, right? Making sure everybody's doing the right things. And they've kind of had a haul pass on cybersecurity for a long time. Like we expect them to be great at financial diligence, they understand the financials of an organization. You're gonna see a maturity, I think in cybersecurity where I think board members all know, Hey, there's risk out there. And we're on our own to kind of defend ourselves from it, but they don't know how to quantify it. And they don't know how to express it. So bottom line boards are interested in cyber and we just have to mature as an industry to give them the tools they need to measure it appropriately. >>Sean, one of the things I wanted to ask you. So Steven Schmidt, I noticed changed his title from CISOs chief inf information security officer, the chief security officer. Your title is chief security officer. Is that a nuance that has meaning to you or is it just less acronym? >>It depends on the organization that you're in, in our organization, the chief security officer owns all risks. So I have a CISO that comes underneath me. Yep. And I've got a security folks that are handling our facilities, our personnel, those sorts of things, all, all of our offices around the globe. So it's all things security. One of the things that we've found and Kevin and I were actually talking about this earlier is this intersection between the physical world and the virtual world. And if you've got adversaries that want gain access to your organization, they might do it remotely by trying to hack into your network. But they also might try to get one of your employees to take an action on their behalf, or they might try to get somebody hired into your company to take some nefarious acts. So from a security perspective, it's about building an envelope around all things valuable and then working it in a collaborative way. So there's a lot of interface, a lot of interaction and a lot of value in putting those things together. And, >>And you're also president of the services division. Is that a P and L role or >>It is, we have a it's P P O P and L. And we have an entire organization that's doing incident response and it's a lot of the work that we're doing with, with Kevin's folks now. So I've got both of those hats today. >>Okay. So self-funded so in a way, okay. Where are companies most at risk today? >>Huh? You wanna go on that one first? Sean, you talk fast than me. So it's bigger bang for the buck. If >>You >>Talk, you know, when I, when I think about, about companies in terms of, of their risk, it's a lot of it has to do with the expansion of the network. Companies are adding new applications, new devices, they're expanding into new areas. There are new technologies that are being developed every day and that are being embraced every day. And all of those technologies, all of those applications, all of that hardware is susceptible to attack. Adversaries are looking for the vulnerabilities they can exploit. And I think just kind of that sprawl is something that is, is disconcerting to me from a security perspective, we need to know where our assets are, where the vulnerabilities lie, how do we plug the holes? And having that visibility is really critical to ensure that you're you're in, involved in mitigating that, that new architecture, >>Anything you >>Did. Yeah. I would like when I, so I can just tell you what I'm hearing from CISOs out there. They're worried about identity, the lateral movement. That's been kind of part of every impactful breach. So in identity's kind of top three of mind, I would say zero trust, whatever that means. And we all have our own definitions of migration to zero trust and supply chain risk. You know, whether they're the supplier, they wanna make sure they can prove to their customers, they have great security practices. Or if they're a consumer of a supply chain, you need to understand who's in their supply chain. What are their dependencies? How secure are they? Those are just three topics that come up all the time. >>As we extend, you know, talking about XDR the X being extend. Do you see physical security as something that's being extended into? Or is it, or is it already kind of readily accepted that physical security goes hand in hand with information security? >>I, I don't think a lot of people think that way there certainly are some and Dave mentions Amazon and Steve Schmidt as a CSO, right? There's a CSO that works for him as well. CJ's clear integration. There's an intelligence component to that. And I think that there are certain organizations that are starting to recognize and understand that when we say there's no real perimeter, it, it expands the network expands into the physical space. And if you're not protecting that, you know, if you don't protect the, the server room and somebody can actually walk in the doors unlocked, you've got a vulnerability that might be exploited. So I think to, to recognize the value of that integration from a security perspective, to be holistic and for organizations to adopt a security first philosophy that all the employees recognize they're, they're the, the first line of defense. Oftentimes not just from a fish, but by somebody catching up with them and handing 'em a thumb drive, Hey, can you take a look at this document? For me, that's a potential vulnerability as well. So those things need to be integrated. >>I thought the most interesting part of the keynote this morning is when George asked you about election security and you immediately went to the election infrastructure. I was like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. But then I was so happy to hear you. You went to the disinformation, I learned something there about your monitoring, the network effects. Sure. And, and actually there's a career stream around that. Right. The reason I had so years ago I interviewed was like, this was 2016, Robert Gates. Okay. Former defense. And I, I said, yeah, but don't we have the best cyber can't we go on the offense. He said, wait a minute, we have the most to lose. Right. But, but you gave an example where you can identify the bots. Like let's say there's disinformation out there. You could actually use bots in a positive way to disseminate the, the truth in theory. Good. Is, is that something that's actually happening >>Out there? Well, I think we're all still learning. You know, you can have deep fakes, both audible files or visual files, right. And images. And there's no question. The next generation, you do have to professionalize the news that you consume. And we're probably gonna have to professionalize the other side critical thinking because we are a marketplace of ideas in an open society. And it's hard to tell where's the line between someone's opinion and intentional deception, you know, and sometimes it could be the source, a foreign threat, trying to influence the hearts and minds of citizens, but there's gonna be an internal threat or domestic threat as well to people that have certain ideas and concepts that they're zealots about. >>Is it enough to, is it enough to simply expose where the information is coming from? Because, you know, look, I, I could make the case that the red Sox, right. Or a horrible baseball team, and you should never go to Fenway >>And your Yankees Jersey. >>Right. Right. So is that disinformation, is that misinformation? He'd say yes. Someone else would say no, but it would be good to know that a thousand bots from some troll farm, right. Are behind us. >>There's, it's helpful to know if something can be tied to identity or is totally anonymous. Start just there. Yeah. Yeah. You can still protect the identity over time. I think all of us, if you're gonna trust the source, you actually know the source. Right. So I do believe, and, and by the way, much longer conversation about anonymity versus privacy and then trust, right. And all three, you could spend this whole interview on, but we have to have a trustworthy internet as well. And that's not just in the tech and the security of it, but over time it could very well be how we're being manipulated as citizens and people. >>When you guys talk to customers and, and peers, when somebody gets breached, what's the number one thing that you hear that they wished they'd done that they didn't. >>I think we talked about this earlier, and I think identity is something that we're talking about here. How are you, how are you protecting your assets? How do you know who's authorized to have access? How do you contain the, the access that they have? And the, the area we see with, with these malware free attacks, where adversaries are using the existing capabilities, the operating system to move laterally through the network. I mean, Kevin's folks, my folks, when we respond to an incident, it's about looking at that lateral movement to try and get a full understanding of where the adversary's been, where they're going, what they're doing, and to try to, to find a root cause analysis. And it really is a, a critical part. >>So part of the reason I was asking you about, was it a P and L cuz you, you wear two hats, right? You've got revenue generation on one side and then you've got you protect, you know, the company and you've got peer relationships. So the reason I bring this up is I felt like when stucks net occurred, there was a lot of lip service around, Hey, we, as an industry are gonna work together. And then what you saw was a lot of attempts to monetize, you know, private data, sell private reports and things of that nature you were referencing today, Kevin, that you think the industry's doing a much better job of, of collaboration. Is it, can you talk about that and maybe give some examples? >>Absolutely. I mean, you know, I lived through it as a victim of a breach couple years ago. If you see something new and novel, I, I just can't imagine you getting away with keeping it a secret. I mean, I would even go, what are you doing? Harboring that if you have it, that doesn't mean you tell the whole world, you don't come on your show and say, Hey, we got something new novel, everybody panic, you start contacting the people that are most germane to fixing the problem before you tell the world. So if I see something that's new in novel, certainly con Sean and the team at CrowdStrike saying, Hey, there's because they protect so many endpoints and they defend nations and you gotta get to Microsoft. You have to talk to pan. You have to get to the companies that have a large capability to do shields up. And I think you do that immediately. You can't sit on new and novel. You get to the vendor where the vulnerability is, all these things have to happen at a great rate to speak. >>So you guys probably won't comment, but I'm betting dollars to donuts. This Uber lapses hack you guys knew about. >>I turned to you. >>No comment. I'm guessing. I'm guessing that the, that wasn't novel. My point being, let me, let me ask it in a more generic fashion that you can maybe comment you you're. I think you're my, my inference is we're com the industry is compressing the time between a zero day and a fix. Absolutely. Absolutely. Like dramatically. >>Yes. Oh, awareness of it and AIX. Yes. Yeah. >>Okay. Yeah. And a lot of the hacks that we see as lay people in the media you've known about for quite some time, is that fair or no, not necessarily. >>It's, you know, it's harder to handle an intrusion quietly and discreetly these days, especially with what you're up against and, and most CEOs, by the way, their intent isn't, let's handle it quietly and discreetly it's what do we do about it? And what's the right way to handle it. And they wanna inform their customers and they wanna inform people that might be impacted. I wouldn't say we know it all that far ahead of time >>And, and depends. And, and I, I think companies don't know it. Yeah. Companies don't know they've been breached for weeks or months or years in some cases. Right. Which talks about a couple things, first of all, some of the sophistication of the adversaries, but it also talks about the inability of companies to often detect this type of activity when we're brought in. It's typically very quickly after the company finds out because they recognize they've gotta take action. They've got liability, they've got brand protection. There, whole sorts of, of things they need to take care of. And we're brought in it may or may not be, become public, but >>CrowdStrike was founded on the premise that the unstoppable breach is a myth. Now that's a, that's a bold sort of vision. We're not there yet, obviously. And a and a, and a, a CSO can't, you know, accept that. Right. You've gotta always be vigilant, but is that something that is, that we're gonna actually see manifest, you know, in any, any time in the near term? I mean, thinking about the Falcon platform, you guys are users of that. I don't know if that is part of the answer, but part of it's technology, but without the cultural aspects, the people side of things, you're never gonna get there. >>I can tell you, I started Maning in 2004 at the premise security breaches are inevitable, far less marketable. Yeah. You know, stop breaches. >>So >>Yeah. I, I think you have to learn how to manage this, right? It's like healthcare, you're not gonna stop every disease, but there's a lot of things that you can do to mitigate the consequences of those things. The same thing with network security, there's a lot of actions that organizations can take to help protect them in a way that allows them to live and, and operate in a, in a, a strong position. If companies are lackadaisical that irresponsible, they don't care. Those are companies that are gonna suffer. But I think you can manage this if you're using the right technology, the right people, you've got the right philosophy security first >>In, in the culture. >>Well, I can tell you very quickly, three reasons why people think, why is there an intrusion? It should just go away. Well, wherever money goes, crime follows. We still have crime. So you're still gonna have intrusions, whether it has to be someone on the inside or faulty software and people being paid the right faulty software, you're gonna have war. That's gonna create war in the cyber domain. So information warriors are gonna try to have intrusions to get to command and control. So wherever you have command and control, you'll have a war fighter. And then wherever you have information, you have ESP Espino. So you're gonna have people trying to break in at all times. >>And, and to tie that up because everything Kevin said is absolutely right. And what he just said at the very end was people, there are human beings that are on the other side of every single attack. And think about this until you physically get physically get to the people that are doing it and stop them. Yes, this will go on forever because you can block them, but they're gonna move and you can block them again. They're gonna move their objectives. Don't change because the information you have, whether it's financial information, intellectual property, strategic military information, that's still there. They will always come at it, which is where that physical component comes in. If you're able to block well enough and they can't get you remotely, they might send somebody in. Well, >>I, in the keynote, I, I'm not kidding. I'm looking around the room and I'm thinking there's at least one person here that is here primarily to gather intelligence, to help them defeat. What's being talked about here. >>Well, you said it's, >>It's kind >>Of creepy. You said the adversary is, is very well equipped and motivated. Why do you Rob banks? Well, that's where the money is, but it's more than that. Now with state sponsored terrorism and, you know, exfiltration of state secrets, I mean, there's, it's high stake's games. You got, this >>Has become a tool of nation states in terms from a political perspective, from a military perspective, if you look at what happened with Ukraine and Russia, all the work that was done in advanced by the Russians to soften up the Ukrainians, not just collection of intelligence, not just denial of services, but then disruptive attacks to change the entire complexity of the battlefield. This, this is a, an area that's never going away. It's becoming ingrained in our lives. And it's gonna be utilized for nefarious acts for many, many decades to come. >>I mean, you're right, Sean, we're seeing the future of war right before us is, is there's. There is going to be, there is a cyber component now in war, >>I think it signals the cyber component signals the silent intention of nations period, the silent projection of power probably before you see kinetics. >>And this is where gates says we have a lot more to lose as a country. So it's hard for us to go on the offense. We have to be very careful about our offensive capabilities because >>Of one of the things that, that we do need to, to do though, is we need to define what the red lines are to adversaries. Because when you talk about human beings, you've gotta put a deterrent in place so that if the adversaries know that if you cross this line, this is what the response is going to be. It's the way things were done during nuclear proliferation, right? Right. During the cold war, here's what the actions are gonna be. It's gonna be, it's gonna be mutual destruction and you can't do it. And we didn't have a nuclear war. We're at a point now where adversaries are pushing the envelope constantly, where they're turning off the lights in certain countries where they're taking actions that are, are quite detrimental to the host governments and those red lines have to be very clear, very clearly defined and acted upon if they're >>Crossed as security experts. Can you always tie that signature back to say a particular country or a particular group? >>Absolutely. 100% every >>Time I know. Yeah. No, it it's. It's a great question. You, you need to get attribution right. To get to deterrence, right. And without attribution, where do you proportionate respond to whatever act you're responding to? So attribution's critical. Both our companies work hard at doing it and it, and that's why I think you're not gonna see too many false flag operations in cyberspace, but when you do and they're well crafted or one nation masquerades is another, it, it, it's one of the last rules of the playground I haven't seen broken yet. And that that'll be an unfortunate day. >>Yeah. Because that mutually assure destruction, a death spot like Putin can say, well, it wasn't wasn't me. Right. So, and ironically, >>It's human intelligence, right. That ultimately is gonna be the only way to uncover >>That human intelligence is a big component. >>For sure. Right. And, and David, like when you go back to, you were referring to Robert Gates, it's the asymmetry of cyberspace, right? One person in one nation. That's not a control by asset could still do an act. And it, it just adds to the complexity of, we have attribution it's from that nation, but was it in order? Was it done on behalf of that nation? Very complicated. >>So this is an industry of superheroes. Thank you guys for all you do and appreciate you coming on the cube. Wow. >>I love your Cape. >>Thank all right. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave ante be right back from Falcon 22 from the area you watching the cue.

>>Hello, and welcome back to the cubes coverage of.com. Splunk's annual conference is virtual this year. I'm John furrier, host of the cube and a very special guest Sean vice president of product and technology cube, alumni, Sean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube and chatting with us. Thanks. It's great to be here. It's been a while since we chatted, you were at AWS. Now it's Splunk heading up the entire products and technology group here, um, which we've been covering sponsors 2012. So we kinda know a lot about what's going on and, and followed your career. Um, your keynote, we kind of went into this cloud vision is hitting Splunk with the data because the cloud scale, which you know a lot about and data is now taking Splunk to a whole nother level. And that's the big theme you observability multi-cloud and security excuse has been for one there for a while. What's your, what's your assessment. >>Yeah, I mean, you know, uh, you and I have talked a number of times before, and what I found is that, you know, there's a lot of companies through this pandemic that, you know, some are thriving and some are not. And the ones that are really thriving, they have this strong data foundation. Like when you, when you talk to them, they're not stuck. Like they're there. When they talk about scaling or adding capacity or building new co uh, uh, customer experiences, they can, uh, their data platform allows that to happen. But the ones that are are stuck, you know, they just can't, they can't, they can't get to the data. They can't ask those questions that they otherwise, you know, love too. So that's, you know, I think Splunk is right in the middle of that. And that's the fun part of it. >>Yeah. You told me you have the strong foundation when thinking about Splunk is every inflection point in the industry. Over the past decade, you see Splunk do something new operationalized data, do something new, operationalize it. We saw security, I think around 2015, come on the radar at.com. And then since then a whole nother level of data, you've got edge. You have now cybersecurity, even, even more advanced than ever before. And then enterprise is just trying to develop modern applications. So you have this whole rapid scale of CICB pipeline, modern applications and the role of data. Isn't just storing it and managing it. It's like making it addressable. This is like, uh, the, the new current phenomenon of cloud. >>I mean, I liked the way you just put it, it, it really, you know, making data addressable, we put it in terms of like turn data into doing so, you know, if you have data that you're storing it, oh, that's one thing. If you don't, you don't want to leave data behind because you don't know what question you may want to ask. And when, but to your point making it addressable is if you and I decided, Hey, we want to build a new customer experience where we're thinking about doing this thing, and we're going to have a million questions to ask that data is going to help you be, uh, to know whether what you're trying to do for your customers is right or wrong. So it is a, it's remarkable to see how many customers are in pursuit of really turning data into >>Doing so. We've got to you, we had the formula one team on here, McLaren, um, Zach brown. I got a little selfie with, uh, the drivers that kind of cool. My son loved it, but that's an IOT application in my mind, first, the coolest of the sports. Awesome. But like the car going in real time, you know, driving that, driving an advantage with data. So it's an IOT IOT. Then you got just the blocking and tackling >>Data warehouse in the cloud. And then you got companies who are trying to transform a data. So I have to ask you as customers out there, look at Splunk and look at the next level of their architecture with multicloud coming around the corner. How should they be thinking about data? Get the foundation with Splunk. What's the next chapter in your mind? I mean, you know, a lot of customers that I meet they're in multiple clouds. They're not just in one. It means they've got data in Amazon or Google or Azure. A lot of them still have data on prem, you know, but when I talk to customers, they don't say things to me like, Hey, I'm in different clouds, I'm on prem. Can you make sure I have different observability and security experiences for each one? Like they don't, they really, at the end of the day, they're like, look, I need a consistent observability experience, consistent security, regardless of where my data is. >>So what that means to Splunk is, you know, wherever your data is, we're going to be Splunk will just work that that's kinda, as you know, it's how we think about it. And speaking that I had dinner with Lando the other night and it was, I hadn't met Lando before, but man, what an awesome, awesome person. We were just kind of hanging out, talking about data and I ask, this is the kind of stuff you wouldn't normally get. I asked him like, Hey, if you could, if technology could do anything to help you win formula one races, what would it be? A totally open-ended question. And I wasn't sure how he was going to answer it, but he didn't pause this guy. Like you talk about, you think of these scenarios. He's very quickly. He's like, oh man, if we had data, could help me do this and this and this and this because in his business, a millisecond can be the difference between winning or losing a race. And for some of you like, oh, that can't be, but for him, that's how his mind works. So it's crazy to see how excited he was to use tech, to get to data, ask questions that can ultimately help them. >>What was the number one thing pitting the right time or tires? What was he, what did he come up there? He is. >>You know, I can't, unfortunately >>I don't want to put you on the spot. I will be. >>This is like, you know, I, I wouldn't, uh, that would put him in a bad spot, but I will tell you though, I mean, this guy is, and that whole team is really about using data to win. >>Well, you know, I was joking. Um, but these guys can, they came on. Cause you know, I'm a big fan, obviously with the Netflix special driving two survives the name of the title. They become hugely popular to a new fan base, especially techies. Um, I said, Hey, you're driving the advantage with data kind of my little, little comeback to that, but that's really kind of a real encapsulates a real world scenario. I mean, well, there are 10,000 people working on McLaren. You have the driver in the car, you have the car itself with all this instrumentation that kind of encapsulates the enterprise experience right now. They don't have the right app doing the right thing with customers. It could be the difference between having a successful digital transformation or not. So it's kind of like parallel. I mean, I know that's kind of the tie in with the, with the sponsorship, but that's the real world now. >>Yeah, it is. And I mean, if you think about it, there's two drivers per car, 10 teams. There's so many races, there's a tremendous amount of money that they're all spending. But you know, when, when your season is really composed of a certain number of races and you got millions of people tuning in you're right. There's hundreds of people working behind the seat. Could you imagine if they didn't use data and you're trying to, you're, you're trying to race and formula one against the best drivers and the best engineers in the world. I just, you know, it goes to show you're right. It is, it's a perfect example of them transforming as any other enterprise, basically using data to get an advantage. >>And just before we move on to the next topic, the e-sports thing is fascinating as well, because now they're taking this memento verse kind of vibe where they're moving people on the e-sports, where they're having the shadow competition. It's a very interesting kind of bringing the fan base in, but there's probably gonna be a lot of data involved in that as well. Maybe identify the next driver who knows, hopefully, you know, good stuff. So Sean, you're in charge of process technology. I have to ask you, um, as customers look at all the different solutions out there, I'll say multicloud check, you guys have a good vision on that. Like that observability. I mean, that's the fashion right now. Let's talk about observability that there's so many companies out there doing quote observability. How should customers think about what that means in context to the decision of they make everyone's coming into the, the CSO or the CIO saying, um, your observability solution? >>Yeah, I mean first, um, you know, what is observability? I always like to just sort of map it back to things we might understand. So back in the day, monitoring really was connect to a machine. It has a monolith app, you know this and you just try to debug this one thing. That's not the world we live in today. Today when you're building apps in the cloud, you're you, you have hundreds of these services behind the scenes. Like no one person can actually comprehend all of it. So now all of a sudden tools become, they really matter. And what I would say is from a Splunk perspective, when we talk to customers, it's not like one person there, one team is quote, you know, working and making the whole system work. Oftentimes you have different teams like network teams, app teams, security teams, and they all kind of need to work together in one way shape or another. But this is why, you know, when rebuild our systems, it's off of shared data so that, you know, if I'm an operator, you're an app developer. And if I need to work with you, at least I can share something with you in context. So we, we, while there are individual tools to do certain things, our mental model is that they all do work together. That's super, super important for any observability thing you're looking at. You just want to make sure that you can see things end to end. Otherwise you get in trouble >>Quick. You know, I'd love to get your perspective being new to Splunk as you come in and new, the industry obviously has experienced that in the cloud has been well documented, certainly in the cube. What's it like there because as you come in, it's not a utility anymore. It's not a tool anymore. It's a platform and it's getting bigger and growing. So you have probably a lot of things going on. So you walk in and you, you say, okay, let me see the price of technology. Were you blown away? What was your reaction? What can you share some, uh, color around what's uh, what was it like when you open up the doors of the kingdom of the product? >>Yeah. Well, I mean, these t-shirts are real men and there's like ponies running around this. The Splunkers love to have fun. And you know, before I came to Splunk, the one thing I noticed, anytime I asked my thoughts long, they were fired up. Like they were really, really excited about the tech, but when I got into it, the truth is, you know, you don't know what you don't know until you see it, but I was just done to, to then sort of connect the dots like wow. Splunk is in the core data plane of tens of thousands of enterprises all over the world, like the data plane for all of their architecture and applications. So with that becomes a great responsibility, as you could imagine, but it is not just a tool. It is something that customers like. I dunno, the university of Illinois, you know, with COVID, they'll they'll track, uh, they'll track 3.2 million saliva tests just for contract tracing and behind the scenes, they're using Splunk for a real thing. Or we've talked about F1 or you think of slack, like we're all kind of using slack. These days, slack is using, um, uh, Splunk to make sure that their environment of slackers and everything's building it's all secure. So th it's those stories that go on and on are just incredible. When you learn that, >>I started at Teresa Carlson yesterday, and we were talking about the growth opportunity and I spent speculating that, you know, my opinion, my opinion, that's looking, hang on the cube is that Splunk's that this new inflection point that another elbow, another kickoff, the growth, the way it's positioned. If you look at kind of where it's been, kind of where it's going with security now as a platform with the enterprises, how do you describe that growth in your mind? Because obviously this market's changing an edge real time. All these things are happening. What's, what's the, where's the growth going to be? >>Yeah, I think it's in the cloud. I mean, if you think of Splunk, I think the company is about 18, 19 years old. So its history is an almost 20 years of on-premise software. In some sense, you might go, Hey, is that a liability? But Rio, the reality is it's a strength because we're already part of these enterprise infrastructures and application stacks. And then when you now move that group to the cloud, and then you got all others coming to the cloud, that's where they're, I mean, it is just the tip of what is happening. So, you know, if I'm a customer and I moved to the cloud in the cloud, it's like, I don't have to really scale or size anything. Like it just works. And it, to me, it's just an end point and I load data. So in that context, the number of new use cases that customers are able to get after is actually pretty awesome. But really at the end of the day it's cloud. >>Well, great to have you on, I know you've got to go. Thanks for coming on the queue. One final question. What's your vision for the next year or two, what's your to do items. What's the message to the marketplace. >>You know, I'm, I'm thrilled to be here, but at the end of the day, you know, my message to the marketplaces, we're all excited to work with our customers to really help them have that strong foundation so they can turn data into doing and actually pull off these digital transformation. >>One final final question for the companies that get the cloud scale combined with putting data into action for the, for the value what's the result going to be is they can put more competitive advantage. Is it more agility? What do you see happening when you combine the cloud scale with a great data plane? >>Yeah, I think at the end of the day, these companies would tell you that they can move faster than ever before. They're more competitive there. They have confidence that their environments secure, they can build new customer experiences. And when you put all of that together, honestly, that is what these digital transformations are all >>Great to be in the product and technology business these days. Isn't it a lot of fun, a lot of action. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Yeah, you bet. Good to be here. It's the cube coverage here, here at the live studio for Splunk studios, for their virtual events, the cube bring you all the action. I'm John for a, your host. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCube with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hi, and welcome to theCube Virtual in our coverage of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Shawn Snyder. She is the managing director at Deloitte and Cloud Migration market leader. Thanks for coming on the show Shawn. >> Thank you, Rebecca. I'm glad to be here. >> So we're talking today about cloud migration in the public sector in the COVID era, but I want to start by having you introduce yourself to our viewers tell them a little bit about what you do at Deloitte. >> Sure, I'm Shawn Snyder. I'm a managing director based out of Atlanta. I lead our cloud migration offering for our government and public sector clients. So that really means that I serve clients in the government, both public sector local government agencies, as well as federal agencies and helping them move to the cloud, and I'm also responsible for building out our capabilities, our tools, our resources, and people to help clients do that in a very fast and accelerated way. >> So even putting aside the pandemic for a second, shifting to the cloud is such a big and daunting undertaking for so many organizations, including federal agencies. How do you help CIOs and clients think through the processes and what they need to do and how they need to do it? >> Yeah, I mean, it all starts with where are they at on this journey, right? We actually have a show our clients like a typical journey to the cloud and, you know, we have a method and set of tools that we can work with them depending on where they are but if they're just in the initial stages of exploring, moving to cloud, it typically starts with a strategy and really understanding what, you know, how engaged is the mission and the agencies in supporting this. Are they really looking to continue to build their own talent? What is the end state look like? Do they want to build cloud skills and cloud engineering skills within their organization, or are they looking to do more of a managed service model? So a lot of these conversations happen and also around what platforms they want to use and then we typically look at their portfolio of applications. So it could be, you know, they're looking to move out of a data center and go more to a cloud virtual environment. It could be that they're looking to move a couple of mission critical applications that are highly complex with lots of data and sensitive information, so. It really kind of depends on what they're trying to achieve and what is the business result that they're looking to gain. >> And how do you help them think through the business case for this? Because I know that that is definitely an imperative. >> So we take a couple of, I can give you an example. So when we were working with a state in local agency, looking at a big mission critical integrated eligibility system, they wanted to be able to move because they were, the technology was getting a little dated. It was eating inflexible to maintain and when they were looking at the maintenance costs that they were spending on both the infrastructure and the application, it was starting to, you know, take up to 90% of the budget and so the lack of ability to be able to do new capabilities and new innovation when you're talking about especially post COVID, which I know we haven't gotten into, but when they're looking, there's actually more and more products and aid that's being made available. So they need more flexibility, and so what we did was we actually did a bunch of analysis around what does that technology stack look like? What's the cost drivers and then we built out what the future would look like on the, in this particular case was the AWS platform. How could they take advantage of some native services and reduce some of their licensing costs? How could they upgrade through our products? We have a seamless way to upgrade to cloud suitable operating systems. So in this case, they were on an outdated Windows and Linux platforms. We were able to update that to cloud suitable, which allowed them to, you know, save a lot of money in terms of their infrastructure costs to maintain some of that outdated infrastructure and then we get them on end state tools around security monitoring, around infrastructure monitoring and so they can really streamline some of those infrastructure costs as they are spending tremendous amount of money just on the tools when they're managing all of that on-prem, on a complex system. >> So thinking about now we are in this pandemic, which has changed everything about the way we live and the way we work, moving to the cloud was a business goal. Something that a lot of organizations sort of had, in they're two and three year, two and five-year plan. Now it is an absolute mandate. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are organizations saying to you now? >> There's just such a, there's such a demand for speed and doing it at scale very fast. So prior to COVID, like you said, it was a multi-year journey. We'll get to it when we can, but there were other priorities that automatic, always got in the way of that and also just the cost justification, right? When you're talking about migration and a lot of times these systems that's portfolio systems are outdated, they're not cloud suitable. So how do you have to refactor them? That can get pretty costly pretty quickly. Now our clients want to move fast and they have a virtual work workforce, they need more scale. They need more storage for some of the data. They need to be able to integrate with other partners, especially in the healthcare space, whether it's at the state and local agency level or in the federal space, that ability to create that ecosystem of being able to transmit and share data in a very secure way at a very large volume is becoming, you know, mission critical with combating COVID with being able to protect our citizens. >> Speed is the name of the game, as you're saying. So what, how is Deloitte investing in automation and what kinds of migration accelerators are you bringing to clients now? >> So a few different things. One, we are partnering with AWS, both on a professional services perspective, as well as with some programs. So we've integrated our methodologies and we've been certified by AWS for our methodology around migration acceleration program. So that's the map because of our qualifications of the amount of migrations we do globally, as well as our methodology and tool set, we're able to offer this joint map program, which allows us to team with AWS. Go on site in quickly use our tools to diagnose what applications are actually at cloud ready to move, how fast can they move? And it gives a lot of information around technical configurations, what servers they reside on, and all of basically the affinities, all of the information you would need to be able to move those applications and if it's not cloud suitable, we can detect if it, how quickly we could get it cloud suitable. What would need to be done is an application code, or is it database, or is it operating system? What are those things that need to get upgraded to move it to the cloud? And is it worth moving to the cloud? So we actually look at the business value that each of these applications are providing and saying, you know, this might be more suited to stay on-prem for now. So we work with them through this map program to really come up with that detailed migration schedule and plan and we then use that information that we collected during that diagnostic phase feeds into our migration tools. So the migration is actually automated with the information that was collected during the diagnostics and the landing zones, and all of the sizing of the infrastructures able to be sized appropriately based on the information that was collected. >> I want to ask you about innovation. In a lot of these Cube Virtual conversations that we're having, we're hearing from a lot of executives that the pandemic has been a forcing mechanism in sort of forcing people to think more resourcefully, more ingenuitively about how they solve these pressing problems. What have you experienced, and have you seen in particular examples of innovation that have been inspiring and exciting for you? >> Yes, absolutely. So I actually work in the federal health space most, and our ability to be able to stand up an application or a service, whether it's a Salesforce service, the AWS platform, but we've been able to stand up contact tracing for local agencies, for state agencies. We've been able to set up cloud native services that allow the data that's getting collected across these different organizations to be able to make meaningful information using machine learning and some of the other native services that are available within cloud and they can be stood up very quickly and very cost-effectively and I think that's the other value that cloud is unlocking for organizations and really now starting to realize that they can move towards innovation and start to spend much more money on innovation than what they were doing previously on spending most of the budget on maintenance. >> When you're talking to clients now about the future, what are they thinking? What's on their minds in this sort of this 12 to 24 month plan? Are they just thinking we just need to get through this next period and cope with this uncertainty? Or are they thinking about the future. >> Moving to cloud isn't just an infrastructure move. I think that's getting your head around what does it mean? What does your workforce have to look like? What does, how do you collaborate with the business? What are the, what is the future innovation use cases? What is going to, how do you actually start to use those use cases to demonstrate early value and start to do things much more in an agile and iterative way instead of, you know, delivering something in a, you know, several months or years. So it, it really is shifting, it's a transformation for how the office of the CIO or how they actually operate. It's creating integrated teams within the CIO organization. We're actually embedding different disciplines like engineering, infrastructure, IT operations, security operations, risk management, financial management, these disciplines as part of these, what we call DevOps DevSecOps type teams, and be able to deliver an end-to-end product on a particular platform in a very agile way. >> In thinking about the future of the workforce and how the pandemic is changing people's careers. I know that you serve as the technology campus champion at Georgia Tech, and you're very active in recruiting bright young business talent. Can you talk to our viewers a little bit about the changes that you foresee in terms of how people plan their careers and their professional development and anything in particular that Deloitte is doing to make sure that the pandemic does not have such a damaging effect, you know, from a lot of statistics that women are dropping out of the workforce in large numbers. >> Yes, so let me unpack your question a couple of ways. So, you know, first of all, you know, I'm really passionate about talent development and recruiting, and I've learned recruiting efforts at the undergrad for many, many years, and I've always been a technologist. So now, like just seeing how technology is embedded in all of the business that we do and it's so mission critical, you now, I'm very focused on making sure there's more women and more minorities going into technology oriented degrees. There's so much you can do with a technology degree and the of career careers that are available, you know, are unlimited. We can't hire enough people that have the right skills. There's just a war on talent for people that have the right security and cybersecurity skills, cloud engineering skills, and just the analytical skills. I mean, this is very complex stuff that you're trying to, you know, build stuff and create stuff that hasn't been created before. So I find it extremely fascinating and I hope that people can see the creative side of things and the scientific it's really bringing it both together and that's what I try to mentor a lot of the recruits on campus. In addition to that, so I think that there's tremendous amount of opportunity for folks going into those types of degrees, as well as for women I, you know, it's been a challenge because people are, you know, some schools aren't closed are not open. If you have a dual working family, it can be a big challenge if you're taking care of children or elderly parents, for example. So at Deloitte, we actually recently implemented a dependent care policy for folks that could take advantage of additional stipend to subsidize, you know, childcare or dependent care. So that's helped a little bit, we're also really focused on diversity inclusion. So, you know, really having candid conversations, individual conversations around what are your boundaries at work right now? Can, do you have to be off right now from, you know, dinner time till bedtime? What does that look like? And we're trying to really help people have the tools and feel comfortable about having those conversations, 'cause it's not just women, it's men, too. I mean, this, these are difficult situations that we're all, you know, co living with our spouses and our significant others and our children, and potentially, you know, extended family members and trying to work in the same environment and is very challenging, and so we're trying to create space for people to be able to have those conversations and make it work for them. >> Don't I know it's Shawn. So just in terms of thinking about the future and what is next for Deloitte, and you've just talked about how you are a technologist at heart, and you see so much excitement about bringing in different disciplines, different functions to solve these urgent and pressing problems. What do you foresee for yourself and for Deloitte over these next couple of years, as we emerge hopefully out of this crisis situation. >> I think Deloitte, you know, one reason I've stayed at Deloitte for so long is that we've always been really focused on how does the technology solve the business problem, the mission problem? And so we have a real opportunity to continue to be able to bring the IT and the technology enablement and make sure it aligns to the business strategy and so the business use cases, you know, we've invested a lot in our labs Capabilities where we're able to bring different disciplines, whether it's, you know, HR and talent thinking about workforce of the future, you know, that technology stack and the architects together, as well as the thinking about across the ecosystem, what are some of the future use cases that you're not even thinking about? So we're able to bring a lot of these different disciplines or subject matter experts together. Now I'll be in a very virtual way, but we've been able to take these lab concepts and it really helps kind of get that out of the possible defined and really strong alignment across these different constituents across the enterprise. So that is really exciting to me. I also think the investment that we're making in our cloud engineering practice, in our alliances with companies like AWS, it really gives us insight into where the technology is going and making sure our staff and our tools and our resources available to us are aligned to that more than investments are being made in the technology. >> So well Shawn thank you so much for coming on theCube Virtual. It's a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned for more of theCube Virtual's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of aws reinvent 2024 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah. >>Welcome back here to our coverage here on the Cube of AWS reinvent 2020. It's now pleasure. Welcome. Sean. Vice to the program was the vice president of databases at AWS and Sean. Good day to you. How you doing, sir? >>I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. >>You bet. You bet. Thanks for carving out time. I know it was a very a busy couple of weeks for the A. W s team on DSO certainly was kicked off key notes today. We heard right away that there's some fairly significant announcements that I know certainly affect your world at AWS. Tell us a little bit about those announcements, and then we'll do a little deeper divers. You you go through >>sure, you know. And he made three big announcements this morning as it relates to databases, one of whom was around Aurora serverless V two on. Do you could just think of that as, uh um, no infrastructure whatsoever to manage and Aurora server list that can scale for, you know, from zero to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, literally with no infrastructure to manage. So it's a really easy way to build applications in the cloud. Eso excited about that? Another big announcement WAAS related to a lot of our customers today are really they're using the right tool for the right job. In other words, they're not trying toe GM all of their data into one database management systems. They're breaking app down into smaller parts. They pick the right tool for the right job. And with that context, we announce glue elastic views, which just allows you to very easily write a sequel. Query most. There's a lot of developers that understand sequel. So if I could easily write a sequel query to reach out to the source databases and then materialize, um, that data into a different target, Um, that's a really simple way toe. Build new customer experiences and make the most of the databases you have. Aan den. The third big announcement remained today was called Babble Eso Babel. Babel Fish is really a a compatibility or a sequel server compatibility layer on Aurora post grass. So if you have ah sequel server application. You've been trying to migrate it to post grass, and you've been wishing for an easier way to get that done. Babel Fish allows you to take your T sequel or your Microsoft sequel server application connected to post grass. Using your same client drivers with little to no code change eso That's a big deal for those that are trying to migrate from commercial systems to open source. And then finally, we didn't stop there as we thought about Babel, Um, and talked to a lot of customers about it. We actually are open sourcing the technology, so it will be available later in 21. All the development will be done open transparently hosted on get hub and licensed under Apache 20 so those that's kind of one lap around the track, if you will, of the big announcements from today How big >>the open source announcement to me. I mean, that's fairly significant that that you're opening up this new opportunity thio the entire community, um, that you're willing to open it up, and I'm sure you're gonna have you know, I mean, this is this is gonna be I would imagine Ah, very popular destination for a lot of folks. >>Yeah, I think so, too. You know, I'm I'm personally, I'm a believer that every customer can use data to build a foundation for future innovation. And to me, a lot of things start and end with data. As we know, data really is a foundational component of at a swell A systems and, you know, and you know, what we found is not every customer can plan for every contingency that happens. But what they can do is build a strong foundation. So, you know, and with a strong foundation, you really stand the best chance to overcome whatever that next unexpected thing is or innovate new ways. And with that is a backdrop. We think this open source piece is a big deal. Why? I'll tell you, you know, it's just us right now. But if I told you the story behind the story, I have met so many customers over the last few years that you know, John, if you and I were sitting down with them, it kind of sounds like this. You sit down, you talk to somebody and they'll say things like, Hey, I've built, you know, we've built years and years and years of application development against sequel server. We really don't like the punitive commercial licensing and, you know, we're trying to get over Thio open source, but we need an easier way and, you know, and we thought about that long and hard and, you know, we came up with the team, came up with a wonderful solution for this, But to tell you the truth, as we were building Babel fish and talking to customers, what became really clear with the community enterprises in I S V s and s eyes is they all basically said, Hey, if there was a way where we could go and extend this, um for, you know, like it could be Boy, if this thing supported to more features, that would be awesome. But if it was open source, that would be even better, because then we could we could take things under our own control so that that's what truly motivated this decision to go open source and based on conversations we've had in the decisions we made, we actually think it's it's really big. It's really big for everybody who has been trying to move off of commercial systems and over toe open source. You. >>Let's talk about transforming your kind of your database mindset in general right now from a client's perspective, especially for somebody who was considering, you know, substantial moves, you know, a major reconfigurations off their processes. What's the process that you go through with them to evaluate their needs, to evaluate their capabilities, to evaluate their storage? All that, you know, that comes into play here and help them to get thio kind of the end of the rainbow >>because it z absolutely, you know, so it really depends on who you're talking Thio and no, at this stage of the game, the clouds been around now for 10, 14 years. I think it is something in that range, you know? So a lot of the early cloud adopters, you know, they've been here and they've been building in a certain way. Um and you know, you and I know early cloud adopters by way of watching streaming media, ordering rideshare, taking a selfie, you know, and you know, we have these great application experiences and we expect them to work all the time at Super Low. Leighton See, they should always be available. So you know, the single biggest thing we learned from Early Cloud builders was there's no such thing as one size football. There's one thing doesn't fit anything at all. Um, that's kind of the way data was, you know, 20 years ago. But today, if you take the learning from these early cloud builders, the journey that we go on with, let's say a mid to late stage cloud a doctor. We're all excited on, you know, sort of. If they can start now today, where Early Cloud Wilders have done a bunch of pioneering, they get excited. So So what happens is, um, there's usually to kind of conversations. One is how do we you know, we've got all these databases that we self managed on premise. How do we bring those into the cloud? And then how do we stop doing undifferentiated heavy lifting? In other words, what they're saying is, we don't want to do patching and back up and monitoring that Z instead, our precious resources should be working on innovations for the business. So in that context, you and I would end up talking to somebody about moving to fully managed services like an already s, for example, um and then the other conversation we have with customers is is the one about breaking free, which is hey, a burn on commercial. I wanna move for open source. And in that context, there are a lot of customers today that they'll move to the cloud. And then and then when they get there as a first step, their second step is to is to migrate over toe open source. And then that third piece is folks that are trying to build for the cloud, these modern APS. And in that context, they follow the playbook of these early cloud builders, which is what you take this big app. You break it into smaller parts and then they pick the right tool for the right job. So that's that's kind of the conversation that we go through there. And finally, what I would say is, most customers say that they'll say to me, What do you mean by picking the right tool for the right job? And the mindset is very different than the one that we all grew up in from 20 years ago. 20 years ago, you just bought a database platform. And then whatever the business was trying to do, you you you would try to support that access pattern on on that database choice. But today, the new world that we live in, it really is. Let's start with the business use case first, understand the access pattern and then pick the best optimized database storage for that. So that's that's kind of how those conversations go. >>You've got what, 15, 14, 15 different data based instruments, you know, like in your tool chest? Um, how how is that evolution occurred? Um because I'm sure, you know one, but got another big at another big at another, looking at different capabilities, different needs. So I mean, >>kind of walked me >>through that a little bit and how you've gotten to the point that you've got 15 >>Tonto eso. So one of the things that you know I'd start off with here, like the question is, Well, if there's 15 today, is there gonna be 100 tomorrow? The real answer is, I don't know, you know, And but what I do know is there's really a handful of categories around data models and access patterns that if you will kind of fill out the portfolio if you will. Um, the first one is around relation. Also, relational databases have been around for a long time. It has a certain set of characteristics that people have come to appreciate and understand and, you know, and we provide a set of services that provide fully managed relational services. Let it be for things like Oracle or sequel, server or open source, like Maria DB or my sequel or Post Press and even Aurora, which provides commercial grade performance availability and scale it about 1/10 the cost of commercial. So you know, there's a handful of different services in that context. But there's new services in this key value. And think of a key value access pattern along the lines of you. Imagine. We order you order a ride share and you're trying to track a vehicle every second. So on your phone you can see it moving across your phone. And now imagine if you were building that at our a million people going to do that all at the same time or 10. So in that kind of access pattern, a product like dynamodb is excellent because It's designed for basically unlimited scale, really high throughput. So developer doesn't have toe really worry about a million people. 10 million people are one. This thing can just scale inevitably. Yeah, it's just not an issue. And, you know, I'll give you one other example like, um, in Neptune, which is a graph database. So you and I would know graph databases by way of seeing a product recommendation, for example, Um, and you know, grab the beauty of a graph databases. It's optimized for highly connected data. In other words, as a developer, I can what I can do with a few lines of code and a graph database because it's optimized for all these different relationships. I might try to do that in a different system that I might write 1500 lines of codes and because it was never designed for something like highly connect the data like graph. So that's kind of the evolution of how things there's just these different categories that have to do with access patterns and data models. And our strategy is simple. In each category, we wanna have the very best AP is available for our customers. Let's >>talk about security here for a moment because you have, you know, these just these tremendous reservoirs now, right that you've built up in capabilities got, you know, new data centers going up every day. It seems like around around the country and around the world, security or securing data nevermore important on dnep ver mawr, I guess on the radar of the bad actors to at the same time because of the value of that data. So just if you would paint the picture in terms of security awareness three encryption devices that you're now deploying the stuff that's keeping you up at night, I would think probably falls into this category a little bit. Eso Let's just take it on security and the level of concern. And then what you at a w s are doing about that? >>Yeah. So, you know, when I talked to customers, I always remind people security is a shared responsibility on De So Amazon's piece of that is the infrastructure that we build the processes that we have, you know, from how people you know can enter a building toe, what they can do in an environment. The auditing to the encryption systems that rebuild. Um, there's there's three infrastructure responsibility, which, you know, we think about every second of every day. Um, Andi, it's, you know, yes, it's one of those things that keeps you up at night. But you have to kind of have this level of paranoia, if you will. There's bad actors everywhere. And, you know, that mindset is kind of, you know, kind of helps you stay focused on Ben. There's the customers responsibility to in in terms of how they think about security. So, you know, um and what that means is, uh, you know, best practices around how they how they integrate identity and access management into their solution. Um, you know how they use how they rotate encryption keys, how they apply encryption and all the safeguards that you would expect the customer do so together, you know, we work with our customers to ensure that our systems are are secure. Um, and the only other thing that I would add to this is that, you know, kind of in the old world. And I keep bringing up the old world because security in the old world was sort of one of those things. Like if you go back 20 years ago. You know, security sometimes is one of those things that you think about a little bit later in the cycle. And I've met a lot of customers that tryto bolt on security and it never works. It's just hard to just bolt it into an app. But the really nice thing about thes fully managed services in the cloud they have security built right in. So security, performance and availability is built right into these fully managed A p I s eso customer doesn't have to think about Well, how do I add this capability onto it? You know, in some sense, it could be a simple is turning a feature on or something like encryption being turned on by default, and they don't have to do anything. So, you know, there it's just a completely different world that we live in today, and we try to improve it every second of every day. >>Well, Sean, it's nice to know that you're experiencing the paranoia for all your customers. That Zaveri very gracious yesterday There. Hey, thanks for the time. I appreciate it. I know you're very busy the next couple of weeks with the number of leadership sessions and intermediate sessions as well with AWS reinvent. So thanks again for carving a little bit of time for us here today on the Cube. >>You bet, John. Thank you. I really appreciate it. >>Take care.

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good afternoon everyone. You are watching the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sean Gifford. He is the senior infrastructure administrator, administrator and infrastructure team lead at Illinois mutual. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Thanks for having me. This is really fun. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about Illinois mutual. >>Sure. So Alou Mutual's a a life insurance company. We sell life insurance Dai and several other insurance products. We've been around for a little over a hundred years now. So, uh, not myself, but uh, you know, the company. Um, and uh, we are based in Peoria, Illinois, uh, about 200 employees. And uh, we're uh, mostly uh, based on one headquarters there with a couple of their uh, uh, one of their, uh, co located dead center. >>And you are a senior infrastructure administrator. Tell us, tell our viewers a little about what you do. >>Sure. So basically a infrastructure admin means you do just about everything now. Just seems that way sometimes. Um, so, uh, my team, uh, handles everything from windows system, ministration, um, individual systems like a, your exchange, SharePoint, you know, things like that that we would use on prem. Um, too. Also outside of the on prem side, any of our cloud management, et cetera. All right, so, so Sean, you know, this shows decades old and started out at the windows administrator and you know, what's now office or O three 65, uh, at its core. Uh, so have you been to the show before or is this your first time? Uh, on one time, watch. Never on before. Okay. So, but you know, I, I'd love just your viewpoint on Microsoft before we get into some of the environments. Cause of that, you know, Microsoft, you know, started out as people knew kind of windows and some of their apps, but now, you know, the sprawling company with, you know, apps everywhere in the cloud, the edge and the data center, uh, you know, such a big footprint is what they do. >>How you personally in Illinois mutual look at Microsoft? Well, Microsoft is definitely a major partner for Illinois mutual. Right. I mean, we are a very big Microsoft shop. Does that mean that everyone, uh, you know, thinks that Microsoft is the best that every product? Of course not, but, uh, they do a lot of things and they do them really well. So I mean, we obviously rely on them not only for our on prem active directory, but then replicating that out to, to as your, um, you know, I mean our email much just people like might not like to admit it is still one of the most essential pieces of the infrastructure. Um, and that's around on exchange. So I mean, honestly, uh, as much as a, you know, people might want to say Cisco networking is like the backbone of the network. Uh, my Microsoft technologies really are kind of the backbone as far as I look at it. >>Okay. So you still have exchange, you know, in your own shop. You haven't made the move. DOE Microsoft pressure in there. >> Yeah, I know, right? Um, so, uh, no. Yeah, we're, we're still on prem. Um, we have our O three 65 account and we're, um, full disclosure. So, you know, I've been in it for 20 some years, but, uh, uh, been into Eleni mutual for about four. When I was in consulting before only mutual. I did a lot of, uh, in a cloud consulting and getting people on. So it felt really weird to me, but that's, uh, you know, coming into Eleanor mutual where, uh, at the time they came on, uh, it was, the cloud in general was like a bad word. Um, so, and getting past that culture-wise has been a little bit of a struggle. >> Oh yeah. I would, I'd love you to just step back for a second. >>You know, you work for a company that's over a hundred years old, uh, so, you know, exchange in cloud and everything like that is, you know, been around for a very short piece of the overall company. So tell us some of the, you know, what are some of the changes, the pressures going on? Oftentimes there's M and a involved in pulling all those things together. So, uh, you know, Illinois mutual as a company, what are the, what are the drivers and stressors on, you know, your, your, your, your organization? >> Yeah, well first and foremost, data security, right? Um, getting it, uh, any data so that it's fully encrypted at rest in transit and all that sort of thing so that, uh, you know, and, and you don't have to worry about it, uh, leaving anywhere once it's on someone else's prem. Right. Um, it has always been a big part of it. >>Um, trust I mean in is really what it just comes down to. Uh, when you, when you're selling life insurance policies that, you know, go for the life of a human being, you know, that's a pretty longterm relationship. And, uh, going with something, uh, especially a technology like that, that is considered as you say, you know, new to the game, uh, has, has been a struggle for sure. I mean, we're, uh, just to give you an idea, we're a still on mainframe and, uh, we have now to be, to be fair, we have a sizable, uh, uh, project for getting, uh, things moved off of the mainframe, but that, you know, is 40 plus years old. Getting, getting that moving, uh, to, you know, try and hop just into the end of the 20th century, let alone the 21st is always a little bit hard. >>So talk about some of the specific challenges of managing legacy infrastructure, managing tape and, and sort of what, what you do as more of a on the Vanguard of technology in terms of how you're leading your organization to make changes that are, that are much needed. >>Yeah. Uh, so yeah, when, when I came in on, in fact until just a few months ago, you bring up the example of tape. I mean, uh, we had been doing tape off to a, on off-prem, a site that, uh, had been just the way they did it, right. And, uh, um, as a joke, when some people an earlier, um, as the new crew came in, uh, one of the things that we instituted is a, uh, that's how we always done it. Jar. Um, and, uh, instead of people having a swear jar, right, they'd have to throw money in a anytime. They didn't say, I can't do it cause that's how we've always done it. And that's always been just that struggle, you know, with tape, you know, why is it that we're sending our tapes, why are we sending tapes at all? But why are we sending them to this place that's a, you know, three miles away from our place and calling that disaster recovery. >>Um, so I, I, that has been one of the major struggles for sure. Um, getting through that. But, uh, I've been really impressed, uh, culture-wise with the fact that, uh, people are really starting to, to get in line with it. You know, they're seeing the, the advantages that we're bringing. Um, w when you have a cloud strategy that's well thought out and, uh, isn't, uh, at least inherently a, you know, tied to a given vendor as your AWS or whoever it might be. Um, and, and you're not making decisions for cloud just for the sake of calling it cloud. It makes a big difference. I think. So, uh, as you, as you started to embrace cloud, uh, how did things like data protection and security, you know, what stayed the same? You know, what, what things did you need to rethink as you roll those out? >>Data protection changes completely, right? Um, first of all, uh, you know, everyone had that, uh, idea that if it's in cloud, of course it's completely protected, right? It's not right. And so getting people to understand that, uh, as they say, Oh yeah, we're going to, you know, do this new sass offering. It's totally, you know, they take care of everything, the applications on them. You don't have to touch it. Right? Well, no, that's not really the case. You know, that they can lose a data just like anybody else. So getting through pieces like that on the, on the cloud side is, has been a struggle. But, uh, getting into just even normal or excuse me, newer, um, on-prem technologies has, has meant changing completely the way we're doing a lot of things. Um, the, uh, it was becoming harder and harder, especially as we moved data sets off of the, uh, uh, mainframe side to keep up with a lot of those replication timeframes and things like that because, uh, it, as you push more data through what is still a small pipe and it's never big enough, um, it, uh, it became everyday nightmares. >>So it's been a struggle. >>So when you are, when you, when you come to the conclusion that you need to make a change and you need to look for other kinds of solutions, how do you go about finding the right vendor for the problem that you're trying to solve? How do you find the best in class? Right. And that's, >>that's been an interesting piece with w with alimony mutual and, and, uh, having spent time at VARs for the first part of my career, I was used to, you know, answering things like RFPs and whatnot. Right. Um, and we don't necessarily do it within an RFP process, but, uh, honestly conventions like this one and stuff is how I like to do it. Um, you know, we get really stuck in the day to day doldrums and stuff like that too, right? As much as you're trying. And your goal might always be to, you know, get things to at least the cutting edge if not the bleeding edge. Uh, you really need to, you know, be at a places where you can learn about new new technologies now. So when it comes to us, we end up finding a lot of our vendors like that. And, uh, you know, cause we don't really want her to necessarily rely on, you know, the sales people or, or even really our, our, you know, sales people from a VAR or anything like that. >>It's about trying to find, uh, that, that third party knowledge to, to really understand what's the best thing for the needs and the, uh, pain points that you're having. And that's Sean, can you bring us in through, can you tell us, you know, which solutions you were, uh, you were deciding between and how you ultimately came to your final decision? Yeah. So, uh, so we looked at, uh, several different vendors. Um, when it came to our, uh, data protection, uh, analysis, we had looked at a beam for awhile. We had looked at rubric. Um, we had, we had looked at, uh, uh, of course, uh, you know, trying to continue things along with our current vendor at the time we should have been con ball. Um, and we did, uh, we did an M U a you right. a utility attribute analysis. Yeah. Uh, and we, uh, set that up and, uh, just tried to really compare and, uh, uh, you know, what are the actual things we really wanted, what were the selection criteria we have and grading each vendor on those things. >>Um, and ultimately that's what it took to be able to get it through to, you know, to our executives and, and whatnot, uh, building an algorithm that, uh, that, that looked at all those pieces and then, you know, as really address the pain points we were having, you know, uh, not just as a Jeep cause yes, as always a big thing. Right. But is it gonna replicate in time? Is it, is it going to, uh, reduce our overhead, uh, that we're in, that we're experiencing right now? Am I going to have to keep on a full time contractor just to, you know, do my data protection. So, all right, so you ended up choosing Cohesity. So what was it about Cohesity that separated it from, uh, from, from all the others? Yeah, so Cohesity, um, I had pretty given up, uh, when I did the analysis I was talking to you about a couple of years ago. >>Um, I looked around and nobody could quite fit the square peg into the round hole that I was trying to make it work. Right? I wanted a lot of things and nobody had exactly what I was looking for. Can we sit? He was the first one that could really do most of what I wanted to do. Uh, as an example. Um, being able to replicate your data, but while keeping it encrypted on both ends and but still having dedupe and compression and all those things built in, into the platform and, and weight, it's actually searchable wallets in those States, right? I can do like a Google type search and be able to find exactly what I'm looking for. Made a huge difference and it cut it down. Uh, you know, time wise, not only on the administrative effort but also when I had to do a restore and we had a major project just a, a month or so ago where, uh, I had my DBA doing a backup, uh, during a rollout. He accidentally set at the backup to go with the wrong side at the wrong data center. Everyone was kind of freaking out, right? What are we gonna do? We restored it across data centers, across the handling, kept within our timeframes. I was, that's the type of thing, type of thing that really makes it different stuff. So, >>so, so talk about some of the results that you've seen since implementing this. >>Yeah, so replication, um, that I brought up a couple of times, but, uh, it was a really big problem that we would take. For instance, um, I'll take SQL as an example, right? Our SQL data, we would do a data mirroring, right? So it replicated across our wind line for that. We would, uh, we would do a, uh, primary storage replication. So in this case, a nimble Sans that would replicate across with snapshots and then our actual data protection. Uh, so the same exact data would have to replicate across one tiny land line three times for every a replication. Um, since putting in Cohesity, we have experienced an actual, I was blown away when we actually calculated the results, but it was actually a four times increase in replication efficiency. Uh, it just allowed us to do a whole lot more without buying more land bandwidth. So this is a big deal for us. >>So, in terms of this show, as you said this, this is really helpful for you to go and meet different kinds of companies that you might not even know exists. There are new entrance all the time. So what are you going to bring back with you when you go back to Illinois mutual next week? What are some of the things that have stuck out to you, resonated most with you? >>Yeah, so I'm, I'm really encouraged and even with just Cohesity, for instance, I've talked to a, I'm actually met up with a couple of the engineers that I've talked with them, um, who had one of them and even put out a, uh, a new, uh, feature request for us. And he was telling me before lunchtime about some new features available that I can start to change up some of my jobs. I've, I'm really excited. I was texting my, my, uh, data protection, uh, you know, secondary admin, uh, uh, you know, texting furiously to them, we can do this. And, you know, I'm really excited about that. But, uh, honestly on the other side, is these your side? I'm, uh, really, uh, excited to learn about some of the things that we can actually implement, uh, even with older infrastructure, uh, in trying to pull some of those things, uh, into a cloud platform in ways that actually make sense and aren't gonna lose us money in the longterm. So I'm happy with that. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Thank you very much. It's been fun. I'm Rebecca aid for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cube.

(snazzy music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE, covering WTG Transform 2019, brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE exclusive coverage of WTG Transform 2019. It's the Winslow Technology's Dell MC user group, and therefore, we are always thrilled when, not only do we have a user on the program, but we have a local user who's also the Chief Information Officer. Shawn Rothman, who is the Chief Information Officer, CIO, of the town of Weymouth. Coming up from the south shore, a nice easy drive when the traffic isn't too bad. Shawn, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, glad to be here. It's Boston though, so there is no such thing as the traffic being easy. >> Yeah, the traffic and the weather. Just wait a little while, it'll change greatly. We've got the mast plate right behind us with Fenway, and yeah, it is starting to get to the evening. You know, Friday commute back. But uh, you're probably going to the Sox game, so you won't have to worry about that. >> Exactly. That's my plan, is to wait it out. >> All right. So, as I mentioned, town of Weymouth about 12 miles from where we're sitting right now. You know, you're the CIO. Give us a little bit about, you know, what that means to be the CIO of a town here in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. >> Yeah, so you know, IT is so different when you get out of the corporate setting. We have a lot of high needs or requirements. There's a lot of public safety needs, things like that, that are consuming often. But the drive isn't always there to take advantage of it, so we've been continually working to grow new things, to grow new technology in Weymouth. We uh, I'm really struggling, sorry. >> Yeah, no it's great Shawn. Give us a little bit about, you know, what you can, how many people that you've served in the community, and your team itself, how many people you've managed, just to give us a little bit of a scope. >> So, in Weymouth we have about 500 full time employees within the town side and another, you know, more than 2,000 if you take in our schools. Now we have a separate IT department for our schools. We share combined networks, so we have a private dark fiber network that runs throughout the town that we share. I provide services for police, fire, DPW, emergency management, finance, all the things that you kind of do, public works. It's a lot of different areas. There's a lot of different needs and ways that we can meet the needs of the public. >> Okay, that's awesome. So underneath that, so infrastructure is a piece of what your group owns, yes? >> Yes. >> Give us a little bit, kind of scope that out for us, what that means when kind of the pieces that allow you to deliver those services to your constituents. >> Right, so it starts with lots of things people don't see, right? So, IT is often very hidden. If we're doing our job well, people don't really notice us. So, like I said, we have dark fiber all throughout the town that enables us to do everything from public safety communication, data replication, allows for DR so we have multiple sites for our data. We run Compellent SANs, based off running Dell servers, running VM ware. And, we run two different set ups. One at the town hall and another at my police department, and that provides my disaster recovery and things like that. From there, then you start looking towards facing of customers. We need to run bills for taxes, and water, and utilities, things like that, so, all those pieces start to play in. We're continually looking to grow in that area, so, one of the areas that we're actually looking at right now is increasing our presence online, as far as people's ability to apply for permits online to have inspectional services done online, to pay their bills online. You know, I think everybody wants their experience online to be Amazon, right? Go, open up your cart, buy up, put a bunch of things in there, hit pay, and be done. And, that's the direction we're trying to move, these days. >> Shawn, some of the fascinating conversations I've had in the last few years is when you talk to government agencies, municipalities, and the like, and that word gets thrown out, digital transformation, and what that means from you. Right, you know, today, you know, me? I live in a town here in Massachusetts. Yeah, gosh, why can't everything just be something that, I talk to my home assistant and it just gets done magically, and it's nice and easy? But you know, it's a journey that we all need to go on and there's some things that, you know, you don't have unlimited budget and unlimited head count to be able to manage that, so talk to us a little bit about, you know, does digital transformation mean something in your world? And, how are you helping to deliver some of those mobile enabled services? >> Yeah, so that really, I run into really two challenges there, well multiple challenges, more than two, but two really big challenges. One is getting people used to the idea of doing things in a way that they haven't done it before. You don't need to come to the town hall, go online and do it. You have to understand that billing, if you pay online, you pay with a credit card, there's charges that get assumed. With Amazon, that gets eaten by the product managers and things like that. Well, we don't have that, so those are surprise fees for people. So, those are challenges to teach people about. We also then have problems with teaching people within the town. Hey, I've always done my business x way. People come and see me, they do things, they fill out this form, they move along, and it's kind of transforming their abilities to understand and move in that technical age, also. Those are kind of the two biggest areas. Outside of that, is, you know, the up side is huge. We're talking to another community that has kind of gone to these things online, and they say they're getting like 40 to 60 percent of their building permits between midnight and 6:00 AM. That's a whole new world for the way the government has worked in the past. >> Yeah. Shawn, come on. I live in a town here in Massachusetts. We are proud of our 300 year old legacy and the way things are done here, which is a little bit different than the conversation we're generally having in IT these days. >> Yes, for sure. (chuckling) >> Great. So, you mentioned a little bit, you know, I hear Compellent SANs. You've got disaster recovery and all these pieces, so tie us into this event. What brings you to WTG Transform? Of course, I know Compellant has a long history of the team here, Scott and the team, so how long have you been working with them? And, tell us a little bit about the relationship. >> We've had a Compellent SAN actually installed by Winslow, it's got to be nine plus years ago to get started, and it's just kind of been one of those things that grew. You know, we started with Compellent, and then Dell bought Compellent, and we had HP servers, and while it was nice to have everything together, so we moved to our Dell servers, but I love to come here and see kind of where things are moving, where Winslow is going, where there's opportunities for me kind of to meet people's needs in ways that they're looking for that maybe I don't know about, ways I can protect our data, ways I can protect my constituents and my residents. Those are all concerns, and this is a great opportunity for kind of see all those different pieces, to get my hands on things once in a while, or to hear something that would get me moving in a direction maybe I hadn't previously looked at. >> Shawn, is there any initiatives you have, or technologies that you're poking at that you'd like to understand more, or things that you're looking for from kind of the vendor community that would make your world easier? >> It's hard to know what you don't know, and so there's always something new. Every time I get here, I see something that I'm like, "Man, this could really be transformative for us." It's often different to figure out how and when to implement those things. So, I don't know that I have, you know, I don't know that thing I don't know yet, I think I haven't found that key hot button for this year, I don't think. >> You bring up a really good point, a question I actually asked for years is, how do you keep up? And, of course the answer is, I don't care if you're the smartest person at the most important company in the world, no one can keep up with all of it all the time. So, the question is, who do you rely on to help you to understand and learn some of those new things? >> Yeah, so I mean, we all look at things from media, and there's Spiceworks is a great community I use, but my VARs are kind of, that's really where the rubber meets the road for me, And, you know, Winslow has just been, there are many things that I would, I'll take and leave. There's technology I use, and if I had to replace it, I get rid of it. Well, Compellent, Winslow, that combo is, I mean, it's called dead-hand technology, I mean, it doesn't leave, it's not going any place. They're crucial to me, knowing where to go, how to go. They help me figure out road maps, they've always kind of gone above and beyond in making sure that my needs are met, and that I know the direction things are going before I get jammed into a spot where I can't get out. >> Yeah, so last question I have for you, Shawn. CIO of a town here in Massachusetts, where do you find it kind of different and the same compared to the peers that you'd be talking to at an event like this? >> It's hard to find other venues like this. There's some government run programs, but they're not the same. >> So, I guess just to, what I'm asking for is when you talk to your peers here, do you have some of the same concerns and the same looking at technology, or are there opportunities or challenges you have working for a town government that maybe the average mid-sized business wouldn't? >> Sorry, yeah. Yeah, I think we share a lot of security concerns. Security, I think our concerns are very much aligned, right, we're all worried about what's happening outside our environment, we're concerned about the weakest link, which tends to be our end users ability to click a button, but outside of that, when we get to like how business really works, at times we're very different, at times we're very similar. So, my needs for disaster recovery, again, two buildings across town, that works for me. If I lose those two buildings across town, two, three, four miles, I've lost everything I care about, where a company, you lose something, you need to have backups across the country. So, there's some different needs, but the reality is we both need to protect our data, we both want to provide quality service to the people that depend on us, we both want to be moving in positive directions, we both have constraints on our budgets. So, I think there's a lot of overlap for me that I can pick up information here, even if sometimes the exact model they use isn't the same as what I would use. >> All right, last question I have for you, Shawn is, when I travel, you know, I live about 26.2 miles from downtown Boston, but I say I'm from Boston because people definitely outside this country, and even across this country, don't necessary know much of Massachusetts, so when you talk to somebody, how do we put Weymouth on the map? >> So, Weymouth is on the south shore of Boston, but generally, I would say the same thing, I'm from Boston, but we're, like you said, I mean, we're less than 10 miles really from the edges of Boston. We're right along the water, we have one, actually, one of the busiest ports in Massachusetts, outside of Boston, itself, Boston harbor, and so, you know, we're kind of right here in the middle of everything. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well it's getting close to beach season, it's actually the first day of Summer here. So, Shawn, thank you so much for sharing this story, town of Weymouth, and what's happening in your world, really appreciate you joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching the CUBE. (snazzy music)

(futuristic electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas with AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent 2018's CUBE coverage. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage here on the ground floor. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years we've been coming to re:Invent. Every year except for the first year. What a progression. We got great news. Always raising the bar, as they say at Amazon. This year, big announcements. One of them is blockchain. Really kind of laying out early formation of how they're going to roll out, thinking about blockchain. We're here to talk about here, with Rahul Pathak, who's the GM of analytics, and data lakes, and blockchain. Managing that. And Shawn Bice who's the vice president of non-relational databases. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> I wish my voice was a little bit stronger. I love this segment. You know, we've been doing blockchain. We've been following one of the big events in the industry. If you separate out the whole token ICO scam situation, token economics is actually a great business model opportunity. Blockchain is an infrastructure, a decentralized infrastructure, that's great. But it's early. Day one really for you guys in a literal sense. How are you guys doing blockchain? Take a minute to explain the announcement because there are use cases, low-hanging use cases, that look a lot like IoT and supply chain that people are interested in. So take a minute to explain the announcements and what it means. >> Absolutely, so when we began looking at blockchain and blockchain use cases, we really realized there are two things that customers are trying to do. One case is really keep an immutable record of transactions and in a scenario where centralized trust is okay. And for that we have Amazon QLDB, which is an immutable cryptographically verifiable ledger. And then in scenarios where customers really wanted the decentralized trust and the smart contracts, that's where blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum play a role. But they're just super complicated to use and that's why we built Managed Blockchain, to make it easy to stand up, scale, and monitor these networks, so customers can focus on building applications. And in terms of use cases on the decentralized side, it's really quite diverse. I mean, we've got a customer, Guardian Life Insurance, so they're looking at Managed Blockchain 'cause they have this distributed network of partners, providers, patients, and customers, and they want to provide decentralized verifiable records of what's taking place. And it's just a broad set of use cases. >> And then we saw in the video this morning, I think it was Indonesian farmers, right? Wasn't that before the keynote? Did you see that? It was good. >> I missed that one. >> Yeah, so they don't have bank accounts. >> Oh, got it. >> And they got a reward system, so they're using the blockchain to reward farmers to participate. >> So a lot of people ask the question is, why do I need blockchain? Why don't you just put in database? So there are unique, which is true by the way, 'cause latency's an issue. (chuckles) Certainly, you might want to avoid blockchain in the short term, until that gets fixed. Assume that every one will get fixed over time, but what are some of the use cases where blockchain actually is relevant? Can you be specific because that's really people starting to make their selection criteria on. Look, I still use a database. I'm going to have all kinds of token and models around, but in a database. Where is the blockchain specifically resonating right now? >> I'll take a shot at this or we can do it together, but when you think of QLDB, it's not that customers are asking us for a ledger database. What they were really saying is, hey, we'd like to have this complete immutable, cryptographically verifiable trail of data. And it wasn't necessarily a blockchain conversation, wasn't necessarily a database conversation, it was like, I really would like to have this complete cyrptographic verifiable trail of data. And it turns out, as you sort of look at the use cases, in particular, the centralized trust scenario, QLDB does exactly that. It's not about decentralized trust. It's really about simply being able to have a database that when you write to that database, you write a transaction to the database, you can't change it. You know, a typical database people are like, well, hey, wait a second, what does immutable really mean? And once you get people to understand that once that transaction is written to a journal, it cannot be changed at all and attached, then all of a sudden there's that breakthrough moment of it being immutable and having that cryptographic trail. >> And the advantage relative to a distributive blockchain is performance, scale, and all the challenges that people always say. >> Yeah, exactly. Like with QLDB, you can find it's going to be two to three times faster cause you're not doing that distributing consensus. >> How about data lakes? Let's talk about data lakes. What problem were you guys trying to solve with the data lakes? There's a lot of them, but. (chuckles) >> That's a great question. So, essentially it's been hard for customers to set up data lakes 'cause you have to figure out where to get data from, you have to land it in S3, you've got to secure it, you've then got to secure every analytic service that you've got, you might have to clean your data. So with lake formation, what we're trying to do is make it super easy to set up data lakes. So we have blueprints for common databases and data sources. We bring that data into an S3 data lake and we've created a central catalog for that data where customers can define granular access policies with the table, and the column, and the row level. We've also got ML-based data cleansing and data deduplication. And so now customers can just use lake formation, set up data lakes, curate their data, protect it in a single place, and have those policies that enforce across all of the analytic services that they might use. >> So does it help solve the data swamp problem, get more value out of the data lake? And if so, how? >> Absolutely, so the way it does that is by automatically cataloging all datas that comes in. So we can recognize what the data is and then we allow customers to add business metadata to that so they can tag this as customer data, or PII data, or this is my table of sales history. And that then becomes searchable. So we automatically generate a catalog as data comes in and that addresses the, what do I have in my data lake problem. >> Okay, so-- >> Go ahead. >> So, Rahul, you're the general manager. Shawn, what's your job, what do you do? >> So our team builds all the non-relational databases at Amazon. So DynamoDB, Neptune, ElastiCache, Timestream, which you'll hear about today, QLDB, et cetera. So all those things-- >> Beanstalk too, Elastic Beanstalk? >> No we do not build Beanstalk. >> Okay, we're a customer of DynamoDB, by the way. >> Great! >> We're happy customers. >> That's great! >> And we use ElastiCache, right? >> Yup, the elastic >> There you go! >> surge still has it. >> So-- >> Haven't used Neptune yet. >> What's the biggest problem stigmas that you guys are trying to raise the bar on? What's the key focus as you get this new worlds and use cases coming together? These are new use cases. How are you guys evaluating it? How are you guys raising the bar? >> You know, that's a really good question you ask. What I've found in my experience is developers that have been building apps for a long time, most people are familiar with relational databases. For years we've been building apps in that context, but when you kind of look at how people are building apps today, it's very different than how they did in the past. Today developer do what they do best. They take an application, a big application, break it down into smaller parts, and they pick the right tool for the right job. >> I think the game developer mark is going to be a canary in the coal mine for developers, and it's a good spot for data formation in these kind of unstructured, non-relational scenarios. Okay, now all this engagement data, could be first person shooter, whatever it is, just throw it, I need to throw it somewhere, and I'll get to it and let it be ready to be worked on by analytics. >> Well, yeah, if you think about that gamer scenario, think about if you and I are building a game, who knows if there's going to be one user, ten players, or 10 million, or 100 million. And if we had 100 million, it's all about the performance being steady. At 100 million or ten. >> You need a fleet of servers. (John laughing) >> And a fleet of servers! >> Have you guys played Fortnite? Or do you have kids that play? >> I look over my kid's shoulder. I might play it. >> I've played, but-- >> They run all their analytics on us. They've got about 14 petabytes in S3 using S3 as their data lake, with EMR and Athena for analytics. >> We got a season-- >> I mean, think about that F1 example on keynotes today. Great example of insights. We apply that kind of concept to Fortnite, by the way, Fortnite has theCUBE in there. It's always a popular term. We noticed that, the hastag, #wherestheCUBEtoday. (Rahul chuckling) I couldn't resist. But the analytics you could get out of all that data, every interaction, all that gesture data. I mean, what are some of the things they're doing? Can you share how they're using the new tech to scale up and get these insights? >> Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing a bunch of things. I mean, one is just the health of the systems when you've got hundreds of millions of players. You need to know if you're up and it's working. The second is around engagement. What games, what collection of people work well together. And then it's what incentives they create in the game, what power ups people buy that lead to continued engagement, 'cause that defines success over the long term. What gets people coming back? And then they have an offline analytics process where they're looking at reporting, and history, and telemetry, so it's very comprehensive. So you're exactly right about gaming and analytics being a huge consumer of databases. >> Now, Shawn, didn't you guys have hard news today on DynamoDB, or? >> Yeah today we announce DynamoDB On-Demand, so customers that basically have workloads that could spike up and then all of a sudden drop off, a lot of these customers basically don't even want to think about capacity planning. They don't want to guess. They just want to basically pay only for what they're using. So we announced DynamoDB On-Demand. The developer experience is simple. You create a table and you putyour read/write capacity in the on-demand mode, and you literally only pay for the request that your workload puts through system. >> It's a great service actually. Again, making life easier for customers. Lower the bill, manage capacity, make things go better, faster, enables value. >> It's all about improving the customer experience. >> Alright, guys, I really appreciate you coming in. I'm really interested in following what you guys do in the future. I'm sure a lot of people watching will be as well, as analytics and AI become a real part of, as you guys move the stack and create that API model for, what you did for infrastructure, for apps. A total game changer, we believe. We're interested in following you guys, I'm sure others are. Where are you going to be this year? What's your focus? Where can people find out more besides going to Amazon site? Is there certain events you're going to be at? How do people get more information and what's the plans? >> There's actually some sessions on lake formation, blockchain that we're doing here. We'll have a continuous stream of summits, so as the AWS Summit calendar for 2019 gets published that's a great place to go for more information. And then just engage with us either on social media or through the web and we'll be happy to follow up. >> Alright, well, we'll do a good job on amplifying. A lot of people are interested, certainly blockchain, super hot. But people want better, stronger, more stable, but they want the decentralized immutable database model. >> Cryptographically verifiable! >> And see as everyone knows. >> Scalable! >> Anyone who wants to keep those, they talk about CUBE coins but I haven't said CUBE coin once on this episode. Wait for those tokens to be released soon. More coverage after this short break, stay with us. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. 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(orchestral music) >> Hello there and welcome to this special CUBEConversation. I'm John Furrier, here in theCUBE Studios, in Palo Alto, California. I'm here with special guest, Shawn Douglass, who's the Founder and CEO of Amberdata, Amberdata.io. It's a hot blockchain-based analytics startup kind of taking a different approach. I obviously would like to highlight some of the startups that are doing pretty amazing things. Shawn welcome to this CUBEConversation >> Great, thank you very much for having me here. >> So you have an enterprise background. You're entrepreneur, technical, been a CTO at EMC. You've helped EMC run their venture capital firms over the years. Helped them build it up from scratch. Done a variety of startups. Kind of cloud, kind of like large-scale. Now doing the blockchain startup. That's, I find super interesting. I think you might have more there than you think, but that's my opinion seeing the demo. Folks watching Amberdata.io is the site. Let's talk about that, I mean obviously blockchain, we've been covering pretty heavily recently with theCUBE. We've been covering Bitcoin since 2010 on our blog SiliconANGLE.com But you're seeing a renaissance in software development, with cloud computing, but now you start to see a new wave coming. We've been documenting. We've been calling it, you know, the future of money, the future of work, the future of infrastructure, because what blockchain and decentralized applications are doing is changing the stack a bit. And you've been in, in many, involved in those waves, so you're at the heart of it. So I got to ask you, you know, as an entrepreneur, before we get into what your company does, I want to just get your take on, you know, I mean, you kind of look at this market and say, it's a wide-open space. >> Right. >> As an entrepreneur who's doing a start-up, what's it like? What's your view? And how do you see the marketplace evolving? >> Yeah, that's a great question, there's a lot there. Let me try to unpack that the best that I can. So having gone between startup to big company to investor, helped buy, build, sell, in companies and operating for as long as I have in Silicon Valley. I think, as you said, technology and innovation happen in waves. And I think that waves are mini-revolutions, if you will. And I think that revolutions are about addressing a fundamental human need. If we look at, look to history, to see where the future is going. If you look at the Industrial Revolution, it was about automation and supply, I mean, uh production chains, and to be able to produce things at scale. If you look at the Information Age it was about the ability to communicate, and the servers and the networks and the web 2.0 companies that arose out of that, was around communication. That was another major wave. If you look at what's happening with AI right now, and self-driving cars, that's about the ability, for the need to think, right? And you're starting to see algorithms and machine learning applied to Google self-driving cars, and you know, just about every facet of our life AI is touching, you're using Siri at home, whatever you're using. I think what we're seeing with blockchain is that next wave. It's that next revolution, and that revolution I believe is about trust, and about decentralization. So, coming out of web 2.0 we saw participatory and non-participatory consolidations, in creation of juggernauts of technology. The Facebooks of the world, the Amazons of the world. On the other side, the Equifaxes of the world, where you didn't opt-in, in exchange for being the product, to use their platform, they just got your data. We've seen violation of that trust in data breaches, you know, at every major player, you know. Equifax being the bad guy in this case, where they've lost every single citizen in the United States data, and we never benefited from that, but we carry the liability forward. And what we're seeing with blockchain is the ability for people to leverage decentralized platforms and smart contract platforms, specifically, as mechanisms to easily deploy with zero barrier to entry. These, you know, these smart contract vending machines, if you will, into a world where people are taking back trust. So I, that's what we see, and we see that opportunity across both the enterprise space, 'cause we're hard core enterprise people, that we're building member data, but we're also seeing new enterprises being created on chain and that list is really long. So it's pretty, it's definitely a big wave. >> Well, the one, blockchain's an infrastructure, I think people getting all crazy over that, which I think it's legit. And there's some people out there saying, "Oh, blockchain's not legit." They don't really know what they're talking about in my opinion, and that's just, and a lot of people are confused. So there's a lot of people who are, you know, obviously don't see it, some people do. But I think the phenomenon that's interesting is, you know, taking a tech stack approach is, if you look at the decentralized application market, >> Shawn: Right. >> Where Ethereum for instance has got a lot of, the most developers. And they're working fast on some technical challenges they had but they're making progress. The D applications, the distributed, I mean the decentralized applications, that's like an application server on the blockchain. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So what that happens, is the things are happening, so you almost think of it, and you and I were talking about this, is that, you know, the vending machine of the future or the transaction service layer is that decentralized smart contract. >> Absolutely. >> 'Cause that's where the value is going to be captured. >> Shawn: Absolutely. >> And created and captured. >> Let me unpack that, because that's spot-on, I 100% agree with what you're saying there. Is that, what is a blockchain? A blockchain is effectively a decentralized database and network put together. What I think is interesting, is smart contract platforms that put a virtual machine on top of that. Like Ethereum has the EVM. Where it's your application server. And what are smart contracts? Smart contracts, like you said, are vending machines. They're a vending machine that has the appropriate level of security, the appropriate level of service, and allows you to have an autonomous transaction with that. When you walk up to a Pepsi machine, you put in a dollar, you expect to get back a Pepsi, it works, you go away, you don't think anything about it. What blockchain is allowing anybody to do, is to publish a smart contract on chain and monetize that at the most elemental level. It's analogous to, if Amazon allowed you to deploy a lambda function and monetize that. It's analogous to, if E-Business Suite allowed you to monetize your plugins from an Oracle world. It's analogous to if SAP with, when Shai Agassi was still there doing composable applications, allowed you to, as a vendor, anybody publish into that SAP ecosystem and monetize that. This is a massive, massive transformation and it reduces barriers to entries for people to come in and compete with juggernauts like an Amazon or an Oracle because at the barrier to entry is, they're publishing into a globally available, decentralized, platform, right. >> And the thing too that's interesting, and just to tie that together with what's happening in the cloud world, is if you look at like Kubernetes containers, and micro-services, the ability to be efficient with micro-services, allows for that IT infrastructure to completely be re-platformized. >> Exactly. >> So what you're getting at, is with the smart contracts and the atomic nature of the transaction, you can be laser-focused and scale transactions, >> Right. >> and be efficient, so the efficiency is a big part of this. >> It is, there's efficiency, and there is the ability to decompose things, and that's been a trend, for as long as I've been in technology right. It's, first it was, you know, cloud services, then it was SOA, then it was cloud, and now it's serverless, it's blockchain, it's just on that spectrum. There's not a lot new here actually, right. It's a continuum of technology, and I think all of these waves are enabled by different revolutionary forces. >> Operational change and software drives it obviously And you got the characteristics of blockchain, immutability et cetera, et cetera and DApps is just a new way to kind of write the software for that. They create those vending machines or transactional services So I got to ask you, so with what you guys are doing, I want to tie that together, because one of the things we've been reporting on theCUBE is, the piece of action that's most hyped up is, ICOs. These blockchain apps that are changing, and the old guard and disrupting incumbents. But there's not a lot of tooling around it, so, you know, if you think about like trading platforms, >> Right. 24/7 traders have access to stuff. Now the world's a 24/7, 365 global. There's not a lot of tooling, not a lot stuff. So this instant industry's created. This new wave is coming. You're building some tooling, so I want to get your thoughts on the support needed to do this. >> Shawn: Right. >> Say I put my business on the blockchain >> Shawn: Right. >> And with, use developers to do decentralized applications. >> Yeah, so, >> I need tools. >> Aboslutely, that's exactly, so, you know, got a little gray hair here, and I grew up building internet software at scale, right. Whenever you run anything in production, you always have your network operations center. You have your AppD, you have your Splunks, you have your New Relics, you have all of this. You've instrumented your infrastructure. You've instrumented your application transactions. You've instrumented search for operational log data. You need to be able to triage a security instance. You need to be able to respond to performance or production issues. You need to be able to communicate with your customers. None of this existed when I looked at the blockchain space, and I'm like I don't get it. This is a massive opportunity, because if you look at the enterprise space, 'cause public right now, sure, it's very interesting. ICOs are the killer use case. There's 300 million dollars per hour traversing in the public at their IMNetwork, 50% of those are going to smart contracts. A lot of that is actual transactional trading volume. But step back from the hype for a second, and you look at IBM, you look at VMware, you look at Cisco, you look at Microsoft, you look at, you know, all these guys. JP Morgan with Quorum. You look at, they all have major bets that are starting to evolve around taking things and removing intermediaries, just like public chain, but they're doing it with things like swaps, credit default swaps, interest swaps, currency swaps. They're talking about removing escrow services, they're talking about, >> So pre-existing companies are going to take the efficiency side of this and drive it. >> It's going to, it is a massive transformation right, and especially when they're working with their trading partners, there's almost a, what, a 2006 VMware data center consolidation play. Remember when the data centers were full of servers, and then all of a sudden, you know, they started pulling back the number of servers and turning off the A/C because they were able to take entire data center floors and consolidate them inside of VMs where they had three and four virtual machines in a server. And I think that you're going to get those same types of efficiencies over time once they get to pass some scaling issues around blockchain where you don't have to have seven copies of your data across your front office, your back office, across your trading partner. You can have one single source of truth and operate in an open transparent world where you can reduce some of those inefficiencies. And then there's a whole business transformation play that, you know, there's there's just, I think it's a, >> It's a perfect storm. You have a consolidation piece, which is more efficient operationally, and then you got the top-line revenue opportunity with disrupting kind of industries with new transactional models, business models and token economics. So we've talked a lot about it in theCUBE. I want to talk to you about your company, Amberdata. So you guys are trying to make sense of what's happening because if you're going to put a business on the blockchain, >> You need this. >> and use decentralized applications as a transactional application server if you will, for lack of a better description. You got to know what's going on, and there's gas involved, you got to pay the mining fees, so where there's costs, you need visibility. >> Right. So the old school, the old model was, you'd have KPIs, set some alerts, dashboarding, you're doing that right? >> That's what we've done. >> So take a minute to explain what Amberdata's doing. Did you do a round of funding? What's going on with the company? You got the product up there Amberdata.io >> Right, yeah, so let me unpack, there's a lot there. So uh, we started the company end of August. We raised a round of funding with traditional enterprise venture capital firm Hummer Winblad. Lars Leckie, amazing investor, really understands enterprise software and how to enable companies to grow. Amazing partner to work with. We've been heads down building a product. About 45 days ago we launched our platform live, and what we have today, is we have instrumentation for blockchain infrastructure, decentralized applications, transactions, and an ontology-based search, that gives a clean user experience where you can be search-driven to drill into a smart contract, a transaction, into a block, and you know, if you're building on top of chain, I mean, we're a classic picks and shovels play, It's pure, it's enterprise software, we built this for enterprises. Today our platform supports public Ethereum, but it was really to demonstrate, if we can do this for the entire Ethereum network and we can do this for its scale, of course we can do this for any enterprise. And today we support public Ethereum and Quorum, which is private Ethereum, it's a JPMorgan project, that I think is the one of the leaders in private blockchain, and that's a project that's being supported by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. We will also in our working with IBM, I was just on the Hyperledger technical steering committee this morning, I participate in that. So, we will support Hyperledger in the future, we will support multiple other public and private chains so the private ecosystem today is, you know, Enterprise Ethereum à la Quorum. It is Hyperledger. It is Corda. On the public side, it is Ethereum, it is Stellar, it is, you know, things like Quantum that are emerging, Neo, or emerging. >> So is your business model SaaS? Yes, it's a SaaS model and today we support public chain as a demonstration of it, but we're also working on allowing people to, just like a data dog, or what have you, where we have a connector, we can pull your data in, and it's private, it's only visible for you, for your private blockchain. Or we could deploy into their private cloud or into (talking over each other) >> John: So is Amberdata.io like a demo site, or is that more of, >> It's a demonstration of the ability to instrument blockchain infrastructure, applications, transactions, with search, the ability to set alerts on every single panel, which are your KPIs. If you're going to run a business, you either have explicit or implicit service level agreements, and you need to be able to instrument those service level agreements with KPIs, and those KPIs you need to be able to set alerts and events, receive emails, you know, all of those. >> I love the demo, the demo, I think the demo will be a great freemium model, because it showed, just my notes here, smart contracts on the decentralized application, top 50 sorted transaction volume, token velocity change in price, because you know gas you're still paying the gas to get the transaction written. I mean this is kind of like spot pricing for Amazon almost. You need to understand what am I paying for, if there's an SLA involved in a smart contract? >> Absolutely. >> You got to know the policy involved right? So, again, this is like old-school, like enterprise thinking, >> Shawn: Right. >> The world is now a global enterprise if you think about it. >> Shawn: Yeah, you absolutely need transparency into your operating costs. Those are your transactions costs of either, for your customers to consume your service or for you to provide your service. And, prior to this, there was very little transparency. It's ironic, is that, the most trustless, transparent platform, had no real view into it. And that's what we've built. We've built transparency and are enabling you to trust the trustless platform, to get transparency into your DApp KPIs, and so for example, if you're building, like you look at like EtherDelta's, EtherDelta's is one of the non-custodial smart contract based exchanges. They're doing 70 million dollars a month in transaction value. I don't know what they did before. We've talked with people that are consumers of that. We've talked to people on pretty much all of the decentralized exchange platforms. But the ability to understand, what are the number of transactions per hour, per second, per minute, that are hitting my smart contracts? What are the token transfers, if I've tokenized my unit economics. Who are the top 10 callers to my contract? Is my smart contract calling other contracts? What are my pending transactions? What is my book of trades? What is market depth of my gas prices? What, I need to be able to search if I've got failure. Show me transactions between this date, that date, to, from, where, that is all mission-critical stuff that you need if you're going to operate any business. >> So a lot of operational data and that's phenomenal, but are you worried that people aren't going to adopt? Blockchain I mean. >> I'm not worried about that at all. I actually think that there's an entire, when we started this, we were focused on enterprises exclusively, and we saw what we were doing on public Ethereum as a marketing ploy. We're like "Hey we'll go instrument "the whole public Ethereum Network". I'm a big data guy, we've built high-throughput, four terabytes a day of social graph ingestion platforms. We're like, public Ethereum, you know, not that transactionally intensive. We're going to do this for the world. Now, after building the platform and seeing 300 million dollars an hour, with 50% of those transactions going to smart contracts, we're seeing a new Enterprise emerge. You can look at companies like, you know, Sia, Storj coin, IPFS. >> So can actually see the activity (slurred) it's encrypted, but you can look at the metadata and get the patterns. I mean you're essentially looking at the transactional volume, almost like a stock exchange. We can, we have full transparency into every transaction, that's happening on chain, and we can see, like the other day, I did a tweet on, there was a token that's traded, I don't know, we're not interested in the trading side but it's the use case that has the most buzz, and we have transparency, so we see it, we're like, "Hey, this smart contract went "from two thousand transactions, to 40 thousand "transactions. What is going on?" Right, and we actually saw that. >> You can see the pump-and-dump scams too. >> Oh you can totally see that. In providing transparency, is now, it's becoming easy for anybody to search for anything. >> Well that's a great free service, and I appreciate you, and I've been playing with that over the weekend, I love it, I'm like, "Hmm, I might get some trades on this thing." >> Thank you. Check it out. We'd love feedback from anybody that's seeing this, Amberdata.io and I can be reached at Shawn@Amberdata.io >> So, I mean obviously funding you must have a ton of VCs throwing money at you, is that the case? Are you thinking about an ICO? What's the thoughts on the capital expansion? Yes obviously got a great, hot startup here, so what's the funding strategy? >> We've been heads down on building things, and we're obviously getting inbound, but you know, we're well funded, we're in as, I think we're in a position of strength. What we're focused on is taking the mountain, and defining and being the category leader. I think right now, we have defined it. >> There's no one else doing it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So you're like the solo, you're the only one doing it. >> So, we are going to define the space for operational monitoring analytics for public and private blockchain, and be that single pane of glass that allows enterprises to build on or around, you know, decentralized smart contract platforms, or, you know, private smart contract platforms. And we're going to take that hill, and we're going to stay out in front. So right now, we're heads down. We'll eventually, (talking over each other) >> Can I get an API to the data set? Can you just give me an API? Like a fire hose opportunity there? >> So we are enabling this as a platform, to drive network effects, and we're working with several exchanges, we're working, you know, some of non-custodial exchanges. We've got a lot of inbound interest from people more on the trading side. We're evaluating whether we do that, and we want people to be able to build on top of our platform, other analytics tools, you know, connect to exchanges, connect what have you, right and create that marketplace, create those APIs, inroads, and then allow people to drive that. And on the ICO front, we're really not focused on that. We're enterprise software. >> Well theCUBE team would love to have an API and program with it for theCUBEInsights, we'd love to look at that. >> That would be great right. >> That's something we can work together and collaborate on that. I got to ask you about the data 'cause this is fascinating, coming from the search background that I come from, it's almost like the Google crawler. You went out, >> It's a Google for blockchain. >> Is it true that you guys crawled all the Genesis nodes on Ethereum, so you got into the Genesis nodes? >> Shawn: That's correct. >> So from the Genesis nodes to today, you've essentially gotten all those instrumented, >> Shawn: Right >> And have real time data coming in. >> Yes, that is correct. So as far as I know, we're the only people that have done this. It's computationally intensive and from the data structure perspective pretty difficult to do. But what we've done is, and it has to do with the data structures in the way Ethereum works whether that be public or private, is that there's an account-based blockchain that has transactions, but then the smart contracts and transfers of tokens happen in messages. So what we've done is, we have the ability to, or we have done and we have the ability to do in perpetuity moving forward, we instrument every transaction, every internal transaction, every token transfer, with time series data, indexed, searchable, we also have graph as well as relational views into the data, to be able to give the transparency, enable trust, enable you to triage an issue. Like, you know, I think about having worked at, you know, other enterprises in the past. Where you have a, you know, a security incident, that you need to respond to. We're currently under attack we need to find out who, what are they doing, what have they done, what is our exposure, how do we contain that, how do we, you know, deal with that? Without what we have, you can't do that. You got to like right Python scripts, and do API (talking over each other) >> You're chasing a ghost basically, and by the time you get it, it's over. >> Right, and then for enterprises, they've got hard core regulatory compliance considerations that you need to deal with. Ad-hoc queries from an auditor, you need to be able to show "Hey, I've got confidentiality, I have availability, "I have integrity" >> Well, even these smart contracts are still software. They, and you know, we've interviewed Hartej Sawhney, who's got a company that's doing just that auditing, >> He's killing it right. >> Auditing, the smart contracts because someone's going to write the code, and the code's back vulnerabilities. >> Absolutely. >> So there's a compliance aspect coming, quickly. >> Yes, yes absolutely. Yeah, I mean, so there's, it's an amazing space. There's a tremendous amount going on. It's moving super fast. >> Picks and shovels for the new miners, literally miners. Shawn, great to have you on. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> On your new startup. I think you've got a great product. I've been playing with the data, I love it. I think it's fascinating. If you could summarize the data that you've learned from the tool that you've built and platformed, what's the summary? What if you had to kind of tease it out, what's actually happening right now in the market, on the Ethereum network, with the apps and blockchain? >> Right, so, there is, so at the end of the day, Ethereum is a smart contract platform, and it pans out, that 50% of the transactions are actually going to smart contracts, which is a great validation right. Two: the actual value being transferred and interacting with smart contracts is 300 million dollars an hour. That is, it's, on an enterprise software perspective, it's not huge, but it's definitely a validation. >> It's legit. >> It's legit. The number of smart contracts that have been created in the last three months, is 400%. It is just going through the roof. Some of this, there's a lot of junk, but there's a lot of stuff that are people are building new enterprises, and on the enterprise side, we're seeing real business cases going into production, working with a few large customers now, on instrumenting real, you know, removing, you know, instrumenting real, over-the-counter type use cases. It's very, very interesting times. >> Well, you know my rants. I've been ranting about some of these bankers that have come from an old-school bank, and they're young kids too, so they're not, they're younger than me but they're trying to valuation mechanisms around, you know, companies and tokens, and they're using like discounted cash flow. Now I mean I get how they could go there, 'cause they learn that in school. >> Shawn: Right. But the reality is there's a new school going on. The school's in session. If you know the data, you have very interesting valuation variables that could be constructed on these new models that need to be looked at. I mean, how do you value a company? Certainly velocity. >> Shawn: Yeah, volume. >> Who's actually doing the transactions? Are they real smart contracts? So there's a lot of gamification and, I won't say scams, but I would say the investors want the transparency too. >> Yeah, I think it's amazing is that, we have that transparency, we provide that transparency as free service to the community right now and the ability to have transparency into transaction volume for smart contracts, token velocity, number of unique callers, market capitalization, the change in price, this gives you the ability to value that. That's something that, you know, we've thought about extensively is, maybe we should just provide valuation as a service, on just these assets that are publicly available? Yeah, I don't know. >> You had a lot of opportunities, so great job. Congratulations, good work. You guys have really done the work on this project, love it. And again, it validates the reality of the smart contracts, the application side of the business changing. Shawn Douglass here, inside theCUBE for CUBEConversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (orchestral music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau. (electronic music) Live from Nassau in The Bahamas, it's The Cube, covering Polygon '18, brought to you by Polymath. >> Welcome back, everyone. It's The Cube's exclusive coverage live in The Bahamas for Polycon '18. This is where all the action is, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, blockchain, you name it, token economics, a paradigm shift of epic proportions. This is a decentralized internet. It's impacting the world. Missions, technology, applications, and all sectors. Our next guest, Shawn Owen, CEO of SALT Lending, serial entrepreneur, killer idea, so simple, so stupid simple. No one's doing it, he's doing it, lending cash for Bitcoin and currency. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, it's good to be here. >> You know, there's two things that I love, the crazy ideas that everyone says is the dumbest idea on the planet that becomes billion-dollar opportunities, then something that's so simple and obvious that no one does because either a bag at your dogma or other interests. You're in kind of both. You got the simple idea, lending. Take a minute to talk about SALT Lending and your innovation that you guys do on the business side. >> Yeah, you got it. Everybody here at these conferences, or hopefully, people that are watching, have some interest in cryptocurrencies or blockchain, and probably accumulate some value in that currency, or the asset class. Once you do, then you have options, that you can either continue to hold that, or you can sell it. We're opening up a new market for the ability to see that as property and borrow against it. In fact, the technology makes a perfect form of collateral. We have all this ability to program in smart contracts. You can write in the rules. You can make it highly secure, yet nobody is doing it, so it's one of these simple things that, as this market emerges, became kind of obvious as a pain point, which is, I go to the bank, and I show them my personal financial statement, and they look at Bitcoin, and scratch their head. Somebody's got to bridge that gap, so we're building technology that ultimately should be used by banks or financial institutions to bring this together to where you have that ability like you would with any other type of property. If you look at any other type of property, you can lend against it, somebody's figured out how to, whether it's minerals, whether it's land, whether it's cars. Really now, we're doing that for cryptocurrency. SALT Lending stands for secured automated lending technology, so it's very much a technology-driven company, yet it's foundational in lending. It's just very simple to understand because it's the oldest business known to man. >> We covered cloud computing from day one. It's interesting, automation wins the day. We're seeing a lot of things where automating M&A process, we talked to those guys at LEXIT. You're doing something here with lending. You're just so simple. Here's the question, if I have Bitcoin, and there's a lot of whales walking around here, people, billionaires, millionaires, a lot of people have made money over the past couple of years. Certainly, if you were in it 2011 after, you're a whale. They got value. I put it up, and I get cash? Is that how it works? >> That's right. Everybody has assets that they want to hold onto, that are precious to them, whether it be gold, heirlooms, art, Bitcoin. Then they have currencies that are things that they want to spend quickly and/or just don't even think twice about it, I'll pay for a cup of coffee, a bottle of water, whatever. As the world moves into the blockchain era, as all value can be recorded on distributed ledgers in blockchains, you have this new way of thinking about everything. You can imagine a wallet where you have all the things you really care about, and you can dynamically decide what your currency is based off where you're traveling, where you want to spend, what you think is happening with inflation, depending on what your interest is. Maybe it's video game points you want to spend in the future. However, having that scale, and saying, at any point in time, I want to hold onto this, and I want to spend more of that, there's a partnership, right? A really easy way to think about that is, how can I leverage what I have, which is portfolio lending, or any type of lending, into more of the currencies I need, whether it's, I need to go buy a house, I need to buy a car, I want to buy more investments? We see it as a very powerful tool, and almost a necessity, but then, on top of that, just extremely cool in how you could imagine the future of finance in this world. >> Yeah, it's a total game-changer. I love what you're doing. I think, getting the fiat conversion really gets immediate liquidity in a currency that people can spend. If someone says, "Hey, I don't want Bitcoin," great, I want to buy a boat, or start a business, I need to get some fiat, I pledge up my coin. >> That's right. >> Now, you go valuation issues, so I'm assuming you have math behind this that says, "Hmm, but if Bitcoin drops..." >> Yep, that's the thing. We really solve a couple fundamental pieces of the blockchain that, at its core, are difficult for people to do well. One is security, and the other is user interface. When you wrap that into a product, and you build out the user interface and the security, suddenly, it becomes a lot easier. When it comes to the risk mitigation, it's simply over-collatoralized. We're going to pitch you as a borrower, and say, "You're already probably storing all this "somewhere anyway, in a wallet. "Why not put it in a secure wallet, "drive the loan to value ratio way down "so you're only borrowing what you need "when you need it, you don't bring out "these giant loans for no good reason, "you just borrow what you need, "the interest rate becomes a lot lower, "and then you have extra collateral for the volatility?" Ideally, that's the scenario. If, in a world where it's very volatile, and you're at a higher loan value rate, then that's where we give you options. We say, "Hey, would you like to sell some of this, "or would you like to add more? "Would you like to prepay your loan if not?" There's always the option for somebody to correct the loan instrument, but that's the other really cool part about a smart contract, or a smart written language around the instrument itself, is that you can get a little more creative. Instead of just having legal paperwork, you can say, "Let's put this into the code." It becomes very dynamic in the ability for it to cure, the instrument itself, to stay course. >> Software money, I love this. Let's go down, talk about the token that you have, SALT Token, and that's for the borrower, or the lender? >> It's, right now, the borrower, although it will expand into all uses. It's effectively, as people say, it's powering the network, or it's the gasoline behind it. It's our internal currency. It acts as a store value in the regards of how you would think about a serial number. If I have Microsoft Office, and you buy a serial number, that's the key that lets you in, and it tells you how much of the product you have. If you have 20 or 30 of them, you can give them to your employees, or you could redeem it for some other value. We just think that tokens actually do a better job of that recording 'cause it's now put on a permanent ledger. You have the permanent auditability of it, than just a serial number in a private database. >> I think you got a great solution because the alternative to not having it is essentially, get a liquid on an exchange, which some people might not want to do. Then also, where do you do it, right? There's all kinds of dynamics on the exchange side. Here, I'm saying, I'm long on Bitcoin, but I need to get some working capital for whatever the project is, so you're there. Is there any competition? Is anyone else doing this? >> There's no competition yet. There's definitely some people that are out there saying that they are, and I would be careful. Some of them may be legitimate. We've seen a few that are scams, so always be protected, and be wary. >> John: Give an example of what a scam would look like for the people. >> A scam would be somebody who says, "Hey, we're doing an ICO," and you start looking at it, and it looks exactly like what we've built, except for they're, maybe, in Russia, and you can't actually contact the people, and they don't have any banks behind them, or any kind of regulatory framework. >> They're spoofing your brand. >> Yeah, we've seen a lot of that. We've had a lot of phishing attempts, and people trying to spoof the idea or the site, and that's a little worrisome, but there probably will be competitors. It's a big market. >> Yeah, that's going to happen more and more, more of those spear phishing attacks too. Great, and outlook for you guys. Where are you guys at with the company? Talk about what your needs are. You hiring? What's going on with the operation? >> Yeah, we're constantly hiring, looking for anybody who's got great financial background and wants to be in the blockchain space, and/or developers, constantly looking for blockchain-focused developers, people that either want to learn the space, or already know the space, either way is fine. We'd love to talk to you. We've issued $30 million in loans in the states we're approved. We're rapidly expanding that genre of where we can lend. We're working to partner with banks, so if you're a bank, or you're a financial institution, there's a lot of capital money at this conference, we'd love to talk to all you guys because there's an opportunity for us to give you an indirect exposure into the market. >> It's good for the big whales who have a lot of currency, a lot of value, to pay it forward in the mission, in the community. They could be lenders too, right? >> Very much so, yes. >> Wow, so what states aren't you in? 30 million, that's a good number. What's your top list? >> The next on the list that we're working towards, we're really close to Texas, we're really close to California, really close to New York, really close to Utah. Those are some big ones. Lots of interest in Puerto Rico, so we're heavily focused on getting there, and it's just a road map, a heat map. There's a lot of interest in Europe, so we're going over into Europe, lots in Canada. >> Shawn, thanks for coming on, sharing the project, your success. Love your idea, again. Disruption continues. The stampede is coming behind us at Polycon. That's their logo. Polymath is the company behind this event. Of course, we're The Cube, we're independent, we're bringing you all the action here at Polycon '18. More live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Miami. Lisa Martin here live with the Cube at IFS Unleashed 2022. We're so excited to be here. We just had a great conversation with Ifss, CEO of Darren Rouse. Now we've got another exciting conversation. F1 is here. You know how much I love f1. Christian Peterson joins us as well, the Chief Product Officer at ifs, and Sean Edwards IT business partner at Aston Martin. F1. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having >>Us. Thank you >>Very much. We were talking about F one. We probably could have an entire conversation just on that, but Christian, I wanna talk with you. It's been three years since the Cube has covered ifs obviously for obvious reasons during that time. So much momentum has happened. IFS cloud was launched about 18 months ago. Give our audience an o, a flavor of IFS, cloud and some of the milestones that you've hit in such a short time period. >>Yeah, I mean IFS cloud is really transformational in many ways. It's transformational for first and foremost for our customers in what enables them to do, but also transformational for us from a technology perspective, how we work and how we do everything. And at the end of the day, it has really surfaced, served around the the, the fact of what we need to do for our customers. And what we saw our customers often do back then, or any company, was they were out looking for EAP solutions or FSM Solutions or EAM Solutions or what have you. And then they were trying to stitch it all together and we, we said like, Hang on a second, these these traditional software s, those are some that I'm guilty. You know, there's some that we actually invented over the years together with analysts. So we invented EER P and we invented CRM and EAM and all these different things. >>But at the end of the day, customers really want a solution to what they are, they are what they're dealing with. And so in these conversations it became very clear that and very repeated conclusions from the conversations that customers wanted something that could manage and help them optimize the use of their assets. Regardless of what industry you're in, assets is such a key component. Either you are using your assets or you're producing assets. Second thing is really get the best use of of your people, your teams and your crew. How do you get the right people on the right job at the same time? How do you assemble the right crew with the right set of skills in the crew? Get them to the right people at the same time. So, and then the final thing is of course customers, you know all the things that you need to do to get customers to answer these ultimate questions, Will you buy from this company again? And they should say yes. That's the ultimate results of moments of service. So that's how we bring it all together and that's what we have been fast at work at. That's what IFS cloud is all about. >>And you, you talked about IFS cloud, being able to to help customers, orchestrate assets, people, customers, Aston Martin being one of those customers. Shawn, you came from ifs so you have kind of the backstory but just give the audience a little bit of, of flavor of your role at Aston Martin and then let's dig into the smart factory. >>Sure. So I previously worked at IFS as a manufacturing consultant. So my bread and butter is production planning in the ERP sector. So we, I Aston Martin didn't have an ERP system pre IFS or a legacy system that wasn't working for them and the team couldn't rely upon it. So what we did was bring IFS in. I was the consultant there and as IFS always preached customer first, well customer first did come and I jumped to support the team. So we've implemented a fully RP solution to manage the production control and the material traceability all the way through from design until delivery to track. And we've mo most recently implemented a warehouse solution at Trackside as well. So we are now tracking our parts going out with the garage. So that's a really exciting time for RFS. In terms of the smart factory, it's not built yet. >>We're we're supposed to move next year. So that's really exciting cause we're quadrupling our footprint. So going from quite a small factory spread out across the North Hampton Share countryside, we're going into one place quadruple in our footprint. And what we're gonna start looking at is using the technology we're implementing there. So enabling 5G to springboard our IFFs implementations going forward with the likes of Internet of things to connect our 15 brand new CMC machines, but also things like R F I D. So that comes with its own challenges on a Formula One car, but it's all about speed of data capture, single point of truth. And IFFs provides that >>And well, Formula One, the first word that comes to mind is speed. >>Absolutely. Second >>Word is crazy. >>We, we are very unique in terms of most customers Christian deals with, they're about speed but also about profit and efficiency. That doesn't matter to us. It is all about time. Time is our currency and if we go quicker in designing and manufacturing, which ifs supports ultimately the cargo quicker. So speed is everything. >>And and if we, if we think of of people, customers and assets at Asset Martin F one, I can't, I can't imagine the quantity of assets that you're building every race weekend and refactoring. >>Absolutely. So a Formula one car that drives out of the garage is made up of 13,000 car parts, most of which, 50% of which we've made in house. So we have to track that all the way through from the smallest metallic component all the way up to the most complex assembly. So orchestrating that and having a single point of truth for people to look at and track is what IFFs has provided us. >>Christian, elaborate on that a little bit in terms of, I mean, what you're facilitating, F1 is such a great example of of speed we talked about, but the fact that you're setting up the car every, every other weekend maybe sometimes back to back weeks, so many massive changes going on. You mentioned 50% of those 13,000 parts you manufacture. Absolutely. Talk about IFS as being a catalyst for that. >>I mean the, it's, it's fascinating with Formula One, but because as a technology geek like me, it's really just any other business on steroids. I mean we talk, we talk about this absolutely high tech, super high tech manufacturing, but even, even before that, the design that goes in with CFDs and how you optimize for different things and loose simulation software for these things goes into manufacturing, goes into wind tunnels and then goes on track. But guess what, when it's on track, it's an asset. It's an asset that streams from how many sensors are on the car, >>I think it's over 10,000 >>Sensors, over 10,000 sensors that streams maybe at 50 hertz or 50 readings. So every lap you just get this mountain of data, which is really iot. So I always say like F one if one did IOT before anybody invented the term. >>Absolutely. >>Yep. You know, F1 did machine learning and AI before anybody thought about it in terms of pattern recognition and things like that with the data. So that's why it's fascinating to work with an organization like that. It's the, it's the sophistication around the technologies and then the pace what they do. It's not that what they do is actually so different. >>It is, it absolutely isn't. We just have to do it really quickly. Really >>Quickly. Right. And the same thing when you talk about parts. I mean I was fascinated of a conversation with, with one of your designers that says that, you know, sometimes we are, we are designing a part and this, the car is now ready for production but the previous version of that part has not even been deployed on the car yet. So that's how quick the innovation comes through and it's, it's, it's fascinating and that's why we like the challenge that Esther Martin gives us because if we can, if we can address that, there's a lot of businesses we can make happy with that as far, >>So Sha I talk a little bit about this is, so we're coming up, there's what four races left in the 2022 season, but this is your busy time because that new car, the 23 car needs to be debuted in what February? So just a few months time? >>Absolutely. So it's a bit cancer intuitive. So our busiest time is now we're ramping up into it. So we co, we go into something called car build which is from December to December to February, which is our end point and there's no move in that point. The car has gotta go around that track in February. So we have got to make those 13,000 components. We've gotta design 'em, we've gotta make 'em and then we've gotta get 'em to the car in February for our moment of service. They said it on stage. Our moment of service as a manufacturing company is that car going around the track and we have to do it 24 times next year and we've gotta start. Well otherwise we're not gonna keep up. >>I'm just gonna ask you what a, what a moment, what's a moment of service in f1 and you're saying basically getting that >>Functional car >>On the track quickly, as quickly as possible and being able to have the technology underpinning that's really abstracting the complexity. >>Absolutely. So I would say our customer ultimately is the driver and the fans they, they need to have a fast car so they can sport it and they ultimately drive it around the track and go get first place and be competitive. So that is our moment of service to our drivers is to deliver that car 24 times next year. >>I imagine they might be a little demanding >>They are and I think it's gonna be exciting with Alonzo coming in, could the driver if we've gotta manage that change and he'll have new things that he wants to try out on a car. So adds another level of complexity to that. >>Well how influential are the drivers in terms some of the, the manufacturing? Like did they, are they give me kind of a a sense of how Alon Fernando Alanzo your team and ifs maybe collaborate, maybe not directly but >>So Alonzo will come in and suggest that he wants cars to work a certain way so he will feed back to the team in terms of we need this car, we need this car part to do this and this car part to do that. So then we're in a cycle when he first gets into the car in that February, we've then gotta turnaround car parts based off his suggestions. So we need to do that again really quickly and that's where IFS feeds in. So we have to have the release and then the manufacturer of the component completely integrated and that's what we achieve with IFFs and >>It needs to be really seamless. >>Absolutely. If, if we don't get it right, that car doesn't go out track so there's no moving deadline. >>Right. That's the probably one of the industries where deadlines do not move. Absolutely. We're so used to things happening in tech where things shift and change and reorgs, but this is one where the dates are set in their firm. >>Absolutely. And we have to do anything we can do to get that car on the track. So yeah, it's just a move. >>Christian, talk about the partnership a little bit from your standpoint in terms of how influential has Aston Martin F1 been in IFS cloud and its first 18 months. I was looking at some stats that you've already gotten 400,000 plus users in just a short time period. How influential are your customers in the direction and even the the next launch 22 R too? >>I mean our customers do everything plain and simple. That's that's what it is. And we have, we have a partnership, I think about every single customer as a partner of ours and we are partnering in taking technology to the next level in terms of, of the outputs and the benefits it can create for our customers. That's what it's all, all about. And I, I always think about these, these three elements I think I mentioned in our state as well. I think the partnership we have is a partnership around innovation. Innovation doesn't not only come from IFS or the technology partner, it comes from discussions, requirements, opportunities, what if like all these things. So innovation comes from everywhere. There's technology driven innovation, there's customer driven innovation, but that's part of the partnership. The second part of the partnership is inspiration. So with innovation you inspire. So when you innovate on something new that inspires new innovation and new thinking and that's again the second part of the partnership. And then the third part is really iterate and execute, right? Because it's great that we can now innovate and we can agree on what we need to do, but now we need to put it into products, put it in technology and put it into actual use. That's when the benefits comes and that's when we can start bringing the bell. >>And I think it's really intrinsically linked. I mean if you look at progress with Formula One teams and their innovation, it's all underpinned by our technology partners and that's why it's so important. The likes of Christian pushes the product and improves it and innovates it because then we can realize the benefits and ultimately save time and go faster. So it's really important that our, our partners and certainly inform one, push the boundaries and find that technology. >>And I think one of the things that we also find very, very important is that we actually understand our customers and can talk the language. So I think that was one of the key things in our engagement, Martin from the beginning is that we had a set of people that really understand Formula One felt it on their bodies and can have the conversation. So when the Formula One teams they say something, then we actually understand what we're talking about. So for instance, when we talk about, you know, track side inventory, well it's not that different from what a field service technician have in his van when he goes service. The only difference is when you see something happening on track, you'll see the parts manager go out to the pit lane with a tablet and say like, oh we need this, we need that, we need this and we need that. And then we'll go back and pick it and put it on the car and the car is service and maintain and off go. Absolutely. >>Yeah that speed always impresses me. >>It's unbelievable. >>Shannon, last question for you. From a smart factory perspective, you said you're moving in next year. What are some of the things that you are excited about that you think are really gonna be transformative but IFS is doing? >>So I think what I'm really excited about once we get in is using the technology they've already put in terms of 5G networks to sort of springboard that into a further IFS implementation. Maybe IFFs cloud in terms of we always struggle to keep the system up to date with, with what's physically happening so that the less data entry and the more automatic sort of data capture, the better it is for the formula on team cuz we improve our our single point of truth. So I'm really excited to look at the internet of things and sort of integrate our CNC machines to sort of feed that information back into ifs. But also the RFID technology I think is gonna be a game changer when we go into the new factory. So really >>Excited. Excellent. Well well done this year. We look forward to seeing Alonso join the team in 23. Fingers >>Crossed. >>Okay. Fingers crossed. Christian, Jeanette, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and how ifs asked Martin are working together, how you really synergistically working together. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much for having us. Our >>Thanks for having us. And go Aston >>Woo go Aston, you already here first Lisa Martin, no relation to Aston Martin, but well, I wanna thank Christian Peterson and Shannon Edwards for joining me, talking about IFS and Aston Martin team and what they're doing at Speed and Scale. Stick around my next guest joins me in a minute. >>Thank you.

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in Monaco for the MoCo crypto summit. I'm John fur. You're host of the cube. We got a great guest Dustin plant Boltz who is a crypto advisor, but also the crypto editor for Forbes Monaco here. Seeing the official event, the AAL event of the Monaco crypto summit in Monaco, your coverage area for Forbes, your MCing. Welcome to the >>Cube. Thank you for having me. And it's, it's always fun when I get to have an event in our backyard, cuz I get to hear what others know. And to me I'm very curious. Yeah. Always >>Learning. So you're on the MC on the stage here, you know, queue in the program online great program. So it's innovative event, inaugural event, great name by the way. Crypto summit and mono crypto >>Summit. Yeah, the MoCo crypto summit. >>That sounds like I want to attend every year. >>You're you're more than welcome to attend next year. >>Well, I hope so. Either way. I'm at the Al event with you. So gimme the take on what's on stage. What's been the program, like what's your observations going on here at the event today? >>So what we're starting to see globally is this digitization of things and the people that are part of the innovation side. And so that's what we've been able to see this morning. We're we're now at the break is what sort of companies are out there, the good ones and what are they building? Is this innovation? Is it even innovative and figuring out how they're gonna do it and the roadmaps to getting there from the metaverses to NFTs and even to decentralized finance. >>Yeah, it's the number one question I get is what's legit. What's not legit. And then you're starting to see the, the, the wheat and the shaft separating here and you know, something called crypto winter. But I don't see it. I mean, I see correction for some of the bad things going on in terms of not having the right underpinning infrastructure, the creative ideas are amazing. We're also seeing like digital bits and other platforms kind of coming together to enable the creators and, and the NFT side for instance has been huge. What has been your observation on that enablement? Because you have two schools of thoughts. You have the total nerds we're up and down building everything. Then you have artists and creators, whether it's music, tech apps building, they don't necessarily want to get 'em to the covers. They don't want to deal with all that. Yeah. Have you seen, what's your, what's your take on that? >>So I I'm seeing that a lot of these major brands, you know, they they're striving for excellence. You know, they're being more careful of who they partner with and the types of companies and you know, they, they look at it from reality and a little tough love to figure out should they align their brand. So what we're seeing here is is that there is so much inertia moving forward. That we're just at the beginning of this thing. Yeah. McKinsey recently said that the ecosystem will be over $30 trillion. So when you recognize that we are so early and it's those right now, or some might say are the risk takers. But to me there, aren't taking risk. They're being a part of making history. >>Yeah. You get the pioneers and you get the financial. So as they come together, how do you see the market? Cause what I've noticed with crypto and here in, in this, this market is international. One lot of international finance us is kind of lag behind. You got all kinds of rules, but you got the, the combination of the, the future billionaires. Sure. Okay. The pioneers and then the financeers yeah. Coming the money, the money and the power coming together. What's your reporting show you that's going on right now? What should people know about on how this is evolving? What they shouldn't >>Expect? Well, so you have a group that wants to become cryers they're seeing these individuals globally. They're making lots and lots of money, but what they don't realize is that not everybody is gonna have that outcome, but looking at the technology aspect of it and how it's going to improve a system that many can agree is collectively broken legacy just can't move beyond. It was never designed to you'll see people take shots at certain card companies and I go, but you recognize they developed the assembly line. And so I'm seeing that the smart money they got in long ago, believe it or not. And those now they're looking out for their errors are the ones that saying, I will not have an excuse when my, my grandkids or my, my nieces or my nephews, when they come and ask, where were you when the greatest transformational shift in human history, from both education to jobs, to careers and even wealth was being shifted to a digital world, why were you on the sideline waiting? And so I think what we're gonna see is this tsunami coming, and it's gonna start with one big player and then two and five, you go, go alone. You go far, go together. You go further. And that's what we're seeing is that this collective is moving forward >>And the community, we just had Beth Kaiser on, I've known Beth for many, many years. And she's what she's her journey has done. She's had a great mission and then gets she's a data scientist and came to Analytica. Now she's doing work with Ukraine and the rallying support around it has been impressive. And it's a community vibe, but the community's not just like sympathetic they're hands on together to your point. >>Yeah. It, but it also takes courage. I mean, you look at Britney Kaiser and what she had, and to me, courage is not, not having fear. Courage is not allowing the fear to stop. You, you know, recently asked my executive coach, who's 85 and I'm turning 39. This question of, do you let fear stop you? How do you decide? And he said, you know, you can either let, you can either ride the dragon. And I said, or let the dragon chase you. And Brittany has been one of these that made a decision to do what was right. And it came down to integrity. Yeah. >>So what are you have to these days what's going on in your world? >>What is going on in my world? So I moderate events all over and I connect and I like to ask people questions. So I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna turn at the interviewer on the >>Interview. It's good. Natural. >>What are you learning? >>I mean, I'm learning, I mean today or this week or this month or this year. Well, I was just talking with Brittany about this. The security world is converging cloud technology, cloud computing. That revolution has just been amazing. Amazon posted their earnings yesterday. They blew it away as far as I'm concerned. So they kind of show there's no tech recession. I've learned that this recession, that we're so called in is the first downturn in tech where there's been cloud players as hyperscalers as an economic engine. Okay. So from a, from a business perspective, Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure now Google cloud, Alibaba's now in, in international version. This is the first time at downturns ever happened with cloud computing as an economic engine. And so therefore what I'm seeing is the digital transformation that's happening across the world for enterprises and entrepreneurs is not stopping. >>It's actually accelerating. So although the GDPs down in inflation is down, you're seeing a massive shift continuing to accelerate, spending and transformation with cloud technologies and decentralized. So you can almost see it kind of in the, this event and other events, even some of the bigger events, the best smartest people are working on it. The applications in all the categories are transforming. If cloud is step one, decentralized gonna be step two. So I see that kind of bridge going from cloud computing, cloud native to decentralized native. And I think a D DAPP market's gonna just explode. I think NFTs are just scratched on the surface. I think that's kind of, I won't say gimmicky, but I think no, but you're right, much more of a much more of a, an illustration that there's more coming. >>There is a lot more coming because people are seeing that there's more to an NFT than an ugly luck and J you know, ugly and JP image that there's, that there's data in there. And that your avatar will be stored as just that as an NFT. And I learned today from go of sing, that decentralization is, is the key to innovation. And I agree with that statement. Holy. >>Yeah. I mean, I think access to stuff is gonna be multidimensional. Like you think about the NFT as, as an ID, whether it's him or UN unstoppable domains is that company just got financing another round where the billion dollars, their concept is like, Hey, one NFT is your access for all of your potential identities in context. >>And isn't that exciting that we're now gonna be at this stage where you travel with you. Yeah. Instead of someone else traveling with you, you get to decide who you will be. And to me, everything you're doing in this world, this reality is now becoming part of your digital asset as a whole. >>I remember when I started my podcasting company in 20 2004, early pioneers, Evan Williams was there with Odo and you had, you know, the blogging revolution going on that whole democratization wave actually didn't happen right then. But all the people that were involved in that web two oh, kind of CRAs was all about democratization. It's kind of happening now. I mean, 15, 20 years later at web services is transformed cloud the democratization for own your own data, putting users in control. And I think in the middle of that, the Facebook's the world, the world garden data, you know, manipulation kind of took it off track a little bit. So I think now I'm, I psych to see that it's back on track to where it was. I mean, Facebook made billions of dollars. Now you got LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn's great for your resume, but it's also become a wall's garden with no data export. >>Yeah. And then >>No APIs keep >>Changing. Think about this. That if you wanna apply for a job, just change something quickly. Yeah. Ah, now you're the senior VP. Yeah. Before you were, you're an office manager >>Like to see the immutable block change, >>You don't get to see when did the record change. Yeah. >>Reputation data. You're a digital exhaust people gonna wanna reign that in. And I think the user in charge message that Brit Kaiser was talks about is hugely a mess under, under, under amplified concept. Digital assets are key, but the data ownership is something that I think is, is >>Powerful. So I'm gonna be launching a brand new company in and around September called cryptos. And it's a crypto career center. Think of it like the, the crypto for LinkedIn, that it's an aggregator becoming the industry standard for education, becoming the industry standard for crypto ships, with partners like ledger and moon pay and Casper labs. >>Look at this, we got an exclusive scoop on the cube. This >>Is the first time I will tell you this the first time in, in an environment like this. Yeah. That I'm excited to, I'm excited to talk about, right. Because it's time to be part of the change. Yeah, exactly. You know, as a father, I look at, I know where it's headed in the world of business. I know in the world of this, that we're gonna call the internet of connected things. Yeah. That it's gonna require you to have a certain talent skill or a certain certification. And to me, it's important to have an industry that supports one >>Staff and also, and also history on misinformation, smear campaigns can happen and ruin a career >>Overnight. Can you imagine that one little thing and because the internet never forgets. Yeah. It stays around indefinitely. >>The truth has to come out. Dustin. Great to have you on the queue. Thank you so much. Final question. What have you learned in there is MC what's your takeaway real quick? >>What I've learned is I never tire of learning. Thank you again, to learn more. Dustin plan.com. >>All right. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Cube coverage here at Monaco. I'm Shawn furry. We'll back with more coverage after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of splunk.com 2021 virtual. We're here live in the Splunk studios. We're all here gettin all the action, all the stories. Garth Fort, senior vice president, Chief Product Officer at Splunk is here with me. CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Last time I saw you, we were at AWS now here at Splunk. Congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you. Great to see you again. >> Great keynote and great team. Congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you. It's a lot of fun. >> So let's get into the keynote a little bit on the product. You're the Chief Product Officer. We interviewed Shawn Bice, who's also working with you as well. He's your boss. Talk about the, the next level, cause you're seeing some new enhancements. Let's get to the news first. Talk about the new enhancements. >> Yeah, this was actually a really fun keynote for me. So I think there was a lot of great stuff that came out of the rest of it. But I had the honor to actually showcase a lot of the product innovation, you know, since we did .conf last year, we've actually closed four different acquisitions. We shipped 43 major releases and we've done hundreds of small enhancements, like we're shipping code in the cloud every six weeks and we're shipping new versions twice a year for our Splunk Enterprise customers. And so this was kind of like if you've seen that movie Sophie's Choice, you know, where you have to pick one of your children, like this was a really hard, hard thing to pick. Cause we only had about 25 minutes, but we did like four demos that I think landed really well. The first was what we call ingest actions and you know, there's customers that are using, they start small with gigabytes and they go to terabytes and up to petabytes of data per day. And so they wanted tools that allow them to kind of modify filter and then route data to different sort of parts of their infrastructure. So that was the first demo. We did another demo on our, our visual playbook editor for SOAR, which has improved quite a bit. You know, a lot of the analysts that are in the, in the, in the SOC trying to figure out how to automate responses and reduce sort of time to resolution, like they're not Python experts. And so having a visual playbook editor that lets them drag and drop and sort of with a few simple gestures create complex playbooks was pretty cool. We showed some new capabilities in our APM tool. Last year, we announced we acquired a company called Plumbr, which has expertise in basically like code level analysis and, and we're calling it "Always On" profiling. So we, we did that demo and gosh, we did one more, four, but four total demos. I think, you know, people were really happy to see, you know, the thing that we really tried to do was ground all of our sort of like tech talk and stuff that was like real and today, like this is not some futuristic vision. I mean, Shawn did lay out some, some great visions, visionary kind of pillars. But, what we showed in the keynote was I it's all shipping code. >> I mean, there's plenty of head room in this market when it comes to data as value and data in motion, all these things. But we were talking before you came on camera earlier in the morning about actually how good Splunk product and broad and deep the product portfolio as well. >> Garth: Yeah. >> I mean, it's, I mean, it's not a utility and a tooling, it's a platform with tools and utilities. >> Garth: Yeah >> It's a fully blown out platform. >> Yeah. Yeah. It is a platform and, and, you know, it's, it's one that's quite interesting. I've had the pleasure to meet a couple of big customers and it's kind of amazing, like what they do with Splunk. Like I was meeting with a large telco on the east coast and you know, they actually, for their set top boxes, they actually have to figure out in real time, which ads to display and the only tool they could find to process 15 million events in real time, to decide what ad to display, was Splunk. So that was, that was like really cool to hear. Like we never set out to be like an ad tech kind of platform and yet we're the only tool that operates at that level of scale and that kind of data. >> You know, it's funny, Doug Merritt mentioned this in my interview with him earlier today about, you know, and he wasn't shy about it, which was great. He was like, we're an enabling platform. We don't have to be experts in all these vertical industries >> Garth: Yep >> because AI takes care of that. That's where the machine learning >> Garth: Yeah >> and the applications get built. So others are trying to build fully vertically integrated stacks into these verticals when in reality they don't have to, if they don't want it. >> Yeah, and Splunk's kind of, it's quite interesting when you look across our top 100 customers, you know, Doug talks about like the, you know, 92 of the fortune 100 are kind of using Splunk today, but the diversity across industries and, you know, we have government agencies, we have, you know, you name the retail or the vertical, you know, we've got really big customers, they're using Splunk. And the other thing that I kind of, I was excited about, we announced the last demo I forgot was TruSTAR integration with Enterprise Security. That's pretty cool. We're calling that Splunk Threat Intelligence. And so That was really fun and we only acquired, we closed the acquisition to TruSTAR in May, but the good news is they've been a partner with us like for 18 months before we actually bought em. And so they'd already done a lot of the work to integrate. And so they had a running start in that regard, But other, one other one that was kind of a, it was a small thing. I didn't get to demo it, but we talked about the, the content pack for application performance monitoring. And so, you know, in some ways we compete in the APM level, but in many ways there's a ton of great APM vendors out there that customers are using. But what they wanted us to do was like, hey, if I'm using APM for that one app, I still want to get data out of that and into Splunk because Splunk ends up being like the core repository for observability, security, IT ops, Dev Sec Ops, et cetera. It's kind of like where the truth, the operational truth of how your systems works, lives in Splunk. >> It's so funny. The Splunk business model has actually been replicated. They call it data lake, whatever you want to call it. People are bringing up all these different metaphors. But at the end of the day, if you guys can create a value proposition where you can have data just be, you know, stored and dumped and dumped into whatever they call it stored in a way >> Garth: We call it ingest >> Ingested, ingested. >> Garth: Not dumped. >> Data dump. >> Garth: It's ingested. >> Well, I mean, well you given me a plan, but you don't have to do a lot of work to store just, okay, we can only get to it later, >> Garth: Yep. >> But let the machines take over >> Garth: Yep. >> With the machine learning. I totally get that. Now, as a pro, as a product leader, I have to ask you your, your mindset around optimization. What do you optimize for? Because a lot of times these use cases are emerging. They just pop out of nowhere. It's a net new use case that you want to operationalize. So balancing the headroom >> Yep. >> Or not to foreclose those new opportunities for customers. How are customers deciding what's important to them? How do you, because you're trying to read the tea leaves for the future >> Garth: A little bit, yeah. >> and then go, okay, what do our customers need, but you don't want to foreclose anything. How do you think about product strategy around that? >> There's a ton of opportunity to interact with customers. We have this thing called the Customer Advisory Board. We run, I think, four of them and we run a monthly. And so we got an opportunity to kind of get that anecdotal data and the direct contact. We also have a portal called ideas.splunk.com where customers can come tell us what they want us to build next. And we look at that every month, you know, and there's no way that we could ever build everything that they're asking us to, but we look at that monthly and we use it in sort of our sprint planning to decide where we're going to prioritize engineering resources. And it's just, it's kind of like customers say the darndest things, right? Sometimes they ask us for stuff and we never imagined building it in a million years, >> John: Yeah. >> Like that use case around ads on the set top box, but it's, it's kind of a fun place to be like, we, we just, before this event, we kind of laid out internally what, you know, Shawn and I kind of put together this doc, actually Shawn wrote the bulk of it, but it was about sort of what do we think? Where, where can we take Splunk to the next three to five years? And we talked about these, we referred to them as waves of innovation. Cause you know, like when you think about waves, there's multiple waves that are heading towards the beach >> John: Yeah. >> in parallel, right? It's not like a series of phases that are going to be serialized. It's about making a set of investments. that'll kind of land over time. And, and the first wave is really about, you know, what I would say is sort of, you know, really delivering on the promise of Splunk and some of that's around integration, single sign-on things about like making all of the Splunk Splunk products work together more easily. We've talked a lot in the Q and a about like edge and hybrid. And that's really where our customers are. If you watch the Koby Avital's sort of customer keynote, you know, Walmart by necessity, given their geographic breadth and the customers they serve has to have their own infrastructure. They use Google, they use Azure and they have this abstraction layer that Koby's team has built on top. And they use Splunk to manage kind of, operate basically all of their infrastructure across those three clouds. So that's the hybrid edge scenario. We were thinking a lot about, you mentioned data lakes. You know, if you go back to 2002, when Splunk was founded, you know, the thing we were trying to do is help people make sense of log files. But now if you talk to customers that are moving to cloud, everybody's building a data lake and there's like billions of objects flowing into millions of these S3 buckets all over the place. And we're kind of trying to think about, hey, is there an opportunity for us to point our indexing and analytics capability against structured and unstructured data and those data lakes. So that that'll be something we're going to >> Yeah. >> at least start prototyping pretty soon. And then lastly, machine learning, you know, I'd say, you know, to use a baseball metaphor, like in terms of like how we apply machine learning, we're like in the bottom of the second inning, >> Yeah. >> you know, we've been doing it for a number of years, but there's so much more. >> There's so, I mean, machine learning is only as good as the data you put into the machine learning. >> Exactly, exactly. >> And so if you have, if you have gap in the data, the machine learning is going to have gaps in it. >> Yeah. And we have, we announced a feature today called auto detect. And I won't go into the gory details, but effectively what it does is it runs a real-time analytics job over whatever metrics you want to look at and you can do what I would consider more statistics versus machine learning. You can say, hey, if in a 10 minute period, like, you know, we see more errors than we see on average over the last week, throw an alert so I can go investigate and take a look. Imagine if you didn't have to figure out what the right thresholds were, if we could just watch those metrics for you and automatically understand the seasonality, the timing, is it a weekly thing? Is it a monthly thing? And then like tell you like use machine learning to do the anomaly detection, but do it in a way that's more intelligent than just the static threshold. >> Yeah. >> And so I think you'll see things like auto detect, which we announced this week will evolve to take advantage of machine learning kind of under the covers, if you will. >> Yeah. It was interesting with cloud scale and the data velocity, automations become super important. >> Oh yeah. >> You don't have a lot of new disciplines emerge, like explainable AI is hot right now. So you got, the puck is coming. You can see where the puck is going. >> Yeah >> And that is automation at the app edge or the application layer where the data has got to be free-flowing or addressable. >> Garth: Yeah. >> This is something that is being talked about. And we talked about data divide with, with Chris earlier about the policy side of things. And now data is part of everything. It's part of the apps. >> Garth: Yeah. >> It's not just stored stuff. So it's always in flight. It should be addressable. This is what people want. What do you think about all of that? >> No, I think it's great. I actually just can I, I'll quote from Steve Schmidt in, in sort of the keynote, he said, look like security at the end of the day is a human problem, but it kind of manifests itself through data. And so being able to understand what's happening in the data will tell you, like, is there a bad actor, like wreaking havoc inside of my systems? And like, you can use that, the data trail if you will, of the bad actor to chase them down and sort of isolate em. >> The digital footprints, if you will, looking at a trail. >> Yeah. >> All right, what's the coolest thing that you like right now, when you look at the treasure trove of, of a value, as you look at it, and this is a range of value, Splunk, Splunk has had customers come in with, with the early product, but they keep the customers and they always do new things and they operationalize it >> Garth: Yep. >> and another new thing comes, they operationalize it. What's the next new thing that's coming, that's the next big thing. >> Dude that is like asking me which one of my daughters do I love the most, like that is so unfair. (laughing) I'm not going to answer that one. Next question please. >> Okay. All right. Okay. What's your goals for the next year or two? >> Yeah, so I just kind of finished roughly my first 100 days and it's been great to, you know, I had a whole plan, 30, 60, 90, and I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do. Like I'm really hoping, sort of, we get past this current kind of COVID scare and we get to back to normal. Cause I'm really looking forward to getting back on the road and sort of meeting with customers, you know, you can meet over Zoom and that's great, but what I've learned over time, you know, I used to go, I'd fly to Wichita, Kansas and actually go sit down with the operators like at their desk and watch how they use my tools. And that actually teaches you. Like you, you come up with things when you see, you know, your product in the hands of your customer, that you don't get from like a CAB meeting or from a Zoom call, you know? >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so being able to visit customers where they live, where they work and kind of like understand what we can do to make their lives better. Like that's going to, I'm actually really excited to gettin back to travel. >> If you could give advice to CTO, CISO, or CIO or a practitioner out there who are, who is who's sitting at their virtual desk or their physical desk thinking, okay, the pandemic, were coming through the pandemic. I want to come out with a growth strategy, with a plan that's going to be expansive, not restrictive. The pandemic has shown what's what works, what doesn't work. >> Garth: Sure. >> So it's going to be some projects that might not get renewed, but there's doubling down on, certainly with cloud scale. What would advice would you give that person when they start thinking about, okay, I got to get my architecture right. >> Yeah. >> I got to get my playbooks in place. I got to get my people aligned. >> Yeah >> What's what do you see as a best practice for kind of the mindset to actual implementation of data, managing the data? >> Yeah, and again, I'm, I'm, this is not an original Garth thought. It actually came from one of our customers. You know, the, I think we all, like you think back to March and April of 2020 as this thing was really getting real. Everybody moved as fast as they could to either scale up or scale scaled on operations. If you were in travel and hospitality, you know, that was, you know, you had to figure how to scale down quickly and like what you could shut down safely. If you were like in the food delivery business, you had to figure out how you could scale up, like Chipotle hit two, what is it? $2 billion run rate on delivery last year. And so people scrambled as fast as they could to sort of adapt to this new world. And I think we're all coming to the realization that as we sort of exit and get back to some sense of new normal, there's a lot of what we're doing today that's going to persist. Like, I think we're going to have like flexible rules. I don't think everybody's going to want to come back into the office. And so I think, I think the thing to do is you think about returning to whatever this new normal looks like is like, what did we learn that was good. And like the pandemic had a silver lining for folks in many ways. And it sucked for a lot. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but you know, there were things that we did to adapt that I think actually made like the workplace, like stronger and better. And, and sort of. >> It showed that data's important, internet is important. Didn't break, the internet didn't break. >> Garth: Correct. >> Zoom was amazing. And the teleconferencing with other tools. >> But that's kind of, just to sort of like, what did you learn over the last 18 months that you're going to take for it into the next 18 years? You know what I mean? Cause there was a lot of good and I think people were creative and they figured out like how to adapt super quickly and take the best of the pandemic and turn it into like a better place to work. >> Hybrid, hybrid events, hybrid workforce, hybrid workflows. What's what's your vision on Splunk as a tier one enterprise? Because a lot of the news that I'm seeing that's, that's the tell sign to me in terms of this next growth wave is big SI deals, Accenture and others are yours working with and you still got the other Partnerverse going. You have the ecosystems emerging. >> Garth: Yep. >> That's a good, that means your product's enabling people to make money. >> Garth: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And that's a good thing. >> Yeah, BlueVoyant was a great example in the keynote yesterday and they, you know, they've really, they've kind of figured out how, you know, most of their customers, they serve customers in heavily regulated industries kind of, and you know, those customers actually want their data in a Splunk tenant that they own and control and they want to have that secure boundary around that. But BlueVoyant's figured out how they can come in and say, hey, I'm going to take care of the heavy lifting of the day-to-day operations, the monitoring of that environment with the security. So, so BlueVoyant has done a great job sort of pivoting and figuring out how they can add value to customers and do, you know, because they they're managing not just one Splunk instance, but they're managing 100s of Splunk cloud instances. And so they've got best practices and automation that they can play across their entire client base. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that. And, and Teresa's just, Teresa is just, she loves Partners, absolutely loves Partners. And that was just obvious. You could, you could hear it in her voice. You could see it in her body language, you know, when she talked about Partnerverse. So I think you'll see us start to really get a lot more serious. Cause as big as Splunk is like our pro serve and support teams are not going to scale for the next 10,000, 100,000 Splunk customers. And we really need to like really think about how we use Partners. >> There's a real growth wave. And I, and I love the multiples wave in parallel because I think that's what everyone's consensus on. So I have to ask you as a final question, what's your takeaway? Obviously, there's been a virtual studio here where all the Splunk executives and, and, and customers and partners are here. TheCUBE's here doing all the presentations, live by the way. It was awesome. What would you say the takeaway is for this .conf, for the people watching and consuming all the content online? A lot of asynchronous consumption would be happening. >> Sure. >> What's your takeaway from this year's Splunk .conf? >> You know, I, it's hard cause you know, you get so close to it and we've rehearsed this thing so many times, you know, the feedback that I got and if you look at Twitter and you look at my Slack and everything else, like this felt like a conf that was like kind of like a really genuine, almost like a Splunk two dot O. But it's sort of true to the roots of what Splunk was true to the product reality. I mean, you know, I was really careful with my team and to avoid any whiff of vaporware, like what were, what we wanted to show was like, look, this is Splunk, we're acquiring companies, you know, 43 major releases, you know, 100s of small ones. Like we're continuing to innovate on your behalf as fast as we can. And hopefully this is the last virtual conf. But even when we go back, like there was so much good about the way we did this this week, that, you know, when we, when we broke yesterday on the keynote and we were sitting around with the crew and it kind of looking at that stage and everything, we were like, wow, there is a lot of this that we want to bring to an in-person event as well. Cause so for those that want to travel and come sit in the room with us, we're super excited to do that as soon as we can. But, but then, you know, there may be 25, 50, 100,000 that don't want to travel, but can access us via this virtual event. >> It's like a time. It's a moment in time that becomes a timeless moment. That could be, >> Wow, did you make that up right now? >> that could be an NFT. >> Yeah >> We can make a global cryptocurrency. Garth, great to see you. Of course I made it up right then. So, great to see you. >> Air bump, air bump? Okay, good. >> Okay. Garth Fort, senior vice president, Chief Product Officer. In theCUBE here, we're live on site at Splunk Studio for the .conf virtual event. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. >> All right. Thank you guys. (upbeat music)