[Announcer] Live from Stanford University, it's The Cube! Covering global women in Data Science Conference. Brought to you by SiliconeANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin, live at Stanford University for the fourth annual Women in Date Science Conference, hashtag WiDS2019. We are here with Kavita Sangwan, the Director of Technical Programs, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Intuit. Kavita, it's wonderful to have you on the program. >> Thank you, pleasure is all mine. >> So Intuit is a global and visionary sponsor of WiDs, and has been for a couple of years. Talk to us a little bit about Intuit's sponsorship of this WiDs movement. >> Sure, well, Tech Women at Intuit has been important part of our culture. It was founded sometime a couple of years back from our previous CTO Taylor Stansbury. He was the founder and sponsor for it, and it has been getting the continuous support and sponsorship from our current CTO, Marianna Tessel. We highly believe that diversity in inclusion, and diversity in talks, and diversity in employees, is an important aspect for our company because that kind of helps us to deliver awesome product experiences and seamless experiences to our customers. This is our second year at WiDs, and we are proud to be part of this event today. >> It's growing tremendously, you know I mentioned it as a movement, and in three and a half years, this is the fourth annual, as I mentioned, and Margot Gerritsen, one of the co founders, chatted with me a couple hours ago and said they're expecting 20,000 people to be engaging today alone. The live stream at the event here at Stanford, but also the impact that they're making. There's a 150 plus regional events going on around this event in 50 plus countries. >> So it's the... You and I were chatting before we went live that you feel this, this palpable energy when you walk in. Tell me a little bit about your role at Intuit, and how you're able to really kind of grow your career in this organization that really seems to support diversity. >> Sure, I head the Technical Program Management for Intuit Data Science Organization, so it's all about data, data science, AI Machine Learning. We apply and imbed AI Machine Learning across all of our product suites. And also try to apply AI Machine Learning in different other aspects as well. Some of the focus areas where we applying AI Machine Learning is making our products smart, security risk and fraud space, where we are all several steps ahead of the fraudsters. Also, in customer success space, and also within the organization, the products and services our work employees use to make their experiences amazing. I have been with Intuit for almost three years now, and it has been an amazing journey. Intuit is such a... It embraces diversity, and it's because of its diverse, durable, innovative culture, I think Intuit has been in Silicone Valley as a strong force for over 35 years. >> So when we think about Data Science, often we think about the technical skills that a data scientist would need to have, right? It's the computational mathematics and engineering, being able to analyze data, but there's this whole other side that seems to be, based on some of the conversations that we've had, as important but maybe lagging behind, and that is skills on being a team player, being collaborative, communication skills, empathy skills. Tell me about, from your perspective, how do you use those skills in your daily job, and how does Intuit maybe foster some of those communication negotiation skills as equal importance as the actual data itself? >> It's very important for us, as we hire our top talent in our organization to empower and grow that top talent as well. We do that by providing them opportunities to learn from different sessions we host around executive presence, negotiation skills, public speaking skills. In addition to advancing them in their technological space. As you rightly said, it's very important for us to operate in a team setting. You know, a data scientist has to interact with a product manager, and a data engineer, a business person, a legal person, because there is questions about security and privacy. So there are so much interactions happening across functional space, it is very important for us to be a team player, and having the ability to have those conversations in the right way. So, Intuit invests heavily, not just in the technology space to advance women, but also in all the other ancillary spaces, which are equally important to be successful as you advance in your career. >> So, as our viewers understand Intuit, I'm a user of it as well for my business, who understand it to a degree. What do you think would surprise our viewers about how Intuit is applying Data Science? >> So, it's important to know that we operate with a customer's mindset. Everything we do starts with our customers, and it's very important for us to build a culture which reflects the values, and the talent, and the skills of our customers. And that is why I said it's very important for us to have diversity in our teams. Our most opportunistic areas for investment in the AI machine learning is the smart products space where we are heavily investing to make our products intelligent, customize it according to the needs of our customers, and giving them great insights for our customers to save them money, make them do less work, and build more confidence in our product suites. >> Confidence, that word kind of reminds me of another word that we hear used a lot around data, and I'm making it very general, but it's trust. That's something that is critical for any business to establish with the customer, but if we look at how much data we're all generating just as people, and how every company has a trail of us with what we eat, what we buy, what we watch, what we download. Where does trust come into play, if you're really designing these things for the customer in mind, how are you delivering on that promise of trust? >> It's very rightly said, just to add to that sentiment, it has been shared in some articles that we have accumulated so much data in the last two years which is more than what we have accumulated in the last five thousand years of humanity. It is really important to have trust with your customers because we are using their data for their own benefits. Intuit operates with the principle and the mindset that this our customer's data, and we are their stewards. We make sure that we are one of the best stewards for their data, and that's what we reflect in our products, how we serve them, build intelligent products for them, and that's how we start to gain trust from our customers. >> And I imagine being quite transparent in the process. >> That's true, yes. >> So in terms of your career, I was doing some research on you, and I know that you love to give back to the community by being a champion for women in technology, encouraging young girls in STEM towards building that community. Tell me a little bit about your career as we are here at WiDS at Stanford there's a lot of involvement in the student community. Tell me a little about your background and what some of your favorite things are about giving back to the next generation. >> Sure, I actually, when I graduated from engineering, I was one of the four women students out of the, maybe, a class of around 50 students. So I think it struck me right there that there is a disparity in the industry, in the education system, and then in the industry. I felt the same thing in my different companies where I worked, and that always led me to a point that I actually, rather than just being observing this from afar, why can't I be the one who moved the needle on this? That led me to a point where I started collaborating within the companies, started forming teams, and started working with the teams who were already there to move the needle in technical women's space. I think, if I reflect back in my journey, a couple of things that stand out for me is passion for what you do, and I am really passionate about what my goal is and I try to line up my work according to that and that's why this women in tech, something which is close to my heart and I'm passionate about, always comes forward whenever I do something. The second important aspect is, I've always thrown myself into situations which I've never done before. For example we were offline talking about hackathon, which is DevelopHer. I had never done any hackathons before because I was so passionate about doing it, I just threw myself in and I ran that hackathon. And then the third thing is being persistent about what you do. I mean, you can't just do one thing and then drop it and then come back after a few weeks and then do it again. You have to have that consistency of doing it, only then do you start moving the needle. I think when I reflect and look back, these three things stand out for me and that has applied in my own personal career, as well as everything I do in my life. >> How do you give, and the last question, it seems like you sort of have that natural passion, I love this, this is what I want to do, you were persistent with it, how do you advise younger girls who might not have that natural passion to really develop that within themselves? >> I think experiment and explore. When you try to do different things, only then you find out where your passion lies. Just don't be scared of throwing yourself into a situation which you have never dealt before. Always try to find new things and throw yourself in an uncomfortable situation, and try to get out of it. It helps you become super bold, and gives you confidence, and that's the way to find what you're naturally passionate about. >> I like that, I like to say get comfortably uncomfortable. Last question in the last few seconds, I just want you to have the opportunity to tell our viewers where they can go to learn more about Intuit and their Data Science jobs. >> Yes, you can always go to intuit.com, and intuitcareers.com, and learn about the great opportunities we have for Intuit and Data Science. >> Excellent, well Kavita, it's been a pleasure to have you on The Cube this afternoon. Thank you for stopping by, and also for sharing what Intuit is doing to support WiDS. >> Thank you, it was my pleasure, thank you so much. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube, I'm Lisa Martin live from the WiDS fourth annual WiDS global conference at Stanford. Stick around, I'll be right back with our next guest.

(bright music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to a special Cube Conversation here, in the Palo Alto studios, for theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconeANGLE Media and theCUBE, and cohost of theCUBE. My next guest is Adrian Scott, who is the CEO of Soma Capital and Head of Technology of decent.bet. You can get the idea of that going to be all about, but, industry legend-- >> Yeah. >> Star of the big screen, good to see you, thanks for comin' in. >> Thank you John, it's great to see you. >> I'm glad I wanted to talk to you, because I know you've been doing a lot of traveling, you've been living in Panama, and overseas, outside the US, mainly around the work you've been doing on the crypto side, obviously Blockchain and with the start of decent.bet, lot of great stuff, but congratulations on a successful initial coin offering! >> Thank you. >> Great stuff, but you're also notable in the industry, initial investor in Napster, our generation, first P2P, the first renegade, you know, break down the movie business, but the beginning of what we're now seeing as that decentralized revolution. But you've seen many waves of innovation. You've seen 'em come and go. But this one in particular, Blockchain, decentralized internet, decentralized applications, crypto. Pretty awesome, and lot of young guns are coming in, a lot of older, experienced, alpha entrepreneurs are coming in like yourself, and, we're lookin' at it too. What's your take on it? I mean, how do you talk people that are like, "Well, hey, this is just a scam on the ICS site, "is this real, is it a bubble?" Share your vision on what this is all about, this whole mega-trend, crypto, decentralized. >> And I'll also add, in addition to what you mentioned, the other neat thing here is just the global nature of it. Because we're so used to being Silicon Valley-centric, and having to dig around for funding here, and also, looking only at talent that would move here, whereas with this whole new industry, it's very global, there's global teams, international teams, and, some of the Silicon Valley folks are just struggling to stay relevant, and stay in the game, so that's a fascinating aspect to this new revolution as well. >> And also, the thing I love about this market, it's very efficient, it takes away inefficiencies, in venture capital right now, and private equity being disrupted, that's where the arbitrage is, hence the ICO bubble, but, there is real, legit opportunities, you have Soma Capital, you're an investment fund, that you're doing token investments on. The global nature is interesting, I want to just ask here about this, because, my view is, it changes valuation, it changes valuation mechanisms, it changes the makeup of the venture architecture, it makes up on how people recruit teams, the technology used, and with open source, I mean, this is a first-time view at a new landscape. You can't take a pattern match, model, to this, your thoughts. >> Agree completely, and the efficiency you mentioned, applied to teams, and surfacing engineering talent, and the mathematical minds that can handle crypto internationally, the formation of teams internationally online is actually something special as well, so, with Decent Bet, our team, our founding team includes folks from the US, Panama, Australia, as well, who met up, in a Facebook chat group! And that's how they initially connected, and they didn't know each other physically, before this connection online, and that led to this project, Decent Bet, and ICO, and so on. So it's-- >> You created value from essentially a digital workforce, but, I mean, it reminds me of, like in the old days, you'd chat, and it wasn't a lot of face-to-face, but then now there's video gaming culture, you know, you come in, "Hey, you want to play a game," people don't even know each other, and get a visual, and also an immersive experience with each other. This is now the application for entrepreneurial equations, so this kind of gaming, the game is startups! So how are you looking at this, and how are you investing in it, what are some of the things, and what can people learn from what we're seeing in this new game-ified, if you will, you know, world of starting companies? >> I think one of the things you alluded to there has really become visible, which is the importance of video, as a medium, and I'm still, absorbing and adjusting to that myself. For example, we do video communications, we do conversations at Decent Bet, of the founding team, and, it really connects to the community, and it's so important, and I'm still absorbing it, like I mentioned, 'cause I'm just so used to publishing articles that are very clearly written, and detailed, and so on. We just did an AMA video, an Ask Me Anything video, in Las Vegas, with the executive team, and it went for 80 minutes, answering the questions, that the community had all submitted! And I just try and imagine that five years ago, it's new way of relating-- >> 'Cause there was no blogging, link back, the only thing you could do in blogging. >> Yeah. >> And then write a perfect blog post, or white paper. >> Exactly. >> And that was who you were. >> Yeah. >> Not anymore, it's more community driven. >> Exactly, and that video as a piece of it, has become so, so important, as a way of communicating the character of the team, and-- >> Before we get into decent.bet, I want to drill those, I think it's a great use case, and again, congratulations on great work there. I want to ask you about something that I've been fascinated with, because I obviously, our generation, we grew up on open source when it was second-class citizen, now it runs the whole world, as first-tier, first-class citizen in software world. The role of the community was really important in software development, 'cause that kept a, it kept a balance, there was governance, was consensus, these are words that you hear in the crypto world. And now, whether it's content and or ICO, the role of the community, and certainly, areas that's out of control in the ICO site, people are cracking down on certainly, like you see Facebook and Twitter trying to do something, but you can't stop the wisdom of the crowd. The role of the community in this crypto, decentralized market, ICOs and whatnot, is super important. Can you share your thoughts, and color commentary on why the community's so important, how do you deal with it (laughs), any best practices, either through scar tissue, or successes, share your thoughts on this. >> Oh yeah, it's totally become a factor, and it's 24/7, right? So, when you are running a crypto project, you need your community management team to be there, in the community channels, 24/7, you need to have somebody there, and they need to be at a certain level that they can handle the challenging questions! And we've definitely had moments where, we have people who try to create FUD, potentially, you know, and bring up stuff, and bring it up again later and whatnot, and we need to be proactive, so when questions come up, we were there to be able to explain, "Okay, here's where you can see this on the Blockchain. "You can verify it yourself." And sometimes, it happens when the team is just about to get on a plane (laughs), and be out of internet communication for a while, so, it's a real challenge, and there's been the voice of experience, on that. >> So talk about how you guys connect, because obviously, being connected is important with community access, but also, with connection, increases the service area for hacks, are you guys carrying five burner phones each, how do you handle email, how have you guys dealt with the whole, you know, there is a lot of online activity, certainly, people trying to do some spear phishing, or whatever tactics there are. Telegram has been littered with a lot of spoofing, and what not, so, all this is going on, that you got to have access communication. But there's a safety component that could have really big impacts to these businesses, that aren't tokeners, because, hacking can be easy if you don't protect yourself. >> We really like Signal app, as a communications medium, there's a new one, starting to grow now, called Threema, which is pretty interesting. Telegram, is just a real challenge, and it's unfortunate, because it's now become this metric. >> How many people are active on your channels-- >> That investors like to look at the size of the Telegram group, but we don't actually have a Telegram group for Decent Bet. And we've used Slack, we are going to be rolling out a internally hosted Slack replacement soon based on Rocket.Chat, we really like Rocket.Chat. As you mentioned, there are spear phishing, we do see that, and, one of the nice things is, a few years ago, you had trouble convincing a team to take security seriously! But you know, when you have team members who may have lost $10,000 in a hack-- >> Or more! >> Or more, you know, there's no question that this needs to be a priority, and everybody buys in on it. So that is one net positive out of this. >> Well let's talk about Decent Bet, fascinating use case, it's in the gaming area, gaming as in like betting, my friend Paul Martino invested I think in DraftKings, one of those other companies, I forget which one it was. In the US, there was regulatory issues, but, you know, outside the US where I think you guys are, there's not as much issue. Perfect use case for tokens, in my opinion. So, take a minute to explain Decent Bet, what you guys are all about, and talk about the journey of conception, when you guys conceived it, to ICO. >> Yeah. Decent Bet was founded about a year ago, by the CEO Jedidiah Taylor, who developed an interesting idea, and plan, so, the neat thing about Decent Bet is, first of all, you have all the benefits of the Ethereum Blockchain, in terms of verifying, transactions, and verifying the house's take. Additionally, what Decent Bet does is distributes all the profits of the casino back to the token-holders. 95% goes as proportionally, and then 5% is awarded in a lottery, so there's no profit for any Decent Bet entity, it all goes back to the tokenholders. So you use the token to play, by gambling, but you can also use your token to convert into house shares, for a quarter, and participate in-- >> So the house always wins, that a good model, right? >> Yes. >> You could become the house, through the tokens. >> Exactly, so, the motto we use is our house is your house (laughs). >> Don't bet against the house. >> Yeah. >> Alright so, I love the gambling aspect of it, I think that's going to be a winner. Tech-involved, ICO process bumps, learnings, things you could share with folks? >> Yeah, so, on the technology, one of the neat things we are doing is, we do offer a slots game, which is a primary component of online gambling, and casinos, a pretty dominant piece of the action. But, if you are going to do a simple slots game on the Blockchain, and wait around for blocks to be mined, you're not going to have a great experience. 'Cause you're going to be waiting around, more than you're going to be clicking that button. So, what we use is a technology called state channels, which allows us to do a session, kind of on a side channel, so to speak, and through this state channel, at the end of the session, you post back the results. So you get the verifiability of the Blockchain, but without the delay. So that's a major difference. >> That's off chain, right? >> Yeah. >> Or the on chain is off chain. >> It's kind of-- >> So you're managing the league, to see the chain, so you still experience, and then get to preserve it on the chain. >> Exactly-- >> Okay. >> In terms of the ICO experience, we initiated the ICO end of September, ran for a month, raised more than 52,000 Ether, so very productive ICO process, but with actually some interesting details, so, the ICO structure limited the amount that a particular address could purchase, in the first phases, to 10,000 worth, and then 20,000 dollars worth, with the idea of getting the tokens into the hand of, of people who are going to potentially use them for betting, not just-- >> The more the merrier for you, not, no one taking down allocations, big players. >> Exactly. >> Or whales. >> Not just for the whales, take all, kind of thing. So, that was a interesting structure, and-- >> And that worked well? >> Yeah! >> Alright, talk about the dynamic of post-ICO, because now you guys are building, can you give an update on the state of where you guys are at with the product, availability, how that's going, 'cause obviously you raised the capital through the ICO, democratize it if you will through clever mechanism, which is cool, thanks for sharing that, now what happens? Now, what's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, I think we're doing pretty well in terms of hitting milestones, and showing progress compared to a lot of projects, we released our test net, with slots, and then sportsbook, at the beginning of January, and mid-January, for sportsbook. And, we also did some upgrades with our wallet, we released that, for some enhanced usability, and handling during high peaks on the Ether network, Ethereum network. And then, also, our moving to main net. So we did some newer versions of the test net-- >> When did the main net come in? >> Main net is coming out end of April, and we're on track with that. >> Great, awesome. Congratulations, congratulations on a great job, 52,000 Ether, great raise there, and awesome opportunity. Soma Capital. >> Mm-hmm. >> You're investing now, what do you look for for deals, there's more money chasing good deals now, as we can see, has been a flight to quality obviously. Great global landscape still, what are you looking for? And advice to folks who are looking to do a token, sale, what's your-- >> Big thing we look for are real projects, so (laughs), and they're not that many out there, so we do look for a real use case that makes sense, because, there's a lot of folks out there just sticking Blockchain tag onto anything. And it's not just-- >> Like Kodak for instance. >> Yeah. >> Kodak's the prime example. >> Yes. There are projects out there doing interesting things, Guardium is doing some neat things in terms of 911 response, and opening that up, and creating an alternative to government services. There's WorkCoin, which is-- >> Do you invest in Guardium? >> Yeah, in Guardium, yeah. >> I interviewed them in Puerto Rico. >> Okay, great. >> Great project. >> So very interesting, I was recently giving a talk at a university in Guatemala, and, the students there at business school, it really resonated, the message there, to them, about okay, government 911 is maybe not the ultimate solution for getting help when you need it. >> Well I think, there's a lot of this AI for a good concept, going to Blockchain for good, because, you're seeing a lot of these easy, low-hanging fruit applications around these old structural intuitions. And that's where the action is, right, I mean, do you agree? >> Yeah, yes. And the other thing we're looking at is not just Blockchain. So I really like talking about the field more as crypto, and, I have a little video I did on calling it kind of decentralized, crypto-enabled applications, or platforms. So, beyond Blockchain, we have DAGs, Directed Acyclic Graphs, one interesting-- >> Like Hashgraph. >> Yeah, Ha-- >> Hashgraph's a DAG, isn't it? It's kind of a DAG, Hashgraph? >> Yeah, so, I'm not a huge fan of Hashgraph, one that I do like is called Guld, G-U-L-D, which is, again, thinking beyond the Blockchain. 'Cause we get so tied into Blockchain, Blockchain, Blockchain-- >> What does beyond the Blockchain mean to you? Thinking beyond the Blockchain, what does that mean to you? >> So, the proof of work process, the mining process, the creating new blocks process, is one way of doing things. But we have all these other things going on in crypto, like the signing process, and so on, and so, you can use those in a DAG, a different architecture than just this mining new blocks, you know, mental model. And so, that can be used for different use cases, for publishing, for group consensus, and so on. And so, Guld is an example of a project where it looks like there is something real there, and that's a very interesting product. >> Advice for folks that are looking at tokeneries, because, again, we've said this on theCUBE many times, people know, I'm beating this drum, you got the startups, that see an opportunity, which is fantastic, and then on the end of the spectrum, you got the, "Oh, shit, we're out of business, "let's pivot, throw the Hail Mary, put Blockchain on it, "crypto, and get an ICO, and get some going." And then you've got these growth companies that are, either self funded and or growing, that have decentralized kind of feel to it, it has an architecture that's compatible with tokenization. >> Yeah. >> So we see those three categories. Do you agree, am I missing anything? In terms of the profile? And which ones do you like? >> Well, I think one thing that we need to look at, in each of those cases, is decentralization actually happening, in the project? And are people actually thinking about decentralization. Because, it can be scary for a traditional company! Because, if it truly becomes decentralized, you're not controlling it anymore. And so, that is-- >> If you're based on control, then it's incompatible. >> And that's the real Hail Mary, right? (laughs) When you give up that control, if you give it up, so, we have examples coming out, where, you know, Ripple is running just a few nodes, Neo's running a few more, and you know, things that are not really decentralized, and they're saying, "Well, we're going to be," (laughs) you know? >> Will they ever? >> Is it going to be in the future-- >> Yeah, that's always the question, will they ever be? They've already made their money, well certainly Ripple's done well, but, I mean, what's the incentive to go-- >> Yeah. >> Decentralized. >> Yeah, so if, if you are creating a new project, the benefit from this architecture, beyond the money, is to think about it in that decentralized way, and figure out token economics that work, in that context, in that paradigm! And that's really where the challenge is, but also really where some of the benefits can rise, because, that is what enables truly new ways of doing things. >> Talk about the dynamic, because I actually, I live in Silicon Valley, I've been here 19 years, going on 20, you know, I moved from the east coast, and basically, if you weren't here, this is where the action is. If you're in the sports of tech, this is where all the athletes are. That's now changed, as you mentioned earlier, when we started, it's everywhere. Now, also there's jurisdictional issues, I mean the US, one guy's told me, the US is turning into Europe, all these regulations, it's not as much free capital as you think, and then, we certainly know that. With FCC, and others are putting the clamp down. But, structuring the token, is a concern, right? Or consideration. >> Yes. >> And a concern, so, you know, US entrepreneur, what should they do in your opinion, and if someone's outside the US, what do they do? What's the play book, or, not play book, what's the best path right now? >> Leave the US (laughs). Move out of the US. >> Tell that, wife and four kids. See you later. Yeah, but that's real legit, that's-- >> Come and check out Panama, one of my friends is building a Blockchain incubator, crypto-incubator, I mean I think if you're-- >> What's it like to move out of the United States, I know you just recently went to Panama for this, but, what's it like? Is it scary down there, I mean, is it entrepreneurially friendly? What's the vibe, what's the scene like, take a minute to explain that. >> So I've actually been out there 12 years now, in Panama. One of the neat things, you want a place that has an international outlook, international perspectives, so, you want to think in terms of a Dubai, a Singapore, a Hong Kong. And so, Panama has some aspects of that, it's not perfect, but it does have that international perspective thanks to the Canal! So it has, you know, a hundred years! (laughs) >> It also has the Panama papers, which is a negative blowback for those guys, so it's a safe place to do commerce, in your opinion? >> Um, it is a nice geographic base to do international commerce. >> Got it. >> So, you don't necessarily want to rely on the local jurisdiction, but, in terms of a geographic base, that is US time zone, US dollar, no hurricanes, it's a very interesting place. >> Puerto Rico's got the hurricanes, we know that. >> Yeah. >> Final thoughts, just overall perspective, you've been around the block, we've been around the block, both of us have, I mean, I kind of have these pinch me almost like, "Damn, this is great time, "I wish I was 22," I mean, do you have those? What's it like, how you explain this environment? If people ask you, "Hey, what was it like in the old days?" You know, when you have to provision all your own stack, and do all the stuff, it's pretty interesting right now. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I mean, I think we're going through an interesting moment right now, where, we are getting to a point where the forces of centralization are coming against the forces of decentralization, and that includes from the regulatory, as well as the business side, and so, I think it is important, as we look where to dedicate our efforts to, to really find ways to increase the decentralization as a factor that encourages creativity, and entrepreneurship. >> Yeah, it really is a personal, I think it's a great environment. Decent.bet, bet, make your bets, any updates on how to get tokens, what people can expect, a quick plug-in for Decent. >> Yeah, check out our website, we've got links to exchanges, the token is currently listed on Cryptotopia, HitBTC, and a couple other exchanges, and, yeah! Please check out the test net, please check out the white paper, and just learn about how this protocol works, this platform works. I think it is very inspiring, as a structure. >> Adrian Scott here, inside theCUBE, Soma Capital, also experienced entrepreneur himself, technologist, and has been through the ICO process, head of technology at decent.net, we'll be checkin' it out, it's theCUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconeANGLE Media's independent live broadcast of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to have join with me a first-time guest, John McAdam, who is the former CEO of F5 and an independent board member for a number of companies including F5, Tableau, and Nutanix. The show that we're at. So John, thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so let's start, just for people who aren't familiar, I said, you know, you were CEO of F5 for quite a few years, just give us a little bit about your background in business and what brings you here. I graduated from Glasgow University, you probably can tell from the accent, I'm Scottish. >> Stu: Yes. I moved over to the States when I joined a company called Sequent in 1994, and I became president of Sequent in 1995, and I've actually been in the States since then, up until I retired in April this year. So I spent 11 years at Sequent, president and chief operating officer, big server company is what we did at the time. Mainly selling Oracle type databases running on the servers. We were purchased, we were acquired by IBM in '99. I stayed with IBM for a year. I was running the AIX business globally for IBM, and then I was headhunted by F5 Networks, and I joined them in 2000, just as the .com bust was about to happen, and we'll talk about that later maybe. And I was the CEO at F5 for 17 years, and during the last few years I joined the board of Tableau, as you mentioned, and a company called Apptio as well based in Seattle, and of course Nutanix. Yeah, so a lot of our audience are everything from CIOs to people that someday might want to be a CIO, but very much kind of a blend of business and technology, can you tell people, some people are like, I don't understand how somebody becomes an independent board member. You're not the former CEO of that company or you're not one of the people... What does it mean to be an independent board member? You know, it's an interesting story because the independent board members at F5 actually kept encouraging me to join the board, and I kept saying, no I don't need to do that, I'm really busy, focused on the company. And also I've been a board member since 1995 as an executive, as a board member of Sequent and a board member of F5, so why would I want to join a board. And then eventually, I actually got approached, first of all by Tableau, the CEO of Tableau at the time, and seemed a very interesting conversation. So I decided to join the board. It was pre-IPO. And I thought I could add some value there, in terms of growing the company, etc. So I went along to the first board meeting and I went to the second, and I came back to the F5 board and I said, I apologize. I should have done this earlier. I didn't appreciate how much I would realize and learn being at the other side of the table as an independent board member. Because remember, you're turning up once every three months or two months. You don't know the day-to-day what's going on, but you have a very different perspective. And I wish I had done it earlier, but really it's all about trying to give consultancy, support, advice, obviously there's governance things you do as well. And I've really enjoyed being on the boards and especially Nutanix. Okay, your career, you know we've had, I think since about the time you joined F5, there was the .com crash, there was the downturn in '07/'08, so you've seen some boom times, you've seen some down times. What do you take away for those and how do you help advise the companies that you're working with? You're absolutely right. It's been an interesting experience. When I joined, as I mentioned earlier, it was a .com about to crash happening, and the big issue for F5 was it was actually 90% .com business, so the revenue collapsed completely, the stock price dropped, from today's price, from $21 to $1.50. We've run out of cash in certain areas. We ended up selling off 10% of the company to actually Nokia, they took ownership. So it was very much a survival phase. And in that phase you really have to, you need to make quick decisions. There's no time for the coaching that you would normally do. It's not as inspirational. But once you're out of it, once you get the P and L, you know, the profit and loss, and the balance sheet in good shape. Then we moved into, I would call, the stability phase, and the deal there was that we really were building a new architecture of product. We knew it was going to take a couple years. So that's all about making sure that you're in a good environment, you're going to deliver the goods from a market perspective, and we did that. I remember this well, in September 2004, we announced a new version, a new architecture, boom, we jumped into the growth (mumbles). Fifty percent growth, not quite as much as Nutanix today, but 50, 55, 40%. That's different, that's an inspirational world, you know, where you're really trying to inspire the company, it's all about hiring, and it's fun. How much do companies, when you advise them, worry about kind of what's happening to them versus what's happening locally and globally from an economics standpoint? I talked to Dheeraj many times kind of leading up to the IPO, and it was like, well, we have no control over kind of the global economical pieces, so we're building for the long term, and we will just eventually have to be like, okay, we'll go out in the public market. You know, you can't, just like buying and selling stocks, you can't necessarily time it. So, how does that impact, you know, kind of balance some of those things? I mean the best example is 2008, 2009, where we had the financial crisis, and, as I mentioned, we were very much in growth phase in 2004, '05, '06, '07. Interesting enough, as we were moving into 2008, the timing wasn't great because we were doing a product transition, and then along came the financial crisis, and it was pretty mind boggling, And the end of 2008, December 2008, customers stopped buying. And at first we thought oh my God, is this just us? And then of course, pretty soon moving into January 2009 you realize it's not you. So we didn't ignore it, to be honest, we didn't ignore it. But what we did do was we kept hiring. We cut back a little bit on the hiring, and in fact, I wish we hadn't have done that. I wish we would have completely ignored it, and of course this is me now looking back, so I can say that. The reason I'm saying I wish we had ignored it and kept growing was six months after, moving into the second half of 2009, not only did we see our business starting to grow again, but it accelerated because a demand had built up during that time. So bottom line is I don't think you can ignore global issues going on. You certainly can't ignore big global issues like 2008, but you still have to focus on what you know as your business, especially if you know you've got a good market, you know there's a demand, and just see yourself through it. Yeah, you mentioned one of the companies you joined was pre-IPO from an advisor standpoint. Have you been a Nutanix advisor just before the IPO (mumbles)? I have, I've actually had the unique experience of being on Tableau pre-IPO, Nutanix pre-IPO, and also Apptio, all pre-IPO. So I've watched the three of them going through the IPO process. So of course, Dheeraj tries to say, look, you know, I'm not going to let Wall Street kind of dictate anything, but, you know, it has to be a little bit different when you've got kind of the financial people looking at things from the outside, always trying to second guess strategy and the like. How do you give advice through that? Yeah, my advice on this, and it is somewhat different, to say it's not different wouldn't be completely correct, however, you can't let Wall Street run your business, you can't, especially if you've got conviction in terms of what you're doing. The one area where you do need to be a bit careful is that, the thing I've always said when I was CEO of F5 was our business was all about, when I was asked, do you think you could be acquired? The answer has always been from me the following: We're focused on the business, we're focused on growing a company. When you do that you become more strategic and attractive to other companies. But as long as you keep growing, your market cap keeps high, and you keep going. Right. If your market cap drops as well as the stock price there is always a danger that you could become an acquisition target. So you can't ignore it completely. But frankly, both of those messages are win-wins for investors. Absolutely, what can you say about Nutanix? You know, a year after an IPO, 2800 employees, pushing globally, you know, this show's doubled in attendance from last year. Without getting into closed-doors things, what's your take on (mumbles). Yeah, and as an independent director, I have to be more generic, but clearly, fast-growing company in a great market, a leader in the hyperconvergent market. I love their concept of simplicity, invisible infrastructure. I think that's a place that customers want to be right now, so I think they're in really good position. What in the market is interesting you these days? I look across kind of the companies you work with, you know, data is becoming more and more valuable. I spent many years working for a large storage company, used to be it wasn't really about the data, it was about the storing, and now, data from the big data companies, everything else, it's about how do I leverage and get information out, you know, we're hearing Nutanix play into that message. Yeah, and really it's the three main areas, data, you know data in particular, the Cloud, I'm not going to give you anything new here, and security. They're the three hot topics today. And the three of those are twisted in a knot are they not? They're all linked together. We just interviewed a gentleman from a bank, and he said basically, all of our budget gets put on security these days. Yeah, I mean, what concerns you, is it kind of the geopolitical, the hackers and ransomware, security? I think back early in my career, security always got lip service as being important, but today, it absolutely comes to the front of mind and you know most companies I talk to are concern would probably be understating it as to kind of the state of security. No absolutely, I mean, it's touching everybody now, boards, independent board members, it's high up on the list of discussion topics at board meetings. You know, every company is vulnerable, and if you're a technology company that's got customer data and you're in the security business as well, you really have to make sure that you're well protected. How often is security a board-level discussion these days? Most board members, most board discussions, and certainly in the audit committee, it's almost every one now. What has to happen there? Making sure that it's being looked at properly by the executives, that they take it seriously, there's enough investment, making sure that all the tools are in place if there is an attack, all of the above. Do you touch on GDPR at all? I'm curious if that comes up in your conversations. No I haven't been involved in that. I know there's a breakout session on it today, but I've not been involved in that. It just reminds me of a similar thing is that people have said, you need to make sure you're doing your due diligence and doing as much as you can, which feels like the same for security, because nobody's going to say, yes, I'm 100% secure because there's no such thing anymore. There's no such thing and there's so many different attacks, and frankly, most companies have got security solutions from so many different vendors, even sometimes from your competitor. All right, so the last thing I have to say is I don't think we've ever done theCUBE in Scotland, and it's a beautiful country, so we've got to figure out how to do some small event there. I'll help you. (laugh) All right, John, I want to give you the final word, your take, you come, why do you attend? Obviously you're an independent board, you probably have some meetings, talk to us about a show like this, what brings you. Yeah, and this is the first one I've attended. I've actually attended one similar with Tableau and similar with Apptio as well. It's good for an independent board member to see some of the presentations, how the executives and management are talking to customers, so it's actually good to get more of a feel for the business. All right, well John McAdam, appreciate you bringing a different perspective to our programming. We always want to help give a taste of what's happening at these shows out to our audience. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by, NetApp. (upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, live here, in Las Vegas, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of NetApp's Insight 2017, and I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconeANGLE Media, and co-host of The Cube, with Keith Townsend, my co-host all day today, going until seven o'clock, here with NetApp Insight. We have a special segment, we had an opening in the segment, so we're going to talk about communities. In light of the tragedy in Vegas, that happened, really, on the doorstep of the NetApp event, and they've handled it with great class and respect. The show must go on, as they say. As the community comes together, we wanted to have segment on communities, and the role of communities. This is something that, as you know, at theCUBE, you know it's a real passion for us. The role of the community, and as well as Keith, it's important to know who your peers are, your "peeps," or whatever you want to say, and that's important because you look at the society today, it needs to change. And I don't want to re-hash our our intro on our thoughts on the massacre, but you know, the key trends that are happening in Blockchain, for instance, really highlight something that I want to talk about, and that is, know your customer, and anti-money laundering. Not that anti-money laundering has anything to do with communities. It speaks to the new culture of anonymous. A lot of the underbelly and future trends are around Bitcoin and Blockchain, and that's great for anonymous transactions, of which the outcome is money laundering. So there's two major trends in Blockchain, anti-money laundering and know your customer. This is about communities, and all the success in this cryptocurrency is about communities. The success in the enterprise we believe, and B2B marketing, and in general, in society is, know who your neighbor is, know who your community is, know who your peers are, because we have to be aware of each other, because if we see a crazy guy, we have to report it. >> That's right. >> You know? Role of community is going to be instrumental. Annalisa Camarillo is with the NetApp team. You're in the community business, you're in the content business. Content and communities go hand-in-hand. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Of course, and thank you for having me. So, I've thought about content, for a really long time. One of the things that comes to mind that I explain to my family, is really that I'm thankful to be living in this era, where content is, sort of becoming democratized, right? Where we've given people communities, the ability to talk, the ability to communicate whatever's on their mind. In your case, as you were just saying, when there's accidents that have happened, when there's tragedies and things like that, that take place, they now have, are equipped with the tools to be able to communicate, to be able to do something about that. Which has changed the way content is now seen, right? One of the other things that I hear a lot is, "Content is king." And the way that I see that is, I don't think content is king, I think customers are king, audiences are king. I think context is queen, and then I think content is just the result of what we've done as a society, to now allow the microphone to be given to the communities, right? Let them share their perspective. >> And content is data, too, so you bring up context, context is queen, I love that, I haven't heard that before. But content can come out of engagement, new content. And if you look at the fake news, and all the critique out there, the Russians, they didn't really hack the election, they took advantage of Facebook, which is not a real context, they don't do original news, they're a data platform for people to hook up with people in high school, get connections, so original content and communities also provide data because, if we're contributing content and people applause, okay, which, Medium has that new feature which I love, and then you know it's good, if no one claps, then it fell flat, so that's data. >> Exactly. >> And so you start to see how the world's changing with the data. My son said to me yesterday, he says, "Dad, you're from the generation that uses search engines." (laughter) "You actually type keywords into a browser that go through results and sift through things?" And he's got a good point. >> Right. >> The world has changed on how people discover organically through peers and relationships, there'll always be batch marketing, I call it, search, email marketing, funneling, but users know what that means, they're walking on the lot to buy a car, they get jammed up, but now they want to just talk to their friends, "Hey what do you think?" "How do you make sense of what happened, or what's happening?" "Who's involved, what does it mean to me?" >> So my son, who's 10 years old, he actually only uses voice assistance for all of his searching of content. He does not text anything, he does not type something into a search engine, he talks to his phone. And so if he wants to find the latest, fastest exotic cars, as an example, because he loves exotic cars, he'll ask for it on his phone. So voice assistance, digital assistance, all of those types of technologies that have now been brought to market are going to be the new ways that audiences and communities engage with content, right? And so the interesting thing is that if he's interested in knowing what is going on in the world, if he's interested in knowing what's going on in the neighborhood, he talks to his phone. So he avoids advertisements, he avoids information that may be- >> John: They have Ad Blocker on all their browsers, I mean, ads are dead. >> The days are so different. What does that mean for NetApp? So this gets back down to my view on B2B marketing, I think the batch stays around but this real time thing is organic, it's community-based, so the role of the communities are going to be more important than ever. As I said on the intro, the monologue, know your customer is a part of things like a BlockChain, banks do it for fraud, we should know our people in our communities, and it changes how we engage. >> Annalisa: Right. >> What is NetApp's customer? It's broadening...you have to serve your traditional storage admin and then you're broadening out to a new customer, what does that mean about the types of content you guys create and where you place that content? >> It means we get to have a lot of fun. It means, to be honest, so I'm not a marketer by academic background, but the marketing that I'm now doing and that I'm participating in is one that I love and I love it because it's now more about human behavior. It is about telling stories. It is about bringing journalistic value to content. Just telling the story, right? And so our audiences now get to interact with content that I think is more direct. That I think is truthful. That I think is transparent. And it's all of those kinds of attributes that I think technology has helped break through, right? Because I appreciate being able to choose what I consume, and I think choosing what, our customers choosing what they consume, a lot of it is going to be driven by data and the way that we use information to teach every marketer who the audience is and what they actually what to know. So data analytics and marketing in particular is really big at NetApp right now, and so we're paying a lot of attention to prescribing content to the reader, and being more of a reader advocate than being a company who's focused on selling and selling products and pushing products. But really understanding what is at the heart of our customers' needs, using the information we have on who they are and what they want, and delivering that and only that, right? And letting them interact and go on the journey with NetApp in the way that they choose to do it. And so I think that that's exciting in my opinion. That's the kind of content I want to write. That's the kind of content that every marketer is going to have fun with, right? The day and age where, now, I am free, I'm free to tweet what I want to tweet, and share it with my tweet friends, and I get to knowledge-share, I get to communicate with them in real time, and so a lot of those things I think are very exciting about the new era for marketing... >> John: And the B2B marketing opportunity, too, for your customers, if they want to be collaborating, because they're in a discovery. The old way was discovering, was like I said, search, you navigate to a webpage, or a landing page, or whatever. Now it's conversational. >> Annalisa: Right, exactly, real time conversation. >> So storytelling and attention's one thing, but if you do too much attention, people are like, "I want value." >> That's true. >> I want content and value. >> That's very true, you don't want to be over-scripted. And you want to just let things happen organically. And so organic experiences, I think, is another thing that we've talked a lot about. Take this event as an example. We let our heart lead, we put our best foot forward, and everybody is really rallying around that, right? Our customers really just want to know that we're a company with heart, and that we pay attention, and we're listening, and we're aware of what's happening around us, and that's the kind of content they want. >> And you guys are great, thanks for working with us. We appreciate the opportunity to come here and thanks for sponsoring theCube. >> Thank you for having me. >> We believe that events are no longer one and done. On digital it's ongoing. >> Annalisa: Right. And certainly events do happen, and we will constantly be working with the community. Community model, theCube, that's our passion. Here at the NetApp Insight 2017, I'm John Furrier, stay tuned for more coverage, here live at the Mandalay Bay, after this short break. (upbeat music) (upbeat rock music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by, NetApp. >> Hey welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconeANGLE Media, and co-host of theCUBE. My co-host this week is Keith Townsend, @CTOAdvisor, and our next guests are Josh Atwell, who's a developer advocate at NetApp, and Jason Benedicic, who's with, Principal Consultant ANS Group Cloud Service Provider in the UK, great topic, talking DevOps. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Good to see you as well, thank you. >> Boy, DevOps has gone mainstream. >> It's a thing. >> Okay, it's absolutely gone mainstream, we've been saying it for years, I remember going back a few years ago, you say, DevOps, huh? Infrastructure as Code? Everyone loves it, it's now the new model, people are moving fast to. What's goin on with NetApp and tell all of us your story. Go ahead. >> So within NetApp, we look at DevOps as a unique opportunity for us to level up. Everybody that's doing infrastructure and going from saying, you just going out and developing an application to saying, we can actually help deliver you the best experience. We look at where applications are being developed and supported, everybody likes to say it's straight out to the public cloud, that's where all the innovation happens, but, it's also happening on premises as well. The reason that we see most frequently is that reduced friction. You know, going to the public cloud, that has become a model that people can go out, they can get what they need and do what they need, and it's been something that's significantly easier than what their local IT organization has had. DevOps is forcing infrastructure and IT to understand that availability and reliability, which is what we've always been measured on, is no longer the core measure that we have to focus on. It's agility and availability and delivering unique services. >> Well I would just say to your point, Wikibon analysts research have validated your point, and they actually show the data that the on premise, they call it true private cloud, numbers, are growing actually, not declining. What is declining is about $1.5 billion in non-differentiated labor, but that's shifting to SAS models. So what it means is, the on premise action, in a cloud operational way, is growing. Which is not saying that's declining, it's just saying, people are getting their house in order. They're doing DevOps on prem. Prep to do cloud. >> Yeah. >> Cloud's got native stuff, you do versioning, you can put some stuff in the cloud, test/dev, sure, there's great use cases, but most enterprises are on prem, getting ready to take advantage of it. >> It's an absolute and conversation, and that's also somethin' that we are working really hard with our customers, in our field and the entire company as a whole. To understand, it's not an or conversation. Most companies are looking at how do we solve a variety of different challenges, how do we accommodate for a variety of different workloads that are being developed, and how do we modernize the mode one operational workloads that we've had and bring them into the future with new services. So, it's an absolute and conversation. It's a pretty exciting time to be dealing with IT. >> So Jason, as we think about DevOps, we give, we have plenty of examples for private cloud and inside of our own datacenters, but you help run a public cloud. >> So we run services within a public cloud. >> Right. >> And a hybrid model. So we run a number of services to man assessments, so we help in the UK, I think we're a little bit further behind than the US is currently, so some of the biggest services that we do is helping people to assess their applications, assess their data, and understand what they can move. Using things like the Gartner TIME Analysis, where we can take best leverage of on premises private cloud, where you've got hybrid approach, where you've got native. We got the expertise around retooling and assessment services to move legacy applications into a cloud model, and then we provide management services on top, and those sorts of things. That's where we use, utilize the DevOps, around taking what would be our managed services ITIL processes, things that people would traditionally do manually. We take a lot of that, and we prepackage that up into workflows and data automation operations for our customers so they can provision where they like, across a multitude of on premises and in the public cloud. So we take that work which would traditionally be done by a analyst on a desk or that sort of thing, package that up, using a lot of NAVs, APIs, and Solufy tooling. So, we're saving enterprises time so they can work on what's really important to them, and that's their line of business applications. >> So from an assessment perspective, I love to get feedback, what are customers learning? Is it, that they thought they could just lift and shift, or that they have to go through some type of DevOps transformation -- >> Yeah, so -- >> What's been the balance of the results? >> Yeah, so a lot of people don't necessarily understand where they are. There are a lot of misconceptions around being able to lift and shift things to the crowd, but that's not really a great cost model. I find in the public sector in the UK a lot, is you've got a lot of legacy applications that potentially people don't have any knowledge of, 'cause the people that ran them and installed them in the first place have long gone. They need to understand what those applications do for their business, what the business processes around them are, and how they can take that forward into a new model. A lot of retooling. Actually, a lot of time we see the application should probably be ditched and let's look for something that we can just build cloud native. >> So, that requires a new set of skills to operate at that higher level of the stack as we call it in the industry, however, that leaves a lot of low level work that still needs to be done, so automation has kind of walked hand-in-hand with DevOps. What is the NetApp story around automation and helping to remediate some of this low level activity that needs to be done repeatedly? >> Big focus for us as a company is not trying to dictate tooling to people. If you are using Docker, we offer a native Docker volume plugin that allows you to plug right into Docker and be able to provision and manage storage as an application owner or developer, to get what you need, and to handle the services that are available there. When we look at configuration management, or helping code and artifact management, cloud, with Openstack, or VMware vRealize Suite, our initiative is to make the NetApp products seamless and invisible into your processes. How do we remove and eliminate handoffs, and how do we make all of those processes effortless, so that as you identify those tasks, and those high effort but low value tasks that has to be -- taken advantage of. >> And automation -- and automation's critical there. >> Yeah, yeah. Being able to automate those things, remove people from that process, and using their skills and talents for things like auditing, and understanding proper behavior, checking that people are delivering what they are supposed to, and consuming from a policy framework. >> I'd like to get back to the automation, but I just want to shift to Josh, so hold the thought on automation. Josh, I want to get your thoughts on, as we get to automation we start talking about hybrid cloud. You're doing hybrid cloud. That's your -- >> Yeah. >> You're on the front line, you're doing it. Also, hybrid cloud also means things differently, so when you think about hybrid cloud, a customer's got to get their act together. We heard earlier from the NetApp folks, the VP of Engineering, we're doing three things: modernizing the infrastructure, that's just like, okay go clean house, fix things, making sure we're solid, rock solid, build the next generation data center, be ready for the cloud. >> Yep. >> Okay. So, there's some things that need to get done there. What's your view on the table stakes to get there, because you got orchestration capabilities, cloud orchestration demo is hot, we saw that, at the show here. What is NetApp doing to make hybrid cloud easier? >> Across all the products that we utilize run NetApp, you've got APIs on everything. They got a lot of really good tools there, and they're moving away from the traditional hardware. I've been working with NetApp for like 16 years on. It was a hardware company, a software company, and now it's just moved on even further. There's a further evolution there, a management company. It's not just, you're managing your data, the data flow, the fabric around it, and the tools that are on offer there are just game changers. Especially the Cloud Automation option this morning. Yeah, that was great. >> As people know NetApp, eight years ago, they were -- I was scratching my head saying, wait a minute, why are you going to Amazon? So, early in cloud, so clearly they know what DevOps is, so it's not just lip service, we know that, that's just my personal observation and experience with NetApp, but Josh, I want you to talk to the audience that is either a NetApp customer or looking at NetApp, what's different now, what should they know about the new NetApp now, obviously you're on the A-Team, I see the shirt there, but, NetApp has changed and they're changing. I mean, SolidFire came in, you're seeing a lot more action on the DevOps cloud with the flash, some good stuff there, but NetApp has been an innovative company, what's the new story for NetApp in your words? >> For me, it's the speed that they're able to react to the market, moving the ONTAP to a cadence model, six month releases, moving products away from tin, into software, it's all about the value of what we can provide. We've got standalone products now from NetApp that can just do Office 365 backup. That's something that's completely moved forward. You've got a level of innovation and speed coming out of NetApp that's just unrivaled. >> Josh, I'd like to get your thoughts back to automation now, I'm CSO, the cost thing I hear all the time is the following narrative, I don't want the shiny new toy, I got to lot of stuff on my plate. I got an application development team I need to scale up and make modern, which is DevOps, not just take the old guys and put 'em in, I got to recruit, retrain, replatform, I have cybersecurity going on, I got to unbolt that from IT and make that essentially a top line, top reporting to the board, do all the cyber stuff, and I got the data governance stuff to deal with, and by the way, I got IoT over the top coming in. If it's not clear as day on the cloud, it doesn't meet my conversation. How do you guys engage in a dialog like that? One, do you agree with that, that makes that statement, but, that's a lot of stuff going on. Bombs are dropping inside the customer's environment, they're like, this is Hell right now, I got to lot of stuff to do. How do you guys help that environment? >> I think one thing that we have to be mindful of is that we've moved beyond being able to define a very static and rigid infrastructure architecture. In the past, we would define what our storage, what our compute, what our networking is, and that's going to -- what it's going to be. It's very easy to say I know how to support 10,000 Exchange users. That's always been something that we've been comfortable talking about. What you outlined, is the new reality for IT in that, we are getting a diverse set of requirements where we'll come in and say we need to deliver this new application so that we can get to market and capture -- I was actually talking to someone in the military. I said, what if the military was to develop a new recruiting tool, and they go in and say, we need to build this recruiting tool, but we actually don't know how much data is going to be required for it. IT is not comfortable with that conversation. But NetApp has developed, our portfolio, and the integrations and tool sets that we've integrated with, to make that conversation a little bit easier. >> They're not comfortable because they can't forecast it, or it's a blank check in their mind, or they don't know what the -- how to architect it, what's the -- >> It's because we're not accustomed to architecting for those types of scenarios. We generally have focused on what is going to be your use case, when do you need it delivered by, how much do you need? We're still having that same conversation, but the answer now is, I don't know, but we have to ready for whichever direction it goes. >> That creates a good point, at VMWorld we noticed that there's a convergence, not a lot of people are talking about this yet, but I can see the canary in the coal mine chirping away, is that the convergence between hardware and software stacks are coming together. There are untested use cases coming down the pike. >> Yeah. >> That just -- I need this, but, we haven't tested it. Or we don't know the capacity, so you have to have a serverless mindset, you got to have DevOps mindset, you really got to be prepared. >> Well there's certainly a lot of maturity that we're working through. We are definitely from a DevOps perspective, in that juvenile phase, where we're learning who we are, the changes that are happening to us as we go, and we're getting a much more responsible view of what we're trying to deliver against. It's really uncomfortable for a lot of people to have a conversation where there's so many unknowns, but fortunately, the technologies we're able to bring to market and deliver, are providing that, as I describe it, a foothold to make you feel stable in that process to at least know that your data's getting where it needs to be and protected. >> Keith, I know you got to question, but my final point of that is that, that kind of, we see that evolve in the customer mindset too, where you start to see the word trusted relationship become real. It became a cliche, we're a trusted partner, but reality now with all this uncertainty, they need the headroom, they got to cross the bridge with the future with proven people. So that's why I kind of like, I don't mean to dis on the startups, but the shiny new toy's not going to win the day. You got to really hit the scenario today, and prepare to cross that bridge to the future with partners, and I think that's what you're saying. >> Yeah, that is a big part, and the partnerships that we have with folks like Red Hat and Jfrog, where we're trying to improve that experience of implementing these environments and supporting these new workloads, is absolutely a big part of what we're doing. >> So I'd like to talk a little about the necessity of requirements coming from the business, and tying it into something I heard from the stage yesterday. I'm not a storage guy. >> Me neither. >> I'm a data guy. And you've said that before, but one of the things that has interested me is this concept of the data fabric. >> Yes. >> Can you tie in the vision of data fabric to kind of this model of DevOps and being able to adjust to the changing needs of the business? >> I think what's really important and to be mindful of is that as we are seeing IT getting these requirements, as the businesses are identifying what is really impactful and the innovation that we need to deliver on, the data fabric is providing choice. It's allowing you to look at being able to deliver these enterprise class protection and replication, and capabilities, and allowing you to develop, innovate, and run your workloads wherever is most important to you, without having to completely reshift your thinking and what your skillsets are. We are able to level up everyone that has been involved with NetApp, and has invested their career, and invested their energy and becoming knowledgeable in that space, now allowing them to extend out into new areas in the cloud, hybrid cloud frameworks, but also providing these capabilities to the people consuming those resources without them having to care about the infrastructure. They know it is there, they know they can reach out to it and define snapshotting and take advantage of clones, and deliver a good developer experience, without having to understand exactly what's happening in the infrastructure. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on, I see having seamless infrastructure is what everyone wants, but it's hard. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> Final comments, as you go into the future now with DevOps, it's become now operationalized, a lot more work to do, it's not that easy, what's the hardest thing about DevOps, final comment, you guys each weigh in and get the last word. What's the hardest thing about DevOps that people may not understand, 'cause it sounds so easy, it's magic. >> I think the hardest thing for most people is having a critical eye, and being pragmatic about where the challenges really are. If you look at the methodologies that DevOps promotes, it is really identifying the constraints in the work flow process. Regardless of what you're developing and what you're doing, being very pragmatic and realistic about where those constraints are, and focusing energy on solving for those constraints. I think with we deliver out to market, we are providing people some stability, so that as they're going through this process and things feel really shaky as they accelerate their pace of development and release of software, they have some stability so they, when they focus, they don't feel like the wheels are coming off the cart, if you will. >> I think what I find is that you need to -- people need to understand DevOps isn't something that you can buy, you need to build. You need to get the right people, you need to get the right processes, the right mindset, and embrace it. A lot of people think it's just -- You see job adverts these days, I want a full stack DevOps engineer, it's just not that simple. You've got to take the time, take the effort, and move with it, and learn as much as you can. >> And it's a talent issue too, and I just -- I guess one final final question 'cause this just popped in my head, at Big Data NYC last week in New York, what became very clear to us was, certainly in big data applications analytics, a lot of things are being automated. But, question for you is, when should you automate, one comment on Big Dat NYC a guy said, if you do it more than twice manually, automate it. Not that easy in storage and networks and data, but is there -- most DevOps guys have an eye for automate that. They see it, they automate it. What are some of the things you see being automated away? Is there like a ethos, is there like a saying? If you automate twice, what's your thoughts on automation? What should you automate, what's the order of operations, what's the low hanging fruit? >> With respect to DevOps in particular, it is truly finding the constraint. Identifying areas where people are becoming a bottleneck in processes, or the process itself is a bottleneck to success. Focus on that area first. Now, it's also easy to just try to pick the low hanging fruit, and do various things, but there needs to be a discipline in looking at, where are your actual bottlenecks and how can I remove those bottlenecks? >> So you read in a blog post, you got to know your environment, see the pressure point, constraints -- >> Yeah. >> Get some direction, advice, but -- >> Correct. >> You're saying, look at your environment. >> Yeah, we're now moving away from a world where virtualization allowed us to just thrown everything into a big resource pool and we just didn't pay attention to it any longer. We are now actually having to start having conversations -- >> It's engineering involved. >> again, yep. >> It's engineering involved. >> It is. >> Not just writin' some code. Josh, thoughts on automation? What ya automate first? >> I share a lot of those things. You need to look at your processes. You need to look at where you've got your bottlenecks, like he said, things that we would traditionally do in the past as a service provider where you got teams of analysts and engineers working on things. If you can speed that up and allow them to provide a better service to your customers, then yeah, certainly, work on that automation. Deploying out new models, even internal stuff that we need to deploy out, if you need to do that more than once or twice, for test environments, all those sorts of things, then yeah, certainly, automate that out. Because the more time you get out of your people, the more value you are delivering to the business. >> Thanks Josh, A-Team, love the shirt, quick soundbite, what's the A-Team, is there a certification, is there a bar to get over? >> It's a pretty high bar. It's an advocacy program, it's quite a small tight knit group of partners and customers of NetApp. We work in a 360 feedback loop between the NetApp Product Management Teams and other developers, and just give feedback and then rave about them when we feel is necessary. >> Have a beer, or coffee and tea, and say, I love when a plan comes together. (laughing) I couldn't resist. >> That's what John had also mentioned, NetApp has also delivered a developer and opensource community, called The Pub. So at netapp.io, it's a location, we actually have the code on bar behind me, we've got people that are coming in who have interest in containers, interest in Openstack, DevOps, and these new models. We have a large community, over 900 people participating. >> It's called The Pub? >> The Pub. >> John: Is there a URL? >> Yep, netapp.io. >> Netapp.io, and just -- you know we're data driven, seven years been monitoring the community's data, just anecdotally, the favorite drinks of developers in our community, beer and tea. >> Makes sense. >> Pretty makes sense. Beer obviously, tea no coffee? >> Slow release caffeine, I think that probably works better. (laughing) >> Thanks guys so much Josh and Jason, data from the field from the front lines on cutting edge DevOps is going mainstream. This is the cloud native, native cloud, on premise infrastructure innovation here at NetApp. I'm John Furrier, Keith Townsend, we'll be back with more, after this short break.

(quite music) >> I'll open that while he does that. >> Co-Host: Good, perfect. >> Man: All right, rock and roll. >> This is Robin Matlock, the CMO of VMware, and you're watching theCUBE. >> This is John Siegel of VPA Product Marketing at Dell EMC. You're watching theCUBE. >> This is Matthew Morgan, I'm the chief marketing officer at Druva and you are watching theCUBE. >> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE. Covering BigData New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsors. (rippling music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to a special CUBE live presentation here in New York City for theCUBE's coverage of BigData NYC. This is where all the action's happening in the big data world, machine learning, AI, the cloud, all kind of coming together. This is our fifth year doing BigData NYC. We've been covering the Hadoop ecosystem, Hadoop World, since 2010, it's our eighth year really at ground zero for the Hadoop, now the BigData, now the Data Market. We're doing this also in conjunction with Strata Data, which was Strata Hadoop. That's a separate event with O'Reilly Media, we are not part of that, we do our own event, our fifth year doing our own event, we bring in all the thought leaders. We bring all the influencers, meaning the entrepreneurs, the CEOs to get the real story about what's happening in the ecosystem. And of course, we do it with our analyst at Wikibon.com. I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Jim Kobielus, who's the chief analyst for our data piece. Lead analyst Jim, you know the data world's changed. We had commenting yesterday all up on YouTube.com/SiliconAngle. Day one was really set the table. And we kind of get the whiff of what's happening, we can kind of feel the trend, we got a finger on the pulse. Two things going on, two big notable stories is the world's continuing to expand around community and hybrid data and all these cool new data architectures, and the second kind of substory is the O'Reilly show has become basically a marketing. They're making millions of dollars over there. A lot of people were, last night, kind of not happy about that, and what's giving back to the community. So, again, the community theme is still resonating strong. You're starting to see that move into the corporate enterprise, which you're covering. What are you finding out, what did you hear last night, what are you hearing in the hallways? What is kind of the tea leaves that you're reading? What are some of the things you're seeing here? >> Well, all things hybrid. I mean, first of all it's building hybrid applications for hybrid cloud environments and there's various layers to that. So yesterday on theCUBE we had, for example, one layer is hybrid semantic virtualization labels are critically important for bridging workloads and microservices and data across public and private clouds. We had, from AtScale, we had Bruno Aziza and one of his customers discussing what they're doing. I'm hearing a fair amount of this venerable topic of semantic data virtualization become even more important now in the era of hybrid clouds. That's a fair amount of the scuttlebutt in the hallway and atrium talks that I participated in. Also yesterday from BMC we had Basil Faruqi talking about basically talking about automating data pipelines. There are data pipelines in hybrid environments. Very, very important for DevOps, productionizing these hybrid applications for these new multi-cloud environments. That's quite important. Hybrid data platforms of all sorts. Yesterday we had from ActIn Jeff Veis discussing their portfolio for on-prem, public cloud, putting the data in various places, and speeding up the queries and so forth. So hybrid data platforms are going increasingly streaming in real time. What I'm getting is that what I'm hearing is more and more of a layering of these hybrid environments is a critical concern for enterprises trying to put all this stuff together, and future-proof it so they can add on all the new stuff. That's coming along like cirrus clouds, without breaking interoperability, and without having to change code. Just plug and play in a massively multi-cloud environment. >> You know, and also I'm critical of a lot of things that are going on. 'Cause to your point, the reason why I'm kind of critical on the O'Reilly show and particularly the hype factor going on in some areas is two kinds of trends I'm seeing with respect to the owners of some of the companies. You have one camp that are kind of groping for solutions, and you'll see that with they're whitewashing new announcements, this is going on here. It's really kind of-- >> Jim: I think it's AI now, by the way. >> And they're AI-washing it, but you can, the tell sign is they're always kind of doing a magic trick of some type of new announcement, something's happening, you got to look underneath that, and say where is the deal for the customers? And you brought this up yesterday with Peter Burris, which is the business side of it is really the conversation now. It's not about the speeds and feeds and the cluster management, it's certainly important, and those solutions are maturing. That came up yesterday. The other thing that you brought up yesterday I thought was notable was the real emphasis on the data science side of it. And it's that it's still not easy or data science to do their job. And this is where you're seeing productivity conversations come up with data science. So, really the emphasis at the end of the day boils down to this. If you don't have any meat on the bone, you don't have a solution that rubber hits the road where you can come in and provide a tangible benefit to a company, an enterprise, then it's probably not going to work out. And we kind of had that tool conversation, you know, as people start to grow. And so as buyers out there, they got to look, and kind of squint through it saying where's the real deal? So that kind of brings up what's next? Who's winning, how do you as an analyst look at the playing field and say, that's good, that's got traction, that's winning, mm not too sure? What's your analysis, how do you tell the winners from the losers, and what's your take on this from the data science lens? >> Well, first of all you can tell the winners when they have an ample number of referenced customers who are doing interesting things. Interesting enough to get a jaded analyst to pay attention. Doing something that changes the fabric of work or life, whatever, clearly. Solution providers who can provide that are, they have all the hallmarks of a winner meaning they're making money, and they're likely to grow and so forth. But also the hallmarks of a winner are those, in many ways, who have a vision and catalyze an ecosystem around that vision of something that could be made, possibly be done before but not quite as efficiently. So you know, for example, now the way what we're seeing now in the whole AI space, deep learning, is, you know, AI means many things. The core right now, in terms of the buzzy stuff is deep learning for being able to process real time streams of video, images and so forth. And so, what we're seeing now is that the vendors who appear to be on the verge of being winners are those who use deep learning inside some new innovation that has enough, that appeals to a potential mass market. It's something you put on your, like an app or something you put on your smart phone, or it's something you buy at Walmart, install in your house. You know, the whole notion of clearly Alexa, and all that stuff. Anything that takes chatbot technology, really deep learning powers chatbots, and is able to drive a conversational UI into things that you wouldn't normally expect to talk to you and does it well in a way that people have to have that. Those are the vendors that I'm looking for, in terms of those are the ones that are going to make a ton of money selling to a mass market, and possibly, and very much once they go there, they're building out a revenue stream and a business model that they can conceivably take into other markets, especially business markets. You know, like Amazon, 20-something years ago when they got started in the consumer space as the exemplar of web retailing, who expected them 20 years later to be a powerhouse provider of business cloud services? You know, so we're looking for the Amazons of the world that can take something as silly as a conversational UI inside of a, driven by DL, inside of a consumer appliance and 20 years from now, maybe even sooner, become a business powerhouse. So that's what's new. >> Yeah, the thing that comes up that I want to get your thoughts on is that we've seen data integration become a continuing theme. The other thing about the community play here is you start to see customers align with syndicates or partnerships, and I think it's always been great to have customer traction, but, as you pointed out, as a benchmark. But now you're starting to see the partner equation, because this isn't open, decentralized, distributed internet these days. And it is looking like it's going to form differently than they way it was, than the web days and with mobile and connected devices it IoT and AI. A whole new infrastructure's developing, so you're starting to see people align with partnerships. So I think that's something that's signaling to me that the partnership is amping up. I think the people are partnering more. We've had Hortonworks on with IBM, people are partner, some people take a Switzerland approach where they partner with everyone. You had, WANdisco partners with all the cloud guys, I mean, they have unique ITP. So you have this model where you got to go out, do something, but you can't do it alone. Open source is a key part of this, so obviously that's part of the collaboration. This is a key thing. And then they're going to check off the boxes. Data integration, deep learning is a new way to kind of dig deeper. So the question I have for you is, the impact on developers, 'cause if you can connect the dots between open source, 90% of the software written will be already open source, 10% differentiated, and then the role of how people going to market with the enterprise of a partnership, you can almost connect the dots and saying it's kind of a community approach. So that leaves the question, what is the impact to developers? >> Well the impact to developers, first of all, is when you go to a community approach, and like some big players are going more community and partnership-oriented in hot new areas like if you look at some of the recent announcements in chatbots and those technologies, we have sort of a rapprochement between Microsoft and Facebook and so forth, or Microsoft and AWS. The impact for developers is that there's convergence among the companies that might have competed to the death in particular hot new areas, like you know, like I said, chatbot-enabled apps for mobile scenarios. And so it cuts short the platform wars fairly quickly, harmonizes around a common set of APIs for accessing a variety of competing offerings that really overlap functionally in many ways. For developers, it's simplification around a broader ecosystem where it's not so much competition on the underlying open source technologies, it's now competition to see who penetrates the mass market with actually valuable solutions that leverage one or more of those erstwhile competitors into some broader synthesis. You know, for example, the whole ramp up to the future of self-driving vehicles, and it's not clear who's going to dominate there. Will it be the vehicle manufacturers that are equipping their cars with all manner of computerized everything to do whatnot? Or will it be the up-and-comers? Will it be the computer companies like Apple and Microsoft and others who get real deep and invest fairly heavily in self-driving vehicle technology, and become themselves the new generation of automakers in the future? So, what we're getting is that going forward, developers want to see these big industry segments converge fairly rapidly around broader ecosystems, where it's not clear who will be the dominate player in 10 years. The developers don't really care, as long as there is consolidation around a common framework to which they can develop fairly soon. >> And open source is obviously a key role in this, and how is deep learning impacting some of the contributions that are being made, because we're starting to see the competitive advantage in collaboration on the community side is with the contributions from companies. For example, you mentioned TensorFlow multiple times yesterday from Google. I mean, that's a great contribution. If you're a young kind coming into the developer community, I mean, this is not normal. It wasn't like this before. People just weren't donating massive libraries of great stuff already pre-packaged, So all new dynamics emerging. Is that putting pressure on Amazon, is that putting pressure on AWS and others? >> It is. First of all, there is a fair amount of, I wouldn't call it first-mover advantage for TensorFlow, there've been a number of DL toolkits on the market, open source, for the last several years. But they achieved the deepest and broadest adoption most rapidly, and now they are a, TensorFlow is essentially a defacto standard in the way, that we just go back, betraying my age, 30, 40 years ago where you had two companies called SAS and SPSS that quickly established themselves as the go-to statistical modeling tools. And then they got a generation, our generation, of developers, or at least of data scientists, what became known as data scientists, to standardize around you're either going to go with SAS or SPSS if you're going to do data mining. Cut ahead to the 2010s now. The new generation of statistical modelers, it's all things DL and machine learning. And so SAS versus SPSS is ages ago, those companies are, those products still exist. But now, what are you going to get hooked on in school? What are you going to get hooked on in high school, for that matter, when you're just hobby-shopping DL? You'll probably get hooked on TensorFlow, 'cause they have the deepest and the broadest open source community where you learn this stuff. You learn the tools of the trade, you adopt that tool, and everybody else in your environment is using that tool, and you got to get up to speed. So the fact is, that broad adoption early on in a hot new area like DL, means tons. It means that essentially TensorFlow is the new Spark, where Spark, you know, once again, Spark just in the past five years came out real fast. And it's been eclipsed, as it were, on the stack of cool by TensorFlow. But it's a deepening stack of open source offerings. So the new generation of developers with data science workbenches, they just assume that there's Spark, and they're going to increasingly assume that there's TensorFlow in there. They're going to increasingly assume that there are the libraries and algorithms and models and so forth that are floating around in the open source space that they can use to bootstrap themselves fairly quickly. >> This is a real issue in the open source community which we talked, when we were in LA for the Open Source Summit, was exactly that. Is that, there are some projects that become fashionable, so for example, a cloud-native foundation, very relevant but also hot, really hot right now. A lot of people are jumping on board the cloud natives bandwagon, and rightfully so. A lot of work to be done there, and a lot of things to harvest from that growth. However, the boring blocking and tackling projects don't get all the fanfare but are still super relevant, so there's a real challenge of how do you nurture these awesome projects that we don't want to become like a nightclub where nobody goes anymore because it's not fashionable. Some of these open source projects are super important and have massive traction, but they're not as sexy, or flair-ish as some of that. >> Dl is not as sexy, or machine learning, for that matter, not as sexy as you would think if you're actually doing it, because the grunt work, John, as we know for any statistical modeling exercise, is data ingestion and preparation and so forth. That's 75% of the challenge for deep learning as well. But also for deep learning and machine learning, training the models that you build is where the rubber meets the road. You can't have a really strongly predictive DL model in terms of face recognition unless you train it against a fair amount of actual face data, whatever it is. And it takes a long time to train these models. That's what you hear constantly. I heard this constantly in the atrium talking-- >> Well that's a data challenge, is you need models that are adapting and you need real time, and I think-- >> Oh, here-- >> This points to the real new way of doing things, it's not yesterday's model. It's constantly evolving. >> Yeah, and that relates to something I read this morning or maybe it was last night, that Microsoft has made a huge investment in AI and deep learning machinery. They're doing amazing things. And one of the strategic advantages they have as a large, established solution provider with a search engine, Bing, is that from what I've been, this is something I read, I haven't talked to Microsoft in the last few hours to confirm this, that Bing is a source of training data that they're using for machine learning and I guess deep learning modeling for their own solutions or within their ecosystem. That actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, Google uses YouTube videos heavily in its deep learning for training data. So there's the whole issue of if you're a pipsqueak developer, some, you know, I'm sorry, this sounds patronizing. Some pimply-faced kid in high school who wants to get real deep on TensorFlow and start building and tuning these awesome kickass models to do face recognition, or whatever it might be. Where are you going to get your training data from? Well, there's plenty of open source database, or training databases out there you can use, but it's what everybody's using. So, there's sourcing the training data, there's labeling the training data, that's human-intensive, you need human beings to label it. There was a funny recent episode, or maybe it was a last-season episode of Silicone Valley that was all about machine learning and building and training models. It was the hot dog, not hot dog episode, it was so funny. They bamboozle a class on the show, fictionally. They bamboozle a class of college students to provide training data and to label the training data for this AI algorithm, it was hilarious. But where are you going to get the data? Where are you going to label it? >> Lot more work to do, that's basically what you're getting at. >> Jim: It's DevOps, you know, but it's grunt work. >> Well, we're going to kick off day two here. This is the SiliconeANGLE Media theCUBE, our fifth year doing our own event separate from O'Reilly media but in conjunction with their event in New York City. It's gotten much bigger here in New York City. We call it BigData NYC, that's the hashtag. Follow us on Twitter, I'm John Furrier, Jim Kobielus, we're here all day, we've got Peter Burris joining us later, head of research for Wikibon, and we've got great guests coming up, stay with us, be back with more after this short break. (rippling music)

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco. It's The Cube, covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we are live here in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. It's our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the CEO of SiliconANGLE Media, joined by co-host Peter Burris all week. Three days of wall-walk of day three. He's the head of research at SiliconeANGLE Media Inc., as well as the general manager of Wikibon research. Our next guest is Roddy Martin, VP of SC Supply Chain Cloud Product Marketing at Oracle. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much for the opportunity. I look forward to the discussion. >> Thanks for coming on. Really want to hear your thought leadership around the supply chain transformation, because it might be a little bit bumpy depending upon your perspective. But is a huge opportunity going on in every single theater of where software used to be a point solution. The cloud is now an opportunity for customers to think differently, and is a catalyst for essentially a business model change as well as a fundamental data-driven change. Your thoughts on this? What do you see going on? What are the key inflection points? >> So a very interesting part of my background is I came out of the brewing industry in South Africa. and then I led the supply chain practice at AMR Research, which today is Gartner. And we did a lot of studies on, what are companies doing to lead this transformation? Because it's a transformation of the interim business operating model of a company. This is not stitching data together in the traditional supply chain system sense. So one of the very first foundations that is really fundamental, and Gartner has done a great job of carrying the search forward, is the idea that every company progresses to an interim operating model in five stages of capability, and every one of those builds on the other. So they're either reacting in stage one's problem and never saw the shortage coming and ran out of product. Stage two is I performance improve around projects. Stage three is I drive functional excellence. And stage four I start working as an engine outside an operating model. In other words, I'm driving the business from what's happening in the market and I'm making sure that supply is matching demand. So it's very interesting and it's very important to consider that as the base foundation for this whole discussion. >> So that outside is interesting, we've heard this before, a lot of people are going that way, but there's no shortcuts. Can you talk about, cause you talk about the endpoint is then outside-in. >> Right, when you're operating as a demand-driven interim supply channel operating model, you can't run out of supply, right? So if you saw a change happening in the marketplace but there's nothing to supply, you've really just messed up the business. And so, each of these stages builds on every other stage. So functional excellence is: Am I good at planning? Am I good at product management? Am I good at logistics? Because those are the foundations for operating in the interim business model. This is why the Oracle's blanching in the cloud, in fact all of Oracle's developments in the cloud are so important because you're effectively building a new process oriented operating model that spins the entire business. If I started off with ERP systems and then I put logistics in place and tied it together, there's all sorts of disconnects in the business. When you pick it up in cycle times, you pick it in disconnect sometimes, they don't see changes to the marketplace for weeks. So, this overarching end to end supply chain operating model in the cloud is a fundamental enabler. >> So how do you gauge a customer? First of all, I buy everything that you said, but I want to bring up a point, because it seems to me that the theme of Oracle OpenWorld that traditional applications and I won't say, I'll just say the word Silo just to use it as a point, has been a specific domain specific thing. But to be end to end and be outside-in, which is the end game, you have to know how to talk and integrate with other systems which might have been a problem if you built the most badass end to end system. >> That is a part of the challenge and in fact, a lot of companies that I've worked with over the 15 years I've been researching this, they get stuck for that very reason. In other words, this is a re-engineering of the whole IT infrastructure versus having a thousand consultants come in and tie all my data together over a question of four years and move 15 instances of whatever system you want to one. >> So, if I question on the journey thing, you mentioned thousands of consultants, which customers are now seeing. They want faster mile posts, they want to see faster agility but a lot of the customers actually outline the journey for the customer. So they're saying, here's your journey and they shorten the mile posts for the deliverables. But they're the one getting paid for it so is that the right model, should they be outlining the journey for the customer? >> And they are. It's been very interesting because I was a partner with a major global consulting company for four years and I've been mixing with them here, they suddenly recognizing that this path to the cloud is something they've better get on the bandwagon because they're not going to have a thousand consultants deploying whatever ERP system you talk about as the future of IT. So, what's happening is the business is having much more of a say in this fast deployment, fast time to value, putting these new-- >> So they're driving the journey for parameters? >> They are gearing up for this new journey, the consultants are. >> So, let's get to the fundamentals behind all this and ask a question about it. At the end of the day, digital technologies give customers an option to do their journeys very differently whether in a B2B sense or a consumer sense. And as they use digital technologies, they're also giving data up and so we have now a combination where customers are getting something out of digital, they are demanding it as part of the engagement model. They are giving up data along the way, and the technologies for sensing and doing something with that data in business are now, we're not figuring out how that impacts business design, process design, and offering design. >> So, that's stage 4S, what we talk about is people, process, and technology versus, in the past, when you had stage one, two, and three. People as one set of projects, process as another set of projects, and technology as another set of projects. >> Yeah, I may or may not take some middlings with the model you put out, but it does matter. At the end of the day, what is driving this increasingly is that it used to be that the dominant consideration in, I think, and I'm testing you, the dominant consideration was assets. Where is the physical asset, where are the materials, where is the machine, and we'll focus our returns on this things and then presume that there's a demand for it and now we're getting all this data about demand and that is having an impact on how we talk about arranging the assets. >> That is the inside-out to outside-in. So, let me give you an example without mentioning companies. A major retailer and a major pharmaceutical company. They share pollen data, they share weather data, they mine Facebook to find out what are people saying about allergies, let's say in New England. And the ragweed's busting and they say, do we have the right levels of inventory, and they're moving inventory to make sure that people who aren't on Facebook are saying we can't buy this particular product. They're moving inventory, that's the difference. >> So, they're sharing data amongst themselves. >> Yes, and they're collaborating between retailers. >> Arguably a similar example, and a retailer that's actually not moving inventory but moving pointers and offering new channel options so that someone decides may not, that they know somebody's going to come into the store, the size may not be there but they can still get it to them that day. >> So, it's very interesting, Procter and Gamble, who I did a lot of work with, and this is public domain information, the CEO drove two fundamental transformation messages in the business. And they called it the two moments of truth. He said, we will always have our product when we say we've got a product. So, if we promote a new product, the consumer goes to the shelf, it will be there. Moment of truth number two, we understand why consumers choose and use our products. And you don't fix number two until you fix number one because if I wanted a small tube of toothpaste and I went in and there were only big ones, it's the wrong buying signal. So, what you're seeing is that whole flip to measuring what the market's looking for and shaping their demand and then making sure that the assets and the supply system is geared to deliver. >> Right, I want to ask you a question. First of all, I love that point, I love your point about the data, but here's the question: cause supply chain has been very instrumentation drive, okay, and that certainly is transforming but now you mention Procter and Gamble. We are living in an era where, in the history of business, you can actually now potentially measure everything. So how does that impacting the reconfiguration of the business model? I mean, Procter and Gamble has those moments of truth, every company will have a moment of truth which is, everything is now measurable so, advertising to employee things and everything. >> So let's take the asset story versus the on shelf thing, right, so when I have assets and I'm getting all the data out of my assets, what am I doing with all of that data, right? Because it's not connected to demand. What I got to know is what demand data do I really want to be able to move my assets to the right place. >> Peter: By the way, the shelf is an asset. >> Of course it is, yes. It's a sensing point and it's an asset. They own it, they replenish that shelf. So the point is, data is everywhere and now these, the consulting and the BPM organizations supporting and companies doing their own business process manner, they got to know what data is really important and what data from the outside-in is going to allow me to leverage a new operating model for my business and become digital. >> So, this is really awesome, I was talking with an Oracle executive last night at one of their customer parties and we had a conversation around this data sharing. This is a new, different behavior. This is a theme of the show that no one's really talking about but it's in plain sight which is there is a data sharing aspect of systems and vendors and companies. >> Roddy: That's why the cloud is so important. >> John: This is now impacting everything. >> Everything. >> How do companies go forward and do this? What are you seeing, is there a best practice, is there a starting point? Is there a five step process on that? >> Well, first of all, these transformations are being lead by the C level executive team in a business. This is now longer somebody who decides to buy a new IT system and plug it in to the business. So, the business is saying, how do we change the operating model of the way we work, right? So, and then, what are the capabilities, and this is where that five stage model comes in, what capabilities do we need to look at building over the next three years so that we can operate in this intent way because you can't wake up tomorrow and go from an inside-out asset driven business to an outside-in demand driven business in two weeks. It ain't going to happen. >> So what's the progression? What's the progress bar look like when you have that moment of an epiphany and say, you know, I'm the CEO-- >> What's the earning point of the business? If it's Procter and Gamble, I want X number of one billion dollars brands. If you're a pharmaceutical company, you want to launch brand new drugs and you want to do it at half the price and half the speed that you're used to. It's the business articulating, this is why the leadership teams are so fundamental, articulating what's the burning platform and then translating that back into the capabilities-- >> So you get a reverse engineer. >> Outside-In. >> Outside-In, I love it. >> The way our research says it, and it's very similar but I want to test this because it's, we say start with context. >> Yes. >> What are you going to do with your customer that you have to do better than everybody else? And then identify the community that you're going to do it with and identify the capabilities that are going to delight that community. So it's context, community, and capabilities. >> Now here's the context, further piece to context. If context changes, how quickly do I sense that change and how fast can I respond to that change? Because if I've got all my asset capabilities and my supply capabilities locked into one set of context and that changes and I now have to re-engineer my whole business, I may lose the whole show in the process. I got to see those changes as they are happening, literally in real time. This is where the internet of things, this is where demand shaping, demand sensing, retailers collaborating, supplies connected into supply chain, everybody sharing that information and the fact that not many people, they don't know how to do it. The culture of business is not yet at the points-- >> That's why the measurement thing I brought up, I mean Procter and Gamble, they used to say to their agencies, we know that 50% of our advertising is good, we don't know which half. So now they can measure it all just like in every other aspect so this is where the business model-- >> You also have to be careful about whether or not, again going back to context changes, measurements change, data can blow you away. You have to be very smart about how you do it so a lot of these intelligent things, machine learning, how the models get built, how the insides get delivered, all become very very important. Very quickly, I have two quick questions for you. One is really approximate to the conversation, one less so but the approximate one: IOT. IOT is, has many many applications. Certainly turning analogue data into digital data so you can build models is a crucial piece of it. But it also has another implication in how you enact the output of that model back into the real word. How does supply chain and IOT come together? >> So if you look at the studies that are being done by Oracle and Gartner et cetera on what's important to the supply chain, two things come up. One is visibility and the other is analytics. Right, so there's tons of data available, to your point just now. That data could cause massive noise to the business unless you know what you're looking at. I know companies that will say, 95% visibility of changes on their demand side is good enough but I'm good enough on the supply side to be able to adjust. But you got to know which data to look at. So I'm looking at on shelf. I'm looking at what consumers are choosing and using, I'm looking to see what of my contract manufacturers-- >> Peter: Analyze key constraints. >> Bingo, so it's not about, I think what we're all going to have to learn in the internet of things is we need, again, a cloud based internet of things platform that does the analytics. >> Because we can rewire things faster. >> Exactly, you can adjust the business to new scenarios based on what you're reading from the demand side and what you're reading from the supply side. >> So you're a great foil for my second question. My second question is you look back at the history, or the recent history let's call it, of strategy, very asset based, Porter said pick the industry that has the best returns, pick your position in that industry, then choose your games based on the five factor analysis that you want to play to get to that position. Very asset oriented, we're in control, that's going to dictate how things change. What you just suggested was a very very different way of thinking about strategy. >> Same fundamentals. It's the same fundamentals but it's allowing yourself to adjust those fundamentals based on what's happening in the market place. >> Peter: But you're not going to base it on just the assets. >> No, we're not going to base it on the assets unless you've focused on, like if you're an engineering company and that's all you make is machines, you can't suddenly start producing toothpaste, for example. There are, that's why I say it's a reconfiguration of those same principles but flexible enough to meet demand. >> So how does, how does the world of design and the world of strategy start to come together in C suite? >> Fundamentally, because it's the voice of the customer that starts to count. It's the voice of the customer that dictates the strategy. So if my customers don't want green Guinness for Saint Patrick's Day, don't make any, because it's going to hang around and get thrown away, right? So, the voice of the customer determines what's happening on the demand side and the supply side has to be agile enough to meet that need. >> So, I would suggest keep Guinness the way it is because it's damn good the way it is, so personally I would agree on the Guinness comment. No green Guinness. >> So, what's the South Africa beer? >> Castle Lager. Well, SAB, South African Brewery, has been bought by Anheuser-Busch InBrev, a massive big giant. >> We love beer and if there's any beer sponsors out there, we're happy looking for our Budweiser. We want a, maybe an IPA in there. Roddy, thanks for spending the time, coming in with you, appreciate it. Some thought leadership here on Reconfiguration and looking at some of the nuances that are really going to impact the buyers here on The Cube. Oracle Open will be back with more live coverage from SiliconANGLE's The Cube after this short break.

>> Voiceover: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Sapphire Now, headlining sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service, with support from Consolink, the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burse. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Orlando, Florida for Sapphire Now, SiliconeANGLE Media's exclusive coverage of Sapphire. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burse. This is our flagship program, we go out to the events, and extract the citizen noise, you're watching The Cube. I want to do a shout-out to our sponsors. Without their help, we would not be here. SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Consolink at CONSOL Cloud, hot start up in Silicone Valley, and also we have Cap Gemini, we have EMC. Thanks so much for your support. Our next guest is Gaby Corin, who's the EVP of the Americas for Panaya, accompanied about a year ago by Infosys, now a part of Infosys. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Congratulations on the acquisition over a yeah ago, but you guys are to a part of the big machinery of Infosys, which is tier one systems integrated part of SAP's global channel, as they call it, but essentially, you're out serving customers all over the world. >> Gaby: That is correct, yes. >> At Infosys, what's your role in the Infosys organization, and what does your company do? >> Okay, so, I'll start with the company. Panaya was founded ten years ago. Our quest is to help customers to perform all their changes in their ERP environment. We basically analyze the environment, create that mapping, that baseline that helps them understand exactly what they're dealing with, then we support them in scoping out the changes, and then, we work with them throughout the journey of executing on all the testing cycles associated with all the changes. We serve about two thousand customers, and we are a hundred percent cloud-based solution. My role as EVP for the Americas is to support all customers in the region, and we're working very closely with Infosys into bringing Panaya as part of their offering to accelerate the processes, to bring innovation, and to bring much more efficiency to all the SAP projects and activities that they perform with our customers. >> We had the global partner person on earlier, and that was the big point, innovation's now at the center, not just delivery, which Infosys has been great at, but also other things, innovation, time is very important. >> Exactly. >> Your solution speeds things up, so share with us what it is, is it a SAS space? Is it code analyzers? Is it for QA? Is it for testing? What specifically do you guys solve? What problem do you solve? >> Great question. First of all, we are a SAS-based solution, so we do everything in the cloud. This helps, as you said, perform all the tasks faster and more efficiently. The pain that we're coming to address is the fact that change is constant in the ERP. The ERP is never an island, never an isolated solution. It's always in changes, the core of a lot of the businesses that we meet here, so change is their reality, they need to change all the time. They are highly customized, so every change that come from the vendor or from the business requires a lot of preparation and very fast execution, and this is where Panaya plays. We simulate the change virtually in the cloud, and we tell customers in advance what is going to happen to their environment all the way to the code line level what exactly is going to break, how to fix it, what to test, and we support them, again, throughout all the testing cycles from the unit test or the technical test all the way to user-acceptance test, UATs, that is a big pain to organization because of the collaboration. >> It's faster is the point. So, you guys speed up the process. >> Absolutely, we speed up the process, we reduce costs, we bring customers faster to market by about fifty percent, and we allow them to do their projects at the budget that they establish or lower. >> Give me an example of someone who has the problem, and what their environment looks like. Because everyone's trying to get to the cloud, and your solution is tailor-made perfectly for the cloud because it's very dev-ops-like. It makes things go faster, it's part of that whole agile iteration speed game, which we love, but the people trying to get there that are figuring it out, what's their environment, people who have the problem? What's their environment look like? Paint the picture. >> Virtually any SAP customer needs Panaya. >> John: That's a good plug. It's complicated. >> Yes. Their environment can have one instance, or multiple instances of SAP ECCs. They all have the need for testing because they perform testing all the way. They are trying to bring some of the applications to the cloud, but not necessarily. Most of our customers still are heavily on-premise based, so what we do is that we do all the analysis in the cloud, and this is how we help them do things much faster. >> So I got to ask you the Infosys question, because I'm a big fan of Vishal Sikka. For many years, I've watched his work at SAP, certainly. He was very, very early on and very right on a lot of technical decisions around how things played out. I watched him during the SOA days, going back to the web services days, which is the late 90's, early 2000s, he had the right call and vision on web services, and then service-oriented architectures. >> Yes. >> He brought a lot of great mojo to SAP and has always been very open-source driven. >> Right. >> John: And he's just a cool guy, so what's it like working there? I mean, is he always on top of the employees? Do you talk to him? What's it like inside the company at Infosys, and specifically Vishal, what's he up to? >> First of all, he's such a visionary. You listen to him and his vision. His vision is people and software. And he wants to make a difference when it comes to supporting customers, being an SI, being at a company that creates and makes a difference. He's also very personal, so he's very approachable. He loves ideas as innovation, and he believes that the innovations come from within, so he's a huge supporter of Panaya and bringing Panaya to every single Infosys customer and opportunity, but he has that vision that you don't replace a thing, you don't replace stuff. You take something, and you bring, but you learn to collaborate, and you understand that the environments needs to be flexible, and the only way to bring that flexibility is to take the existing environment and continue to bring innovation, even if it's in small steps, you bring that innovation to the table. And this is what makes it so unique to work for a guy like him. >> The traditional systems integrator relationship, there's always been tension, a lot of tension between customers and systems integrators. >> Gaby: Yes. >> Customers say they want something. Systems integrators have the expertise to do it. Customers want it fast, systems integrators sometimes use their experience to inflate billings, but the customer increasingly is in charge in almost all global markets. The question is are you helping your customers stay more in control of Infosys engagements? And if the answer is yes, how does that improve the value proposition of Infosys? >> Okay, that's a great question. One of the reasons that Panaya remains an independent and contained organization within Infosys is, besides commitment to support that, we sell direct a lot to our customers, and we support, we remain objective, whoever the customer chooses to work with, whether it's to do it in house or to use system integrators. And we have more and more projects that there are three, four, or five system integrators that are involved, and each one does a piece of the solution, and Panaya gives that control because of their analysis, because of the support on the planning stage. We paint the right picture of where you are today, where do you want to go, and in the journey of doing that. This is one of the claims of victory of Panaya is that we bring that control back to the hands of the customers exactly as they want to, because they want to understand what are they dealing with, what are the pricing, and SIs on the other hand, also understand that prices cannot continue to be cut forever and ever. But if you don't bring that innovation, that people plus software, it will be impossible to continue to compete in this market. >> They get more net contract value on the sales as they deliver value. >> Gaby: Exactly, to the customers. >> So if they're helping their customers drive more cash and revenue-- >> Well, I would presume that it actually starts with the contracting process for a lot of these efforts is itself very, very expensive and often leads to not a lot of value, and so I presume that in response to what you just mentioned, John, that you're generating artifacts to make it easy for the customer, the SAP customer, to envision where they need to go, and those artifacts then help the SAP customer manage the integrator and the company doing it, which then dramatically reduces the contracting process. >> Gaby: Exactly. >> Because it's a lot clearer, which means I can focus more on the management of the partner-- >> You release resources, correct. >> As a set of capabilities because because it always changes along the way. >> That is correct. >> As I change, I can envision that using some of the technologies you're bringing to bear. >> That is correct, we create these assets that can be reused time and again, and then we free up resources so they can focus on innovation and additional activities. That is exactly our value proposition, you got it absolutely right. >> So, are you a consultant management system in the SAP world? >> We don't claim to be, no, we bring solutions. We're not in the consulting business at all. >> Peter: No, managing the consulting business. >> Oh, absolutely, we help to manage that process. >> Helping the customer manage those consultants. >> That is correct, that is correct. Yes, you're absolutely right. >> My final question for you, thanks for coming on The Cube, by the way, I know it's short notice. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Great to have the insight. What's the biggest change in the ecosystem are you seeing today? Because you're close to the code, so you're close to all the action at Panaya and certainly Infosys is massive and global. What is the biggest change that's happening in the ecosystem, with SI's and generally across the board? >> That's a great question. One thing that we're seeing is much more competition. The customer is much more educated, exactly as you, Peter, said. The customers are much more educated, they know what they want, and they're coming in with much more control and knowledge, so we're seeing this. Customers are looking for much more long-term activities. This is why HANA is becoming such a strong, we're seeing this also here in this show how everybody's talking HANA, because it's not something that you do for the next year. It's something that is going to be with these customers for a long term. They are looking for long-term type of engagements. >> They don't have to buy a lot of HANA. They can actually put their toe in the water, if you will. The old days it was you buy SAP, and you hired the SI's, project management, delivery over a long period of time. They don't have to do that today. They can still have a long view with HANA, right? I mean, are you seeing that, too? >> Yes, and what we're seeing is, a move on this regard, we're seeing a move from best of suite into best of breed. We want on each area the best solution possible. >> Without ballooning integration and training costs. >> Correct, correct, and we fit perfectly into that story. >> Well, thanks so much. Real quick question for you. You guys have a big end-user event like Sapphire. >> Gaby: Yes. >> Didn't you just have one in San Francisco recently? Or do you have one coming up? What's going on with the events for Infosys? >> We participated in Confluence, which is a very large event of Infosys, just a couple of weeks ago. Very, very well-attended, and we-- >> John: Is that a global conference in San Francisco or is it in other areas? >> It's a global event in which the largest, the biggest customers of Infosys attend, once a year, they get together. It's all about thought leadership and sharing ideas, design thinking, which Vishal is leading very strongly. That was the main theme of the event, so we had the chance to meet a lot of our customers and prospects. Now, of course, Sapphire. >> Thank you so much for coming on, Gaby. Great to have you on The Cube, and welcome to the Cube alumni now that you're on The Cube. We are live here in Orlando for SAP Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burse with the Cube. You're watching SiliconANGLE' The Cube. (futuristic music)