>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by PureStorage. (upbeat electronic music) >> Man: Graduated ASU. >> Welcome back to PureStorage Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin with The Cube, sporting the clong of Prince, formerly known as, today because we are at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a really cool concert venue that's been here since 1950 and I'm joined by Dave The Who Vellante today. >> Play the toast and tea. (laughs) >> Pretty groovy T-shirt there. And we're joined by a couple of guys, next we've got Axel Streichart, the senior director of business application solutions from Pure and John Meng, senior director of IT operations at Simpson Strong-Tie. Hi guys! >> Hi. >> Lisa: Welcome to The Cube! >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So John, first question to you. Tell us about Simpson Strong-Tie. Who are you guys, obviously you're a Pure customer, but give us a little bit of an orientation to the business. >> Sure, so Simpson Strong-Tie, we're a public company based out of Pleasanton, California. We've been in business since about 1956, if I've got my history right, so we've been around for quite a long time. We're a manufacturing organization. Basically, if you're building a home or a deck or if you're needing to put two by fours together, our niche is that little connector, that bracket that connects those two by fours and we do pretty well in that business. Overall our revenue is just shy of a billion dollars, so a pretty decent sized organization. >> Dave: So Pure passed you. >> Yes, last year, you know. >> You okay with that or? >> I'm okay with that. (all laugh) >> So tell us about, from a business perspective, the need for PureStorage specifically with respect to your SAP journey. >> So a couple of years ago when I came on board, the business had made a decision that they were going to get off of their old ERP system onto a new ERP system. When I say old ERP system, I'm being a little respectful there. It's a homegrown application running on SQL which is basically, they lovingly called it Blue Screen because you go to fileshare and you double click on the executable that you need, for example, if you're doing accounts payable or accounts receivables or purchase orders or what have you, you double click on the executable you want, opens up a nice little blue screen and it's a DOS based blue screen and you tab around and enter all your information. They had been running on that application for about 30 years. >> Lisa: Is that all? (laughs) >> Yeah, so quite a while. >> Dave: It works. >> It works, right. If it ain't broke don't fix it, but it was developed by a single person and it was time that the company put on some bootstraps and hitched them up, so they went to market to decide on what ERP application they were going to move to and SAP won out. They had actually been running for a year on a test system hosted by SAP when I came on board, so the decision had already been made, the application wise from an ERP perspective, but the next step in our journey for Simpson, and my challenge, was how do we host this environment? Do we host it in a cloud, do we host it on-prem? And so as I took a, looking at our environment, a very distributed environment, I said, alright, well first and foremost, SAP is a centralized solution. Is there a way for us to create a single environment that our entire company could run on, not only for SAP but everything else, a mixed use environment? And I started having conversations with Pure. They actually let me talk to a couple of their existing customers who were very happy about their mixed use workload including ServiceNow who talked today, so definitely a shout out to them on the conversations we had back a couple of years ago. Anyways, Pure ended up being our foundation for currently our core tenant, which is SAP, but also the future tenant for everything else that we're going to throw on there. And it's been an incredible journey over these last couple of years with them. >> And why the decision to stay on-prem, versus go to the cloud? Was it a function of SAP really not being there in the cloud or your data, you didn't just want to shove your business into the public cloud? >> So there was definitely a lot of analysis that went into that. Just from a financial perspective, I worked with the CFO and we put together a 12 year ROI on cloud versus on-prem and just to kind of really give ourselves some understanding over time what the impact would be of renting versus owning and it was very clear that on-prem financially made sense. Then we had to talk about the business, what was the best for the business. We looked at it from a, when I came there, there was some, the project team looking at SAP had really already made their mind up. They wanted it off of IT. They wanted it in an environment that they trusted, so when I came on board I said, look this is something I've done before. We have experience, we have the in-house expertise, you just trust me that this is the right thing and let me show you how and that's where, honestly, a lot of the information that I was able to pull off of FlashStack, off of SAP, it's a certified solution, talking to ServiceNow I was able to prove to the business that look, hosting it internally made the most sense financially as well as for our business and what we were trying to achieve. >> Made you happy. >> Yeah and it's not just that, but this is a story we're hearing more often now. So customers actually trying this out in the cloud and realizing, number one, the cost, it's not that cost-efficient and effective as they were planning for and seeing, especially when you're making multiple copies of this SAP environments. The costs go through the roof and the other thing is also what a lot of customers then realize is how do you actually get your data and get your communication from your data center back to the cloud provider? You need a big pipe and this communication cost just to get the data out is huge, is sometimes huge. The other thing is SLAs. It sounds like a good thing, but in many cases, SLA's because they're not flexible, you're ending up quarter end you need help and they're saying, nope, talk to you in four days. It's not really acceptable. And the third one is, there's this whole concept around I don't really have to invest now into the knowledge, into the skill set, because I put it all in the cloud. It's not the reality. The reality, you still have to invest into the skills. Isn't that? >> Everything he has said is actually the conversations that we had in-house, absolutely. If you want to do a data migration from QA to Dev or Dev to Production or whatever your landscape is and how you want to move the data, oh, well, that's going to be a charge. Oh well, okay, well I need to spin up this extra project. Oh, well there's another charge. I mean, it's just constant nickel and diming and another key component that you hit on that I failed to mention was hosting it internally allowed us to control the end to end experience for our end users. When you're talking about hosting it in the cloud, your data is somewhere else and you can not control end to end. You can control it up to a certain extent, but then from there all you can rely on is the SLAs and, to his point, the SLAs are only what's on paper, they're not very flexible at all. >> So the business case didn't pan out for the cloud. >> Correct. >> But there's certainly attributes of the cloud that are attractive, so what are those attributes and how are you bringing those on-prem? >> So flexibility. Flexibility is huge for us, the ability to just quickly be able to spin things up and scale them back as needed. I kind of look of it as, look, there's a water line that you're going to use on a day in and day out basis for your organization. Maximize your investment there. On the peaks and valleys that you're going to have, that's where the cloud can really help and so, is cloud completely off the table for us? No, that's where we're going to be able to burst into that sort of scenario. If we need more compute, we need more spin cycles, whatever we need from the cloud, we can throw it up there and then bring it back down, so have much more controllable costs in our mind. >> So a major change in the application environment, migration, from an old platform. You had to freeze the app. Does that freeze the code? >> John: Yep. >> How long did you have to freeze the code for? >> So, when we're talking about, just making sure I understand your question. >> Your home-grown ERP, blue screen, C prompt to the SAP environment. >> Yeah, so the landscape as we have it today, we actually just went live on SAP early February and it's not company wide. It's only a certain branch. In its strength, the beauty of that previous application, it was very de-centralized and each branch where we have a high consolidation of users and workers, each branch had their own data center hosting their own ERP for their branch, so we could freeze their environment just during their time window. >> I see. >> Now the challenge for us today is as we start consolidating, those windows start to overlap, but that's honestly why we've invested in technologies like FlashStack and so forth that come with the redundancy built in so we can work on the environment without having to freeze it or bring it down. >> So you need the speed to compress those discontinuities. >> Yes, yes. >> Dave: In data. >> Absolutely. >> What about data protection? How do you, I know that's an area of expertise of yours. How do you approach data protection in this new environment? Are you doing anything differently? Where does Pure fit? >> It's actually a huge shift for us on how we do things. From a data protection standpoint, we're talking about disaster recovery, business continuity and so we have active passive data centers. We're utilizing what Pure has under the hood to be able to replicate in multiple ways. And that's the beauty of our setup that we've designed is the ability to replicate in multiple ways, because in a multi-tenant environment, yes, there are certain parts of the stack that one shoe will fit all sizes. I would say that PureStorage is that, but when you start getting to the details of each of the applications, they don't all play the same way when it comes to DR or it comes to replication or data protection and we will need to look at each one of those applications and design a data protection strategy around it as we import it in, so for SAP, we do have differencing of how we're going to protect that versus when we bring in our web servers, versus when we bring in SharePoint and other core applications to the business. >> So Axel, you mentioned, well actually it was John, you mentioned that you had the opportunity to talk to ServiceNow and maybe another customer of Pure as well when you were in this decision making process. I imagine ServiceNow's business is probably quite different from Simpson Strong-Tie, so what, Axel, I guess both of you, help us understand, what were some of the similar changes that, say, a ServiceNow faced that you were facing and then Axel, to your point, tell us a little bit about the SAP alliance that you have with Pure and how customers as big as ServiceNow and Simpson Strong-Tie are helping to evolve that relationship? >> Me first? >> Go for it. >> Alright, so one of the biggest strategies, the focus that I had when I was making the decision around hosting SAP, I really wanted to make sure I understood, did I have to go a siloed approach? Was I buying architecture specifically for SAP or could I do a multi-use workload? Multi-purpose was huge for me. I was really, I couldn't understand how, in 2016 when I was looking at this, I'm like, look, it's 2016, I know there's a solution out there that can solve this problem and so that's what I was challenging Pure and they're like, who do you want to talk to? And I said, "Well I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP and I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP in a mixed-workload environment." And that's where ServiceNow came into play. And when I was having conversations with them, I said, alright, so you're running mixed workload. Yes, okay, when you have an SAP performance problem, do you have to, is there a lot of effort to show that there's, where the problem in the performance is? And there was a pause on the phone and the guy actually giggled over the phone. I don't know how else to say it. And he's like, "Performance problems? "We don't have any." And so, when you hear that, especially when you're talking about SAP, which is a known beast of an application inside any environment and it will use whatever resource you throw at it and it won't play nice with other apps, when I heard that, I was like, okay, where do I sign? So it was basically that conversation that really said, alright, let's give this a try. The other thing, honestly, for us is SAP is our first tenant and as we start applying other applications to it, we already have our baseline established and we can watch as the other applications are thrown in and it's not impacting anything, SAP, or on their own. >> So FlashStack is going to be able to give you a foundation to not only scale your SAP infrastructure-- >> Absolutely. >> But also to expand to multiple workloads. >> Yeah, for example, some of our public web facing applications, we've already moved them in-house. We used to use a public service provider, a public cloud offering for this web service that I'm talking about. It would take, so you'd go out there and you'd say, you know what, I want a product catalog of all Simpson products and you hit the button. 45 minutes later, it's downloaded, 45 minutes. I took that workload and I put it in our data center. Three minutes. 45 minutes to three minutes. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then another test was a web crawler, so we did a web crawler across that same web application to confirm when we moved it from one location to the other we didn't miss anything. In the old environment, running on a public cloud infrastructure, it took 20 minutes. 17 seconds on our own. And it was run from the same PC. There was no, it was pretty clear and honestly, when marketing felt that increase in performance and saw it and realized it, they bragged to the CFO and now the CFO's like, okay, when are we going to get this out of SAP? Well we have to get the whole company on SAP before we can really realize this investment, but they're very excited about the opportunities. >> And how long have you had the Pure infrastructure? >> We installed it probably about year and a half ago, because we had to get it prepared. We installed it about a year and a half ago. >> So you haven't had to do any upgrades yet. >> No, not major ones. We actually have our first major one this week. We're actually scheduling it, but one of the questions I was asked on an earlier panel was how due you handle outages with Pure and how has your experience been with support. Well, I'm sorry we haven't had to call support yet. I've heard great stories about it (Lisa laughs) and I know that our guys that are working with support right now to get our upgrades done, they've had nothing but praise, but honestly we haven't had a lot of interaction yet with their support, just because we haven't needed it yet. >> And you have an in-house development staff, application development team? >> Yes. >> Has their work flow changed at all in terms of being able to share data, share copies of data, are you there yet or? >> We're not there yet, but one of the goals of our environment, so we have two data centers and we have load balancers in front of the two data centers. When it comes to hosting our public web side of things, the goal is to have a green and a red environment where you develop on the red, green is your production and when it comes time, you just flip the switch and your development becomes your active. And so, basically, a lot of the nuances and strategies that you get out of public cloud, we're going to attain those using our private cloud infrastructure. >> Essentially use live data of the test environment-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And then cutting over immediately. You couldn't have done that three, four, five years ago. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> So Axel, we're just about out of time, but how common is John's story with Simpson Strong-Tie in terms of, we haven't had to call support yet. Are you hearing this resonate pretty pervasively in your SAP install base across industries? >> This is a very typical environment. I would call it almost green field, but most of the environments that we are dealing with are brown field, so customers are long-time SAP users and customers and they're going from, let's say, the Oracle environment into a HANA environment and the nice thing about this is that we are actually providing a platform that can help customers no matter where they are in their journey. If they are still in Oracle, they're already on HANA, they're moving onto AI, whatever it might be, they don't have to change anything on the infrastructure, per se, because there is no configuration or tuning necessary, whether it's Oracle, whether it's HANA, whether it's AI, so you're running it off the same platform. The other thing is that I want to mention is, because you asked me about our relationship with SAP. It's a very strong relationship, so we're actually working with SAP worldwide in their core innovation labs, so they have labs around the world where they develop new solutions together with hardware and software partners and they love to work with PureStorage because it is so simple and they're coming from a functional side. They don't care about the infrastructure at all. They're saying as long as it's simple and you can imagine they are pretty much the Switzerland of ERP. We actually recently published a white paper together with SAP around how to actually save license cost, SAP license cost, of up to 75%. Now you would ask yourself, why would SAP do that? Why would they promote something, push something, that actually cuts into their revenue? But for SAP it is more important to increase the adoption rate of HANA rather than the revenue that's behind it, so that's why we are publishing, and it's on the SAP website that you can download and you can see, together with PureStorage. It's an amazing story that we have. >> Let-- >> And honestly, that was part of why we chose Pure in the beginning, they're certified and now I didn't have to go to the business and try to convince them. It was all on paper for us. >> I can't help but notice that you brought a little kitty cat to the set, Axel. Tell us about this little stuffed animal. >> Maybe you heard it in the keynote this morning. We were talking about PureStorage is actually moving from their solution development towards engineered solutions. We want to actually put more application specific functionality and embed it directly into the array and one of the big challenges that a lot of customers have is how do I create copies, clones, and refreshes of my SAP environment? And we have customers it takes them sometimes nine days just for one copy, nine days. Why? Because it's a very complex and complicated end to end process, so we thought about why don't we take this entire process, automate this entire process, and embed it into our array, and we call this tool that we developed and that's available for everybody that, it's included in the maintenance. We call it Copy Automation Tool, CAT. >> The cat! >> That's the cat. (all laugh) >> And that's what we are, and so if people are asking, why is a cat, Copy Automation Tool. >> That's good. >> Very nice. >> I was like, where is this going? >> I like it. >> Brought it home, brought it home. >> Like you said. >> Do I get to keep this cat? Is this, oh. >> You can. >> Ah, very nice. >> This is pretty cool swag. Well Axel and John, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us the innovations that Pure and SAP are doing, how you are being successful, and now you are a reference customer for what you guys are achieving. >> Great story. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks guys, appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Yep. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and cat. We are live from PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to the Cookie Conundrum, A Recipe For Success an industry conference and summit from Quancast on the demise of third-party cookies. We've got a great industry panel here to break it down. Chris Guenther, senior vice president global head of Programmatic at News Corp. Chris, thanks for coming on. Xiao Lin, managing director solutions at Xaxis, and Somer Simpson, vice president of product at Quancast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, Chris, we'll start with you at News Corp obviously major publisher. Deprecation of third-party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance you guys had on them. And what are you going to do to prepare for this next level change? >> Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there is a, you know, a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot talk about audience targeting, but obviously they realize that third party cookies pervasive across the whole ad tech ecosystem, MarTech stack. And so, you know, we have to think about, you know how that impact, you know, our vendor the vendors we work with, what it means in terms of our use cases across marketing, across advertising across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it's significant. But you know, we look at it as listen. It's disruptive in disruption and change is always a little scary, but overall it's a it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the the cookies, as we all know, is it was a crutch, right? It's sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. And so, as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022, then it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data, leakage, practice sort of devalued for our perspective. Some of the, you know, we offered as, as publishers. And I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look through post gen world, not just kind of recreating the prior world. Because the prior world was flawed or I guess I could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just replicate that. You know, let's make sure that third party cookies goes away other work around like fingerprinting and things like that, you know, also go away. So, you know, philosophically that's where our head's at. And so, you know, as we look at how we are preparing you look at sort of what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? You know, obviously are we aligned with the regulatory environments? You know, in some ways we're not looking just to Jan 2022 but Jan 2023, where there's going to be the majority of our audiences, we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering, to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a a consistent look at our user is whether they're logged in or obviously, anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components, across all our sites, and all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress but you know, we're excited about what's going on. >> I like how you framed it, you know, old world or next gen kind of the current situation is kind of flawed. And as you think about Programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant. It's a huge investment, and you've got great content and audience consuming it. Xiao, from a major media standpoint get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right? So yeah, privacy, you got consent and all of these things kind of boiling up how do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. You know, everyone, everyone has a megaphone now everyone's you know, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >> You know, if the cookieless future was a tik tok dance, we'd be dancing right now and at least until the next year. This has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time. But I think as each day passes the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. The end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of Programmatic. So clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead, to educate, to partner, and to grow with them along this cookieless future. The impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top. Planning will have a huge impact because it's going to start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. We're omni-channel. So clients wants to drive outcomes through multiple touch points of a consumer's journey. Whether that's programmatic, whether that's as a cookie free environment like connected TV, out of home, audio, gaming, and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with Creative testing, Creative insights, you know, Creative in itself is cookieless. So there will be more focus on how to drive a brand dialogue, to connect to consumers with less targeting, with less cookies. With the cohesiveness of holistic planning, Creative can align through multiple channels. And lastly, the role of AI will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech, our products, to compliment new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and tech stack to deliver these outcomes for them. And AI in its core is just taking inputted data and having an output of your desired outcomes. So input data could be DSP data beyond cookies such as browser, such as location, such as contextual, a publisher taking client's first party data, first party CRM data like store visitation sales site activity. And using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. So as we're learning more about this cookieless dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it, and also introducing our own moves. >> That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, you know connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somer, with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at Quancast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting, journalism is about truth you know, good content, original content. But now you have a data challenge, problem, opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. This is a data problem in a way. It's a tech stack, not so much just, you know getting the right ads to show up at the right place, the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >> You know, I, so first I think that consumers already sort of accept that there is a reasonable value exchange, you know, for their data, in order to access free content. Right? And that's a critical piece for us to all kind of understand. Over the past. Yeah, probably two years, since even before the GDPR, we've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. And so, you know, we kind of known this this cookie going away thing is, has been coming and you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it. And it's been really really interesting since Google's announcement how the conversations have changed with our customers and other folks that we talk to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. From the marketer perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, Oh my God, how you know, it's not just about delivering ads. It's about how do I control frequency? How do I measure, you know, success? You know, because the technology has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized, you know, advertising good content to consumers and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too, too intrusive. On the publisher perspective side, we see a slightly different response. It's more of a yes. Right? You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage. We're going to get the value back for our inventory. Both things are a good thing. But if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night. Right? In terms of, you know, them coming together. Right? And that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer. You got to cut out a lot of like that LUMAscape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >> Yeah. It's a fascinating, I love your insight there. I think it's so relevant. And it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data is impacting some of these big structural changes and refactoring of industries look at cybersecurity, you know no one wants to share their data but now if they share, they get more insight more machine learning, benefit, more AI benefit. So now we have the sharing notion but that goes against counter the big guys that want a walled garden. They want to hoard all the data and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So Chris and Homer, in the wheelhouse you've got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming? with privacy and these kinds of services is the open come back again? How do you guys see this? The confluence of open versus walled gardens. Because you need the data to make machine learning good. >> I'll start off. I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens I've created. And I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients? What are we offering to the buy-side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be, obviously, as journalists I think that there is a case of, you know the importance of funding journalism. But ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the the KPIs and the business needs of the buy-side. And I think around that, it is, you know there's sort of three core pillars to that. It's ease of access, it's scope of activation and targeting, and finally, measurable results. So as I think, as us, as an individual publisher of so we have multiple publications so we do have scale, but then in partnership with other publishers perhaps organizations like Prebid, you know I think we can, we're trying to address that. And I think we can offer something that's compelling and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear that transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data. And I I think we've all heard about like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wares. And I think there's something valuable, but you know I think it's who is sort of the right partner or partners, and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting shared for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant way. >> Somer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization. The network effect that we're seeing in virality and across multiple omni-channels as Xiao pointed out, it's happening. That's the distribution now. So that's almost an open garden model. So it's like >> Yeah. And yeah, it's, it's, you know back in the day, you know, Nightrider who was the first group that I, that I worked for, you know each of those individual properties were not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective. but together as a unit, they became valuable. Right. And got a scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the walled gardens. And yeah, this is something that we've talked about before, an open garden. I think that's the definitely the right route to take. And I agree with Chris. It's about publishers getting as close to the marketers as possible, working with the tech companies that enable them to do that, and doing so in a very privacy centric way. >> Xiao how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third-party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's going to be okay, the parachute will open. The future is not going to be as grim. It's a real opportunity, but if managed properly. What's your take on this? Is it just more first party data strategy? And what's your assessment of this? >> So we're collaborating right now with ball grants on how to distill very complex cookieless future you know, what's going to happen in the future. To six steps that we can take right now and marketers should take. The first step is gather Intel on what's working on your current campaign analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temporal or time analysis. We can look at log level data. We can look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how Creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo-targeting strategies. The geo-targeting strategy has been underrated because the granularity and DL data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example, the census block data. And this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data, but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. We want to optimize investments around markets that are working, so strong markets, and then test in underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. We could build on small-scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets, working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data, to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. The fourth one is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFIs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and your future roadmap. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The fifth thing, and I think this is very important, is first party data. That's going to matter more than ever in the cookieless future. Brands will need to think about how to access and develop the first party data starting with the consumer, seeing of value in exchange for the information it's a goldmine and understanding your consumer their intent, their journey. And you need a really great data sciences team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a clean room environment for targeting, for modeling, for insights. And lastly, the sixth thing that we can do is begin inform prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookieless. One, one place that we can start, and it is under invested right now, is Safari and Firefox. They have been cookieless for quite some time. So you can start here and begin testing here. Work with your data scientist team to understand the right mixes to target and start exploring other channels outside of just programmatic cookies. Like CTV, digit auto home, radio, gaming, and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to prepare and plan for the cookieless future. >> So, Chris, let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookieless future? >> I think the one certain answer is there definitely is not just one solution. As we all know right now, there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals when the W3C, work happening within other industry bodies, you know, private company solutions being offered. And you know, it's a little bit, it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand it and understand the impact. And as a publisher, we're obviously, you know, a lot of people are knocking on our door, you know they're saying, hey, our solution is one that it's going to bring in lots of money. You know, all the buy-side is going to use it. This is the one like unlock all the spend. And it's our experience so far is that none of these solutions are, cause I think everyone's still testing and learning. No one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise I think what matters the most to us as publishers, actually something Somer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a, you know, again outside of our sort of independent internal identifier work that we're doing, if we're going to work with an outside party or an outside approach, does it give us control >> As a publisher to ensure that it is, you know we control the, the data from our users, you know there isn't that data leakage, it's privacy compliant. You know, what information gets shared out there? What is it what's released within, you know within the bitstream? If it is something that's attached to a, someone, a declared user, a registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off in another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going again. And so I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world. And so those controls are critical. And I think to have those controls as publisher we have to be collectively be disciplined. And you know, what solutions that we sort of we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when that adoption point arrives it definitely will not be one. There will be multiple because there's just too many cases to address. >> Great, great insight there from you guys at News Corp. Somer, let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation, ups and downs. We're on a new one now. We talked about the open internet and democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now but there's now a wave of quality people, really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and data is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists to reward journalism? Is there a way, is there a path forward? >> So there's what I hope is going to happen. And then I'm just going to ignore what could, right. You know, there's a trend in market right now at a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning in to wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on BiPAC owned and operated, really leaning into supporting those businesses that have been and those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. We are leaning into helping marketers curate that supply, right. And, and really, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that they support and value in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues. And it's not just sort of like a marketing blip but we will do everything possible to kind of encourage that behavior and give people the information that they need to find. You know, truly high quality journalism. >> That's awesome. Chris, Xiao, Somer, thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookieless future. Before we go, just quick summary, each of you if you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction for what's going to happen in the next 24 months. Chris, we'll start with you. >> It's going to be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if Google delays the change to the Chrome by a couple months. And may give the industry some much needed time. But no one knows, I guess, I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere, we are deep within Chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes that happen, changes that happen quickly. And it's going to cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of, you know, from advertising and marketing. So just be prepared. >> Okay. Xiao. Along those same lines, be prepared. Nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. You know, we're all dancing in this together. I think for us, it's planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. So omni-channel, AI, Creative, and I think clients will lean more into those different channels. >> Awesome. Somer, take us home. Last words. >> I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage, right? So this is a time of discovery of leaning and trying everything out learning and iterating as fast as we possibly can. >> Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. I can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Somer, thanks for coming on. Xiao, Chris, thanks for coming on this awesome panel industry breakdown of the Cookie Conundrum, a Recipe for Success data AI open the future is here. It's coming. It's coming fast. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>>what? Hello, I'm john free with the cube. I want to welcome Conrad Feldman, the founder and Ceo of Kwan cast here to kick off the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The events called the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. The changing advertising landscape, super relevant conversation just now. More than ever. Conrad welcome to your own program kicking this off. Thanks for holding this event. It's a pleasure. Great to chat with you today. So a big fan been following your company since the founding of it. Been analytics is always the prize of any data driven company. Media. Anything's all data driven now. Um, talk about the open internet because now more than ever it's under siege. As I, as I mentioned in my open, um, we've been seeing the democratization, a new trend of decentralization. We're starting to see um, you know, everyone's present online now, Clay Shirky wrote a book called, here comes everyone in 2005. Well everyone's here. Right? So you know, we're here, it's gonna be more open. But yet people are looking at as close right now. You're seeing the big players, um, or in the data. What's your vision of this open internet? >>Well, an open internet exists for everyone. And if you think about the evolution of the internet, when the internet was created for the first time really in history, anyone that had access to the internet could publish the content, whatever they were interested in and could find an audience. And of course that's grown to where we are today, where five billion people around the world are able to engage in all sorts of content, whether that's entertainment or education, news, movies. What's perhaps not so widely understood is that most of that content is paid for by advertising and there's a lot of systems that support advertising on the open Internet and some of those are under siege today certainly. >>And what's the big pressure point? Is it just more control the data? Is it just that these walled gardens are wanting to, you know, suck the audience in there? Is that monetization driving it? What's where's the friction? >>Well, the challenges is sort of the accumulation of power into a really small number of now giant corporations who have actually reduced a lot of the friction that marketers have in spending their money effectively. And it means that those companies are capturing a disproportionate spend of the ad budgets that fund digital content. So the problem is if more of the money goes to them, less of its going to independent content creators. It's actually getting harder for independent voices to emerge and be heard. And so that's the real challenges. That has more power consolidates into just a limited number of tech giants. The funding path for the open Internet becomes constrained and there'll be less choice for consumers without having to pay for subscriptions. >>Everyone knows the more data you have the better and certainly, but the centralized power when the trend is going the other way, the consensus is everyone wants to be decentralized more truth, more trust all this is being talked about on the heels of the google's news around, you know, getting rid of third party cookies and others have followed suit. Um, what does this mean? I mean, this cookies have been the major vehicle for tracking and getting that kind of data. What is gonna be replaced with what is this all about? And can you share with us what the future will look like? >>Sure, Well, just as advertising funds the open Internet is advertising technology that supports that advertising spend. It supports sort of the business of advertising that funds the open Internet. And within all of that technology is the need for different systems to be able to align around um the identification of for example, a consumer, Have they been to this site before? Have they seen an ad before? So there's all of these different systems that might be used for advertising for measurement, for attribution, for creating personalization. And historically they've relied upon the third party cookie as the mechanism for synchronization. Well, the third party cookie has been in decline for some time. It's already mostly gone from actually apple safari browser, but google's chrome has so much control over how people access the internet. And so it was when Google announced that chrome was going to deprecate the third party cookie, that it really sort of focus the minds of the industry in terms of finding alternative ways to tailor content and ultimately to just simply measure the effectiveness of advertising. And so there's an enormous amount of um innovation taking place right now to find alternative solutions. >>You know, some are saying that the free open internet was pretty much killed when, you know, the big comes like facebook and google started bringing all this data and kind of pulls all sucks all the auction in the room, so to speak. What's this mean with cookies now getting, getting rid of um, by google has an impact publishers because is it helpful? I mean hurtful. I mean, where's the where is that, what the publisher impact? >>Well, I don't think anyone really knows right now. So first of all, cookies weren't necessarily a very good solution to the sort of the challenge of maintaining state and understanding those sorts of the delivery of advertising and so on. It's just the one that's commonly used, I think for different publishers it may mean different things. But many publishers need to be able to demonstrate the value and the effectiveness of the advertising solutions that they deliver. So they'll be innovating in terms of how they use their first party data. They'll be continuing to use contextual solutions that have long been used to create advertising relevant, relevant. I think the big question of course is how we're going to measure it that any of this is effective at all because everyone relies upon measuring advertising effectiveness to justify capturing those budgets in the first place. >>You know, you mentioned contextual come up a lot also in the other interviews we've done with the folks in the around the internet around this topic of machine learning is a big 12 What is the impact of this with the modernization of the solution? You mentioned cookies? Okay cookies, old technology. But the mechanisms in this ecosystem around it or not, it funds the open internet. What is that modern solution that goes that next level? Is it contextual metadata? Is that shared systems? What's the it's the modernization of that. >>It's all of those and and more. There's no there's no single solution to replace the third party cookie. There'll be a combination of solutions. Part of that will be alternative identity mechanisms. So you know, you will start to see more registration wars to access content so that you have what's called a deterministic identify there will be statistical models so called probabilistic models, contextual has always been important. It will become more important and it will be combined with we use contextual combining natural language processing with machine learning models to really understand the detailed context of different pages across the internet. You'll also see the use of first party data and there are discussions about shared data services as well. I think there's gonna be a whole set of different innovations that will need to inter operate and it's going to be an evolutionary process as people get used to using these different systems to satisfy the different stages of the media fulfillment cycle from research and planning to activation to measurement. >>You know, you put up walled gardens. I want to just touch on the on on this kind of concept of walled gardens and and and and compare and contrast that with the demand for community, open internet has always fostered a community vibe. You see network effects mostly in distinct user communities or subnets of sub networks. If you will kind of walled gardens became that kind of group get together but then became more of a media solution to make the user is the product, as they say, facebook's a great example, right? People talk about facebook and from that misinformation abuse walled garden is not the best thing happening right now in the world, but yet is there any other other choice? That's how they're going to make money? But yet everyone wants trust, truth community. Are they usually exclusive? How do you see this evolving, what's your take? >>Well, I think the open internet is a, is a forum where anyone can have their voice, uh, put their voice out there and have it discovered and it's in that regard, it's a it's a force for good look. I think there are there are challenges, obviously in terms of some of the some of the optimization that takes place with inside the walled gardens, which is, is sort of optimized to drive engagement can have some unintended consequences. Um obviously that's something that's, that's broadly being discussed today and the impact on society, but sort of more at a more pointed level, it's just the absorption of advertising dollars. There's a finite amount of money from advertisers. It's estimated to be $400 billion this year in digital advertising. So it's a huge amount of money in terms of funding the open Internet, which sounds great except for its increasingly concentrated in a tiny number of companies. And so, you know, our job at Quan cast as champions of the free and open Internet is to help direct money effectively to publishers across the open internet and give advertisers a reliable, repeatable way of accessing the audiences that they care about in the environment they care about and delivering advertising results. >>It's a publisher, we care a lot about what our audience wants and try to serve them and listen to them. If we could get the data, we want that data and then also broker in the monetization with advertisers, who might want to reach that audience in whatever way. So this brings up the question of, you know, automation and role of data. You know, this is a huge thing to having that data closed loop, if you will for for publishers. But yet most publishers are small, some niche. And even as they can become super large, they don't have all the data and more, the more data, the better the machine learning. So what's the answer to this as it goes forward? How do we get there? What's the dots that that we need to connect to get that future state? >>So I think it takes it takes companies working together effectively. I think a really important part of it is, is a more direct conversation with consumers. We've seen that change beginning to happen over the past few years with the introduction of regulations that require clear communication to consumers about the data that's captured. And y and I think that creates an opportunity to explain to your audience is the way in which content is funded. So I think that consumer that consumer conversation will be part of the collective solution. >>You know, I want to as we wind down this kickoff segment, get your thoughts and vision around um, the evolution of the internet and you guys have done some great work at quan Cast is well documented, but everyone used to talk about traffic by traffic, then it became cost of acquisitions. PPC search. This is either mechanisms that people have been using for a long, long time, then you know, your connections but audience is about traffic, audience traffic. If this if my family is online, doesn't it become about networks and the people. So I want to get your thoughts and your vision because if community is going to be more important than people agree that it is and things are gonna be decentralized, more openness, more voices to be heard. You need to dress ability. The formation of networks and groups become super important. What's your vision on that? >>So my vision is to create relevance and utility for consumers. I think that's one of the things that's often forgotten is that when we make advertising more relevant and useful for consumers, it automatically fulfils the objectives that publishers and marketers have, everyone wins when advertising is more relevant. And our vision is to make advertising relevant across the entire open internet so that that ad supported model can continue to flourish and that five billion and hopefully many more billions in the future, people around the world have access to high quality, diverse content. >>If someone asked you Conrad, what is quant cast doing to make the open internet viable now that cookies are going away? What's the answer? >>So well, the cookie pieces is a central piece of it in terms of finding solutions that will enable sort of planning activation and measurement post cookies and we have a lot of innovation going on. There were also working with a range of industry bodies and our and our partners to build solutions for this. What we're really trying to do is to make buying the open internet as straightforward for marketers as it is today and buying the walled gardens. The reason the walled gardens capture so much money is they made it really easy for marketers to get results, marketers would like to be able to spend their money across all of the diverse publishes the open internet. You know, our job at Comcast is to make it just as easy to effectively spend money in funding the content that they really care about in reaching the audiences that they want. >>Great stuff. Great Mission. Conrad, thanks for coming on. Conrad Feldmann founder and Ceo here at the cookie conundrum recipe for success event, Quant Cast Industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. Thank you. Conrad appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I'm john ferrier, stay with us for more on the industry event around the middle cookies. Mhm Yeah, yeah, thank you. Mhm. Welcome back to the Qantas industry summit on the demise of third party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. I'm john furrier host of the cube, the changing landscape of advertising is here and shit Gupta, founder of you of digital is joining us chief. Thanks for coming on this segment. Really appreciate, I know you're busy, you've got two young kids as well as providing education to the digital industry, you got some kids to take care of and train them to. So welcome to the cube conversation here as part of the program. >>Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. >>So the office of the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big 34 tech players dominate the marketplace so clearly in a major inflection point and we've seen this movie before Web mobile revolution which was basically a reply platform NG of capabilities. But now we're in an error of re factoring the industry, not re platt forming a complete changing over of the value proposition. So a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet, global internet evolves. What are your, what's your take on this, this industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue? What does it mean? And what proposals are out there? >>Yeah, so, you know, I I really view the identity proposals and kind of to to kind of groups, two separate groups. So on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing and really that's being led by google. Right, so google um you know, introduce something called the privacy sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third party cookies uh as part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say they're all bird themed for some reason, I don't know why. Um but the one, the bird theme proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called flock, which stands for Federated learning of cohorts. And essentially what it all boils down to is google is moving forward with cohort level learning and understanding of users in the future after third party cookies, unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting tracking purposes. And so that's on one side of the equation, it's what google is doing with flock and privacy sandbox now on the other side is, you know, things like unified I. D. Two point or the work that I. D five is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space that actually can still get down to the user level. Right? And so again, unified I. D. Two point oh comes to mind because it's the one that's probably got the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it and unified, I need to point out again is user level. So it's it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites you know that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so if you think about those two work streams right, you've got the walled gardens and or you know, google with flock on one side and then you've got unified I. D. Two point oh and other I. D. Frameworks for the open internet. On the other side, you've got these two very differing type of approaches to identity in the future. Again on the google side it's cohort level, it's going to be built into chrome. Um The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today, but now you're just doing it at a group level so that you're protecting privacy, whereas on the other side of the open internet you're still getting down to the user level. Um And that's pretty powerful. But the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw is under five of all website traffic is authenticated. So really if you if you simplify things you boil it all down, you have kind of these two very differing approaches. >>I guess the question it really comes down to what alternatives are out there for cookies and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because I think, you know, the consensus is at least from my reporting, in my view, is that the world agrees. Let's make it open, Which one is going to be better. >>Yeah, that's a great question, john So as I mentioned, right, we have we have to kind of work streams here, we've got the walled garden work streams, work stream being led by google and their work around flock, and then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say unified I. D to kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an endgame here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly, I think that, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks, neither of them are perfect, they're both flawed in their own ways. There are pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution. Right? So they're saying, hey, we use, you know, an open I. D. Framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data and that's important. But we don't have all the scale. So now we go to google and we go to flock to kind of fill the scale. Oh and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce, right? We have some of our own data, we have some of our own partnerships, we're gonna bring that in and layer it on top. Right? And so really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both. With a little extra something on top. I think that's that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space. And I think that's frankly where we're headed. >>What do you think the industry will evolve to, in your opinion? Because I think this is gonna, you can't ignore the big guys on this because these programmatic you mentioned also the data is there. But what do you think the market will evolve to with this, with this conundrum? >>So, so I think john where we're headed? You know, I think we're right now we're having this existential existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry, because our world is being turned upside down, all the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told they were gonna have new mechanisms, Right? So cookies are going away device ids are going away and now we got to come up with new things and so the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and you know, we're here talking about it, right? Like everyone's always talking about identity right now, where do I think this is going if I was to look into my crystal ball, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today. Right? Forget about all the changes. Just think about it now and maybe a few years before today, Identity for marketers in my opinion has been a little bit of a checkbox activity. Right? It's been hey, um, okay, uh, you know ad tech company or a media company, do you have an identity solution? Okay. Tell me a little bit more about it. Okay, Sounds good. That sounds good. Now can we move on and talk about my business and how are you going to drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business? And I believe the reason that is, is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know. Yes, You have it. Okay, great. Let's move on, type of thing. Right. And so that, that's, that's kind of where we've been now, all of a sudden The cookies are going away, the device ids are going away. And so the world is turning upside down in this crisis of how are we going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future. So everyone's talking about it and we're trying to re engineer right? The mechanisms now if I was to look into the crystal ball right 2 3 years from now where I think we're headed is not much is going to change. And what I mean by that john is um uh I think that marketers will still go to companies and say do you have an ID solution? Okay tell me more about it. Okay uh Let me understand a little bit better. Okay you do it this way. Sounds good. Now the ways in which companies are going to do it will be different right now. It's flock and unified I. D. And this and that right. The ways the mechanisms will be a little bit different but the end state right? Like the actual way in which we operate as an industry and kind of like the view of the landscape in my opinion will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a tell me you have an ID solution. Make me feel good about it. Help me check the box and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're going to solve for my needs. So I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're going to do in the future. My just my viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >>And I'll say the user base is the audience. Their their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and Ai are going to create those and we have the data you have the sharing it or using it as we're finding shit Gupta great insight dropping some nice gems here. Founder of you of Digital and also the Adjunct professor of Programmatic advertising at Levi School of Business and santa Clara University professor. Thank you for coming dropping the gems here and insight. Thank you. >>Thanks a lot for having me john really appreciate >>it. Thanks for watching. The cooking 100 is the cube host Jon ferrier me. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Hello welcome back to the cookie conundrum recipe for success and industry conference and summit from Guanacaste on the demise of third party cookies. Got a great industry panel here to break it down chris Gunther Senior Vice president Global Head of programmatic at news corp chris thanks for coming on Zal in Managing Director Solutions at Z axis and Summer Simpson. Vice president Product at quan cast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Uh thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. Thank you for having us. So chris we'll start with you at news corp obviously a major publisher deprecation of third party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Um, tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance he has had on them. And what are you gonna do to prepare for this next level change? >>Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there's uh a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot of talk about audience targeting but obviously that reliance on third party cookies pervasive across the whole at tech ecosystem Martek stack. And so you know, we have to think about how that impact vendor vendors, we work with what it means in terms of use cases across marketing, across advertising, across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it it's it's significant, but you know, we look at it as listen, it's disruptive, uh, disruption and change is always a little scary. Um, but overall it's a, it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the cookies, as we all know was it was a crutch, right sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. Um, and so as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022 then it's, it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data leakage, um, practice or devalue for our perspective, some of the, you know, we offered as as publishers and I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look at the post gender world, not just kind of recreating the prior world because the prior world was flawed or I guess you could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just not, you know, let's not just replicate that. Let's make sure that, you know, third party cookie goes away. Other work around like fingerprinting and things like that. You know, also go away so philosophically, that's where our heads at. And so as we look at how we are preparing, you know, you look at what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? Yeah, obviously. Are we um aligned with the regulatory environments? Yeah. In some ways we're not looking just a Jan 2022, but Jan 23 where there's gonna be the majority of our audiences we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a consistent look at our users whether they're logged in or obviously anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components across all our sites and in all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress. But we're >>excited about what's going on. I like how you framed at Old world or next gen kind of the current situation kind of flawed. And as you think about programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant, a huge investment and you've got great content and audience consuming it from a major media standpoint. Get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right, So your privacy, you got consent, all these things kind of boiling up. How do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. Everyone, everyone has a megaphone, now, everyone's, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >>You know, if if the cookie list future was a tic tac, dance will be dancing right now, and at least into the next year, um this has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time, but I think as each day passes, the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. Uh the end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of programmatic. Um so clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead to educate, to partner and to grow with them. Um, along this uh cookie list future, the impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top planning will have a huge impact because it's gonna start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. Uh where Omni channel, So clients want to drive outcomes, drew multiple touch points of a consumer's journey, whether it has programmatic, whether it has uh cookie free environment, like connected tv, digital home audio, gaming and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with creative testing. Creative insights. You know, creative in itself is cookie list. So there will be more focused on how to drive uh brand dialogue to connect to consumers with less targeting. With less cookies, with the cohesiveness of holistic planning. Creative can align through multiple channels and lastly, the role of a. I will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech our products to complement new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and text back to deliver these outcomes for them. And ai in its core it's just taking input data uh and having an output of your desired outcome. So input data could be dSP data beyond cookies such as browser such as location, such as contextual or publisher taking clients first party data, first party crm data like store visitation, sales, site activity. Um and using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. Um So as we're learning more about this cookie list dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it and also introducing our own moves. >>That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somewhere with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at quan cast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting Journalism is about truth and good content original content. But now you have a data challenge problem opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. It's a data problem in a way it's a it's a tech stack, not so much just getting the right as to show up at the right place the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >>Um you know, >>so first >>I think that consumers already sort of like except that there is a reasonable value exchange for their data in order to access free content. Right? And that's that's a critical piece for us to all kind of like understand over the past. Hi guys, probably two years since even even before the G. D. P. R. We've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. Um and so you know, we've kind of known this, this cookie going away thing has been coming. Um And you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it and it's been, it's been really, really interesting since Google's announcement, how the conversations have changed with with our customers and other folks that we talked to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. Um you know, from the marketing perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, oh my God, how you know, it's not just about, you know, delivering ads, it's about how do I control frequency? How do I, how do I measure, you know, success? Because the technology has has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized advertising, good content, right. The consumers um and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too too intrusive on the publisher perspective side, we see slightly different response. It's more of a yes, right. You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage, we're going to get the value back for our inventory. Um and that both things are a good thing, but if it's, if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night, right? In terms of um of, you know, they're there, them coming together, right, and that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer, you got to cut out a lot of that loom escape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >>It's a fascinating, I love love your insight there. I think it's so relevant and it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data's impact, some of these big structural changes and re factoring of industries, look at cyber security, you know, no one wants to share their data, but now if they share they get more insight, more machine learning, benefit more ai benefit. So now we have the sharing notion, but that goes against counter the big guys that want to wall garden, they want to hoard all the data and and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey, I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So so christmas summer you're in the, in the wheelhouse, you got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming with privacy and these kinds of services? Is the open, come back again? How do you guys see this uh confluence of open versus walled gardens, because you need the data to make machine learning good. >>So I'll start uh start off, I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens have created, I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients, what are we offering to the buy side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be uh yeah, actually as journalists, I think that there is a case of the importance of funding journalism. Um but ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the KPI is and the business needs of the buy side. And I think around that it is the sort of three core pillars that its ease of access, its scope of of activation and targeting and finally measurable results. So as I think is us as an individual publishers, so we have, we have multiple publications. So we do have scale. But then in partnership with other publishers perhaps to organizations like pre bid, you know, I think we can, you know, we're trying to address that and I think we can offer something that's compelling um, and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data and I think the form, you know, I think we've all heard a lot like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wears. I think there's something valuable but you know, I think it's the right who is sort of the right partner or partners um and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting, share it for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant >>way summer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization, the network effect that we're seeing in Vire al Itty and across multiple on the on the channels. Is that pointed out what's happening? That's the distribution now. So um that's almost an open garden model. So it's like um yeah, >>yeah, it's it's um you know, back in the day, you know, um knight ridder who was who was the first group that I that I worked for, um you know, each of those individual properties, um we're not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective, but together as a unit, they became valuable, right, and got scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the world gardens. Um, and yeah, this is something that we've talked about before and an open garden. Um, I think that's the, that's the definitely the right route to take. And I and I agree with chris it's, it's about publishers getting as close to the market. Is it possible working with the tech companies that enable them to do that and doing so in a very privacy centric >>way. So how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's gonna be okay. The parachute will open. The future is not gonna be as as grim. Um, it's a real opportunity. But if managed properly, what's your take on this is just more first party data strategy and what's your assessment of this? >>So we collaborated right now with ball grants on how did this still very complex cookie list future. Um, you know what's going to happen in the future? 2, 6 steps that we can take right now and market should take. Um, The first step is to gather intel on what's working on your current campaign, analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temperature or time analysis. We could look at log level data. We could look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo targeting strategies. The geo target strategy has been uh underrated because the granularity and geo data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example the census black data and this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. Uh We want to optimize investments around uh markets that are working so strong markets and then test and underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. Uh We could build on small scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets. Working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. Um the 4th 1 is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and their future role maps. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The 15 and I think this is very important is first party data, you know, that's going to matter more than ever. In the calculus future brands will need to think about how to access and developed the first party data starting with the consumers seeing a value in exchange for the information. It's a gold mine and understanding of consumer, their intent, the journey um and you need a really great data science team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a cleaner environment for targeting for modeling for insight. And lastly, the six thing that we can do is begin to inform prospect prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookie list 11 place that we can start and it is under invested right now is Safari and Firefox. They have been calculus for quite some time so you can start here and begin testing here. Uh work with your data scientist team to understand the right mix is to to target and start exploring other channels outside of um just programmatic cookies like CTV digital, out of home radio gaming and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to uh prepare and plan for the cookie list future. >>So chris let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookie was future? >>Uh I think the one certain answers, they're definitely not just one solution. Um as we all know right now there there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals with the W three C uh work happening within other industry bodies uh you know private companies solutions being offered and you know, it's a little bit of it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand and understand the impact. And as a publisher were obviously a lot of people are knocking on our door. Uh they're saying, hey our solution is one that is going to bring in lots of money, you know, the all the buy side is going to use it. This is the one like I ma call to spend um, and so expect here and so far is that none of these solutions are I think everyone is still testing and learning no one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise, I think what matters the most to us as publisher is actually something summer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a again, outside of our sort of, you know, internal identifier work that we're doing is we're going to work with an outside party or outside approach doesn't give us control as a publisher to ensure that it is, we control the data from our users. There isn't that data leakage, it's probably compliant. What information gets shared out there. What is it, what's released within within the bid stream? Uh If it is something that's attached to a somewhat declared user registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off on another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going against. I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world so that those controls are critical and I think they have those controls, his publisher, we have collectively be disciplined in what solutions that we we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when the adoption point arrives, uh definitely it will not be one. There will be multiple because it's just too many use cases to address >>great, great insight there from, from you guys, news corp summer. Let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation ups and downs were on a new one. Now we talked about the open internet democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now, but there's now a wave of quality people really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and date is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists, reward journalism is our ways their path forward. >>So there's uh, there's what I hope is going to happen. Um, and then I'm just gonna ignore what could write. Um, you know, there's there's a trend in market right now, a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning into wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on bipac owned and operated, really leaning into into supporting those businesses that have been uh, those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. Um We are leaning into into helping um, marketers curate that supply right? And really, uh, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that that they support. Um, and uh, and and value right in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues and it's not just sort of like a marketing blip. Um, but we will do everything possible to kind of like encourage that behavior and and give people the information they need to find, you know, truly high quality journalism. >>That's awesome chris Summer. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookie list future. Before we go, just quick summary each of you. If you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction For what's going to happen in the next 24 months Chris We'll start with you. >>Uh it's gonna be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. Um I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if google delays the change to the chrome by a couple of months and and may give the industry some much needed time, but no one knows. I guess. I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere deep within chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes to happen, changes to happen quickly and it's gonna cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of from advertising, marketing. So just be >>prepared. >>Yeah, along the same lines, be prepared, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. Uh You know, while dancing in this together. Uh I think um for us it's um planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. Um So omni channel ai um creative and I think clients will uh lean more into those different channels, >>awesome. So we'll pick us home, last word. >>I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage. Right, so this is a time of discovery of leaning in trying everything out, Learning and iterating as fast as we possibly >>can. Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. Can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Thanks for coming on chris, Thanks for coming on. This awesome panel industry breakdown of the cookie conundrum. The recipe for success data ai open. Uh The future is here, it's coming, it's coming fast. I'm john fryer with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Welcome back to the Quant Cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. We're here peter day. The cto of quad cast and crew T cop car, head of product marketing quad cast. Thanks for coming on talking about the changing advertising landscape. >>Thanks for having us. Thank you for having >>us. So we've been hearing this story out to the big players. Want to keep the data, make that centralized control, all the leverage and then you've got the other end. You got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. Uh what's what are you guys doing to solve this problem? Because cookies go away? What's going to happen there? How do people track things you guys are in this business first question? What is quan cast strategies to adapt to third party cookies going away? What's gonna be, what's gonna be the answer? >>Yeah. So uh very rightly said, john the mission, the Qantas mission is the champion of free and open internet. Uh And with that in mind, our approach to this world without third party cookies is really grounded in three fundamental things. Uh First as industry standards, we think it's really important to participate and to work with organizations who are defining the standards that will guide the future of advertising. So with that in mind, we've been participating >>with I. A. B. >>Tech lab, we've been part of their project Triarc. Uh same thing with pre bid, who's kind of trying to figure out the pipes of identity. Di di di di di pipes of uh of the future. Um And then also is W three C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium. Um And our engineers and our engineering team are participating in their weekly meetings trying to figure out what's happening with the browsers and keeping up with the progress they're on things such as google's block. Um The second uh sort of thing is interoperability, as you've mentioned, there are lots of different uh I. D. Solutions that are emerging. You have you I. D. Two point oh, you have live RAM, you have google's flock. Uh And there will be more, there are more and they will continue to be more. Uh We really think it is important to build a platform that can ingest all of these signals. And so that's what we've done. Uh The reason really is to meet our customers where they are at today. Our customers use multiple different data management platforms, the mps. Um and that's why we support multiple of those. Um This is not going to be much different than that. We have to meet our customers where we are, where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who contrast is innovation. Uh As you can imagine being able to take all of these multiple signals in including the I. D. S. And the cohorts, but also others like contextual first party um consent is becoming more and more important. Um And then there are many other signals, like time, language geo location. So all of these signals can help us understand user behavior intent and interests um in absence of 3rd party cookies. However, uh there's there's something to note about this. They're very raw, their complex, they're messy all of these different signals. Um They are changing all the time, they're real time. Um And there's incomplete information isolation. Just one of these signals cannot help you build a true and complete picture. So what you really need is a technology like AI and machine learning to really bring all of these signals together, combine them statistically and get an understanding of user behavior intent and interests and then act on it, be it in terms of providing audience insights um or responding to bid requests and and so on and so forth. So those are sort of the three um fundamentals that our approach is grounded in which is industry standards, interoperability and and innovation. Uh and you know, you have peter here, who is who is the expert So you can dive much deeper into >>it. Is T. T. O. You've got to tell us how is this going to actually work? What are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to help with data driven advertising in a third party cookie list world? >>Well, we've been um This is not a shock, you know, I think anyone who's been close to his space has known that the 3rd Party Cookie has been um uh reducing inequality in terms of its pervasiveness and its longevity for many years now. And the kind of death knell is really google chrome making a, making the changes that they're gonna be making. So we've been investing in the space for many years. Um and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investment. So one of them is in how as a marketer, how do I tell if my marketing still working in the world without >>computers? The >>majority of marketers completely reliant on third party cookies today to tell them if they're if they're marketing is working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily and statistical techniques which are closer to kind of economic trick models that markets are used to things like out of home advertising, It's going to establishing whether they're advertising is working or not in a digital environment actually, >>just as >>often, you know, as is often the case in these kind of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And you know, digital measurement has often mistaken precision for accuracy. And there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees if you like. And start to come with better methods of measuring the affections of advertising without third party cookies. And in fact to make countless other investments in areas like contextual modeling and and targeting that third party cookies and and uh, connecting directly to publishers rather than going through this kind of bloom escape that's gonna tied together third party cookies. So if I was to enumerate all the investments we've made, I think we'll be here till midnight but we have to make a number of vestments over a number of years and that level investments only increasing at the moment. >>Peter on that contextual. Can you just double click on that and tell us more? >>Yeah, I mean contextual is unfortunately these things, this is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, hey, trust us, this dissipated about CVS to what's possible now and has only really been possible the last couple of years, which is to build >>statistical >>models of the entire internet based on the content that people are actually consumed. And this type of technology requires massive data processing capabilities. It's able to take advantage of the latest innovations in there is like natural language processing and really gives um computers are kind of much deeper and richer understanding of the internet, which ultimately makes it possible to kind of organize, organized the Internet in terms of the types of content of pages. So this type of technology has only been possible the last two years and we've been using contextual signals since our inception, it's always been massively predictive in terms of audience behaviours, in terms of where advertising is likely to work. And so we've been very fortunate to keep the investment going um and take advantage of many of these innovations that have happened in academia and in kind of uh in adjacent areas >>on the ai machine learning aspect, that seems to be a great differentiator in this day and age for getting the most out of the data. How is machine learning and ai factoring into your platform? >>I think it's, it's how we've always operated right from our interception when we started as a measurement company, the way that we were giving our customers at the time, we were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business insights into who their audience was, were, was using machine learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been, has always been machine learning from from before. It was cool. A lot of our kind of, a lot of our core teams have backgrounds in machine learning phds in statistics and machine learning and and that really drives our our decision making. I mean, data is only useful if you can make sense of it and if you can organize it and if you can take action on it and to do that at this kind of scout scale, it's absolutely necessary to use machine learning technology. >>So you mentioned contextual also, you know, in advertising, everyone knows in that world that you've got the contextual behavioural dynamics, the behavior that's kind of generally everyone's believing is happening. The consensus is undeniable is that people are wanting to expect an environment where there's trust, there's truth, but also they want to be locked in. They don't wanna get walled into a walled garden, nobody wants to be in the world, are they want to be free to pop around and visit sites is more horizontal scalability than ever before. Yet, the bigger players are becoming walled garden, vertical platforms. So with future of ai the experience is going to come from this data. So the behavior is out there. How do you get that contextual relevance and provide the horizontal scale that users expect? >>Yeah, I think it's I think it's a really good point and we're definitely this kind of tipping point. We think, in the broader industry, I think, you know, every published right, we're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world, all the way through to my mom's vlog, right? So we get to hear the perspectives of publishers at every scale. I think they consistently tell us the same thing, which is they want to more directly connected consumers, they don't wanna be tied into these walled gardens, which dictate how they must present their content and in some cases what content they're allowed to >>present. >>Um and so our job as a company is to really provide level >>the playing field a little bit, >>provide them the same capabilities they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let's give them more choice in terms of how they structure their content, how they organize their content, how they organize their audiences, but make sure that they can fund that effectively by making their audiences in their environments discoverable by marketers measurable by marketers and connect them as directly as possible to make that kind of ad funded economic model as effective in the open Internet as it is in social. And so a lot of the investments we've made over recent years have been really to kind of realize that vision, which is, it should be as easy for a marketer to be able to understand people on the open internet as it is in social media. It should be as effective for them to reach people in the environment is really high quality content as it is on facebook. And so we invest a lot of a lot of our R and D dollars in making that true. We're now live with the Comcast platform, which does exactly that. And as third party cookies go away, it only um only kind of exaggerated or kind of further emphasizes the need for direct connections between brands and publishers. And so we just wanna build the technology that helps make that true and gives the kind of technology to these marketers and publishers to connect and to deliver great experiences without relying on these kind of walled >>gardens. Yeah, the Director Director, Consumer Director audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for for that's happening in this new world? How do you ingest the content and just this consent uh signaling? >>Uh we were really fortunate to have an amazing, amazing R and D. Team and, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you need to realize our vision. This has meant things like, you know, we have crawlers which scan the entire internet at this point, extract the content of the pages and kind of make sense of it and organize it uh, and organize it for publishers so they can understand how their audiences overlap with potential competitors or collaborators. But more importantly, organize it for marketers. So you can understand what kind of high impact opportunities are there for them there. So, you know, we've had to we've had to build a lot of technology. We've had to build analytics engines, which can get answers back in seconds so that marketers and publishers can kind of interact with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that's compelling and help them drive their strategy as well as their execution. We've had to invest in areas like consent management because we believe that a free and open internet is absolutely reliant on trust and therefore we spend a lot of our time thinking about how do we make it easy for end users to understand who has access to their data and easy for end users to be able to opt out. And uh and as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted adopted consent management platform. So it's hard to tackle one of these problems without tackling all of them. Were fortunate enough to have had a large enough R and D budget over the last four or five years, make a number investments, everything from consent and identity through context, your signals through the measurement technologies, which really bring advertisers >>and Publishers places together great insight. Last word for you is what's the what's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform, uh what's what are you guys seeing as the highlight uh from a platform perspective? >>So the initial response that we've seen from our customers has been very encouraging, both on the publisher side as well as the marketer side. Um I think, you know, one of the things we hear quite a lot is uh you guys are at least putting forth a solution, an actual solution for us to test Peter mentioned measurement, that really is where we started because you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Um so that that is where his team has started and we have some measurement very, very uh initial capabilities still in alpha, but they are available in the platform for marketers to test out today. Um so the initial response has been very encouraging. People want to engage with us um of course our, you know, our fundamental value proposition, which is that the Qantas platform was never built to be reliant on on third party data. These stale segments like we operate, we've always operated on real time live data. Um The second thing is, is our premium publisher relationships. We have had the privilege of working like Peter said with some of the um biggest publishers, but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across um over 100 million plus web and mobile destinations. Um and you know, as you must have heard like that sort of first party footprint is going to come in really handy in a world without third party cookies, we are encouraging all of our customers, publishers and marketers to grow their first party data. Um and so that that's something that's a strong point that customers love about us and and lean into it quite a bit. Um So yeah, the initial response has been great. Of course it doesn't hurt that we've made all these are in the investments. We can talk about consent. Um, and you know, I often say that consent, it sounds simple, but it isn't, there's a lot of technology involved, but there's lots of uh legal work involved as it as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, very good response. Initially >>democratization. Everyone's a publisher. Everyone's a media company. They have to think about being a platform. You guys provide that. So I congratulate Peter. Thanks for dropping the gems there. Shruti, thanks for sharing the product highlights. Thanks for, for your time. Thank you. Okay, this is the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. And what's next? The cookie conundrum. The recipe for success with Kwan Cast. I'm john free with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm

>> live from London, England. Q. Covering A Ws summat. London twenty nineteen Brought to you by Amazon Web services >> to the A. W s Summit in London's Excel Center home. Susanna Street and David is my co host today on the Cube. They mean so much to talk about here at the summit today to do with machine learning an A I and I'm really pleased to say that we have to really key people here to discuss this. But we've got some Tom Summerfield who is head off commerce, a foot asylum on also Richard Potter, who is the CEO of Peak. Now, you guys have really formed a partnership, haven't you? Foots asylum is a leisure wear really. Retailer started in bricks and mortar stores. Really moved online on Peak has been a pioneer for artificial intelligence systems really well to get together. What what comes? Sparked Really your demands ready for their services, Tom? >> Yeah, well, so way knew that we needed to be doing something with data on A and we didn't really know exactly what it would be way were interested in personalization, but then also in a bigger picture, like a wider digital transformation piece for the business where well established bricks, a martyr business but a fast grow in online business. And we're interested to know how we could harness the momentum of the stores to help the digital side of the business and also vice versa. On we thought data would be the key, and we ended up having a conversation with the guys at Peak, and that's exactly what we've been able to do. Actually, on the back of that deliver, we're delivering a hyper personal experience for our consumers Now. >> I was one of the statue that I notice when looking into what you be doing, a twenty percent increase in email revenue. So that's quite remarkable, really. So Richard, tell us you how you're able to do this. What kind of services that you lean on? T make those kind of result. >> It's a combination of a lot of things, really. You know, you obviously need people who know what they're doing from a returning a business perspective. Married with technical experts, data science algorithms, data, I think specifically how we've done is picks built a fairly unique A I system that becomes almost like the central brain within our customers businesses on off that algorithms help automate certain business processes and deliver tangible uplifts in business performance like the twenty eight percent up lift in sales here, Um, in order to do it. So it's quite a long journey, I suppose. The outlook we took when we started collaborating was was that if we could deliver that hyper personalized shopping experience, we were always going to be ableto show customers the right product at the right time. And if we were doing that that we would lead Tio Hi brand engagement, higher loyalty, higher on higher lifetime values of customers. And that's and that's what's shown to be the case in a silent example. >> Yeah, definitely that echo that. You know that the hypothesis hypothesis, wass. If you can show the right custom of the right product at the right time, then their purchase frequency average order Volumetrics all starts move positively and ultimately than affecting their long term engagement with our brand, which increases revenue on also delivers a more, you know, a frictionless consumer experience, hopefully for the customer, >> because I suppose your experience is the same. So many companies out there they're sitting on this huge pile of data, yet they don't know how to best optimize that data. When did you first realize, Richard that there was this kind of gap in the market for Pete to grow? >> Yeah. I think data and analytics have come on a bit of a journey away from common sense reporting Thio more advanced analytics. But when you get a I and machine learning what you're talking about, his algorithms being our self learning make predictions about things, and that actually fundamentally changes the way businesses can operate on DH. And in this case, a great example is you know, we're sending hyper personalized marketing communications, Teo every single foot silent customer. Um, they don't realize necessarily that they are tailored to them, but they just become more relevant. But it doesn't require a digital marketed to create every single one of those campaign or emails and even triggered the sending of those materials. The brain takes care of that. It can automate it. And what the marketer needs to do is feed it engaging content and set up digital campaigns. And then and then and then you're left with this capability where eyes saying you might be a market for this product. Let's let's send you something that might appeal to you on DH that just gives that gives a marketing team scale. And then, as we move into other use cases like in the supply chain for film and delivery of product the same thing that teams just get huge scale out of letting algorithms do those things for them. Andi, I suppose the realization for us that there was that gap in the market was just that you can see the out performance of certain cos you can see that Amazon attributes thirty five percent of their sales to their machine learning recommendation systems. I think Netflix says eighty five percent of all content is consumed >> in prison. It's Al Burns. Andi. Companies >> like that can harness machine learning to such a great degree. How does how do you know howto other businesses do it? Who can't access that talent pool of Silicon Valley or along the global? You know, the global talent leaders in tech and that's that's what we have. The insight that is Peak Way could create a company that gave our system is the that technology and that capability Teo deliver that same kind results that the Amazon and Netflix >> So before the Internet Yeah. Brand's had all the power you could price however you wanted if you overprice, nobody even even knew. And the Internet was sort of like the revenge of the consumer. Aye, aye. And data. How gives the brands the ability to learn more about its customers. But you have to be somewhat careful, don't you? Because your privacy concerns, obviously. Gpr etcetera. So you have to have a value proposition for the customer, as you were saying, which they may not even know that machine is providing these offers. Yeah, but they get value out of it. So how do you guys think about that in terms of experience for the customer? And how do you draw that balance? >> I think from my angle that Richard touch on a couple of bits there to do it scale first and foremost across the entire all on on Thai network of consumers is killer element to it. But to deliver that personal experience, I think consumers nowadays are so they're more expectant of this. Really? We would have considered it innovation a couple of years ago, but now Actually, it's expected, I think, from the consumer. So it's actually in the name ofthe You have to move forward to stand still. So but way Think we're We're right at the front of this at the moment. And we're really looking now how we optimize the journey for the consumer so that actually we know if we're from Simpson transactional data that we have in a little bit of over behavioral data that, you know, we're really conscious of the whole GDP, our peace and stuff, and that's really, really relevant and super important. Andi, I'm pleased to say that you know, we have that backed by a peek. It's completely on lock down from that perspective as >> well. Where do the data's where the data source of comfort. You mentioned some transaction data. Where is the other data come from? Using show social data and behavioral data? Where does that come >> with these elements of social data? Some of it is a little bit black box, so you can always access it. And that's the GPR piece there. And rightly so. Actually, in some cases we have a loyalty scheme which allows us to understand our Kashima's better in our bricks and mortar retail, which is really cool that we've got some of that transactional data on a customer level from the store's way know that some people in our sector maybe don't have that, so that so that allows us to complete sort of single customer view, which then we can aggregate in peaks brain, then transaction data on the website in the app and bits off browsing, you know, just within our own network. But you know where customers potentially being and reactive of somethin, a piece of content on journeys within the website, That's that's how we build that view. >> Do you think this is the way that more bricks and more two stores Khun survive? Because so many are closing in high streets up down that you can in other countries, because simply they're not really delivering what the customer wants? >> Yeah, I think so. Rich Now, both feel quite strongly now that wear something to this now a little bit. It's a really As as our relationship for the two businesses has evolved, it's become clearer and clearer that actually we've armed with this. You know this data, our fingertips, we can actually breathe fresh life into the stores, and it's in the eye of proper true omnichannel retailing way. Don't mind where the cost consumer spends the money. We just need to be always on in a connected environment. So that way said before pushing the right product at the right time. And when that when they're in market, we turn up the mark the message a little bit. But then understanding when they're not in market and maybe to back off him and maybe we warn them what with a little bit of a different type of message then and actually we're trapped would want to challenge ourselves to send but less better marketing communications to our consumers. But absolutely that store piece is now, so we tail back. Our store opening strategy is a business to focus more on the digital side of things, but now it's possible that way might open some more stores now, but it will be with a more reform strategy of wet, wet where, why we need to do that? >> Isn't this ironic? The brick and mortar marketplaces getting disrupted by online retailers, obviously Amazons, that big whale in the marketplace and your answer to that is to use Amazon's cloud services and artificial intelligence to pave the way for your future. Yeah, I mean, that's astounding when you think about >> coming. >> Yeah, sort of unified commerce approach, Tio. You know, there's a place in the world for shops. It's like it's not Romance isn't completely dead and going shopping Friends out, you know so on. Actually, yeah, we're using honest in the eight of us, but we'LL hire our friends at Peak. Yeah, it's it's some irony there. I think it's really cool. >> And that decision that you made obviously made made lightly. But you saw the advantages of working with the clouds outweighing the potential trade offs of competition. >> Yeah, I mean, that's not that was never really, really no, I'm certainly not know. I think this is something that is happening, that data, and on harnessing it in a in a safe, responsible, effective way, I believe, is the future of all commerce. So >> that as far as security is concerned because, of course, we have had data breaches. Yeah, customers, credit card details, access. How do you ensure that it's as secure as possible in the way that you you you choose the services. I think >> that come that just comes down to best practice infrastructure on the way we look at it, a peak is there's no bear tools in the world to do that, then the same technologies that Amazon themselves use. It's to do with how you configure those services until ls to make it secure. You know, if you have an unsecure open database on a public network, of course that's not secure. But you could have the same thing in your own infrastructure, and it wouldn't be secure. So I think the way we look at it is exactly the same thing on actually, being in the Amazon plan for us gives us a greater comfort, particularly in terms of co location of data centres, like making sure that our application fails over into different locations. It gives us infrastructure we couldn't afford otherwise, and then on top of that, we get all these extra pieces of technology that can make us even more secure than we could do. Otherwise we'd have to wait, have to employ an army of infrastructure engineers, and we don't have to do that because we run on Yes, >> okay, so we were able to eliminate all that heavy lifting. Same goes. You've got this corpus of data. I'm interested in how long it took to get through. A POC trained the models how much data science was involved. How much of a heavy lift was that? Yeah, well, I think for us >> we better be pretty rapid. Actually, we start working together in January last year, so we're only just sort of year into that. >> And in that faith in that entire >> sofa length of of our relationship, we've gone from high for personalizing digital campaigns to recommendation systems on a website to now optimizing customer acquisition on social media and then finally into the supply chain and optimizing demand. And so on and on. I think there's a lot of reasons why we've been able to do it quickly, but that's fundamental to the technologies that that peak is built. There's two. There's two sides to it. Our technologies cut out a lot of the friction so way didn't run a proof of concept. We were able to just pick it up, run with it and deliver value. And that's to do with I think, the product that peak is built. But then you obviously need a a customer who's who's going on a transformation journey and is hungry to make that make that stick in London on. Then when the two come together, >> I think that it's an interesting point that, though, because while suite for asylum, we always I always say it's that we're not. We're not massive, but we're not tiny, but it's the sort place you Khun turn upon a Monday and say, I've had an idea about something and we're not doing it by Friday. That's That's a nice, agile culture. It can create some drama as well. Possibly. I think it's really straightforward to get straight into it. And I think this is where some of the bigger, um, sleepier high street retailers that Amar fixed in a in a brick Samara world need to not be too afraid to come out and start embracing it. Because I think some of them are trying now. I think it might be a little bit late for some now, but it's it was just it was just wasn't that hard really to get going here >> and you've seen the business results. Can you share any measurements or quantification. We've >> got a really a really good one that we're just talking about at the moment. Actually, Way were able to use segmentation tools within within the peak brain, too to use them on social than Teo. Create lookalike audiences. So Facebook custom tools, right? We'LL help you create audiences that it thinks will be wrapped pirates complex algorithms itself. But we almost took a leap ahead of their algorithms by fire, our algorithms uploading our own segments to create a more sophisticated lookalike audience. We produced a row US results or return on that spend People are not familiar with that of eight thousand four hundred percent which we we would normally be happy as a business. We've sort of seven, eight hundred percent. If you're running that that we've say on AdWords campaign or something like that, that's quite efficient campaign. So it's at zero. We were a bit like it felt like it's a mistake that, you >> know, that is >> not the right Yeah, but not so that's super cool. And that's really that's really opened our eyes to the potential of punishing that the, you know, our sort of piquet I brain to then bring it onto Social on. Do more outward. Advertise on there. >> So moving the goal post meant that your teeth have really high school. Thank you. Thank you very much for telling us all about that time someone feels on Richard for so thank you for joining me and David Auntie here at the age of Lou s summit in London. Merchant to come on the King.

>> from New York City. It's the cue covering automation anywhere. Imagine, brought to you by automation anywhere you >> were in midtown Manhattan, at the automation anywhere. Imagine Crawford's twenty nineteen really psyched to be here. Fifteen hundred people talking about our P A. But really, the Rp story is much more than just robotic process. Automation is really a new way to work, which we hear about all over the place and really reimagining what this technology can do. We're excited to have our next guest. She's Shelly Kramer, an analyst and partner for feature research. Shelley, great to see you. >> Great to see you, too. And you got it. >> I got a right. >> You got it. >> Well, you're a very busy lady. Got all kinds of stuff going on, which is what we like. So first off, just kind of Have you been here before? General impressions of the show. >> This is my first, Uh, this is my first, uh, automation anywhere event. And so it's exciting. I write a lot about our PPA and about the future of work and work force transformation. So it's great to be >> here. Yeah. And you just wrote not a super uplifting article linked in about, you know, employee dissatisfaction and some of the issues with employee retention. We talked before. We turn the cameras on about things like calling him human resource is, you know, and human capital there, they're people. And I thought my here really touched on it. Well, in the keynote today that this is not a rip and replace technology for people. This is a tool to help us do our jobs better, just like our laptops and our mobile phones and our application. So are you excited about the opportunity? See, it is this transformative. >> I do see this transformative. And I think that before you talk about what we talked about, the technology that we have to talk about people and Simpson and I'm pulling this out of my memory banks. So on average, about eighty two percent of employees within any organization are disengaged. OK, eighty two percent. >> So the ping pong tables and the tables are not doing it. >> And so when you think about it and engaged workforce are people who wake up in the morning or whatever it is, they go to work and who are excited about what they're doing excited about their company. They're working for love, the culture that they're working within. I love all those things that they're doing. And so when you realize that eighty two percent of people are disengaged, that's problematic. Right then, you're talking about the toughest talent acquisition markets that we've had in a really long time. So we're all fighting for top talent, not just top tech talent but any kind of talent. And so focusing on how we can make the workforce better and create better cultures and put systems and processes in place that can make people do their jobs more efficiently, more productively and actually like them. That's to me. That's the beginning of where we get to this technology piece and what our P a Khun Dio How? Aye aye plays a role in there and how you can. How employees can partner you think of technology as a partner, as opposed to worrying about technology replacing them. So I think it's an exciting time in the workforce, and when you think about it that way, it makes a lot of sense. >> Do you think the difference in kind of the expectations that people have when they Goto work to be engaged as a function of the millennials who are looking for something that's more mission lead. Is it a function of just the competition? It's so robust that before people could get away with having, you know, maybe a less compelling work experience. What do you think is driving? The changer hasn't changed, and maybe now we're just paying more attention to it. >> You know, I think it's changed in a little bit. I think that you and I are old enough that when we were coming of age and we were working our way up the corporate ladder, you know, you kind of sold a little bit of your soul to the company store. No matter. I mean, I gripped in advertising, right, and, you know, I work crazy hours, and I loved it. But I never questioned that there were dues that I had to pay, and that's what you think. And I think that people don't necessarily expect the world on a platter. But I think especially the more skilled you are, whether it's a knowledge of tack or whatever it is in today's market, I think that ueno and again it could be someone my age. It could be someone that's twenty five. It could be someone that's forty. I can find something else. So minute, this isn't doing it for me, right? I can go find something else right now. That said, there are also people who are punching a clock. You know what I'm saying? And I don't mean ship workers. Necessarily. As much as I need to pay the mortgage, I need to get my kid's bed. You know, I don't love this job. Maybe it's a path to something. One of my daughters works for an insurance company. She has a very non glamorous job. She doesn't love it, but she knows she has to do it for X amount of time before she can be considered for this different promotion. And she is watching the clock on literally. I'm getting to that milestone and asking for her promotion. And if that doesn't happen, she'LL leave. So so I think that when you can, people don't feel like they need to be stuck, right? So I think that way. As a CZ leaders and his executives in the workforce, I think you always have to be mindful about what the work environment that you're creating is and focus on. How do we keep how do we get people? And how do we build the value props that we used when we entice them to say yes to our offer? How do we get them to stay? >> S o many things there, But But, you know, what things you just mentioned is is I don't think they accept it like we did. Maybe when we're coming up, which is, you know, you hire somebody and you hire them for the act tributes that they're bringing in the organization than it used to be. Then you give him the employee rulebook and you basically squash, you know, kind of all the individual creativity and ingenuity and enthusiasm, which is why you hired him in the first place. And we don't see that as much anymore. But at the same token, you know, not everyone's worried about robots taken their job at the same time. There's so many unfulfilled Rex out there. And as you said, it's the most competitive labor market out there. How our employers supposed to kind of square that circle because they need to bring the automation they want to keep the people happy. It's a hyper competitive market, and they need mission. But, you know, we gotta pay the bills and get the products out. >> I think that So I think that we can never forget that people that work for our companies need to pay the bills too. Right? So when you can give them something that they could be excited about, Tio dio that helps. Right? But it just kind of like I'm thinking back Teo, uh, presentation and I can't remember his name. But the V p of product did a presentation about today on a loan mortgage loan application. Okay, that has to be like one of the most boring things, right? If you're in that mortgage loan processing, do this. Do this. Do this villain this spreadsheet love about, By the way, I hate creating spreadsheets. I just want to look at a finished one. But anyway, it was so cool to just look at this, and I shot a video of it, shared it on Twitter. If you want to see what I'm talking about, but which is so cool that you can do this and do this and do this and you know you create this process. And in no time the technology has done all the work and all the calculations, and you've got a recommendation approved, not approved. And so if you're in the mortgage loan business, way to think about that leased, the way that I think to think about it is, doesn't mean that your job is going to go away. It's just like my daughter doing that not very exciting job that she's doing. If automation could fuel some of the mundane, repeatable, banal tasks so that she could focus on the other part of the equation where it's more interesting and more exciting, I think then that's really the value equation there. But I think as I think, what businesses have todo is be transparent and very honest with their employees and tell them, you know, this is our This is why we're doing this. This is what our means, and this is how it's going to add value. It we're not doing this to necessarily replace humans. This is so that we can make this work better, efficient more, you know. And I think that you know, I'll step back and say for a personal example. We went through a process last year where we evaluated all of our business processes, and we looked at how much time our employees were spending sweet track time doing certain tasks. And then we were realizing, you know, the value there. We were actually paying too much in terms of the time, investment or tasks that didn't make sense to. Then we set out integrating automation into our processes, and it was it was a big project, right? And people were kind of worried, you know, and they were kind of worried about it. But one of the things that way told them early on with, like, This is not so that we don't have work for you. This is so that we can make what it is you're doing more efficient and you could do things you like better, >> right? Right. >> And so and that has happened and way didn't lose any of our team. And a lot of those task that they were doing are now automated. They're doing stuff that they like more. So I think that I think that's really the challenge for businesses. Two is the messaging right and then involving your teams in the process, appointment of any kind of >> technology. I think it's just the soul crushing. You know, expression is so it's so valid for for these types of activities. And I think again may hear had a great stat. Four percent of US jobs required a medium level of creativity, which you know people want to get out from under that. But if we can define it as a tool and is a thinking like personal digital assistants, my body will. That used to be just my palm three was my p d. A. Right wow how no. One No one was threatened by the Palm taking the job away. So I think you know, you're right. If we can put it in the context of it's just another tool that's just gonna help you get your job done. That's a very different way to frame the problem versus kind of just ripping replace narrative, which we hear kind of over and over again. >> Well, and I think it also goes beyond Jeff. It's goes beyond, and I think that employees at every level have to understand this. It goes beyond just helping you get your job done. It really is about, you know, cos that survived today and tomorrow are the companies who transformed. And, you know, we talk a lot about digital transformation. And you know, I'm out there on the front lines all day, every day, and I can promise you there are many, many companies who are far from really understanding and embracing this and understanding what it takes from a technology standpoint and the value, that data ad and how to use that data and and the impact that that has on customer experience and all that sort of thing. So So I think it's really is about much more than this will make your jobs suck less >> right, right, Right. >> I think it's about this is how our company stay successful. This is how you helped make your job in the role you play within our organization, what you want it to be, right? And I think that you could probably telling, you know, I've been marketing because I'm always thinking about you know how I know how you spend something and I don't mean in a spin like a PR way, but I think we all have to step back and think about it in terms of the whole equation. And there are a whole lot of companies that don't exist anymore, right? You know whether you're talking about the financial services sector and you know and every business everywhere is being disrupted. I told this story. I was I was talking with me here earlier this morning and I was telling him a story about how my husband, I just bought a new car and we expected to get a loan for that car from our community. It's not a community from our our local bank local. Our local bank has been recently purchased by a bigger bank in the last couple of years, but we run all of our corporate money. I mean, everything that we've ever done is here in this way. You know your spell. ITA loan application. No problem. Give us an interest rate. No problem. But they made every part. My husband I vote travel a lot for business, and they're every part of the process required us to be somewhere together to have an official closing. To do this, to do that and it was just like way could never purchased this car because they were making it so difficult for us. So we enter death talking with the car dealer who said I'm not God. We can fix you up, financed it through their banking partner, which is a huge national bank approved in five minutes. Loan documents in five minutes. Hey, come on out. You sign this tomorrow? He consigned this when he gets, you know. And when I talked to my bank after the transaction, they said, Here's the deal. I wanted to do business with you. But when you make it difficult for a customer to give you their money, they're not gonna hesitate to give somebody else there money, Right? So So I think the banking industry is one example of the these processes that air so cumbersome that in some ways can be automated, but it just it doesn't make sense. And customers today you and I are impatient people as our people younger than we are way. No, there has to be a better way. An analogy could give us a better >> win it right, And, you know, they could use different data sets. And I mean, I've bought himself recently, and you just push the button on the phone and it takes a minute. The wheel spins and then your approved right and you're done if you're done, and it's it's a completely different experience. But the part about the digital transformation I want to follow because it came up today where a lot of times people are the integration point between these systems very similar to the example you just used and you can't digitally transform. If all these automated systems ultimately have the bottleneck through some person to take this piece Veda and stick it over there, right? So it's it's absolutely critical to get those people out of the way, right? So as you look forward twenty nineteen, what are some of the big trends beyond our P A and kind of personal digital assistants not called palm, uh, that you're seeing and that you're excited about? >> Well, I think that, you know, it's hard not to be excited about our p A. Just simply because of, you know, it's predicted to be a one point nine billion this year and to almost double by twenty twenty one. I mean, it makes sense that companies like automation anywhere doubling down on that right. It also makes sense that gigantic companies like IBM and Jo Lloyd and you know why. I mean, you >> know, hearing for >> all here, right? There's a reason for that, right? Because IBM customers want this and Microsoft's customers want this. So So I think that in general I think that technology is fueling our world. Our personal lives are business world, and I think that probably one of the biggest things that I pay attention to to that we pay attention to is that technology alone isn't the answer. It's the partnership of human beings and their skill sets and capabilities and data and automation and artificial intelligence and all those things. So I think that I think that it's an incredibly exciting time. It's kind of like, you know, you you go back to the video that we saw this morning in the bit about the Internet, and I don't know if you remember this. I don't know, probably. I don't know how much older I am than you, but, you know, I remember that Internet machine and wow, this is like I could send an email, you know? And then when you think about right how and those comments, You know that Matt Lauer and Katie Couric we're making it like that weren't down comments we didn't didn't know, right? Know the impact Internet could have would have, you know. And so I think the same is true of this kind of technology today. This this next generation of technology. So there's not just one thing I'm interested. I'm interested in Element. >> Gotta keep learning right because way have a hard time with were very linear and everything is growing exponentially. So you got a got to be willing. Teo learned the next thing because it's right around the corner, >> and I think that's so key. That's that's a great rap. I think that people who are happiest today are people who actually love change and who love learning. And I would say I would posit that most that those air not inherently things that people trades that people possess. I'm lucky because I do. You see what I'm saying? I think it's >> an interesting question, whether that's inherent. If there's just people that liked the learning, our curious all the time, and that and then they got to stick in the muds and Candice stick in the muds, change your attitude and become learners again. >> Maybe they won't. I mean, you know, I think that they're I do think that there are are people who are wired to like change and two are curious and who loved learning. And I think there are a whole bunch of people who are not. And I would I truly believe that for success in today's world and moving forward for young people and not so young people, you better get there if that's not your deal, because I don't think that I did it. And I have stumbled across conversations of people having like, you know, that's not gonna happen, you know? So I don't have to worry about it because I'm gonna be outta here by then. Or and you know what? There are a whole bunch of people that have that mindset, and that's a okay, but especially for young people making their way, >> they okay mindset. But it's not the fact that that's the problem. It's it's happening now. I mean, the future is here, and it's happening at a faster pace. Well, Shelley, we could go on and on and on, but we're going to leave it there. And I appreciate you taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Absolutely. My pleasure. >> All right. She Shelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Where? Automation anywhere. Imagine in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>> Narrator: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. Been here all day with Dave Vellante. We're joined by David Floyer now. Guys, really interesting, very informative day. We got to talk to a lot of puritans, but also a breadth of customers, from Mercedes Formula One, to Simpson Strong-Tie to UCLA's School of Medicine. Lot of impact that data is making in a diverse set of industries. Dave, you've been sitting here, with me, all day. What are some of the key takeaways that you have from today? >> Well, Pure's winning in the marketplace. I mean, Pure said, "We're not going to bump along. "We're going to go for it. "We're going to drive growth. "We don't care if we lose money, early on." They bet that the street would reward that model, it has. Kind of a little mini Amazon, version of Amazon model. Grow, grow, grow, worry about profits down the road. They're eking out a slight, little positive free cashflow, on a non-gap basis, so that's good. And they were first with All-Flash, really kind of early on. They kind of won that game. You heard David, today. The NVMe, the first with NVMe. No uplifts on pricing for NVMe. So everybody's going to follow that. They can do the Evergreen model. The can do these things and claim these things as we were first. Of course, we know, David Floyer, you were first to make the call, back in 2008, (laughs) on Flash and the All-Flash data center, but Pure was right there with you. So they're winning in that respect. Their ecosystem is growing. But, you know, storage companies never really have this massive ecosystem that follow them. They really have to do integration. So that's, that's a good thing. So, you know, we're watching growth, we're watching continued execution. It seems like they are betting that their product portfolio, their platform, can serve a lot of different workloads. And it's going to be interesting to see if they can get to two billion, the kind of, the next milestone. They hit a billion. Can they get to two billion with the existing sort of product portfolio and roadmap, or do they have to do M&A? >> David: You're right. >> That's one thing to watch. The other is, can Pure remain independent? David, you know well, we used to have this conversation, all the time, with the likes of David Scott, at 3PAR, and the guys at Compellent, Phil Soran and company. They weren't able, Frank Slootman at Data Domain, they weren't able to stay independent. They got taken out. They weren't pricey enough for the market not to buy them. They got bought out. You know, Pure, five billion dollar market cap, that's kind of rich for somebody to absorb. So it was kind of like NetApp. NetApp got too expensive to get acquired. So, can they achieve that next milestone, two billion. Can they get to five billion. The big difference-- >> Or is there any hiccup, on the way, which will-- >> Yeah, right, exactly. Well the other thing, too, is that, you know, NetApp's market was growing, pretty substantially, at the time, even though they got hit in the dot-com boom. The overall market for Pure isn't really growing. So they have to gain share in order to get to that two billion, three billion, five billion dollar mark. >> If you break the market into the flash and non flash, then they're in the much better half of the market. That one is still growing, from that perspective. >> Well, I kind of like to look at the service end piece of it. I mean, they use this term, by Gartner, today, the something, accelerated, it's a new Gartner term, in 2018-- >> Shared Accelerated Storage >> Shared Accelerated Storage. Gartner finally came up with a category that we called service end. I've been joking all day. Gartner has a better V.P. of naming than we do. (chuckles) We're looking' at service end. I mean, I started, first talking about it, in 2009, thanks to your guidance. But that chart that you have that shows the sort of service end, which is essentially Pure, right? It's the, it's not-- >> Yes. It's a little more software than Pure is. But Pure is an awful lot of software, yes. And showing it growing, at the expense of the other segments, you know. >> David: Particularly sad. >> Particularly sad. Very particularly sad. >> So they're really well positioned, from that standpoint. And, you know, the other thing, Lisa, that was really interesting, we heard from customers today, that they switched for simplicity. Okay, not a surprise. But they were relatively unhappy with some of their existing suppliers. >> Right. >> They got kind of crummy service from some of their existing suppliers. >> Right. >> Now these are, maybe, smaller companies. One customer called out SimpliVity, specifically. He said, "I loved 'em when they were an independent company, "now they're part of HPE, meh, "I don't get service like the way I used to." So, that's a sort of a warning sign and a concern. Maybe their, you know, HPE's prioritizing the bigger customers, maybe the more profitable customers, but that can come back to bite you. >> Lisa: Right. >> So Pure, the point is, Pure has the luxury of being able to lose money, service, like crazy, those customers that might not be as profitable, and grow from it's position of a smaller company, on up. >> Yeah, besides the Evergreen model and the simplicity being, resoundingly, drivers and benefits, that customers across, you know, from Formula One to medical schools, are having, you're right. The independence that Pure has currently is a selling factor for them. And it's also probably a big factor in retention. I mean, they've got a Net Promoter Score of over 83, which is extremely high. >> It's fantastic, isn't it? I think there would be VMI, that I know of, has even higher one, but it's a very, very high score. >> It's very high. They added 300 new customers, last quarter alone, bringing their global customer count to over 4800. And that was a resounding benefit that we were hearing. They, no matter how small, if it's Mercedes Formula One or the Department of Revenue in Mississippi, they all feel important. They feel like they're supported. And that's really key for driving something like a Net Promoter Score. >> Pure had definitely benefited from, it's taken share from EMC. It did early on with VMAX and Symmetrix and VNX. We've seen Dell EMC storage business, you know, decline. It probably has hit bottom, maybe it starts to grow again. When it starts to grow again, I think, even last quarter, it's growth, in dollars, was probably the size of Pure. (chuckles) You know, so, but Pure has definitely benefited from stealing share. The flip side of all this, is when you talk to you know, the CxOs, the big customers, they're doing these big digital transformations. They're not buying products, you know, they're buying transformations. They're buying sets of services. They're buying relationships, and big companies like Dell and IBM and HPE, who have large services arms, can vie for certain business that Pure, necessarily, can't. So, they've got the advantage of being smaller, nimbler, best of breed product, but they don't have this huge portfolio of capabilities that gives them a seat at the CxO table. And you saw that, today. Charlie Giancarlo, his talk, he's a techie. The guys here, Kicks, Hat, they're techies. They're hardcore storage guys. They love storage. It reminds me of the early days of EMC, you know, it's-- >> David: Or NetApp. Yeah. Yeah, or NetApp, right. They're really focused on that. So there's plenty of market for them, right now. But I wonder, David, if you could talk about, sort of architecturally, people used to criticize the two controller, you know, approach. It obviously seems to be doing very well. People take shots at their, the Evergreen model, saying "Oh, we can do that too." But, again, Pure was first. Architecturally, what's your assessment of Pure? >> So, the Evergreen, I think, is excellent. They've gone about that, well. I think, from a straighforward architecture, they kept it very simple. They made a couple of slightly, odd decisions. They went with their own NAND chips, putting them into their own stuff, which made them much smaller, much more compact, completely in charge of the storage stack. And that was a very important choice they made, and it's come out well for them. I have a feeling. My own view is that M.2 is actually going to be the form factor of the future, not the SSD. The Ssd just fitted into a hard disk slot. That was it's only benefit. So, when that comes along, and the NAND vendors want to increase the value that they get from these stacks, etc., I'm a little bit nervous about that. But, having said that, they can convert back. >> Yeah, I mean, that seems like something they could respond to, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I was at the Micron financial analysts' meeting, this week. And a lot of people were expecting that, you know, the memory business has always been very cyclical, it's like the disk drive business. But, it looks like, because of the huge capital expenses required, it looks like supply, looks like they've got a good handle on supply. Micron made a good strong case to the street that, you know, the pricing is probably going to stay pretty favorable for them. So, I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but that could be a little bit of a head wind for some of the systems suppliers. >> I take that with a pinch of salt. They always want to have the market saying it's not going to go down. >> Of course, yeah. And then it crashes. (chuckles) >> The normal market place is, for any of that, is go through this series of S-curves, as you reach a certain point of volume, and 3D NAND has reached that point, that it will go down, inevitably, and then cue comes in,and then that there will go down, again, through that curve. So, I don't see the marketplace changes. I also think that there's plenty of room in the marketplace for enterprise, because the biggest majority of NAND production is for consumer, 80% goes to consumer. So there's plenty of space, in the marketplace, for enterprise to grow. >> But clearly, the prices have not come down as fast as expected because of supply constraints And the way in which companies like Pure have competed with spinning disks, go through excellent data reduction algorithms, right? >> Yes. >> So, at one point, you had predicted there would be a crossover between the cost per bit of flash and spinning disk. Has that crossover occurred, or-- >> Well, I added in the concept of sharing. >> Raw. >> Yeah, raw. But, added in the cost of sharing, the cost-benefit of sharing, and one of the things that really impresses me is their focus on sharing, which is to be able to share that data, for multiple workloads, in one place. And that's excellent technology, they have. And they're extending that from snapshots to cloud snaps, as well. >> Right. >> And I understand that benefit, but from a pure cost per bit standpoint, the crossover hasn't occurred? >> Oh no. No, they're never going to. I don't think they'll ever get to that. The second that happens, disks will just disappear, completely. >> Gosh, guys, I wish we had more time to wrap things up, but thanks, so much, Dave, for joining me all day-- >> Pleasure, Lisa. >> And sporting The Who to my Prince symbol. >> Awesome. >> David, thanks for joining us in the wrap. We appreciate you watching theCUBE, from Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, for Dave and David, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's the Cube covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and you're watching our exclusive coverage of VEEAMON 2018. #VeeamON. My name is Dave Vallante and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman. Stu, great to be working with you again. >> Thanks Dave. Admiral, David G. Simpson is here. He's a former Chief Public Safety and homeland Security Bureau and CEO, currently, of Pelorus, a consultancy that helps organizations think through some of the risk factors that they face. David, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for taking time out. >> It's my pleasure to be here. >> So, as I was saying, we, we missed a big chunk of your keynote this morning cause we had to come back to the cube and do our open, but let's start with your background and kind of why you're here. >> Sure, well, I spent over three decades in the Navy where my responsibilities throughout included the resiliency of the ability to command and control forces in areas around the world not always so nice and often arduous and often at sea. So, that experience really has given me a very good appreciation, not only for how important economy of operations is, but how difficult it can be and how important the details are, so I am a natural fan of what FEMA's doing to make that easier for organizations. After DOD, I was recruited by the chairman of the FCC to lead the Public Safety Homeland Security Bureau for the Federal Communications Commission. And, in that position, I have responsibility for the nation's climate one system, emergency alerting, and the resiliency of over 30,000 telecommunication companies in the domestic market, so both experiences really have given me a very good insight into the need, the consequence of not getting it right, how to prepare to get it right, but also an ability to look at what's coming down the pike with the new telecommunications technologies that will really be game changers for functionality in the new internet of things environment. >> So, three decades of public service. First of all, thank you. >> Thank you. It's quite an accomplishment. And then, we had talked off camera that we, a couple of years ago, had Robert Gates on and we were gettin' detailed into how the experience that someone like you has had in the public sector translated to the private sector. It used to be there was just such a huge gap between, you know, what you did and what a, what a company had to, had to worry about. Do you see that gap closing? And, maybe, you could add some color to that. >> Sure, and in particular, in the cyber arena, you know, cyber, unlike the land, sea, and air domains, is a domain of Man's own making and the constraints around that domain are of our own choosing. And, we're not constrained by physics, we're constrained by the investment decisions we make and the contours of that expanding environment. But, the internet started out as a DOD research and development project, ARPA, so it has not been unusual for DOD to be out in front in some of the development aspects where counterintuitively we would, normally, see industry out in front. The same occurred I believe with cyber when our intelligence community over 10 years ago said, hey, this is a great thing, this internet thing. And, it's super that we're doing more and more communications, that we're talking with devices at the edge around the battle space, but it's vulnerable to attack and we need to organize, so that we are capable in the defense of that great cyber set of functionality that we've built. >> Could you expand? Just, so, you're doing some teaching in the cyber security world too. Maybe you could share a little bit what you're doing and what you see as kind of the state of this today >> Yeah, well, thank you for asking that about a year ago, the dean of the business school of Virginia Tech, asked me if I wouldn't consider building a cyber program for the business school. Tech has always had a strong engineering component to cyber security and it's led by a good friend of mine Dr. Charles Clancy with some superb research going on, but, increasingly, over two thirds of the work roles, in cyber security are not engineering. They really have much more to do with traditional business functions. Yet, most business leaders aren't well prepared to assess that risk environment, let alone appreciate it, and then, drive investments to address risk reduction. So, at Virginia Tech, we've built a series of four courses that in the MBA programs, the Masters of Accounting, the Masters of Business IT, we are now teaching prospective business leaders how to look at the risk environment and organize an investment structure using the NIST, or National Institute of the Standards of Technology, risk management framework, so that can be done in a repeatable way that communicates well with industry. And, companies like Veeam have an important role to play in that space because Veeam really translates much of the engineering complexities into business understandable conditions by which decisions about that data space can really be made. >> I want to share an observation that we had on the Cube last year, one of my favorite interviews was with a gentleman from ICIT, James Scott. He's a security expert, you may know him. And, we asked him what the biggest threat was to United States and his answer surprised me. I thought it was going to be, you know, cyber warfare or risks to critical infrastructure, he said the weaponization of social media was the number one threat, like wow. And, we had a really interesting discussion about that and, you know, I think of, you know, your background, loose lips sink ships, people on social give up there credentials, all of a sudden, you've got some outside bad actors controlling the narrative, controlling the meme and controlling the population without firing a shot. Wow, so what are your thoughts on social media and it's risk to our society and how to deal with it? >> Well, we're seeing in the last year, that he's very prescient, right, in that you can lockdown all the bits and the bytes and get the integrity, the confidentiality, and the availability of your data sets taken care of, but in a world where the public square, if you will, is now a virtual public square, if an adversary can change the perception of reality in that public square, or if they can cause our democracy to lose confidence in that public square, then an adversary can really achieve a kill, if you will, a desired effect in a way that is very negative for the country, so I don't see that though as being completely distinguished from cyber security. I see, in my mind, that we need to expand the universe, to protect the universe of cyber into that cognitive space. And, we need to understand, increasingly, the origin of comment in the social media arena. We need to understand therole algorithms have to play in amplifying a message and suppressing other messages. And, we need to, I think, have a greater accountability for businesses that are in that virtual public square line of business to help consumers and communities continue to have confidence in that public square and we're, we're challenged in that area. 'cause see Mark Zuckerberg's testimony, right >> Sure. >> Illuminated some big challenges there. >> Yeah, I mean, my heart went out to Zuckerberg, it was, I was like the poor guy, he's just trying to build out a social network and now he's getting, you know, attacked by politicians who are saying, wow you mean you use data for political gain, or you allowed somebody to do it. >> He was in a tough spot. >> And politicians themselves, I think, were a bit embarrassed in revealing their lack of tech savvy in a world where we should expect policy makers to be at least aware enough of the parameters around the virtual public square where they can help develop the right policy to ensure that this continues to be a net asset for the United States, for communities, and for consumers. >> Technology kind of got us into this problem, but, technology, in and of itself, is not going to get out of, get us out of this problem >> Right. >> It's others in the organization, the lines of business, the policies, the practices, some of the work that you do in your teachings, may be >> Yeah, absolutely and when I talk to aspiring business leaders, I communicate a couple of things to them. One, they need to get their heads out of being the decider as the CEO. Increasingly, they will be creating decision environments, right, where decision operations occur and are driven by algorithms, by machine learning, and AI, and so they've got to be thinking, about how do they create those environments to deliver the right kind of decision results that they're looking for. The second piece that I talk to them about, that's counterintuitive, is that they need to, as they bring in network functional virtualization and more and more software oriented things that used to be hardware, they've got to understand the risk exposure from that and bring in, they can, a way to address cyber risk as they introduce new functionality in the market. >> Well, it's interesting of an Admiral talking about network function virtualization, I'm very impressed. Admiral Simpson, thanks very much for coming on the Cube. >> Sure. >> Really a pleasure having you and best of luck in your work. >> Well, thank you and it's great to be here with the Veeam professionals that, I think, are really building a command and control layer of an enterprise of data space that will be very important for the future. >> Alright, okay, thanks for watching everybody. We will be right back, Stu Miniman and Dave Vallante from VeeamOn 2018, you're watching the Cube. >> Great thanks. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, this is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day one of two day coverage of Veritas Vision #VtasVision. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Zach Bosin is here. He's the director of information governance solutions at Veritas. And Anna Simpson is a distinguished systems engineer at Veritas. Which Anna means you know where all the skeletons are buried and how to put the pieces back together again. Welcome to theCube, thanks for coming on. >> Thank You. >> Thank You. >> Let's start with, we've heard a little bit today about information governance, Zach we'll start with you. It's like every half a decade or so every decade, there's a new thing. And GDPR is now the new thing. What's the state of information governance today? How would you describe it? >> I think the primary problem that organizations are still trying to fight off, is exponential data growth. We release research every year called the Data Genomics Index, and what came back this past year is that data growth has continued to accelerate, as a matter of fact, 49% year over year. So this problem isn't going anywhere and now it's actually being magnified by the fact that data is being stored, not only in the data center on premises, but across the multi-cloud. So information governance, digital compliance is all about trying to understand that data, control that data, put the appropriate policies against it. And that's really what we try to do with helping customers. >> I always wonder how you even measure data. I guess you could measure capacity that leaves the factory. There's so much data that's created that's not even persistent. We don't even know, I think, how fast data is growing. And it feels like, and I wonder if you guys agree or have any data suggestions, it feels like the curve is reshaping. I remember when we were talking to McAfee and Brynjolfsson it feels the curve is just going even more exponential. What's your sense? >> That's typically what we see. And then you have IoT data coming online, faster and faster and it really is a vertical shot up. And all different types and new files types. One of the other really interesting insights, is that unknown file types jumped 30-40%. Things that we don't even recognize with our file analysis tools today, are jumping off the charts. >> It used to be that PST was the little nag, it looks trivial compared to what we face today, Anna. What's your role as a distinguished systems engineer? How do you spend your time? And what are you seeing out there? >> I definitely spend my time dealing with customers around the world. Speaking to them about information governance. Particularly around risk mitigation these day. In terms of the issues we see in information governance, data privacy is a big one. I'm sure you've been hearing about GDPR quite a bit today already. That's definitely a hot topic and something our customers are concerned about. >> Are they ringing you up saying, "Hey, get in here. "I need to talk you about GDPR?" Or is more you going in saying, "You ready for GDPR? How does that conversation go? >> It's definitely a combination between the two. I think there is definitely a lot of denial out there. A lot of people don't understand that it will apply to them. Obviously if they are storing or processing data which belongs to an EU resident, containing their personal data. I think organizations are either in that denial phase or otherwise they're probably too aware, so they've probably started a project, done some assessment, and then they're buried in the panic mode if we have to remediate all these issues before May next year. >> What's the bell curve look like? Let's make it simple. One is, "we got this nailed." That's got to be tiny. The fat middle which is "we get it, we know it's coming, "we got to allocate some budget, let's go." Versus kind of clueless. What's the bell curve look like? >> I would say that there's 2% of companies, maybe, that think they have it nailed. >> Definitely in single digits, a low single digits. >> I think maybe another 30% at least understand the implications and are trying to at least but a plan in place. And the rest, 66% or so, still aren't very aware of what GDPR means for their business. >> Dave: Wow. >> Can you take us inside? what's Veritas's role in helping customers get ready for GDPR? We talked to one of Veritas's consulting partners today and it's a big issue, it crosses five to ten different budget areas. So what's the piece that Veritas leads and what's the part that you need to pull in other partners for? >> Sure thing. So in terms of our approach, we have what we refer to as a wheel. Which sort of attacks different parts of the GDPR, so various articles step you through the processes you need to be compliant. Things like locating personal data, being able to search that data, minimizing what you have, because GDPR is really dictating you can no longer data hoard, because you can only keep data which has business value. Further downstream it's obviously protecting the data that has business value, and then monitoring that over time. From a Veritas approach perspective, we tying those articles obviously to some of our products, some of our solutions. There's also definitely a services component around that as well. When you think about e-discovery of regulatory requirements, when the regulators come in, generally they're not necessarily going to be questioning the tools, they're going to be questioning how you're using those tools to be compliant. It is sort of a combination between tools and services. And then we're also partnering with other consulting companies on that process piece, as well. Zach, at the keynote this morning, there was a lot of discussion about there's dark data out there, and we need to shine a light on it I have to imagine that's a big piece of this. Why don't you bring us up to speed. What are some of the new products that were announced that help with this whole GDRP problem. >> In to that point, 52% of data is dark, 33% is rot, 15% is mission critical. Today we announced 23 new connectors for the Veritas information map. This is our immersive visual data mapping tool, that really highlights where you're stale, and orphaned, and non-business critical data is across the entire enterprise. New connectors with Microsoft as your Google Cloud storage, Oracle databases, so forth and so on, there's quite a number that we're adding into the fold. That really gives organizations better visibility into where risk may be hiding, and allows you to shine that light and interrogate that data in ways you couldn't do previously because you didn't have those types of insights. >> Also we heard about Risk Analyzer? >> Yes, that's right. We just recently announced the Veritas Risk Analyzer, this is a free online tool, where anyone can go to Veritas.com/riskanalyzer, take a folder of their data, and try out our brand new integrated classification engine. We've got preset policies for GDPR, so you drop in your files, and we'll run the classification in record speed, and it will come back with where PII is, how risky that folder was, tons of great insights. >> So it's identifying the PII, and how much there is, and how siloed it is? Are you measuring that? What are you actually measuring there? >> We're actually giving you a risk score. When we're analyzing risk, you might find one individual piece of PII, or you might find much more dense PII. So depending on the number of files, and the types of files, we'll actually give you a different risk tolerance. What we're doing with the Risk Analyzer is giving you a preview, or just a snapshot of the types of capabilities that Veritas can bring to that discussion. >> Who do you typically talk to? Is it the GC, is it the head of compliance, chief risk officer, all of the above? >> Yeah, it's definitely all of the above-- >> Some person who has a combination of those responsibilities, right? >> Yeah, exactly. It's usually, if we're talking GDPR specifically, it's usually information security, compliance, legal, and particularly in organizations now, we're definitely seeing more data privacy officers. And they're the ones that truly understand what these issues are; GDPR or other personal data privacy regulations. >> Let's say I'm the head of compliance security risk information governance, I wear that hat. Say I'm new to the job, and I call you guys in and say, "I need help." Where do I start? Obviously you're going to start with some kind of assessment Maybe you have a partner to help you do that, I can run my little risk analyzer, sort of leech in machine, and that's good but that's just scratching the surface. I know I have a problem. Where do we start? What are the critical elements? And how long is it going to take me to get me where I need to be? >> I think visibility is obviously the first step, which Zach already spoke to. You really have to be able to understand what you have to then be able to make some educated decisions about that. Generally that's where we see the gap in most organizations today. And that's particularly around unstructured data. Because if it's structured, generally you have some sort of search tools that you can quickly identify what is within there. >> To add on to that, you actually have 24 hours. We can bring back one hundred million items using the information map, so you get a really clean snapshot in just one day to start to understand where some of that risk may be hiding. >> Let's unpack that a little bit. You're surveying all my data stores, and that's because you see that because you've got the back-up data, is that right? >> The backup data is one portion of it. The rest is really coming from these 23 new connectors into those different data stores and extracting and sweeping out that metadata, which allows us to make more impactful decisions about where we think personal data may be, and then you can take further downstream actions using the rest of our tool kit. >> And what about distributed data on laptops, mobile devices, IoT devices, is that part of the scope, or is that coming down the road, or is it a problem to be solved? >> It's a little out of scope for what we do. On the laptop/desktop side of things, we do have e-discovery platform, formally known as Clearwell, which does have the ability to go out and search those types of devices and then you could be doing some downstream review of that data, or potentially moving it elsewhere. It's definitely a place we don't really play right now. I don't know if you had other comments? >> You got to start somewhere. Start within your enterprise. This has always been a challenge. We were talking off camera about FRCP and email archiving. I always thought the backup ... The back company was in a good spot. They analyzed that data. But then there's the but. Even these are backed up, kind of, laptops and mobile devices. Do you see the risk and exposures in PII really at the corporate level, or are attorneys going to go after the processes around distributed data, and devices, and the like? >> I think anything is probably fair game at this point given that GDPR isn't being enforced yet. We'll have to see how that plays out. I think the biggest gap right now, or the biggest pain point for organizations, is on structured data. It kind of becomes a dumping ground and people come and go from organizations, and you just have no visibility into the data that's being stored there. And generally people like to store things on corporate networks because it gets backed up, because it doesn't get deleted, and it's usually things that probably should not be stored there. >> If I think back to 2006, 2007 time frame with Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which basically said that electronic information is now admissible. And it was a high profile case, I don't want to name the name because I'll get it wrong, but they couldn't produce the data in court, the judge penalized them, but then they came back and said, "We found some more data. "We found some more data. "We found some more data." Just an embarrassment. It was one hundred million dollar fine. That hit the press. So what organizations did, and I'm sure Anna you could fill in the gaps, they basically said, "Listen, "it's an impossible problem so we're going to go after "email archiving. "We're going to put the finger in the dyke there, "and try to figure the rest of this stuff out later." What happened is plaintiff's attorney's would go after their processes and procedures, and attack those. And if you didn't have those in place, you were really in big trouble. So what people did is try to put those in place. With GDPR, I'm not sure that's going to fly. It's almost binary. If somebody says, "I want you to delete my data," you can't prove it, I guess that's process-wise, you're in trouble, in theory. We'll see how it holds up and what the fines look like, but it sounds like it's substantially more onerous, from what we understand. Is that right? >> Yes, I would 100% agree. From an e-discovery standpoint, there's proportionality and what's reasonable relative to the cost of the discovery and things like that. I actually don't think that that is going to come into play with GDPR because the fines are so substantial. I don't know what would be considered unreasonable to go out and locate data. >> Zach you have to help us end this on an up note. (group laughs) >> Dave: Wait, I wanted to keep going in to the abyss. (group laughs) We've talk about the exponential growth of data, and big data was supposed to be that bit-flip ... of turned it for, "Oh my God, I need to store it "and do everything, I need to be able to harness it "and take advantage of it" Is GDPR an opportunity for customers, to not only get their arms around information, but extract new value from it? >> Absolutely. It's all about good data hygiene. It's about good information governance. It's about understanding where your most valuable assets are, focusing on those assets, and getting the most value you can from them. Get rid of the junk, you don't need that. It's just going to get you into trouble and that's what Veritas can help you do. >> So a lot of unknowns. I guess the message is, get your house in order, call some experts. I'd call a lot of experts, obviously Veritas. We had PWC on earlier today, and a number of folks in your ecosystem I'm sure can help. Guys, thanks very much for coming on theCube and scaring the crap out of us. (group laughs) >> Thanks a lot. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back for our wrap, right after this short break. (light electronic music)

>> Speaker: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Yeah we're here live the Cube coverage at VMworld 2017. Behind us is the floor of the VMvillage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next two guest Beth Phalen who's the President and General Manager of Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Yanbing Li who's the Senior Vice President General Management with Storage and Availability at VMware, vSAN, all the greatness; Welcome back to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Got the heavy hitters here, data protection, AWS lot of great relationships synergies happening. >> Yeah. >> Give us the update. >> Yeah well go ahead yeah. >> We've been working together for a long time but recently we've really amped it up to the next level. Great discussions around enabling data protection for vSAN and as announced this week you know with Dell EMC will be first vendor to have data protection for VMware cloud on AWS. So it's a really exciting time to be here and I've been in this business for a long time. This is the best VMworld that I've seen so far and so it's just really great to be here with Yanbing. >> It's been very cohesive, I want to just stay on that for a second. This is the big milestone for VMware. >> It is. >> To have this shipping of the general availability especially with on the heels of the vCloud Air and all that controversy. Andy Jassy's on stage from Amazon web services. >> Yeah. >> Really kind of looking right at the audience and saying we got your back, this is a real deal, and the bridge to the future. I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say those exact words. >> Yeah yeah yeah. >> How do you get that data protection? Because that data protection in the cloud is hard. >> Yeah, well the nice thing is that since we've got all of our data protection running in a cloud environment now we could then use that to build the connections with VMC. So we had Data Domain Virtual Edition running, we have Data Protection Suite running in the cloud. So people can use the same technology they used on prem but now in AWS in conjunction with VMC. >> So you kind have hyper converged infrastructure meets cloud data protection. Yanbing, what is the difference? I mean what's the requirement of hyper converged infrastructure data protection? How does it differ from traditional storage and how is it evolving? >> Ah, great questions you know Beth and I we've known each other for quite a few years. I have to say our relationship hasn't been, you know, this close is and it's getting closer and closer. So coming back to your question in terms of hyper converged infrastructure. We're seeing two fundamental shifts around data protection. One is, the blurring of the boundary between backup and DR and these two really coming together as unified data protection. I think there has been a lot of discussion around this for a long time but this become even more compelling; now we talk about hyper converged infrastructure where you know our customers they so enjoy the benefit of having compute and storage combined together in a common management experience, they're looking for the same for data protection. So we're really seeing customers want to see data protection as a feature of hyper converged, as a capability that's part of that rather than yet another silo they have to manage separately. You know they want policy that manage storage, compute, and backup and DR altogether. So that's why you know that's really drive our partnership so much closer. >> You know it's interesting many of the clients that we've worked with over the years they'll have a backup strategy but they don't really have a DR strategy and they sleep with one eye open at night and they're afraid to go to the board because it's so expensive, it's expensive insurance. So you're seeing that there, sounds like they're blending those 2 together kind of killing 2 birds with one stone. Are there trade offs or things that customers should think about in that regard? How do they sort of go from where they are today which is sort of a backup bolt on to that integrated DR and backup? >> I think one of the key is the technology that we're leveraging now and we leverage something that has like CDP continuous data protection you can use that one to have data path to the secondary storage and you can use that same code to also initiate disaster recovery with near 0 RPO and RTO. So another thing that we announced this week is with our DPS for apps next edition that we now have hypervisor direct back up and what that means is that we're integrated directly with ESX and we are leveraging ProtectPoint through VM's to move data to data domain. That same technology is also leverage within RecoverPoint through VM's and so you can see the engine, the internal engine of the data movements, can be applied both to disaster recovery and to back up with different windows of RTO and RPO. >> I'm glad you said near 0 RPO causes no such thing as 0 RPO but you're seeing, more pressure to get as close to 0 as possible. What's driving that pressure and how are you meeting it? >> Well I think with all of us we know that an industry customers are expecting 24 by, you know 24 by 7 up time right. So they have many many applications that they need to have the confidence that if it does go down for any reason they're going to be able to bring it back up within minutes or hours not days. So that's really the drive for continuous availability. Getting as close to that as possible. >> If I may one more John, the challenge in data protection has always been it's, it's largely been a one size fits all and it's either I'm either under protected or I'm spending and breaking the bank. So are you able to through your technology and process improvements improve the level of granularity for different workloads that require different service levels. >> Two things come to mind, One, we're seeing more and more interesting customers integrating data protection directlywith their applications. Whether it SQL or Oracle and or the VM itself. So that's one thing. So we can custom the data protection to particular application and then on the second piece of that is where the different interfaces that VM offers we're able to do either V80P level integration or more fine grained integration like we do with CheckPoint through VM. So we are getting to the point that we can make different choices either application specific or something that is fine tuned based on the level of mission critical capabilities that application requires. >> I will get you guys perspective just a high level ballistic view for a second. We're seeing convergence of two worlds. The cloud native world that have no walls, have no perimeters they operate in a mindset of there's a security holes everywhere. Then the protections hard. >> They think of a differently. >> Yeah On prem the traditional methods, how are those coming together? Because you have customers that run VMware and do stuff with data protection and then one of them VMware in the cloud. What's different, what do customers need to know that are we on either side of that equation? If I'm on prem and I now want to use VMware in the cloud on AWS. How does data protection fit in that? Is it the same, is there tweaks, how they think about it? >> You want to answer that? >> In terms of on prem or VMware in AWS you know a big value prop is reading at the consistency in the operating model. I'm sure you have heard about this a million times said. >> Yes, talking about it all week. >> All week long. From data protection we're trying to do exactly the same. So for example VMware cloud on AWS, the very first data protection that we certify on that platform is from [Vast 00:07:39] organization is Avamar networker being the first set of solution certified and our customers definitely love the continuity of I already have the experience and licensing associated with my own prem protection solution and they want to carry that forward in today's cloud. >> So same operating module, so from the customers perspective I've been doing it this way >> Exactly. >> With VMware and Dell Data Protection, now it's the same in the cloud. No change in. >> Yeah I mean I think that's really the beauty of it, even with DDVE I mean you can have applications or you can do through different; You know you can have application in the cloud as well as another level of protection of your secondary storage. >> I think some of the changes probably not necessary. So RPD model consistency, Dave we touch upon, hyper convergence is driving a lot of functionality into a single control plate as opposed to these different silos and you know we would like to see that happen in the cloud as well and along that line you know best organization and my organizing are really looking at how we viewed the best next generation integrated technology that truly leverages the strengths of both organizations. >> That's simple and easy to use. >> Simple, easy to use, policy base, you know turn key solutions, so this is, you know what we're doing something pretty innovative by truly bring our engineering together and try to boost our next generation solution. >> Since the synergies that Michael was talking about when we interviewed Michael yesterday he's like look, the synergies are well beyond its expectations. Just it seems to be flowing nicely in the culture. When EMC had the federation there was always kind of like an interesting but now things are flowing differently. It seems to be smoother you guys. >> They are. >> Every action. >> I totally agree with what you said. I mean it feels different and I think as we go forward we have even more opportunities but we're not even a year into it and there was a distinct difference in terms of recognition around the joint opportunity and like you said the smoothness of the conversation I think is >> It's clear, it's clarity. >> It's really helpful. >> Well also you know, the rising tide floats all boats, well VMware stock as gone like this. >> It makes us all happy. >> Its got a nice slope to it. >> I definitely want to hackle Beth on that and the type of collaboration we're seeing between our two organizations, might be you is actually having multiple touch point into Dell and Dell EMC organization whether it's our VxRail and you know the vSAN based collaboration or the data protection angle and we're really seeing that happen across different functions. So we are starting from go to market collaboration you know how we provide the best set of solutions to our customers in joint go to market effort. vSAN is gaining a lot of free print in mission critical workloads and a critical requirement is data protection. So so we're doing a lot of joint solution, joint selling together. And really in the next step is that joint engineering effort leveraging the best of both worlds to build next generation products that's optimized for hyper converged, that's optimized for the cloud. >> For the software defined data centers. >> If I dial back a decade let's say as virtualization generally in VMware specifically saw its ascendancy, data protection totally changed. For a number of reasons, you had less physical resources but backup was still very resource intensive application and so; That's really where Avarmar came before. He walked the floor, back up and data protection is exploding again. It's like the hottest area. So two part question. Why is that and then how does Dell EMC with you know its large portfolio, its big install base, how do you maintain competitiveness with all that new emerging innovation? >> Yeah well I think the first question and I want to hear your answer too but what I would say is because the industry is changing so dramatically it's requiring data protection to change just as dramatically. >> Right. >> Right, so that is a lot of people are seeing opportunity there. Where is maybe, I've had people say, you know, well you don't really have to protect data in the cloud it's all stuff that's magically protected, I've had customers say that to me and I think that we're now beyond that, right and people are realizing, wow you know, just as much of a need or more of a need than it was before. So I think there's plenty of you know companies appreciate opportunity and they see opportunity right now as data protection evolves quickly to address the new IT world that we live in. On anything you would add to the first answer? >> Yeah so I think, several years ago VMworld feels like a storage shelf you know. I think there is still a lot of exciting interesting storage company but there has been quite a bit of consolidation you know. Software defined storage it seems like that market's landscape is becoming clearer and clearer and we're definitely seeing that spreading into secondary storage is now right for a disruption and we're also seeing that is disruption around secondary storage isalso impacting data protection software. It's not just the secondary storage element but you know extent to the entire software stack. I think it's very exciting and also thinking about you know what is going to be the economical benefit of cloud and how do we take best advantage of that and this is why you know our AWS relationship. You know we are rejuvenizing our DR effort. We have successful on prem product like SRM but we're seeing tremendous new opportunity to look at that in the context of cloud to truly leveraging the economy is scale of what cloud has to offer. So lots of driving factors to really revitalize that. >> It's a cloud show and you have no cloud. >> Okay Beth second part of my question is how do you keep pace, it's a pretty tremendous innovations going on, how do you keep pace, what are your thoughts on all that? >> So the really cool thing is because where you know we're Dell Technologies we have not only data protection assets, we also have servers, we also have switches, we have everything we need to build a full integrated stack which we now have without EPA. So within a integrated data protection appliance we have the best of data domain, we have the best of our software, we're leveraging also power at servers and dellium C switches. So we have everything that we need to build that end to end best in class integrated appliance and as customers change how they consume data protection to more like a converged consumption model or hyper converged consumption model we have all the pieces that we need to make that a reality and then to continue to move forward. So when you combine that with our relationship with VMware and the ability that we have to drive innovation jointly I have no doubt that we're going to be really moving ahead into you know modern data protection. >> Final question before we rap. R&D comes up, Micheal also mention and so do Pat, billions of dollars now are in R&D. Free cash was a billion dollars. Three billion for VMware. A lot of observations this week that we kind of looked and read the tea leaves one of them was at least for me was the stack a collision between hardware software stacks as IoT and servers and devices, you have hardware stacks and software stacks. Untested scenario certainly in vSAN; You see a lot of activity around untested new use cases and so it's going to put pressure on engineers. So the question is what's the vision for the R&D for you guys around data protection, because it's not just data protection anymore it's a fundamental linchpin in the equation of cloud >> Yeah. >> Thoughts on engineering road map I mean engineering R&D. >> One thing we're doing actually right now this week is we're restructuring our EMC lab dellium c lab back in Hopkinton to move to more of an open shared pivotal type environment. So you know it's clear that as we go forward doing things like pere programming on test driven development. You know enabling continuous always good known stayed like there is definitely advancements happening in software development that are accelerating innovation and so as we take advantage of that, that's how we keep pace with what's going on around us. Because you're right the number of things to get involved in is endless. >> I just want to point out before we end the segment you guys are very inspirational women in tech. I think you guys are amazing. We talk about the engineer resources. >> Thank you John. Your thoughts on the industry, as there's a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley and around the world around STEM and women in tech. Thoughts that you'd like to share to all the men watching and all the folks and young girls who might inspiration. You know it's passionate for us. >> Yeah, I'll start. So I think, first of all I want to tank the Cube for having such awareness in this topic and you know constantly featuring women in tech on your shows. You guys have been doing a great job raising the visibility women leaders. >> Thank you >> Thanks >> in the industry. Thank you. So certainly this is a topic very dear and near to my heart. This week you know we can still see not only our employee base but our customer base is heavily men dominated. But I think we're seeing unprecedented levels of awareness and attention to this topic in Silicon Valley and across the world. Really I do think we are starting to see much better transparency metric. We're seeing increased accountability in business and business leadership. So I think those and we're seeing a lot of social awareness I think those are going to drive a positive change. So let me give you a concrete example of fuzz for example things we do in VMware, we just gone through bonus allocation and compensation adjustment. I would get a report from it make sure, comparing the percentage of what we have done for the men population and women population and so you get a real time feedback in data and when we see the data is actually quite shocking hopefully we do see, unconsciously you know we may be allocating those >> Unconscious bias if you will. >> Yeah those differently. But because of those real time data and feedback we're good able to you know keep ourself accountable. So just you know this is no longer just talk this is a real data you know in the real HR practices that we are already building into our day to day practice. So I think I'm very optimistic, this will take time but this is you know we're moving in the right direction. >> Historical moment in the world if you think about it. This is super important time. The inspiration and also the young women out there too and also for the men. They need to be aware as well because inclusion includes not just women it's everyone. That seems to be >> Absolutely. >> In fact a trend we had an interview on the Cube and our Simpson who works for Mozilla she's doing some work for Tech Nation, she said they're changing it from diversity inclusion to inclusion and diversity. They're flipping it around where inclusion leads diversity cause they want to lead with the message of inclusion; >> Yeah. >> as a primary message with diversity. So it's not just the diversity message it's inclusion. >> Yeah. >> Love that. >> Yeah the only thing I would add would be the phrase "She can be it if she sees it" I think having people like myself and Yanbing be visible role models it's very impactful, especially for young women to see you know women in tech leadership positions. It's hard to imagine yourself in a role if you don't see anyone similar to in a role. So I think the more that people like us and our peers get out there and really put an effort into being visible. >> Do you see the networks forming more, I mean is there more action flowing happen. Can you compare and contrast just even a few years ago is it on the rise significantly? >> I think it's on the rise. >> Yeah I do get us to be involved in a lot of opportunistic situations, yeah. >> And of course your Twitter handle puts it right out there, @ybhighheels. >> Yeah. >> Right, your not shy about it. >> Yeah, there's nothing shy about it. I realize you know Beth and I, we are both addressed in very feminine way. I do think. >> Your capabilities are off to chart you to great and impressive executives. >> Society is increasingly more inclusive about their notions of female tech leader. It's not just one size fits all and I think it's encouraging us to show who we really are and the authentic self and I think that's very important for young girls to see because I remember when I was a young girl I didn't go into tech expecting I do not get to be who I am >> Yeah and that shouldn't reflect your capability of anyway any kind and that seem to be the greater awareness. The Google memo that went around as all of it so getting us some great videos on Silicon Angle on that topic. Again you guys are great inspiration. We love working with you you guys are great executives. >> Thank you. >> Its great content. >> Your welcome. >> We super passionate about it. We'll be at Grace Hopper for our 4th year we do that. >> Fantastic. >> As we show every year, we're learning more and more and we're going to do a podcast for guys too. >> Nice. >> Different angle. >> Love that. >> A lot of guys want to do what to do. >> Okay that's great. >> Inclusion and diversity of course; I need the help. I'm John Furrier With Dave Vellante Here. Live at Vmworld. More coverage coming after this short break.

(electronic music) >> Hello and welcome to the Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios with two great guests, Tara Chklovski, who is the founder and CEO of Iridescent and Anar Simpson, global ambassador of Technovation. First, thanks for coming in today. I appreciate moving your schedules around to come in. Thanks for coming into our studio. >> You bet, yeah. >> So Sundar Pichai was at your event. That's the big story this past week has been the Google memo from a low level employee who wrote some things that got the whole world shaking around gender biases, role of women in tech, and as we do a lot of women in tech as you know at the Cube. Hundreds and hundreds of women in over the years, friends, and also smart people. This is a pretty big moment for you guys. You had an event at Google. Sundar canceled his all hands meeting to address this under fear of retaliation and safety but came to your event on the Google campus. Surprising to many, as written up on VCode and the Verge. Pretty notable. So tell us about what happened. >> So this was the 2017 Technovation world pitch competition and the award ceremony and Sundar came and he talked to a lot of the girls who were presenting their ideas to solve problems in their community and then he had a little bit of a one on one conversation to learn a little bit more about the kinds of problems, their interest in technology, entrepreneurship, and then he addressed the crowd of 900 plus supporters and really reemphasized that there's a place for women in technology, and more importantly, for him and Google, that there's a place for these girls at Google. >> Talk about your mission. >> Right, so Technovation's mission is to empower girls to become technology entrepreneurs and it's much more than just learning how to code. It's really about telling girls that if there's a problem in their community, technology can help them have a very powerful voice. We've been running for eight years and Anar is our global ambassador who has helped us grow to more than 100 countries, but Technovation's relationship with Google is eight years long. Google has supported Technovation, was the very first technology company to support Technovation way before any other company saw the potential and since then, since 2010, Google has provided funding, mentors, spaces, not just across the U.S. but globally. >> Is it beyond entrepreneurship and beyond coding? Talk about specifically what you guys are bringing to folks outside of Silicon Valley. >> Oh, sure, so my role as the global ambassador for Technovation is really getting to girls all over the world and saying to them, you need to be engaged in technology. And what we found, as Tara mentioned, we've been doing this now, I've been doing this now for five years, is that we're building a movement. We're bringing in girls, we're bringing in mentors, we're bringing in companies and governments together to make this a reality for girls in tech careers in their own countries. >> What's some examples during your life when you had those kind of change moments? >> I think Iridescent, we are now in our 12th year, and every couple of months, it's a change moment because it's a test of grit and just believing in yourself because I started it with just an idea and grew it to be an organization that's all over the world and it doesn't come with just full hearted focus and a lot of courage is what I've seen, I think. I've also seen that how much you are passionate about an idea really swings how the other person is thinking and so the idea only matters so much, I think, of course I mean the track record and everything has to be there, but I think a lot of it depends on your own passion for it and I think I've come to realize that passion is maybe proportional to the complexity and the impact of the problem you're trying to solve, so if you're only trying to solve a small problem, you lose interest in two years. And maybe that's why, I'm always curious, like why do so many start ups fail after two or three years? It's because maybe you came in not thinking that you're going to change the world, maybe you came in because you wanted to make quick money or exit or whatever and so I think for me, it's this is my life's work and we want to bring more underrepresented communities into innovation, and so it's not something that is going to be solved easily. >> Let's get back to the Sundar event that you guys were at because I think it's a good conversation to have because one of the things that came out of the brouhaha that became that memo really was a conversation publicly. Now, it's been polarized here. There's just kind of a hate kind of mindset with it most of the time, plenty of stuff on the internet to go read through but there was actually some good conversations in the industry. What was the conversation like during the event because this was in full conversation mode while you guys were having your 2017 world pitch competition, which he presided over and had a speech to the entrepreneurs. What was it like? What were some of the conversations that were taking place? >> I think the most powerful piece of the whole evening was really the girls walking in and seeing the incredible diversity that we have in this world, right? So we had girls from and mentors and supporters from over 30 countries and just them coming and waving the flags and different faces and different cultures all trying to make the world a better place, I mean it's rare that you see that using technology and I think it's very fitting that Silicon Valley is the center of this, but I think there was not one dry eye in the group because you realize, the conversation is so much bigger than one company, one country. It is something that affects us as all human beings and you're believing in human potential so I think seeing these young girls, some of them 10 years old, there was this, I think, maybe the crowd's favorite was these 10 year old girls from Cambodia who want to improve the lives of these people working in cottage industries, right, and they created an app like say Etsy or something, but focused on Cambodian products and the courage of these little girls, I think everybody walks away feeling, okay there's hope. Even in the midst of all of this discussion. >> Yeah it creates a lightning rod in some ways and hopefully it will move on to the substantive conversations. How do you guys feel about what happened and as you take this mission forward? You guys are doing some amazing work, we'll do a whole nother segment, I think, that's on that in a minute, but given the landscape now, how do you view this and how are you talking with friends and colleagues and family members around it because I've certainly had conversations with my friends, certainly on the east coast, like no, no, that's not the way Silicon Valley is. Google actually is a very cool company, it's not exactly like what you think it is. They're very open. They support a lot of great initiatives and they're candid. And then I go on and explain, it's like a university, serene little area, have this little ecosystem, that they've kind of built a university culture, if you will. But it is open and there's things that happen that get misrepresented and that was my take. That's for the folks that filmed at Silicon Valley. But what's your take? What do you think about what's happening? >> So this is really, really good that you brought up the university campus environment. So I have two girls. They're both millennials and they're both in the tech world and we have this discussion and here is the perfect answer, right. So one of my daughters, Kat, she said that when she read that, she thought it was basically a gathering of his thoughts and it was a gathering of his thoughts because he was probably asked to adhere to I&D staff that's going on in every company right now, right, and so it was a little bit of a, wait a second, you know. He wants to sort of respond to his being asked to go to I&D staff and then Katia said, but you know mom, it was just a gathering of his thoughts and this is an essay, and it was a poorly written one, and if I was grading it, I would give him a C minus. Then my older daughter said-- >> Host: I would have given him an F on that one. She's generous. >> Because he did, he tried to make it very professional and very academic and she said but it was a first draft, he has not, he didn't proceed to toughen it up, solidify it, find more evidence, have it critiqued. It was just a gathering of his thoughts and he hasn't gone through the presses and both these girls graduated from Berkeley and so I think they would know what a C paper looks like versus an A paper. And then my older daughter said, and the other thing is, you know, it's not like I&D efforts are actually bad but what we're trying to do is we're trying to condense the time in which we're trying to get women at equal pairing in the tech world. Now, you know women have never been at equal pairing in many professions. They were not enough doctors, lawyers, accountants, you name it, right? Main Street, Wall Street has never had equality. And now we're looking at technology and the reason everything just flairs up in technology is because we live in today's world where news and information is available all the time. So there's two things going on. Information is readily available. People can come into the conversation very quickly and whenever anything happens in Silicon Valley, the effect is massive because all eyes are on Silicon Valley all the time. So it's a bit of a distorted view but we have gone through this. It took a long time for women to become astronauts. It took a long time for women to become neurosurgeons. It took a long time for women to become lawyers and dentists. It will take a little bit of time for women to become top technologists, but we're hoping that it'll shorten and things happen quickly in the valley and we're trying to get that quicker and so we're seeing a little bit of friction. This is responses from millennials so for me, it was like, yes. >> Host: Interesting perspective. >> Yes, great perspective, and when Sundar said these things at the world pitch, I was sitting in the second row and every time he said something I would clap real loud and Todd said, why are you being so good and I said I need to hear that, I need to hear him say that because-- >> Host: What did he say that moved you? >> Oh he just said, you know you have a place in technology and I said yes, we needed to hear you say that right away, all the time and especially to these girls, these eight to 18 year old girls, and all of the ones that come from 100 countries that weren't at Google but were listening to the live pitch. >> We seem to be going back to a crowd that wants to see respect for the individual and citizenship. These were company values at Hewlett Packard, when I was there, that I always remembered was unique. They go hey, you can have differences, but if you have respect for the individual and you have a citizenship mindset. That seemed to have been lost in tech. With this whole movement you see and win at all costs, being an asshole is what you got to do to be a CEO or flip it fast or bros program, so it became a very selfish environment. It seems to be shifting now, with this conversation. Your thoughts? >> So I have to say, doing a start up is not easy. Getting successful in this world is not easy. Shaking the status quo is not easy, so I have to say that the same people, and we're not going to name names, but the same people who are very arrogant and have little respect for the laws and rules, they have given us products that are changing peoples' lives. There is no question about it. Without their bravado, without their I don't care, I'm just going to go over you if you don't comply with me, a lot of ride sharing wouldn't even have happened, and to me, when you provide employment, when you provide alternative services, when you provide something that takes away the way things were, I see that as a plus. I think what we're seeing is that's needed to a certain extent and then you realize, okay now we have to get back to growing it and working it and if you keep going in that mode, you probably won't succeed. >> So being tough and determined and having grit is what you need to break through those walls as a start up. You don't need to be necessarily a jerk, but your point is if you're creating value. >> If you're creating value, and that sometimes you actually have to be a jerk because there are very few brave, non-jerk people who have gone against a big unions and big monopolies. Right, you and I, I would not be able to go against the taxi commission. You need somebody who is a complete a-hole to do that. And he did that and it made a difference. He doesn't have to continue to do that and that's the point. >> There's a meme going around on the internet, if you want to make friends, sell ice cream. >> Exactly! >> So you cannot always win friends when you're pioneering things. >> And you know, there is a balance and maybe we've fostered the fact that you need to be that attitude for everything and that's not true so the pendulum shifted a bit too much but I think that we shouldn't scorn them because really they have made a difference, let's just let everybody get back to-- >> Its a tough world out there to survive and you have to have that kind of sharp elbows to make things happen and it's the value you're providing is how you do it. >> Exactly. >> Well it's no secret to the folks that know me and watch The Cube and know the Silicon Valley that I'm a huge proponent for computer science and, you know, as someone who kind of fell into that in the '80s, it's now become very interesting in that the surface area for computer science has increased a lot and its not just coding and heads down and squashing bugs and writing code. There's been a whole nother evolution of Soft Scales, Agile, Cloud, you've seen a full transformation with the potential unlimited compute available, with mobile now 10 years plus into the iPhone you see new infrastructure developing so it creates the notion that, okay, you can bring the science of computers to a whole nother level. That must be attractive as you guys have that capability to bring that to bear in the programs. Can you guys comment on how you guys see just the role of computer science playing out and this is not a gender thing, this is more of, as I have a young daughter I try to say, it's not just writing code, you could certainly whip out a mobile app, but it's really bringing design to it or bringing a personal passion that you might have, so what are some of the patterns you're seeing in the surface area of what's now known as computer science? >> I think it's super important because as technology has progressed, we've been able to provide this program. If we were still programming in front of screens and doing the what you see is what you get kind of thing without, we would not be there. I think the big thing that's happened in the last 10 years is the mobile phone. I mean, if you find a girl anywhere today in the world, chances are she'll have a mobile phone on her and she's going to be loathe for you to take that one thing from her. You could take other things from her, but try taking that phone away from her. She will not let you. And so the fact that she's so attached to that mobile phone means that you can then tell her, hey, you don't have to be just a consumer of that thing, you can be a producer of that thing. Anything that you see on there, you can actually design. This is power. This is your thing to good and great and better. And if we can shift that in their minds that this is their link to the world that's wide open, we're seeing that. >> Well the world is consumed by it. I mean, a lot of women in the world will be consumers of product, certainly with AI, the conversation over the weekend I was having with folks as the role of women is super important not just in AI, but as software becomes cognitive, you have to align with half the audience that's out there. Must be hard for a guy to program something that's going to be more oriented towards women, but it brings up the question of application and whether it's self driving cars or utility from work to play and everything in between, software and the role of software is going to be critical and that seems to be pretty clear. Question is how do you inspire young girls. That's the question that a lot of fellow males that I talk to who are fathers of daughters and who are promoting women in tech and see that vision. What are some of the inspiration areas? How do you really shake the interest and how do you have someone really kind of dig in and enjoy it and taste it and feel it? >> So there is some research to back what the formula is that works to drive change in behavior and so there is, one of the biggest names in cognitive psychology is Albert Bandura. He's a professor at Stanford. But basically it's the same principles that drive, say, the addiction from alcohol or weight loss or any kind of new behavior change. So the first is you need to have exposure to someone whom you respect showing that this is something of meaning, and so the key words are someone you respect, right? And so media can play a very big role here, for scale, right, otherwise it's only maybe a teacher or a parent and if they're not exposed to technology they can't really affect your... And so media can play a huge role there. Second is the experience itself, like how do you make it easy to get started. And then it's like learning from video games, so you make it very, very easy, like the first step is just come over here, it'll be fun, there's pizza, come, right, like your friends are coming, but then the feedback has to be very fast, so the first step, and that's where your good curriculum matters. So that's where also working on a mobile phone is very appealing even though maybe apps is not-- >> Host: It's relatable. >> It's relatable but the feedback is instantaneous and so the programming language that the girls use is block based so even though you don't have any prior programming background, you can still build a working app, so that's critical. Then human beings get tired very easily and so the feedback needs to keep changing. It has to be unpredictable. The third piece is that of expectations. Sou have to have very high expectations and so that's why this current discussion around cognitive differences in gender, I feel is missing the point, because it's not what you're born with, what are you capable of? And so if we looked at our genetics, we would never go to space, we would never go to the deepest parts of the ocean, because we're not meant for that. But we had really high visions and expectations and so human beings rose to that. And then the last piece is less relevant in developing countries but it's still important, so it's sort of the human energy. We're not a brain disassociated from the body, we're connected, right? And so if you're hungry and tired and sleepy, not the right time to sort of make a dramatic change in you interests, so this is relevant like for us, we tried to figure out which countries are we going to work in, so post-conflict, war-torn areas are not the best areas to start a new program in. You need the right-- >> So you're saying the biological argument of, of course they're different, men and women, but it's the capability, that's where people are missing the boat. >> And the support system. So have high expectations, provide them with the right support, but the most important thing is your own beliefs in that. >> Let's get your thoughts on that 'cause I think you guys have a great program with Technovation, you mentioned mentors. Key part of the formula most likely. What we here, in the conversation I've had with women here has been, there's a real call to arms at the executive level now, folks my age in the 50s who made it, who were there, succeeding, they really want to give back and they really have recognized the value of having that peer mentorship and then inspiring the young generation, whether it's part of the things that we cover like Grace Hopper or Technovations, things that you do, or even just mentoring in their own communities. What does that mentorship look like that you guys see that you'd like to see double down on or areas you'd like to see tweaked or perceptions that need to change? What's your thoughts on mentorship and the role of inspiring young girls? >> Mentorship from men? >> Host: Men and women, I mean... >> From both? >> Well I see the mentorship with women, as that's the first step. I have a whole nother conversation, in my opinion, about the men needing training, not just like go to class and learn how to talk but how to empathize. >> Well my big thing has been that when you wanted to encourage women up the ladder in your companies or you wanted to encourage women to actually get in to technical roles, that intent should not be placed in the CSR department of your organization 'cause that speaks volumes, right? To say oh, well that's in the social responsibility department or the HR, that just says, okay, so you're not really, you don't think we're capable of helping you with your product or service, we're sort of part of this, and it's like, no. So I think you want to mainstream it, which is what a lot of I&D things are trying to do now. >> Host: Inclusion and diversity. >> Inclusion and diversity. >> To make it part of the fabric, not a department checkbox. >> Exactly. >> That's what you're getting at. >> Exactly and the involvement of these departments, to include everybody and to make it more diverse is going to be not frictionless. It will be friction until a time where it won't even be necessary. I&D departments should have one goal which is to work themselves out of a job. If they can work themselves out of a job, then the company would have done what it needs to be done, but I think-- >> Meaning it's self sufficient, it's self governing, people are humans, it's respect for individuals. I mean this just basically comes down to, if you look at it as humans, it takes it, every conversation could be tabled, that's what? There's a person on the other side, it's a human being, not a woman or a white male or whatever. They're not there yet, but I mean certainly that would be the endgame, so in that scenario, that department's out of business, the I&R, the inclusion and diversity department, has done its job. >> Exactly, you don't need one because you know you're okay. And I think capabilities is really important in corporations and this isn't anybody's fault, this is just how it's been done. This has just been the culture of it. Who gets invited to which meetings. Who gets invited to which conferences. And so we heard the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki saying, you know, she had to sort of elbow a little bit to say hey, why am I not allowed at a certain conference and it's like, maybe just wake up to that and say why aren't you involving more people at conferences and think tanks because, you know, I come from an oil and gas background and people used to do a lot of deals on the golf course 'cause oil and gas people play golf a lot and a lot of deals used to happen, well in the Valley we don't play golf a lot but we do do other things, conferences or get togethers, and if you don't include the people in your team as groups or representationally, well they're not going to be there when you make these decisions so maybe just be a little bit-- >> Exclusionary is a problem and Kleiner Perkins was taken to task, they had ski trips apparently planned and they did all mostly guys and they didn't invite the women part, there was a big scandal. This is where they make that, it's a normative thing and they've got to change the norms. >> Change the norms and if you actually want your company which is made of all kinds of people to move really far ahead, don't be like that. Include everybody because the only goodness about that is you'll go forward. If you don't include somebody, well you're going to hurt them. >> I want to add to that. So there's quite a bit of data. So the patterns are not anything different from what the message girls get from school and parents. So if you look at the data there are 100 countries that legally discriminate against women and so what message industry is telling, is really, firstly it doesn't filter through to the larger population. Silicon Valley is a completely different problem, but overall, the messages girls are given is like, this is not for you, and so especially in some of the most populous, dense countries of the world. And so we have to fight a lot of these kinds of perceptions from the ground up and the number one gatekeeper is the father and so a key part of what we've now done to date is to provide education and training to the parents because there's a very moving story that we work in a remote town in south India and a mentor who's very dedicated has been trying to get these girls to participate in Technovation. He did that and then one girl was actually offered a job but the father kept saying no, not needed, no girl in my family ever needs to work, but he fought it and so the girl actually gets a job. And then a year later, the father calls the mentor and said, you know what, I'm so grateful that you did it because a day after she got the job, I got hit in an accident and I lost my job, but it's these kinds of perceptions that have to be changed one person at a time which is what makes this very hard, unless you actually are able to get the media to change the messaging and I think in the U.S., which is, there's some very interesting studies and a question, right, like if you were to think, would there be more women in STEM in poorer, developing countries versus richer, highly developed countries. Where would you see more women in STEM? The answer is actually the women in the poorer countries like Iran, Malaysia. The reason is because in an individualistic society like in the U.S., where there's a lot of emphasis on materialistic but it's also about are you happy. The conversation has changed from parents telling children and do what makes you happy and then you are very prone to advertising and advertising works when it's highly targeted and highly gendered. And so in the 60s, there was no such thing as pink and blue. Now there is pink and blue. And so now we just made our entire society entirely susceptible to advertising. And girls are passive and complaint and boys are aggressive and so then when you're looking at the board structures, it's very, very hard to fix the problem right there. You have to go down deeper because you don't get leaders who are complaint. Maybe secretaries are compliant. But you have to fix the message that teachers give girls, that parents give their baby girls when they are born, and so industry is just sort of in the spotlight right now but the issue is not that of industry, I think it's also that of society. >> Industry, if you look at what Sundar is supporting you guys it's interesting that this industry seems to chipping and certainly Silicon Valley is a little different as you said, but in general, it is a cultural parent thing. Any plans there with Technovations to have a parent track? >> Yes, totally. I mean, I think, right now, 10% of parents actually volunteer to be mentors, kind of like girl scout troop leaders, and so we are trying to figure out, okay, what is a way to involve parents and to make them part of the discussion? >> Tara, Anar, thanks so much. This is The Cube conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto Studios, with two great guests, Tara Chklovski, who's the founder and CEO of Iridescent, and Anar Simpson, Global Ambassador of Technovation. Thanks for coming in today. Appreciate moving your schedules around to come in. Thanks for coming to our studio. >> You bet, yeah. >> So Sundar Pichai was at your event. That's the big story this past week. There's has been a Google memo from a low level employee who wrote some things that got the whole world sharking around gender biases, role of women in tech. We do a lot of women in tech as you know in theCUBE, hundreds and hundreds of women over the years, friends, and also smart people. This seem a pretty big moment for you guys. You had an event at Google. Sundar canceled his on-hands meeting to address this, under fear of retaliation and safety, but came to your event on Google Campus, surprising to many. It's written up on Recode and The Verge. Pretty notable. So tell us about what happened. >> So, yeah, this was the 2017 Technovation World Pitch Competition and the awards ceremony. And Sundar came and he talked to a lot of the girls who were presenting their ideas to solve problems in their community, and then he had a little bit of a one-on-one conversation to learn a little bit more about the kinds of problems, their interest in technology entrepreneurship, and then he addressed the crowd of 900 plus supporters, and really emphasized that there's a place for women in technology, and more importantly, for him and Google, that there's a place for these girls at Google. >> Great timing for you guys too. And I want to drill more into what happened but I want to just point out this was a scheduled stop for Sundar in terms of it. You guys have a program called Technovation which was a 2017 World Pitch, folks around, you're the Global Ambassador, take a minute to talk about what Technovation is. Why was it on Google's Campuses? What was it all about? What does Global Ambassador mean? Talk about your mission. >> Right, so Technovation's mission is to empower girls to become technology entrepreneurs and it's much more than just learning how to code. It's really about seeing girls and telling girls that if there's a problem in their community, technology can help them have a very powerful voice. We've been running for eight years and Anar is our Global Ambassador who's helped us grow to more than a hundred countries. Technovation's relationship with Google is eight years long. Google has supported Technovation, was the very first technology company to support Technovation way before any other company saw the potential. And since then, since 2010, Google has provided funding, mentors, spaces, not just across the US but globally. And so this year, it was a year long worth of relationship made with code which is their arm focusing on gender equality. They basically provided funding but made this event possible at Google headquarters. >> Anar talk about the Global Ambassador role you have, and kind of comes down to the question for Tara as well, is it beyond entrepreneurship and beyond coding? I mean talk about specifically what you guys are bringing to folks outside the Silicon Valley. >> Oh sure, so my role as the Global Ambassador for Technovation is really getting to girls all over the world and saying to them you need to be engaged in technology. And what we found, as Tara mentioned, we've been doing this now, I've been doing this now for five years, is that we're building a movement. We're bringing in girls, we're bringing in mentors, we're bringing in companies and governments together to make this a reality for girls in tech careers in their own countries. And I want to go back and address Google's relationship with Technovation a little bit more because this is more of an anecdote. I got into Technovation not willingly. Six years ago I had a start-up, it was called Parallel Earth, and I was working hard at it. And I was using the offices at Mozilla because they allow people to do that, you know people like me to work there. And one day somebody sent me a note, it just came on the internal email system, and they said, "You're a woman, you're in tech, "there's an event going on at Andreessen Horowitz "where the luminaries of the Valley are going to be talking." And so the luminaries were Mary Samayo who was at Google at that time, Freada Kapor Klein, Padma Ashriwurier , and I think that there was two other people. And so we went to this event and we sat in a packed room at Andreessen Horowitz. And these women, the luminaries at the Valley at that time, each one of them stood up and told us their story, and afterwards they fed us hors d'oeuvres and offered us wine. And then they said before you go, we have one to ask of you which is could you sign up to be a mentor for Technovation. And I thought to myself, no, I am like over my head in my own company. I don't even have time for myself. And they asked, be a mentor, it's just two hours a week for 12 weeks. And I thought to myself, oh God, man, I drank their wine, I ate their hors d'oeuvres, I listened to them and now how can I say no? And so I signed up. And it was a stretch for me because what happened at that time, the curriculum was still being delivered by a person. And so I've been assigned to the Google Campus in Mountainview. And somebody in engineering at Google had been able to get a room, a very small conference room. And so for 12 weeks I met this team of girls from Mountainview, and there were other mentors like me, and then there was a whole bunch of girls from Sequoia High School. And John, in that 12 weeks, I was a changed woman. Those five girls, they blossomed under me. When I met them, I said to them, "I'm here, I am a type A, this is a competition." >> "I signed up for the Andreessen Horowitz--" >> Exactly, exactly. "Listen, I got my own star, "but we're going to win, this is a competition." So they just rolled their eyes at me, like, who the heck she is, we don't even want to be here. >> John: They draw the short straw on this one. >> Exactly. But those 12 weeks changed my life. >> John: In what way, what way did it change your life? >> I have a degree in Computer Science. I have a Master's in Communication. I went to Stanford for innovation and entrepreneurship. So I've been in the field for a very long time. And what I saw in terms of the curriculum, what I saw in terms of the mentorship, what I learned about design thinking and being able to create an app, I never had that. When people like me, we go in to a university, and doing computer, we never had that kind of stuff. And I thought, oh my God, if I'd had that, I would be, like, soaring the skies right now. And to have girls who really came to this table with nothing, and you see them becoming graphic designers because they had a little bit of access to Microsoft Paint, someone who has the ability to do PowerPoint, one girl, in my team of five, almost never showed up, she was late, she never came, and then two sessions before the Pitch, she showed up and she realized, have we've gone so far without her. So here's what she did, she took that little graphic that that woman who'd done it in Paint, and she got her mom and they went to some t-shirt shop, and they got that graphic printed. And the next time she came, there were five t-shirts that said the name of our team which was Intoxication Station, and one for me. And then it turns out she's a really good speaker. Who knew? So she almost never came, brought these shirts, was the speaker for the group, and we won the local competition and then the next one, then we placed second in the finals. >> She came in, contributed with a t-shirt, and graced you the back end, won the trust of the group, ended up being the speaker and winning the award. >> Yes, they grew, they literally, you know if you take a time lapse and you see a flower blossom, that's exactly what happened. >> Tara talk about your credentials 'coz you have a Ph.D. >> So I have a, yeah, Bachelor's in Physics, and Master's in Aerospace, and I was in the Ph.D. program in Aerospace but I dropped out because I wanted to start Iridescent. >> That's good. Dropping out of Ph.D. has a good track record. A lot of folks who dropped out of Stanford includes some of the big names we now know. What's some examples during your life when you had those kind of changed moments? >> I think, Iridescent, we are now in our 12th year. Every couple of months it's a changed moment because it's a test of grit. And just believing in yourself because I mean, I started with just an idea and grew it to be an organization that's all over the world. And it doesn't come with just full-hearted focus. A lot of courage is what I've seen. I have also seen how much you are passionate about an idea really swings how the other person is thinking. And so the idea only matters so much, I think, of course, I mean, the track record and everything has to be there, but I think a lot of it depends on your own passion for it, and I've come to realize that passion is maybe proportional to the complexity and the impact of the problem you're trying to solve. So if you're only trying to solve a small problem, you lose interest in two years, right, and maybe that's why, I'm always curious, why do so many start-ups fail after two or three years? It's because maybe you came in not thinking that you're going to change the world, maybe you came in because you wanted to make quick money, or et cetera, whatever. And so I think for me this is my life's work. And if you want to bring more and to represent the communities into innovation. And so it's not something that's going to be solved easily. >> Start-up success and then people working on teams, really is about inclusion and letting things bloom and being ready for anything. That's the greatest feat. Let's get back to the Sundar event that you guys were having. Now this is a good conversation to have because one of the things that came out of the aha that became that memo, really was a conversation publicly. And now it's been polarizing. There's just some kind of a hate, hate kind of mindset with it most of the time. Plenty of stuff in the internet to go read there, but what actually are some good conversations in the industry? What was the conversation like during the event? Because this was in full conversation mode while you guys were having your 2017 World Pitch competition of which he presided over and had a speech to the entrepreneurs. What was it like? What are some of the conversations that were taking place? >> I think the most powerful piece of the whole evening was really the girls walking in and seeing the incredible diversity that we have in this world, right. So we had girls, and mentors, and supporters, from over 30 countries and just them coming and waving the flags, and different faces, and different cultures, all trying to make the world a better place. I mean, it's rare that you see that, using technology. And I think it's very fitting that Silicon Valley is the center of this. But I think there was not one dry eye in the group because you realized the conversation is so much bigger than one company, one country. It is something that affects us as all human beings, and you believing in human potential. So I think seeing these young girls, some of them 10 years old, there was this, I think, maybe the crowd's favorite was these 10-year-old girls from Cambodia who want to improve sort of the lives of these people working in cottage industries, right. And they created an app, like, say, Etsy or something, but focused on Cambodian products, and the courage of these little girls, I think everybody walks away feeling okay there's hope even in the midst of all of this discussion. >> It creates a lightning rod in some ways that hopefully will move on to the substantive conversations. How do you guys feel about what happened as you take this mission forward? You guys are doing some amazing work. And we'll do a segment on that in a minute, but given the landscape now, how do you view this? How are you talking with friends and colleagues and family members around it? Because I certainly had conversations with my friends certainly in the east coast, like, "No, no, that's not the way Silicon Valley is." Google actually is a very cool company. It's not what you think it is. They're very open. They support a lot of great initiatives. And they're candid. And then I go on and explain. It's like a university. So me and Larry have this little ecosystem that they've kind of built the university culture if you will. But it's open and there's things that happened that get misrepresented. That was my take for the folks who don't know Silicon Valley. But what's your take? What do you think about what's happened? >> So this is really, really good that you brought up the university campus, environment of it. So I have two girls, they're both millennials, and they're both in a tech world. And we had this discussion. And here is the perfect answer, right. So one of my daughters, Kat, she said that when she read that, she thought it was basically a gathering of his thoughts. And it was a gathering of his thoughts because he was probably asked to adhere to I&D stuff that's going on, in every company right now, right. And so he was like a little bit of a, wait a second, he wants to sort of, respond to his being asked to go to I&D stuff. And then Katya said, "But you know mom, "it was just a gathering of his thoughts. "And if this is an essay, and it was a poorly written one, "and if I was grading it, I would give him a C minus." Then my older daughter said-- >> John: Oh, she'll give him an F on that one. >> Right. >> John: C minus, she's generous. >> No, because he did. He tried to make it very professional and very academic. And she said but it was a first draft. He didn't proceed to toughen it up, solidify it, find more evidence, have it critic. It was just a gathering of his thoughts and he hasn't gone through the process. Both these girls graduated from Berkeley and so I think they would know what a C paper look like versus an A paper. And then my older daughter said, "And the other thing is, "it's not like "I&D efforts "are actually bad, "but what we're trying to do is "we're trying to condense the time "in which we're trying to get women "at equal peering in the tech world." Now women have never been at equal peering in many professions. There were not enough doctors, lawyers, accountants, you name it, right? Main street, Wall Street has never had equality. And now we're looking at technology and the reason everything just flares up in technology is because we live in today's world, where news and information is available all the time. So there's two things going on. Information is readily available. People can come in to the conversation very quickly. And whenever anything happens in Silicon Valley, the effect is massive because all eyes are on Silicon Valley all the time. So it's a bit of a distorted view. But we have gone through this. It took a long time for women to become astronauts. It took a long time for women to become neurosurgeons. It took a long time for women to become lawyers and dentists. It will take a little bit of time for women to become top technologists. But we're hoping that it'll shorten and things happen quickly in the Valley and we're trying to get that quicker. And so we're seeing a little bit of friction. This is responses from millennials. So for me it was like-- >> John: Interesting perspective. >> Yes, great perspective. And when Sundar said these things at the World Pitch, I was sitting in the second row and every time he said something I would clap really loud. And Todd said, "Why are you being so good?" And I said, "I need to hear that. "I need to her him say that because--" >> John: What did he say that moved you? >> Oh, he just said you have a place in technology. And I said yes. We needed to hear you say that right away, all the time, and especially to these girls, these two 18-year-old girls, and all of the ones that come from a hundred countries that weren't at Google but were listening to the live pitch. And I needed to hear it. I'm a veteran but I needed to hear it because-- >> It's interesting too the narrative that the millennials and certainly the younger kids hear is an echo of what comes down. And, interesting, my son who is 15, at dinner last night said, "Dad, I'm a white male. "What does that mean?" >> Poor guy. >> Then I'm like, oh my God, he's a kid. So, again, things are shifting, they're out of context. Tara your thoughts on how this all evolves and the positive things that folks can do. What's your perspective? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I had a lot of discussion with my husband yesterday on this because he's a white male, right? And, but also we have two daughters, right. And so there's this whole he for she campaign, right. And that I think like our conversation earlier, the discussion has to be very inclusive and you cannot polarize. And I think I have to be careful because, I mean, my passion is what drives the work because the work is hard, but I have to also remind that, okay, there's a whole another segment of the population that cares, right, and, so I think it's just constantly remembering these kinds of things. I think in terms of what the industry can do, I think the normal thing is that people are doing which is really well, investing lower in the pipeline, investing in young girls, and all of that kind of stuff, and also sort of the inclusion and diversity stuff in the workforce. But I think there are some other segments, other industries that we can learn from, and I think one very unique place is actually the aviation industry. But the experimental aircraft, so we're just aviation enthusiasts, right. And so they have this gathering, yearly annual gathering, and 600,000 people come from all over the world, the thing that makes it unique and there's almost equal representation, there are two things that make it very unique. First is the family affair. And I think the tech industry has done a very good job, sort of convening these developer conferences but they are closed and most of them are 100% male, right? I think there could be something there where the, again much more than a company, that the industry has to do. And to make it maybe not commercial but do it as a fun family gathering and not in Silicon Valley. And then I think the second would be to actually lean on the veterans of the industry to share their passion with the young ones. And I think one of the problems of technology is that it's moved so fast that it has become very abstract. And nothing is very hands on. If you open up something, you will not understand anything. And so what the aviation industry had done really well is to showcase the core fundamental principles of how these things work using the old airplanes, old engines, combustion engines. But you can see how things work, right, and so-- >> John: It's like kindergarten. >> Exactly, exactly, start that way and then you can go into the more complex. But I think there's a role for the veterans of the tech world to play here. And I think it's not just sort of gender but it's also maybe age and making it much more about the family, rather than just the developer in the family. >> Tara and Anar, you guys are inspiration. Thanks for taking the time. And I've had the, my age, luxury of spending nine years at Hewlett Packard company before, maybe these early 90s when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were around. And one of the things that really influenced me, and I think this is something that I see a positive light coming in this industry, to your point, about so much changes, is that we seem to be going back to a crowd that wants to see respect for the individuals, citizenship. These were company values at Hewlett Packard when I was there that I always remembered was unique. Hey, you can have differences but if you have respect for the individual, and you have the citizenship mindset, that seems to have been lost in tech, and with this whole movement you're seeing, win at all cost, being an asshole, what you going to do to be a CEO, or flip it fast, or programs. So it became a very selfish environment. It seems to be shifting that way with this conversation. Your thoughts? >> So I have to say doing a start-up is not easy. Getting successful in this word is not easy. Shaking the status quo is not easy. So I have to say that the same people and we're not going to name names, but the same people who are very arrogant and have little respect for the laws and rules, they have given us products that are changing people's lives. There is no question about it. With that, they're a provider. With that, they're sort of "I don't care, I'm just going to go over you "if you don't comply with me." A lot of ride sharing, wouldn't even have happened. And to me when you provide employment, when you provide alternative services, when you provide something that takes away the way things were, I see that as a plus, okay. I think what we're seeing is that's needed to a certain extent, and then you realized, okay, now we have to get back to growing it and working it. And if you keep going in that mode, you probably won't succeed. >> So being tough and determined and having grit is what you need to breakthrough those walls as a start-up. You don't need to be necessarily a jerk. But your point is if you're creating value. >> If you're creating value, and that sometimes you actually have to be a jerk because there are a very few brave, non-jerk people who have gone against big unions and big monopolies, right. I would not be able to go against the taxi commission. You need somebody who's a complete a-hole to do that. And he did that and it made a difference. He doesn't have to continue to do that and that's-- >> There was a meme going around the internet, "If you want to make friends, sell ice cream." >> Exactly. >> So you can't always win friends when you're pioneering. >> Right, right. There is a balance and maybe we've fostered the fact that you need to be that attitude for everything and that's not true. The pendulum shifted a bit too much. But I think that we shouldn't scorn them because really they have made a difference. Let everybody get back to-- >> It's a tough world out there to survive. And you have to have that kind of sharp elbows to make things happen. But it's the value your providing, it's how you do it. >> Exactly. >> Well thanks so much guys for coming up. Appreciate to spend the time to talk about your awesome event at 2017 World Pitch as part of Technovation where Sundar represented Google in your great program with young girls go over some tech books. Thanks for sharing. This is CUBE conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat happy music) >> Hello, and welcome to a special CUBEConversations here at theCUBE Studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier here for a special Women in Tech and Technovation conversation with Tara Chklovski founder and CEO of Iridescent also runs TechNation and Anar Simpson global ambassador of TechNation. Great Women in Tech conversation and you guys have done amazing work, you're both rock stars. Thanks for spending the time. We just had a great chat about your event you had the 2017 World Pitch competition for girls in entrepreneurship in coding and everything else. Congratulations, so tell us about Technovation. What do you guys do and you guys are doing some amazing work. Tara start us off, where are you guys and what's going on? >> So Technovation is the world's largest technology entrepreneurship program for girls and girls aged middle school and high school are challenged that you have to find a problem in your community, to learn how to code a mobile application and learn how to start a startup from scratch all the way to the pitch video business plan. And through that process they are partnered with a woman in tech mentor and they go through a hundred hour learning experience. At the end of it they have to submit their apps and business plans for judging, and we have thousands of judges who are experts in tech from all over the world, review those and then we have a quarter final, semi final and then the big World Pitch competition that was held last week here in Silicon Valley. >> And this sounds so progressive and cutting edge. It sounds like what Palo Alto high school would do with Menlo and Sacred Heart and Castilleja, but this is not just Silicon Valley this is, I mean talk to us a little bit about the scope of the program. How do people get involved? Share some of the data. >> Yeah, totally, and so it is all over the world. We run in a hundred different countries, primarily brought and expanded through our work that our global ambassador Anar has done, and most of it is really trying to bring girls who would have never been exposed to technology entrepreneurship careers. And the way we work is really through partnerships, amazing organizations and visionary leaders who do the hard work of actually supporting these girls, getting these girls interested. So these girls would typically never go into careers in tech because they never see themselves as being interested and so the hook is that you want to find a problem in your community. You have to go out, talk to people, try to understand what is a big problem that is worth solving, and then we say, "Oh by the way, you know you could solve "this problem using technology." And so you get in a whole another group of people that would not normally access these careers. >> So is it an application process? Is it in the US? >> Anybody can. >> So anyone in the US. >> Anybody. >> So my daughter who wants to get some community hours could actually go take it to a whole other level. >> Totally, so you can just register. We haven't launched the new season yet but it'll be out live in October. Sign up, find a team of girls, and there's actually a documentary, an award-winning documentary done about the program. So the same woman who did Inconvenient Truth wanted to profile Women in Tech and she did a whole documentary about Technovation and it's called CodeGirl and you can get it on any online video platform. >> That's awesome, well congratulations. It's super impressive work, very inspirational. And Anar, you're bringing the global perspective in and we were talking before we came on camera that you had a goal. Share with us your five year goal and an update of where you are in taking this out beyond the United States. >> Sure, so you know five years ago I was a mentor for Technovation. It was my first time and it was an amazing experience, and we won in the local competition and the regional competition and then placed third in the final competition. And after that I had a conversation with Tara about the amazing experience that I had, and we were chatting and she said she'd love to take this globally. And being the type A enthusiast that I am, I said oh, well okay that's fine, you know, I come from Kenya. I've lived in Canada, so we've got three-- >> John: The perfect mix. >> Yeah, three countries already, but I'm sure we can take it global. Well in fact with our work together, I was able to take Technovation to 18 countries in the first year, 34 countries in the second year, 72 countries in the third year and this year we're at over a hundred countries. And it hasn't been an easy road. We keep saying this to each other, we just keep trying. Our focus is on getting this program. We don't get caught into anything politics or any otherwise, and we just want to get to as many girls as we can. And as Tara said, partnerships have played an immense role in getting Technovation all over the world. So initially it was just cold calls, people I knew in Kenya, people I knew in Canada, people I knew in LinkedIn, my little circle. But then my circle got bigger and bigger and then lots and lots of opportunities presented themselves and one of them was the Tech Women program that's run by the State Department. They bring in senior technical women to Silicon Valley for an internship and then I said to them, Oh and when they go back home, what do they do? Shouldn't they do Technovation? And so we've done good partnerships with them, we've done a good partnership with the UN women. We've been profiled in the United Nations high-level panel report, and these things keep happening and the... But it's not just because of the community or the relationships we're building. Our program works. It is credible. Our impact reports show that these girls end up in tech-related fields as they progress, and that's the whole point of our purpose, right? Is to say look, girls everywhere should be entering technology fields and what Technovation does it it's building a pipeline of young girls to enter these careers all over the globe. >> Well it's no secret that the folks that know me and watch theCUBE and know the show know that I'm a huge proponent for computer science and you know it's kind of similar, we kind of fell into that in the '80s. It's now become very interesting in that the surface area for computer science has increased a lot, and it's not just coding heads down and squashing bugs and writing code. There's been a whole nother evolution of soft skills, Agile, Cloud, you're seeing a full transformation with the potential unlimited compute available. With mobile now 10 years plus into the iPhone, you see new infrastructure developing. So it creates the notion that okay, you can bring the science of computers to a whole nother level. That must be attractive as you guys have that capability to bring that to bear in the programs. Can you guys comment on how you guys see just the role of computer science playing out? This is not a gender thing, just more of, as I have a young daughter I try to say it's not just writing code you can certainly whip out a mobile app but it's really bringing design to it or bringing a personal passion that you might have. So what are some of the patterns you're seeing in this surface area of what's now known as computer science? >> I think it's super important because as technology has progressed we've been able to provide this program. If we were still programming with you know, the in front of screens and doing the what you see is what you get kind of thing without, we would not be there. I think the big thing that's happened in the last 10 years is the mobile phone. I mean if you find a girl anywhere today in the world, chances are she'll have a mobile phone on her and she's going to be loathe for you to take that one thing from her. You could take other things from her, but try taking that phone away from her, she will not let you. And so the fact that she's so attached to that mobile phone means that you can then tell her, hey you don't have to be just a consumer of that thing. You can be a producer of that thing. Anything that you see on there, you can actually design. This is power. This is your thing to good and great and better, and if we can shift that in their minds that this is their link to the world that's wide open, we're seeing that. >> Well the world in consumed by it, I mean a lot of women in the world will be consumers of product. Certainly with AI, the conversation over the weekend I was having with folks is the role of women. It's super important not just in AI, but as software becomes cognitive, you have to align with half the audience that's out there. So it'd be hard for a guy to program something that's going to be more oriented towards a woman. But it brings up the question of application, and whether it's self-driving cars or utility from work to play and everything in between. Software, and the role of software's going to be critical and that seems to be pretty clear. The question is how do you inspire young girls? That's the question that a lot of fellow males that I talk to who are fathers of daughters and or are promoting Women in Tech and see that vision, what are some of the inspiration areas? How do you really shake the interest and how do you have someone really kind of dig in and enjoy it and taste it and feel it? >> Right, right. >> So there is some research to back what the formula is that works and to drive change in behavior. And so there is this, one of the biggest sort of names in cognitive psychology is Albert Bandura. He's a professor at Stanford. But basically it's the same principles that drives say the addiction from alcohol or weight loss or any kind of new behavior change. So the first is you need to have exposure to someone who you respect showing that this is something of meaning. So the key words are someone you respect, right? And so media can play a very big role here for scale, right otherwise it's only maybe your teacher or your parent and if they're not exposed to technology, they can't really affect your, and so media can play a huge role there. Second is the experience itself, right. Like how do you make it easy to get started, and then it's like learning from video games, right. So you make it very very easy, like the first step is just come over here it'll be fun, there's pizza, come right, like your friends are coming. But then the feedback has to be very fast, so the first step and that's where a good curriculum matters, right. So that's where also working on a mobile phone is very appealing even though many apps is-- >> John: It's relatable. >> It's relatable but the feedback is instantaneous, and so the programming language that the girls use is block based so even though you don't have any prior programming background you can still build a working app so that's critical. Then human beings get tired very easily and so the feedback needs to keep changing. It has to be unpredictable. The third piece is that of expectations, and so you have to have very high expectations, and so that's why this current discussion around cognitive differences in gender I feel is missing the point because it's not what you're born with, what are you capable of? And so if we looked at our genetics we would never go to space, we would never go to the deepest parts of the ocean because we are not meant for that, right? But we had really high visions and expectations and so human beings rose to that. And then the last piece is less relevant in developed countries but it's still important so, it's sort of the human energy. We are not a brain dissociated from the body. We are connected, right, and so if you're hungry and tired and sleepy, not the right time to sort of make a dramatic change in your interests. So this is relevant, if for us, we try to figure out which countries are we going to work in, so post conflict, war torn areas are not the best areas to start a new program in. You need the right partners. >> So you're saying the biological argument of, of course they're different, men and women. >> Yes. >> But it's the capability, that's where people are missing the boat. >> And the support system, right? So have high expectations, provide them with the right support, but the most important thing is your own beliefs in that. >> Let's get your thoughts on that because I think you guys have a great program with Technovation. You mentioned mentors, key part of the formula most likely. What we hear in the conversations I've had with women peers has been you know, there's a real call to arms at the executive level now, folks my age in their fifties who made it who are there succeeding. They really want to give back and they really have recognized the value of having that peer mentorship and then inspiring the young generation. Whether it's part of the things we cover like Grace Hopper or Technovation things that you do. Or even just mentoring in their own communities. What does that mentorship look like that you guys see, that you'd like to see doubled down on or areas you'd like to see tweaked or perceptions that need to change. What's your thoughts on mentorship and the role of inspiring young girls? >> Mentorship from men? >> John: Men and women, I mean. >> From both. >> John: Well I see the mentoring with women, that's the first step. >> Right. >> I have a whole nother conversation in my opinion that the men need training. Not just like go to class and learn how to talk but how to empathize. >> Well my big thing has been that you know when you wanted to encourage women up the ladder in your companies or you want to encourage women to actually get in to technical roles. That intent should not be placed in the CSR department of your organization 'cause that speaks volumes, right. To say oh, well that's in the social responsibility department or the HR, that just says okay, so you're not really, you don't think we're capable of helping you with your product or service. We're sort of part of this and it's like, no, you know. So I think you want to mainstream it, which is what a lot of I and D things are trying to do now. >> John: Inclusion and diversity. >> Inclusion and diversity techs. >> To make it part of the fabric not a department checkbox. >> Exactly, and-- >> That's what you're getting at right? >> Exactly, and you know the evolvement of these departments to include everybody and to make it more diverse is going to be not frictionless, it will be friction until a time where it won't even be necessary. I and D departments should have one goal, which is to work themselves out of a job. If they can work themselves out of a job, then the company would have done what it needs to be done. But I think-- >> John: Meaning it's self sufficient, it's self governing. People are humans, there's respect for individuals. >> Yes. >> I mean this is basically comes down to if you look at it as humans it takes, every conversation could be tabled as, what? There's a person on the other side, it's a human being. Not a woman or a white male or whatever. >> And you know-- >> There's not there yet, but I mean certainly that would be the end game, so in that scenario that department's out of business the I and R, the inclusion and diversity department has done it's job. >> You don't need one, because exactly. You don't need one because you know, you're okay, and I think capabilities is really important. In corporations, and this isn't anybody's fault. This is just how it's been done. This has just been the culture of it, right? Who gets invited to which meetings? Who gets invited to which conferences, right? And so we heard the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki saying you know, she had to sort of elbow a little bit to say why am I not allowed at a certain conference? And it's like, maybe just wake up to that and say, well why aren't you involving more people at conferences and think tanks because you know, I come from a oil and gas background, and people used to do a lot of deals on the golf course because oil and gas people play golf a lot and a lot of deals used to happen. Well in the Valley we don't play golf a lot but we do do other things, conferences or get togethers and if you don't include the people in your team as groups or representationally well then they're not going to be there when you make these decisions. So maybe just be a little bit-- >> Exclusionary is a problem and Kleiner Perkins was taken to task. They had ski trips apparently planned and they didn't, well mostly guys and they didn't invite the woman partner. It was a big scandal. This is where they kind of make that, it's a normative thing they've got to change the norms. >> It's change the norms and if you actually want your company which is made of all kinds of people, to move really far ahead, don't be like that. Include everybody because the only goodness about that is you'll go forward. You don't include somebody, well you're going to hurt them and then they won't be able to contribute because they just can't and then your product or your service is going to fail. It's really simple. >> You mentioned the Susan Wojcicki post, was an article in Fortune magazine where she wrote a guest article and she mentioned her daughter. >> Yes. >> Was feeling the narrative which by the way changed from the original Google memo to have a different meaning, but that's what she heard. So the question to you guys that I have on that is with Technovation and the work that you're doing, you're exposed to a lot of the ecosystem, across the world not just in the US from young girls. >> Yes. >> They see what's coming down from the top or the media, so certainly it's the game of telephone as things translate down to the level of the girls. Is there a pattern that you see emerging in their eyes as they look at this nonsense of narratives that are moving around. It's kind of a moving train the narrative of gender, Women in Tech but ultimately they have to internalize it and what patterns do you see and what do you guys do to either nullify that misperception and how do you amplify the real perceptions? >> Can I take that one? I was in Nairobi at the Safaricom headquarters. I don't know if you know Safaricom but these are the people who came up with M-PESA, and this is the currency that you can do on your mobile phone and Kenya uses M-PESA, like almost everybody in Kenya uses M-PESA. So Safaricom is a big tel-co and it's a big deal in Kenya, and Safaricom has taken Technovation, it has embraced Technovation in a big way. And the people who embraced Technovation at Safaricom in a big way are both male. So Josephine who is a tech woman fellow who came here and then went back and started Technovation. Her director, Clibeau Royal, he's male and the CEO of Techno, CEO of Safaricom is Bob Collymore and he's also male and these men, if I could clone these men in every country with every company you would see this sort of moving away and shifting away that women aren't good engineers or can't be good engineers. They are embracing it in such a way, not because they like Technovation because they know for their business having more women and equal women and a diverse company is making their product and their goods better. >> John: Yeah, their arbitraging the labor pool, why would you ignore talent? >> Exactly. >> Whether they're over 50 or they're women, it doesn't matter. >> I want to add to that, so there's quite a bit of data, so the pattern's are not anything different from what the message girls get from school and parents, right. So if you look at the data, there are a hundred countries that legally discriminate against women. And so what industry, what message industry is telling is really firstly doesn't filter through to the larger population. Silicon Valley is a completely different bubble. But overall the message is girls are given is like, this is not for you, right, and so especially in some of the more sort of populous dense countries in the world. And so we have to fight a lot of these kinds of perceptions from the ground up, and the number one sort of gatekeeper is the father and so a key part of what we have now done to date is to provide sort of education and training to the parents because... There's a very moving story that, we work in a remote town in South India and a mentor who's very dedicated has been trying to get these girls to participate in Technovation. He did that and then there were, one girl was actually offered a job but the father kept sort of saying no, not needed, no girl in my family ever needs to work, but he fought it. And then so then the girl actually gets a job, and then a year later the father calls the mentor and said, "You know what, I'm so grateful that you did it "because a day after she got the job I got hit in "an accident and I lost my job." But it's these kind of perceptions that have to be changed one person at a time, which is what makes this very hard. Unless you actually are able to get the media to change sort of the messaging. And I think in the US which is, there is some very interesting studies on that question, right. If you were to think, would there be more women in STEM in poorer developing countries versus richer highly developed countries, where would you see more women in STEM? The answer is actually the women in poorer countries like Iran, Malaysia. The reason is because in an individualistic society like in the US where there's a lot of emphasis on materialistic but it's also about are you happy? The conversation has changed to, from parents telling children do what makes you happy, and then you're very prone to advertising, and advertising works when it's highly targeted and highly gendered. And so in the '60s there was no such thing as pink and blue, now there is pink and blue, right? And so now we have just made our entire society entirely susceptible to advertising, and girls are passive and compliant and boys are aggressive. And so then when you are looking at the board structures, there's no, it's very very hard to fix the problem right there, right? You have to go down deeper because you don't get leaders who are compliant, maybe secretaries are compliant. But you have to fix the message that teachers give girls, that parents give their baby girls when they're born. And so industry is just sort of in the spotlight right now, but the issue is not that of industry it's also that of society. >> Industry (mumbles) are supporting you guys is interesting that this industry seems to be chipping, and certainly Silicon Valley's a little bit different as you said, but in general it is a cultural parent thing. Any plans there with Technovation to have a parent track? (laughing) >> Yes totally, I mean I think right now 10% of parents actually volunteer to be mentors, kind of like say Girl Scout troop leaders and so we are trying to figure out okay what is a way to involve parents and to make them part of the discussion. >> Well we'll keep the conversations going with Technovation you guys do incredible work. I'll just end the segment here by just telling a little bit about what you're working on right now? What are your goals? What are you passionate about? What are some of the things you'd like to do in the next half of the year, next year? What are some of the things going, Tara, you start. >> I think for us is to go deeper, so we are just launching a partnership with MIT to increase sort of the rigor of the curriculum, the rigor of the training and also provide more personalized learning and so this is the power of technology so we don't want to have girls drop out of the program because it's a hard program. So really trying to bring the best from industry to support that. >> Right and so you know my goal is to get Technovation to all the countries in the world, but keeping in mind we're making sure that it's delivered in a really good way and so girls complete the program et cetera, and the model that I hope to replicate in many other countries is the model that we're trying within Canada. So the new Canadian government is very interested in making sure that all of its citizens are you know, innovative, ready for the technology change that's coming there, and they launched a new fund called CanCode and so we have been part of that application process and we hope to have Technovation in almost every city in Canada, across Canada, and to really get this going and we, right now Canada is, everybody's like, you know, favorite country. And we hope that if we can do this in Canada, then other countries will follow and so that this program will get to as many girls as it can. >> Well you know how I feel. I feel computer science training in general should be standard in curriculums, because of all the conversation around automation. Automation is the fear is that jobs will go away. The data we have from our research over at Wikibon shows that the billions being automated away is non-differentiated labor. >> Right. >> Which implies that a working knowledge of those machines will shift to the value side. So you know I'm on the pro side of AI and automation personally. Especially I think it's great for-- >> But there's an education side too. >> There's the education side and I think this is a real fun area. You guys are at the cutting edge of it, both doing great work. I appreciate you taking the time and we'll have you back in for an update. Tara, Inar thanks so much. This is theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat happy music)