hello welcome everyone to thecube's coverage here in monaco i'm john furrier host of thecube the monaco crypto summit is happening we're here for the full day and tonight at the yacht club for special presentations crypto team is here digital bits and the industry's gathering and we get some great guests lined up throughout the day our first guest is michael gord co-founder and ceo of gda capital michael welcome to thecube cube great lunch on so we're kicking off the day here we got a lot of a lot of commentary around crypto and also we're in monaco so kind of a special inaugural event why this event why are people gathering here in monaco monaco has traditionally been a top financial jurisdiction but and there has been crypto events here before but never with participation from from prince albert so this being the first event first blockchain focus event in monaco that has participation from prince albert has brought a has brought a global audience and the fact that digital bets is intending to there's a a lot of excitement and and what uh what digital bits is going to be coming to market with yeah and i think i talked to alberto the founder and ceo of digitalbits um i've known him for many years he's a tech guy by heart but he's been in the trenches doing a lot of work over the years in crypto and one of the things i think digital bits has nailed this first the name's amazing but they got real deals i saw our announcement a couple days ago less than 48 hours roma soccer team has a new player they brought the big roll out digitalbits is on the uniform on the front of it huge crowd great visibility so this is a real trend where the the assets of physical and digital coming together there's certainly a lot of hype and a lot of kind of like cleaning up right now in the market but this train is definition is happening training has left the station there's been a lot of over the past decade a lot of startups building in the on blockchains and some of those startups have become big companies but big traditional enterprises have been slow to adopt digital assets and uh digitalbits is really well positioned to bring a lot of those and bring a lot of enterprise participation to the blockchain yeah i mean we met a couple days ago and we were talking in um at the hotel um you're you've been at this for a while you got some great successes talk about your firm what are you guys doing gda what are some of the things you're working on uh you're doing some investment what are some of the angles you're taking bets you've made things you're looking at yeah so i'm a serial entrepreneur and investor i've been focused on the mainstream adoption digital assets for the last decade went about that in in various different ways as i have as i've matured but the way our business looks now is uh is focused on bridging the gap between institutional capital markets and the blockchain and helping institutional capital participate in the market um so we help digital assets with their with their public offering we've gotten into traditional public markets through uh the blockchain moon acquisition corp spac that one of my co-founders is director of we have a brokerage business that does a few hundred million dollars about the transaction volume collateralized lending business we just started some some funds principal investments and then we incubate our own companies internally in category new categories like the metaverse nfts and um other things like that so pretty diversified across the boxing cabinet market at this point and in general looking to create solutions to um help the traditional capital market and the boxing cabinet market get get deeper exposure here you know it's interesting i hear you're speaking about the um how you guys are handling your your view of the landscape multiple moving parts on the investment thesis a lot of integration of instruments and vehicles it's a new creative structural change i mean if you look at just the money how crypto and the future of money this this cultural shift it's also some structural change on how to invest how to manage the investments how to bring on like incubation into most capital public private at the same time on the other side of the coin you have the entrepreneurial energy of um a lot of entrepreneurial ideas you see a lot of creative artists the creator culture has emerged in the past year and a half as a massive wave but to me that's just an application on top of the new infrastructure if you look at all the big investment houses that are pouring billions of whether it's industrial horowitz or other big vcs moving and shifting it's all the same game it's the infrastructure platform applications and it's but it's different it's not what we used to see because it decentralized how do you react to that what's your view on that concept you see it the same way yeah i think that there's everything with blockchains is novel but almost all of it we've seen before so um we've had games before now with the blockchain we have the ability to earn income by playing games we've had exchanges before but they've always been a centralized organization that everything that is now built on blockchains exists in the traditional internet or capital market or game industry or or whatever uh that you know there has been art for generations there's been uh now the ability to have art on the blockchain with provable nft like every everything is innovative because of the decentralization aspect but it's not it's not the first thing the first time that we've seen any of this stuff it's almost interesting you're seeing it recycling all the same concepts on the old web kind of come in the new web and there's also a gen z angle especially the metaverse metaverse the constant theme i'm seeing is hey you want to watch sports you can watch in the metaverse and do it differently and not have to attend so you know the whole pandemic has shown us that hybrid virtual and hybrid is coming together and so i see a huge tsunami of innovation coming from just the tailwind post pandemic i think still massive value in a real event like this us being able to sit in front of each other as real people is uh not replicatable in the metaverse but to be in monaco is not possible for everyone because uh visa reasons because they have something you know it's just you have to be here today is not possible for a hundred percent of the world or for a sports game or for a concert or for a music premiere movie premiere really anything that's happening in the real world is not the metaverse is not gonna replace the real world but it is gonna create a massive additional audience to anything that's happening in the real world that anyone around the world can participate and how amazing would it be for uh for someone from zimbabwe someone from sydney and someone from brazil to all be interested in what digital bits is doing in monaco and what prince albert is you know how how how how the monarchical crypto summit is looking to position monaco in the future of cryptocurrency the kind of theme of this event and they have the amazing fortune to meet in the metaverse it doesn't replace well i mean i think i mean i think this is a great point this to me is going to be the holy grail in my opinion i agree if you look at the notion of presence we're face to face we're here there's people here so we peace we see each other in the lobby maybe he's out sightseeing at dinners so when you have that face to face that's the scarce resource right that's going to be the intimacy sometimes it's not even just to learn about what the pro what's going on but if we're present here how do we create that same experience when you have presence not just some icon chatting but like just movement knowing that you're there connected to people first party is going to be no one's really done it well i think the metaverse is to me is showing the path to being a first-class citizen digitally with a real-time event it's new so it is possible to communicate in the metaverse through through a microphone so if if you're beside someone then similar to the real world you can say you know hey how's it going what do you think about the presentation or or whatever you want and if you're speaking in a conversational way then the person beside you will hear what the person down the hall might might not um it's also that i've i've seen new features in certain like experiences that are coming to market that kind of take the google hangout or skype yeah like video infrastructure and put that in so we could choose to have our cameras on which is it's getting better but it of course doesn't replace real presence there's no doubt in my mind that in near future soon sooner or later there's gonna be a guest sitting right next to you that's not here okay there will be a hologram model where people will be interviewed will have capability to visualize that person they'll be in a metaverse they'll be queuing up for interviews this is a game this is a mind-blowing thing i mean if you just think about that concept that we could have participation in real time here with expressions with their with their digital expression their icon whatever whatever their nfts are so i think this is going to be the blending of how communities gather and i think ultimately how truth and and journalism and news is going to change so to me yeah we're super excited we're here obviously because we want to get the stories and you know we love what digital bits is doing prince albert certainly a relevant figure on the global stage um i think this is a signal for a lot of things to come indeed indeed all right so final question before we move on what's your hottest thing you got going on what are you looking at what are you most excited about um well just just this conference um we've got quite a lot of of companies we have exposure in that are that are presenting and a lot of them are coining new new new niches of the market so um we have uh um we've spoken about a lot about the metaverse we have you know i'm and i think the metaverse is probably the the thing that i'm overall most excited about i think it's the next multi-trillion dollar market that feels like bitcoins in but in addition to that we have the first regenerative finance platform that is that is presenting here that's using decentralized finance and and blockchain technology to create a model that people can earn income while mining carbon credits essentially with an objective of having first boxing all blocking protocols but eventually creating a leader board of carbon positive businesses where businesses will challenge their competitors to be more carbon positive in a way that actually earns them earn some income outside of the potential value what's the name of that company that's kyoto protocol uh we have the first entertained to earn a company that is is presenting here it's playgood um the first uh e-commerce metaverse platform so integrated directly into e-commerce without needing to i think the future of the metaverse is is social links you have you know finest in the metaverse and you have all of the all the logos of metaverses that you have experiences in which is cool yeah that that's uh but then you're you're going out of the native website instead of having a um instead of you know native to the to the website having a metabolism experience so they're doing that um yeah really cool awesome final question one more final question i got for you because you made me think of it so metaverse obviously hot is there going to be an open metaverse you start to see walled gardens and you got facebook they got slam dunk by the u.s uh in terms of monopolistic move for buying a exercise act which you know i can i i don't think that was a good move by the u.s i think i let him do that but but there they're they're kind of the wall garden model the old facebook i mean decentralized about open yeah historically if we go back in time there's always open and closed infrastructure in the internet um there was there is companies building open infrastructure companies building closed infrastructure and we could have been talking in 1992 about whether the private intranet will create mass adoption or the open internet will create mass adoption and not that the the intranet is probably is even today still a multi-billion dollar per year business but it's not a multi-trillion dollar per year per year you know infrastructure like the public internet same with the blockchain in 2012 2013 um private blockchains were all the rage by banking raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build up private boxing infrastructure and private blockchains are generating probably today still multi-billion dollars of revenue annually but they haven't accrued multi-trillion dollars like the public watching has i think the same thing will be in the metaverse there will be open and closed infrastructure um but event and there already is close you know fortnight and and games are are essentially closed metaverses just without ownable land um i always look at the i'm old school i look at aol they had they monopolized dial up internet like where the hell did that go you know history so again yeah we don't know it's going to be maybe a connection a connection point between these open metaverses we'll see maybe i'm investment update michael thanks for coming on thecube appreciate you kicking off the event here monaco crypto summit powered by digital bits presented by digital bits uh the company really and behind all the innovation here and the companies i'm john furrier with more coverage after this short break thanks john [Music] you

>>Time series data is any data that's stamped in time in some way that could be every second, every minute, every five minutes, every hour, every nanosecond, whatever it might be. And typically that data comes from sources in the physical world like devices or sensors, temperature, gauges, batteries, any device really, or things in the virtual world could be software, maybe it's software in the cloud or data and containers or microservices or virtual machines. So all of these items, whether in the physical or virtual world, they're generating a lot of time series data. Now time series data has been around for a long time, and there are many examples in our everyday lives. All you gotta do is punch up any stock, ticker and look at its price over time and graphical form. And that's a simple use case that anyone can relate to and you can build timestamps into a traditional relational database. >>You just add a column to capture time and as well, there are examples of log data being dumped into a data store that can be searched and captured and ingested and visualized. Now, the problem with the latter example that I just gave you is that you gotta hunt and Peck and search and extract what you're looking for. And the problem with the former is that traditional general purpose databases they're designed as sort of a Swiss army knife for any workload. And there are a lot of functions that get in the way and make them inefficient for time series analysis, especially at scale. Like when you think about O T and edge scale, where things are happening super fast, ingestion is coming from many different sources and analysis often needs to be done in real time or near real time. And that's where time series databases come in. >>They're purpose built and can much more efficiently support ingesting metrics at scale, and then comparing data points over time, time series databases can write and read at significantly higher speeds and deal with far more data than traditional database methods. And they're more cost effective instead of throwing processing power at the problem. For example, the underlying architecture and algorithms of time series databases can optimize queries and they can reclaim wasted storage space and reuse it. At scale time, series databases are simply a better fit for the job. Welcome to moving the world with influx DB made possible by influx data. My name is Dave Valante and I'll be your host today. Influx data is the company behind InfluxDB. The open source time series database InfluxDB is designed specifically to handle time series data. As I just explained, we have an exciting program for you today, and we're gonna showcase some really interesting use cases. >>First, we'll kick it off in our Palo Alto studios where my colleague, John furrier will interview Evan Kaplan. Who's the CEO of influx data after John and Evan set the table. John's gonna sit down with Brian Gilmore. He's the director of IOT and emerging tech at influx data. And they're gonna dig into where influx data is gaining traction and why adoption is occurring and, and why it's so robust. And they're gonna have tons of examples and double click into the technology. And then we bring it back here to our east coast studios, where I get to talk to two practitioners, doing amazing things in space with satellites and modern telescopes. These use cases will blow your mind. You don't want to miss it. So thanks for being here today. And with that, let's get started. Take it away. Palo Alto. >>Okay. Today we welcome Evan Kaplan, CEO of influx data, the company behind influx DB. Welcome Evan. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey John, thanks for having me >>Great segment here on the influx DB story. What is the story? Take us through the history. Why time series? What's the story >><laugh> so the history history is actually actually pretty interesting. Um, Paul dicks, my partner in this and our founder, um, super passionate about developers and developer experience. And, um, he had worked on wall street building a number of time series kind of platform trading platforms for trading stocks. And from his point of view, it was always what he would call a yak shave, which means you had to do a ton of work just to start doing work, which means you had to write a bunch of extrinsic routines. You had to write a bunch of application handling on existing relational databases in order to come up with something that was optimized for a trading platform or a time series platform. And he sort of, he just developed this real clear point of view is this is not how developers should work. And so in 2013, he went through why Combinator and he built something for, he made his first commit to open source in flu DB at the end of 2013. And, and he basically, you know, from my point of view, he invented modern time series, which is you start with a purpose-built time series platform to do these kind of workloads. And you get all the benefits of having something right outta the box. So a developer can be totally productive right away. >>And how many people in the company what's the history of employees and stuff? >>Yeah, I think we're, I, you know, I always forget the number, but it's something like 230 or 240 people now. Um, the company, I joined the company in 2016 and I love Paul's vision. And I just had a strong conviction about the relationship between time series and IOT. Cuz if you think about it, what sensors do is they speak time, series, pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, light, they're measuring they're instrumenting something over time. And so I thought that would be super relevant over long term and I've not regretted it. >>Oh no. And it's interesting at that time, go back in the history, you know, the role of databases, well, relational database is the one database to rule the world. And then as clouds started coming in, you starting to see more databases, proliferate types of databases and time series in particular is interesting. Cuz real time has become super valuable from an application standpoint, O T which speaks time series means something it's like time matters >>Time. >>Yeah. And sometimes data's not worth it after the time, sometimes it worth it. And then you get the data lake. So you have this whole new evolution. Is this the momentum? What's the momentum, I guess the question is what's the momentum behind >>You mean what's causing us to grow. So >>Yeah, the time series, why is time series >>And the >>Category momentum? What's the bottom line? >>Well, think about it. You think about it from a broad, broad sort of frame, which is where, what everybody's trying to do is build increasingly intelligent systems, whether it's a self-driving car or a robotic system that does what you want to do or a self-healing software system, everybody wants to build increasing intelligent systems. And so in order to build these increasing intelligent systems, you have to instrument the system well, and you have to instrument it over time, better and better. And so you need a tool, a fundamental tool to drive that instrumentation. And that's become clear to everybody that that instrumentation is all based on time. And so what happened, what happened, what happened what's gonna happen? And so you get to these applications like predictive maintenance or smarter systems. And increasingly you want to do that stuff, not just intelligently, but fast in real time. So millisecond response so that when you're driving a self-driving car and the system realizes that you're about to do something, essentially you wanna be able to act in something that looks like real time, all systems want to do that, want to be more intelligent and they want to be more real time. And so we just happen to, you know, we happen to show up at the right time in the evolution of a >>Market. It's interesting near real time. Isn't good enough when you need real time. >><laugh> yeah, it's not, it's not. And it's like, and it's like, everybody wants, even when you don't need it, ironically, you want it. It's like having the feature for, you know, you buy a new television, you want that one feature, even though you're not gonna use it, you decide that your buying criteria real time is a buying criteria >>For, so you, I mean, what you're saying then is near real time is getting closer to real time as possible, as fast as possible. Right. Okay. So talk about the aspect of data, cuz we're hearing a lot of conversations on the cube in particular around how people are implementing and actually getting better. So iterating on data, but you have to know when it happened to get, know how to fix it. So this is a big part of how we're seeing with people saying, Hey, you know, I wanna make my machine learning algorithms better after the fact I wanna learn from the data. Um, how does that, how do you see that evolving? Is that one of the use cases of sensors as people bring data in off the network, getting better with the data knowing when it happened? >>Well, for sure. So, so for sure, what you're saying is, is, is none of this is non-linear, it's all incremental. And so if you take something, you know, just as an easy example, if you take a self-driving car, what you're doing is you're instrumenting that car to understand where it can perform in the real world in real time. And if you do that, if you run the loop, which is I instrumented, I watch what happens, oh, that's wrong? Oh, I have to correct for that. I correct for that in the software. If you do that for a billion times, you get a self-driving car, but every system moves along that evolution. And so you get the dynamic of, you know, of constantly instrumenting watching the system behave and do it. And this and sets up driving car is one thing. But even in the human genome, if you look at some of our customers, you know, people like, you know, people doing solar arrays, people doing power walls, like all of these systems are getting smarter. >>Well, let's get into that. What are the top applications? What are you seeing for your, with in, with influx DB, the time series, what's the sweet spot for the application use case and some customers give some >>Examples. Yeah. So it's, it's pretty easy to understand on one side of the equation that's the physical side is sensors are sensors are getting cheap. Obviously we know that and they're getting the whole physical world is getting instrumented, your home, your car, the factory floor, your wrist, watch your healthcare, you name it. It's getting instrumented in the physical world. We're watching the physical world in real time. And so there are three or four sweet spots for us, but, but they're all on that side. They're all about IOT. So they're think about consumer IOT projects like Google's nest todo, um, particle sensors, um, even delivery engines like rapid who deliver the Instacart of south America, like anywhere there's a physical location do and that's on the consumer side. And then another exciting space is the industrial side factories are changing dramatically over time. Increasingly moving away from proprietary equipment to develop or driven systems that run operational because what, what has to get smarter when you're building, when you're building a factory is systems all have to get smarter. And then, um, lastly, a lot in the renewables sustainability. So a lot, you know, Tesla, lucid, motors, Cola, motors, um, you know, lots to do with electric cars, solar arrays, windmills, arrays, just anything that's gonna get instrumented that where that instrumentation becomes part of what the purpose >>Is. It's interesting. The convergence of physical and digital is happening with the data IOT. You mentioned, you know, you think of IOT, look at the use cases there, it was proprietary OT systems. Now becoming more IP enabled internet protocol and now edge compute, getting smaller, faster, cheaper AI going to the edge. Now you have all kinds of new capabilities that bring that real time and time series opportunity. Are you seeing IOT going to a new level? What was the, what's the IOT where's the IOT dots connecting to because you know, as these two cultures merge yeah. Operations, basically industrial factory car, they gotta get smarter, intelligent edge is a buzzword, but I mean, it has to be more intelligent. Where's the, where's the action in all this. So the >>Action, really, it really at the core, it's at the developer, right? Because you're looking at these things, it's very hard to get an off the shelf system to do the kinds of physical and software interaction. So the actions really happen at the developer. And so what you're seeing is a movement in the world that, that maybe you and I grew up in with it or OT moving increasingly that developer driven capability. And so all of these IOT systems they're bespoke, they don't come out of the box. And so the developer, the architect, the CTO, they define what's my business. What am I trying to do? Am I trying to sequence a human genome and figure out when these genes express theself or am I trying to figure out when the next heart rate monitor's gonna show up on my apple watch, right? What am I trying to do? What's the system I need to build. And so starting with the developers where all of the good stuff happens here, which is different than it used to be, right. Used to be you'd buy an application or a service or a SA thing for, but with this dynamic, with this integration of systems, it's all about bespoke. It's all about building >>Something. So let's get to the developer real quick, real highlight point here is the data. I mean, I could see a developer saying, okay, I need to have an application for the edge IOT edge or car. I mean, we're gonna have, I mean, Tesla's got applications of the car it's right there. I mean, yes, there's the modern application life cycle now. So take us through how this impacts the developer. Does it impact their C I C D pipeline? Is it cloud native? I mean, where does this all, where does this go to? >>Well, so first of all, you're talking about, there was an internal journey that we had to go through as a company, which, which I think is fascinating for anybody who's interested is we went from primarily a monolithic software that was open sourced to building a cloud native platform, which means we had to move from an agile development environment to a C I C D environment. So to a degree that you are moving your service, whether it's, you know, Tesla monitoring your car and updating your power walls, right. Or whether it's a solar company updating the arrays, right. To degree that that service is cloud. Then increasingly remove from an agile development to a C I C D environment, which you're shipping code to production every day. And so it's not just the developers, all the infrastructure to support the developers to run that service and that sort of stuff. I think that's also gonna happen in a big way >>When your customer base that you have now, and as you see, evolving with infl DB, is it that they're gonna be writing more of the application or relying more on others? I mean, obviously there's an open source component here. So when you bring in kind of old way, new way old way was I got a proprietary, a platform running all this O T stuff and I gotta write, here's an application. That's general purpose. Yeah. I have some flexibility, somewhat brittle, maybe not a lot of robustness to it, but it does its job >>A good way to think about this is versus a new way >>Is >>What so yeah, good way to think about this is what, what's the role of the developer slash architect CTO that chain within a large, within an enterprise or a company. And so, um, the way to think about it is I started my career in the aerospace industry <laugh> and so when you look at what Boeing does to assemble a plane, they build very, very few of the parts. Instead, what they do is they assemble, they buy the wings, they buy the engines, they assemble, actually, they don't buy the wings. It's the one thing they buy the, the material for the w they build the wings, cuz there's a lot of tech in the wings and they end up being assemblers smart assemblers of what ends up being a flying airplane, which is pretty big deal even now. And so what, what happens with software people is they have the ability to pull from, you know, the best of the open source world. So they would pull a time series capability from us. Then they would assemble that with, with potentially some ETL logic from somebody else, or they'd assemble it with, um, a Kafka interface to be able to stream the data in. And so they become very good integrators and assemblers, but they become masters of that bespoke application. And I think that's where it goes, cuz you're not writing native code for everything. >>So they're more flexible. They have faster time to market cuz they're assembling way faster and they get to still maintain their core competency. Okay. Their wings in this case, >>They become increasingly not just coders, but designers and developers. They become broadly builders is what we like to think of it. People who start and build stuff by the way, this is not different than the people just up the road Google have been doing for years or the tier one, Amazon building all their own. >>Well, I think one of the things that's interesting is is that this idea of a systems developing a system architecture, I mean systems, uh, uh, systems have consequences when you make changes. So when you have now cloud data center on premise and edge working together, how does that work across the system? You can't have a wing that doesn't work with the other wing kind of thing. >>That's exactly. But that's where the that's where the, you know, that that Boeing or that airplane building analogy comes in for us. We've really been thoughtful about that because IOT it's critical. So our open source edge has the same API as our cloud native stuff that has enterprise on pre edge. So our multiple products have the same API and they have a relationship with each other. They can talk with each other. So the builder builds it once. And so this is where, when you start thinking about the components that people have to use to build these services is that you wanna make sure, at least that base layer, that database layer, that those components talk to each other. >>So I'll have to ask you if I'm the customer. I put my customer hat on. Okay. Hey, I'm dealing with a lot. >>That mean you have a PO for <laugh> >>A big check. I blank check. If you can answer this question only if the tech, if, if you get the question right, I got all this important operation stuff. I got my factory, I got my self-driving cars. This isn't like trivial stuff. This is my business. How should I be thinking about time series? Because now I have to make these architectural decisions, as you mentioned, and it's gonna impact my application development. So huge decision point for your customers. What should I care about the most? So what's in it for me. Why is time series >>Important? Yeah, that's a great question. So chances are, if you've got a business that was, you know, 20 years old or 25 years old, you were already thinking about time series. You probably didn't call it that you built something on a Oracle or you built something on IBM's DB two, right. And you made it work within your system. Right? And so that's what you started building. So it's already out there. There are, you know, there are probably hundreds of millions of time series applications out there today. But as you start to think about this increasing need for real time, and you start to think about increasing intelligence, you think about optimizing those systems over time. I hate the word, but digital transformation. Then you start with time series. It's a foundational base layer for any system that you're gonna build. There's no system I can think of where time series, shouldn't be the foundational base layer. If you just wanna store your data and just leave it there and then maybe look it up every five years. That's fine. That's not time. Series time series is when you're building a smarter, more intelligent, more real time system. And the developers now know that. And so the more they play a role in building these systems, the more obvious it becomes. >>And since I have a PO for you and a big check, yeah. What is, what's the value to me as I, when I implement this, what's the end state, what's it look like when it's up and running? What's the value proposition for me. What's an >>So, so when it's up and running, you're able to handle the queries, the writing of the data, the down sampling of the data, they're transforming it in near real time. So that the other dependencies that a system that gets for adjusting a solar array or trading energy off of a power wall or some sort of human genome, those systems work better. So time series is foundational. It's not like it's, you know, it's not like it's doing every action that's above, but it's foundational to build a really compelling, intelligent system. I think that's what developers and archs are seeing now. >>Bottom line, final word. What's in it for the customer. What's what, what's your, um, what's your statement to the customer? What would you say to someone looking to do something in time series on edge? >>Yeah. So, so it's pretty clear to clear to us that if you're building, if you view yourself as being in the build business of building systems that you want 'em to be increasingly intelligent, self-healing autonomous. You want 'em to operate in real time that you start from time series. But I also wanna say what's in it for us influx what's in it for us is people are doing some amazing stuff. You know, I highlighted some of the energy stuff, some of the human genome, some of the healthcare it's hard not to be proud or feel like, wow. Yeah. Somehow I've been lucky. I've arrived at the right time, in the right place with the right people to be able to deliver on that. That's that's also exciting on our side of the equation. >>Yeah. It's critical infrastructure, critical, critical operations. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. Great stuff, Evan. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate this segment. All right. In a moment, Brian Gilmore director of IOT and emerging technology that influx day will join me. You're watching the cube leader in tech coverage. Thanks for watching >>Time series data from sensors systems and applications is a key source in driving automation and prediction in technologies around the world. But managing the massive amount of timestamp data generated these days is overwhelming, especially at scale. That's why influx data developed influx DB, a time series data platform that collects stores and analyzes data influx DB empowers developers to extract valuable insights and turn them into action by building transformative IOT analytics and cloud native applications, purpose built and optimized to handle the scale and velocity of timestamped data. InfluxDB puts the power in your hands with developer tools that make it easy to get started quickly with less code InfluxDB is more than a database. It's a robust developer platform with integrated tooling. That's written in the languages you love. So you can innovate faster, run in flex DB anywhere you want by choosing the provider and region that best fits your needs across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google cloud flex DB is fast and automatically scalable. So you can spend time delivering value to customers, not managing clusters, take control of your time series data. So you can focus on the features and functionalities that give your applications a competitive edge. Get started for free with influx DB, visit influx data.com/cloud to learn more. >>Okay. Now we're joined by Brian Gilmore director of IOT and emerging technologies at influx data. Welcome to the show. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. >>We just spent some time with Evan going through the company and the value proposition, um, with influx DV, what's the momentum, where do you see this coming from? What's the value coming out of this? >>Well, I think it, we're sort of hitting a point where the technology is, is like the adoption of it is becoming mainstream. We're seeing it in all sorts of organizations, everybody from like the most well funded sort of advanced big technology companies to the smaller academics, the startups and the managing of that sort of data that emits from that technology is time series and us being able to give them a, a platform, a tool that's super easy to use, easy to start. And then of course will grow with them is, is been key to us. Sort of, you know, riding along with them is they're successful. >>Evan was mentioning that time series has been on everyone's radar and that's in the OT business for years. Now, you go back since 20 13, 14, even like five years ago that convergence of physical and digital coming together, IP enabled edge. Yeah. Edge has always been kind of hyped up, but why now? Why, why is the edge so hot right now from an adoption standpoint? Is it because it's just evolution, the tech getting better? >>I think it's, it's, it's twofold. I think that, you know, there was, I would think for some people, everybody was so focused on cloud over the last probably 10 years. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that they forgot about the compute that was available at the edge. And I think, you know, those, especially in the OT and on the factory floor who weren't able to take Avan full advantage of cloud through their applications, you know, still needed to be able to leverage that compute at the edge. I think the big thing that we're seeing now, which is interesting is, is that there's like a hybrid nature to all of these applications where there's definitely some data that's generated on the edge. There's definitely done some data that's generated in the cloud. And it's the ability for a developer to sort of like tie those two systems together and work with that data in a very unified uniform way. Um, that's giving them the opportunity to build solutions that, you know, really deliver value to whatever it is they're trying to do, whether it's, you know, the, the out reaches of outer space or whether it's optimizing the factory floor. >>Yeah. I think, I think one of the things you also mentions genome too, dig big data is coming to the real world. And I think I, OT has been kind of like this thing for OT and, and in some use case, but now with the, with the cloud, all companies have an edge strategy now. So yeah, what's the secret sauce because now this is hot, hot product for the whole world and not just industrial, but all businesses. What's the secret sauce. >>Well, I mean, I think part of it is just that the technology is becoming more capable and that's especially on the hardware side, right? I mean, like technology compute is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And we find that by supporting all the way down to the edge, even to the micro controller layer with our, um, you know, our client libraries and then working hard to make our applications, especially the database as small as possible so that it can be located as close to sort of the point of origin of that data in the edge as possible is, is, is fantastic. Now you can take that. You can run that locally. You can do your local decision making. You can use influx DB as sort of an input to automation control the autonomy that people are trying to drive at the edge. But when you link it up with everything that's in the cloud, that's when you get all of the sort of cloud scale capabilities of parallelized, AI and machine learning and all of that. >>So what's interesting is the open source success has been something that we've talked about a lot in the cube about how people are leveraging that you guys have users in the enterprise users that IOT market mm-hmm <affirmative>, but you got developers now. Yeah. Kind of together brought that up. How do you see that emerging? How do developers engage? What are some of the things you're seeing that developers are really getting into with InfluxDB >>What's? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there are the developers who are building companies, right? And these are the startups and the folks that we love to work with who are building new, you know, new services, new products, things like that. And, you know, especially on the consumer side of IOT, there's a lot of that, just those developers. But I think we, you gotta pay attention to those enterprise developers as well, right? There are tons of people with the, the title of engineer in, in your regular enterprise organizations. And they're there for systems integration. They're there for, you know, looking at what they would build versus what they would buy. And a lot of them come from, you know, a strong, open source background and they, they know the communities, they know the top platforms in those spaces and, and, you know, they're excited to be able to adopt and use, you know, to optimize inside the business as compared to just building a brand new one. >>You know, it's interesting too, when Evan and I were talking about open source versus closed OT systems, mm-hmm <affirmative> so how do you support the backwards compatibility of older systems while maintaining open dozens of data formats out there? Bunch of standards, protocols, new things are emerging. Everyone wants to have a control plane. Everyone wants to leverage the value of data. How do you guys keep track of it all? What do you guys support? >>Yeah, well, I mean, I think either through direct connection, like we have a product called Telegraph, it's unbelievable. It's open source, it's an edge agent. You can run it as close to the edge as you'd like, it speaks dozens of different protocols in its own, right? A couple of which MQTT B, C U a are very, very, um, applicable to these T use cases. But then we also, because we are sort of not only open source, but open in terms of our ability to collect data, we have a lot of partners who have built really great integrations from their own middleware, into influx DB. These are companies like ke wear and high bite who are really experts in those downstream industrial protocols. I mean, that's a business, not everybody wants to be in. It requires some very specialized, very hard work and a lot of support, um, you know, and so by making those connections and building those ecosystems, we get the best of both worlds. The customers can use the platforms they need up to the point where they would be putting into our database. >>What's some of customer testimonies that they, that share with you. Can you share some anecdotal kind of like, wow, that's the best thing I've ever used. This really changed my business, or this is a great tech that's helped me in these other areas. What are some of the, um, soundbites you hear from customers when they're successful? >>Yeah. I mean, I think it ranges. You've got customers who are, you know, just finally being able to do the monitoring of assets, you know, sort of at the edge in the field, we have a customer who's who's has these tunnel boring machines that go deep into the earth to like drill tunnels for, for, you know, cars and, and, you know, trains and things like that. You know, they are just excited to be able to stick a database onto those tunnel, boring machines, send them into the depths of the earth and know that when they come out, all of that telemetry at a very high frequency has been like safely stored. And then it can just very quickly and instantly connect up to their, you know, centralized database. So like just having that visibility is brand new to them. And that's super important. On the other hand, we have customers who are way far beyond the monitoring use case, where they're actually using the historical records in the time series database to, um, like I think Evan mentioned like forecast things. So for predictive maintenance, being able to pull in the telemetry from the machines, but then also all of that external enrichment data, the metadata, the temperatures, the pressure is who is operating the machine, those types of things, and being able to easily integrate with platforms like Jupyter notebooks or, you know, all of those scientific computing and machine learning libraries to be able to build the models, train the models, and then they can send that information back down to InfluxDB to apply it and detect those anomalies, which >>Are, I think that's gonna be an, an area. I personally think that's a hot area because I think if you look at AI right now, yeah. It's all about training the machine learning albums after the fact. So time series becomes hugely important. Yeah. Cause now you're thinking, okay, the data matters post time. Yeah. First time. And then it gets updated the new time. Yeah. So it's like constant data cleansing data iteration, data programming. We're starting to see this new use case emerge in the data field. >>Yep. Yeah. I mean, I think you agree. Yeah, of course. Yeah. The, the ability to sort of handle those pipelines of data smartly, um, intelligently, and then to be able to do all of the things you need to do with that data in stream, um, before it hits your sort of central repository. And, and we make that really easy for customers like Telegraph, not only does it have sort of the inputs to connect up to all of those protocols and the ability to capture and connect up to the, to the partner data. But also it has a whole bunch of capabilities around being able to process that data, enrich it, reform at it, route it, do whatever you need. So at that point you're basically able to, you're playing your data in exactly the way you would wanna do it. You're routing it to different, you know, destinations and, and it's, it's, it's not something that really has been in the realm of possibility until this point. Yeah. Yeah. >>And when Evan was on it's great. He was a CEO. So he sees the big picture with customers. He was, he kinda put the package together that said, Hey, we got a system. We got customers, people are wanting to leverage our product. What's your PO they're sell. He's selling too as well. So you have that whole CEO perspective, but he brought up this notion that there's multiple personas involved in kind of the influx DB system architect. You got developers and users. Can you talk about that? Reality as customers start to commercialize and operationalize this from a commercial standpoint, you got a relationship to the cloud. Yep. The edge is there. Yep. The edge is getting super important, but cloud brings a lot of scale to the table. So what is the relationship to the cloud? Can you share your thoughts on edge and its relationship to the cloud? >>Yeah. I mean, I think edge, you know, edges, you can think of it really as like the local information, right? So it's, it's generally like compartmentalized to a point of like, you know, a single asset or a single factory align, whatever. Um, but what people do who wanna pro they wanna be able to make the decisions there at the edge locally, um, quickly minus the latency of sort of taking that large volume of data, shipping it to the cloud and doing something with it there. So we allow them to do exactly that. Then what they can do is they can actually downsample that data or they can, you know, detect like the really important metrics or the anomalies. And then they can ship that to a central database in the cloud where they can do all sorts of really interesting things with it. Like you can get that centralized view of all of your global assets. You can start to compare asset to asset, and then you can do those things like we talked about, whereas you can do predictive types of analytics or, you know, larger scale anomaly detections. >>So in this model you have a lot of commercial operations, industrial equipment. Yep. The physical plant, physical business with virtual data cloud all coming together. What's the future for InfluxDB from a tech standpoint. Cause you got open. Yep. There's an ecosystem there. Yep. You have customers who want operational reliability for sure. I mean, so you got organic <laugh> >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, again, we got iPhones when everybody's waiting for flying cars. Right. So I don't know. We can like absolutely perfectly predict what's coming, but I think there are some givens and I think those givens are gonna be that the world is only gonna become more hybrid. Right. And then, you know, so we are going to have much more widely distributed, you know, situations where you have data being generated in the cloud, you have data gen being generated at the edge and then there's gonna be data generated sort sort of at all points in between like physical locations as well as things that are, that are very virtual. And I think, you know, we are, we're building some technology right now. That's going to allow, um, the concept of a database to be much more fluid and flexible, sort of more aligned with what a file would be like. >>And so being able to move data to the compute for analysis or move the compute to the data for analysis, those are the types of, of solutions that we'll be bringing to the customers sort of over the next little bit. Um, but I also think we have to start thinking about like what happens when the edge is actually off the planet. Right. I mean, we've got customers, you're gonna talk to two of them, uh, in the panel who are actually working with data that comes from like outside the earth, like, you know, either in low earth orbit or you know, all the way sort of on the other side of the universe. Yeah. And, and to be able to process data like that and to do so in a way it's it's we gotta, we gotta build the fundamentals for that right now on the factory floor and in the mines and in the tunnels. Um, so that we'll be ready for that one. >>I think you bring up a good point there because one of the things that's common in the industry right now, people are talking about, this is kind of new thinking is hyper scale's always been built up full stack developers, even the old OT world, Evan was pointing out that they built everything right. And the world's going to more assembly with core competency and IP and also property being the core of their apple. So faster assembly and building, but also integration. You got all this new stuff happening. Yeah. And that's to separate out the data complexity from the app. Yes. So space genome. Yep. Driving cars throws off massive data. >>It >>Does. So is Tesla, uh, is the car the same as the data layer? >>I mean the, yeah, it's, it's certainly a point of origin. I think the thing that we wanna do is we wanna let the developers work on the world, changing problems, the things that they're trying to solve, whether it's, you know, energy or, you know, any of the other health or, you know, other challenges that these teams are, are building against. And we'll worry about that time series data and the underlying data platform so that they don't have to. Right. I mean, I think you talked about it, uh, you know, for them just to be able to adopt the platform quickly, integrate it with their data sources and the other pieces of their applications. It's going to allow them to bring much faster time to market on these products. It's gonna allow them to be more iterative. They're gonna be able to do more sort of testing and things like that. And ultimately it will, it'll accelerate the adoption and the creation of >>Technology. You mentioned earlier in, in our talk about unification of data. Yeah. How about APIs? Cuz developers love APIs in the cloud unifying APIs. How do you view view that? >>Yeah, I mean, we are APIs, that's the product itself. Like everything, people like to think of it as sort of having this nice front end, but the front end is B built on our public APIs. Um, you know, and it, it allows the developer to build all of those hooks for not only data creation, but then data processing, data analytics, and then, you know, sort of data extraction to bring it to other platforms or other applications, microservices, whatever it might be. So, I mean, it is a world of APIs right now and you know, we, we bring a very sort of useful set of them for managing the time series data. These guys are all challenged with. It's >>Interesting. You and I were talking before we came on camera about how, um, data is, feels gonna have this kind of SRE role that DevOps had site reliability engineers, which manages a bunch of servers. There's so much data out there now. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's like reigning data for sure. And I think like that ability to be like one of the best jobs on the planet is gonna be to be able to like, sort of be that data Wrangler to be able to understand like what the data sources are, what the data formats are, how to be able to efficiently move that data from point a to point B and you know, to process it correctly so that the end users of that data aren't doing any of that sort of hard upfront preparation collection storage's >>Work. Yeah. That's data as code. I mean, data engineering is it is becoming a new discipline for sure. And, and the democratization is the benefit. Yeah. To everyone, data science get easier. I mean data science, but they wanna make it easy. Right. <laugh> yeah. They wanna do the analysis, >>Right? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it, it's a really good point. I think like we try to give our users as many ways as there could be possible to get data in and get data out. We sort of think about it as meeting them where they are. Right. So like we build, we have the sort of client libraries that allow them to just port to us, you know, directly from the applications and the languages that they're writing, but then they can also pull it out. And at that point nobody's gonna know the users, the end consumers of that data, better than those people who are building those applications. And so they're building these user interfaces, which are making all of that data accessible for, you know, their end users inside their organization. >>Well, Brian, great segment, great insight. Thanks for sharing all, all the complexities and, and IOT that you guys helped take away with the APIs and, and assembly and, and all the system architectures that are changing edge is real cloud is real. Yeah, absolutely. Mainstream enterprises. And you got developer attraction too, so congratulations. >>Yeah. It's >>Great. Well, thank any, any last word you wanna share >>Deal with? No, just, I mean, please, you know, if you're, if you're gonna, if you're gonna check out influx TV, download it, try out the open source contribute if you can. That's a, that's a huge thing. It's part of being the open source community. Um, you know, but definitely just, just use it. I think when once people use it, they try it out. They'll understand very, >>Very quickly. So open source with developers, enterprise and edge coming together all together. You're gonna hear more about that in the next segment, too. Right. Thanks for coming on. Okay. Thanks. When we return, Dave LAN will lead a panel on edge and data influx DB. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Why the startup, we move really fast. We find that in flex DB can move as fast as us. It's just a great group, very collaborative, very interested in manufacturing. And we see a bright future in working with influence. My name is Aaron Seley. I'm the CTO at HBI. Highlight's one of the first companies to focus on manufacturing data and apply the concepts of data ops, treat that as an asset to deliver to the it system, to enable applications like overall equipment effectiveness that can help the factory produce better, smarter, faster time series data. And manufacturing's really important. If you take a piece of equipment, you have the temperature pressure at the moment that you can look at to kind of see the state of what's going on. So without that context and understanding you can't do what manufacturers ultimately want to do, which is predict the future. >>Influx DB represents kind of a new way to storm time series data with some more advanced technology and more importantly, more open technologies. The other thing that influx does really well is once the data's influx, it's very easy to get out, right? They have a modern rest API and other ways to access the data. That would be much more difficult to do integrations with classic historians highlight can serve to model data, aggregate data on the shop floor from a multitude of sources, whether that be P C U a servers, manufacturing execution systems, E R P et cetera, and then push that seamlessly into influx to then be able to run calculations. Manufacturing is changing this industrial 4.0, and what we're seeing is influx being part of that equation. Being used to store data off the unified name space, we recommend InfluxDB all the time to customers that are exploring a new way to share data manufacturing called the unified name space who have open questions around how do I share this new data that's coming through my UNS or my QTT broker? How do I store this and be able to query it over time? And we often point to influx as a solution for that is a great brand. It's a great group of people and it's a great technology. >>Okay. We're now going to go into the customer panel and we'd like to welcome Angelo Fasi. Who's a software engineer at the Vera C Ruben observatory in Caleb McLaughlin whose senior spacecraft operations software engineer at loft orbital guys. Thanks for joining us. You don't wanna miss folks this interview, Caleb, let's start with you. You work for an extremely cool company. You're launching satellites into space. I mean, there, of course doing that is, is highly complex and not a cheap endeavor. Tell us about loft Orbi and what you guys do to attack that problem. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, thanks for having me here by the way. Uh, so loft orbital is a, uh, company. That's a series B startup now, uh, who and our mission basically is to provide, uh, rapid access to space for all kinds of customers. Uh, historically if you want to fly something in space, do something in space, it's extremely expensive. You need to book a launch, build a bus, hire a team to operate it, you know, have a big software teams, uh, and then eventually worry about, you know, a bunch like just a lot of very specialized engineering. And what we're trying to do is change that from a super specialized problem that has an extremely high barrier of access to a infrastructure problem. So that it's almost as simple as, you know, deploying a VM in, uh, AWS or GCP is getting your, uh, programs, your mission deployed on orbit, uh, with access to, you know, different sensors, uh, cameras, radios, stuff like that. >>So that's, that's kind of our mission. And just to give a really brief example of the kind of customer that we can serve. Uh, there's a really cool company called, uh, totem labs who is working on building, uh, IOT cons, an IOT constellation for in of things, basically being able to get telemetry from all over the world. They're the first company to demonstrate indoor T, which means you have this little modem inside a container container that you, that you track from anywhere in the world as it's going across the ocean. Um, so they're, it's really little and they've been able to stay a small startup that's focused on their product, which is the, uh, that super crazy complicated, cool radio while we handle the whole space segment for them, which just, you know, before loft was really impossible. So that's, our mission is, uh, providing space infrastructure as a service. We are kind of groundbreaking in this area and we're serving, you know, a huge variety of customers with all kinds of different missions, um, and obviously generating a ton of data in space, uh, that we've gotta handle. Yeah. >>So amazing Caleb, what you guys do, I, now I know you were lured to the skies very early in your career, but how did you kinda land on this business? >>Yeah, so, you know, I've, I guess just a little bit about me for some people, you know, they don't necessarily know what they wanna do like early in their life. For me, I was five years old and I knew, you know, I want to be in the space industry. So, you know, I started in the air force, but have, uh, stayed in the space industry, my whole career and been a part of, uh, this is the fifth space startup that I've been a part of actually. So, you know, I've, I've, uh, kind of started out in satellites, did spent some time in working in, uh, the launch industry on rockets. Then, uh, now I'm here back in satellites and you know, honestly, this is the most exciting of the difference based startups. That I've been a part of >>Super interesting. Okay. Angelo, let's, let's talk about the Ruben observatory, ver C Ruben, famous woman scientist, you know, galaxy guru. Now you guys the observatory, you're up way up high. You're gonna get a good look at the Southern sky. Now I know COVID slowed you guys down a bit, but no doubt. You continued to code away on the software. I know you're getting close. You gotta be super excited. Give us the update on, on the observatory and your role. >>All right. So yeah, Rubin is a state of the art observatory that, uh, is in construction on a remote mountain in Chile. And, um, with Rubin, we conduct the, uh, large survey of space and time we are going to observe the sky with, uh, eight meter optical telescope and take, uh, a thousand pictures every night with a 3.2 gig up peaks of camera. And we are going to do that for 10 years, which is the duration of the survey. >>Yeah. Amazing project. Now you, you were a doctor of philosophy, so you probably spent some time thinking about what's out there and then you went out to earn a PhD in astronomy, in astrophysics. So this is something that you've been working on for the better part of your career, isn't it? >>Yeah, that's that's right. Uh, about 15 years, um, I studied physics in college, then I, um, got a PhD in astronomy and, uh, I worked for about five years in another project. Um, the dark energy survey before joining rubing in 2015. >>Yeah. Impressive. So it seems like you both, you know, your organizations are looking at space from two different angles. One thing you guys both have in common of course is, is, is software. And you both use InfluxDB as part of your, your data infrastructure. How did you discover influx DB get into it? How do you use the platform? Maybe Caleb, you could start. >>Uh, yeah, absolutely. So the first company that I extensively used, uh, influx DBN was a launch startup called, uh, Astra. And we were in the process of, uh, designing our, you know, our first generation rocket there and testing the engines, pumps, everything that goes into a rocket. Uh, and when I joined the company, our data story was not, uh, very mature. We were collecting a bunch of data in LabVIEW and engineers were taking that over to MATLAB to process it. Um, and at first there, you know, that's the way that a lot of engineers and scientists are used to working. Um, and at first that was, uh, like people weren't entirely sure that that was a, um, that that needed to change, but it's something the nice thing about InfluxDB is that, you know, it's so easy to deploy. So as the, our software engineering team was able to get it deployed and, you know, up and running very quickly and then quickly also backport all of the data that we collected thus far into influx and what, uh, was amazing to see. >>And as kind of the, the super cool moment with influx is, um, when we hooked that up to Grafana Grafana as the visualization platform we used with influx, cuz it works really well with it. Uh, there was like this aha moment of our engineers who are used to this post process kind of method for dealing with their data where they could just almost instantly easily discover data that they hadn't been able to see before and take the manual processes that they would run after a test and just throw those all in influx and have live data as tests were coming. And, you know, I saw them implementing like crazy rocket equation type stuff in influx, and it just was totally game changing for how we tested. >>So Angelo, I was explaining in my open, you know, you could, you could add a column in a traditional RDBMS and do time series, but with the volume of data that you're talking about, and the example of the Caleb just gave you, I mean, you have to have a purpose built time series database, where did you first learn about influx DB? >>Yeah, correct. So I work with the data management team, uh, and my first project was the record metrics that measured the performance of our software, uh, the software that we used to process the data. So I started implementing that in a relational database. Um, but then I realized that in fact, I was dealing with time series data and I should really use a solution built for that. And then I started looking at time series databases and I found influx B. And that was, uh, back in 2018. The another use for influx DB that I'm also interested is the visits database. Um, if you think about the observations we are moving the telescope all the time in pointing to specific directions, uh, in the Skype and taking pictures every 30 seconds. So that itself is a time series. And every point in that time series, uh, we call a visit. So we want to record the metadata about those visits and flex to, uh, that time here is going to be 10 years long, um, with about, uh, 1000 points every night. It's actually not too much data compared to other, other problems. It's, uh, really just a different, uh, time scale. >>The telescope at the Ruben observatory is like pun intended, I guess the star of the show. And I, I believe I read that it's gonna be the first of the next gen telescopes to come online. It's got this massive field of view, like three orders of magnitude times the Hub's widest camera view, which is amazing, right? That's like 40 moons in, in an image amazingly fast as well. What else can you tell us about the telescope? >>Um, this telescope, it has to move really fast and it also has to carry, uh, the primary mirror, which is an eight meter piece of glass. It's very heavy and it has to carry a camera, which has about the size of a small car. And this whole structure weighs about 300 tons for that to work. Uh, the telescope needs to be, uh, very compact and stiff. Uh, and one thing that's amazing about it's design is that the telescope, um, is 300 tons structure. It sits on a tiny film of oil, which has the diameter of, uh, human hair. And that makes an almost zero friction interface. In fact, a few people can move these enormous structure with only their hands. Uh, as you said, uh, another aspect that makes this telescope unique is the optical design. It's a wide field telescope. So each image has, uh, in diameter the size of about seven full moons. And, uh, with that, we can map the entire sky in only, uh, three days. And of course doing operations everything's, uh, controlled by software and it is automatic. Um there's a very complex piece of software, uh, called the scheduler, which is responsible for moving the telescope, um, and the camera, which is, uh, recording 15 terabytes of data every night. >>Hmm. And, and, and Angela, all this data lands in influx DB. Correct. And what are you doing with, with all that data? >>Yeah, actually not. Um, so we are using flex DB to record engineering data and metadata about the observations like telemetry events and commands from the telescope. That's a much smaller data set compared to the images, but it is still challenging because, uh, you, you have some high frequency data, uh, that the system needs to keep up and we need to, to start this data and have it around for the lifetime of the price. Mm, >>Got it. Thank you. Okay, Caleb, let's bring you back in and can tell us more about the, you got these dishwasher size satellites. You're kind of using a multi-tenant model. I think it's genius, but, but tell us about the satellites themselves. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, we have in space, some satellites already that as you said, are like dishwasher, mini fridge kind of size. Um, and we're working on a bunch more that are, you know, a variety of sizes from shoebox to, I guess, a few times larger than what we have today. Uh, and it is, we do shoot to have effectively something like a multi-tenant model where, uh, we will buy a bus off the shelf. The bus is, uh, what you can kind of think of as the core piece of the satellite, almost like a motherboard or something where it's providing the power. It has the solar panels, it has some radios attached to it. Uh, it handles the attitude control, basically steers the spacecraft in orbit. And then we build also in house, what we call our payload hub, which is, has all, any customer payloads attached and our own kind of edge processing sort of capabilities built into it. >>And, uh, so we integrate that. We launch it, uh, and those things, because they're in lower orbit, they're orbiting the earth every 90 minutes. That's, you know, seven kilometers per second, which is several times faster than a speeding bullet. So we've got, we have, uh, one of the unique challenges of operating spacecraft and lower orbit is that generally you can't talk to them all the time. So we're managing these things through very brief windows of time, uh, where we get to talk to them through our ground sites, either in Antarctica or, you know, in the north pole region. >>Talk more about how you use influx DB to make sense of this data through all this tech that you're launching into space. >>We basically previously we started off when I joined the company, storing all of that as Angelo did in a regular relational database. And we found that it was, uh, so slow in the size of our data would balloon over the course of a couple days to the point where we weren't able to even store all of the data that we were getting. Uh, so we migrated to influx DB to store our time series telemetry from the spacecraft. So, you know, that's things like, uh, power level voltage, um, currents counts, whatever, whatever metadata we need to monitor about the spacecraft. We now store that in, uh, in influx DB. Uh, and that has, you know, now we can actually easily store the entire volume of data for the mission life so far without having to worry about, you know, the size bloating to an unmanageable amount. >>And we can also seamlessly query, uh, large chunks of data. Like if I need to see, you know, for example, as an operator, I might wanna see how my, uh, battery state of charge is evolving over the course of the year. I can have a plot and an influx that loads that in a fraction of a second for a year's worth of data, because it does, you know, intelligent, um, I can intelligently group the data by, uh, sliding time interval. Uh, so, you know, it's been extremely powerful for us to access the data and, you know, as time has gone on, we've gradually migrated more and more of our operating data into influx. >>You know, let's, let's talk a little bit, uh, uh, but we throw this term around a lot of, you know, data driven, a lot of companies say, oh, yes, we're data driven, but you guys really are. I mean, you' got data at the core, Caleb, what does that, what does that mean to you? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think the, and the clearest example of when I saw this be like totally game changing is what I mentioned before at Astro where our engineer's feedback loop went from, you know, a lot of kind of slow researching, digging into the data to like an instant instantaneous, almost seeing the data, making decisions based on it immediately, rather than having to wait for some processing. And that's something that I've also seen echoed in my current role. Um, but to give another practical example, uh, as I said, we have a huge amount of data that comes down every orbit, and we need to be able to ingest all of that data almost instantaneously and provide it to the operator. And near real time, you know, about a second worth of latency is all that's acceptable for us to react to, to see what is coming down from the spacecraft and building that pipeline is challenging from a software engineering standpoint. >>Um, our primary language is Python, which isn't necessarily that fast. So what we've done is started, you know, in the, in the goal of being data driven is publish metrics on individual, uh, how individual pieces of our data processing pipeline are performing into influx as well. And we do that in production as well as in dev. Uh, so we have kind of a production monitoring, uh, flow. And what that has done is allow us to make intelligent decisions on our software development roadmap, where it makes the most sense for us to, uh, focus our development efforts in terms of improving our software efficiency. Uh, just because we have that visibility into where the real problems are. Um, it's sometimes we've found ourselves before we started doing this kind of chasing rabbits that weren't necessarily the real root cause of issues that we were seeing. Uh, but now, now that we're being a bit more data driven, there we are being much more effective in where we're spending our resources and our time, which is especially critical to us as we scale to, from supporting a couple satellites, to supporting many, many satellites at >>Once. Yeah. Coach. So you reduced those dead ends, maybe Angela, you could talk about what, what sort of data driven means to, to you and your teams? >>I would say that, um, having, uh, real time visibility, uh, to the telemetry data and, and metrics is, is, is crucial for us. We, we need, we need to make sure that the image that we collect with the telescope, uh, have good quality and, um, that they are within the specifications, uh, to meet our science goals. And so if they are not, uh, we want to know that as soon as possible and then, uh, start fixing problems. >>Caleb, what are your sort of event, you know, intervals like? >>So I would say that, you know, as of today on the spacecraft, the event, the, the level of timing that we deal with probably tops out at about, uh, 20 Hertz, 20 measurements per second on, uh, things like our, uh, gyroscopes, but the, you know, I think the, the core point here of the ability to have high precision data is extremely important for these kinds of scientific applications. And I'll give an example, uh, from when I worked at, on the rocket at Astra there, our baseline data rate that we would ingest data during a test is, uh, 500 Hertz. So 500 samples per second. And in some cases we would actually, uh, need to ingest much higher rate data, even up to like 1.5 kilohertz. So, uh, extremely, extremely high precision, uh, data there where timing really matters a lot. And, uh, you know, I can, one of the really powerful things about influx is the fact that it can handle this. >>That's one of the reasons we chose it, uh, because there's times when we're looking at the results of a firing where you're zooming in, you know, I talked earlier about how on my current job, we often zoom out to look, look at a year's worth of data. You're zooming in to where your screen is preoccupied by a tiny fraction of a second. And you need to see same thing as Angela just said, not just the actual telemetry, which is coming in at a high rate, but the events that are coming out of our controllers. So that can be something like, Hey, I opened this valve at exactly this time and that goes, we wanna have that at, you know, micro or even nanosecond precision so that we know, okay, we saw a spike in chamber pressure at, you know, at this exact moment, was that before or after this valve open, those kind of, uh, that kind of visibility is critical in these kind of scientific, uh, applications and absolutely game changing to be able to see that in, uh, near real time and, uh, with a really easy way for engineers to be able to visualize this data themselves without having to wait for, uh, software engineers to go build it for them. >>Can the scientists do self-serve or are you, do you have to design and build all the analytics and, and queries for your >>Scientists? Well, I think that's, that's absolutely from, from my perspective, that's absolutely one of the best things about influx and what I've seen be game changing is that, uh, generally I'd say anyone can learn to use influx. Um, and honestly, most of our users might not even know they're using influx, um, because what this, the interface that we expose to them is Grafana, which is, um, a generic graphing, uh, open source graphing library that is very similar to influx own chronograph. Sure. And what it does is, uh, let it provides this, uh, almost it's a very intuitive UI for building your queries. So you choose a measurement and it shows a dropdown of available measurements. And then you choose a particular, the particular field you wanna look at. And again, that's a dropdown, so it's really easy for our users to discover. And there's kind of point and click options for doing math aggregations. You can even do like perfect kind of predictions all within Grafana, the Grafana user interface, which is really just a wrapper around the APIs and functionality of the influx provides putting >>Data in the hands of those, you know, who have the context of domain experts is, is key. Angela, is it the same situation for you? Is it self serve? >>Yeah, correct. Uh, as I mentioned before, um, we have the astronomers making their own dashboards because they know what exactly what they, they need to, to visualize. Yeah. I mean, it's all about using the right tool for the job. I think, uh, for us, when I joined the company, we weren't using influx DB and we, we were dealing with serious issues of the database growing to an incredible size extremely quickly, and being unable to like even querying short periods of data was taking on the order of seconds, which is just not possible for operations >>Guys. This has been really formative it's, it's pretty exciting to see how the edge is mountaintops, lower orbits to be space is the ultimate edge. Isn't it. I wonder if you could answer two questions to, to wrap here, you know, what comes next for you guys? Uh, and is there something that you're really excited about that, that you're working on Caleb, maybe you could go first and an Angela, you can bring us home. >>Uh, basically what's next for loft. Orbital is more, more satellites, a greater push towards infrastructure and really making, you know, our mission is to make space simple for our customers and for everyone. And we're scaling the company like crazy now, uh, making that happen, it's extremely exciting and extremely exciting time to be in this company and to be in this industry as a whole, because there are so many interesting applications out there. So many cool ways of leveraging space that, uh, people are taking advantage of. And with, uh, companies like SpaceX and the now rapidly lowering cost, cost of launch, it's just a really exciting place to be. And we're launching more satellites. We are scaling up for some constellations and our ground system has to be improved to match. So there's a lot of, uh, improvements that we're working on to really scale up our control software, to be best in class and, uh, make it capable of handling such a large workload. So >>You guys hiring >><laugh>, we are absolutely hiring. So, uh, I would in we're we need, we have PE positions all over the company. So, uh, we need software engineers. We need people who do more aerospace, specific stuff. So, uh, absolutely. I'd encourage anyone to check out the loft orbital website, if there's, if this is at all interesting. >>All right. Angela, bring us home. >>Yeah. So what's next for us is really, uh, getting this, um, telescope working and collecting data. And when that's happen is going to be just, um, the Lu of data coming out of this camera and handling all, uh, that data is going to be really challenging. Uh, yeah. I wanna wanna be here for that. <laugh> I'm looking forward, uh, like for next year we have like an important milestone, which is our, um, commissioning camera, which is a simplified version of the, of the full camera it's going to be on sky. And so yeah, most of the system has to be working by them. >>Nice. All right, guys, you know, with that, we're gonna end it. Thank you so much, really fascinating, and thanks to influx DB for making this possible, really groundbreaking stuff, enabling value creation at the edge, you know, in the cloud and of course, beyond at the space. So really transformational work that you guys are doing. So congratulations and really appreciate the broader community. I can't wait to see what comes next from having this entire ecosystem. Now, in a moment, I'll be back to wrap up. This is Dave ante, and you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Welcome Telegraph is a popular open source data collection. Agent Telegraph collects data from hundreds of systems like IOT sensors, cloud deployments, and enterprise applications. It's used by everyone from individual developers and hobbyists to large corporate teams. The Telegraph project has a very welcoming and active open source community. Learn how to get involved by visiting the Telegraph GitHub page, whether you want to contribute code, improve documentation, participate in testing, or just show what you're doing with Telegraph. We'd love to hear what you're building. >>Thanks for watching. Moving the world with influx DB made possible by influx data. I hope you learn some things and are inspired to look deeper into where time series databases might fit into your environment. If you're dealing with large and or fast data volumes, and you wanna scale cost effectively with the highest performance and you're analyzing metrics and data over time times, series databases just might be a great fit for you. Try InfluxDB out. You can start with a free cloud account by clicking on the link and the resources below. Remember all these recordings are gonna be available on demand of the cube.net and influx data.com. So check those out and poke around influx data. They are the folks behind InfluxDB and one of the leaders in the space, we hope you enjoyed the program. This is Dave Valante for the cube. We'll see you soon.

(electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. This is the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture and our coverage of this great event continues. Lisa Martin here, I've got two guests with me here to talk about Amazon Connect. Please welcome from Hawaiian Airlines, Will Van Devender, Senior Director of IT Engineering. Will, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me here. >> And from Accenture, Erich Chen is here as well, the Hawaii Regional Lead at Accenture. Erich, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be here. >> I feel very overdressed. You can tell I'm on the mainland with my turtleneck and you guys are on Oahu, which is fantastic. And I'm excited that I have a seat on Hawaiian Airlines in just a few weeks. So you guys, let's talk about this technology solution that you put together. Will, I want to start with you. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Hawaiian Airlines was having prior to working with Accenture and Amazon. >> Well, nothing really unique to us. We had the challenges that everybody had with the pandemic and scaling out to work from home, as well as an old legacy stack that had been around for a long, long time. The specific ones that drove us to launch this particular project was we had been running into some talent acquisition issues. We're not of size where we have a huge telecom team that can specialize in IDRs and other things like that. So we need folks that can play a lot of different spaces. And in this particular case, we had a situation where we had really old technology and the people we were bringing in were a lot more savvy on Cloud and those kinds of things. And so AWS Connect was a way for us to take talent that traditionally wasn't inside the telephony space and use them and bring them to bear for that business need. So it kept us from having to scale up to do this. The other thing we had was a big issue with work from home that actually predated COVID. So we had been, we're in a hurricane zone, we had been doing hurricane preparedness exercises and we realized that we had a difficult time scaling our environment to large scale work from home. So even prior to COVID, we had been started looking at the technologies that we had, which ones worked well outside of an office for a distributed workforce. And we had been moving technology in that direction. And so telephony was one of the ones that we had to beef up. And so it was nice to have a good leg up on it when the pandemic hit us. >> Absolutely. I can't imagine how advantageous that was when it struck. And of course we all know how much the airlines were affected. Talk to me about an interesting catalyst for this solution in terms of challenge with talent acquisition and work from home. Interesting impetus for this solution. Talk to me about, are you long time partners, Hawaiian Airlines with Accenture? Talk to me about how you went about looking for the right solution with them as a partner. >> Ah, okay. So Hawaiian Airlines and Accenture had been partnering for many years, but in a much bigger way in 2019, when we solidified a new managed services deal. So Accenture came in to help us out with our day to day operations. And one of the big reasons for that was actually cloud adoption. So we needed a partner that was much more up to date technology wise. And as we started ramping up our engineering and architecture designs and releasing things on new stacks, we needed folks in the operation side that could keep up with that. And not only that, actually enable and push us in those directions. And so when we went out to RFP, Accenture kind of stood out in that area and that's been a good thing. We've had very little friction as we've been going out and acquiring new technology with being able to bring that out to our run and operation space. >> That's critical, especially given the tumultuous times in which we are still living. Erich, let's go ahead and bring you into the conversation. Now, talk to me about you guys at Accenture developed and deployed this solution quickly. We're talking an eight week timeframe. Talk to me about the solution that you architected, about that delivery, and what some of the challenges were along the way that you tackled and mitigated. >> Yeah. Thanks Lisa. I mean, it was, you know, eight weeks when you look back on it, it's hard to believe we did complete it in that timeframe, but, you know, we were able to do it with some strong experts from our side. Some of the challenges we ran into along the way were probably at the very beginning, just securing the right team for Hawaiian to deliver the kind of the proper designs and development upfront, and then helping to kind of manage through the delivery process itself. You know, they were great. They had some great people with some deep expertise, kind of from a business process side of things, kind of paired with our technical and then also industry knowledge of the airlines as well. It made for a really nice, you know, strong partnership where we could get it through in eight weeks. So it was pretty amazing. >> And then walk me through the actual, oh Will, sorry. Did you want to say something? >> Yeah, I was actually going to comment on that, that was exactly what we were looking for was that sort of wholesale partner. So when we went out to modernize our entire telephony stack, it wasn't just call centers. It was the conference rooms, it was the telephony, we went to new phone providers and circuit providers, we moved everyone off of Skype over on to Teams, all the desk phones. And so there was this scope of work that was simply larger than our team. And so what we were looking for from a partner was one, who's done this before, and then two, could you manage the whole piece of work? And so what was nice for Accenture, because they owned our existing operation space, they not only did the AWS Connect piece, they got on the old systems and they brought up all the specs of how the call queues worked, how the call flows worked, they found the old voice talent, they brought those, imported them without us having to do anything over onto the new stack, and then brought it over for testing. So it was just a very minimal lift from the Hawaiian Airlines side. And since they ran our operations, they then moved it over to the run space. And it was just very few man hours on the Hawaiian Airlines side expended for that outcome. >> Wow. It sounds fairly seamless. Erich, how did you guys accomplish that? >> I mean, that's a type of experience and partnership we like to have with our clients, more of an all-inclusive type service. But we're sometimes accused of not having the cheapest prices on the block, but you know, you do get a great, you know, a pretty holistic experience with us and we do try to make it as easy as possible for our clients and bring kind of the full breadth of Accenture to fill in a lot of gaps. >> Well, one of the things, Will, that you mentioned is we were looking for a partner that had done this before, where there's actual proof in the pudding, especially given the, like I mentioned before, the tumultuous market. Erich talk to me about, if we look at Hawaiian Airlines as an example, as a template here, how common or how often are you seeing these same challenges with respect to talent acquisition and work from home? Is that something that really skyrocketed in the last year and a half? >> Sure. I mean, it's maybe a blessing in the type of business that we're in, right. But whenever there are, you know, big, you know, kind of market issues and kind of pandemics as an example, right. Our clients do turn to us for, you know, support to help them through, you know, smaller times of need. And, you know, maybe very compressed issues. So we're very happy to, you know, reach into our larger organization to make sure that we can bring the best of Accenture to them and help them get through these tough times. >> Will, let's talk about how this solution is helping employees, agents get through these tough times. As we know, Hawaii had some really strict travel restrictions on COVID. And of course, one of the things that a lot of people lost during this time, was patience. Talk to me about how the workforce is improving, the employees, the agents, now that you have this solution implemented and a leg up probably on your competitors. >> Yeah, the whole pandemic hit us in a hard way. So we found ourselves, you know, all of a sudden one day waking up and finding that our customer facing support desks couldn't be staffed. People couldn't get into the office and actually get there. At the same time, as you and everyone else knows, flights were getting canceled and customers were calling at a level we'd never seen before trying to reschedule their flights or get credit back or get money back. And so AWS Connect was interesting in that it was one of the things we could ramp up new call centers very quickly. And so we knew we wanted something that was consumption-based because we didn't know how long it was going to last. And we wanted to be able to spin it up, get new agents going, respond to our customers, scale up to the volume, and then be able to decrease it out. So it was a good win there. What wasn't talked about much was the reliability aspect of it. Being on a really old system, our telephony was pretty stable, but our call center internal business facing ones were not. We had a series of outages out there and those outages directly impact our ability to get planes out in the air. There's the sort of customers calling about tickets and about help with flights, but there's also things like cruise, trying to get cruise scheduling done, trying to get staffing to a plane, trying to get things moved around in an airport. And there's a lot of internal desks that deal with those kinds of things. And having that on an incredibly stable technology and stack is key for us. And so we were able to get Connect deployed, and we were also able to front that with a number of other technologies that allowed us to have DR plans. So even if we lost that desk, how can we quickly move that over to manual calls and desk phones and those kinds of things. And so that's been, that part has been very well received. That has helped us out a lot. Our confidence, knowing that if anything should happen, our ability to recover and get back into full operations now is just night and day from where it was 12 months ago. And so thank you all very much for your assistance in getting us to this point. >> Getting that stability and that reliability during a time of chaos that's, and also in a time that can really affect brand reputation, it sounds to me like IT is really helping drive the business forward. This is something that you did in partnership with the business side, because of course during the last year and a half, so many brands have had challenges with reputation and the ability to not do things. Talk to me about that business IT relationship. And was this a facilitator of making that even better? >> Well, it's certainly better. Yeah, we have far better conversations internally than I can ever remember in my time here in Hawaiian Airlines. But you know, when these kinds of emergencies hit, I don't think about it as IT or business. I mean, there's a problem and you got to go fix it. And so we're all in there and IT is one piece of that. How do we get a solution stood up almost overnight in this, you know, very, very difficult pandemic business time? But you know, the business is trying to get talent together and trying to get agents trained and being able to do things like handle these customer calls is very, very skill intensive. So there's a lot of partnership coming in and getting solutions, demoing with the business, dialing them in back and forth, and a lot of collaboration there. And so that builds stronger teams. And that's one of the outcomes I like more than anything else, is we're working together and dialing in the IT and the business needs very much in unison. >> That's probably one of the best outcomes you can hope for. Erich, talk to me about, are you seeing similar things with customers in other industries? Are you seeing that business IT coming together, especially during these challenging times we've been living through? >> Yeah, to varying degrees, you know, that's always the crux of, you know, a successful IT department, right. You know, you're there to serve and support the business side of things, right. We don't do technology for technology sake. But yeah, I think the better ones are getting better, better at, you know, being more fully integrated and it's not a business or IT decision, right, it's a collective kind of team decision. And I think as long as you have people who respect and understand the other side of the coin sometimes, easier the conversation will go. And I think that's what our team was able to do is express, you know, very clearly and concisely kind of what the decisions they had to make were and they could make a decision a little bit easier that way. >> And talk to me, Erich, about the solution, what impressed you? What are you most excited about in terms of what Accenture has helped to accomplish for Hawaiian Airlines? >> Yeah, I was really happy that even, you know, within a short eight week period itself, you know, things always come up as you go throughout a project. And I think the business team was getting excited about the possibilities once they saw kind of the potential of the platform. And so some, you know, requests came up in the middle of the way, you know, in flight. And, you know, our team was able to accommodate a number of the kind of minor enhancements or tweaks to the system to make it even better and serve the business in a better fashion there. >> Gotcha. Will, what is next for Hawaiian Airlines, besides my flight on it in a few weeks? Talk to me about where you guys are going from an IT perspective. >> Well we've rolled out a solution quickly 'cause we needed to, but there's a lot still to be done to dial it in for the business. Where reliability and speed were key, we got those done, but there was some aspects of the old system that were still a little easier. For those call centers where people needed to dial in, get ahold of an agent, and then pass it onto an internal employee, there's still a disconnect between our call center technology, AWS Connect, and the internal collaboration, Microsoft Teams. And that's because Teams really wasn't up to all of the call center technology needs at the time we started this. Things like call recording and things like that just weren't there at the time. So we've got some of our internal desks that still need to be tweaked and integrated more seamlessly between the two platforms or maybe as Teams gets ready, moved back over onto that. So that's, again, the part of it, being able to have this deep conversation with the business, understand their needs, having a partner where you can quickly go respond and go dial it in. And so we don't look at it as our telephony migration is complete. We look at it as we got our first big hurdle done, moving off decades old tech onto our modern stack. And now we're looking at refining it with our partners over the future. >> Right. Phase one, it's always that journey that we talk about. Erich, last question for you. What are some of the things that are coming up next as you help Hawaiian Airlines to continue on this modernization journey? >> Yeah, so more broadly we're really excited because this effort was one of the first or probably more platform centric system integration type projects we've done for Hawaiian. We've been on the operation side, we've done some business consulting worked with them for various business functions already, but this was really more on the application modernization side of things. And, you know, we see that Hawaiian has a number of areas that they're looking to kind of modernize and improve along the way. And we're very excited about, you know, being a strong partner for them in that journey coming up. >> Awesome guys, great work. Congratulations on a huge transformation accomplished during a very chaotic world time period and done so quickly. We appreciate your comments, your feedback, and look forward to seeing what you dial in next. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> For Will Van Devender and Erich Chen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back here in theCUBE, this is day three of our coverage right here in the middle of all the action of Cloud City at Mobile World Congress. This is the hit of the entire show in Barcelona, not only in person, but out on the interwebs virtually, this is a hybrid event. This is back to real life, and theCUBE is here. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante and DR is here, Danielle Royston. >> Totally. >> Welcome back to theCUBE for the fourth time now at the anchor desk, coming back, we love you. >> Well, it's been a busy day, it's been a busy week. It's been an awesome week. >> John: Feeling good? >> Oh my God. >> You made the call. >> I've made the call. >> You did on your podcast what, months ago. >> Yeah, right? >> You made the call. >> Made the call. >> You're on the right side of history. >> Right, and people were like, it's going to be canceled. COVID won't be handled, blahbity blah. >> She's crazy. >> Nope, I was just crazy, I'm okay with that, right? >> Crazy good. >> Right, I'm like I'm forward looking in a lot of ways. And we were looking towards June and we're like, I think this is going to be the first event back. >> You know, the crazy ones commercial that Apple ran is one of the best commercials of all time. You can't ignore the crazy ones in a good way. You can't ignore what you're doing. And I think to me, what I'm so excited about is cause we've been covering cloud we're cloud bigots, we love the cloud, public cloud. We've been on that train from day one. But when you hear the interviews we did here in theCUBE and interviews that we talked about with the top people, Google, Amazon Web Services. We're talking about the top people, both technology leaders like Bill Vass and the people who run the telecom verticals like Alfonzo, Adolfo, I mean, Hernandez. We had Google's top networking executive, we had their industry leader and the telecom, Microsoft and the Silicon all are validating, and it's like, surround sound to what you're saying here, and it cannot be ignored. >> I mean, we are coming to a big moment in Telco, right? And I mean, I've been saying it's coming. I called 2021, the year of Public Cloud and Telco. It helped that Erickson bailed. So thank you, Erickson people. >> It was a gift. >> It was a gift. >> It was. >> It really was a gift. And it was not just for me, but I think also for the vendors in the booth, I mean, we have a Cloud City army, right? Here we go, let's start marching, and it's awesome. >> He reminds me of that baseball player that took a break, cause he had a hangover and, Cal Ripkin. >> Cal Ripkin? >> Yeah, what was that guy's name? >> Did that really happen? >> Yeah, he took a break and uh- >> New guy stepped in. >> Yeah, and so well, not Cal Ripkin. >> No, no, so before, you want to know, who was it, Lou Gehrig? >> Lou Gehrig, yeah, Lou Gehrig. >> Right, so, Lou Gehrig was nobody, and we can't remember the guy's name, nobody knows the guy's name, what was that guy's name? Nobody knows, oh, there's Lou Gehrig, he got hurt. He sat out and Lou Gehrig replaced him and never hear of him again. >> Danielle: Love it, I'll take that. >> Never, never missed a game for his entire career. So again, this is what Erickson did, they just okay, take a break. >> Yeah, but I mean, it's been great again. I had a great day yesterday, my keynote was delivered. Things are going well with the booth, we had Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, that was just epic and it was acoustic and it was right after lockdown. I think everyone was really excited to be there. But I was talking to a vendor that said we'd been able to accomplish in three days, what normally it would take three years from a sales funnel perspective. I mean, that's big and that's not me. That's not my organization. That's other organizations that are benefiting from this energy. Oh, it's awesome. >> The post isolation economy has become a living metaphor for transformation, and I've been trying to sort of grok and put the pieces together as to how this thing progresses in my interview with Portal One in particular really brought it into focus for me, anyway, I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things we haven't talked much about is public policy, and I think about all the time, all the discussion in the United States about infrastructure, this is critical infrastructure, right? And the spectrum is a country like South Africa saying, come on in, we want to open up. We want to innovate, to me, that's the model for these tier two and tier three Telcos that are just going to disrupt the big guys, whereas, maybe China's maybe on the other end of the spectrum, very controlling, but it's the former that is going to adopt the cloud sooner, and it's going to completely transform the next decade. >> Yeah, I think this is a great technology for a smaller challenge or CSP that still is a large successful company to challenge the incumbents that are, they are dinosaurs too, they move a little bit slow, and maybe if you're a little bit faster, quicker dinosaur you'll survive longer, maybe you'll be able to transform and, and a public cloud enables that. And I think, you know I'm playing the long game here, right? Is public cloud already for every Telco in every corner of the world, no. And there's a couple of things that are barriers to that. We don't really talk about the downsides, and so maybe we sort of wrap up with- there are challenges and acknowledge there are challenges, you know, in some cases their data regulations and issues, right? And you can't right? There's not a hyperscaler in your country, right? And so you're having a little bit of challenges, but you trend this out over 10 years and then pace it with the hyperscalers that are building new data centers. They're each at 25 plus each, you know, plus or minus a few, right? They're marching along, and you trend this out over 10 years, I think one of two things happened, your data regulations are eased or a hyperscaler appears in a place you can use it, and those points converge and hopefully the software's there, and that's my effort and (claps) yeah. >> Dave: You know what's an interesting trend, DR and John, that is maybe a harbinger to this, is you just mentioned something. If the hyperscalers might not have a presence in, in a country, you know what they're doing? And our data shows this, I do that weekly series breaking analysis and the data Openstack was popping up. Like where does OpenStack come from, well, guess what, when you cut the data, it was Telcos using open source to build clouds in regions where there was no hyperscalers. >> It's a gap filler. >> Yeah, it's a gap filler, it's a bandaid. >> But I think this is where, like. outpost is such a great idea, right? Like getting outposts, and I think Microsoft has the ability to do this as well, Google less so, right? They're not providing the staff, they're doing Anthos. So you're still managing this, the rack, but they're giving you the ability to tap into their services. But I was talking to a CTO in Bolivia. He was like, we have data privacy issues in our country. There's no hyperscaler, not sure Bolivia is like next on the list for AWS, right? But he's like, I'm going to build my own public cloud. And I'm like why would you do that when you can just use outposts? And then when your data regulations release, where they get to Bolivia, you can switch and you're on the stack, and you're ready to go. I think that's what you should do. You should totally do that. >> John: Yeah, one of the things that's come up on here in the interviews, in theCUBE and here, the show is that there are risk takers and innovators and there's operators. And this has been the consistent theme around, yeah, the on-premises world you mentioned this regulation reasons, and or some workflows just have to be on premise for security reasons, whatever, that's the corner case. But the operating model of the technology architecture is shifted. And that reality, I don't think is debatable, so I find it, I got to ask you this because I'm really curious. I know you get a lot of people staring at ya, oh the public cloud's just a hosting, but why aren't people getting this architectural shift? I mean, you mentioned outpost and wavelength, which Amazon has, is a game changer. It's Amazon cloud at the hub. >> Yeah, at the edge. >> Okay, that's a low latency, again, low-hanging fruit applications, real buys, whatnot. I mean, that's an architectural dot that's been connected. Why are people getting it. >> In our industry, I think it is a lot of not invented here syndrome, right? And that's a very sort of nineties thought and I have been advocating stand on the shoulders of the greatest technologists in the world, right, and you know, there's, there is a geopolitical US thing, I think we lived through a presidency that had a sort of nationalistic approach and a lot of those conversations pop up, but I've also looked to these guys and I'm like, you're still, you still have your Huawei kit installed. And there's concerns with that too. So, and you picked it because of cost, and it's really hard to switch off of, so give me a break with your public cloud USA stuff, right? You can use it, you're just making excuses, you're just afraid. What are you afraid of, the HR implications? Let's talk about that, right? And the minute I take it there, conversation changes. >> Yeah, I talked to Teresa Carlson when she was running the public sector at AWS, she's now president of Splunk. I call her a Renaissance woman. She's been a great leader and public sector for this weird little pocket of AWS where it's a guess a sales division, but it's still its own company. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And she's, did the CIA deal, the DOD, and the public sector partnerships are now private, a lot more private relationships, So it's not like just governments, you mentioned government and national security, and these things, you started to see the ecosystem not, not just be about companies, >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Government and private sector. So this whole vibe of the telecom being regulated, unregulated, unbundled is an interesting kind of theory. What's your thoughts and reactions to this, kind of this, melting pot of ecosystem change and evolution? >> Danielle: Yeah, I mean. I think there's a very nationalistic approach by the Telcos, right? They sort of think about the countries that they operate in. There's a couple of groups that go across multiple countries, but can there be a global Telco? Can that happen, right? Just like we say, you were saying it earlier, Netflix, right? You can say Netflix, UK. Right, and so can we have a global Telco, right. That is challenging on a lot of different levels. But think about that in a public cloud start to enable that idea, right? Elon Musk is going to get to Mars. You need a planetary level Telco. And I can, I think that day is, I mean, I don't think it's tomorrow, but I think that's like 10, 20 years away. >> Dave: You're done, we're going to see it start this decade, it's already starting. We're going to see the fruits of that dividend. >> Danielle: Yeah, it's crazy. >> I've got to ask you, you're a student of the industry and you get so much experience, it's great to have you on theCUBE and chat about, riff about these things, but, the classic who's ready for disruption question comes up, and I think there's no doubt that the Telcos as an industry has been slow moving and the role and the importance has changed. People need the need to have the internet access they need to access. >> Yeah. >> So, and you've got the edge, now applications are now running on it, since the iPhone 14 years ago, as you pointed out, people now are interested in how packets move. That's fast whether it's a doctor or an emergency worker or someone. >> Danielle: What we have done in 2020 without the internet and broadband and our mobile phones, I mean? >> You know, I think about 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic hit a hundred years ago, those guys did not have mobile phones and they must have been bored, right? I mean, what are you going to do, right? And so, yeah I think last year really moved a lot of thinking forward in this respect, so. >> Yeah, it's always like that, that animal out in the Serengeti that gets taken down, you know, by the cheetah or the lion. How do know when someone is going to be disrupted What's the, what's the tell sign in your mind, you look at the Telco landscape. What is someone waiting to be disrupted or replaced like? >> You know what they're ostriches, how do you say that word, right? They stick their head in the sand. Like I don't want to talk about it, la la la, I don't want to, I don't want to think about it. You know, they bring up all these like roadblocks, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to come visit you in another six months to a year, and let's see what happens when the guys that are moving fast that are open-minded to this, and it's, I mean, when you start to use the public cloud, you don't, like, turn it on overnight. You start experimenting, right? You start, you take an application that is non-threatening. You have, I mean, these guys are running thousands of apps inside their data centers. Pick some boring ones, pick some old ones that no one likes, and move that to the public cloud, play with it. Right, I'm not talking about moving a whole network overnight tomorrow. You got to learn, you have no, I mean, very little talent in the Telco that know how to program against the AWS stack. Start hiring, start doing it, and you're going to start to learn about the compensation, and I used to do compensation, right? I spent a lot of time in HR, right? The compensation points and structures, they compare AWS and Google, versus a Telco. Do you want Telco stock? Do you want Google stock? >> Dave: Right, where do you want to go? >> Right, right? like that's going to challenge the HR organization in terms of compensate. How do we compensate our people when they're learning these new valuable skills? >> When you think about disruption, you know, the master or the professor of disruption, Clay Christensen, one of the best lectures he ever gave was who at Cambridge, and he gave a lecture on the steel industry, and he was describing it, it was like four layers of value in the steel industry, the value chain, it started with rebar, like the lowest end, right? >> Danielle: Yeah yeah. >> And the Telco's actually the opposite, so that, you know, when, when the international companies came in, they went after rebar, and the higher end steel companies said, nah, let them have it, that's the low margin stuff. And then eventually, uh, when they got up to the high end. >> Danielle: It was over, yeah. >> The Telcos are the opposite. They're like, the, you know, in the, in the conductivity and they're hanging on to that because it's so big, but all the high value stuff, it's already gone to the, over the top players, right. >> It's being eaten away, and I'm like, what is going to wake you guys up to realize those are your competitors, that's where the battle is, right? >> John: That's really where the value is. >> The battle of the bastards, you're there by yourself, like "Game of Thrones" and they're coming at you. >> John: You need a dragon. >> What are you doing about it? >> John: I need a dragon to compete in this market. Riding a dragon would be a good strategy. >> I know, I was just watching. Cause I have a podcast, I have a podcast called "Telco In 20" and we always put like little nuggets in the show notes, I personally reviewed them, I was just reviewing the one for the keynote that we're putting out, and I had a dragon in my keynote, right? It was a really great moment, it was really fun to do, but there's, I don't know if you guys are "Game of Thrones" fans. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> Right, but there's a great moment when Daenerys gets her dragons, the baby dragons, and she takes over the Unsullied Army, right? And it's just this, right? Like all of a sudden the tables turn in an instant where she has nothing, and she's like on her quest, right. I'm on a quest. >> Dave: Comes out of the fire. >> Right, comes out of the fire, the unburnt, right? She has her dragons, right? She has them hatch. She takes over the Unsullied Army, right? Slaves, it starts her march, right? And I'm like, we're putting that clip into the show notes because I think that's where we are. I think I've hatched some dragons, right? The Cloud City army, let's go, let's go take on Telco. >> John: Well, I mean, this to me. >> Easy. >> It definitely have made, made it happen because I heard many people talking about cloud, this is turning into a cloud show. The question is, when does this going to be a cloud show? That's just Cloud City, it's a big section of the show. I mean, all the big players are behind it. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> Amazon Web Services, Google Azure, Ecosystem, startups, thinking differently, but everyone's agreeing why aren't we doing this? >> I think, like I said, I mean, people are like, you're such a visionary, and how did, why do you think this will work, I'm like, it's worked in every other industry. Am I really that visionary, and like, these are the three best tech companies in the world, like, are, are you kidding me? And so I think we've shown the momentum here. I think we're looking forward to 2022, you know? And that we see 2022, you got to start planning this the minute we get back, right? Like I wouldn't recommend doing this in a hundred days again, that was a very painful, but you know, February, I was, there's a sign inside NWC, February 28th. Right, we're talking seven months. You got to get going now. >> John: Let's get on the phone. >> With Telco, I mean, I think you're right on. I mean, you know, remember Skype, in the early days, right? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> It wasn't regional. It was just, plug into the internet. >> Danielle: It was just Skype, it was just WhatsApp. >> Well this is a great location, if you can get a shot guys of the people behind us, I don't know if you can, if you're watching check out the scene here, It's winding down, a lot of people having happy hour. Now this is a social construct here at Cloud City, not only is it chock full of information, reporting that we're doing and getting all the data and with the presentations on the main stage, with Adam and the studio and the team, this is a place where people are meeting and there's deals being done face to face, intimate relationships, the best of the best are here, they make the trek. So there's been a successful formula. Of course theCUBE is in the middle of all the action, which we love, we're psyched to be back. I want to thank you personally, while we have you on stage here. >> I want to thank you guys, and the crew, the crew has been amazing, turning out videos on short order. We have all these crews in different cities, it's, our own show has been virtual. You know, Adam's in Bristol, right? We're here, this was an experiment, we talked about this a hundred days ago, 90 days ago. Could we get theCUBE there, do the show but also theCUBE. >> You are a visionary, you said made for TV hybrid event with your team, produce television shows, theCUBE, we're digital, we love you guys, great alignment, but it's magical because the content doesn't end here, the show might end, they might break down the beautiful plants and the exhibits, but the community is going to continue, the content and the conversations. >> Yeah. >> So, we were looking forward to it and- >> I'm super glad, super glad we did this. >> Awesome, well, any final moments that you would like to share in the last two minutes we have, favorite moments, observations, funny things that have happened to you, weird things that have happened to you, share something that people might not know, or a favorite moment? >> I think, I don't know that people know, we have a 3D printer in the coffee shops, and so you can upload any picture and they're 3d printing, coffee art, right? So I've been seeing lots of social posts around people uploading their, their logos and things like that. I think Jon Bon Jovi, he was super thankful to be back. He thanked me personally two different times of like, I'm just glad to be out in front of people. And I think just even just the people walking around, thank you for being brave, thank you for coming back. You've helped Barcelona and we're happy to be together. Even if it is with masks, it's hard to do business with masks on, everyone's happy and psyched. >> John: Well the one thing that people cannot do relative to you is they cannot ignore you. You are making a great big wave. >> Danielle: I shout pretty loud, It's kind of hard to ignore me. >> You're making a great big wave, you're on the right side, we believe, of history, public cloud is driving the bus down main street of Cloud City, and if people don't get out of the way, they will be under the bus. >> I'm, like I said, in my keynote, it's go time let's do it. >> Okay. Thank you so much for all your attention and mission behind the cloud and the success. >> Danielle: We'll do it again. We're going to do it again soon. >> After Togi's a hundred million dollar investment, you're the CEO of Togi that, let's follow that progress, and of course, Telco DR, Danielle Royston, the digital revolution. Thanks for coming on with you. >> Thank you guys, it was super fun. >> This is theCUBE I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallante, we're going to send it back to Adam in the studio. Thanks, the team here. >> Woo! (audience applauding) >> I want to thank the team, everyone here, Adam is great, Chloe. >> Great working with you guys. >> Awesome, and what a great crew. >> So great. >> Thank you everybody. That's it for theCUBE, here on the last day, Wednesday of theCUBE, stay tuned for tomorrow more action on the main stage, here in Cloud City. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, we're back here in theCube. This is day three of our coverage right here in the middle of all the action of Cloud City at Mobile World Congress. This is the hit of the entire show in Barcelona, not only in person, but out on the interwebs virtually. This is a hybrid event. This is back to real life, and theCube is here. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and D. R. is here, Danielle Royston. >> Totally. >> Welcome back to theCube for fourth time. now at the anchor desk, coming back. >> I don't know. It's been a busy day. It's been a busy week. It's been an awesome week. >> Dave: Feeling good? >> Oh, my god. >> You made the call. >> I made the call. You finished your podcast, what months ago? >> Yeah. >> Made the call. >> Made the call. You're on the right side of history. >> Right? And people were like, "It's going to be canceled. COVID won't be handled." Blahbity blah. >> She's crazy. >> And I'm like, nope. She's crazy. I'm okay with that. Right? But I'm like... >> Crazy good. >> Right, I'm like, I'm forward-looking in a lot of ways. And we were looking towards June, and we're like, "I think this is going to be the first event back. We're going to be able to do it." >> You know, the crazy one's commercial that Apple ran, probably one of the best commercials of all time. You can't ignore the crazy ones in a good way. You can't ignore what you're doing. And I think to me, what I'm so excited about is, 'cause we've been covering cloud. We're cloud bigots. We love the cloud, public cloud. We've been on that train from day one. But when you hear the interviews we did here on theCube and interviews that we talked about with the top people, Google, Amazon Web Services. We're talking about the top people, both technology leaders like Bill Vass and the people who run the Telecom Verticals like Alf, Alfonzo. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Adolfo, I mean, Hernandez. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> We had Google's top networking executive. We had their industry leader in the telecom, Microsoft, and the Silicon. All are validating, and it's like surround sound to what you're saying here. And it cannot be ignored. >> I mean, we are coming to a big moment in Telco, right? And I mean, I've been saying that it's coming. I called 2021, the year of public cloud and Telco. It helped that Ericcson bailed. So thank you, Ericcson people. >> Dave: It was a gift. >> It was a gift. >> John: It really was. >> It really was a gift. And it was not just for me, but I think also for the vendors in the booth. I mean, we have a Cloud City army, right? Here we go. Let's start marching. And it's awesome. >> He reminds me of that baseball player that took a break 'cause he had a hangover and Cal Ripken. >> Cal Ripken, right, yeah, yeah. What was that guy's name? >> Did it really happen? >> Yeah, he took a break and... >> The new guy stepped in? >> Yeah, and so we'll go to Cal Ripken. >> No, no, so before it was it? Lou Gehrig. >> Lou Gehrig, yeah. >> Right, so Lou Gehrig was nobody. And we can't remember the guy's name. Nobody knows the guy's name. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> What was that guy's name? Nobody knows. Oh, 'cause Lou Garrett, he got hurt. >> Danielle: And Lou Gehrig stepped in. >> He sat out, and Lou Gehrig replaced him. >> Danielle: Love it. >> And never heard of him again. >> Danielle: I'll take that. >> Never missed a game. Never missed a game for his entire career. So again, this is what Ericcson did. They just okay, take a break and... >> But I mean, it's been great. Again, I had a great day yesterday. My keynote was delivered. Things are going well with the booth. We had Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, that was just epic, and it was acoustic, and it was right after lockdown. I think everyone was really excited to be there. But I was talking to a vendor that said we'd been able to accomplish in three days what normally it would take three years from a sales funnel perspective. I mean, that is, that's big, and that's not me. That's not my organization. That's other organizations that are benefiting from this energy. Oh, that's awesome. >> The post-isolation economy has become a living metaphor for transformation. And I've been trying to sort of grok and put the pieces together as to how this thing progresses. And my interview with Portaone, in particular, >> Danielle: Yeah. >> really brought it into focus for me, anyway. I'd love to get your thoughts. One of the things we haven't talked much about is public policy. And I think about all the time, all the discussion in the United States about infrastructure, this is critical infrastructure, right? >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And the spectrum is a country like South Africa saying, "Come on in. We want to open up." >> Danielle: Yeah. >> "We want to innovate." And to me that's to me, that's the model for these tier two and tier three telcos that are just going to disrupt the big guys. Whereas, you know, China, may be using the other end of the spectrum, very controlling, but it's the former that is going to adopt the cloud sooner. It's going to completely transform the next decade. >> Yeah, I think this is a great technology for a smaller challenger CSP that still is a large successful company to challenge the incumbents that are, they are dinosaurs too. They move a little bit slow. And maybe if you're a little bit faster, quicker dinosaur you'll survive longer. Maybe it will be able to transform and a public cloud enables that. And I think, you know, I'm playing the long game here, right? >> Dave: Yeah. >> Is public cloud ready for every telco in every corner of the world? No. And there's a couple of things that are barriers to that. We don't really talk about the downsides, and so maybe we sort of wrap up with, there are challenges, and I acknowledge there are challenges. You know, in some cases there are data regulations and issues, right? And you can't, right? There's not a hyperscaler in your country, right? And so you're having a little bit of challenges, but you trend this out over 10 years and then pace it with the hyperscalers are building new data centers. They're each at 25 plus each, plus or minus a few, right? They're marching along, and you trend this out over 10 years, I think one of two things happens. Your data regulations are eased or you a hyperscaler appears in a place you can use it. And those points converge, and hopefully the software's there, and that's my effort. And, yeah. >> You know what's an interesting trend, D. R., John? That is maybe a harbinger to this. You just mentioned something. If the hyperscalers might not have a presence in a country, you know what they're doing? And our data shows this, I do that weekly series "Breaking Analysis," and the data, OpenStack was popping up. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Like where does OpenStack come from? Well, guess what. When you cut the data, it was telcos using open source to build clouds in regions where there was no hyperscaler. >> Where it didn't exist, yeah. >> So it's a-- >> Gap-filler. >> Yeah, it's a gap-filler. It's a Band-aid. >> But I think this is where like Outpost is such a great idea, right? Like getting Outposts, and I think Microsoft has the ability to do this as well, Google less so, right. They're not providing the staff. They're doing Anthos, so you're still managing this, the rack, but they're giving you the ability to tap into those services. But I was talking to a CE, a CTO in Bolivia. He was like, "We have data privacy issues in our country. There's no hyperscaler." Not sure Bolivia is like next on the list for AWS, right? But he's like, "I'm going to build my own public cloud." And I'm like, "Why would you do that when you can just use Outposts?" And then when your data regulations release or there's a, they get to Bolivia, you can switch and you're on the stack and you're ready to go. I think that's what you should do. You should totally do that. >> Yeah, and one of the things that's come up here on the interviews and theCube and here, the show, is that there are risk takers and innovators and there's operators. And this has been the consistent theme around, yeah, the on-premises world. You mentioned this regulation reasons and/or some workflows just have to be on premise for security reasons, whatever. That's the corner case. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the operating model of the technology architecture is shifted. >> Danielle: Yep. >> And that reality, I don't think, is debatable. So I find it. I've got to ask you this because I'm really curious. I know you get a lot of people steering 'ya, oh the public cloud's just a hosting, but why aren't people getting this architectural shift? I mean, you mentioned Outpost, and Wavelength, which Amazon has, is a game changer. It's Amazon Cloud at the hub. >> Yeah, at the edge, yeah. >> Okay, that's a low latency again, low-hanging fruit applications, robotics, whatnot. I mean, that's an architectural dot that's been connected. >> Yeah. >> Why aren't people getting it? >> In our industry, I think it is a lot of not invented here syndrome, right? And that's a very sort of nineties thought, and I have been advocating stand on the shoulders of the greatest technologists in the world. Right? And you know, there is a geopolitical US thing. I think we lived through a presidency that had a sort of nationalistic approach and a lot of those conversations pop up, but I've also looked to these guys and I'm like, you still have your Huawei kit installed, and there's concerns with that, too. So, and you picked it because of cost. And it's really hard to switch off of. >> John: Yeah. >> So give me a break with your public cloud USA stuff, right? You can use it. You're just making excuses. You're just afraid. What are you afraid of? The HR implications? Let's talk about that, right? And the minute I take it there, conversation changes. >> I talked to Teresa Carlson when she was running the public sector at AWS. She's now president of Splunk. I call her a Renaissance woman. She's been a great leader. In public sector there's been this weird little pocket of AWS where it's, I guess, a sales division, but it's still its own company. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> And she just did the CIA deal. The DOD and the public sector partnerships are now private, a lot more private relationships. So it's not like just governments. You mentioned government and national security and these things. You start to see the ecosystem, not, not just be about companies, government and private sector. So this whole vibe of the telecomm being regulated, unregulated, unbundled is an interesting kind of theory. What's your thoughts and reactions to this kind melting pot of ecosystem change and evolution? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's a very nationalistic approach by the telcos, right? They sort of think about the countries that they operate in. There's a couple of groups that go across multiple countries, but can there be a global telco? Can that happen, right? Just like we say, you were saying it earlier, Netflix. Right? You didn't say Netflix, UK, right? And so can we have a global telco, right? That is challenging on a lot of different levels. But think about that in a public cloud starts to enable that idea. Right? Elon Musk is going to get Mars. >> Dave: Yep. >> John: Yeah. >> You need a planetary level telco, and I think that day is, I mean, I don't think it's tomorrow, but I think that's like 10, 20 years away. >> You're done. We're going to see it start this decade. It's already starting. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But we're going to see the fruits of that dividend. >> Danielle: Right, yeah. >> I got to ask you. You're a student of the industry and you got so much experience. It's great to have you on theCube and chat about, riff about, these things, but the the classic "Who's ready for disruption?" question comes up. And I think there's no doubt that the telcos, as an industry, has been slow moving, and the role and the importance has changed. People need the need to have the internet access. They need to access. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> So and you've got the Edge. Now applications are now running on a, since the iPhone 14 years ago, as you pointed out, people now are interested in how packets move. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> That's fast, whether it's a doctor or an emergency worker or someone. >> What would we have done in 2020 without the internet and broadband and our mobile phones? I mean. >> Dave: We would have been miserable. >> You know, I think about 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic hit a hundred years ago. Those guys did not have mobile phones, and they must have been bored, right? I mean, what are you going to do? Right? And so, yeah, I think, I think last year really moved a lot of thinking forward in this respect, so. >> Yeah, it's always like that animal out in the Serengeti that gets taken down, you know, by the cheetah or the lion. How do you know when someone is going to be disrupted? What's the, what's the tell sign in your mind? You look at the telco landscape, what is someone waiting to be disrupted or replaced look like? >> Know what? They're ostriches. Ostriches, how do you say that word right? They stick their head in the sand. Like they don't want to talk about it. La, la, la, I don't want to. I don't want to think about it. You know, they bring up all these like roadblocks, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to come visit you in another six months to a year, and let's see what happens when the guys that are moving fast that are open-minded to this. And it's, I mean, when you start to use the public cloud, you don't like turn it on overnight. You start experimenting, right? You start. You take an application that is non-threatening. You have, I mean, these guys are running thousands of apps inside their data centers. Pick some boring ones. Pick some old ones that no one likes. Move that to the public cloud. Play with it, right? I'm not talking about moving your whole network overnight tomorrow. You got to learn. You have no, I mean, very little talent in the telco that know how to program against the AWS stack. Start hiring. Start doing it. And you're going to start to learn about the compensation. And I used to do compensation, right? I spent a lot of time in HR, right? The compensation points and structures, and they can bear AWS and Google versus a telco. You want Telco stock? Do you want Google stock? >> John: Right, where do you want to go? >> Right? Right? And so you need to start. Like that's going to challenge the HR organization in terms of compensate. How do we compensate our people when they're learning these new, valuable skills? >> When you think about disruption, you know, the master or the professor of disruption, Clay Christensen, one of the best lectures he ever gave is we were at Cambridge, and he gave a lecture on the steel industry and he was describing it. It was like four layers of value in the steel industry, the value chain. It started with rebar, like the lowest end. Right? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> And the telco's actually the opposite. So, you know, when the international companies came in, they went after rebar, and the higher end steel companies said, "Nah, let them have it." >> Danielle: Let it go. >> "That's the low margin stuff." And then eventually when they got up to the high end, they all got killed. >> Danielle: It was over, yeah. >> The telcos are the opposite. They're like, you know, in the connectivity, and they're hanging on to that because it's so big, but all the high value stuff, it's already gone to the over-the-top players, right? >> It's being eaten away. And I'm like, "What is going to wake you guys up to realize those are your competitors?" That's where the battle is, right? >> Dave: That's really where the value is. >> The battle of the bastards. You're there by yourself, the Game of Thrones, and they're coming at you. >> John: You need a dragon. >> What are you doing about it? >> I need a dragon. I need a dragon to compete in this market. Riding on the dragon would be a good strategy. >> I know. I was just watching. 'Cause I have a podcast. I have a podcast called "Telco in 20," and we always put like little nuggets in the show notes. I personally review them. I was just reviewing the one for the keynote that we're putting out. And I had a dragon in my keynote, right? It was a really great moment. It was really fun to do. But there's, I don't know if you guys are Game of Thrones fans. >> Dave: Oh, yeah. >> John: For sure. >> Right? But there's a great moment when Daenerys guts her dragons, the baby dragons, and she takes over the Unsullied Army. Right? And it's just this, right? Like all of a sudden, the tables turn in an instant where she has nothing, and she's like on her quest, right? I'm on a quest. >> John: Comes out of the fire. >> Right, comes out of the fire. The unburnt, right? She has her dragons, right? She has them hatch. She takes over the Unsullied Army, right? Slays and starts her march, right? And I'm like, we're putting that clip into the show notes because I think that's where we are. I think I've hatched some dragons, right? The Cloud City Army, let's go, let's go take on Telco. >> John: Well, I mean to me... >> Easy. >> I definitely have made it happen because I heard many people talking about cloud. This is turning into a cloud show. The question is, when does this be, going to be a cloud show? You know it's just Cloud City is a big section of the show. I mean, all the big players are behind it. >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah. >> Amazon Web Services, Google, Azure, Ecosystem, startups thinking differently, but everyone's agreeing, "Why aren't we doing this?" >> I think, like I said, I mean, people are like, you're such a visionary. And how did, why do you think this will work? I'm like, it's worked in every other industry. Am I really that visionary? And like, these are the three best tech companies in the world. Like, are you kidding me? And so I think we've shown the momentum here. I think we're looking forward to 2022, you know? And do we see 2022, you get to start planning this the minute we get back. Right? >> John: Yeah. >> Like I wouldn't recommend doing this in a hundred days again. That was a very painful, but you know, February, I was, there's a sign inside NWC, February 28th, right? We're talking seven months. You got to get going now. >> John: Let's get on the phone. (John and Dave talking at the same time) >> I mean, I think you're right on. I mean, you know, remember Skype in the early days? >> Danielle: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It wasn't regional. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> It was just plug into the internet, right? >> Danielle: It was just Skype. It was just WhatsApp. >> Well, this great location, and if you can get a shot, guys, of the people behind us. I don't know if you can. If you're watching, check out the scene here. It's winding down. A lot of people having happy hour now. This is a social construct here at Cloud City. Not only is it chock full of information, reporting that we're doing and getting all the data and with the presentations on the main stage with Adam and the studio and the team. This is a place where people are meeting and there's deals being done face to face, intimate relationships. The best of the best are here. They make the trek, so there's been a successful formula. Of course theCube is in the middle of all the action, which we love. We're excited to be back. I want to thank you personally while we have you on stage here. >> I want to thank you guys and the crew. The crew has been amazing turning out videos on short order. We have all these crews in different cities. It's our own show has been virtual. You know, Adam's at Bristol, right? We're here. This was an experiment. We talked about this a hundred days ago, 90 days ago. Could we get theCube there and do the show, but also theCube. >> You are a visionary. And you said, made for TV hybrid event with your team, reduced television shows, theCube. We're digital. We love you guys. Great alignment, but it's magical because the content doesn't end here. The show might end. They might break down the beautiful plants and the exhibits, but the community is going to continue. The content and the conversations. >> Yeah. >> So. >> We are looking forward to it and. >> Yeah, super-glad, super-glad we did this. >> Awesome. Well, any final moments that you would like to share? And the last two minutes we have, favorite moments, observations, funny things that have happened to you, weird things that have happened to you. Share something that people might not know or a favorite moment. >> I think, I mean I don't know that people know we have a 3D printer in the coffee shops, and so you can upload any picture, and there are three 3D printing coffee art, right? So I've been seeing lots of social posts around people uploading their, their logos and things like that. I think Jon Bon Jovi, he was super-thankful to be back. He thanked me personally two different times of like, I'm just glad to be out in front of people. And I think just even just the people walking around, thank you for being brave, thank you for coming back. You've helped Barcelona, and we're happy to be together even if it is with masks. It's hard to do business with masks on. Everyone's happy and psyched. >> The one thing that people cannot do relative to you is they cannot ignore you. You are making a great big waves. >> Danielle: I shout pretty loud. It's kind of hard to ignore me. >> Okay, you're making a great big wave. You're on the right side, we believe, of history. Public cloud is driving the bus down main street of Cloud City, and if people don't get out of the way, they will be under the bus. >> And like I said, in my keynote, it's go time. Let's do it. >> Okay, thank you so much for all your tension and mission behind the cloud and the success of... >> Danielle: We'll do it again. We're going to do it again soon. >> Ketogi's hundred million dollar investment. Be the CEO of Togi as we follow that progress. And of course, Telco D. R. Danielle Royston, the digital revolution. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thank you, guys. It was super-fun. Thank you so much. >> This is theCube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're going to send it back to Adam in the studio. Thanks the team here. (Danielle clapping and cheering) I want to thank the team, everyone here. Adam is great. Chloe, great working with you guys. Awesome. And what a great crew. >> So great. >> Thank you everybody. That's it for theCube here on the last day, Wednesday, of theCube. Stay tuned for tomorrow, more action on the main stage here in Cloud City. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella sees a different future for cloud computing over the coming decade. And as Microsoft Ignite keynote, he laid out the five attributes that will define the cloud in the next 10 years. His vision is a cloud platform that is decentralized, ubiquitous, intelligent, sensing, and trusted. One that actually tickles the senses and levels the playing field between consumers and creators by placing tools in the hands of more people around the world. Welcome to this week's wiki buns cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll review the highlights of Nadella's Ignite keynote share our thoughts on what it means for the future of cloud specifically, and the tech industry generally. We'll also give you a more tactical view of Microsoft and compare its performance within the ETR's dataset to its peers. Satya Nadella's forward-looking cloud attributes comprised five key vectors that he talked about. The first was ubiquitous and decentralized computing, Nadella made the statement that we've reached peak centralization today that we're witnessing radical changes in computing architecture from the materials used to semiconductors software, and that is going to serve a new frontier that's forming at the edge. Nadella envisions a world where there will be more sovereignty and decentralized control. We couldn't agree more. The cloud universe is expanding and the lines are blurring between what's being done on-prem, across public clouds and the cloud experience which is going to extend everywhere, including the edge. And of course, data is going to be flowing through this hyper decentralized system. Next was sovereign data and ambient intelligence. To us data sovereignty means that whatever the local laws are the system is going to have the intelligence to govern privacy, ensure data provenance, and adhere to corporate edicts. Ambient intelligence is a field of research that leverages pervasive sensor networks and AI to respond to and anticipate humans and machines. Nadella sees the future where a business logic will move from being code that is written to code that is actually learned from data, pretty interesting. He sees this autodidactic system if you will, as fundamental to tackling big problems like personalized medicine or even climate change. Third, he talked about empowered creators and communities everywhere. Nadella said, there'll be increasingly a balance between consumption and creation. His talking about an economic balance essentially he's predicting that creation will be democratized and his vision is to put tools in the hands of people to allow them to tip the scales toward knowledge workers, frontline employees, students, everyone, essentially creating content, applications, code, et cetera power to the people if you will. And underneath this vision is a new form of or emerging new forms of Silicon operating systems and entirely transformative digital experiences. Next was economic opportunity for the global workforce. So picking up on the accelerated themes of remote work that were catalyzed by COVID, Nadella emphasize that the future has to accommodate flexibility in how, when and where people work. He sees a new model of productivity emerging, not necessarily defined by corporate revenue per employee for example, but by the economic advantages that become accessible to everyone through better access to technology, collaboration tools, education, and healthy lifestyles, all enabled by this ubiquitous cloud. Finally, trust by design, Nadella said that ethical principles must govern the design, development and deployment of AI. The system he said must be secure by design with zero trust built in to protect business assets and personal privacy. So this was a big vision that Nadella put forth it, connects the dots between bits and atoms and sets up Microsoft to extend its reach well beyond office productivity tools and cloud infrastructure. He cited the Microsoft cloud as the underpinning of its future and specifically called out Teams, he mentioned 365, HoloLens 2 and the announcement of Microsoft Mesh, a new mixed reality platform. Nadella said Mesh will do for virtual reality what X-Box live did for gaming. Take the experience from single person to multi-person imagine holographic images with no screens, empowering advances in medicine, science, technology, and very importantly social interactions. Now, one of the things that we took away from his talk was this notion of Microsoft as a technology arm's dealer. No, we're not, Nadella avoided slamming the competition directly by name one statement that he made, stood out. He said, " No customer wants to be dependent on a provider that sells them technology on one end and competes with them on the other" And to us this was a direct shot at Amazon, Google and Apple. How so you ask? And what does it tell us? In his book "Seeing Digital" author David Moschella said, "that Silicon Valley broadly defined as a duel disruption agenda." What does that mean? Not only are large tech companies disrupting horizontal layers of the tech stack like compute, storage, networking, database, security, applications, and so forth. But they're also disrupting industries Amazon and media, grocery, logistics, for example. Google and Amazon on healthcare, Google and Apple on automobiles, all three in FinTech. And it's likely this is just the beginning but Nadella's posture suggests that Microsoft for now anyway, is content being mostly a horizontal technology provider, aka arms dealer. Now, there are some examples where you could argue that Microsoft sort of crosses the line maybe as a games developer or as a SAS competitor. Do you really want to, if you're a SAS player do you want to run your system on Azure and compete with Microsoft? Well, it depends if you're vertically oriented or maybe horizontal in their swim lanes, but anyway, these are more natural cohorts to technology than say for example, Amazon's retail business. So I thought that was something that was worth taking a look at. All right, let's take a quick look at how Microsoft compares to a couple of the great tech giants of the past several decades. Here's a financial snapshot of Microsoft compared to Oracle a highly profitable software company and IBM an industry legend. The first two things that jumped right out of Microsoft, size and it's growth rate. Microsoft is twice the revenue of IBM and nearly four extent of Oracle. And yet Microsoft is growing in the mid-teens compared to low single digits for Oracle and IBM continues to shrink so extensible you can grow. Microsoft's gross margin model has been pulled down by its hardware business but its operating margins are unbelievable. Meanwhile, the cash on its balance sheet is immense much larger than Oracles, which is very impressive. It's certainly dwarfs that of IBM, a company that had to take on a lot of debt to acquire Red Hat and has a balance sheet, that increasingly looks more like Dell's than it's historical self. And then on the last two rows Oracle and IBM, both owners of their own cloud have been lapped by Microsoft in terms of CapEx and research & development investment. Ironically, as we pointed out, IBM's R & D spend in 2007 the year after AWS launched the modern era of cloud was comparable to that of Microsoft. Let's now pivot it to some of the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft fares. We'll start by sharing a fundamental basis of the ETR methodology, that is the calculation of net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum and here's how it's derived. This chart shows the components of Microsoft's net score. It comprises five parts and represents the percentage of customers within the ETR survey with specific spending profiles. The lime green is new adoptions, the forest green is increased spend of 6% or more for 2021 relative to 2020, the gray is flat spend, the pinkish slice is spend declining by more than 6% or 6% or more relative to last year and the bright red is replacing the platform. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score. As you can see, Microsoft's net score is 53% which is very high for $150 billion Company. Now let's put that in context and expand the scope here a little bit. This chart shows how Microsoft fares relative to its peers, the vertical axis shows net score against spending velocity and the horizontal axis shows market share. Market share measures pervasiveness in the survey. In the table insert, you can see the vendors they're sorted by net score and the shared end column is there as well, which represents the number of shared accounts in the dataset. On both accounts bigger is better. Now note the red dotted line, that's the 40% watermark which is my personal indicator of an elevated net score anything above that in our view is really solid. Microsoft is as usual off the charts strong well to the right with it's market presence and then an overall net score of 53% as we showed earlier. And then there's Azure, separate from Microsoft overall. We wanted to plot that specifically which of course it doesn't have the presence of Microsoft overall, no surprise, but it's still prominent on the x-axis and it has a net score approaching 70%, which is quite amazing. AWS not surprisingly is highly elevated with a presence that's even larger than Azure. And you can see Zoom, Salesforce and Google Cloud all above the 40% line. Google as we've reported is well off the pace in the horizontal axis and even though its net score is elevated, we would like to see it even higher, given its smaller size relative to AWS and Azure. You know, SAP always stands out because it's a large company and it's got a net score that's hovering just under 30%. It's not above that 40% line, but it's solid. And you can see IBM and Oracle now we're showing here IBM and Oracle overall so it's the whole kitchen sink comparable to Microsoft that turquoise dot, if you will. So you can see why those two are valued much lower Microsoft. The large base of its business that's declining is much, much larger than the pieces of their business that are growing. Now Oracle has some momentum, the Back Aaron's article on February 19th, which declared Oracle a cloud giant and it declared its stock a buy combined with some earnings upgrades including one today from Ramo Lyncho of Barclays has catapulted the stock to all time highs and a valuation over $200 billion. IBM is a different story as we've discussed frequently Arvind has a lot of work to do to get this national treasure back to what's prominent itself. Okay, let now unpack Microsoft's vast portfolio a bit and see where it's doing well and where it's making moves and maybe where it's struggling, some. This graphic shows Microsoft's net score across its entire product portfolio within the ETR taxonomy. And you can see it's pretty much killing it across the board. Microsoft plays in almost every sector in the ETR taxonomy and you can see the 40% red line and how many of its offerings are above that line. The yellow bar being the most recent survey and while there's quite a bit of gray, i.e. flat spend relative to 2020, we're talking about some very tough compares from last year. And yet there's still a huge chunk of the portfolio in the green meaning spending momentum is actually up from last year and some of Microsoft's most important sectors like Cloud and Teams and Analytics. Look only Skype and Microsoft Dynamics are lagging, so really nice story there in our view. Now let's come back and take a look at Microsoft's cloud business specifically as compared to its peers. So Satya basically said that Microsoft's future will build on top of its cloud and looking at this picture it's pretty encouraging for the company. This chart, again, shows net score or spending momentum inside specifically Fortune 500 customers and it's a key bellwether in the ETR dataset, and you can see Azure and Azure functions well above the 40% red line and extremely well positioned relative to AWS and GCP. Importantly, the yellow bar tells us that compared to previous surveys Microsoft's cloud business is actually gaining momentum in this very important sector. Now, other notable call-outs on this chart VMware Cloud, which, it's on-prem hybrid cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS, which is reportedly doing well but off from the momentum of its highs last spring. You can see Oracle jumped up indicating cloud momentum, but still well below the performance of the largest cloud players. The IBM Cloud appears to be a non-factor in the survey and as we previously stated, we'd like to see IBM recalibrate the financials for its cloud business and come up with a reporting framework that better represents the prevailing mental model of cloud computing. We think a cleaner number would allow IBM to build on the Red Hat momentum. I'm not sure what to make of the HPE boost, it looks significant, but in digging into the data it's only 17 data points, but look 17 within the Fortune 500 companies is not terrible. And HPE net score in that sector is more than double its overall cloud net score so that's positive we think. Okay, let's wrap by looking at how customers are thinking about multi-cloud adoption and really this data that we're about to show you simply asking customers about clouds they're using versus any type of long-term vision. So it's a good representation of what's happening today and what CIO is are thinking about in the near future particularly over the next 12 months. The survey asks customers to describe their cloud provider usage and strategy. You can see that only 14% of the survey respondents have exclusively a mono-cloud strategy, but now add in another 22% who were predominantly single cloud and you now have more than a third of the customer base gravitating toward mono-cloud. Another 14% say they're concentrating cloud providers more narrowly. Now on the flip side, you've got a big group, 29% that are moving toward multi-cloud and if you add in the additional 16% who say they are and will continue to be evenly spread, 45% of the survey is solidly headed in that direction so it's a mixed picture. What's the takeaway? Well, we think Andy Jassy is right when he says that while many customers use more than one cloud, they tend to have a primary provider and have something like a 70,30 or even 80,20 split between primary and secondary clouds. Now we think, however that this will change, but only to the extent that the vendor community is adding value on top of the existing hyperscale clouds. What we're saying and have been saying is that there is a real opportunity to create value on top of the cloud infrastructure that's being built out by AWS, Google and Microsoft. Instead of fearing cloud, the vendor community should be embracing it creating a layer on top, abstracting away the underlying complexities associated with cloud native, exploiting cloud native, and then building on top of that. Snowflake's data cloud vision is right on in my view, we can envision virtually every layer of the stack following suit. Even within database there are opportunities to identify more granular segments across clouds. For example, despite Snowflakes early multi-cloud lead you're seeing competitive firms like Teradata begin to architect a system across clouds that can query data warehouses from distributed locations, including on-prem as part of what they refer to as a data fabric, sounds kind of like Snowflakes global data mesh, or maybe better Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh. Yeah, sure but Teradata has capabilities that Snowflake doesn't for example, the ability to do complex joins and we can see plenty of market for both companies to differentiate. And why shouldn't similar vision extend from on-prem, across clouds to the edge for data protection, security, governance, hybrid compute ,analytics, federated applications, its a huge market that the hyperscale providers are likely too busy worrying about their own walled gardens to start building across on top of their competitors clouds. So Dell, HPE, VMware, Cisco, Palo Alto Fortunate, Zscaler or Cohesity, Veeam and hundreds of other tech companies, including by the way IBM and Oracle should be saying thank you to AWS, Google and Microsoft for spending all that money to build out great infrastructure on which they can build value, tap for future growth. And many of you will say, Hey, we're already doing this. Okay, I'll be watching to see the ratio of real versus slideware because generally today, in my opinion the denominator is much larger than the numerator. So when that ratio hits 1X we'll know it started to become real. Okay, that's it for today remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen so please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibun.com and siliconangle.com. Please comment on my LinkedIn post or you can tweet me @DVellante or feel free to email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey and data science action. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Be well, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Tech spending is poised to rebound as the economy reopens in 2021. CIOs and IT buyers, they expect a 4% increase in 2021 spending based on ETR's latest surveys. And we believe that number will actually be higher, in the six to 7% range even. The big drivers are continued fine tuning of, and investment in digital strategies, for example, cloud security, AI data and automation. Application modernization initiatives continue to attract attention, and we also expect more support with work from home demand, for instance laptops, et cetera. And we're even seeing pent-up demand for data center infrastructure and other major risks to this scenario, they remain the pace of the reopening, of course, no surprise there, however, even if there are speed bumps to the vaccine rollout and achieving herd immunity, we believe tech spending will grow at least two points faster than GDP, which is currently forecast at 4.1%. Hello and welcome to this week's (indistinct) on Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our latest macro view of the market, and then highlight a few key sectors that we've been watching, namely cloud with a particular drill down on Microsoft and AWS, security, database, and then we'll look at Dell and VMware as a proxy for the data center. Now here's a look at what IT buyers and CIOs think. This chart shows the latest survey data from ETR and it compares the December results with the year earlier survey. Consistent with our earlier reporting, we see a kind of a swoosh-like recovery with a slower first half and accelerating in the second half. And we think that CIOs are being prudently conservative, 'cause if GDP grows at 4% plus, we fully expect tech spending to outperform. Now let's look at the factors that really drive some of our thinking on that. This is data that we've shown before it asks buyers if they're initiating any of the following strategies in the coming quarter, in the face of the pandemic and you can see there's no change in work from home, really no change in business travel, but hiring freezes, freezing new deployments, these continue to trend down. New deployments continue to be up, layoffs are trending down and hiring is also up. So these are all good signs. Now having said that, one part of our scenario assumes workers return and the current 75% of employees that work from home will moderate by the second half to around 35%. Now that's double the historical average, and that large percentage, that will necessitate continued work from home infrastructure spend, we think and drive HQ spending as well in the data center. Now the caveat of course is that lots of companies are downsizing corporate headquarters, so that could weigh on this dual investment premise that we have, but generally with the easy compare in these tailwinds, we expect solid growth in this coming year. Now, what sectors are showing growth? Well, the same big four that we've been talking about for 10 months, machine intelligence or AI/ML, RPA and broader automation agendas, these lead the pack along with containers and cloud. These four, you can see here above that red dotted line at 40%, that's a 40% net score which is a measure of spending momentum. Now cloud, it's the most impressive because what you see in this chart is spending momentum or net score in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. Now cloud it stands out, as it's has a large market share and it's got spending velocity tied to it. So, I mean that is really impressive for that sector. Now, what we want to do here is do a quick update on the big three cloud revenue for 2020. And so we're looking back at 2020, and this really updates the chart that we showed last week at our CUBE on Cloud event, the only differences Azure, Microsoft reported and this chart shows IaaS estimates for the big three, we had had Microsoft Azure in Q4 at 6.8 billion, it came in at 6.9 billion based on our cloud model. Now the points we previously made on this chart, they stand out. AWS is the biggest, and it's growing more slowly but it throws off more absolute dollars, Azure grew 48% sent last quarter, we had it slightly lower and so we've adjusted that and that's incredible. And Azure continues to close that gap on AWS and we'll see how AWS and Google do when they report next week. We definitely think based on Microsoft result that AWS has upside to these numbers, especially given the Q4 push, year end, and the continued transition to cloud and even Google we think can benefit. Now what we want to do is take a closer look at Microsoft and AWS and drill down into those two cloud leaders. So take a look at this graphic, it shows ETR's survey data for net score across Microsoft's portfolio, and we've selected a couple of key areas. Virtually every sector is in the green and has forward momentum relative to the October survey. Power Automate, which is RPA, Teams is off the chart, Azure itself we've reported on that, is the linchpin of Microsoft's innovation strategy, serverless, AI analytics, containers, they all have over 60% net scores. Skype is the only dog and Microsoft is doing a fabulous job of transitioning its customers to Teams away from Skype. I think there are still people using Skype. Yes, I know it's crazy. Now let's take a look at the AWS portfolio drill down, there's a similar story here for Amazon and virtually all sectors are well into the 50% net scores or above. Yeah, it's lower than Microsoft, but still AWS, very, very large, so across the board strength for the company and it's impressive for a $45 billion cloud company. Only Chime is lagging behind AWS and maybe, maybe AWS needs a Teams-like version to migrate folks off of Chime. Although you do see it's an uptick there relative to the last survey, but still not burning the house down. Now let's take a look at security. It's a sector that we've highlighted for several quarters, and it's really undergoing massive change. This of course was accelerated by the work from home trend, and this chart ranks the CIO and CSO priorities for security, and here you see identity access management stands out. So this bodes well for the likes of Okta and SailPoint, of course endpoint security also ranks highly, and that's good news for a company like CrowdStrike or Forescout, Carbon Black, which was acquired by VMware. And you can see network security is right there as well, I mean, it's all kind of network security but Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet are some of the names that we follow closely there, and cloud security, Microsoft, Amazon and Zscaler also stands out. Now, what we want to do now is drill in a little bit and take a look at the vendor map for security. So this chart shows one of our favorite views, it's getting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal. Okta, note in the upper right of that little chart there that table, Okta remains the highest net score of all the players that we're showing here, SailPoint and CrowdStrike definitely looming large, Microsoft continues to be impressive because of its both presence, you can see that dot in the upper right there and it's momentum, and you know, for context, we've included some of the legacy names like RSA and McAfee and Symantec, you could see them in the red as is IBM, and then the rest of the pack, they're solidly in the green, we've said this before security remains a priority, it's a very strong market, CIOs and CSOs have to spend on it, they're accelerating that spending, and it's a fragmented space with lots of legitimate players, and it's undergoing a major change, and with the SolarWinds hack, it's on everyone's radar even more than we've seen with earlier high profile breaches, we have some other data that we'll share in the future, on that front, but in the interest of time, we'll press on here. Now, one of the other sectors that's undergoing significant changes, database. And so if you take a look at the latest survey data, so we're showing that same xy-view, the first thing that we call your attention to is Snowflake, and we've been reporting on this company for years now, and sharing ETR data for well over a year. The company continues to impress us with spending momentum, this last survey it increased from 75% last quarter to 83% in the latest survey. This is unbelievable because having now done this for quite some time, many, many quarters, these numbers are historically not sustainable and very rarely do you see that kind of increase from the mid-70s up into the '80s. So now AWS is the other big call out here. This is a company that has become a database powerhouse, and they've done that from a standing start and they've become a leader in the market. Google's momentum is also impressive, especially with it's technical chops, it gets very, very high marks for things like BigQuery, and so you can see it's got momentum, it does not have the presence in the market to the right, that for instance AWS and Microsoft have, and that brings me to Microsoft is also notable, because it's so large and look at the momentum, it's got very, very strong spending momentum as well, so look, this database market it's seeing dramatically different strategies. Take Amazon for example, it's all about the right tool for the right job, they get a lot of different data stores with specialized databases, for different use cases, Aurora for transaction processing, Redshift for analytics, I want a key value store, hey, some DynamoDB, graph database? You got little Neptune, document database? They've got that, they got time series database, so very, very granular portfolio. You got Oracle on the other end of the spectrum. It along with several others are converging capabilities and that's a big trend that we're seeing across the board, into, sometimes we call it a mono database instead of one database fits all. Now Microsoft's world kind of largely revolves around SQL and Azure SQL but it does offer other options. But the big difference between Microsoft and AWS is AWS' approach is really to maximize the granularity in the technical flexibility with fine-grained access to primitives and APIs, that's their philosophy, whereas Microsoft with synapse for example, they're willing to build that abstraction layer as a means of simplifying the experiences. AWS, they've been reluctant to do this, their approach favors optionality and their philosophy is as the market changes, that will give them the ability to move faster. Microsoft's philosophy favors really abstracting that complexity, now that adds overhead, but it does simplify, so these are two very interesting counter poised strategies that we're watching and we think there's room for both, they're just not necessarily one better than the other, it's just different philosophies and different approaches. Now Snowflake for its part is building a data cloud on top of AWS, Google and Azure, so it's another example of adding value by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure complexity and it obviously seems to be working well, albeit at a much smaller scale at this point. Now let's talk a little bit about some of the on-prem players, the legacy players, and we'll use Dell and VMware as proxies for these markets. So what we're showing here in this chart is Dell's net scores across select parts of its portfolio and it's a pretty nice picture for Dell, I mean everything, but Desktop is showing forward momentum relative to previous surveys, laptops continue to benefit from the remote worker trend, in fact, PCs actually grew this year if you saw our spot on Intel last week, PCs had peaked, PC volume at peaked in 2011 and it actually bumped up this year but it's not really, we don't think sustainable, but nonetheless it's been a godsend during the pandemic as data center infrastructure has been softer. Dell's cloud is up and that really comprises a bunch of infrastructure along with some services, so that's showing some strength that both, look at storage and server momentum, they seem to be picking up and this is really important because these two sectors have been lagging for Dell. But this data supports our pent-up demand premise for on-prem infrastructure, and we'll see if the ETR survey which is forward-looking translates into revenue growth for Dell and others like HPE. Now, what about Dell's favorite new toy over at VMware? Let's take a look at that picture for VMware, it's pretty solid. VMware cloud on AWS, we've been reporting on that for several quarters now, it's showing up in the ETR survey and it is well, it's somewhat moderating, it's coming down from very high spending momentum, so it's still, we think very positive. NSX momentum is coming back in the survey, I'm not sure what happened there, but it's been strong, VMware's on-prem cloud with VCF VMware Cloud Foundation, that's strong, Tanzu was a bit surprising because containers are very hot overall, so that's something we're watching, seems to be moderating, maybe the market says okay, you did great VMware, you're embracing containers, but Tanzu is maybe not the, we'll see, we'll see how that all plays out. I think it's the right strategy for VMware to embrace that container strategy, but we said remember, everybody said containers are going to kill VMware, well, VMware rightly, they've embraced cloud with VMware cloud on AWS, they're embracing containers. So we're seeing much more forward-thinking strategies and management philosophies. Carbon Black, that benefits from the security tailwind, and then the core infrastructure looks good, vSAN, vSphere and VDI. So the big thing that we're watching for VMware, is of course, who's going to be the next CEO. Is it going to be Zane Rowe, who's now the acting CEO? And of course he's been the CFO for years. Who's going to get that job? Will it be Sanjay Poonen? The choice I think is going to say much about the direction of VMware going forward in our view. Succeeding Pat Gelsinger is like, it's going to be like following Peyton Manning at QB, but this summer we expect Dell to spin out VMware or do some other kind of restructuring, and restructure both VMware and Dell's balance sheet, it wants to get both companies back to investment grade and it wants to set a new era in motion or it's going to set a new era in motion. Now that financial transaction, maybe it does call for a CFO in favor of such a move and can orchestrate such a move, but certainly Sanjay Poonen has been a loyal soldier and he's performed very well in his executive roles, not just at VMware, but previous roles, SAP and others. So my opinion there's no doubt he's ready and he's earned it, and with, of course with was no offense to Zane Rowe by the way, he's an outstanding executive too, but the big questions for Dell and VMware's what will the future of these two companies look like? They've dominated, VMware especially has dominated the data center for a decade plus, they're responding to cloud, and some of these new trends, they've made tons of acquisitions and Gelsinger has orchestrated TAM expansion. They still got to get through paying down the debt so they can really double down on an innovation agenda from an R&D perspective, that's been somewhat hamstrung and to their credit, they've done a great job of navigating through Dell's tendency to take VMware cash and restructure its business to go public, and now to restructure both companies to do the pivotal acquisition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and clean up it's corporate structure. So it's been a drag on VMware's ability to use its free cash flow for R&D, and again it's been very impressive what it's been able to accomplish there. On the Dell side of the house, it's R&D largely has gone to kind of new products, follow-on products and evolutionary kind of approach, and it would be nice to see Dell be able to really double down on the innovation agenda especially with the looming edge opportunity. Look R&D is the lifeblood of a tech company, and there's so many opportunities across the clouds and at The Edge we've talked this a lot, I haven't talked much about or any about IBM, we wrote a piece last year on IBM's innovation agenda, really hinges on its R&D. It seems to be continuing to favor dividends and stock buybacks, that makes it difficult for the company to really invest in its future and grow, its promised growth, Ginni Rometty promised growth, that never really happened, Arvind Krishna is now promising growth, hopefully it doesn't fall into the same pattern of missed promises, and my concern there is that R&D, you can't just flick a switch and pour money and get a fast return, it takes years to get that. (Dave chuckles) We talked about Intel last week, so similar things going on, but I digress. Look, these guys are going to require in my view, VMware, Dell, I'll put HPE in there, they're going to require organic investment to get back to growth, so we're watching these factors very, very closely. Okay, got to wrap up here, so we're seeing IT spending growth coming in as high as potentially 7% this year, and it's going to be powered by the same old culprits, cloud, AI, automation, we'll be doing an RPA update soon here, application modernization, and the new work paradigm that we think will force increased investments in digital initiatives. The doubling of the expectation of work from home is significant, and so we see this hybrid world, not just hybrid cloud but hybrid work from home and on-prem, this new digital world, and it's going to require investment in both cloud and on-prem, and we think that's going to lift both boats but cloud, clearly the big winner. And we're not by any means suggesting that their growth rates are going to somehow converge, they're not, cloud will continue to outpace on-prem by several hundred basis points, throughout the decade we think. And AWS and Microsoft are in the top division of that cloud bracket. Security markets are really shifting and we continue to like the momentum of companies in identity and endpoint and cloud security, especially the pure plays like CrowdStrike and Okta and SailPoint, and Zscaler and others that we've mentioned over the past several quarters, but CSOs tell us they want to work with the big guys too, because they trust them, especially Palo Alto networks, Cisco obviously in the mix, their security business continues to outperform the balance of Cisco's portfolio, and these companies, they have resources to withstand market shifts and we'll do a deeper drill down at the security soon and update you on other trends, on other companies in that space. Now the database world, it continues to heat up, I used to say on theCUBE all the time that decade and a half ago database was boring and now database is anything but, and thank you to cloud databases and especially Snowflake, it's data cloud vision, it's simplicity, we're seeing lots of different ways though, to skin the cat, and while there's disruption, we believe Oracle's position is solid because it owns Mission-Critical, that's its stronghold, and we really haven't seen those workloads migrate into the cloud, and frankly, I think it's going to be hard to rest those away from Oracle. Now, AWS and Microsoft, they continue to be the easy choice for a lot of their customers. Microsoft migrating its software state, AWS continues to innovate, we've got a lot of database choices, the right tool for the right job, so there's lots of innovation going on in databases beyond these names as well, and we'll continue to update you on these markets shortly. Now, lastly, it's quite notable how well some of the legacy names have navigated through COVID. Sure, they're not rocketing like many of the work-from-home stocks, but they've been able to thus far survive, and in the example of Dell and VMware, the portfolio diversity has been a blessing. The bottom line is the first half of 2021 seems to be shaping up as we expected, momentum for the strongest digital plays, low interest rates helping large established companies hang in there with strong balance sheets, and large customer bases. And what will be really interesting to see is what happens coming out of the pandemic. Will the rich get richer? Yeah, well we think so. But we see the legacy players adjusting their business models, embracing change in the market and steadily moving forward. And we see at least a dozen new players hitting the radar that could become leaders in the coming decade, and as always, we'll be highlighting many of those in our future episodes. Okay, that's it for now, listen, these episodes remember, they're all available as podcasts, all you got to do is search for Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll you'll get them so please listen, like them, if you like them, share them, really, I always appreciate that, I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and really would appreciate your comments and always do in my LinkedIn posts, or you can always DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, and tell me what you think is happening out there. Don't forget to check out ETR+ for all the survey action, this is David Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, we'll see you next time. (downbeat music)

>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector >>Hi and welcome to the Q Virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of the public sector. I'm your host, Rebecca >>Knight. >>Today we have two guests for our segment. We have Kevin McCallum Jr. He is the chief technology officer at Maximus. Thanks for joining us, Kevin, and we have way. And we have Steve Zimmerman, who is the vice president of consulting services at Insight. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Steve. >>Thank you for having us appreciate it. >>So I want to start by asking. You both have to tell us a little bit more about your company's. Kevin. Let's start with you. Tell us a little bit more about Maximus. >>Yes, Thanks for having me. Maximus is a 40 year old company. We partner with state, federal and local governments to provide communities with critical health and human service programs. We leverage extensive experience to develop high quality services and solutions that are cost effective and tailored to their unique needs. One of the things that we do is offer government's ability to programs rapidly and scalable so that we can focus on the automation and their operations. We do services from Medicare to Medicaid, Welford work, and we have comprehensive solutions. Help the government's run effectively and efficiently. >>Great, Steve, tell us a little bit about insight. >>Yeah, sure. Um, Insight is a Fortune 500 company, you know, in 2020 will roughly do you know, probably a plus billion dollars in revenue. Global company. You know, we have thousands of treaty GIC relationships, but I'd say we have probably a couple 100 partners. We focus on one of those key partners to us is a W s. Right. As we go to market, Azzawi start, you know, working with our customers around transformation, of which we're gonna talk a little bit about that today with Kevin as it relates, Thio incite public sector. It's >>a pretty sizable >>part of our business. You know, we'll do about $1.5 billion in revenue. We have 200 plus contract vehicles, will work out there over 500 plus teammates, and we're seeing that business grow quarter over quarter, 20% growth. So It's a big investment for us and really looking forward to hearing Kevin talk about Maximus, uh, to the team, because obviously it's a big lever for us for inside public sector to get the word out there about the great transformation work. What you do with our customers. >>That's a great segue. So let's go back to you, Kevin, and talk a little bit about Maximus. Cloud transformation. Why did you hire insight for help you with this? >>Yeah, A Z We started our journey. One of the things we realized is as we were moving to the cloud is the experience. We needed a trusted partner and we ran an RFP process looking for partners out there that have done it that have done major data center programs. You're moving large companies, you know, We're moving about 6000 workloads 160 plus applications. So it was not a light or easy project and insight fit that. Aziz, We went through the interview process. It became very clear that they have done this for Fortune 500 companies in the past and their experience is beneficial to helping us drive to the future and the other factors is we wanted to make sure that once we were done with the project, we had the experience internally that they helped us with Thio drive forward. >>So talking about the importance of a trusted partner, which is such a key component of digital transformation cloud journeys tell us a little bit about the the strategy tied to the data center transformation and why you chose AWS. >>Sure. So, as we started doing our research, we did analysis across all of the cloud providers who were out there. AWS is clear leader in the marketplace. Their technology is better aligned with what Maximus has as the underlying technologies were, ah, majority of Lennox Base. We also have windows. We have Oracle, which, with the AWS depth on breath of our offerings, tied better to what we had. The other thing we were looking to do is get rid of our monolithic off the shelf products and use mawr of the cloud based products that are out there. Amazon has a very deep, uh, native technology that allows you to replace your old services where you had to bolt on or purchase another product to something that is integrated and streamlined, you know, down Thio, how do you monitor your systems? How do you do logs things like that. And, you know, as we looked at the time frame, we had to deliver this. They had to be able to grow with us. So as we were building out, new infrastructure were able to build where previously internally. With data centers, you have to buy infrastructure. You wait for it to arrive, you install it. Amazon has it at the click of a ah button. So we're able Thio basically have environment stood up in a day rather than having to wait weeks for it. So and the last thing was up time. So you know Amazon. They're five nines plus in up time and most of our contracts or three nines or better requirements. We had to find a bender that had multiple availability zones and regions that allowed us to be flexible in how we deployed. >>So talking about the convenience and the ability to streamline, and also the need for flexibility in the covert era. Of course, the word hybrid work environments has taken on a new meaning. But I want to ask you about how you see the hybrid era in the long term affecting Maximus. >>Yeah. Since Maximus is a government contractor, we will always be in a hybrid, uh, set up. So some of our contracts are very restrictive, especially when you get into our S d. O. D. And some of those agencies you have a fed ramp requirement is right. Well, with some of the federal agencies. So some of those components about to stay internally So where we can force, uh, you know, moving to the cloud because of the flexibility we have to deploy, that is the right will go. Um, co vid has introduced a new complexity. When it started back in March, you know, Maximus had 30,000 or so employees, and we instantly were thrown into You gotta make those employees get those employees to work from home. So we used Amazon's workspace Thio push our employees to work from home, where, you know, some of the employees and some of our contracts are customer owned equipment. So we couldn't actually take that equipment home. So we had to move to a B y o d model on Amazon workspaces in order to get the users to work from home and the complexity that, with what Amazon has to offer, allowed us to quickly move over 25,000 employees on the Amazon workspaces and work from home and then keeping the data center migration moving in the middle of it has also been, ah, challenge. So we will, in our federal space, still have internal data centers. Integration points that Amazon offers with their inter connects is key toe. How we make it a seamless process because we may have a business unit has stuff sitting in the data center and at Amazon, and they have to look at the seamless package. >>Steve, I want to bring you in here a little bit into this conversation. Cloud transformation, digital transformation. These are These are difficult and huge undertaking in the best of times. How does this pandemic this health crisis emergency. How has that affected the way you help your clients the way you work with your clients? Collaborate, communicate, talk a little bit about the effect of Kobe on this on the >>eso I would. I'll answer the question in a couple different ways, so I would agree with Kevin because, you know, forget about what we do with our customers. You know, we had a pivot really quick to write all remote workforce. You know, I think about my team, you know, 1000 plus teammates. Everyone's 80% travel all gone like, um, and I write eso everybody working remote. Everybody work from their homes. And but the challenging part was working with our customers. And, you know, I look at you know, I looked at with Kevin. You know, I've never met Kevin in person, you know, frankly, and there's teammates have come on to our to the project and execute executing this program remotely, so it makes it that much harder working with the customer. Um, you know, doing more video chats. You know, our methodology is built to be all remote. We have a proprietary tool called snap start that allows to bail scan environments. All that things done. Remote migrations could be done remote. The hard part is when you have to go on site because there's this stuff you have to go on site for around physical inventory to look at the equipment, but it just makes it that much harder. You know, I think he taking advantage of these video tools like we're doing today. You know, I can't tell me how many Skype You know how many calls have been on with Kevin like this and with his peers and with his leadership. But communication is really important program like this because, you know, in a program like this, there will be problems, right? And there will be challenges and, you know, getting on a call on being I will look at Kevin face to face and see what his reaction is really key. But you gotta work that much harder. You gotta work that much harder now in the pandemic. You know, I have other projects right now leaving with this other projects that, frankly, we have sold all remote and we're doing it all remote. And what I'm seeing with the bidam IQ is an acceleration of digital transformation. So, other similar projects like we're doing with Kevin. We're doing for other large fortune 500 companies because it's an acceleration of Hey, look, we gotta be old digital now, so it'll be interesting to see you know how the pandemic effects is long term because it is definitely accelerating out their digital transformation if you haven't done it, you're in trouble because it's gonna eat your company alive. >>Mhm. So, Kevin, he's talking. He talked a little bit about she talked a little bit about the importance of communication, particularly when work so many people are working from home. Um, talk a little bit of about other best practices that have emerged. Things that you have noticed. Things that you advice you would have to your peers. I mean, a Z we heard from Steve. If you're not there yet, you're in trouble. But for the for the people, for the executives out there who are watching this, What advice would you have for them? >>Yeah, I think that you know this this is brought to light. You know, there was always a view that you had to be in an office on a white board and actual actually functioning in that fashion. So, you know, before the pandemic, I was traveling three weeks a month on now, not traveling. I feel that I actually get more work done. I actually feel that I'm closer to the team just because we've introduced a lot of different digital channels. So now we have slack we have teams we do zoom. I require everybody to be on a on video, whereas previously before the pandemic you'd rarely have anybody on video. Um, and you've seen Ah, transformation is people pick up the phone a lot quicker than they did in the past. So it is, actually, I believe, brought the team closer together because now you know, everybody's on. Um, the downside of it is everybody's on all the time. So you've also had to have people step away from work because generally when they take PTO, they leave the office that go somewhere with their family. Now it's your kind of at home. There's not much to dio. You kinda have to force them to take the time off. One of the major factors that has has been interesting is we're doing this transformation in the middle of co vid with moving. All of our resource is the home. So we've we've had to take pauses, toe focus on getting everybody to work from home. Okay, now their work from home back to the project. And, you know, it's kind of a change the timeline a little bit, but in the end, you know we have some hard deadlines to meet. So it's been an interesting transition. You >>know, Kevin, um, I wanna agree with you two points is, uh you know, I think we're also getting not only your time, but also senior leadership, that I think, frankly, we never would have gotten, you know, I'm talking, you know, your peers and your leadership, Like I would fly for those meetings. I think about all the time that I've saved. But then again, it never ends, right? Never. It begins and never ends. And, you know, one of the things I'm concerned about is you know, the long term burnout factor for these folks because and depending on what state you're in, it never ends. You don't have anywhere to go, right. And you know, I think about teammates. I think you know, Kevin, I have talked about this related to our project like burdens and really thing right now for sure. 889 months into this thing. It's a real thing. Is people they have to focus on. Is is work sometimes. So it's a it's a concern for all of us is a project team is we start looking at the executing. This continue to execute this program for the next year. >>And it really highlights the importance of visionary leadership and a leader who cares who is empathetic, who is checking in with his or her team and making sure that the colleagues feel appreciated and cared for. I want you both to just give us look into your crystal ball is a little bit and talk about the where you see things 12, 24 months from now. Hopefully there will be a vaccine and we will return to somewhat of a of a new normal. Um, talk a little bit about where you see the Maximus transformation in two years. Absolutely. Yeah. Start with you. >>So s so you know, our cloud migration. We have some hard deadlines through next year, so we have a focus with insight to get that completed by September next year because our data center contracts are up and we've got to get out. You know, one of the the advantages of where we're headed is to move into more of a Dev ops model where you know you're able thio enable groups that have previously not been able to do work just do thio. The infrastructure was set up your now, enabling them to do deployments, get into production and have full stack ownership. That's really where our focus is. Is enablement of the teams that couldn't do the work previously because now you're in a different type of environment. Um, the other thing is being able thio be more agile. So as we move forward into the cloud journey, we as a company are consort contracts quicker. We are part of the, you know, contract tracing on unemployment insurance. We've done a lot of contracts with states that you know previously most of our contracts or anywhere from a 62 120 day startup. These contracts and contact tracing and covert projects. We've had to start them up in three days. That's having 500 employees online on workspaces on Genesis Cloud and fully functional, and it has been a challenge. But it also has introduced a a better way to do business because now we can we can move quicker for our customers and we can get contracts where they come and say, Hey, I need something in the next couple days. If you look further down the road. You know, it's taking the advantage of what Amazon has to offer, you know, moving from arm or monolithic programs like, you know, we sit on Oracle on Lenox today. You know, we could move into Aurora, which opens up the doors and floodgates, because then you manage, er a little differently. You manage your data a little differently. That's really where I think the the market's going and where we can actually transform our business. Even better, Thio, where we could be more flexible. We can start up quicker and, you know, be doom or things for our customers. >>The final word from you >>e I think it's gonna be a hybrid world, right? It's at least in the short term. And you know, we believe it's all about the workload and getting those workloads or applications, you know, in in the right spot, whether it be public or private and helping our customers with that journey, you know, just a pile on with Kevin talked about around Dev ops. Once you get a guy to get once you get all the stuff over there, you still got to manage it, Whether it's in a W. S or, you know, on Prem. You still gotta have a process to do that. So we see a lot of opportunity around the Modern I t operations and helping with that way. We want to continue to be a trusted partner. Thio Maximus. It's been a great relationship, but I want to thank Kevin and his his leadership team for trusting in us. And we look forward, Um, or more success with him in the future. >>Excellent. Thank you both so much. Kevin and Steve, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you. >>I'm your host, Rebecca. Night. Stay tuned. For more of the Cube virtual coverage of AWS reinvent with special coverage of the public sector.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. It's a virtual event, like all the events in 2020, but we've been going there since 2013. We're happy to be back this year and we're excited to have for the first time on theCUBE, our next guest, she's Kelly Herod the US SAP Offering Leader for Deloitte Consulting. Kelly, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Jeff, thanks so much for having me. >> Absolutely, so first time on, on theCUBE, you guys have a really interesting concept at Deloitte, you call it the Kinetic Enterprise. What is the Kinetic Enterprise all about? >> Yes. So if you think about the past, organizations built their technology infrastructures to be what we would call built to last, the future though is all about built to evolve. And that's exactly what the Kinetic Enterprise is. It's really how we're helping our clients create the right technology infrastructures that evolve with their business. And Kinetic Enterprise is focused on four key pillars. The first, that we're building a technology solution that's clean. That means we want to have reduced amount of custom code or things that we may have built that really rack up your technical debt. The second pillar is that it's intelligent. So we're leveraging all of the technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, to really automate and change the way in which an organization runs their business. The third pillar is that it's responsive, and that means it's on the cloud and this is where AWS comes in. And then the last pillar is that it's inclusive. So it uses all of the technologies and microservices available to really optimize and achieve a company's business value objectives. >> So that is a great summary, and I've got the list of the four pillars. It's just interesting you lead with clean. You know, there's a lot of conversation about digital transformation and move fast and be dynamic, you know, would be kind of an opposite to static. But clean, interesting choice of words. It runs with core... Core clean ERP with minimum technical debt. Why clean is such an important thing? I get kind of intelligent and responsive, but clean is an interesting attribute to pick. >> Absolutely, so if you take a step back and think... (Kelly hangs) when comes to ERPs, when ERPs came out, there was... (Kelly hangs) how you're going to run your entire organization on this one solution. What we've found is that as companies have put ERPs, they've gone through and created so much customization, that it's that which makes it very difficult to be able to keep up with technology changes or actually migrate to the next versions. So the concept here is if you're going to go in and put in brand new ERP, such as an SAP S/4HANA, this time around in order to achieve the promise of ERPs, let's make it clean. Let's stick to as much standard functionality as possible within the core, and then we innovate on the edges. And so that will allow us in the future to maintain that flexibility or dynamicism of a Kinetic Enterprise. >> Right. So I have to tease you Kelly 'cause SAP R/3 and ERP is not necessarily synonymous with digital transformation, speed, agility, and embracing change. So you've been involved in Deloitte's SAP practice for a long time. Why should people start to rethink about SAP in terms of being responsive, in terms of being able to change quickly and to your vocabulary, more kinetic? >> And you're right. You know, I've been doing SAP for 20 years. So I actually did start back in the R/3 days. And, you know, I would just say that things are changing, is evolving. You know, SAP themselves has been going through a transformation, a revolution. You look at the ERP landscape as a whole, all of the ERP players are moving to the cloud. The technology is the backbones are changing. Now the reality is, you know, going in and actually changing out your ERP, no matter what solution you're using, it's a big endeavor or undertaking. The goal here, and why we're partnering with SAP, partnering with AWS is really focused on how can we make this more efficient for our clients? More importantly, I like to think about it as how can we make this less of a one and done, and more of a let's keep transforming the technologies and the business as things are changing in the market, along the way. And using technologies to even change how we implement, allows us to do that. >> So, Kelly, another thing a lot of people probably don't think of is SAP and AWS, together in the same sentence. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that are much more intelligent about this, but for those that aren't as familiar, tell us a little bit about the relationship with SAP and AWS and then how you guys are leveraging that at Deloitte. >> Absolutely. So when you... There's a couple of things that I would bring up. One is SAP S/4HANA solutions, in particular, but any SAP environment that you're running on, one of the objectives most of our clients are focused on is how to move to the cloud, and that's where AWS comes in. You can absolutely run any of your SAP solutions on AWS. And what that brings you with is more flexibility, so that you can actually scale or contract your infrastructure that you're running SAP on based on your business needs. The second thing that we've been partnering with AWS to do is a little bit of what I just mentioned, which was a teaser around, how do you change the way you even go about implementing an SAP solution or start to migrate your business? So one of the things we asked ourselves was, could we radically change how you jumpstart an S/4 implementation? And what we decided to do is team up with AWS and leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, most importantly, standing up an environment on AWS. We actually created what we call Kinetic Finance Startup. Many of our clients are choosing to start with finance and specifically SAP central finance to begin their journey to the new S/4HANA environment. And what we've been able to do is create a touchless build solution, so over a weekend, we can actually connect to your existing ERP solution. Majority of those is starting with an ECC environment. We can extract the data, we can use harmonization rules to actually change and modify your data and optimize it for the future. And then we actually through completely touchless built-in automation, stand up a brand new AWS environment with S/4HANA on it and actually automate the configuration and testing of the basic financial transactions. So when you come in the next week and we start the conversation with the client, we're actually looking at a real life S/4HANA system on AWS with their mas... >> Oh, that's... >> So the whole concept is to change how we engage. >> Right. So again, I don't know that I were to think of finance as kind of a lead application, to start this journey. I mean, I can see on one hand, it is the system of record and it, you know, it has a lot of very important information that's got to eventually get into finance. On the other hand, it seems like there's less critical, maybe lower hanging fruit that's less risky. Is it because you can run it kind of in a parallel path for some period of time, but it strikes me that finance might not be the first place you go to look for some early wins. >> It's actually what you just said about the parallelism. So the reason we've seen that finance actually was one of the starting points is even if you look at the history of SAP's S/4HANA solution, way back before we got to that, it started with a concept called smart accounting or simple finance. And the theory here is, you could actually... If a company has, let's say multiple ERPs, as most do, you can actually grab the financial information, bring it into a new S/4 or central finance environment, and actually combine or merge the accounting information to get improved reporting, optimize a shared service organization. So it's actually a lower risk way to start the journey before going and touching the heart of the business or core operations, or manufacturing, for example, >> That's pretty interesting. So you run it in parallel for a while and then eventually does, is the plan that it takes over, from the old. So it is effectively kind of, I guess, a slightly delayed lift and shift, or maybe it's a reassemble and then a flip. I don't know how you would describe it because it's not really lift and shift. >> It's not really lift and shift actually, you have two options. You can either over time pull all of your business processes out of the underlying ERP solutions and bring them into the S/4HANA environment or multiple S/4HANA environments. Or some companies may choose to continue to... (Kelly hangs) Especially if you're in an industry where you do a lot of acquisitions or divestitures, you may not have an intention of ever combining all of your ERPs, but you may want to change each of them to S/4HANA underneath, and then have one environment in which you're pulling your data together to really consolidate your financial reporting. >> That's great. I want to follow up on something that you mentioned, which is the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And we talk a lot about, right? Those are hot buzzwords all over the place, but, you know, I'm pretty vehement in that, you know, general purpose AI and ML is kind of interesting, but where the real interesting stuff ends is where the rubber hits the road, is in applied. And it sounds like you've got a pretty interesting application where you're applying this technology to help make this move to cloud go a little bit smoother. >> Yes. One of the areas, you know, since we've been talking a bit about finance then I'll use it as an example. Is if you think about it, whenever we go in and we're typically working with... (Kelly hangs) especially in finance, you know, one of the topics is, how to optimize a chart of accounts? So over time we've done this hundreds of times, if we can look at different sectors, different industries, we can use benchmark chart of accounts. So instead of making this a paper-based exercise that individuals are doing, why not take that and actually use artificial intelligence machine learning to create data harmonization rules, so that technologies can actually do that same work. And so that's been one of the things we've been working on that I personally find very interesting just in my finance background. >> Right. And is this a relatively new thing, or have you guys been doing this for a while? >> Actually, it's something that over the last 12 months, we've been focused on building out in partnership with AWS. So it's fairly new. >> That's great. I want... I'd love to shift gears a little bit, and talk about COVID, and the impact of COVID on your business. Clearly in March, right? It was the light switch moment and everybody had to work from home and it was a quick rush to make sure that everybody was safe and we could support our remote workers, that said, can't help with the ba... All the bad stuff that's happening in hospitality and travel, and a whole lot of other industries. So that aside and that's bad stuff. In the tech industry, we were able to make the move, but now we know we're six, seven, eight months into this thing, and it's clear that, you know, we're going to have many elements of this going forward for a while. So I'm curious just from your business and your customer point of view, if you can share, you know, kind of the contrast of what happened in March and April to what you're seeing now and how this new reality, whatever this new reality is going to be, as we, you know, continue to evolve is impacting this digital transformation conversations? >> It is interesting. So if I pivot back to March, when this all occurred, you know, it truly did feel an instant going from in-person. And as consultants we travel and typically have a Monday through Thursday, or Monday through Friday type of travel schedule to an instant working from home overnight. And, you know, I'm really proud of our teams and how they seamlessly made that transition. Many, including myself, were actually leading clients through final cut overs in parallel to this happening. And we were able to really pivot and make those shifts, and I was reflecting with one of the executives I worked with, you know, she and I, you know, six months later, we're looking back at how we did that and how impressed we were with what the team pulled off. And since then, they've been able to do several other go lives, which is great. But I think that it was something we had to do quickly. I think many would have said it couldn't have been done that you would see the whole world move to a working from home environment, but we did. What it tells me is it gives me a lot of hope for a lot of the things that businesses can do in the future. In the past we used to constrain ourselves of, Oh, there's no way we could ever get XYZ done, or we can't make this type of change in the world, but we can. If I flash forward to now, I think we're very settled in kind of this new way of working, but I'm also hopeful for what the future is going to look like. I don't believe it will be a pivot all the way back to... Especially for consultants traveling on a regular basis of Monday through Friday. Instead, I think we're going to create models that give people and organizations the flexibility they need to really balance some of their personal responsibilities along with their work responsibilities. My hope and expectations is that also opens up options so that all organizations have access to more talent that they may not have had before. And I think that also means global talent. I think we're showing we can work as global teams, which means, you know, I could now have members from Japan joining, you know, my permanent leadership team in ways that I maybe never have thought of before. Those are just some examples of what I expect and hope for all of us that we'll see coming out of this. >> Hopefully and I know... Like you said, you've been a consultant for years and years and years, and you guys spend lots of time on airplanes, and hopefully you don't have to spend quite so much time on airplanes because you don't necessarily have to be there all the time. But you talked about an interesting thing and that's talent and opening up the opportunity to get more talent that maybe you wouldn't have ever considered. And along those same lines, right? Is the move in diversity and inclusion. And I just watched a show that you did a few months ago, called the... "A Chance for Change: Accelerating Business Recovery, Through Gender Diversity," on a Facebook interview, very cool panel, really enjoyed it. And I want to follow up on some of those things, 'cause you've made some really simple and poignant points. And one of the things that you said definitively, go back to the wide diverse talent and perspective equals winning in business, period. I love that. You know, we hear this all the time that, you know, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also good for business. And isn't it nice when those two things can actually line up. And you just talked about, you know, in more of a generic sense, the ability to open up your talent window when there's a worldwide talent shortage, both for geography, but also the work in diversity and inclusion and to continue to hold the momentum that continues to build in this area. I wonder if you could, you know, kind of share your thoughts on that, and your position and what's going on with Deloitte. >> Absolutely. You know, I do think this is one of those key pivotal moments for all of us, and I believe we have, coming out of this an option to really move the needle on our diversity and inclusion, and equality efforts. You know, one example I think about women, women in leadership positions. You know, being in consulting, you know, one of the challenges has always been that we do travel a lot, and it can be difficult to balance all the responsibilities, professional and personally. I think with a move to more flexible work arrangements, less travel, or travel for purpose is what I would highlight for the future. I think it opens the door to many more women being able to have careers in consulting, if that's what they, you know, had desired. I also think it allows them to have... You know, spend their entire careers in consulting and in ways we never saw before. And that means you'll see as significant movement and women in leadership positions. I also think this applies to underrepresented minorities. I hope that from all of this, instead of there may be companies that focus on recruiting from, you know, schools that are local to them or within their surrounding areas. I think this gives us an opportunity to really open that aperture up and look at talent from any school or university, or geography, and being able to get the right skill sets in the door and the right talent. Therefore you can actually see movement and diversity within teams, as well as at the leadership levels for URMs. >> Right. Right. And really managing to the right things too. I think that's the other thing that's coming out of this, and we've had a lot of conversations on work from home or work from anywhere. You guys are a little bit different than the consultant 'cause your team is there, usually local at the client site for some period of time. But for a lot of people, it's the first time they are not sitting across from a desk or, you know, within close proximity. Now you too, in your teams. And so, the shift changes that now you have to judge output, (Jeff chuckles) and not activity. And you would think that that would be a great and easy thing to execute, but we're hearing more and more that it's not necessarily. And you really highlighted, I think, three leadership traits that are always important, but more important now than ever before in that other interview. And I just want to call them out 'cause I thought it was worth calling out. You know, empathy has never been more important. Resilience, and my favorite one you said at the end, calm in the storm. I just wonder again, if you could share, you know, kind of, as you've gone through it, both, you know, as somebody at Deloitte within the greater Deloitte group, but then also in managing your own teams, to maintain that calm in the storm and to maintain, you know, empathetic leadership, because I think you've said it before, right? This is a personal challenge that we're all going through. We all have different things going on at home, whether it's the spouses working, the kids are doing homeschool. People are taking care of older parents, this and that. It's a real personal thing, and so these leadership characteristics, these softer leadership characteristics have never been more important >> That's so true. And, you know, when I think about the empathy part, right now what we're going through is also about how is each of us as leaders also sharing a bit more about how we're experiencing this? I think the sharing of stories is what also helps many on the teams adapt, adjust. The reality is when you're working on camera all day and, you know, in the past, imagine that you maybe were having a tough day or you weren't feeling that great, you weren't on camera all day with every one of your coworkers. You we're actually, you know, sitting in an office, you may have to go to the conference room to do some meetings, but you didn't look... (Kelly hangs) like someone was kind of staring at you all day long. Now, when we're working from home virtually and we're on Zoom or Skype or WebEx, et cetera, all day, it does feel like you're under the lights when you're on camera. And there's a lot of pressure and people are trying to figure out how to manage their own emotions while doing that. And, you know, my message would say as an empathetic leader, it's okay for you to also share when you might be having a tough go that day. Maybe one of your children has been kind of acting out and they didn't really want to do the virtual school. It's okay to share in that because everyone's going through it, and it makes us all more human. >> Right. >> And it makes us all more connected. >> Right. Well, I will share with you a pro tip, we've done a few of these interviews and it is okay to let people turn off the camera. And I think as a manager, I think it's actually an okay thing to say, okay, everyone, let's just turn off our cameras and get a break from that camera that's got that eye on you all the time, because it is just another, you know, kind of a factor that we have to deal with. Well, go ahead. >> And I was going to ask, what do you actually, you know, I don't know what one of your techniques is, but I know mine is some of the meetings, it's actually just go back to traditional telephone calls (Jeff chuckles) and actually even just being on your cell, put on your air, you know, your earbuds, or your headphones and even walk. >> Right. >> So I think the other thing we're all missing is actually that movement, the steps to go to the coffee maker and back, or to lunch and back, we don't have them anymore. So you've got to work extra hard, actually getting those extra steps in calories and just mental breaks at times. >> Yeah, well then there's a whole another tranche on walking during meetings. And I used have a boss that I would only do one-on-ones while we took a walk. He always says, I get in there... 'Cause then there's, you know, you're not necessarily looking at each other. And if there's some sensitive things or tough conversations, sometimes it's easier if you're not just looking across the table at one another with all the silence. So there's a lot to be said for that as well. Well, Kelly, I really enjoyed this conversation and getting to meet you for the first time. It sounds like you're doing a lot of cool and exciting things and, you know, exciting speed and innovation with SAP, that's noble work and I'm sure a lot of people are really happy to have you help them out there. So thank you very much for your time and to have a great AWS re:Invent. >> Thanks, Jeff. It was great to discuss this with you. >> Absolutely. All right. She's Kelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> As we reported last week, we believe that in the next decade, there will be changes in public policy that are going to restrict the way in which big internet companies are able to appropriate user data. Big tech came under fire again this week with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google going toe to toe with several U.S. senators. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, however, was not one of those CEOs in the firing line. Microsoft doesn't heavily rely on ad revenues, rather, the company's momentum is steadily building around Azure, which by my estimates is now roughly 19% of Microsoft's overall revenues. It's surpassed, maybe nearly got to $7 billion for the first time on a quarterly basis. I'll come back to you on that. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll respond to the many requests we've had to dig into the business of Microsoft a little bit deeper and provide a snapshot of how the company is faring in the ETR dataset. Let's take a quick look at Microsoft's financials, and the scope of Microsoft's business is actually mind-boggling. The company has roughly $150 billion in revenue, and it grew its top line 12% last quarter. It has more than $136 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Microsoft generates over $60 billion annually in operating cashflow. And last quarter alone threw off more than 19 billion in operating cash. Its gross margins are expanding across virtually all of its major business lines. So let's look at those business sectors. Microsoft, it doesn't suffer from the nagging problems that we've talked about with a lot of older tech companies. Companies like IBM and Dell and Cisco and Oracle and SAP, they struggle with growth sometimes because their growth businesses are not yet large enough to offset the declines in their traditional on-premises business segments. Now at the highest level, Microsoft breaks its business into three broad categories, and they're all growing quite nicely. Let me add some color here. Let's start with the productivity and business process line of business. LinkedIn, which is growing at 16%, is in this category as is Office. This business is shifting from one of on-prem licenses, which are really headwinds right now from Microsoft, to the cloud, in the form of SaaS with Office 365, which is growing at a 20% clip within its commercial market base. Even the consumer side of O365 is growing in the double digits. Dynamics is Microsoft's ERP and CRM business, and that falls into this slice of the pie, that's growing at 18%. And then the newer Dynamics 365, that's growing at 37%. So you can see, Microsoft is easily able to show growth despite the transitions from its legacy business. Intelligent cloud is the next segment. It's kind of the kitchen sink category, meaning there's stuff in there that includes a bit of cloud washing in my opinion, but Microsoft is not nearly as egregious as IBM with the liberties that it takes around its cloud categorization. For Microsoft it's a $13 billion quarterly business. And it's growing at 19%, as we show in the pie chart. Azure is an increasingly large portion of this segment. Azure is the most direct comparison with AWS. And I have said in the past quarter, I'd say it's around 50% of the intelligent cloud, and that it's approaching by my estimates around $7 billion a quarter. Azure grew at 47% annually this past quarter, the same growth rate as last quarter. Ironically, both AWS and Google Cloud grew at the same year over year rate this quarter as they did last quarter. AWS is 29% GCP in the high 50s by at my estimates. AWS revenue was 11.6 billion this past quarter, and I have GCP still well under 2 billion. We'll be updating our cloud numbers and digging deeper next week into this topic. So consider these estimates preliminary for Azure and GCP, which the respective companies don't break out for as Amazon, as you know, breaks out AWS explicitly. Now, back to Microsoft's intelligent cloud business. It includes on-prem server software, which is a managed decline business from Microsoft. They also include enterprise services in this category. So as you can see, it's not a clean cloud number for comparison purposes. Now finally, the third big slice of the pie is more personal computing. I know, it's kind of a dorky name, but nonetheless it's nearly a $12 billion business that's growing at 6% annually. The Windows OEM business is in here, as is Windows 10 and some security offerings. Surface is also in here as well and it's growing in the mid-thirties. Search revenue is in this category as well. It's declining per my earlier statements that it's not a main piece of Microsoft's business. Now, one of the most interesting areas of this sector is gaming. Microsoft's gaming business is growing at 21% and they just acquired ZeniMax Media for seven and a half billion dollars. Let me land on gaming for a minute. The gaming experts at theCUBE are really excited about Microsoft's XBox content services, which grew at about 30% this past quarter. Game Pass is essentially Microsoft's Netflix, or you can think of it as maybe like a Spotify model. You can get in for as low as $5 a month. I think you can pay as much as $15 a month and get access to a huge catalog of games that you can download. In November of last year, Microsoft launched its xCloud beta service, which allows you to download to a PC or a game box. Now eventually with 5G, the box goes away. All you'll need is a screen and you know, controller with the joysticks, no download. In fact, this is how it works today for Android. Now, interestingly, Apple is blocking Microsoft and some others like Google's Stadia, saying that they don't allow streaming game apps like Microsoft's xCloud service, because they don't follow the company's guidelines. What Apple's not telling you is that its adjacent offering, Apple Arcade, is considered subpar by hardcore gamers. And while Apple allows the streaming of movies and music from any service on the iPhone, it's decided not to allow streaming games. Now, the last thing I want to stress about Microsoft is its leverage point around developers. Developers is a big one here, we all remember the sweaty Steve Ballmer running around the stage like a mad man, screaming, "Developers, developers, developers!" Well, despite his obsession with Windows, he sure got that one right. The GitHub acquisition was Microsoft's way of buying more developer love. It does concentrate power with a tech giant, but you know what, if it wasn't Microsoft that bought GitHub, it would have been Facebook or Amazon or Google or one of the other tech giants. Now, despite some angst in the developer community over this, GitHub, it really is a linchpin for Microsoft to more tightly integrate GitHub with its pretty vast developer tool set. All right. Let's look deeper into the Microsoft data and focus on the enterprise. We'll bring in the ETR as we always do. We said last week that Google needed to look to the cloud and edge and get its head out of its ads. Well, Microsoft recovered from its Windows myopia after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, and by all accounts from the ETR survey data, Microsoft is killing it across the board. Let me start by putting Microsoft in context with some of the most prominent companies that both compete with, and sometimes partner with Microsoft. So this xy graph, it's one of our favorites. I show it all the time and it shows net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending momentum from ETR, and the horizontal axis shows what we call market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Now in the upper right hand table, you can see the data for each of the companies. There's an ETR survey taken in October and it had more than 1400 completes. Several points stand out here. Microsoft is by far the most pervasive in the dataset, and yet its net score or spending velocity is right there with AWS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Workday. Only Snowflake, which I put in there for context, because of its consistently strong net scores, shows a meaningfully higher net score, of course from a much smaller base. Now what makes this so impressive is it represents a pan-Microsoft view across its entire portfolio. And you can see where companies like IBM and Oracle struggle from a momentum standpoint compared to Microsoft, which is a much, much larger company. It's that problem that I referred to earlier regarding the smaller size of their respective growth businesses. Also called Cisco and SAP, which despite some earnings challenges lately, are able to maintain net scores that while not in the green, they're not in the red, either. Green essentially means your overall install base is expanding. Red indicates contraction. Now let's look at the spending patterns for Microsoft customers. This chart shows the granularity of ETR's net score for Microsoft. The green represents increased spend and the red decreased spend. What's impressive is that Microsoft's red zone, I mean it's essentially negligible at 6%, when you add two reds up, the pink and the bright red. Their customers, they're all spending more, or the same, and very few are leaving the platform. Now I made the case last week that Google should double or triple its efforts and focus on cloud and the edge. Microsoft has already made that transition in its business and is the, that's the premise really of my discussion today. Specifically, Microsoft Azure is powering the company across all of its products and services. It's giving Microsoft tremendous operating leverage and steadily improving marginal economics. You can see that in the gross margin lines this quarter, across all of its businesses. And here's a graphic showing its position within cloud computing in terms of net score. Microsoft Azure functions, which is the first bar on this chart, and Azure overall, which is the third set of bars, shows momentum that's as strong as any cloud category, including AWS Lambda, which as we've talked about many times is killing it. Now five over from the left, count them over, one, two, three, four, five, you can see AWS overall. So that's a really important reference point. And while its levels are still elevated, Azure overall, which again is number three from the left, has meaningfully more momentum with 65% net score versus 52% for AWS overall. Now reasonable people can debate the quality of these respective clouds and you could argue over feature sets, who's got the most features, who's got the most regions, which regions are most reliable, who's got the most data centers and all that stuff, but it's really hard to argue against Microsoft's "Good enough" strategy. It's working in the cloud, and it has been working for the company for decades. Now another Microsoft strategy has been to be a late comer to a category and then bundle multiple capabilities into one suite. We saw this at first, really in the late 1980s with Office, and it's continued in a number of areas. The latest example, Microsoft Teams. Teams combines features like meetings, phone, chat, collaboration, as well as business process workflows that leverage tools like SharePoint and PowerPoint. I mean, it's a killer strategy, and you can see the results in this chart. I mean, it's essentially competing with Zoom, it's competing with Slack and all the sort of productivity plays there in that space. And this graphic compares net scores from the year ago October survey for reference, the July survey from this year, and the most recent October survey, as I said, 1400 respondents. Look at the lead that Teams has relative to the competition. There's a story across Microsoft's portfolio. Look at Microsoft's products in the ETR taxonomy. Video conferencing with Teams, productivity apps, RPA, cloud, cloud functions, machine learning, artificial intelligence, containers, security, end point, analytics, mobile, even database. The only signs of softness are really seen in the company's legacy businesses like Skype or on-prem licenses business, which I said were a headwind for them. And while PCs and tablets are weaker, that's what you'd expect from this mature industry relative to some of these other categories. Now, again, the premise here today is that by pivoting to the cloud and going all in competing with infrastructure as a service, Microsoft has created a platform for innovation for its business, and its developer chops are really credible, so it's evolving its install base very successfully to Azure. It's got a very solid hybrid and multi-cloud strategy and story with Microsoft Arc, which eventually it can take to the edge. You know, we think its edge strategy needs some work, but nonetheless, the company is really, really well positioned. Microsoft has a huge partner ecosystem, heck, it even partners with Oracle and database, as well as using Azure to enter new markets, including vertical clouds like healthcare, which it talked about on its earnings call. I mean, there's really not much on which you can criticize Microsoft. You know, sure, they've had some high profile failures in the past. The Nokia acquisition, the Windows phone, you remember Zune? Mixer, you know, Bing. Is Bing a fail? I don't know. Maybe not really. I guess the fail is, you know, what I was talking about last week with antitrust, Microsoft was distracted by the DOJ and maybe that caused it to miss search, give it to Google, and in that sense, maybe it was a failure, but overall, pretty good track record from Microsoft. Yeah, maybe you can say Microsoft is somewhat of a copycat, you know, the graphical user interface that they copied from the Mac, but hey, even Steve Jobs stole that. Surface, okay. The cloud? But so what, ideas, they're plentiful, execution is the key, really. No matter how you slice it, the data doesn't lie. Microsoft's financial performance, its pivot to the cloud, and the success of its adjacent businesses, make it one of the most remarkable rebirths in the history of technology industry. Now I didn't use the word turnaround because the company was never really in trouble. It just became irrelevant and kind of boring. Today, Microsoft is far from immaterial. Okay. That's it for this week. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. So please subscribe. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data and analytics. I appreciate always the comments on my LinkedIn posts or you can DM me @DVellante, or email me at David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody, be well, and we'll see you next time. 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>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes wall to wall coverage of Dell Technologies World, The digital experience 2020. The Virtual Cube is coming at you. I'm Dave Volonte. And with me or two Great guest, my colleague and longtime business friend Howard Elias. He's the chief customer officer and president of services and digital Adele. And also joining me is Sri Raj, aka Sri Can't him Nene, who is the managing director of digital insights at Cargo, which is one of the world's largest privately held companies in the top maker and distributor of agricultural products and the things that we eat every day. Gentlemen, thanks so much for your time and coming on the Cube. Great to see you. >>Great to see you, Dave. And three. Great to see you again as well. >>Good to be with you both. So >>I wanna Howard, I wanna talk about start by talking about digital transformation. I'm gonna make it laugh. So I was talking to a customer every day or the other day, and we all talk about, you know, digital transformation. And I said, What's digital transformation to you? He said, Dave, my S a P system was 15 years old and I have to upgrade. It was like, Okay, there's eso There's a spectrum, as you know, but what do you seeing as digital transformation? What does that mean to your customers? >>Well, what we're seeing is a glimpse of the future. And first of all, Dave, Great to be with you again, uh, free and all of you out there hope everybody's safe. And, well, thanks for joining us, Adele Technologies World today. But digital transformation from our customers perspectives the technology enablement of experiences with customers, partners and employees, a swells automating processes to deliver value to the all key stakeholders. And we've just seen a glimpse of the future. Customers are accelerating their adoption of technology. We see this through necessity, right when everybody had to pivot from or toe work from home, especially those professional workers and for the most part, whether companies plan forward or not, we all embraced and learned new ways of being productive remotely, and that was all enabled by technology. But we've seen it in every walk of life. It's really an acceleration of trends that were already underway, whether it was the remote experience for professional employees, whether it's e commerce experience, whether it's telemedicine, distance learning. All of these things have been available for a while, but we've seen them be embraced and accelerated tremendously due to what we've seen over the last six months in all industries. And free will talk about what's happening specifically in the agricultural industry, and what we've seen is customers that have made investments over the years have been ableto move even faster in their specific industries. We've just on a survey of about 4600 customers around the world, and 80% have accelerated their investments in digital technology to improve the experience of their employees of their customers and of their partners. >>Yes, so So thank you for that, Howard. Three. I mean, a lot of people might think of cargo. There's physical business, but it's anything but. I mean, you've got such a huge data component to your business, but I wonder what you would add. I mean, we're maybe talk a little bit. I mean, it's such amazingly, you know, rich and deep company. But maybe talk about your digital transformation journey and at least in your sphere of the world where you're at. >>Yeah, thanks, David. You know, Howard's absolutely right. What? What Cove it has done is just accelerated the need for technology on farm and with our customers. And and certainly in the last few months, we've seen that accelerate tremendously, right? A t end of the day. Agriculture has been a technology first, um, industry for for hundreds of years, and and so we're seeing that take fold in the form of digital adoption, the use of analytics, the use of really unique sensor technologies like cameras and computer vision. Um, sound I liken it to the senses that we all have every day that we used to make decisions. Well, we're now seeing that adopted with our with our customers. And so it's a really interesting time, and I think an opportunity for for the industry to really move forward. >>I mean, in terms of the three in terms of the pandemic, you know, we we talked to a lot of customers. Howard just mentioned a survey. You certainly saw the pivot in tow work from home you know, increase in laptop momentum. And in Dell's business, we saw that you're seeing identity access, management, cloud security and point security. Even even VD I These were big tail winds early on. What did the pandemic due to your business and just in terms of your your priorities did you have to obviously shift to those things to support work from home? What happened to your digital transformation was was anything put on hold and is restarting. Can you just Yeah, I don't know what you could tell us about that, but anything you could describe and add some color to that narrative would be really helpful to our audience. >>Certainly. Yeah. You know, I think overnight we had, ah, workforce that went from being in the office toe working from home and and that just accelerated the need for for collaboration tools. Things like like teams and and Skype and Zoom have just taken off right? But also technologies that allow for virtual engagement, like white boarding and brainstorming sessions that we used to do in the office with customers and suppliers. We're now having to do in a virtual setting. So so that has just transformed how we do business on the customer. And, you know, technologies like computer vision and and sound really transform the need to to leverage labor differently. Right? One of the biggest challenges that the cove it has has placed is how labor interacts with animals and and with food production. And we've just seen a significant adoption of technology to help alleviate some of those stresses. >>Now you guys probably have seen the tongue in cheek cartoons, the covert wrecking ball, you know, the guys in the audience or the building saying digital transformation. Not on my watch in the cove, it comes in. I've often joked, uh, I guess we have to have a sense of humor in these times, but But if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We'll cove. It kind of broke everything. And Howard, when you think about digital transformation, yes, was going on before co vid. But But there are a lot of industries that hadn't been disrupted. I think about health care. I think about financial services. I think about defense. I mean, the list goes on unlike publishing, for instance, which got totally disrupted by the Internet. But now it seems like If you're not a digital business, you're out of business. Eso Are you seeing like virtually every industry adopting digital? Or are you seeing any trends that are different by industry? What are you seeing out there >>were absolutely seeing every company in every industry adopted in their own way, thinking through their business models. I mean, even think about what's happened in your local town. How technology is able enabled restaurants to dio, you know, uh, take out and delivery through digital tools, your local dry cleaner, your your local butcher and your baker. I mean, everybody's having toe be creative and reinvent. It's not just the, you know, large professional industrial financial services companies who are also reinventing. But I go back to what I said before what we're seeing. These trends were already underway. They've just been put into hyperspeed what folks were thinking about doing in two or three years we're doing into two or three months. The pivot toe work from home worldwide happened in two or three weeks, and it's not the crisis we planned for, but we're always preparing for the future. The groundwork was laid, and now it's just been accelerated. We're seeing it everywhere, including inside Adele. You know, I think about all the processes and the way we serve our employees, our customers and partners we've accelerated were adopting the product model within our own Del digital organization, for example, that's been accelerated. The move to multi cloud on having a cloud operating model no matter where the infrastructure has been accelerated. And you know, everything we've talked about on the client experience. Security models, networking model software, defined models, every every industry, every company has had to embrace this >>so sorry. I mean, I'm fascinated by your business. I mean again, I think a lot of people think of it as a real physical business. But there's so much data. You're the head of digital insights, which is You've got data running through your your entire operations. There's other things. There's there's double take words I see in your your background like aqua culture. So So how are you re imagining the future of your industry? >>That's Ah, that's a fascinating question, Dave. You know, think, Imagine this. You could listen to a shrimp eat and then turn that into unique insights about the feeding patterns on behaviors of shrimp, right? Who would have imagined 10 years ago that we would have technology that enabled us to do things like that? Right? And so, from aquaculture thio the dairy industry to, you know, grain origination. We're leveraging digital and data to really help our customers and producers make better, more informed decisions where in in the past it was really experience that allowed them toe be good farmers and and good stewards of our planet. Now we're using technology, so it's really an opportunity toe harness, the power of digital for our industry. >>Well, you know, and it's critical because we have people to feed and actually it's working. I mean, the yields that air coming out of the industry or are amazing. I know there's a lot of discussion now, but hey, you know, we're actually getting a lot of food to people. And now there's a discussion around nutrition that's that's front and center, and I presume technology and data fit in there as well. Three. I wonder if you could comment. >>Yeah, you know, by 2050 day there will be nearly 10 billion people on this planet. And to feed that growing population, we're gonna need 70% more protein on DSO. As you think about the impacts that that that growing population has on the planet. There's also, you know, nutrition. But think about sustainability. How do we how do we grow this food and get it from the place that it's produced to the place where it's consumed in a way that's a resource efficient and effective? So there's nutrition in just the middle class in Asia, you know, having a higher propensity to spend and dealing with that challenge on one end of the spectrum and then on the other end of the spectrum, being ableto really deal with with sustainability. >>I would have watched your career over the decades, and you've had so many roles, and I always used to joke with you. They give you the hardest problems if you want. If you want to get stuff done, you give it to the busiest guy. It was always Howard, you know, help us with with our own transformations. Help us do the integrations, whether it was m and a or the course, the largest in just >>industry I love a good challenge is you know, >>I do know and so I want to get. Get the update on Dell's own transformation. I've been talking to a number of your executives this week, and it looks like you know, you guys air, drinking your own champagne, dog food and whatever you wanna call it. But but bring us up to date on what you guys are doing internally. >>We are, and we're no different than any of our customers. And having Thio focus on our digital transformation agenda, I mentioned earlier the adoption of our product model, you know, moving from a project based Dell Digital and I T Organization to one that's a product model. So these are balanced teams with a product manager, a designer and developers working closely with the business and the function in an agile manner and the C I. C. D pipeline manner. And all of this again has been accelerated. We have our own del digital cloud, which is our hybrid cloud that we leverage internally. We're software defining everything, and it's really paying dividends because what we've seen literally in the last 6 to 8 months is higher levels of security, higher levels of availability, higher levels of resiliency. We've been able to handle all of the increased transactions on our e commerce engines, all at higher quality and lower costs. Now we the groundwork for this with Jen Felch in the team over the last couple of years, but again, by necessity, had to accelerate. And we've done that. And we're even moving faster now on data pipelines and really understanding all of our key processes and understanding the work flows and the data flows, working with machine learning and artificial intelligence again, exactly the way Cargill and other of our customers are doing in their businesses. I know you're talking or have talked to Doug Schmidt. You know, we've digitized and automated thousands of processes and our services organization Theobald bility on a remote basis to service our customers were we've invented new and innovative ways the service our customers remotely versus going on site, not just in break fix, deployment, remote change, management, manage services, consulting. It's just, you know, great to see all this wonderful innovation come together serving our customers. >>Thank you for that, Howard. And you, you said something that triggered me in a good way. Data pipelines. I use that term a lot. And three I wonder if you could talk about this because you're You guys have been around since the 18 hundreds, I think the largest privately held company in United States, I think, right, and probably close to one of the largest in the world. And so >>you >>got a lot of data and a lot of different places. So a huge challenge for you is okay. How do you manage those data pipelines? Those data, the data lifecycle, And I would think the company the size of cargo to the extent that you can reduce the end to end time it takes to go from raw data to insights E. That's gonna be telephone numbers for for your business and your bottom line that you can then reinvest and get back to customers, etcetera and be competitive. I wonder if you could talk about >>you >>know, that whole concept of the data pipeline And how are you using data and and some of the challenges of compressing that end to end cycle time and Leighton >>see, to >>get to insights >>that day. You know, Carlos, 155 year old company and and at our core were a supply chain company. Right? Um, you know, taking food from where it's produced, getting it through the manufacturing process, toe customers. And so at the end of the day, I I joked that not only are we have physical supply chain company, but we're also a data supply chain company. So the data value chain right is really about taking all the different inputs in data that we have in turning that into unique insights. And I don't think there's ah company on the planet in the food space that has the ability to connect those dots in the way that we dio. And so our ability to create unique, actionable insights for our customers is going to be really powerful, especially in the in the coming years. >>So talk about let's talk about Dell a little bit. I always ask, uh, technology leaders how your vendors doing for you? How did they help you through the pandemic? How would you grade del uh, in terms of its support through the pandemic? >>Dell has been absolutely fantastic, right? I mean, I think it is really need to have partners like Dell helping us achieve our mission for our customers. And I know they feel that way about us as their customers. So it's really wonderful. Toe have the type of collaboration and partnership that we do. >>Alright, Howard, Same question for you. How would you grade Del Onda? How you guys have done through the through the pandemic with regard to supporting your customers. I mean, you're you're never one toe overhype, uh, in my experience with you. But give us the your take. >>Why would grade del by what our customers say? And we do it both through direct conversations as well as the data and telemetry we get and the data and telemetry we have in terms of our NPS r R C sat scores or service level objectives that were delivering all have remained in profile. The team has really risen to the occasion. Been super creative, passionate, full of grit. We heard Alison and Angela talk about that the Dell Technologies world this morning, and our team is embodied that spirit and that great to be able to deliver. But in the conversations we're having with customers three and his peers, uh, you know, look, it's it's been a challenging time, but as you know, Dell has always focused on delivering value for the long term. We're not in it for the short term, and that has served us well. That philosophy Theobald active. We have with working with customers, eyes always about what's in the best interests of our customers in the long term. Because if we do that, it will ultimately be in the best interest of Dell. >>Well, it's It's been amazing to just watch. I mean, it's just ironic that we got hit with this at the beginning of this decade. It's gonna It's obviously gonna define. You know what we do going forward. I think we've all talked about it. It's funny. Everybody in our business and the technology business. We've become covert experts in some way, shape or form overnight. But we've talked a lot about the the things that we see as as permanent, and I think that >>you >>know you clearly the your two companies are examples of agility leaning into technology. And, as you said, Howard here for the long term, 155 years old, I think story said so well, here's to another 155 years. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming to Cuba. Awesome guests. >>Thanks. Day. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for watching everybody. Our continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. You're watching the Cube?

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering upgrade twenty twenty, The NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >>Welcome back. I'm stupid a man. And this is the Cubes coverage of Upgrade twenty twenty. Of course, it's the NTT Research Summit and happy to welcome to the program someone that watch the Cube for a long time. But first time on the program. Simon Walsh. He is the new CEO of NTT America's Simon. Great to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks very much. Too good to be here. All right. See, >>A Zai mentioned your your previous companies that you've worked for are ones that the Cube and Cube audience are well aware of. Matter of fact, when I worked for some of those companies, NTT is one of the large global companies that I had the pleasure to interact with over the years. But if you could maybe let's start with just a little bit of your background. And as I said, it's only been a few months that you've been the CEO, so you know, what's it like coming into a role like this? You know, during the situation that we're all faced with in twenty twenty. >>Yeah, Thank you. I mean, my background is really in, You know, the platforms that enable the customers Thio run their technologies. Andi, Uh, you know, I spent some of my time in Europe and the media on then latterly the last five plus years in the Americas. I have to say I really enjoy It's a much better environment. If I think about it from a GDP and an economy perspective, it's, ah really dynamic place to work. I worked with companies headquartered from Europe running America's, and I've worked with companies that were headquartered in the Americas, running some of the European businesses. So I've crossed the continent's if you like. I recently joined NTT. I have to say, you know, it was a pretty lengthy process to explore, but that was partly, you know, interviews and due diligence because you want to make sure that, you know, you're you're buying into a company that, you know, number one, you can have ah, cultural compatibility with, but also somebody who you see really investing in technology that consult for, you know, the business agenda of the markets. So that's really a bit about my background and then, you know, joining. I mean, I literally joined last week of June, so my whole time has bean through, locked down in terms of employment. It's been very unique. Taking on a new post, exclusively remote. Andi I was a bit worried, you know, at a human level, just, you know, how do you connect with people? What I would comment is I've actually had the ability to really meet ah, lot more people in person because you can physically get to people's schedules a lot easier. So that's certainly helped, you know. And I've done my, uh, activities of meeting clients. Eso they've been very amenable to connecting talking to our business partners and spending, you know, considerable amount of time with my colleagues, uh, in the Americas and around the world. Andi, it's actually been very rewarding. I think, funnily enough, you probably physically closer because you're on a screen and you probably like twenty four inches away from each other. Whereas in a meeting room you'd be the other side of the table. So it's been unique, but so far so good. >>Well, yeah, absolutely. The the new abnormal is we. We have sometimes say what? We're all usedto looking in the screens all day talking to various people there. Uh, the impact on business, though, has been, uh, you know, obviously ah, lot of different things, depending on the company. But that discussion of digital transformation a few years ago it was like, Oh, I don't know if it's really is it a buzzword? But that the spotlight that's been shown here in twenty twenty is what Israel and what is not leveraging cloud services, giving people agility, being able to react fast because, boy in twenty twenty if we needed to react fast, so help bring us inside a little bit. And your time there, the discussion you're having with customers, that adoption moving along that journey for digital transformation, the impact that you're seeing and house NTT helping its customers as they need to accelerate and respond toe the realities that we see today. >>Yeah, so you're right into I mean, digital disruption has been ongoing for multiple years. Way used to call it technology and change, and now we call it digital disruption or digital transformation. So it's not necessarily new. I think the thing that's really accelerated in twenty twenty, You know, as a consequence of the pandemic is really the word distributed, uh, in that customers are undertaking their digital transformations understanding. You know what it is to modernize processes, you know, modernize the customer experience on Then they're finding that actually, they don't need in a board room and discuss, you know, the performance of the business so they now need to have distributed access to data on. I think the topics that we see very prevalent is the distributed nature off the workforce. Andi. Obviously there's always been a filled workforce, and we've had systems, crm systems and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have toe think about our supply chain management systems and our HR systems, the P and L. And you know all of the activities that business undertakes with an entirely distributed workforce, and it's quite abnormal. And I think what we've learned is where is the data on how doe I amalgamate data from distributed systems. And so I see. And we're doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really about how doe I join data from system a two system F in a distributed manner, most importantly, securely timely on in A in an interface that is usable on it sounds really easy is like Oh, great, yeah, it's just two different data points. Connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency. But we all know that the world is full of technical debt, legacy systems and platforms Very expensive and significant historical investments on those things Don't modernize themselves overnight. Quite often. The dollars to modernize them don't justify themselves. So we then end up layering on, you know, new technology. So you know what I'm seeing on in digital transformation is really about. How do we handle distributed data Distributed decision making on how we do that in a secure manner on through an interface that is, uh, user friendly? >>Yeah, way. Obviously know that there's had to be some prioritization. You know, the joke. I've had everybody came into twenty twenty with Okay, here. Here's what I'm gonna do for the first half of the year. Here's the objectives that I have, and we kind of throw those in the shredder rather early on Number one priority. I still hear it was probably that the number one priority coming into the year and it stays there, and you've mentioned it multiple times. Its security, you know, is absolutely front and center Still. How overall, though, How are your customers? You know, the c X So sweet. How are they adjusting their priorities? Are there certain projects that just go on hold? Are there certain ones that get front and center? Obviously, you know, that distributed work from anywhere. Telemedicine, uh, you know, teach and learn from anywhere have been top of mind. But any other key learnings you're finding or prioritization changes, some of which are gonna probably stay with us. Uh, you know, for the long term, >>Absolutely. We've definitely seems Thio customers re prioritizing. And I think there is obviously an inevitability to this, a za consequence of the pandemic. I mean, if you were undertaking a campus upgrade, you might just put that on pause for the moment. And we've absolutely seen that. But what we've really seen is a prioritization has been How do we get our information to our users? Whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee, you know, there's examples where there's lots of companies who are saying they've got, like, online detail, right. But now they've got to do curbside pickup because they've actually got inventory in the stores. But the stores couldn't open. So what you've seen is a re prioritization to say, Well, when we look out inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring in that the inventory we have in a store could also be seen as inventory across the stores? And in fact, what we've really got now is a distributed warehouse. We've got inventory in the warehouse like wholesale, ready for distribution on. Then we've got inventory in a store retail ready for consumer consumption. What? We don't want that to be separate Infantry. We want that to be holistic on. Then how do we enable any any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup, which we didn't used to do because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order? But the inventory may come from, you know, I may send something from San Francisco to somebody in Boston because it was in a storied inventory in San Francisco. Now, sure, it's got it's got some freight cost, but I've also got some other efficiency savings, and I'm reducing my working capital in my inventory expense. So we've seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. I come back to it. This word distributed is very simple in principle, but everything is now working on a new dynamic. So that's some of the prioritization we've seen. >>Um, you mentioned one of the things that might get put on hold is wait. If I was doing a corporate network update, that might not be the first thing. You know, we we Absolutely. We've gotten some great data on just the changing traffic patterns of the Internet, but the network is so critically important, everybody from home is, you know, dealing with Children doing their zoom classrooms while we're trying to dio video meetings. Um, NTT obviously has a strong, uh, you know, network component to what? Its businesses help us understand the services that are important there. What? What? You're working with customers. And how has this kind of transformed, uh, some of those activities? >>Yeah, Yeah, sure. Thank you. You're so right. I mean, I have to say I just like thio, pay my respects to colleagues and fellow workers around the world who are not just working from home but also home schooling in parallel. Uh, kids are fled the nest, you know, they're working for themselves now, so we don't have the extra activity of home schooling. But I can really have a lot of respect her colleagues who are trying to do both. It's a real fine art on. We've seen a lot of actually just talking of re prioritization. We've seen a lot of companies, including ourselves. You know, say to our colleagues, Look after your Children home, school them do everything you can to support your families on, then get to your work So that re prioritization. Justin behavior has been a key change that we've seen a lot of people do that flexibility to. You know, work is something you do not somewhere you go on. Therefore, as long as the work is done, we can flex around. You know your needs is a family, so that's one prioritization we've seen at, actually. But to your point on the network, it is quite amusing to me that we've been for years now talking about cloud on demand subscription services on Actually, the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network and its historically been the least cloudlike that you could possibly imagine Because you still need to specify a physical connection. You still need to specify a band with value you still need to specify. You know, the number of devices you get too attached to it. I think this is really a monstrous change that we're going to experience and really are experiencing the network as a service. I mean, we talk about I as has SAS. But what happened toe now, as I mean really, did we just think that everything was about computing software? The network is the underpin er on DSO. Really? We see a big change and this is where we've been very busy in the network as a service enabling customers tohave dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, prioritize events, you know, a lot of customers are now doing activities such as hosting their own event, their own digital conference on. Do you want to prioritize what the user experience is when you host one of those events over perhaps a back office process that, quite frankly, wait a few days so we see a significant opportunity. This is where we've been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network of the service solutions. You know, the Cloud Network. And I think the whole software defined network agenda has materially accelerated. That's one major area on then. The other area has just been the phenomenal ship to I p voice on soft bone, actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody using you know, teams or Skype or Google hangouts to really use as their collaboration mechanism on. Then you know, we're providing all the underlying transportation layer. But as I p voice, you know, that creates a much more integrated collaboration. Experience on git creates a cost saving because you're taking away classic voice services. >>Yeah, Simon Boy, I'm excited for that. I I remember when I got my first BlackBerry and they were trying to sell me some things. I'm like, Wait, this is an Internet endpoint. I can do all of these things there and of course you know it's taking taking it. The last dozen years. If If Ghana certain far, but and we always joke, it's like smartphones. We don't use them for phones anymore. We use them for all the messaging and all those services. So, uh, the the data and the network are so critically important, something I want to turn Thio, you know, upgrade twenty twenty. You know what? I'm excited about this. You know, we've talked about, you know, the major impacts of what's happened in twenty twenty, and we're looking at the here and now. But it's great in technology when we get to be able to look forward and look at some of the opportunities out there. So we'd love to hear from your standpoint, some of the areas. What's exciting? You what's exciting? That we can look forward to some of the areas and pockets of research that we see at the event. >>Yeah. Thank you. Strewn E. I think what I like about Aravind is the investment that we make to work with, You know, scientific community, academia, really invest in, you know, forward looking future proofing, how physics and different technologies might play a role in the future. And, you know, some of these investments and some of this research yields commercial products, and some of it doesn't. But it's still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at you know where technology is going. I think the areas that particularly appealing to me on a personal level, just the whole thing of quantum computing. This is, uh, you know, I know we're already exploring the capabilities of quantum computing in, you know, some labs and Cem academia centers on really to understand, how can we take advantage of that? But I think if you then say and you take another area that we're exploring through the event Biosciences, if you then take the two together and you think Okay, how do we take quantum computing on? We take Biosciences on you think about health care, and then you think about the pandemic. You know? Are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us a greater comprehension and ability to accelerate understanding, understand, accelerate testing, and then really contribute to, you know, the health and welfare of society. Andi, I think that's really quite an exciting area for us. So that's a specific topic that I'm particularly interested in. I'm glad to see us doing a lot in that space quantum computing as well as you know, Biosciences. And I'd say, you know, one other area where I still think we're all trying to ascertain how it serves the business is really the area of Blockchain. I think this is, um, intriguing. I'm still mentally trying to master the subject. No amount of white papers has managed Thio overcome the topic of my brain yet, So I'm still working on it on. Then I think cryptography, I come back to the same subject security. I mean, we are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology. Now, on our data is available how we secure it, How we make sure that it's encrypted is absolutely going to be critical. You see an increasing push nationally on globally to ensure that there is, you know, security of data on. I think the subject of cryptography and how we go forward with, you know, beyond one hundred and twenty eight bit is gonna be a very difficult and critical subjects. So these are the areas I'm very impressed with. >>Wonderful. Simon, I wanna give you the final word from update. Great. Twenty twenty. >>Yeah, thanks to you. Just thanks very much, Thio. Anybody that's attending what you'll find through various workshops. There's lots of insight from our strategic partners from research scientists from academia from ourselves. So thank you very much for participating. You know, we always value your feedback. So please tell us what we could do to improve the content to help you with your businesses. Onda, We look forward and hope that everybody stays safe. Thank you for connecting with us virtually >>well. Simon Walsh, Thank you so much. Great. Having a conversation and glad to have you in our cube alumni now, >>thank you very much to have a good day. >>Alright, Stay tuned. More coverage from upgrade twenty twenty. I'm still minimum. And thanks. As always, for watching the cube. Yeah,

>> From around the globe, its theCUBE, covering the UPGRADE 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT research. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of UPGRADE 2020. Of course, it's the NTT Research Summit and happy to welcome to the program, someone that's watched theCUBE for a long time, but first time on the program, Simon Walsh, he is the new CEO of NTT Americas. Simon, great to see you, and thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks very much Stu, good to be here, nice to see you. >> As I mentioned, your previous companies that you've worked for are that theCUBE and theCUBE audience are well aware of. As a matter of fact, when I worked for some of those companies, NTT is one of the large global companies that I had the pleasure to interact with over the years. But if you could, maybe, let's start with just a bit of your background. And as I said, it's only been a few months that you've been the CEO. So, what's it like coming into a role like this, during the the situation that we're all faced with in 2020? >> Yeah. Thank you. My background is really in the platforms that enable the customers to run their technologies. And, I've spent some of my time in Europe and India and then lastly the last five plus years in the Americas, I have to say, I really enjoy it. It's a much better environment. And if I think about it from a GDP and an economy perspective, it's a really dynamic place to work. I've worked with companies, headquartered from Europe, running in Americas. And I've worked with companies that were headquartered in the Americas, running some of the European businesses. So, I've crossed the continents if you like. And I recently joined NTT and I have to say, it was a pretty lengthy process to explore, but that was partly, interviews and due diligence. Cause you want to make sure that, you're buying into a company that, number one, you can have a cultural compatibility with, but also somebody who you see really investing in technology that consult for the business agenda of the markets. So, that's really a bit about my background and then joining. I mean, I literally joined the last week of June, so, my whole time has been through lockdown in terms of employment. It's been very unique taking on a new post, exclusively remote, and I was a bit worried, at a human level, just, how do you connect with people? But what I would comment is I've actually had the ability to really meet a lot more people in person cause you can physically get to people's schedules a lot easier. So, that's certainly helped. And I've done my activities of meeting up clients. So, they've been very amenable to connecting, talking to our business partners and spending considerable amount of time with my colleagues in the Americas and around the world. And it's actually been very rewarding. I think, funnily enough, you probably physically closer because you're on a screen, and you're probably like 24 inches away from each other. Whereas in a meeting room you'd be the other side of a table. So, it's been unique, but so far so good. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. The new abnormal, as we've sometimes say we're all used to looking in the screens all day, talking to various people there. The impact on business though has been, obviously a lot of different things depending on the company, but that discussion of digital transformation a few years ago, it was like, "Oh, I don't know if it's real, is it a buzz word?" But that the spotlight that's been shown here in 2020 is what is real and what is not? Leveraging cloud services, giving people agility, being able to react fast because buoyant 2020th, we needed to react fast. So, help bring us inside a bit, and your time there, the discussions you're having with customers that adoption, moving along that journey for digital transformation, the impact that you're seeing and how's NTT helping its customers as they need to accelerate and respond to the realities that we see today. >> Yeah. So you're right Stu. I mean, digital disruption has been on varying for multiple years and we used to call it, technology and change and now we call it digital disruption or digital transformation. So, it's not necessarily new. I think the thing that's really accelerated in 2020, as a consequence of the pandemic is really the word distributed in that customers are undertaking their digital transformations, understanding what it is to modernize processes, modernize the customer experience. And then they're finding that actually they don't meet in a boardroom and discuss, the performance of the business. So, they now need to have distributed access to data. And I think that the topics that we see very prevalent is the distributed nature of the workforce. And obviously there's always been a field workforce and we've had systems. CRM systems and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have to think about how supply chain management systems and our HR systems, the PNL, and, all of the activities that our business undertakes with an entirely distributed workforce. And it's quite abnormal. What I think what we've learned is where is the data and how do I amalgamate data from distributed systems? And so I see, we're doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really about how do I join data from system A to System F in a distributed manner? And most importantly, securely, timely and in an interface that is usable. And it sounds really easy. It's like, Oh great. Yeah, it's just two different data points, connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency. But we all know that the world is full of technical debt, legacy systems and platforms, very expensive and significant historical investments. And those things don't modernize themselves overnight. And quite often the dollars to modernize them don't justify themselves. So, we then end up layering on new technology. So, what I'm seeing in digital transformation is really about how do we handle distributed data, distributed decision making, and how do we do that in a secure manner and through an interface that is user friendly. >> Yeah, we obviously know that there's had to be some prioritization. The joke I've had, everybody came into 2020 with, "Okay, here's what I'm going to do for the first half of the year. Here's the objectives that I have." And we kind of throw those in the shredder rather early on. Number one priority I still hear it was probably that the number one priority coming into the year and it stays there and you've mentioned it multiple times, it's security, it is absolutely front and center still. How overall though, how are your customers, the CXO suite, how are they adjusting their priorities? Are there certain projects that just go on hold? Are there certain ones that get front and center, obviously, you know, that distributed work from anywhere telemedicine, teach and learn from anywhere, have been top of mind. But any other key learnings you're finding or prioritization changes, some of which are going to probably stay with us, for the longterm. >> Absolutely. We've definitely seen customers reprioritizing. And I think there is obviously an inevitability to this as a consequence of the pandemic. I mean, if you were undertaking a campus upgrade, you might just put that on pause for the moment. And we've absolutely seen that. But what we've really seen as a prioritization has been, how do we get our information to our users, whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee? There's examples where there's lots of companies who say they've got like online e-tail, right? But now they've got to do curbside pickup because they've actually got inventory in the stores, but the stores couldn't open. So, what you've seen is a re-prioritization to say, well when we look at inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring in the inventory we have in a store could also be seen as inventory across the stores? And in fact, what we've really got now is a distributed warehouse. We've got inventory in the warehouse like wholesale ready for distribution. And then we've got inventory in a store, retail ready for consumer consumption. What don't want that to be separate inventory. We want that to be holistic. And then how do we enable any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup, which we didn't use to do because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order. But the inventory may come from you know, I may send something from San Francisco to somebody in Boston because it was in a store inventory in San Francisco. Now, sure, it's got some freight cost, but I've also got some other efficiency savings and I'm reducing my working capital or my inventory expense. So, we've seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. I come back to it, this word distributed is very simple in principal, but everything is now working on a new dynamic. So, that's some of the prioritization we've seen. >> You mentioned one of the things that might get put on hold is, wait if I was doing a corporate network update, that might not be the first thing, we absolutely, we've gotten some great data on just the changing traffic patterns of the internet, but the network is so critically important. Everybody from home is dealing with, you know, children doing their Zoom classrooms while we're trying to do video meetings. NTT obviously has a strong network component to what its business is. So, help us understand the services that are important there, what you're working with customers and how has this kind of transformed some of those activities? >> Yeah. Yeah, sure. Thank you. You're so right. I mean and I have to say, I just like to pay my respects to colleagues and fellow workers around the world who are not just working from home, but also homeschooling in parallel. Our kids fled the nest, either they're working for themselves now, so, we don't have the extra activity of homeschooling, but I can really have a lot of respect for colleagues who are trying to do both, it's a real fine art. And we've seen a lot of actually just talking of re-prioritization. We've seen a lot of companies including ourselves, say to our colleagues, look after your children, homeschool them, do everything you can to support your families and then get to your work. So, that re-prioritization just in behavior has been a key change that we've seen a lot of people do. That flexibility to, you know, work is something you do, not somewhere you go. And therefore, as long as the work is done, we can flex around, you know your needs as a family. So, that's one prioritization we've seen active actually. But to your point on the network, it's quite amusing to me that we've been for years now talking about cloud, on-demand subscription services. And actually the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network. And it's historically been the least cloud-like that you could possibly imagine because you still need to specify a physical connection. You still need to specify a bandwidth value. You still need to specify, the number of devices you've got to attach to it. I think this is really a monstrous change that we're going to experience and really are experiencing, the network as a service. I mean, we talk about IAS, PAS SAS, but what happened to NAS? I mean, really did we just think that everything was about computer and software? The networker is the underpinner. And so really we see a big change and this is where we've been very busy in the network as a service enabling customers to have, dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, prioritize events. A lot of customers and are doing activities such as hosting their own event, their own digital conference. And you want to prioritize what the user experience is when you host one of those events over perhaps back office process that can quite frankly wait a few days. So, we see a significant opportunity. This is where we've been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network as a service solutions, the cloud network. And I think the whole software defined network agenda has materially accelerated. That's one major area. And then the other area has just been the phenomenal shift to IP voice and software and actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody using, Teams or Skype or Google Hangouts to really use as their collaboration mechanism. And then, we're providing all the underlying transportation layer, but as IP voices, that creates a much more integrated collaboration experience, and it creates a cost saving cause you're taking away the classic voice services. >> Yeah. So Simon boy, I'm excited for that. I tell you, I remember when I got my first Blackberry and they were trying to sell me some things, I'm like, "Wait, this is an internet endpoint. I can do all of these things there." And of course, you know, it's taken me the last dozen years. If gone a certain far, but, and we always joke. It's like smartphones, we don't use them for phones anymore. We use them for all the messaging and all those services. So, the data and the network are so critically important. Simon, I want to turn to UPGRADE 2020, you know what I'm excited about this, we've talked about the major impacts of what's happened in 2020. And we're looking at the here and now, but it's great in technology when we get to be able to look forward and look at some of the opportunities out there. So, would love to hear from your standpoint, some of the areas, what's exciting you, what's exciting that we can look forward to some of the areas and pockets of research that we see at the event. >> Yeah, I think he's Stu. I think what I like about our event is the investment that we make to work with the scientific community, academia, and really invest in, forward-looking, future-proofing, how physics and different technologies might play a role in the future. And, some of these investments and some of this research yields, commercial products and some of it doesn't, but it's still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at where technology is going. I think the areas that are particularly appealing to me on a personal level, just the whole thing of Quantum computing. This is, I know we're already exploring the capabilities of Quantum computing in some labs, and some academia centers and really to understanding how can we take advantage of that. But I think if you then say, and you take another area that we're exploring through the event, Biosciences. If you then take the two together and you think, okay, how do we take Quantum computing, and we take Biosciences and you think about healthcare, and then you think about the pandemic, are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us greater comprehension and ability to accelerate, understanding, accelerate testing, and then really contribute to the health and welfare of society. And I think that's really quite an exciting area for us. So, that's a specific topic that I'm particularly interested in. I'm glad to see us doing a lot in that space, Quantum computing, as well as the Biosciences. And I'd say one other area where I still think we're all trying to ascertain, how it serves the business is really the area of blockchain. I think this is intriguing. I'm still mentally trying to master the subject. No amount of white papers has managed to overcome the topic in my brain yet. So I'm still working on it. And then I think cryptography, I come back to the same subject security. I mean, we are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology now, and our data is available how we secure it, how we make sure that it's encrypted is absolutely going to be critical. You see an increasing push nationally and globally to ensure that there is security of data. And I think the subject of cryptography, and how we go forward with, beyond 128 bit is going to be a very difficult and critical subject. So these are the areas I'm very impressed with. >> Wonderful. Simon, I want to give you the final word from UPGRADE 2020. >> Yeah. Thanks, Stu Just thanks very much to anybody that's attending. What you'll find through various workshops is lots of insight, from our strategic partners, from research scientists, from academia, from ourselves. So thank you very much for participating. We always value your feedback. So, please tell us what we could do to improve the content, to help you with your businesses. And we look forward and hope that everybody stays safe. Thank you for connecting with us virtually. >> Well, Simon Walsh. Thank you so much. Great having a conversation and glad to have you in our Cube alumni now. >> Thank you very much Stu. Have a good day. >> All right. And stay tuned more coverage from UPGRADE 2020 I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> So, hi, my name is Daniel Terry, I work as Lead Designer at SEB. So, today we will go through why we are why we are Mirantis' customer, why we choose Docker Enterprise, and mainly what challenges we were facing before we chose to work with Docker, and where we are today, and our keys to success. >> Hi, my name is Johan, I'm a senior developer and a Tech Lead at SEB. I was in the beginning with Docker for like, four years ago. And as Daniel was saying here, we are going to present to you our journey with Docker and the answers. >> Yeah, who are we? We are SEB group. So we are a classic, financial large institutions. So, classic and traditional banking services. In Sweden, we are quite a big bank, one of the largest. And we are on a journey of transforming the bank so it has to be online 24-seven. People can do their banking business every day, whenever they want, nothing should stop them to be online. So this is putting a lot of pressure on us on infrastructure to be able to give them that service. (drum fill) >> So our timeline here. Is look, we started out with how to facilitate the container technology it has to be. 2016. And, in 2018, we had the first Docker running in SEB in a standalone mode. You need that. We didn't have any swarm, or given up this cluster since a while. For 2019, we have our first Docker-prise enterprise cluster at SEB. And today, 2020, we have the latest and greatest version of Docker installed. We are running around approximately two and a fifth at 450 specs. Around a thousand services and around 1500 containers. So, developer challenges. As for me as a developer, previous to Docker was really, really hard to get things in production. Times. It took big things and ordering services and infrastructures was a pain in the... yeah, you know what I mean? So for me, it was all about processes. We use natural processes and meaning that I wasn't able to, to see maintaining my system in production. I was handing that over to our operations teams and operation teams in that time, they didn't know how the application works. They didn't know how to troubleshoot it and see, well, what's going wrong. They were experts on the infrastructure and the platforms, but not on our applications. We were working in silos, meaning that I as a developer, only did developing things. The operations side did their things, and the security side did their things. But we didn't work as a team. I mean, today we have a completely different way of working. We will not see shapes. I mean, we have persons that were really good in maybe MQ technologies, or in some programming language and so on, but we didn't have the knowledge in the team techs to solve things, as we should have. Long lead times. I mean, everything we were trying to do had to follow the processes as we had. I mean that we should fill in some forms, send it away, hopefully someone was getting, getting back to us and saying, yeah guys, we can help you out with these services or this infrastructure, but it takes a really long time to do that. I mean, ordering infrastructure is when you're not an expert on that really hard to do. And often the orders we made or placed were wrong. When we have forms to fill in, it wasn't possible for us to do things automatically. Meaning that we didn't have the code, or the infrastructure as code. Meaning that if we didn't get the right persons into the meetings the first time, we didn't have the possibility to do it the right way, meaning that we had to redo and redo, and hopefully sometimes we got the right. We didn't have consistent set ups between the environments. When we order, as for example, a test environment, we could maybe order it with some minor resources, less CPU, so less memory, less disc or whatever. Or actually less performance on the hardware, but then we moved up to production. We realized that we have different hardware, different discs, different memories, and that could actually cause some serious problems in applications, access-wise. I mean, everyone likes to have exercise, especially if you are the maintainer of the system. That was really, really hard to get. I mean, every system has their own services, their own service, and therefore they need to apply for access to those other services. But today there's a complete difference since we only have one class to produce. Since we don't have infrastructure as a code back then, there were really lots of human errors. I mean, everyone was doing things manually. When you're coming from the Windows perspective, everything is a UI. You tend to prefer that way of working, meaning that if you used to click something in between the environments, the environments will not look the same. Life cycles. I mean, just imagine. When we have the server installed, it's like a pet. You have everything configured all from certificates to port openings, cartels, install patches, you name it. And then imagine that Windows are terminating a version and you need to reinstall that. Everything needs to be redone from the beginning. So there was a really long time taking to, to do the LCM activities, General lack of support of Microservice architecture was really also, a thing that are driving us forward with the containers technology, since we can't scale our applications in the same way as for containers. We, for example, couldn't have two applications or two processes using the same TCP port. For example, if you'd like to scale a web server, you can't do that on the same hardware. You need to have two different servers. And just imagine replacing all the excesses, replacing all the orders again for more hardware, and then manually a setting up there. The low balancer in front is a really huge task to do. And necessarily if you don't have the knowledge how the infrastructure is where you're working, then it's also really hard for you as a developer to do things right. Traditionalist. I mean, the services for us are like pets. They were really, really hard to set up. It'd take maybe a week or so. And if something was wrong with them, we will try to fix them as a pet. I mean, we couldn't just kill them and throw them away. It will actually destroy the application as this, our, like a unit box where all our things are installed. >> So, coming in from the infrastructure part of this, we've also seen challenges. For my team, we're coming from a Windows environment. So doing like a DevOps journey, which we want to do, makes it harder due to our nature in our environments. We are not used to, maybe use API, so we are not used to giving open APIs to our developers to do changes on the servers. Since we are a bank, we don't allow users to log into the servers, which means we have to do things for them all the time. This was very time consuming. And a lot of the challenges we actually still are seeing is the existing infrastructure. You can't just put that container platform on it, and thinking you're sold and everything. One of the biggest issues for us is, has been to getting servers. Windows servers usually takes like 15 minutes, Linux servers can takes up to two week in a bad day. So we really lack like, infrastructure as code. If we want a low balancer, that is also an order form. If we want the firewall opening, that's an order form. Hopefully they will not deny it. So it will go faster. So it's a lot of old processes that we need to go through. So what we wanted to do is that we want to move all of these things to the developers, so they can do it. They can own up their problems, but with our old infrastructure, that wasn't possible. We are a heavily ITIL-based organization, meaning that everything went from a cab. Still does in some way, we have one major service window every month where we take everything down. There is a lot of people involved in everything. So it's quite hard to know what will be done during the maintenance window. We lack supporting tools, or we lacked supporting tools, like log-in, good log-in tools. We have a bunch of CI/CD tools, but the maturity level of the infrastructure team wasn't that good. Again, order form and processes. If we want to, like, procure, do our procurement on a new like, storage system, or a backup system, we talk about here. So to do it is, for us, with containers, it would solve a lot of problems, because we cause we would then move the problems, not maybe move the problems to the developer, but we would make it able for them to own their own problems. So everything that we have talked about up till now boils down to business drivers. So the management's gave- gave us some policies to, or what they, how they want to change the company, so we can be this agile and fast moving bank. So one of the biggest drivers are cloud readiness, where Containers comes in perfectly. So we can build it on premises, and then we can move it to the cloud when we are ready but we can't, but we also need an exit strategy to move it back on premises if we need, due to hard regulations. Maybe you can throw it in the air. >> Absolutely. I definitely can. You're absolutely right. We need to develop things in a certain way. So we can move from infrastructure to infrastructure depending, or regardless of the vendor. Meaning that if we are able to run it on-prem, we should be able to run it in cloud or vice versa. We should also be able to move between clouds, and not be forced into one cloud provider. So that's really important for us at SEB. Short time to market is also a thing here. I mean, we are working with the huge customers. I can't name them, but they're really huge. And they need to have us being moving forward. I mean, able to really fast switch from one technology, maybe to another, we are here for them. And it's really important to us to be really fast for us to get new things out in production. All right, maybe. Nothing else? >> I don't, don't really. From the upside, we are in a huge staff DevOps transition. So, or a forced DevOps transition, which means we need to start looking at new infrastructure solutions, maybe deploy our infrastructure parts inside of containers to be able to use it the same way in the cloud. That's what we do prior, do here on premises, we have private clouds which are built on techno- technology, container technology today. So this fits quite good to have the Docker platform being one part of that one. >> Yeah. And this is solid, we are also working really, really actively on open source platforms and open source drivers. We can see that we have a huge amount of vendors in SEB, really huge ones, but we can also see that we can, facilitate open source platforms, and open source technology as well. So container technology will bring that for us. I mean, instead of having a SaaS platform and SaaS services, we can actually instantiate our own with containers and stuff. >> Also we are, since we are quite heavily regulated, the process of going through to you as like a SaaS service can take up to two years for us to go through, and then maybe the SaaS service, is it, is it what we want to use anymore? So, also we want to develop the things in our own premises and maybe, and scale it to the cloud if we need. And also we want to be an attractive employer, where maybe it's not that, the coolest thing for a young student to work in mainframe, we have a mainframe it's, it's not going anywhere, but it's hard to get people, and we want to be an attractive employer, and everyone is talking Kubernetics and containers or, and clouds. So we need to transition into those technologies. >> Yeah, we need to be open minded and necessarily facilitate the new technologies. So we can actually attract new employees. So it's really important to us to have an open mind. Our experience with Docker Containers. I mean, as I said before, scalability is a really important thing for us today. When we are using a more microservice architecture, we need to be able to Skype. We need to be scaling horizontally instead of vertically. So for that, containers are perfect storage. As we said before, we have a huge problem with environments being differently set up, since it was often manually done. Today, as we have a infrastructure as a code, it's really, really nice to have the same things exactly configured, the same in all environments. And we also have the same tooling, meaning that if I can run it on my machine, it's the same tooling I will be using to run it for test purposes or in production. That's a huge benefit for us as a developer. Time to market. I mean, today, we don't have to order service, we are using the service approach here. So we have a container cluster that are actually just sitting there waiting for our services to be hosted. So no more forms, no more calls, no more meetings before we can set up anything. We also own our problems. I mean, before, as I said, we have the processes, meaning that we ship our applications to any server. And then the operation sites take over. That's not the case now. We are actually using this as we should in DevOps. Meaning the other teams are actually responsible for all their errors as well. Even if it's on the infrastructure part, it's completely different if it's a platform's problem, because then it's the platform's team, and we can use different windows. We can try stuff out, we have an open mind. And that says that I can download and try any container image I would like on my developer machine. It's not maybe, okay to run it in production without having the security people look at it. But normally it's really, really much faster instead of waiting maybe six months, we can maybe wait one week or so. And of course less to none LCM activities. I mean, as I said before, it will take months, maybe, to do an LCM activity on multiple servers. Today, our LCM activities more or less are just switching to a new version of the image from Docker hub. That's all we have to do. So that's actually maintained during the processes we have in CI/CD pipelines. >> And the last one. So our keys to success: you should get demanded from the managers and management that everything should be a container. All the new development has to go through a container before you start ordering servers. Everything shall go through a CI/CD pipeline. We don't actually, here at SEB. Our developers build their own CI/CD pipeline. We just provide a platform for them to use it against, and the CI/CD to systems, but they build everything for themselves. Cause they know how their application works, how it should be deployed, with what tools. We just provide them with a tool set. Build a Cross Team. So you should incorporate all the processes that you need, but you should focus on the developer part, because you are building a platform for the developers, not for operations or security. >> And then maybe >> A lot of... >> you'll be able to take flight >> Yeah. Luck has nothing to do with it? Yes, it has. Of course, luck has something to do with it, even if you're really passionate, even if you're really good at some things. I mean, we got some really nice help from Dr. Inc. We were really... Came in with the technology in the right time for us to be, and we had really engaged people with these projects and that's a really luck for us to have. >> Yeah. And also we... I want to thank our colleagues, because we have another container team who started before us. And they have actually run into a lot of organizational problems, which they have sold, so we could piggyback on that, on those solutions. Also, start small and scale it. This is where Docker swarm comes, fits perfectly. So we have actually, we started with swarm. We are moving into Kubernetics in this platform. We will not force-move anything. The developers just should show us, what their- fits their needs. Thank you! >> Thank you very much.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with our leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here in our Palo Alto studios, we got our quarantine crew, getting the remote interviews, getting the conversations that matter, a great guest Chris Eldredge, Senior Director of Business Intelligence at Paycor. Chris, thanks for joining today remotely from Ohio. Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having me. It's great to be here, John. >> I was just joking with a friend football seasons up in the air and I know Ohio you're stuck in between all the different cities there. The east coast, certainly there's a lot of football madness might be canceled. So, this COVID-19 has hit us hard and I hope everyone's safe out there with you guys. >> Yeah, yeah, we're staying hunkered down. >> So tell us more about Paycor. What are you guys doing to make a difference? >> Good question. Paycor is a software as a service company that focuses on payroll, human capital management, time, for small and medium businesses, and we are a growing company. We've got nearly 2000 employees, and we've been in business for about 30 years. But it really does feel like a start up every day. Because we have, such a focus for our customer and the technology is improving all the time. >> Business intelligence has been around, you have the old school guard companies and you've been around for 30 years, you've seen them, the technology has changed, and with that, there's been more data. Okay, now you add on the pandemic, and more surge of demand in computer science, data science, data engineering, one of the hottest categories on the job market front, all pointing to the same thing. There's a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunities around data, and the implications for businesses. And you guys are on the front lines, give us your take on how you see that evolving because more than ever data is at the center of the value proposition. And even more now and it's changing very rapidly, what's your perspective? >> Absolutely right, you would think when you have a pandemic, you would really slow things down. But in fact, we did not, in fact, we actually went from an environment where we were doing monthly and occasionally weekly reporting, and then all of a sudden, we needed daily updates. If you remember, when COVID first started out, and everything started closing, people wanted information fast and furious, and nobody really knew what to do. Luckily, because about a year before that, we had put in place a very dynamic and incremental approach to how we're going to enable data strategy at Paycor, we were able to just in a matter of days, give them a daily dashboard of over 50 metrics. >> What are some of the challenges you guys have faced? Because now you guys also have to move in real time, you got to put out the insights, they got to be actionable, but data is not that easy to work with, depending upon how it's built. So how are you guys facing the challenges, and what's the implication for your business? >> A great question again, so when I first came to Paycor in early 2019. We really had an environment where it was the wild west of data. There were lots of folks that were cobbling together their own data sets, people were rolling up products and customers any way they wanted to, and you had just incompatible data. Well, we really had to focus on there, and what made a difference to kind of unwind this, tangle of data was really to just talk to folks, get them aligned, get people to understand the true impact of data and if you can govern it, master it, then you can set it up in such a way that people understand how it mixes and matches with other data sets, you have power, and that was the real key is helping people understand the power of what they could unlock with their data, and then being ready to unleash that when it's needed. >> I talked a lot of data pros, I've seen Informatica, all these other companies, certainly cloud scale helps when you start to get into data that has to be integrated across different platforms or applications or new insights that are emerging out a new data sets, whether it's unstructured data or whatnot, you get more stakeholders more people in the equation, more fingers in the pie so to speak, as that happens, which is natural, by the way, you've seen that with virtual events and how people, what was once a department now as the whole company, a lot of stakeholders to please, how did you guys approach that? Because you got to align the business, you got to try to please everyone, and that's really hard to do. How do you get that done? >> Well, John, you have to be careful with what you do, because success is contagious, and once you start setting up one department or one function in a company, that they're happy with their data, most places that I've been and I've worked with this a long time, no one's ever happy with their data or their reporting, right, and so once you get people that are happy with it, all of a sudden, now that kind of explodes, and everybody wants your time, everybody wants your attention, and everybody wants their data to be accessible as well. And so you have to think about what does that scale look like? How do I go from five metrics to 500 metrics? And how quickly do I need to do that? Those are the kind of things you have in mind. >> It's interesting, you mentioned the scale, I'll throw another word at that, and I want to get your reaction to it because scale matters, speed also matters. You got scale and speed, these are becoming requirements. What's your reaction to that? >> Yes. Not just scale and speed, but the technology itself is changing. If you think about predictive modeling, if you think about data science that people talk about and how to operationalize artificial intelligence, if you don't have a good data foundation, none of that's going to help you. So, you really have to enable speed by having processes in place where as the business changes, you can make sure that you have the right data, you have to enable scale, and that you could go easily from a couple thousand records to your millions and millions of records depending on how the data needs to be structured, how you want to think about the data and what kind of features you would want, and let's just say a predictive model, that really proliferate your data, so you need all three of those things. >> Take me through play by play on how you guys modernize with Informatica, because you had to kind of take a step back, you got to look holistically at things. How did they play that role in your modernization of the business intelligence environment? >> Well, essentially, we took a look at the landscape and we saw that most people were self sourcing their data and they didn't really know how, and when something went wrong, they really struggled with, how do I fix this? How do I re-run it? If I'm on vacation who's going to make sure that these data sets get populated? And so we changed the game with Informatica by basically saying, let's pre-think all the things that we need to do around data movement into the data warehouse. And let's really think about not from A, how do I get it from A to B, but how do I get a production grade pipeline of data into my environment, so that I can really have what I need, and anybody in the business that is either part of the data team, or part of the IT team can understand what we're doing, can troubleshoot what we're doing, and we can have a common language, about how we talk about that data. So we put in place standards, we put in place, common metadata, we put in place a process that was aligned across, and we made sure that we put protections in there using things like DevOps, to make sure that whatever we gave the business in terms of data was bulletproof, and was structured in such a way that it had been tested, it was backed up, and it was something that we could actually, re-create if we needed to. That's an elegant it. >> When did this all go down? Last year, this year? Can you take us through the timeline? >> Well, we first started thinking about Informatica, the first half of 2019, and we first signed a contract with them in June of 2019. But before we did anything before we installed it, before we started writing the code, we talked to people we talked to people depending on which area you're talking about between three and six months before we actually implemented. And because we had set up the process, the procedure, we understood how the data model needed to be put together, and we understood the expectations of the business, whether they wanted drill through reporting or they wanted top of the house KPIs or things like that. We talked to them and once we knew what that blueprint needed to look like, Informatica really helped by making it very easy for us to pull that data in, from variety of sources all in the same way or manage the same way, and build our data warehouse. We essentially built a data lake where we tried to get data as close to what it looks like in the source system as possible but accessible by the data engineers. And then we built certified data marts that were structured in a way that was more useful for the business. And all that really took less than a year, the actual hands to keyboard code took less than six months just because we had spent all the time preparing. >> And now we're in COVID, so take me through cause it's really kind of a change of landscape, BC before COVID, DC during COVID, and then AC which is coming after COVID, hopefully sooner than later, but this is the new reality. How has the impact changed your environment if any good, bad, did it change the trajectory? Was the solution in place before? Any benefits coming out of it? Because you're an interesting timetable here, you went in full planning, went into production, and then COVID hits March. How did you get to respond to that? What happened? >> Be careful what you wish for, and also, no good deed goes unpunished, right? So, because we had to quickly adapt our plan, and go from, weekly, monthly, typically monthly reporting into a daily environment, people wanted daily metrics every day. As you can imagine, during the chaos of COVID, some of those 50 metrics changed, or maybe weren't understood completely and needed to be adjusted so that they were more in line with the expectations of the stakeholders as well as match the spirit of the other metrics. And so, now going forward we have to be prepared that as requests come in, as needs come in, we might have new daily reporting, and that means we have to figure out where that's coming from, figure out who owns that information, figure out what transforms needs to be done, to make sure that it's represented correctly, and then figure out how to make sure that we get that same data pipeline flowing every single day. And that's a challenge, but luckily, we were able to do that, because we were able to, set that platform, right, we didn't have to guess about what we're going to use to pull the data. We don't have to guess about what kind of things were happening to name it, we don't guess about where we're going to put that data, and so we know how to record it. >> What's interesting, you mentioned DevOps earlier in the interview, you have that DevOps mindset, and now, the business has to react to the environment, which is the pandemic, and a lot of companies are actually re-factoring or re-setting and then have to put a re-invention plan to get on the business side and then have a growth strategy which might mean completely change a metrics, so being agile with the data, super valuable sounds like that's what happened. There are folks out there that may or may not be in that same situation, so how do you share your best practice for someone out there who's saying, I had an environment, I was in the middle of this or I need to rethink it, but because my stakeholders are saying we need to change or refactor our business, I got to make the data agile. What do you say to that? What do you say to your peers and your colleagues in the industry? >> DevOps is a good place to start, and I bring that up because DevOps is a critical function, a lot of companies like Paycor have dedicated people working on DevOps, but there are also other groups within the technical community that can have a hand in your success, right? There's database administrators, there's application development teams, there's enterprise level architects that are looking across, there's information security, we live in a world where privacy is becoming more and more important. And any one of those groups, if you're not aligned correctly, or if you haven't thought about it, really can cause your progress to slow down, and if you do work together with them, and you build the right operating model, then you can actually figure out a way to make your progress speed up, if you have alignment with those guys, and let's just say a privacy or personal identifying information, question comes up, if you've already thought about who needs to answer that, how you need to evaluate that, and ultimately, how can you move something like that in your production environment, you're way better off and it takes sometimes a matter of minutes, whereas in some cases, in some companies I've been at, it can actually take weeks or months to work through those kind of issues. >> I want to give you a personal take because one of the things that's historic time for the tech industry as it continues to try to do good at the same time, cause there's health issues involved, every company has a thing about the health of their employees and their customers being, in a sheltered in place. We're living in a kind of historic time where, this real agility in engineering around the architecture and thinking things through, because there is a new reality and that is going to be more work at home, which is edge of the network, more data coming out, maybe there's more sources. So, a new wave of challenges is coming in. How do you see that? If based on your experience over the years, you've seen many waves, what's going on? What's some of the learnings that you've seen? What observations can you share any insight from the perspective of where you're sitting? >> So from that perspective, data governance becomes a lot more important. Yeah, whereas in the past, when you were in an office, when we all used to work in an office, you could actually just walk to your neighbor or walk across to another department, you could have that conversation. Today that's, a little bit more challenging in terms of, you would have to figure out are they online? You'd chat them up? Do you use the collaboration tools? And because of that environment, because everybody is digital or online, now you have to think about, how do we make sure that the data governance manifests correctly? And so that means we have to think about data catalogs, how can I go to a definition quickly of what is this data set or metric mean, metadata itself? How do I understand what I'm even looking at? We think about things like, data lineage, how can I go into that and figure out, where do this data come from? How has it changed, if at all possible, who is using it? That needs to be something that's accessible to a broader community, and especially now, where you have collaboration tools, you have things like Slack and Microsoft Teams, you have things like Zoom and Skype, and you need to connect together but you're also online and you're on the network. So, if you can point to documents or better yet, companies like Informatica have tools, like glossaries and data catalogs and things like that where you can actually provide stakeholders, that makes it much easier. And that's much more important now, because you're getting thrown so much stuff on the computer, so much data, so much information, you really need to understand how to parse through that. >> I think it's a great opportunity for someone to come up with some really new collaboration tools around the use case, right? That's what we're talking about here, because you don't have the neighbor, you don't have someone you can just walk down the hall, or jump into a conference room and whiteboard something, you got to do it online. It's like what the heck. >> It really makes you think and when you come into data, right, so I like to think about data as the data pipeline or how it gets sourced, right, I think about the data model and how you need to make sure that it's something that can be consumed by people. But then there's really the business intelligence side or the data consumption side, and those tools are changing they changing quickly, and we need to think about how we use those to communicate the way people are communicating now. >> Chris, thanks for coming on sharing the insight. One final question, obviously as cloud and we've seen the past decade of big data, unstructured data, as the world starts to become more horizontally scalable where data needs to be accessed by a lot of different things, but yet be needed with specialism around machine learning and automation, you've got this new kind of thinking going on, that's kind of becoming more mainstream, which is, hey, I want the data to be everywhere, and I want it to be specialized for machine learning. I mean, sounds really easy, but it's not right? So, this is kind of the future architecture. Would you shade your perspective on that? And that's a segment cause I think this is teasing out some of the things like the tooling, the workforce involved, how is your architecture going to be laid out? This seems to be something that seems to be more of a conversation now than ever before. What's your thoughts? >> Well, you've triggered upon a real time discussion we're having at Paycor of how does the cloud how does the introduction of machine learning across the different parts of any kind of data chain or value chain or process, how does that change where our focus needs to be? And in this case, if we're talking specifically around data, and how do I analyze data, you really need to think about the foundational side, machine learning, artificial intelligence is meant to make our lives easier. It doesn't mean it's easy to implement. But it also means that, if you're giving up that control from a person to a machine, whether it's an algorithm, predictive model, whatever it might be, you really need to make sure that the underlying foundation of data is correct, right. And so, you change the focus, whereas we used to have, over the last couple decades, we had a lot of people thrown at reporting, somebody working on a report or with a business intelligence tool can interact with that and turn things around. If you give that to an artificial intelligence, your application, now whatever they're looking at, you're not going to have those natural connections like, oh, that doesn't look right. >> Yeah. >> And you need to make sure that you put your resources are there people on making sure that that data is as good as it possibly can be. >> That's a great point. You have this amazing fast reports that actually are wrong, right, you got to think foundational first, and it makes the humans more important. I mean, you don't lean on the machines, if they're augmenting the humans, this is a big point. Close us out with that thought. >> Well, you absolutely still need people it's just a matter of where does their focus change to, what can you now free them up from doing that was maybe tedious or maybe just busy work that was needed, but not super value added into much more higher value added type activities. >> Chris, great insight, thanks for sharing. I see you're on the cutting edge, Business Intelligence is changing, you guys been working hard, congratulations, stay safe, and looking forward to catching up another time. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much I enjoyed it. >> Chris Eldredge, Senior Director of Business Intelligence at Paycor, implementing some great data engineering, having the data warehousing, now it's scaling in the right place the right time, as businesses reacting to it, and this is what everyone's facing right now. How do you make data agile as the business evolves quickly, and excel on a highly accelerated basis? How do you become more agile to serve the business needs? This is theCUBE bringing you remote coverage from Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover virtual experience brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. This is the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, and I'm joined by a couple of guys who were gonna talk through one of HPC ease. Longest partnerships. We've got shells. No Ryan and the Senior director Ecosystem Sales or North America at HP And Dr Rajesh, It's really a Boston. The global head of sales and solutions for the TCS. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >>Yeah, Thank you. >>So, first question for you is I mentioned HP and TCS have been partners for over 30 years. Talk to our audience about the partnership and how it has evolved to where it is today. >>Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. Firstly, you know, I'm pretty excited to be part of this Cube interview with garages. You know, I know him personally for over five years through various interactions globally and this new role for North America. This is our strategy and global system integrator partner. And this is a longstanding partnership between HP and this years has grown multi falls over the last 30 years. Ah, we you know, pretty much enjoyed every single I would say transactions or the business engagements, what we've had so far. And we liberate each other for our internal I T requirements and also to drive joint, go to market initiatives across the world. That's making this a truly 3 60 degree partnership. There is a lot of heritage, a mutual trust and respect between both organizations at all levels and the complimentary offerings. You know what you will hear a lot more in the next couple of questions. Uh, we bring to the table together are very unique and very differentiating to the clients which are >>excellent. Dr. Rajesh, walk us through some of those joint offerings that TCS cloud in h e or delivering. >>Yeah, so far. So far. Thanks. I just want to thank the HP team for giving me the opportunity to up to a larger audience. Andi, This new normal. This is the first time I'm doing an interview like this. Thanks for that experience. Actually, as Jules mentioned, this relationship goes a long way. I am talking about the larger PCs were a long relationship, Andi, specifically on the easiest load we started this journey in a very, very practical way. Five years back it was it was started in a very, very small trial and error basis. We started this relationship RPC explode. But at this point in time after So yes, we have taken this into ah, new norm, actually. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the examples We have a very major retailer in Germany, which we work so that it was a $1,000,000 deals. Our busiest on GHB. Yes, you wanna unique offering to the customer s AP and a space on that is really growing a lot. And that's the one offering I would like to tell the audience that really has picked up and spent on the relationship in the German region. Right now we are trying to take that up, offering across on other other regions also, so that is one of the key offerings that we are doing it. The other offerings are multiple offerings we are doing. But again, I want to highlight the storage as a service offering. Great. It's everybody in the industry today, Andi, we are experimenting that in the initial stages in Australia we started in Australia a small offering. And now we are expanding it in the US geography in a big way. And this year we are going to make that as a unique offering. And we're going to offer they're all over cloud customers as a storage as a service offering. Also multiple other offering, Lisa. But I just thought that I like this tool which are making our business. We're making a lot of business together with these two offerings >>is the, uh, s AP opportunity that you mentioned is that the Hana as a service that TCS is delivered? >>That's correct. So it's ah, it's a service. But the uniqueness of that particular offering is we jointly created the architecture so that the customer can use that, like a database as a service model. Right? So it was It was not available that time in the industry so easily like what we offered at that point in time to do enough years back. We offer that particular said we spoke a summer and interestingly, that particular offering the customer was using s AP themselves as a service initially, and they migrated their to us actually from Maybe that's a reason they bought HP and TCS. There is like a summer on this API and a platform. So that's the That's the interesting story under, >>if we didn't do that just a little bit further, I wanted the audience to understand the impact that this partnership has H p E and TCS delivering Hana as a service or your customers. What are the benefits there than what the customer, as you said was doing previously? >>Yeah, yeah, I think I just want to highlight the three or four points that make that this offering very unique, and that helps the customer number one is associated with model. So the customer has got the complete flexibility off going up and down like a true cloud model, right? And so it is a really a unique proposition at that point in time, where the customer not a story about using less for some time and then using more sometimes so it's kind of a complete, flexible model that we offered at the time. Number two is, it's a complete customization is possible. It is not like a fixed architecture. The architecture is so flexible so that the customer business needs can be met through the architectural changes. So it's not like normally people think that lotus highly standardized architecture, right? So that has gone out, and we were given a flexible architecture for the customer. That is the number two number three, obviously the cost end of the day. There's a business case which we need to make it work right for the customer. So obviously, with the PCs and HP coming together, we were able to do the costarred, want age with a customer that is the third advantage of that. The last, but not the least, is the quality of service it is it is all about. I always used to tell my partners that selling is easy. Delivering it is what it's important it is, which will make the customer to stick with you, right? The were given and delivery quality experience who our customer s so that I think that makes a very unique proposition from a technology perspective from a pricing. But but from an architecture and also from the delivery perspective. So those are the few few things I just thought that I violated. >>Excellent. So a couple of words that you mentioned popped into my mind as really even more well, have a different meeting as we're in summer 2020 flexibility and unique offering chills back to you from a go to market perspective. How is that relationship with HP? And he says, changing in the Koven era. >>Yeah, it's pretty interesting, and I would like to call it an example off. You know, what we see is is that you themselves during the corporate times, you know, it also came in the in the pets close to 90% of the workforce. We're 100% productive. Uh, and, uh, they have a plan to go 75% of the employees, you know, go being remote by 2025. Right? So that's the journey they're taking on. And another thing that you notice there's a lot of the, you know, During the corporate times, many of the customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure. So they wanted their employees to be productive, bi directional and in the other area of focus was like a TCP, you know, how do I kind of make sure on the applications are available to you? The customers and also do their internal organizations. So we've seen a lot off. I would say engagement with that is I could picture team and also the solution team toe address This requirements off the market joint >>when we look at certain things that now might even be more important with this new normal, if you will, that the fact that most companies are still in phase one of this work, everyone works from home trying to get to a phase to that might see some some maybe by function groups coming back to the office and then getting to this third. Maybe it's the new nirvana of some hybrid workforce, where there's gonna be some that come back permanently, and some that Don't and Tony Unirea chose, I saw was quoted last month as saying he thinks that 50% of the workforce will only 50% will come back. So in this new not only hybrid I T environment in which your customers love it now, this new pending hybrid workforce environment how are you addressing some of the concerns together with respect to the network connectivity security, >>I will just take the cost anything. It's a very, very interesting at least when we all ended up in this pandemic in March. We really very, very nervous, actually, because everyone has to operate remotely on we are. We are dealing with the customer data. It's ah, it's very, very important that we have a secure environment to access the information and at the same time maintain the integrity of the data and also the quality off the plate. Those other two primary objective for us. We don't want to compromise on quality. We don't want to compromise on security from a cloud perspective. So the solution we have put in really, I just give you one example there was on the airline Ah, UK based the airline industry airline company which they need that workforce overnight. They want everybody to go remote because you know you cape on. They just put up condition that nobody can work from the office overnight and then terror ports as toe work from home purchases, implement the solution for them on our clothes overnight and make that 1000 employees store from home the next day morning. All of them started working with full quality of services and also with a full security aspect of it, has been taken care ornate on the solution. We are deployed. Very interesting case study on The important thing we have done is use the technology to the port. Use all kinds of technology to make sure that the employees that work from home we took care of the network connectivity. We took our eye off the security aspects off the data from security aspects. We've implemented all the security functions from really APIs. But people, Children stop perspective. Andi, make the workforce enable that. But now you are talking about millions off millions of workers going to work from home. Right? Because it is one example for one company we have done that now the easiest themselves has got more than 400 1000 employees. And we are talking about millions off our pores, going to work from home on going forward. So that is I'm seeing this as a big opportunity. It's not that everybody has are just this at this point in time, I'm seeing this as an opportunity where on the cloud easiest cloud kind off. The solution is going to help them to achieve this. And this is a great opportunity for not only for PCs, but also for HP because the solution we're putting together with the HP is more on the digital or course how we can enable the people to work from home, not compromising on as I mentioned from a security you're in from millions perspective. So I'm seeing this as an opportunity for both the organization, and it's a long way to go is we need to work on this. It's not. We don't have a magic want to make the millions off workers to work from home, but it is going to have all soon and probably in the next step. Yeah, so we may achieve this, impair people off. The workforce is going to go remotely on this list. So that's that. And my take on this >>is so the impact that HP and TCS Herb being able to make for customers who have had to massively transform their entire workforce overnight, as he said, to work from home to talk about some of the new maybe new solutions or new business opportunities that HPC is partnering with TCS shells, we'll start with you in this new era, >>Yeah, so if you look at it, I just taking it again on extension off of the projects. What he just mentioned about the percentage of employees going remote Lisa across industries today. I would say less than 20% of the employees are actually working remote or they have the ability. But the organizations have the ability to support the employees going, and if you have to take it to 50% so you can look at the kind of opportunity we have both as HP and as PCs. So we bring in a lot of best in breed infrastructure from for enabling the employee workforce to know where it is. I would say capacity off workloads and it's all workload specific. And what business does this or when people Pretty easy as we kind of bundle that creating a reference architecture or a giant architect picture addressing the customers by industry word. So because one what suits for one vertical may not be really suiting well for a different world, right? For example, if you take a banking sector are playing, a workstation solution would look very different from somebody's doing remote work in retail, so we kind of continuously engage with the PCs, and that's where both of us have joint lab as well, where our technologies and pieces technologies come together, working on joint solutions and assisting the market in terms of the opportunity lights. And we offer this as part of A C is our digital workplace offerings. >>Are your conversations Dr Additional go to you or your conversations when you're jointly selling, changing in terms of who your audience is? Is this now a C level conversation? Since these leaders and we've heard leaders of Google and Facebook already last month saying Work from home extended still 2021. Is this now at the C suite level, where you guys are helping them really understand how to completely change and digitize their entire way of doing business? >>Absolutely. I think it's a great question, and it's actually the opportunity goes beyond the work from home solution. As you rightly I want to know that it is. It is all about digitization. It is all about digitizing their whole business process. It is not anymore infrastructure. Our application solution. It is more about really finding that business process be defending. The way the business is going to operate in future is the discussion we are having so a lot of these discussions are happening at a very, very high level and with the business team also directly so earlier, you used to interact with the technology partners off our organization. But now we are interacting directly with the head of business are the C level except of the company. And that is the reason the exact reason is Ah, you. If you want your ports to be productive remotely, you can't just offer them on network on. You can't offer them just a solution to work from home. But you need to really find your whole business process you need. You need to digitize your infrastructure. You need to digitize your application. You need to rethink your whole process off. You're operating on it, so that's what I'm seeing. It's not only an opportunity for our players like a business cloud, but it is the opportunity for a bigger opportunity for PCs. And it should be not only in terms off on infrastructure in our cloud business, it goes beyond that. So that is that is the kind of an opportunity we're seeing, especially in the in the sectors of healthcare you're seeing major reforms are happening in the healthcare industry as we speak, and obviously manufacturing is going to go through a lot of changes. Also from that. And retail obviously has gone through a lot of changes already in terms of online, uh, stuff, but know that also going to go through changes in this new era? Yes, >>I have to ask you shelled, talking about redefining? That's a word that we've seen so many years in a row at tech conferences, right, this technology redefining this business or that industry. And now, of course, we're being redefined by an invisible virus. But how? How is the sales process being redefined? Is it a lot more accelerated because businesses have to put together new plans to continue operations? >>Yeah, again, a great question. Is this how you have? You know, I would say it's divided by industry body. It's not a uniform thing by, as not British was saying, every industry has got its own, its own set of challenges and its own set of opportunities, and some of them are really actually doing well even in times like and some of them have seen, Really. I mean, like, travel our transportation or you know some of those industries are, and even hospitality that's kind of affected big time. So our view of you know, the entire sales engagement of the processes we're spending more time on there. We really need to focus and which can help improve the businesses. Right? So the conversation's ready from How do I take the cost out in terms of how can I make a little more investment to get greater returns from the business? So it's like it's completely, I would say, an interesting pain and engaging compositions and decisions are happening. So we, if you look at us from an automatic perspective, the Internet to the sales team is armed with various virtual tools like we know you zoom views Skype using SMS teens. So all the tools available to make sure that we're able to connect with all our partners and customers on do enable joint business together. >>I just want oh, I add to it, Lisa, 111 point. I want bad, Really interesting change I'm seeing on the sales is normally we respond to it. I asked from a customer that is a sales happens. I want this many days. Do it and then what you can do with a solution that is a normal sales process. What I have seen that has changed completely. Yes, we go and tell the customer, Is this what you need Actually, to make you yourself your business? Better? This is the new offerings I'm having good. And this offering is going to help you to solve the problem what you are having today. So we are engaging a different level off sales conversation today with our customers. We know the problem of the customer because we are working with them for many years and we know exactly what they're going through. And we also know what new offerings we are having in this. So we are engaging the discussion with the customer doing that. This is my new offering. This is going to help you to solve this problem. But that is a different angle of sales we have seen nowadays they spend on it. >>The last question shells to you. We started our interview today talking about the HP TCS relationship. You talked about how it's evolved. Last question. You talked to me about H B's strategy. How does it match TCS Alfa Cloud offering. >>Yeah, so again, a great question, Lisa, if you look at our strategy, is to accelerate the enterprises with it. Centric and cloud enable solutions which are workload up, optimized and delivered everything as a service. And whatever you heard from Dr Rogers through this entire conversation was about how do we give as a service model you gave an example of honor. You gave an example off, you know, going how optimizing workloads for video and getting employees to be able to be productive remotely and all of that kind of extremely resonate well with, you know, what we see is confined to price. Cloud offering is bringing to the table for the customer and the underlying platform. You know, we kind of elaborate extensively and closely with the easiest architecture. Seem to have the HP portfolio off. You know, the compute and storage portfolio integrated as part of their offering, and we go together to market, you know, and addressing and kind of an ask service model. 1,000,000,000. >>Excellent. Well, shells Dr. Rajesh, pleasure talking with you both today about what UCS and H e are doing together and some of the ways that you're really helping businesses move forward in these uncertain times, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you for represents. Thanks. Thank >>you. Dr Rajesh. >>My guest. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.